Suncatchers (9 page)

“Well, all right,” he said.

“Oh, you are the nicest thing!” Eldeen said. “You just come over and knock when it's time to leave, or better yet, just toot the horn a little bit. I'll be sitting on ready.” And she put one large hand up close to her face and gave a tiny slow wave like a shy child.

6

A Heart Problem

At five o'clock that afternoon Perry stood at the kitchen counter unloading two bags of groceries. Removing a jar of spaghetti sauce from the sack, he noted how heavy it felt. He had never known grocery shopping could be so physically draining. For well over an hour he and Eldeen had walked up and down every aisle of Thrifty-Mart, very slowly, with Perry pushing the cart and Eldeen fingering through a shoebox labeled “Dr. Nebergall's Ortho-treads” that served as a file box for her coupons. They had had to backtrack to several different aisles: once to hunt for muffin papers, which they had overlooked the first time on Aisle 8; another time to get a second box of strawberry Jell-O on Aisle 6 after Eldeen grew worried that the recipe for Berry Berry Swirl, which she wanted Jewel to make for the upcoming spring social at church, might call for a large box of Jell-O instead of a small box; and then all the way back to Aisle 3 to exchange vanilla wafers for graham crackers after Eldeen had examined her coupon for a Nabisco cookie product more carefully.

“See, there's a picture of graham crackers right smack in the middle of all them cookies,” she said, pointing to her coupon triumphantly. “I'm glad I noticed it. I like graham crackers a whole lot better than vanilla wafers. Vanilla wafers are bad to go soft, and I can't stand a soft cookie. I like them crisp. If I want something soft, I'll eat cake, thank you, not a cookie. Cookies oughta
crunch
when you bite down. 'Course, graham crackers can go soft, too, but they usually don't last long enough for that at our house.”

She stopped suddenly beside a large display of peanut butter at the end of an aisle. “Now here's something I plum' forgot to put on my list, for crying out loud. You can't eat graham crackers without peanut butter, and Joe Leonard nearly cleaned out the jar last night after church. Have you ever tried graham crackers and peanut butter together, Perry?” But before he could answer, she gave her throaty laugh and swatted his hand. “Oh, what in the world am I thinking of? 'Course you've tried it. Everybody has. I bet all you little northern children had graham crackers and peanut butter for snacks after school, same as we did.”

Perry nodded. A whole compartment of his childhood suddenly unlocked. He hadn't thought of it for years. In elementary school he used to come home after school and sit down at the white enameled table in the kitchen with a box of graham crackers, a jar of peanut butter, and a knife. His mother would be at the sink or washer or sewing machine or ironing board, usually listening to an old Cole Porter or Mills Brothers album. Perry would eat slowly and quietly, taking in all the sounds: the splash of the water at the sink, the steady thunk of the washing machine, the rhythmic ticking of his mother's Singer sewing machine, the hiss of the steam iron, but most of all the words to all the songs. “You're the Top,” “I've Got You Under My Skin,” “Opus One,” “Paper Doll,” “Glow Worm”—he had learned them all and used to sing snatches of them for humorous effect: “I get a kick out of you” the time he tried to teach Beth to punt a football, “Don't get around much anymore” when he sprained his ankle, “You always hurt the one you love” after Beth stepped on her cat's tail, “I know a little bit about a lot of things” when he guessed the right answer on “Final Jeopardy.” The only problem was that no one at home ever laughed at his little musical jokes, and he had finally quit trying.

There was one the Mills Brothers sang titled “Dinah.” He remembered singing it to Dinah: “Dinah—is there anyone finer in the state of Carolina?” The song went on to describe the charms of gazing into Dinah's sparkling eyes. Perry had put in all the same inflections when he sang it, just as he'd heard it on the album—scooping up to notes, holding certain ones out longer, and punching at others to add a syncopated effect. Dinah would laugh and shake her head when he got to the part of the song in which the speaker worried that his beautiful Dinah might grow tired of him someday and change her mind about loving him. Not a chance, she'd say. Not a chance in the world.

He tried to remember the last time he'd sung the song to her. It must have been at least five or six years. Why had he stopped? he wondered. Funny how he'd wound up in the state of Carolina and Dinah had indeed changed her mind about him.

At some time or other his mother had stopped listening to her record albums. He never knew why. She had also stopped buying graham crackers and had started buying boxes of graham cracker crumbs for her cheesecakes and pies. Gradually Perry had begun going directly to his bedroom after school and had stopped sitting at the kitchen table for snacks.

