Rain Song (6 page)

Chapter Ten

As the finicky month of March swirls through eastern North Carolina, Ducee tells us after Sunday dinner that we must finalize our reunion planning. She uses her large spiral notebook with a lopsided pineapple on the cover to jot down the menu and other items needing attention. She is filled with questions and poses some of them. Should she use the local florist, Flowers by Deena, or should she ask her cousin Tweetsie in Goldsboro to make the arrangements for the reunion events? Tweetsie would be honored, yet can she be told—nicely, of course—that the arrangements need to showcase more than just white roses from her garden? Color is key here. We don’t want to offend her. We do remember that her roses received a blue ribbon at the Goldsboro Home and Garden Show. Oh, and should the invitations be printed on four-by-six cards like last year? With a larger font. Last year’s was so tiny ninety-seven-year-old Aunt Louise in Morehead City thought she’d received a floral postcard with mere black lines on the backside. Ducee spent a day trying to appease the woman, telling her the lines were words, and no, the small font was not a conspiracy to keep Aunt Louise from the gathering.

Between Ducee and Iva, the questions and concerns mount like mashed potatoes. What about a trip to the coast in the church van? You know those Wyoming folk need to see the ocean and get some fresh salty breezes in their faces. They don’t have the privilege of living close to the coast like we do, bless their hearts. Will Aaron be able to secure a van for the ride? Will the Friday evening dessert be at Third Presbyterian again this year? If so, we need more folding chairs. Is Clive up for the Sunday breakfast at his house? Back to the dessert, are the twins going to play the harmonica and flute for the entertainment that night?

Iva says she heard they were going to The Netherlands.

“What?” Ducee cries. “Who is going where?”

“The twins.”

I am always amused that these grown men, Ivan and Patrick, are not known by their given names but referred to as The Twins.

“The Netherlands?” Ducee says the name of the country as though it’s a disease. She removes her bifocals and rubs her eyes.

Iva sighs. “I know. How can they choose that weekend to be away? Where is their family loyalty?”

Ducee fits her glasses over the bridge of her nose. “No, Iva, the twins wouldn’t do that. You probably got the dates wrong. They wouldn’t miss a reunion.” For Ducee, not attending a family reunion is equivalent to not getting into heaven.

Iva shrugs and moves the ashtray toward her plate, which holds half a slice of pound cake.

I’ve already finished my cake, enjoying each buttery bite.

“Tell us the menu for Saturday’s picnic again,” Iva pipes out.

Adjusting her bifocals, Ducee reads as I sip from a cup of ginger tea. “Potato salad, chicken salad, honey-baked ham, corn on the cob, green bean casserole, egg salad sandwiches, iced tea, lemonade, and chutney. And Mrs. McCready will bring a few pies.” Mrs. McCready isn’t related to any of us, but like Mr. McGuire, she is considered family.

Iva puts down her cigarette. “We are missing something.”

Ducee looks over her page, shakes her head, and looks up. “No, I read it all.”

“You didn’t say anything about cucumber sandwiches.”

“Well, Iva, as I’ve told you before, you can’t have egg salad and cucumber at the same meal.”

“All right, I got that theory of yours.”

I grimace. Ducee does not think her Southern Truths are mere theories. She takes offense to anyone not realizing she is the queen of etiquette. But I have learned, over the years, to stay out of these sibling spats. I try to relax and sip my tea.

“If we can’t have cucumber sandwiches at the picnic on Saturday here, then we can have them at the breakfast at Clive’s.”

“Whoever heard of cucumber sandwiches for breakfast?” If Ducee were a rocket, she would be through the roof, halfway to Mars.

“Clive eats fried oysters for breakfast. So he’ll let my sandwiches be on his breakfast menu.”

“Clive will let you have sandwiches for breakfast?” Ducee sounds as if she is ready to march over to Clive’s small farm and take him down.

“If we have the Sunday breakfast at his house, he will.”

Ducee closes her eyes as though she is praying.

We wait.

When her eyes open, she says, “Okay, why not?”

“What?” Iva’s cigarette hand is suspended in midair.

Ducee lifts the cloth napkin from her lap to wipe her mouth. “I said, why not?”

“Why not what?”

She tosses her napkin onto her left thigh. “You can have them—cucumber sandwiches.”

Iva gives me a wide-eyed look and quickly cries, “Write it down! In the book.”

