Me and My Baby View the Eclipse (21 page)

It will take Cherry Oxendine two more weeks to die. She's tough. And even when there's nothing left of her but heart, she will fight all the way. She will go out furious, squeezing Harold's hand at the very moment of death, clinging fast to every minute of this bright, hard life. And although at first he won't want to, Harold will go on living. He will buy another store. Gladys will die. Tammy Lynn will make Phi Beta Kappa. Harold will start attending the Presbyterian church again. Eventually Harold may even go back to his family, but he will love Cherry Oxendine until the day he dies, and he will never, ever, tell anybody what he saw.

S
haron Shaw first met her lover, Raymond Stewart, in an incident that took place in broad daylight at the Xerox machine in Stewart's Pharmacy three years ago—it
can't
be that long! Sharon just can't believe it. Every time she thinks about him now, no matter what she's doing, she stops right in the middle of it while a hot crazy ripple runs over her entire body. This makes her feel like she's going to die or throw up. Of course she never does either one. She pats her hair and goes right on with her busy life the way she did
before
she met him, but everything is different now, all altered, all new. Three years! Her children were little then: Leonard Lee was eleven, Alister was ten, and Margaret, the baby, was only three. Sharon was thirty-four. Now she's over the hill, but who cares? Since the children are all in school, she and Raymond can meet more easily.

“Is the
coast clear?
” Raymond will ask with his high nervous giggle, at her back door. Raymond speaks dramatically, emphasizing certain words. He flings his arms around. He wears huge silky handkerchiefs and gold neck-chains and drives all the way to Roanoke to get his hair cut in what he calls a modified punk look. In fact Raymond is a figure of fun in Roxboro, which Sharon knows, and this knowledge just about kills her. She wants to grab him up and soothe him, smooth down his bristling blond hair and press his fast-beating little heart against her deep soft bosom and wrap him around and around in her big strong arms. Often, she does this. “Hush now, honey,” she says.

For Raymond is misunderstood. Roxboro is divided into two camps about him, the ones who call him Raymond, which is his name, and the ones who call him Ramón, with the accent on the last syllable, which is what he
wants
to be called. “Putting on airs just like his daddy did,” sniffs Sharon's mama, who works at the courthouse and knows everything. Raymond's daddy was a pharmacist who, according to Sharon's mama, never got over not being a doctor. She says this is common among pharmacists. She says he was a dope fiend too. Sharon doesn't know if this part is true or not, and she won't ask; the subject of his father—who killed himself—gives Raymond nervous palpitations of the heart. Anyway this is how Raymond came to be working at Stewart's Pharmacy, where he mostly runs the Xerox machine and helps ladies order stationery and wedding invitations from huge bound books which he keeps on a round coffee table in his conversation area—Raymond likes for things to be nice. A tall, sour-faced man named Mr. Gardiner is the actual manager—everybody knows that Raymond could never run a store. Raymond stays busy, though. He does brochures and fliers and handouts, whatever you want, on his big humming Xerox machine, and he'll give you a cup of coffee to drink while you make up your mind. This coffee is strong, sweet stuff. Sharon had never tasted anything quite like it before the day she went in there to discuss how much it would cost to print up a little cookbook of everybody's favorite recipes from the Shady Mountain Elementary School PTA to make extra money for art.

It was late August, hot as blazes outside, so it took Sharon just a minute to recover from the heat. She's a large, slow-moving woman anyway, with dark brown eyes and dark brown hair and bright deep color in her cheeks. She has what her mother always called a “peaches-'n'-cream complexion.” She used to hear her mother saying that on the phone to her Aunt Marge, talking about Sharon's “peaches-'n'-cream complexion” and about how she was so “slow,” and wouldn't “stand up for herself.” This meant going out for cheerleader. Later, these conversations were all about how Sharon would never “live up to her potential,” which meant marrying a doctor, a potential that went up in smoke the day Sharon announced that she was going to marry Leonard Shaw, her high school sweetheart, after all.

Now Sharon talks to her mother every day on the telephone, unless of course she sees her, and her mother still talks every day to Sharon's Aunt Marge. Sharon has worn her pretty hair in the same low ponytail ever since high school, which doesn't seem so long ago to her either. It seems like yesterday, in fact, and all the friends she has now are the same ones she had then, or pretty much, and her husband Leonard is the same, only older, heavier, and the years between high school and now have passed swiftly, in a strong unbroken line. They've been good years, but Sharon can't figure out where in the world they went, or tell much difference between them.

