Sacred Dust (22 page)

Glen did too. He said he thought it was just what I needed. He told me I could get someone in to clean here at home three days a week, loves the idea that I’m involved with Travis’s education, blah, blah, blah.… It’s a lot more responsibility than you might think. Michael lives on a spiritual plane, and you have to be grounded in reality if you’re trying to keep a small private school running in the black.

Michael grins at me like I’m talking Sanskrit half the time. Health insurance for the teachers and physicals for the students and private school accreditation aren’t where he lives. There’s also the plain dull organization of files and putting together a newsletter and substituting when teachers are sick. It’s work I do well. It keeps my mind off me and the insatiable desires that lead me into trouble.

Tuesday after school Travis went home with his new friend Bobby. I stayed late to finish up the newsletter. Michael was in his room behind the office. He lives at the school. He goes back there between four and six to rest up for his evening karate classes three nights a week. I’d never been back there in his room. I’d watched him disappear behind that door a hundred times. I was curious to see it. I wondered if he had an altar to some of those Eastern gods he talks about. Or love letters from an old girlfriend or any other relics from the life he had before he came here. I have infinite curiosity about Michael England. It went against my nature, but I never so much as peeked behind the door to his room.

Michael is many things, but he’s not much of a writer. He wanted me to put a long article in the newsletter I was working on that afternoon explaining a little bit about this observance he had planned for Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, birthday. I had changed his original sketch so much that I wanted him to read it before I printed it up. At last I had a legitimate excuse to knock on the door of the holy of holies.

Everything in Michael’s room is white. He has this theory about white and energy that he’d have to explain. Not that there was much inventory—the rollaway bed where he was lying down, a
little dresser, a lamp, a few books and a couple straw mats. The window was covered with a sheet and it was getting on towards dusk, so I couldn’t immediately tell if he had his clothes off under the sheets. If you know Michael, you don’t make much of a thing like that. Michael has no chicanery or guile about him. I never heard him condemn anyone, and I suppose, in exchange for that, he expects the right to live as he pleases.

He sat up on the bed, revealing his bare upper torso as he took the newsletter out of my hand and started to read it. I stood by the edge of the bed in that white room and condemned myself for what I was feeling. I was flooded with the sudden, stupid hope that he’d take me into his arms and make love to me. Maybe if I touched him, he’d guide me away gently and give me a lecture on spirituality. I wanted to test him, I guess. I don’t know. I wanted him. Period. I had for weeks. He must have been able to hear my heart racing.

I felt lower than Glen had ever made me feel despite his best efforts. I told myself that having him this way—just having him close, just helping him achieve his goals—was better than all my dark thoughts.

“This is great,” he said, and handed me the paper.

His voice broke my heart because it expressed a kind of appreciation that Glen never could, that Sarah would never intend, that I might be lucky enough to experience from Travis only if I lived long enough. His voice spoke an admiration for parts of me that no one else ever saw, or maybe I just didn’t have the guts to show them. It made me cry.

“Is something wrong?”

It was the most terrible moment I ever experienced. Glen tried to make me feel low and common. But it only angered me, it only goaded me on. Michael tried to make me his equal and I wanted to slip between the cracks in the floorboards. Of course I wanted him, but more than anything, I wanted to hold on to his approval.

There is no terror like an unspoken love, particularly when you haven’t even admitted it to yourself. Until that moment, Michael
had been my one true thought. His teachings were my hope for a new and bearable existence.

“I think I’m in love with you.”

My words splattered out, clanked around the almost empty room and landed in a silent heap in a corner. If I could have run, I would have cheerfully run, fled, driven home, starched and ironed sheets gratefully until midnight. But then I heard the same words again.

“I think I’m in love with you.”

Only this time, they didn’t clank and they didn’t heap, they swirled around and around on a trail of little stars illumining that room, because this time Michael had spoken them. He was crying too. We let our eyes talk, we let our arms dream, we let those little stars that swirled over us become endless sky. The world let us off for an hour. We made each other one—fast—and we made each other one—slow. We let our hearts lead our limbs deeper and deeper into each other, mingling and swirling, exploding and drinking in sensation, wonder, each other, love beguiling—shameless, awe-inspiring, prince-and-princess-hidden-in-a-secret-tower-room-against-a-storm—love spilling over, washing away all doubt or disbelief, waking enchantment, hard and fast and furious and resurrecting love!