With great effort, Ducee flips open her notebook and slowly jots down a few words.

Iva’s beam is so bright, I think I need sunglasses to shade my eyes. She gives me a light kick under the table. “Did you write cucumber sandwiches, thinly sliced, no skins?”

“Yes.” Ducee sighs as she puts down her pen, picks up her napkin, and carefully wipes the edges of her mouth one more time.

Later, after the dishes are cleared and washed, Iva and Ducee sing a few Irish ballads.

Ducee’s eyes form tears during the last stanza of “Danny Boy,” and that’s when I head out the door to go home.

All day I’ve wanted to sit at my computer and write to Harrison. Even during the sermon this morning, based on one of Ducee’s favorite passages, Matthew six, about God caring for the birds of the air, my mind was coming up with comments to make on Harrison’s latest email message.

After Monet had deleted his picture before I got a chance to view it, Harrison resent the photo as an attachment with a note. His words on the screen made me smile and think, what a sweet guy.

Nicole,

Monet sounds charming. I don’t blame her if she deleted my picture after looking at it. She’s not the first. An ex-girlfriend of mine still throws darts at a 5 X 7 of me in her spare time.

If you look at the pond, by the lily, just behind me, you can get a glimpse of my Kohaku, my most gluttonous koi. I think he is guilty of eating the plants.

Harrison

Charming? Monet? Harrison used the same word to describe Monet as Ducee once did. In my mind I saw her ketchup-stained face, her one-legged stances, her puckered lips. I let out a light laugh but was not sure I agreed to
charming
.

Then I closed my eyes, pressed the paper clip to open the attachment, let out one single breath, opened my eyes, and was face-to-face with a man of more or less average build seated on a stone bench by a pond framed in foliage. He was wearing dark blue jeans and a long-sleeved blue shirt that brought out the blue in his deep-set eyes. His hair was brown and cut short. His eyes were alive with a smile and his lips parted to show two rows of white teeth. I searched for his shoes, but his feet were hidden by the cattails growing beside the pond.

I studied his face and then found the fish’s white-and-red spotted back, barely visible in the pond. My eyes moved to Harrison’s face again.

It was then that I had the urge to tell someone about Harrison. If only I had a girlfriend, I could call to say, “Guess what? Harrison sent me a picture of himself. Come over and see!”

Oh, I knew I could call Ducee. Ducee has always let me know she wants to be right in the center of my life, but telling Ducee wasn’t the same. Besides, I wasn’t sure I was ready to talk to Ducee about this. What would my grandmother say? “You met him online? Isn’t that very dangerous? Yes, that’s it, yes.”

Aunt Iva would throw in that she knew someone who had met a guy online and was now at the bottom of the Neuse River as fish bait. Cousin Aaron would likewise tell me to beware of a stranger. His pastoral warning would sound something like, “Beware, Nicole. God’s given us discernment for times like these.” Or would he be glad that I was finally dealing with the Japan part of myself ?

Carefully, I went over every aspect of the photo from the pond to the cattails to Harrison’s face. I concluded that Harrison was not a movie star, but sure as the sun, neither was I. He did have a cuteness to him, though.

In the quiet of my house that night, I moved from my computer to plan my lessons for Monday’s seventh- and eighth-grade classes. I opened the literature textbook. Half an hour later I’d read nothing from any of the pages. But I had written Harrison’s name in bold letters on a page in my lesson planner.

Back at my computer, I clicked on the photo attachment again.

Harrison does have nice eyes, I told myself. They are blue and a little crinkled at the edges due to his smile. They seem to embody a cross between warmth and ease, and something else, something I couldn’t quite place.

Grandpa Luke always said when you met someone for the first time not to neglect his eyes. His instructions were to hold the eye contact and see what your gut told you. “When I met Ducee,” he told me, “I locked my eyes with hers and saw into her pretty and strong soul. Yes, I thought, by golly, this is the woman for me!”

As I fed my fish, I said to them, “His eyes are kind. They’re blue like the ocean. I bet they’d gloss over when he was told a sad story.”

My angelfish and clownfish just opened and closed their button mouths.

Yet I didn’t say a word to Harrison about my birth in Japan or Mama. I simply replied that I was very glad to get the picture and that his outdoor fish pond looked great.