Until she met Raymond, that is. Now she has some high points in her life. But “met” is the wrong word. Until she saw Raymond with “new eyes” is how Sharon thinks of it now.

She went into Stewart's that day in August and showed Raymond her typed recipes and told him what she wanted. He said he thought he could do that. What kind of paper? he wanted to know. What about the cover? Sharon hadn't considered the cover. Raymond Stewart bobbed up and down before her like a jack-in-the-box, asking questions. It made her feel faint, or it might have been the sudden chill of the air-conditioning, she'd just come from standing out in her hot backyard with the hose, watering her garden. “What?” she said. Sharon has a low, pretty voice, and a way of patting her hair. “Sit right down here, honey,” Raymond said, “and let me get you a cup of coffee.” Which he did, and it was
so strong
, tasting faintly of almonds.

They decided to use pale blue paper, since blue and gold were the school colors. Sharon looked at Raymond Stewart while he snipped and pasted on the coffee table. “Aha!” he shrieked, and “Aha!” Little bits of paper went flying everywhere. Sharon looked around, but nobody seemed to notice: People in Stewart's were used to Raymond. She found herself smiling.

“Hmmm,” Raymond said critically, laying out the pages, and “This sounds
yummy
,” about Barbara Sutcliff's Strawberries Romanoff. Sharon had never heard a grown man say “yummy” out loud before. She began to pay more attention. That day Raymond was wearing baggy, pleated tan pants—an old man's pants, Sharon thought—a Hawaiian shirt with blue parrots on it, and red rubber flip-flops. “Oh, this sounds
dreadful
,” Raymond said as he laid out Louise Dart's famous chicken recipe where you spread drumsticks with apricot preserves and mustard.

“Actually it's pretty good,” Sharon said. “
Everybody
makes that.” But she was giggling. The strong coffee was making her definitely high, so high that he talked her into naming the cookbook
Home on the Range
(which everybody thought was just darling, as it turned out), and then he drew a cover for it, a woman in a cowboy hat and an apron tending to a whole stovetop full of wildly bubbling pans. The woman had a funny look on her face; puffs of steam came out of some of the pots.

“I used to draw,” Sharon said dreamily, watching him. Raymond has small, white hands with tufts of gold hair on them.

“What did you draw?” He didn't look up.

“Trees,” Sharon said. “Pages and pages and pages of trees.” As soon as she said it, she remembered it—sitting out on the porch after supper with the pad on her lap, drawing tree after tree with huge flowing branches that reached for God. She didn't tell him the part about God. But suddenly she knew she
could
, if she wanted to. You could say anything to Raymond Stewart, just the way you could say anything to somebody you sat next to on a bus:
anything
.

He grinned at her. His hair stood up in wild blond clumps and behind the thick glasses his magnified eyes were enormous, the pale, flat blue of robins' eggs. “How's that?” He held up the drawing and Sharon said it was fine. Then he signed his name in tiny peaked letters across the bottom of it, like an electrocardiogram, which she didn't expect. Something about him doing this tugged at her heart.

Sharon drank more coffee while he ran off four copies of the recipe booklet; he'd do five hundred more later, if her committee approved. Raymond put these copies into a large flat manila envelope and handed it to her with a flourish and a strange little half-bow. Then somehow, in the midst of standing up and thanking him and taking the envelope—she was all in a flurry—Sharon cut her hand on the flap of the envelope. It was a long, bright cut—a half-moon curve in the soft part of her hand between thumb and index finger. “Oh!” she said.

“
Oh my God!
” Raymond said dramatically. Together they watched while the blood came up slowly, like little red beads on a string. Then Raymond seized her hand and brought it to his mouth and kissed it!—kissed the cut. When Sharon jerked her hand away, it left a red smear, a bloodstain, on his cheek.

“Oh, I'm sorry! I'm so sorry!” Raymond cried, following Sharon out as she fled through the makeup section of the pharmacy where Missy Harrington was looking at lipstick and that older, redheaded lady was working the cash register, and where nobody, apparently, had noticed
anything
.

“I'll call you about the recipe book,” Sharon tossed back over her shoulder. It was only from years of doing everything right that she was able to be so polite . . . or was it? Because what
had
happened, anyway? Nothing, really . . . just not a thing. But Sharon sat in her car for a long time before she started back toward home, not minding how the hot seat burned the backs of her legs. Then, on the way, she tried to remember everything she had ever known about Raymond Stewart.

