I Cannot Get You Close Enough (22 page)

About a week after Miss Crystal first mentioned Maine to me she mentioned it again. “Let's go over and talk to Noel,” she suggested. “She'll tell you about it better than I can.”

“All right,” I said. “As soon as I finish this kitchen. I can't stand this refrigerator another day.”

“Come on now,” she insisted, “when we get back I'll help you with it.” Then the two of us walked around the corner to pay a call on Miss Noel and get more details.

She was sitting up in her bed with frilly pillows all around her and books and papers and all the mess of her projects on tables by the windows. Many paintings were propped against the walls and there were glass jars with cookies and several opened boxes of candy on the tables. Miss Noel herself is very thin. She keeps the candy and cookies for her visitors.

“It would be wonderful to get out of the swamp for the summer,” she began. “Traceleen, you owe it to your niece to let her see the world. Did she say she might go?”

“She was all for it. I'm the one who can't decide. What is there to do up there for black people?”

“The same things there are for white people. Rest and think, see the ocean, sleep in the ocean air. Don't you think Crystal needs a change, after what you've been through with King?”

She was referring to problems we have had with King and taking drugs. We had had him back in school and off of them for several months when this idea of Maine came up. But Miss Noel was right. It had been a terrible year and Miss Crystal hadn't left home even to go skiing or sail their sailboat in the British Virgin Islands or do a thing but worry, worry, worry. I have no children myself and lately I have begun to think I was lucky not to. The things they do to your heart.

“Go on up there,” Miss Noel insisted. “Have an adventure. See the world.”

“I'm seeing the world right now,” I answered.

“Go to Maine,” Miss Noel said again. “You'll be glad you did.”

“If Traceleen will go, I will,” Miss Crystal put in. “You can hire all the help you need, Traceleen. And if you don't like it you can leave.”

“Let me think it over,” I said. “Give me another week.”

Of course in the end I agreed and we began to make our plans. Here is who all was going once the plans were laid. Myself and my niece Andria, to keep the house and let Andria earn money for LSU. Miss Crystal and her son, King, age nineteen. Crystal Anne, age nine. Plus our visitors, the list of which was growing with every phone call.

King said he would only go if he could invite Mr. Daniel Hand of Charlotte, North Carolina, and his daughters, Jessica and Olivia. Then Miss Crystal found out Mr. Manny would not be able to join us because he was on some big case involving millions of dollars, so Miss Crystal invited Miss Lydia, her best friend from Seattle who is a painter and an actress on television. Miss Lydia has never married and lives alone in a cottage by a rain forest and devotes herself to art. She is deathly afraid of airplanes because she is so sensitive to the internal workings of things. Still, she manages to come to New Orleans several times a year to visit and sell her paintings at shows Miss Crystal and Miss Noel arrange. Miss Lydia is also a very close friend of Miss Noel's and lived in her house one year while she was painting the flowers of New Orleans and the debutantes and the graves. It was Miss Noel who talked Miss Lydia into flying down to join our expedition. She told her an artist has to know the exact moment when they must agree to take their life in their hands.

So Miss Lydia came and joined us. She arrived in the middle of the afternoon with all her bags and paintings. She still travels like they did when they were hippies, with her clothes rolled up in little sets in a canvas bag and her paintings underneath her arm. She takes them off the frames and rolls them up and brings them to show Miss Crystal and Miss Noel every time she comes from California. Both Miss Crystal and Miss Noel have collected quite a few of Miss Lydia's paintings. I think Miss Lydia's paintings are more wonderful than any I have ever seen and I can never understand why she wants to waste her time being a television actress.

“I am only listening to country music all summer,” she declared as she came into the hall, with King behind her carrying her things. Miss Crystal had had to go to Crystal Anne's graduation at Saint James and couldn't meet the plane, so King had gone in her place. “I have given up on the real world. Let's go to Maine, wherever that turns out to be.”

