The Orange Blossom Special (8 page)

“You look beautiful,” he said.

“Thank you, honey,” said Victoria, nuzzling into his chest.

“How about we open up a bottle of nice Rosé and get an early start on the party?”

Every Memorial Day, the Landys had a family barbecue. The tradition was that they'd each do some sort of performance. This year, they invited Dinah and Tessie because, as Ella put it, “Poor souls, to be alone on Memorial Day is a crying shame.” Victoria had little interest in meeting the girl's mother. She could barely stand having the girl around.

Still, on issues of what was right and wrong, Victoria was always on shaky ground. She had the self-awareness to recognize that about herself, and to yield to Charlie, Maynard—even Ella—all of whom she felt had a greater sensitivity toward other people than she did. So begrudgingly, she invited Tessie Lockhart to the barbecue.

“If the merry widow is half the jackass that her daughter is, this will be one zippydeedoodah Memorial Day,” she said to Maynard.

“You are so graceful with the English language,” he answered.

Victoria never knew whether or not he was kidding.

D
INAH TRIED TO
prepare her mother for her meeting with the Landys. “She's a snob,” Dinah said. “For all the times I've been there, I don't even think she knows my name.”

Dinah didn't say that Mrs. Landy made her embarrassed about being poor and not having a father. “The only thing she's ever said to me was that she had this fancy beautician who knew everything about hair straightening.” And she surely didn't mention that time in the bathtub.

“Well that's pretty awful,” said Tessie, who'd been agonizing about the invitation for the past week. She'd already figured out that, since the barbecue was called for seven, she could have a glass of wine at six in the privacy of her own home.

“You're dreading this, aren't you?” Dinah asked her on that afternoon.

“I'll be honest, I am a little. I mean these people don't exactly sound like my cup of tea.”

Dinah thought about how her mother hadn't visited anybody since her father died, nor had anyone visited her.

“Mom, you haven't had a cup of tea in four years,” said Dinah.

“That's so, isn't it?” said Tessie. “Well, I've had cups of other things.”

T
HE HOUSE WAS
even grander and fancier than Tessie had imagined. “What am I supposed to say to all this?” she wondered as Ella took them through it to the backyard: “Nice place you have here?” She decided against saying anything and joined Maynard and Victoria in a semicircle of lounge chairs by the pool.

Conversation got off to a desolate start. “So, how are you snowbirds enjoying Gainesville?” Maynard asked as Tessie sipped her Rosé and Victoria picked at her cuticles.

“I have a wonderful new job,” she said. “Lithographics, the printing plant on old Butler Road.”

“Of course,” said Maynard. “It's the biggest one in central Florida.”

“I'm the office manager,” said Tessie embellishing her position.

“I know Senior and Junior,” said Maynard. “We're in the Rotarians together. Devout Baptists, both of them. Can't drink, can't cuss, can't gamble. Junior comes into the store every once in a while looking as guilty as an underage kid. ‘I just need one of those little bottles of Scotch,' he'll say. And each time, he reminds me, ‘Flora doesn't have to know about this now, does she?' Nice guy, but scared to death of his wife.”

Tessie was buoyed by the knowledge of Glenn Jr. being a little henpecked. The thought emboldened her to remark on some of Lithographics' clients, as though they'd all been friends for years. “There's this fella who comes up from Fort Lauderdale, he runs the Jai Alai fronton down there. We print all of his programs.”

“The Baron!” said Maynard.

“You know him?”

“Everyone in the state of Florida knows the Baron,” said Maynard. “He used to be a starving painter in Paris. Now he's a businessman worth more than a million. Fascinating story.”

“Quite a character,” said Tessie, trying to sound neutral.

“A horny one at that,” laughed Maynard. “Though he's a monk compared to the Baroness.”

“The Baroness, who's that?” Tessie cocked her head.

“Fran Antonucci. Barone's wife. The former—quote, dancer from Teaneck, New Jersey, unquote.” Maynard raised his eyebrows. “Whoo, that woman can drink any man under the table. And she's built like a brick you-know-what house.”

Tessie took another sip of the wine. “I've heard that,” she lied.

Just then, Victoria jumped up and clapped her hands together. “All right now, it's showtime. Crystal and her friend have prepared a song for us.”