———

On Sunday afternoon after I get home I write until the sun sets. I answer Harrison’s questions about teaching, why I became a teacher, and why I like living in Mount Olive. “It’s tiny and quaint. Have you ever been to the South?” I tell him about the family reunion in July, the food we’ll make, including pineapple chutney. “We use an ancient recipe my grandmother says comes from Ireland, although we know there are few pineapples, if any, in Ireland.” I say that the green bean casserole is made with heavy cream instead of milk, which adds about five thousand extra calories to each serving, but somehow, on reunion Saturday at my grandmother Ducee’s, we don’t care.

Chapter Eleven

As we walk out into the fading late-March sunshine after school one Tuesday, Kristine wants to know why I look sad. When I don’t reply but just push my hands into my coat pockets, she tells me I can’t brood over Richard any longer. “Nicole, you have to get out there and circulate again.”

Richard? I haven’t given him a thought in weeks. He is probably circulating with the tattooed librarian and that is just peachy by me.

“You’re cute,” Kristine tells me with one of her wide smiles and a flick of her gently wind-blown hair. “I know this guy who would like to date you. He’s about your height, has brown wavy hair. Since he’s been out of jail he hasn’t found anyone he’s attracted to.” Then she turns to walk toward her red Mustang. “Let me know, okay?”

As I get into my car to go home, I look at myself in the mirror and can barely see my eyes. The wind has ruffled my frizzy mane in all directions. It’s hopeless. My hair will never look like Kristine’s, nor will my smile or eyes or legs. I speed out of the parking lot, return Mr. Vicker’s wave, and sail down the street.

What is wrong with me? Other than my wayward hair? It was a good day at school, I think. My eighth-graders wrote poetry and some of the poems, especially Clay’s, were electrifying. Maybe they were paying attention last week as I taught them how to string adverbs and adjectives together. Perhaps my students will make it to Fortune 500 companies. Once they pass middle school, high school, and college, that is. And as adults, they may even look back upon their eighth-grade year and thank me. After all, Henry Adams did say that a teacher affects eternity.

But it is not teaching that has me on edge. The teaching aspect of my life has been going well for a while now. It’s really quite simple. Sazae knows; my aquarium of swimming beauties know. I haven’t heard from Harrison in over a week.

I reread the previous messages I’ve sent, analyzing each one, trying to find the line or word that may have caused him to be offended and quit corresponding. We’ve been writing constantly and now the inevitable has happened—one of us is tired. And it’s not me.

For the whole month, I’ve sent messages in the afternoon and received replies the next morning. He writes at night, while I am still sleeping and on the brink of waking to a day that he is just about to complete. I learned early on that during the spring, Japan is thirteen hours ahead of America’s East Coast.

I wrote on a Saturday after cleaning my fish tank. In a cheerful mood, since I’d just completed the tedious chore of scrubbing the insides and outsides of the glass tank, I made a bowl of grits and wrote about the first goldfish I ever owned. He’d recently written about his first fish, which was a minnow he caught in a stream at a local park in Kyoto.

I typed,

My cousin in Mount Olive gave me my first fish. My father and I lived in Richmond at the time and I was visiting my grandma Ducee the summer before entering first grade. Aaron came over with a glass globe container, and it held one piece of seaweed, a blue rock and a green and red pagoda. He poured the contents of a plastic bag into the container and out gushed water and a bright orange goldfish. I was attending Vacation Bible School that week and we were studying Jonah and the big fish. So, naturally, I named my fish Jonah. He lasted all summer, swimming happily in his home, which I kept on my grandmother’s kitchen counter. I still have the green pagoda, and every fish tank I’ve had since then gets this childhood item placed on the gravel.

I looked forward to hearing his response. But the next morning before heading to church, my inbox was empty. I didn’t hear from him the next day or the next. Why isn’t he writing? I asked myself. Did I say something wrong? My mind spun with confusion.

I even prayed that he would write as I walked the halls at school, listened to Kristine in the teachers’ lounge, and tried to ease Iva’s worries about Ducee’s failing health. Then I thought, what a silly prayer. He’s just a guy across the ocean who likes fish. Big deal. Get over it. God must think you are awfully frivolous to ask Him for such a selfish thing.

But he writes poetry. His blue eyes are kind. And when I look at his picture and read lines from his email messages, it is as though I can see his eyes move and light up and—

I have to stop sitting in Aunt Lucy’s chair. I am not only crazy, but obsessed.