I went home. Glen was on the phone with a client. He had a migraine. Sarah wouldn’t touch her butter beans. Her teacher had sent a note home about her not wearing shorts to third grade. Travis spilled Krazy Glue all over his brand new solid mahogany bedroom furniture. I stood in the kitchen after they were all in bed. I starched and ironed and ironed and starched sheets until after midnight. I walked out onto the porch. It was windy. The water was choppy. There were thin puffy clouds moving over the trees. Behind the moon, brilliant and fine, the stars were still swirling.

I
had been avoiding Lily. I knew she’d be all over me wanting me to come back to the discussion group. She caught me pulling turnips in the garden on Saturday morning. At first I tried to act busier than I was. It surprised me how glad I was to see her. I’d put in two weeks out at Wal-Mart by that time and I didn’t know how much more I could take. Mr. Dumas, the manager, starts the new ones out as greeters. You stand at the door and welcome every mangy shred of humanity to Wal-Mart eight hours a day. “Welcome to Wal-Mart,” like it was a step up, like they had arrived from some lower level in life. It doesn’t have the effect that the management intends. It puts people off. Most ignore you completely and the ones who respond look at you like you’re pitiful and walk away thinking you must be the most desperate soul on earth to stand there doing that all day. One lady with two kids in her shopping cart stopped dead in her tracks. “Welcome to
Wal-Mart?
” She hissed back at me, “Woman, people don’t
come
to Wal-Mart. People
end up
here.”

Other things. The employees’ bathroom is filthy. I don’t care for that crowd I have to eat my lunch with, and that includes Marjean. Marjean manages linens—if you call what they sell linens—and she feels entitled to say anything to or about me because she helped to get me on out there. I want so badly to tell her that I worked for
Pizitz in Birmingham. Pizitz of Birmingham was decidedly a place to go rather than end up.

Dashnell acts like I filed for divorce. My job is an insult to his twenty-seven thousand a year. I can’t serve a leftover without his complaining I abandoned my real job at home. Suddenly he wants his bowling shirt ironed. He says I promised him, if he’d buy me the lake house, I’d make it a showplace. I’d love to know when I said that. I’ve only had two paychecks so far, and I haven’t even opened them. They’re hardly worth taking to the bank.

I had to admit Lily was a tonic against all of that when she caught me in the garden. She’s taken down some weight, and you can really see how delicate her face is. She looks like an alabaster angel. I took her up on the porch and made us some iced tea. She was jollier than I’ve ever seen her, like she really appreciated me taking the time with her.

Of course she teased me mercilessly about my not coming back to the discussion group. She was serious, but somehow her manner didn’t offend me. I gave her an earful about Marjean and Wal-Mart. She had plenty to say that made me laugh about Marjean. She went on about how she looks like a banty hen with straw hair and how Jake must have done that caps job on her upper teeth with his power saw and on like that until my sides hurt from laughing.

Dashnell came in with a stringer of crappie for me to clean. He was proud of his catch, so he brought it on the porch and set it on an ice chest where we could see it. Lily looked like she was going to vomit.

“Dashnell, do you really expect this poor woman to clean those nasty things? Where did you grow up? In a cave?”

Dashnell laughed, but I could see he didn’t like it. He told me to call Jake and Marjean. He said I was fixing to fry fish and hush puppies and to chop slaw.

“I’d like to see the day Glen commands me to clean fish and then stand over a hot kettle and fry them for a woman who runs her mouth about me all day at work.”

Dashnell flashes hot all at once. He either blows or walks away. He flashed. He didn’t walk away either. I had to say something.

“Go on and get your shower. What time are they coming?”

“I hadn’t asked them yet,” Dashnell says. “I couldn’t say.”

Lily had to keep her presence and her disapproval known. “Couldn’t
say.
Well,
I’ll say!”

“Run on home, honey.…” That was me to Lily with her arms crossed and her foot tapping and her own set of fireworks about to explode. Dashnell’s look scared her. She cooled down some.