Dinah's right, thought Tessie. That woman really doesn't know her name.

The girls had made up their own dance to the popular song “Lollipop.” They snapped their fingers, bent their knees, and wiggled their hips in time to the simple rhythm. “Lollipop, lollipop, oh lolli lolli lolli . . .” Charlie sat behind the girls, playing the bongos as they acted out the song. He watched his sister with a smile. Crystal could put a bag over her head or jump up and down in place, and she'd still be cute. She danced with the ease and confidence of someone who didn't worry how she looked. But the other girl, Dinah, there was an awkwardness in her step, something hesitant about the way she kept looking to Crystal for confirmation that she was doing it right. If Crystal abandoned herself to joy, Dinah seemed intent on keeping it at bay.

He watched Mrs. Lockhart take deep drags on her cigarette, her eyes darting as if to take in the ceramic birdbath, the pool, the brass sundial, the fountain that cascaded into the pool, the cutting garden, the grasses, the enormous house that went as far as the eye could see. Nervous, he thought. She wonders what she's doing here. She can't figure out how a nice man like my father ended up with a spoiled woman like my mother. She's not bad looking. If she did something with that limp hair and wore less dowdy clothes, she would be quite attractive. God help me, I am starting to sound like my mother.

Victoria lit a Salem and lay cross-legged on her chaise. The nighttime air was smoky and sweet with frangipani. There was a soft breeze. “For all the misery in the world, there is this night,” Victoria said to Maynard and Tessie. The girls were winding it up, thrusting their arms forward, and rolling their l's from the back of their palettes. “. . . oh lolli lolli lolli. Lollipop!”

“Whoever wrote that song had the IQ of a water bug,” Maynard whispered. Victoria laughed and swatted him on the thigh. Tessie
wondered what Victoria could possibly know about misery. Everyone clapped for the girls. Then Victoria stood up again and announced, “Charlie has a special song he would like to sing. And he will accompany himself on the guitar.”

Charlie stood next to the grill, his wide face backlit by a citronella candle. He strummed the guitar and bobbed his head up and down before he began to sing. The song started out innocently enough—something about an old man and his cat. But then came the chorus:

The cat came back, the very next day
The cat came back, we thought she was a goner
But the cat came back, she just couldn't stay away.

He never took his eyes off Tessie. When he finished, Tessie clapped harder than anyone. Dinah tried not to stare at her. “What could he know?” she wondered. Crystal nudged her on the arm and whispered, “I swear, I never told him a thing. He's just weird that way.”

Victoria followed with some song she'd learned in her sorority: “It's a great big wonderful world we live in, when you're in love you're a master of all you survey, you're a gay Santa Claus . . .”

Her voice was sweet and warbled and slightly off tune. It was one of the few times she seemed nakedly vulnerable, and when Maynard got up to do his imitation of Nat King Cole's “Mona Lisa,” he dedicated it to her. They all tried to get Tessie to sing, but the most she would do was chime in on the “Mona Lisa” chorus. Afterward, they ate barbecued ribs and killed three bottles of Rosé. At the end of the evening, Victoria actually used Dinah's name when she said, “Thank you for coming, Tessie and Dinah. This is one of those nights we'll never forget.”

“So was it as bad as you thought?” asked Dinah later as she and her mother drove through Cypress Woods.

“If a woman is built like a you-know-what brickhouse, does that mean she's attractive?” answered Tessie.

“It's a compliment, Mom, like
va va va voom.
”

Tessie got lost in her thoughts. How did Dinah know about all this? How could a married man send the kind of notes that the Baron had written to her? What else did Dinah know that she didn't?

“I had a very nice time,” she finally said.

“Yeah, it was pretty neat,” said Dinah. “The brother's nice.”

Neither of them mentioned the cat.

On the second day that Eddie Fingers didn't show up for class, Mr. Reilly stood in front of the class, his hands clasped and his head bowed like an altar boy's. “I have an announcement. You know our friend Eddie Howell? He will not be back for the rest of the school year. Why? Because he is sick and will have to be in the hospital for a while.” Mr. Reilly continued, as though he were a ventriloquist using two different voices. “What's wrong with him? The doctors think it might have something to do with his heart, but they're going to do their darndest to find out.”

