The Land of Mango Sunsets (4 page)

“Oh, golly! Sorry! Hi! I’m Liz Harper.”

“Yes, you are!” Kevin said, grinning like a cat. “Didn’t mean to scare you half to death.”

“My goodness! Won’t you come in? I’m Miriam Swanson. I think my tiny vestibule is violating your personal space.”

“Oh! No bother at all! Thanks!”

“May I take your coat?”

“Thanks.” She pulled off her gloves, stuffed them in her pockets, and handed her coat to me in kind of a wound-up wad. Perhaps she thought I was going to stuff it in a cubby.

“I’ll get the tea going,” I said.

Kevin was enthralled with her. I could tell by his solicitous remarks.

“Don’t you just love living in the city? I knew someone from Birmingham once; they say it’s such a beautiful place! Did anyone ever tell you that you look like Cameron Diaz? You’re thirty-one? Nooooo! Impossible. I would have guessed you weren’t a day over twenty-five. I should be twenty-five and know what I know now…”

I heard her say, “And I’m just thinking how wonderful it would be if I
did
know what you know!”

They burst into a fit of laughter and I felt a twinge of annoyance. I was actually a little jealous and it surprised me. In the next breath, I asked myself what was I thinking to be bothered by Kevin’s easy rapport with a girl young enough to be my daughter? But only technically. It was ridiculous of me and I got over it.

I hung her coat in the closet, checking the label. It was a classic, single-breasted black merino-wool tuxedo coat made by Searle. Sensible. Investment dressing. Not covered in cat hair. After all, my Harry was not fond of cats. Her hand-crocheted scarf was at least ten feet long, which I
imagined she needed because her neck rose from her shoulders like a swan’s.

I fixed the tea and carried the tray to the living room, where they were chatting away like magpies.

“Tea, anyone?”

“Oh! What a great idea! Thank you!” Liz said, smiling.

“Why don’t I pour, Miriam?” Kevin said. “You sit right there like the regal creature that you are.”

Attention! My ego was healed.

“We’ve just been talking about Liz and her work at Hunter College…”

“And I said that I like my other jobs just one whole heckuva lot better.”

“And what are your other jobs?

“Bartending and nannying. I like kids.”

Bartending?

“And where do you tend bar?”

“Oh, I work for several caterers and we work private parties and benefits…”

I wondered if she had ever worked at the museum. I’ll admit that I liked her appearance and her taste. She was tall and blond, not with classical good looks, but rather angelic in an angular way. She was dressed in moderately expensive clothes, a sweater set and a wool skirt. And pearls. She wore pearls. How bad could she be?

We chatted on for a while, and after Kevin and I were satisfied that she wasn’t dangerous, that she could afford the rent, and that she lived rather quietly, we led her upstairs to see the space.

“Oh, my…! Y’all! This is so freaking beautiful! It looks like something from a magazine! I love these colors! It’s so…I don’t know…cool!”

Freaking?

“I’ll have it all finished by the weekend,” he said. “Except the closets.”

“Oh, who cares about some dumb old closets? I can do them myself!”

Kevin was shooting me his best see-I-told-you-so look and I just shook my head.

“Kevin? Why don’t you get your eyebrows off the ceiling and let’s let Liz have a few moments here alone?”

“For what?”

“You know…to see herself in the space?”

“Please. She’s seeing just fine. No props needed for this one.”

Liz was pacing off the floor in the bedroom, squealing with delight every thirty seconds.

“Y’all! My bedroom furniture will fit perfectly! And my towels match the tile!”

“Wonderful!” Kevin said.

Her exuberance was contagious. I have to say I hadn’t felt so optimistic in a long while, but that same exuberance was a little much.

“So what do you think, Kevin?” I whispered to him. “Don’t you think she’s maybe a little gauche for us?”

“Let her have the place, Miriam. She’s not gauche. She’s, I don’t know, young and full of life!”

Then Liz appeared at my side and made the impassioned speech that sealed the deal.

