Keeping Secrets (26 page)

Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.

And it was. Emma couldn’t believe her good fortune, when she had moments to catch her breath. What had she been so afraid of all these years? She had never been so happy or so busy in her life.

There was much to do. For starters, though Jesse had had a world-class woodworking studio built in the side yard, his decorating efforts on the house hadn’t gone beyond knocking out most of the interior walls and painting it all white.

“It looks like a hospital in here.”

He held out the color samples again.

The stairs to the two little rooms above shone with a lacquered blue. The front door was bright yellow.

“Friendly, don’t you think?” Emma stood back and inspected their handiwork.

“Yes. But who are we being friendly with?”

For no one ever came up the winding little road looking for them—their rare invitation was to Maria and Clifton. The truth be known, they didn’t need anybody else. They were a world within themselves, round, fat as a tick, complete.

They didn’t own a television.

They lay in bed propped on a sea of pillows and stared at each other’s toes.

“Yours are beautiful. Just like your hands. Mine are weird.”

“You can say that again.”

“Mine are weird.”

Then he took a footful of her toes in his mouth.

“If I suck on this little middle one, do you think it will grow?”

“Nope, my father’s never did. It’s part of my inheritance.”

“Do all Jews have a short middle toe?”

“Do all blacks have little bitty dicks?”

“Yep. All of us. Now why don’t you suck on this one and see if it’ll grow bigger than your toe?”

“Lawdy, Mistah Jesse, leave me be, I don’t know nothing ’bout sucking dicks.”

* * *

Emma asked, “What do you think about puce for the bathroom?”

“I think your cousin Wanda June’s tastes has rubbed off on you.”

Wanda June Cooter was one of Jesse’s favorites. She was Emma’s step-aunt Janey’s only girl.

“Tell me another Cooter bedtime story,” Jesse begged of Emma sitting beside him in one of his old T-shirts.

“I don’t think it’s nice you making fun of my relatives, Jesse.”

“They’re no more your kin than I am, honey bun.”

So once again Emma would tell about how when they were children Wanda June got to pick all the colors of the Cooter house. The living room was bright orange. The dining room chocolate brown.

“You’d drop something in there off the table, you might as well have thrown it down the outhouse for all you could see. Smelled like that, too, sort of. Their house was way out in the country, out past Bernie’s, and always smelled like cold dishwater, sorghum syrup and beans.”

Wanda June’s room was deepest orchid. The boys’ rooms were red, navy and snow-pea green.

Jesse picked it up. “And in her purse, just in case, she carried…you tell it.”

“Why, you know it all by heart.”

“Nope.” They were sitting out in the carport they’d screened in and planted like a florist’s shop with begonias, fuchsias and ferns.

“She carried a bottle of Mercurochrome and the number of the FBI.”

Jesse slapped his leg. “Now do Lollie, do Lollie,” he begged.

So once again she told him about Wanda June’s brother Lollie Cooter who invented his own religion which had all the trappings of Christianity except Jesus. “I told him he didn’t know it but he’d become a Jew.” He quit his job as a washing-machine repairman and devoted full time to proselytizing. He built a billboard in front of the house he and his mother, Janey, lived in when they moved to town. “Look Here, Sinners,” it began.

* * *

“Do you think I’m getting fat?” Emma asked.

“Well, you might be. If you’re leading up to being pregnant, go pin it on one of the dudes you screw when I’m up in the studio.” It was one of their running jokes. For Jesse had had himself fixed after the woman named Patience whom he married for three months had tricked him with her false pregnancy. And Emma wouldn’t have looked at another man if she’d had the energy. Which she didn’t. Jesse used it all up.

“Is there a square inch of this house on which we haven’t banged yet?” she asked.

Jesse pulled on his mustache. “How about the doormat?”

“Pull the sucker in here. Can’t hurt its feelings, leaving it out.”

“Is it May yet?”

Emma checked her watch. Actually, she’d completely lost track of the seasons. Sometimes she was so consumed with Jesse, his taste, his smell, his voice, his touch that she didn’t even know what day it was. Her students at the junior college thought she was on drugs.

“I think it’s May fifteenth,” she said.

“By God, we’ve missed the beginning of outdoor fucking season by over two weeks. I want your sweet ass on this doormat at good dark.”

* * *

To answer Emma’s question, they should have been getting fat, for her genius in the kitchen had gone berserk. She cooked in at least eight languages now. Her catering was getting to be a problem. She had to expand or quit.

“Why don’t we just move down into Los Gatos to the Safeway?” Jesse asked. “It’ll save us carting all those groceries up the hill.”

Emma just smiled and kept on cooking, twirling her wooden spoons and her French knives as if she were a magician dressed in kitchen whites.

Besides, she liked taking Jesse to the grocery store with her. She liked handing him a list and his own cart and then trailing behind as if she were a stranger, watching the looks women gave him. Some of them crashed their buggies into his on purpose, some because they had seen him only at the last minute and had been stunned like a deer in the light. They winked. They dimpled. They twitched their behinds. Driving back up the mountain, Emma could hardly keep her hands off him. Sometimes she didn’t.

“Emma, Emma, stop,” he said to the top of her head buried in his lap. “Stop. I can’t drive while you do that.”

“Then pull over.”

* * *

Skytop was the only blemish on the peach of their contentment. It just wasn’t going as planned.

“How long’s the new subflooring on the porch going to take if I come help you pound nails?”

“A weekend.”

Three weekends later Emma was still pulling splinters from her ruined manicure, and it wasn’t finished yet.

“Do you think this is going to take longer than you planned?”

Jesse frowned and grew silent and Emma bit her tongue.

When they met, Jesse was a scotch drinker, but after two or three she didn’t like him much.

“You ought not to do this to yourself—and to us.”

