The Reading Lessons (26 page)

“Look!” Flora said. “It’s the Pink Boothes.” 

Sure enough, circling the shiny black dance floor like a giant set of puffy lips were the noterious pink leather boothes they’d heard so much about. Flora wasn’t sure, but she thought one of the men holding court in the boothes was Fats Waller. Outside of Fats Waller and two young colored women, the Pink Boothes were filled to capacity with white girls. 

 “This menu is bigger than the Declaration of Independence,” Flora said. “I’ll never make up my mind.” But she was smiling. The band was playing
Drifting and Dreaming.
A soft mist of cigarette smoke curled around the room. Everywhere you looked, there were palm trees covered with twinkly lights. 

“Well, I’m gonna try
Stormy’s Pecan Goose Cassoulet
. Tilly won’t fix anything with pecans.”

After much consternation, Flora settled on the cassoulet as well. “It’s not everyday a girl can get her goose cooked so fashionably,” she said. 

Hadley cleared his throat. “There’s something else I been wondering about, Flora.” 

A pink napkin folded like a fan sat in the center of every white plate in the room. Flora unfolded and refolded the fan, teaching herself how to do it. 

“Do you think your Daddy would rent me Helen?”

“I don’t know about that,” she said. “He’s awful set on starting up with radios over there.”

“Shoot, with you and all your junk out of the way, Flora, he’ll have room to build a Viking ship inside that house.”

Flora laughed. “If we moved my birds into Helen, where would we eat? I don’t think there’s room for birds and a table.”

“We’ll hang the cages from the ceiling. There’s room for that. I don’t know what it is about that place, but it feels special to me. I think we’d cheer it up if we lived there, don’t you?”

Flora fanned her face with her napkin-fan. “I’d live in a cardboard box with you if you asked.”

“You would?”

“Of course. But I like the idea of renting Helen better.” 

“Now we just have to convince your Daddy.” Hadley had made some diagrams to help him visualize where everything might go. “The place needs a stove and a sink. A bathroom would be nice, too, I reckon.”

“Daddy’s still sore about losing his peas.”

“If he lets me move in, I’ll grow him all the peas he wants.” 

Hadley touched Flora’s shoe with his shoe under the table. The band started playing
The Love Nest
. “Do you think we should try and dance?”

“Definitely,” Flora said. “It’s not every day a girl gets to go dancing at the Salamander Club.” 

Flora was a better dancer than Hadley, but not so good that she lost patience with him. “Ain’t it a beautiful song?” she asked.

“It ought to be our song, Flora. If your Daddy rents us Helen, we should call it the Love Nest instead of Helen. It sounds nicer.”

In a small room, tea set of blue,

There's the ballroom, dream room for two,

Better than a palace with a gilded dome,

Is the love nest you can call home.

Hadley was so happy, he didn’t even notice trouble when it came wiggling up behind him in a low cut dress. “Why don’t you teach her the
Twinkle Hesitation
?” 

Hadley didn’t turn around. He danced them away, as if they might escape, determined to ignore her.

“Hadley?” Flora said, squeezing his fingers and looking at him expectantly. She nodded at the woman behind his shoulder, waiting to be introduced. 

Flora was a polite girl, there was no denying that, a kind-hearted girl with a magnolia pinned to the front of her dress and an Alabama spoon tucked away in her pocketbook. She smiled even though she knew full and well that the woman in the red dress was probably the one he danced the Twinkle Hesitation with. 

“You must be Flora.” Lucinda said, offering her hand. “I’m Mrs. Worther-Holmes.”

###

Flora gave her napkin a murderous snap. They’d returned to their table before the song was done, and she had yet to stop staring at Lucinda who sat in a Pink Booth polishing off crawfish with a loud and drunken Babe Butternut. 

“Why didn’t you tell me? All this talk of being in love, and not once did you mention that the woman you love is the woman you work for. You
live
in her house, for heaven’s sake.”

“So what?” Hadley said. “You know how I feel about you. You’re the one I love.”

Flora rubbed her nose like she was about to cry. “You never said anything about her being married neither.”