He was younger—he'd been three or four years behind Sharon in school. Everybody used to call him Highwater because he wore his pants so short that you could always see his little white socks, his little white ankles. He'd been a slight, awkward boy, known for forgetting his books and losing his papers and saying things in class that were totally beside the point. Supposedly, though, he was “bright”; Sharon had had one class with him because he had advanced placement in something, she couldn't remember what now—some kind of English class. How odd that he'd never gone on to college. . . . What Sharon
did
remember, vividly, was Raymond's famous two-year stint as drum major for the high school, after her graduation. Sharon, then a young married woman sitting in the bleachers with her husband, had seen him in this role again and again. Before Leonard Lee was born, Sharon went to all the games with Leonard, who used to be the quarterback.

So she was right there the first time Raymond Stewart—wearing a top hat, white gloves, white boots, and an electric-blue sequined suit which, it was rumored, he had designed himself—came strutting and dancing across the field, leading the band like a professional. Nobody ever saw anything like it! He'd strut, spin, toss his baton so high it seemed lost in the stars, then leap up to catch it and land in a split. Sharon remembered remarking to Leonard once, at a game, that she could hardly connect this Raymond Stewart, the drum major—wheeling like a dervish across the field below them—with that funny little guy who had been, she thought, in her English class. That little guy who wore such high pants. “Well,” Leonard had said then, after some deliberation—and Leonard was no dummy—“well, maybe it just took him a while to find the right clothes.”

Raymond had a special routine he did while the band played “Blue Suede Shoes” and formed itself into a giant shoe on the field. Everybody in the band had showed more spunk and rhythm then, Sharon thought, than any of them had ever shown before—or since, for that matter. Under Raymond's leadership, the band won two AAA number-one championships, an all-time record for Roxboro High. They even went to play at the Apple Blossom Festival the year the governor's daughter was crowned queen, all because of Raymond Stewart.

And just what had Raymond done since? After his father's suicide, which must have happened around the end of his senior year, he had turned “nervous” for a while. He had gone to work at Stewart's Pharmacy and had continued to live with his mother in their big old nubby green concrete house on Sunset Street. Everybody said something should be done about the house, the shameful way Raymond Stewart had let it run down. Since the leaves had not been raked for years and years, all the grass had died—that carefully tended long sloping lawn which used to be Paul Stewart's pride and joy back in the days when he walked to work every morning in his gleaming white pharmacist's jacket with a flower in his buttonhole, speaking to everybody. Paint was peeling from the dark green shutters now, and some of them hung at crazy angles. The hedge had grown halfway up the windows. The side porch was completely engulfed in wisteria, with vines as thick as your arm. It was just a shame. Of course Raymond Stewart wouldn't notice anything like that, or think about raking leaves . . . and his mother!

Miss Suetta was as crazy as a coot. Raymond hired somebody to stay with her all the time. The Stewarts had plenty of money, of course, but Miss Suetta thought she was dirt poor. She'd sneak off from her companion, and hitchhike to town and go into stores and pick out things, and then cry and say she didn't have any money. So the salespeople would charge whatever it was to Raymond, and then they'd call him to come and get her and drive her home. Sharon had been hearing stories about Miss Suetta Stewart for years and years.

But about Raymond—what else? Every Sunday, he played the organ at the First Methodist Church, in a stirring and dramatic way. The whole choir, including Sharon's Aunt Marge, was completely devoted to him. They all called him Ramón. And he had had his picture in the paper last year for helping to organize the Shady Mountain Players, an amateur theatrical group which so far had put on only one show, about a big rabbit. Sharon saw that, but she couldn't remember if Raymond had had a part in it or not. Mainly you thought of Raymond in connection with weddings—everybody consulted Raymond about wedding plans—or interior decoration. Several of Sharon's friends had hired him, in fact. What he did was help you pick your colors through your astral sign. He didn't
order
anything for you, he just advised. In fact, come to think of it, Sharon herself had ordered some new business cards from Raymond Stewart several years ago, for Leonard when he got his promotion. Gray stock with maroon lettering, which Leonard hadn't liked. Leonard said they looked gay. When he found out where she got them, he said it figured, because Raymond Stewart was probably gay too. Sharon smiled at this memory now, driving home. How funny to find that she knew so much about him, after all! How funny that he'd been right here all along—that you could live in the same town with somebody all these years and just simply never notice them, never think of them once as a person. This idea made Sharon feel so weird she wished she'd never thought it up in the first place.