“Run on home, now.”

“What makes you think she wants to clean and fry fish?”

“It’s what she’s good at,” Dashnell says. “Now a woman like you, she might not be so good at frying fish. She might have other talents.…” He was drunk, of course.

“Like what?” Lily knew from his tone what he meant.

“Like yours.”

“Just what would mine be?”

“Precious, I really think you ought to run on. Dashnell, get your shower.”

I stepped towards the fish which he’d dropped on the porch floor by my feet.

“Not before this big, grizzly redneck explains his insult.”

“Probably touching your toes together over my head and squealing like a pig,” he says.

“Is that so?” She was on fire. All in one jerk, she had the stringer of fish, and she pitched them way off into the yard behind the woodpile. He hollered for her to get off his property, and threatened to fetch his gun.

“It’s Rose’s property too.”

I said I wasn’t concerned about whose house it was, I didn’t care for the way things were going and I wanted them both to go on about their business.

“You
want
to clean those fish?” Her look flattened me. I didn’t want to clean and fry fish for Marjean. She knew it. I knew it. Dashnell knew it too. Dashnell said he was going down to Lily’s to fetch Glen, who he called a “squirmy worm.”

“Dashnell Lawler, you’re a disgrace to the buzzards!” That was me. “Now you reach way down deep inside yourself and you find
that last tiny shred of decency you keep hidden there and you apologize to Lily right now!” I was giving the fool an out. I was publicly pretending I believed underneath all his fire he was semihuman.

“Get that slattern off my property.”

Lily rose to leave. Something told me if I didn’t make a genuine effort to take up for her I’d never see her again. In that moment I realized that Lily was the only real friend that I had made since I came home to Prince George County. Suddenly that mattered to me more than anything else.

“Lily Pembroke is nobody’s slattern. Lily Pembroke is my very good friend. You’re a damned fool and you’re stinking drunk and you are not fit for human companionship.”

It was his mindless response to everything. It didn’t hurt near as much as it looked like it did when it started to swell. The blood on my teeth didn’t help. Quick as he seen what he’d done, he walked into the kitchen. Lily grabbed some ice from a glass of tea there on the table and pressed it against my lip. I told her to go on home. I said I’d be fine.

“Sit down,” she says, ignoring me, “and don’t talk till you quit bleeding.” I wanted to get indoors as quick as I could, because I knew Marjean and Jake could hear us from their place. It wouldn’t matter to Marjean if we had a DOA on the back porch. If she had wind that I was going to cook fish, she’d be over in a New York minute.

“I’m all right now,” I says. “Go on.” How many times did I ask her to leave? A hundred maybe. I started to get up and she sat me back down, then she rubbed on my sore shoulder and finally she went into the kitchen and poured me a finger or two of rum into a Coca-Cola. I’m not a drinker, but that settled me. Through the screen I could see Dashnell inside the house, wet from the shower, digging through the hall closet for a shirt. The temperature had dropped considerably. There was mist on the lake. I was limp by now. The crickets were screeching madness in the trees. You could smell rain.

“Dashnell?” She called into the kitchen like nothing had happened. “Do you want to know how you made her feel?” Lily was
standing opposite him in the kitchen now. Her voice was as calm as if she’d been the one sipping on the rum and Coke, soaking up the shoulder rub and the attention.

“I lost myself,” Dashnell said in a voice I hadn’t heard since he and the minister made arrangements for Carmen. I figured there was a trick underneath it. But how to warn Lily?

“But do you know how you made her feel?” He said he didn’t.

“Well, I’ll just show you,” she says, and her fist was at his jaw before I could turn around to see. I heard his tooth crack. A sudden light came all around her as she stood there, preventing me with an upraised arm from moving to see if he was all right. A light swirled over her and it lit something in me that I would have to describe as a hurtful joy like the memory of childbirth or Daddy. Dashnell stood silent in the door with his hand over his mouth. The light must have come into my eyes by then, because Dashnell Lawler had the saddest look I ever saw on his face. After Carmen, sorrow was all he could feel. Sometimes that sorrow burst into anger like it had a little while before. Sometimes it exploded and diminished, but it would always grow in him again.