“Mrs. Swanson? I know you could have any tenant that you want. Anyone. But this apartment is the absolute maximum dream I could ever have. If you’ll just give me a chance I’d like to prove to you that I can be the ideal tenant. Really. Seriously. I mean it, y’all. I just…I mean, I don’t know what else to say…”

Oh, pass the Kleenex, I thought. From the moment I saw Kevin’s delight I knew that I was going to let her move in.

The February misery of blasting cold wind was preceded by the snowiest, coldest, iciest January on record in many years. It didn’t seem to matter how many logs I burned, the house was drafty and chilled. But I had a new tenant coming and that was a great relief. Finally, finally, February and Liz Harper arrived.

It was around ten o’clock in the morning when Liz and all her worldly possessions pulled up in front of the house. I was surprised at how compact the rental truck was. She wasn’t even using a moving company. Were friends helping her? And who were her friends? Would she entertain a lot? Good heavens! I certainly hoped not.

I went out to the front steps to greet her.

“Good morning! Situation in hand?” Of course I had no intention of doing anything more than saying hello.

“Hi, Mrs. Swanson! Yeah. I just need the keys. Cold, huh?”

“Cold is a fact of life in the big city, hon. No matter the season.” I reached in my pocket and handed the keys to her. “Make an extra set. You know, in case your purse gets snatched. I mean, that kind of thing usually never happens in this neighborhood, but it does happen.”

Liz smiled and said, “I’ll do that, but don’t worry. I always keep my keys in my pocket. My purse has my driver’s license in it and that would lead them to a home address in Birmingham. Can you imagine? Too far for thieves to go to torment my mother!”

Kevin was coming down the steps and threw in, “Or tramps and gypsies!” He did a five-second Cher impersonation and we rolled our eyes and moaned.

“Going to work?” I asked him.

“Nope, just around the corner for the newspaper. Miriam’s a worrywart. You ladies need anything?”

“Advice on how to lay out my furniture?” Liz said.

“Soon as I return, sunshine!”

“If you need me, let me know,” I said and closed my door. Sunshine, indeed. Sure, go help her lay out her furniture.

Harry was in the kitchen imitating the doorbell. Somehow Harry had escaped meeting Liz, but I would make a point of introducing them over the next few days. After all, Liz had to sort through boxes of dishes and everything to organize her new home. I didn’t want to seem meddlesome.

I made myself a cup of hot tea and tried to imagine how many trucks it would take to move all of my possessions. For years I had collected china, crystal, a tonnage of sterling silver, and all sorts of things. Then, with the decline of Mother’s good sense, I came into a considerable amount of family memorabilia. I was the keeper of all the old photographs, my father’s christening gown, my grandmother’s tea service, and
so on. My apartment looked like a retail store. It was jammed to the rafters with goodies and curiosities.

I had the family’s portraits and a few beautiful landscapes of the Lowcountry. Many of my museum friends collected contemporary art. I wouldn’t hang angst art in my basement. It’s all that modern business that looks like the artist was furious or miserable or both when he slapped his paint on a canvas. No. I liked tradition. I walked on rugs that had been in our family since the Revolution, and that would be the BIG Revolution, not the industrial, the women’s, or the sexual. My embroidered linens were the handiwork relics of aunts and cousins from a time when women took pride in the creation of such things. And my sets of silver flatware were more weighted and intricate than anything available on the market today. I treasured all these things not just for what they were but for what they represented—gracious living. History. And yes, they were all testimony to the ashes of my privileged background.

Like everyone, I was subject to mood changes, and on another day I might tell myself that I had too much junk and needed a yard sale in the worst way. That was because I hated to polish silver, to starch linens, and to dust everything that needed dusting. Maybe I would give some things to my sons. Someday. When they remembered how to be nice to their mother.