Normally, Dinah and Crystal would be biting the insides of their cheeks to keep from laughing. But they didn't even exchange glances. Dinah knew how people could disappear forever, and Crystal knew that her friend had a strange attachment to Eddie. That's why she never revealed what Charlie had told her months earlier. Eddie had caught his eye at the end of a school assembly. “How ya doing?” Charlie had asked. “Can you help me?” Eddie had answered. “I've wet my pants and need to get to the men's room.” Charlie told Crystal that Eddie seemed to have a wheeze in his voice. He also said that the way Eddie had spoken to him, so straight forwardly and without embarrassment, made him think that Eddie was used to asking for help.

All day, Dinah thought about Eddie. About his bluish fingernails,
the way he slumped in his desk, how he looked thin and used, like a much older person. While she hated listening to her mother talk to her father each night, she was certain that this boy was the direct connection to her father. Should she write him a card? What would she say? Maybe she should send a present. She couldn't imagine someone her own age being in the hospital. With him not at school, how would she talk to her father?

I
F JERRY LOCKHART
was in heaven, he wasn't having much fun. Between doling out advice and devising cryptic numerical codes to transmit through a six-fingered fourteen-year-old boy, when would the poor man have time to indulge in the glories of his new location? For the past week Tessie had besieged him. What about the Baron? June 4th was only two days away. Should she have lunch with him? And now there was a wife. Her notes were becoming more desperate.

One night she wrote: “It seems like a betrayal to think of any other man but you. Of course you are the only one.” And on another night, after she'd had a couple of glasses of wine, she'd slipped this note into his box: “You know, Jerry,” it began with a tone of belligerence. “I am a woman and have desires sometimes. It is so strange to me that you are not here and that I have to think about these things by myself.”

O
N THE MORNING
of June 4th, Tessie woke with a start. She'd dreamed that she was driving Victoria Landy around Cypress Woods, looking for Crystal and Dinah. The women were lost, and the longer they drove, the further away their daughters seemed to get. “We might never see them again,” Victoria said. It was as if her words took shape and ran in front of the car. Tessie slammed on the brakes and heard the awful noise of shells breaking beneath her
wheels. “Don't even say that,” she shouted, then woke up. She jumped out of bed to get as far away from her dream as possible. She threw on her vermilion robe with beige flowers, the same robe she'd worn for fifteen years. “Rise and shine,” she said, trying to sound chipper as she opened Dinah's door.

But Dinah had long since risen. She lay in bed, her head propped up against the pillow, her eyes narrow and swollen. “Didn't sleep much,” she said. “Can't go to school today.”

Tessie hadn't heard that dullness in her daughter's voice since Car-bondale. She felt her own anxiety, the clutch in her stomach, the lure of getting back into her still-warm bed. It tugged at her like an old habit, and it took every form of will she could muster to resist it. Instead, she climbed into bed next to Dinah. “We can't, you and me, go back to the way we were,” she said gently. “I know how you feel. There are some days I can't imagine going on. It's just a step at a time. You get up, you brush your hair, eat breakfast. And before you know it, you've gotten through an hour, and then another hour, and soon you're not thinking about the time you put behind you. You just have to keep moving forward.”

Dinah started to cry. “Sometimes it's just too hard.” She wasn't about to tell her mother about Eddie. “I miss Daddy so much.”

Then Tessie told Dinah about her Jerry Box and how, whenever she had a question, he always seemed to answer. “I believe there's a part of him that watches us,” she said. “I know him well enough to be sure he'd hate it if either of us was hiding in our rooms. Tell you what. Why don't you have Crystal come over after school today. I'll come home early and make you girls some french fries. I'll buy some Coca-Cola with cherry syrup, too.”

They lived on a strict budget; Dinah knew never to ask for any of the extravagances. Trips to the supermarket became lessons on indulgence. “Too rich for my blood,'” her mother would say, returning
an item to its shelf after examining its price. “Some people can afford to kiss their money goodbye, I guess. Hooray for them.” Consequently, Dinah had never had Coca-Cola with cherry syrup until that first time at Crystal's house. She turned on her side and rested her head on the inside of her mother's arm. The familiar smell of stale cigarette smoke and last night's Noxzema made her feel safe, as if she was a little girl again bundled in her mother's lap. “Coca-Cola? Really?” she asked.