“Oh, Lydia, you look so wonderful,” Miss Crystal said. It is always the first thing she says to any of her friends. Of course Miss Crystal is blind as a bat without her glasses, which she never wears, so all she sees of her friends is the colors they are wearing and their smiles. Occasionally, she will look up at me when she is at her desk doing bills or wearing her glasses in the kitchen to see a recipe. Then she will move in real close and really look at me as though she had never seen me before, and begin to comment on the color of my eyes or my earrings, the same ones I have worn every day since my auntee died down in Boutte and willed them to me. Amethysts set in eighteen-karat gold that were given to her by a Mrs. LaDoux Provostee of Ascension Parish. I had my ears pierced to receive them when I was twenty-five years old and I have worn them ever since. Anyway, Miss Crystal goes on about how wonderful Miss Lydia looks and I put on some coffee and get out some homemade chocolate walnut cookies and they settle down at the breakfast-room table to talk.

“I am only listening to country music and only painting people I admire and only acting in plays written by geniuses. I have had it with the culture,” Miss Lydia says. “I am in love with a program called
Austin City Limits
. Chet Atkins is my ideal now. When he puts that guitar down close to his dick and begins to play, I almost faint. I am into older men.” Miss Lydia lets the shoulder bag she is carrying drop onto the floor and holds out her arms to Crystal Anne, who is dancing around in her red tutu wearing a tiara. She falls into Miss Lydia's lap and begins to study her beads.

“Noel said you could paint in her studio in Maine,” Crystal said. “She said everything you need is there.”

“I'm going to paint a series of heroes,” Miss Lydia declares. “I'm going to paint Barbara Jordan and Cesar Chavez and men and women who have served their people. Oh, God, Crystal. I saw a wolf last week down in Northern California. Oh, God, you wouldn't believe it. It had this intelligent haunting gaze. I almost died.”

“Maybe they'll have some up in Maine,” I said. “They might have them there. Where is this Maine anyway?”

Then we got out the maps and looked them over and planned what roads we would go on and then Miss Crystal and Miss Lydia went over to spend the afternoon with Miss Noel and get the keys to the mansion and last-minute advice about what to do if the electricity went out. It was the twenty-third of May. In the morning we would leave.

After I left work that afternoon I went by my sister's house to see if Andria was ready to leave. She is my oldest niece and the apple of my eye. She has always made the finest grades and worked to prepare herself for the future. She had just finished high school at the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts, and was planning on going to Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge in the fall. She was going to study with a poet there who is on a radio program everyone around here listens to. This poet from Russia or somewhere who came once to Andria's school and talked with them. So Andria was saving money for LSU and was delighted when Miss Crystal offered her six hundred dollars a month and room and board to come along to help out in Maine. It would be so nice for me to have her company at this time in her life. They grow up so fast, the young ones that we love. Before long all we have are memories and they are gone out to the world.

“You ready to go?” I said. I had found her in the living room, watching television and polishing her toenails. “You got your things packed?”

“I'm almost ready.” She looked up, finished a toenail, then put the nail-polish brush back into the bottle. I looked around the room. It was so dark and crowded. Such a musty old place to have a pearl like Andria sitting in the middle of it, polishing her nails. I won't comment on my sister Mandana and the life she lives. Who are we to judge?

“Miss Lydia's arrived and they want to leave by noon tomorrow. We are going to start off slow and drive to Montgomery, Alabama, and stop to see a Shakespearean play at a theater there. Then the next day we can begin to really drive.”

“How long is this going to take?”

“About six days the way they have it mapped now. They want the trip to be educational for everyone.”

“Is King going?” Andria screwed the cap down on the fingernail polish and got up from the sofa. She was wearing a pair of very tight blue jeans cut off so short you could see her underpants and a little tight halter top. I guess they all wear that now but I cannot get used to it. Still, if someone has to go around half naked it might as well be Andria. Her body is like a beautiful tall young tree. I delight in her until my heart could break. All her life she has been the same lovely little pale chocolate tree, growing taller and taller without ever getting awkward or whining. She is of mixed blood. Her father was a sailor from Norway that my sister met in the French Quarter, never heard from again.