I peeked out of the window and watched Liz’s movers struggle under the weight of her king-size mattress. It was curious that a single girl in the city would want such a large bed when every square inch of living space came at such a premium. Maybe she liked to toss and turn. It was a little sad that everything that Liz owned was in one orange and white U-Haul. If I ever moved I’d need a convoy of eighteen-wheelers. I laughed at the thought of them roaring down a highway to somewhere. But, as you know, I had no intention of ever moving. Where? Florida? Never. Where then? Nowhere. I was leaving horizontally in a permanent, breathless recline.

People came and went, bringing in boxes and pieces of furniture. The
racket overhead was almost intolerable. Kevin must have been up there with her by then.

I said, “Harry? Do you hear all that noise? Shhh! Right? Can you say ‘shhh’?”

Angel that he was, Harry said, “Shhh!” And then gave a wolf whistle. Maybe he
had
already sneaked a peak at Miss Liz.

“Let’s call Miss Josie, shall we?”

Harry gave me a look and I dialed Mother’s number. She had changed her recording on her answering machine.

We mean this in the nicest possible way. If you are selling something, there is no point in leaving a message because your call will not be returned. We are not kidding. Have a nice day and please wait for the tone. Thank you.

Well, it was considerably better than the other one, but it was still somehow impolite.

“Mother? Hi, it’s Miriam. Just wanted to chat. Call me when you have a moment, okay?”

I hung up and looked at the phone, feeling lonely for her company. A visit to Sullivans Island was long overdue. The Land of Mango Sunsets. I craved it.

How mysterious and dreamy the Lowcountry was in the winter! For as hot and sultry as it was in the summer, the wet rolling fogs of January and February covered the islands in thick mist so dense you could imagine ghosts slipping in and out of it, whispering their histories in your ear.

When I was a young girl, we would have family gatherings at our Sullivans Island beach home all summer long, but it was the winter ones I loved most. The house was uninsulated and sometimes it was so cold indoors you could see your breath. I couldn’t recall ever being bothered by the cold then, but I remembered the older people complaining and someone would always say, well then, why don’t you put on a sweater? In those days you didn’t demand the perfect temperature, you ate leftovers—another incarnation of yesterday’s dinner and indication that the world was a per
fectly wonderful place. After an early supper of maybe black-eyed peas over rice and a thick slice of baked ham, fried with canned pineapple, my grandmother would take the binoculars and go out on the back porch that faced the marsh. She would sit in her favorite ancient wicker rocking chair to watch the birds and the sunset. In retrospect, I imagine what she had been truly seeking was a little well-earned peace and quiet. She could have had it, that is, until I showed up. I would crawl all over her and beg for a story.

“Let’s settle down, sweetheart,” she would say.

Once I stopped wiggling, my grandmother would tuck me in against her side with an old afghan to block the chilly air of the evening. I would snuggle and relive the same tales her mother had told her long ago. Her voice was so soothing and musical, and most of all, the stories she told were fantastic.

I would close my eyes and be transported to the Isle of Palms as it was hundreds of years ago. Native American women from the Seewee tribe were cooking venison over an open fire or whole fish on bamboo skewers. I could almost hear their babies gurgling and laughing, hanging from tree limbs, tightly and lovingly laced in their deerskin cradle boards. The women would suspend them from a branch while they performed whatever chore was at hand—gathering berries or firewood. My grandmother would get to the part of the story where she talked about the ingenious opening in the bottom of the cradle boards that allowed the baby’s natural business to drop to the ground without the baby being soiled. I would dissolve in a fit of snickers and she would narrow her eyes at me in mock horror that made me giggle even more. Like most children of my day, I thought talking about babies swinging from trees and watering the ground was very naughty business.

In later years, my mother had told the same stories and others to my sons—stories of black bears lumbering through the shallow waters looking for fish, of the shining eyes of wild jaguars that would eat you alive, and of drunken pirates, their crazed gunfights and buried treasure. Those tales gave the boys nightmares. But then she would tell of the adventures
of soldiers and their bravery and of Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote “The Gold Bug” when he was stationed at Fort Moultrie. Those yarns gave the boys imaginary games to play for hours on end.