“ . . . and would eat a jar every day if his mama would let him.” Eldeen was still talking as she sifted through her coupons. “Here we go. Skippy—fifty-five cents off. Now, let's see here.” She bent close to the shelves to examine the prices. “That's what I thought! Now, that's just exactly what I thought!” She straightened and pointed to the jars of Skippy. “Even with this coupon here, that kind is going to run me almost forty cents more than the Lucky Lady brand. And it's not a bit better. Not a bit!”

She picked up a jar of the Lucky Lady and set it firmly in the cart, then placed her unused coupon on top of a Skippy jar on the shelf. “There, I'll leave that right there in case somebody's just dead set on getting Skippy and doesn't care about sticking to a budget. It irks me when a coupon is for fifty-five cents anyway. They won't double anything over fifty cents, so the way I see it, a coupon for fifty-five is gypping me out of forty-five cents, if you know what I mean.” She looked at Perry as if expecting an answer. He frowned and nodded. What in the world was she talking about? “It's for the chunky kind anyway,” she continued, “and I'd much rather have the creamy.”

On the graham cracker aisle Eldeen's face suddenly creased with pleasure as she pointed to a woman headed toward them. “Why, there's Martha Joy Darrow! Martha Joy, it's been so long since I've seen you, honey.”

Martha Joy, a tall, pale woman with limp, shoulder-length hair and thick glasses, looked up and squinted toward them, craning her neck forward. Suddenly she smiled widely and said, “Well, if it's not Eldeen Rafferty, you sweet thing you. I couldn't figure out who you were at first.”

Eldeen immediately introduced Perry as “my handsome young neighbor who offered to bring me grocery shopping with him.”

Martha Joy stuck out her hand, and as Perry took it, he noticed that her orange lipstick overlapped her lips by an eighth of an inch all the way around. Maybe it was a beauty tip for making thin lips appear fuller. And it would probably work fine if you didn't get up too close to anyone. Or maybe she was extremely farsighted and couldn't see what she was doing in the mirror.

Martha Joy smiled at him and said, “I saw you at church yesterday morning, but I slipped out early, so I didn't get to visit. You don't meet many gentlemen nowadays, that's for certain. It's mighty nice of you to offer Eldeen a ride to the store. It's a pleasure to meet you.”

“How's Burton getting along?” Eldeen asked her, and then she and Martha Joy talked for several minutes. Burton, who was evidently Martha Joy's husband, was suffering from diverticulitis, which Martha Joy said was “tying his insides in knots.”

Perry walked on down the aisle and exchanged the vanilla wafers while Eldeen talked. As he returned to the cart, another woman with a baby and two toddlers in her cart turned down Aisle 3. He heard Eldeen gasp. “Well, I'll be. If it's not
another
one of my favorite people in the whole wide world. Imagine it, meeting two of my nicest friends here on the same day.” The three women laughed and hugged one another.

The new woman, named Crystal, told Eldeen and Martha Joy that she'd had to miss the last two Sundays because of the children. “They can't all of them get well and stay that way for more than a day or two,” she said. The little girl in the cart lifted her dress to cover her face, exposing a pair of blue panties. The other toddler, a little boy oozing thickly from his nose, was clapping two cans of peas together. The baby started waving his arms and crying like a weak lamb.

Eldeen asked Crystal about her houseplants. “Did the fertilizer I gave you help any?” Crystal said she'd never gotten around to trying it, and Eldeen patted her arm. “I know, honey, you've got lots more important things on your mind than puny violets.” They talked a few more minutes before one of Crystal's toddlers ripped open a bag of rice and she quickly wheeled away. “That poor woman, I feel so sorry for her,” Eldeen said to Martha Joy, and they stood side by side, sadly watching Crystal round the corner.

A stock boy in a green Thrifty-Mart apron passed at the end of the aisle. “Gordon!” Eldeen called, waving the top of the coupon shoebox. “Gordon! There's been a spill here on this aisle! It's a safety hazard! Bring a broom!”