It doesn’t matter what I try to tell myself; I want to hear from Harrison.

As I unlock my front door, I promise myself I’ll do five things around the house that need to be done before checking my new email messages. Promise.

In the kitchen there is an answering machine message from my stepmom, Bonnie. She emphasizes how wonderful it would be to hear from me. I suppose it’s time I give her a call.

First, I make a cup of Earl Grey and sip it at the kitchen table. Maybe Harrison has been on vacation. He did say he was going to southern Japan, to Okinawa, to snorkel, but wasn’t that in July? I finish my tea, realizing I didn’t even taste it.

Then I pick up the phone.

She answers on the third ring. I’d hoped to get by with the easy method—leaving a message.

“Hi, Bonnie, how are you? How’s Father?” I try to conjure a cheery voice, sort of like Kristine would sound.

“Oh, Nicole. It’s you. How nice of you to call.” I hear it in her voice. What she really means is, finally, you are returning my phone calls. At last you are showing some concern for me and your father. Well, girl, it is about time.

“How are you?” I repeat.

“We are doing.” Which means she is busy with the women’s club of Richmond while Father sits on the couch and eats sardines from a can. “How are you doing?”

I tell her school is fine and my fish are fine and then ask if she and Father will be at the family reunion.

She sighs. “When is it?”

Same as every year, I want to say, but instead tell her the first weekend in July.

“Oh,” her voice sounds hollow. “No, I don’t think so. The Club is having a luncheon that Friday. Saturday they are holding a canned-goods drive.” Bonnie has never been one for conversation. I once tried to get her to describe her childhood house to me. Since she holds an interest in interior decorating, I figured this subject would cause her to tell in detail about each room, the furniture, the swing in the backyard. Instead, she replied in a sinister voice with, “Our house was cold. There was this dampness that crept up from the floors.” Which brought chills over my skin. I didn’t want to hear any more.

Now the silence makes my head itch. I attempt to break it. “So what is Father doing? Can he come to the phone?”

Quickly, she says, “Oh no. But he sends his love.”

“Oh.”

“Richard?”

“What?”

“How is Richard?”

Coolly, I tell her, “Fine.” I’m sure he is, running off with the librarian.

“Will you come see us soon?”

“I hope to.” Please, don’t make me set a date.

“Can you come for your father’s birthday? He’d like that.”

“We’ll see,” I tell her. My students claim that when adults say
we’ll see
it’s just another way of saying
no
.

Father married Bonnie during an eclipse, I’m sure. That one moment in his life when the sun and moon lined up and he was actually sober and happy. He managed to put on some cologne to cover the smell of sardines, propose with a diamond he bought in a pawn shop, and she, enticed by his good looks, accepted. Since then there has never been another eclipse in his life. Just this large darkness like an overgrown shadow. The darkness has actually been around since Mama’s death, I’m told. “Her death ripped his life apart,” Ducee said once. “Just took everything from him. Yes, that’s it, yes.” You’d never guess my father is a medical doctor. But I heard he was once a good one, eager with enthusiasm to work at the Baptist Hospital in Kyoto, Japan. I’ve heard from some relatives that in his early twenties, right before he met Mama, he battled depression. Once the love of his life was dead, the illness consumed him, and not caring to seek help or medication, he lost his faith and spiraled downward. That’s what they tell me.

“Well,” Bonnie breathes in. “We do miss you.”

“Thank you.” As soon as the words leave my lips, I think, what a dumb thing for me to say. I know what I’m expected to say. “Oh, I miss you, too.” But I just can’t. I don’t miss anything about her, not even the beef stew she makes, which is actually tasty. And Father. His depressed lifestyle has never been something I’m proud of. In fact, I used to worry that if depression is hereditary, I was doomed.

“Well,” Bonnie says once more. “I’m glad we could talk.”

“Take care of each other,” I reply. Then I quickly whisper, “Bye,” and hang up.

It’s over. Going to the dentist would have been easier. But I did it. I’ve taken care of something before giving myself the luxury to check for new messages.

I ease into my computer chair. Yes! There is a message from Harrison. He’s written back, at last. I let the relief sink in for a moment, enjoy it. All is well now. I glance up at my fish. “It’s okay,” I reassure them. “He wrote. Everything’s okay.” Smiling, I open his newest message.

It holds only one line. I am too stunned to read it aloud to my fish.

Nicole, my mother remembers the night you were born.