In the summers, my sons would run shirtless and free all over the island, climbing the forts and picking wild blackberries. They would arrive home filthy, knees skinned, faces freckled and sunburned. I would swear to this day that the light of their exuberant smiles actually brightened all the rooms. Of course, I would march them straight to a good scrub. After baths, I would make thick tomato sandwiches slathered with my mother’s homemade mayonnaise because it was just too hot to eat anything else. They would swing together in the same old Pawleys Island hammock that had hung on our porch forever until the lightning bugs came out and then they would run around to catch them.

Those were magical days when we were all together, our eyes so filled with one another. Every wonder of nature was right before us and history was never more alive. And we were happy. I missed the days when my sons were little boys and they looked up to me. And I longed to take my grandchildren to Sullivans Island to tell them the stories, but Dan and Nan had no interest or time to fly across country for something so frivolous. Or they claimed to be impossibly busy and booked up.

But that wasn’t the truth. We all knew it.

Oh, I had been a very foolish woman to tell my boys they had to choose between their father and me. They had never really declared a choice but had drifted away from both of us, never understanding why I had drawn a line in the sand in the first place. I thought they should come to my defense and try to talk some sense into their father’s head. Could they have saved my marriage? Now I think not, but at that time I resented that they would not try. I was so deeply and pathetically desperate then to hold everything in place, for our lives to return to their orbit, and for Judith to disappear. Along with the two illegitimate children of hers that my husband had fathered.

I never should have let the duplicity and the immoral philandering of
any man, even their father, come between us. But it had. I couldn’t stop it. I harangued them mercilessly to tell their father how wrong he was, that I was a wonderful spouse and how could he do this to us? Once the cat and the kitties of Charles’s other family were out of the bag, there was no stopping the bad news. Charles simply moved out and I was left alone with my town house and very little cash.

You know how you always hope that when life gives you a great challenge you’ll be noble and wise and do the right thing? That you’ll conduct yourself in ways that won’t embarrass anyone? That you won’t be an emotional albatross? Well, I was flat-out robbed of the opportunities to be noble or to be a raving lunatic.

Charlie, my oldest, was already in medical school, studying twenty-seven hours a day, and Dan was in California married to Nan. The only good thing about my behavior then was that at least I had maintained enough dignity to wallow in the privacy of my bedroom. But I cried enough tears to refill Lake Superior, which is what I thought I was.

Charlie had helped the most. He was the one who found the contractor to convert the town house into apartments. I turned my space into a small three-bedroom apartment in case the boys ever came back for a visit. It was a useless conciliatory act but my way of demonstrating contrition. Soon after, Charlie moved himself to Harlem and immersed himself in his studies, which he had to do if he was going to be a pediatric surgeon someday. Did I say that he thought I disapproved of his live-in girlfriend? Well, it wasn’t because she was Jamaican. Really. It wasn’t. It was because she had the worst personality I had ever encountered. Yes, she was studying to be a pediatrician, so obviously she wasn’t a dummy. It was just that every time we had lunch or dinner I felt like I was going to fall asleep in my plate. I wasn’t the only boring woman on the earth, you know. And okay. To be perfectly honest? I did think there were too many cultural differences for me to ever be comfortable with her. I knew I owed Charlie a phone call. Admittedly, I was avoiding him because the last time we spoke it had not gone well.

I had invited him to dinner on the spur of the moment and he said, “Is this invitation for me alone?”

That was all he had to say and I knew we were heading down a dark path.

“Well, Charlie, sometimes I just like to get caught up with my son and discuss family matters.”

“Matters not intended for outsiders, right?”

“Yes. Is that so terrible?”

“Mom? Priscilla and I have been living together for two years. Get used to it. She’s family.”

“These days playing house seems to be acceptable to the world, according to your father, at least.”

“Playing house? Hmmph.”

“Oh?” That’s nice. Thanks for the compliment.

“Anyway, Priscilla and I have plans for dinner tonight. Maybe some other time.”

“Well, dear? If you’d rather eat jerk chicken, that doesn’t make you a jerk.”

It did not result in a chuckle and a promise of another date. He hung up on me.