“Come on, Flora. Don’t let this ruin our night.”

She picked up her teaspoon and looked at her upside-down self in the shiny silver. “You never said she was white. Or pretty. Or rich.”

“I didn’t know you wanted the details.”

The waiter put down their plates with such a dramatic flourish right then, Hadley thought Flora’s mind might return to happier things. He smiled at her hopefully over his goose.

“Does she know you were planning to propose to me tonight?” Flora asked.

Hadley reached for her hand across the table, but Flora moved it into her lap. “It’s none of her business,” he said. He followed her sad gaze across the room to where Lucinda was laughing it up like she didn’t have a care in the world. “She has no say in what I do with my life.”

 “
A lost lover welds more power than a whip,
” Flora said, quoting from a magazine article she’d read to him called
Ten Sound Reasons for Avoiding a Jilted Man.
 

“That’s nonsense, Flora.”

“Is it? Look at that red dress.” Flora bit down on lip. “You aren’t really going to marry me, are you?”

“Of course I am,” he growled. He smacked the table with his open hand, and the candle fell in his goose. 

“Denial is Passion’s unholy bridegroom,”
Flora whispered.
“Their dark marriage is eternal.”
 

It was like eating dinner with Mama.

###

He dropped her off at ten thirty. Without a kiss. It didn’t seem right anymore, even though he’d been planning all week to kiss her. Instead, they held hands awkwardly on the front stoop with Flora standing three steps higher, ready to sprint for the door. 

“I won’t tell anyone about Alabama yet,” she said.

“Nothing has changed, Flora.”

Flora’s eyes were glassed with tears. “You should have told me who she was.”

He let loose of her fingers. “It wasn’t meant to be a secret. Anyway, I can’t undo the past.”

“You told me that you loved her, but there’s one more thing I’d like to know. Was it . . . just wishful thinking?” She took hold of his necktie then and pulled until he lifted onto the tips of his toes. “I don’t think I can bear the idea of you working in that house if you had an extramarital affair with Mrs. Worther-Holmes.”

Hearing the word “extramarital” come out of Flora’s sweet mouth was enough to make him regret every poor decision he’d ever made. “I’ll get a different job,” he said.

She stared down at the tie clenched between her fingers. 

“Put the spoon up with the others, Flora,” he said.

“We’ll see.” She dropped the tie and turned to go. 

“Wait! I didn’t get a chance to tell you everything I wanted to say tonight.” 

Flora paused with her hand on the doorknob. “What else is there?”

“The meaning of magnolias.” He turned her back around to face him. “
Happiness in marriage
. We can have that, Flora. Please hang the spoon up on your spoon rack.”

She kissed him lightly on the cheek. “I’ll think about it.”

###

I still quivered in every nerve to think how slight a sinking or slipping of the machinery would precipitate that keen, glistening axe upon my bosom . . . 

~ Edgar Allen Poe

Hadley expected to find Lucinda waiting in the shadows, ready to hit him with some new bit of monkeyshine meant to keep him by her side. When he found the kitchen empty, he tiptoed into the bedroom and checked behind the curtains, but there was nobody there. He got down on his knees and peeked under the bed. He saw a slipper, a lost comb, and a handful of dust bunnies. He opened the closet door. “A-hah!” he cried when something moved, but it was only a bumped hanger.

With a sigh of relief, he sat on the bed, pulled off his shoes, and chewed himself out for coming up with the bad idea of taking Flora to such a fancy place. He was angry with himself for not coming completely clean about Lucinda, too. He couldn’t think why he hadn’t. Part of him even thought that he had. Part of him thought that it was bad manners to speak about her as much as he did. 

When he was done chewing himself out, he kicked off his trousers and carried his pillow into the bathroom and yanked on the light. 

There was a bathtub with a white plastic curtain that nobody except Hadley ever used. He kept his bedclothes there. Tonight, the curtain was ripped off its rings, and the bedclothes were in the middle of the floor. Mrs. Worther-Holmes sat on his sheets, rubbing a blanket against her face in a way that made him more nervous than anything she’d ever done. 