“You got a better suggestion?”

“I’d rather dance.”

“Apples and oranges,” he said.

Emma did some research.

“You want the Giggles, the Zombie, the I Need a Cookie, or the Motha, Just Let Me Lie Down?” Emma had the marijuana separated, nicknamed and labeled in cannisters on a kitchen shelf. She bought it from their next-door neighbor, an entrepreneur of wholesale smoke.

“Just roll one of each and we’ll decide when we get to the Catalyst.”

On the way to Santa Cruz, they never smoked until they were over the mountains with the ocean in sight. Otherwise, like so many others, they’d have been roadkill, victims of the unforgiving Highway 17.

The Catalyst met all of Emma’s requirements: it was old and funky, a bar, a dance hall, a good café, a coffeehouse, all in one.

Somewhere between the car door and the Catalyst’s palm trees, Emma lit up.

“I can hear the colors of the music,” she said as they passed through the swinging doors. She took Jesse’s hand.

“Let’s dance to the purple, Jess.”

“Just a minute, hon.”

Jesse didn’t really like to dance, but she was twirling already, out on the floor with the couples, the trios, the children, the dogs. It was that kind of place. One old man swayed every night before a speaker that was twice as tall as he.

“Never,” said Emma, looking a gigantic whole-grain tostada in the face while a Stones tune shook the table, “never eat anything bigger than your head.”

“If one could find your head.” Jesse smiled, for he knew it could be anywhere. He loved to watch Emma when she was stoned. God, how the woman flew. Loosey-goosey. She giggled. She shook her booty to the music. And more than once she’d taken his hand and led him out to the street, where she’d pulled him into the nearest darkened doorway and lifted her skirt above her hips.

“Do me, Jess,” she whispered. “I can’t wait till we get home.”

Oh, yes, Jesse loved Emma and the naughty woman she became when she was stoned.

* * *

Now, if things would only go right with Skytop. He couldn’t get a handle on it. He couldn’t figure out what was wrong. He couldn’t get the flow going. He kept bumping into corners, running into blind alleys. He’d start in one room, and then another would seem to be calling to him.

Emma stood with a hand on one hip, the tip of her tongue poised to point to the heart of the matter.

“You’re all over the lot here, Jess. Why don’t you just pick a room and finish it, as if it were a piece of furniture, then move on to the next?”

“Why don’t you just shut up? Go home and tend to your cooking, woman.”

He was sorry afterward when he saw her tears. But he couldn’t help himself. Skytop, which was supposed to have been such fun, his retreat from hard-driving obsession, was driving him nuts. And he didn’t know why. Sometimes he wondered whether the place was haunted, but if so, with whose demons?

* * *

“You want to send them eight-by-ten color glossies?”

“Of the two of us or of me, the darky lover, alone? Do you think Rosalie and Jake would like that?”

“Seriously, what do you want to do?”

“Emma, I’ve told you before, I don’t see that we have to do anything. It’s not as if you’ve ever made them privy to the details of your life.”

For Jesse knew that since that long-ago first-time-home-from-Atlanta Christmas, Emma had written a letter to her parents every two weeks that was less revealing than her shopping list. And even though she visited dutifully once a year, for all they shared she might as well not have bothered. It was all one-way travel. After the JFK assassination weekend, they had never visited her.

“I’m willing to tell them all about us, Jess, though you know they’ll never begin to understand. Jake won’t mind so much deep down, but he’s been corroded by all that cracker shit.”

“Emma, let’s just skip it. It means nothing to me. I don’t need another set of relatives, God knows. Look at my own.”

Emma tried to, but they were as much fictional characters to her as Rosalie and Jake were to Jesse. For though Jesse had mentioned Emma to his mother and his sisters, they had never met.

“Don’t worry about it, Em. I don’t.”

“We’ll just be orphans together, then,” she said.

At that, Jesse pulled her into his lap.

“I’ll be your momma and your daddy and your sisters and your brothers. Your grandma and your grandpa and all the family you never had.”

And for a while he was, that first year. He made Emma feel at home. She had found a safe harbor that would give her passage to the adventures of the sea while at the same time protecting her from its raging terrors. That first year, Emma felt she was his beloved. Why, there was no way she could drown.

10

California

1971

California is a roller coaster. Pay your money, step right up, and it takes you for a ride. A thrill a minute, this state of the United States that is also a state of mind.

It was in a roller coaster mood that Jesse and Emma set out one morning in their second spring together to a serendipitous Sierra destination, perhaps Lake Tahoe.

They started from a giddy peak, perched on their little mountaintop. Then down they rolled, pointing Jesse’s Morgan into the Santa Clara Valley, Valley of the Heart’s Delight, where the springtime orchards bloomed. Up again, up, up eastward over a transmission-eating incline before dropping over the other side into the Sacramento Valley that stretched brown and flat as the Holy Land. They followed the Sacramento River as they turned north toward the capital city of the same name. The delta land was damp and swampy like Louisiana bayou land. Rice grew in diked bogs along with crawfish, called crayfish here. But, when boiled, served with a pungent sauce in the beached paddleboat of a restaurant where Emma and Jesse had stopped for lunch, no matter what the pronunciation, the small crustaceans tasted the same.

“God, I’m stuffed.” Emma patted her stomach and pushed back from the Formica tabletop.

Through plate glass windows the sun shimmied like a Bourbon Street fan dancer on the levee-hemmed water. Emma felt lazy with food, sunshine and beer, floating in a delicious afternoon dizziness called “the fantards” back home.

“Why don’t we find someplace cozy and take a long nap?” She reached under the table and squeezed Jesse’s blue-jeaned knee.

In answer he grinned, then fingered a corner of his mustache, twirled it like the villain in a melodrama who was certain that, if not now, surely in a minute he’d have the upper hand.