Martha Joy said good-bye and left, but Eldeen stayed to watch the cleanup. “Over there's some more,” she told Gordon, pointing with the shoebox lid. “Crystal's had a hard time of it,” she said to Perry. “She's got four more children besides them three with her. The oldest one is ten or thereabouts, and it's all up to Crystal to put clothes on their back. Her husband is just a no-account. He sure needs Jesus, that man does. I need to pray harder for him.” She closed her eyes right then, and Perry saw her lips moving. He looked down at Gordon in embarrassment and then back at Eldeen, who still had her eyes closed. Perry ran his foot under the edge of a round revolving rack displaying cakes of toilet sanitizer and sponges of various sizes. Several grains of rice scooted across the floor, and Gordon swept them into his pile.

Eldeen opened her eyes. “Every time I see Crystal, my heart just breaks in two for her. Some folks have such a hard time in life it doesn't seem fair, does it? But Jesus knows. Jesus knows. ‘The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord,' the Bible says, and I reckon that includes a good woman too.” Gordon finished sweeping and held out his dustpan, which was full of rice. Eldeen nodded approvingly. “There, that's got it,” she said.

By the time they had covered the whole store, the cart was full. Perry had stacked his things in one half of the lower section at Eldeen's suggestion, using a jumbo box of Corn Flakes as a divider. Eldeen's purse and box of coupons took up most of the smaller top section. A large bag of potatoes and two economy packs of paper towels filled the flat shelf on the bottom.

“Jewel will be so glad I got all this,” Eldeen said as they finally headed toward a checkout lane.

There was only one cashier working, so they got in line behind two other people. A small elderly man stood directly in front of them, shoulders hunched forward and chin resting somewhere near his sternum. His scalp shone like a bright pink balloon through his thin, oily yellowish hair, which straggled untidily around his ears.

“My, but a buggy can sure fill up fast, can't it, Mr. Hammond?” Eldeen said loudly, tapping the man's arm lightly with the shoebox lid she was still holding. He slowly pivoted and scowled up at Eldeen from deeply sunken eyes. “Seems like you no sooner get started than you run out of room,” she continued cheerfully, motioning toward her cart. Perry wondered if she really did think it had happened fast. The man's cart held only four small tubs of cottage cheese and a big jar of apple juice, he noticed.

The old man stared at Eldeen for a moment without answering, then solemnly studied their loaded cart. “I used to like sausage,” he said in a hoarse whisper, “but it doesn't set with me anymore.”

“Well, now, that's a shame,” Eldeen said. “I guess if it's not one thing it's another, isn't it? Now, me, I used to pour a gallon of Italian dressing on my salad, and then all of a sudden it started upsetting my digestion something awful. I can't take even the slightest little taste of it anymore. But sausage—now
that
would be a hard, hard thing to have to give up.”

Without responding, the old man turned back around and inched his cart forward as the woman in front of him finished unloading her groceries onto the moving belt.

Eldeen began digging in her purse, unzipping several interior pockets and extracting folded bills. “That poor old man, he's just shy of being totally and completely deaf,” she announced to Perry without lowering her voice. The old man gave no sign of having heard her. “His name's Otis Hammond, and he lives all by hisself, he told me one day,” Eldeen continued, “and he said he comes to the store every day. I see him in here all the time. It just gives him something to do, I reckon. I keep inviting him to come to church, but he says he doesn't see any sense in religion, that his brother-in-law was a preacher and the worst bag of hot air in the country. I'm praying hard for him, though, and I keep having this dream that I'm setting in church one Sunday and I look up and there he is, coming in through the back door. He's got a heart problem—I mean, besides his
spiritual
one—and then some days he can hardly talk on top of that. It's some kind of nodules on his thyroid that just keeps growing bigger and bigger. And he won't have a operation. Thinks doctors are a bunch of butchers and thieves, he says.”

The old man stooped to pick up his purchases and place them on the belt. The small bones running down the back of his hands protruded like taut cords as he grasped each carton one at a time. He coughed weakly and appeared to be lost in dark thoughts.

Eldeen poked Mr. Hammond again and pointed to a tabloid beside the candy rack. “Now, if that's not just the biggest bunch of flimflam!” she shouted. “Looka there at that: ‘Ninety-year-old Woman Marries Teenage Siamese Twins.' They must think we're a nation of idiots to believe that. ‘Alien Dog Emits Beta Rays.' And to think there's people that
buys
them papers and reads that stuff!” She laughed and pointed. “There's a good one: ‘Farmer Teaches Pigs Spanish.' Ha! Wouldn't you like to hear 'em? Wonder how a pig oinks in Spanish!”