“Is King going for sure?” She pulled down the top to cover her little nipples and kicked the television set off with the very tip of her painted toe. Then she moved over nearer to me and gave me a little hug.

“Of course he's going. Miss Crystal is paying him the same as she's paying you because he is supposed to do the heavy work and be the lifeguard when people go out to the sea.”

“Good,” she said. “I'm glad he's going. I like him a lot. He's always good to me.”

“You will like everyone that's going along,” I said. “Come on, let me see what you are packing. It might be cold up there, honey. You can't just take summer clothes.”

“I got everything packed,” she said. “I got everything you told me to bring.” Then we went into her room and she let me look at what she had packed and I suggested a few other things and she put them in. Then she put on a skirt and we went down to the K&B drugstore and bought her some shampoo and deodorant and powder and a new toothbrush and some other things I thought she might need. If I had any second thoughts about taking her off for three months with only a bunch of white people, I put them aside because of the chance it would give her for an education.

We left at noon the next day. We were in two cars, preparing to go all the way up the United States from New Orleans, Louisiana, to Maine. Here is who was in the cars. Andria and myself and Crystal Anne and King in one, with King driving. That was the Peugeot. Then Miss Crystal and Miss Lydia in the station wagon with the luggage and supplies. It is the baby blue station wagon Mr. Phelan bought for us in Texas when the oil bust caused all the Mercedes Benz cars to go on sale. It is a very comfortable automobile and the prettiest blue I have ever seen, inside and out.

It was a beautiful hot day when we left New Orleans, the sun beating down out of a blue sky and reflecting on the Bonnet Carré spillway and the lake. We headed east toward Mobile, then turned and drove up the state of Alabama to Montgomery. We were taking a route that would lead us to Atlanta, Georgia, and Greenville, South Carolina, then over to Lynchburg and Alexandria, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., after which we could just drive up the Eastern Seaboard all the way to our destination.

I can't tell you everything that happened on the trip but some of it is worth writing down. Like the play we saw in Montgomery, Alabama, the first night.
The Midsummer Night's Dream
with this Robin fellow sprinkling lily juice on everyone to make them fall in love. The costumes were so lovely and the way the stage was decorated. Everyone was quite set up afterward and had to talk for hours and couldn't sleep.

Another thing was the plane ride over the city of Atlanta. Miss Crystal's old roommate from college, Miss Alexandra DeMent, lives there now and is married to a man so rich he buys her airplanes and she flies across the ocean by herself and into Canada and is in races. She took us up in a little one-engine plane called
The Debutante
and we looked down on Atlanta, Georgia, going out to lunch. It is hard to believe there are that many people in the world, much less only in Atlanta. First Miss Crystal and Crystal Anne and I went up and flew around, then we came down and Miss Alexandra took the others up. Afterward, we spent the night at Miss Alexandra's house and had a very interesting Chinese dinner of artichoke and cold fish and sliced fruit. No wonder Miss Alexandra stays so thin, I told Miss Crystal. Eating such exotic food and flying around in airplanes all day.

“Oh, she does many other things,” Miss Crystal answered. “She collects money for charities and teaches other women how to fly. She flies in the Powder Puff Derby and each year almost wins. As soon as she gets the right plane she is going to win.”

“I hope she does,” I answered. “She is the epitome of what a rich lady should turn out to be and looks so dashing in her slacks and scarves.”

“I'm going to be a pilot,” Andria put in. “The minute I get a chance I'm learning how.”

“Me, too,” Crystal Anne says. “Flying is the thing for me.”

“You've got to let me have lessons,” King added. “I don't care what it costs. I'll pay for them myself.”

Later that night King and Andria went off for a long walk alone in Miss Alexandra's neighborhood and I stayed up half the night worrying about them. That was two nights my sleep was interrupted and we had barely begun our trip. Well, who ever said travel would be easy? No one did.

The next day I got Andria off and questioned her about her talk with King. “I don't want any hanky-panky going on with him,” I said to her. “I can't have you spoiling my summer that way.”