“How long have you been sleeping in the bathroom?”

“Goddamn it, Lucinda,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

She hugged the blanket against her robe. “All this time, I thought you were
listening
. We had a deal about that, remember? Or is this your way of being faithful to little Miss Flora Gibbs?”

Hadley squatted on the octagon tiles and looked her in the eye. If he didn’t know better, he’d think those were real tears dripping down her cheeks. His heart beat with both sympathy and revulsion. “Go to bed, Lucinda.”

“I don’t want to,” she whimpered. “I don’t want to go to bed with that big old boar.”

Not for the first time, he wondered if she wasn’t just a little bit crazy. He was gladder than glad that he’d found a nice girl like Flora to love. “You got no cause to be here, Lucinda. ”

She ran a cold hand down his stomach. “What do you want with her? She isn’t as pretty as me. Do you think she’s as pretty as me?” Her fingers found the waistband of his union suit and yanked so hard, he almost fell off his feet. “You love
me
. You said so.”

Hadley got close enough to smell if she’d been drinking, but Lucinda said alcohol gave her dark circles under her eyes, and she rarely touched the stuff. She smelled like she always smelled. Like his daydreams. 

“I’m going to marry her,” Hadley said. He knew it was a mistake to let such words come out, yet saying them was important. He wanted to see that spoon hung up in Flora’s kitchen just as soon as possible. It wasn’t right to keep quiet about a happy thing like love. “I can’t work for you no more.”

There! It was done. Her irises burned so fiery hot, it was like putting your face down on a gas jet, but so be it.
Let her explode
, he thought.
Let her call Dickie down here and tell him what I did to her against the wall of his house. He can just go on and pound me to a nub! At least I was brave enough to tell her . . . 

But Lucinda didn’t call Dickie down. Instead, she ran her fingernail along the inside of his thigh, snagging his new “patented for durability” underwear until Hadley smacked her hand away. 

“You can’t stop me from marrying her, Lucinda.”

Lucinda squeezed the tiger tooth in her fist until it punctured the heel of her palm. Red drops splashed on the octagons. “That’s where you’re wrong, dear.”

Part II

Nina

From PAGE 3B of the Beattie’s Bluff Examiner, June 3, 1932:

FREAK CRASH TUMBLES DICTATOR

Late Thursday afternoon, Mrs. Winchell P. Lovette of Number 9 Tullip Hill Road, lost control of her husband’s new Studebaker Dictator, running it into a tree in the 400 block of Archway Boulevard and Treebourne Street. According to witnesses, injuries occurred when Mr. Lovette put his fist through the living room window after being informed of the damage done to the automobile he had saved ten years to buy. Asked how she managed to lose control on such a nice clear day, Mrs. Lovette indicated she had become distracted by a particularly fine display of wisteria growing in a neighborhood lawn. Said Mrs. Winchell P. Lovette of Tullip Hill Road, “When I saw all that wild beauty, my head got to swimming and I drove into a tree.”

Nina first came across the books in the window seat when she was eleven years old. Oh, what a memorable day that was. Thanks to the Timpone cousins’ hopeless lack of imagination, she was dragging her way through the world’s most
humdrum
game of hide-n-seek ever played when she happened upon the discovery. As all the really worthwhile hiding spots had been squeezed into long ago, she desperately wedged behind the aquarium and butted the library ladder. The ladder toppled sideways, crashed down on the window seat and made the lid hop up. And what a surprise that was! 

Nina and the cousins had hidden in the curtains next to the window seat some five thousand times before, and Nina had once stretched out on top of the window seat and lined up the cushions head to toe across herself, but the Timpones had noticed the lumpiness and immediately jumped on her face, and the mud turtle in her pocket had been smooshed. It was also popular to hide under the table next to the window seat and doodle on the baseboard, as this was the safest of all vandalism. Anyone too big to fit underneath would never have the chance to see the crime. Usually a crayon was used for the job, but some gutsy soul had
eschewed
tradition and scratched the word STRAP
with a dime long before Nina came along. In spite of all this poking about, no one had ever discovered that the window seat actually opened.