The Book of Marie Read online

  Give me thirty minutes at least, he told her.

  Make some coffee, she ordered.

  She had with her a printout of what he had written the night before, and by the expression on her face—fresh, alert—he knew she had found something in the words that intrigued her.

  I want you to tell me if you considered her vulnerable, she said, stirring cream into her coffee.

  Then? he replied. No, not then. Now? Yes, I can see that. Why?

  She leaned forward in her chair, her elbows on the table, a girlish way of sitting. She said, What you wrote about her buying the outfit, I thought it was odd that you remembered it. Where did that come from?

  I’m not the counselor, you are, he answered. You tell me.

  Counselors don’t tell, she countered. Counselors ask. But I’ve already settled that with you, haven’t I? You’re not paying me, so the rules don’t count. This is person-to-person. You and me. Besides, it has nothing to do with you or Marie Fitzpatrick.

  Then who? he asked.

  Me, she said bluntly. She paused, drank from her coffee. Then she turned to gaze out of the window at the deep covering of snow resting on his lawn and the silhouette of her face against the window was like a cameo carved from ivory. He had always considered her a striking woman. Even in her early fifties, she had a classic look—long brunette hair, a slender face, the comma of a slight scar trailing off her left eye. He thought of his dream of her, the erotic dream. Felt a rush of energy and then a blush of embarrassment.

  You? he said. I don’t understand.

  She held her gaze out of the window. After a moment, she said, I told you this girl reminded me of me. I read what you wrote—about the dress—and I remembered something very similar happened to me when I was young. I never thought of it as being vulnerable, but that’s what it was. I was so damn vulnerable, I punished myself for years and I had no idea that’s what I was doing.

  You want to tell me about it? he asked.

  She turned back to look at him. Her eyes, dark against her pale skin, had a shine in them. He was my first lover, Cole, she said evenly. I thought he would never leave me. But he did. Packed his bags, got in his car and drove away without so much as a look-back. She inhaled suddenly, swallowed, then pushed a smile into her face. Live and learn, right? she whispered. I know you’ll write about it sooner or later, but I want to know the answer now. Did you make love to her?

  No, he said quietly. I did not.

  She picked up her coffee, held it. The smile softened. I didn’t think so, she said. That’s one of the things I love about you, Cole. You do have a modicum of respectability.

  Thank you. One of the things I love about you is the confusion you toss about like confetti, he told her.

  She laughed easily. It goes with the territory, she said. They teach it in graduate school, but I’m glad to know you have affection for me in some small way.

  Go home, Tanya, he said.

  She reached across the table and gently touched his face. Don’t forget Christmas dinner, she said.

  I won’t, he promised. But let me bring—

  Oh, Jesus, not again, she moaned. Please. Enough of this, Colonel Sanders. She stood. Go take a shower and get back to work, she said.

  In an hour, he was again sitting in front of his laptop, inspired by the visit from Tanya. He could feel energy rippling in his fingers as he touched the soft pads of the keys. He wrote:

  December 22, morning

  I am now in my late sixties, a fine age, I think. Look-backs over time are mostly enjoyable and some of them are remarkably clear—especially those that became important in odd ways. My first date with Marie Jean Fitzpatrick was one of them. Maybe the most important.

  Late Saturday, in the dimming of sunlight, I drove to Marie’s home. She was sitting on the front porch, dressed in her denim overalls and one of her father’s shirts. She had a green shawl draped around her shoulders. She did not wait for me to get out of the car. She opened the passenger door and slipped inside and closed the door. She did not look at me.

  “I would have gotten out,” I said.

  “Let’s go,” she ordered.

  “Uh—do your parents know you’re going out?” I asked, knowing it was her first date in Overton.

  “I told them I was. I don’t think they believed me. I guess they think I’m making it up.”

  “Why?”

  “I told them who I was going with.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.

  She cut her eyes to me and sighed. “Why, Cole,” she said in a southern accent that mocked Sally Dylan, “it means they simply can’t believe it. Plain, little old me, going out with Cole Terrific. Football hero. Quarterback. Town talker.”

  “Ah—”

  “Daddy said you lost the football game last night.”

  “Me?” I said.

  “No, fool, the team. He said you were spectacular. His word, not mine. He only uses it if he’s taking about football.”

  “You didn’t come to the game?” I asked.

  “I was in such a dither about our date, I had to stay home,” she cooed. “You know, go through my wardrobe.”

  I glanced at her. Dear God, I thought, don’t let us be seen. “We almost won,” I said. “We were on the one-yard line when the game ended, and—”

  “You lost, and that’s that, now let’s go,” she interrupted.

  I started the car. “Where to?”

  She turned again to look at me. “Wherever you go to park and make out.”

  “What?” I asked in astonishment.

  “You heard me.”

  “Ah—I don’t do that,” I told her.

  “And don’t get it in your empty head that you’re going to start tonight,” she said. She let a pause, a beat, pass, then added, “I just wanted you to think I was like everybody else around here.”

  “You hungry?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “You don’t want to drive to Dixie Top and get a hamburger?”

  “My God, no.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because that’s where every idiot you call a friend will be, making sure they’re getting their money’s worth?”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  “They’re paying you to do this, aren’t they?” she said irritably.

  “What—what makes you think that?”

  She turned in the seat to face me. “Damn it, Cole Bishop. I’m not blind, or deaf. And I’m a lot smarter than that whole football team put together, including you. I’ve watched it all week, listened to it. ‘Cole, Cole, you really going to do it, Cole? Maybe she’ll give you some, Cole. Get her in the backseat, Cole. Maybe she’ll let you have it.’”

  I stared at her incredulously. Plainly, there was a mad woman beside me. I drove quickly away from the house, down the back streets of Overton. Marie sat comfortably against the door. She looked out of the door window at the blur of scenery, humming tonelessly, seemingly oblivious to my presence.

  “Where do you live?” she asked after a few moments.

  “A few miles from here. In the country. A little community called Crossover,” I told her.

  “Let’s go there.”

  “Fine,” I said.

  “You don’t have to stop at your home and introduce me or anything. I just want to see where you live.”

  “All right.”

  “Tell me about your family,” she said. “Your siblings.”

  “I’ve got two sisters, Amy and Rachel,” I answered. “Amy lives in Arizona, Rachel lives in Atlanta. My brother Toby lives at home and helps my father on the farm.”

  “Do you like them?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “I think you were spoiled,” she said.

  “I probably was,” I admitted.

  She did not say anything for a few moments and then she asked, “Can you drive with one hand?”

  I looked at her. The look carried the question I did not ask.
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br />   “Good God, Cole, I’m not asking you to put your arm around me or feel me up, or anything like that,” she said. Then she laughed softly. “I just want to look at your right palm.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I read palms. I want to read yours.”

  I extended my hand to her. She took it, turned it palm up, and began to gaze at it.

  “Where’d you learn to do that?” I asked uncomfortably.

  “From books, fool,” she answered. “Where I learn everything—just like you. Now shut up, so I can concentrate.”

  I remember the awkwardness of that moment—my hand being held by her hands, the curious, hard-stroking of my heart against my chest, telling me I was in a place, a moment, I did not understand. I thought of the day I went to her home and met the children of a black maid named Jovita.

  I remember thinking it could have been interesting helping her teach, if the teaching could have been kept private. If it got out that we were teaching black children in a garage, there’d be talk, and there already was enough talk about blacks and whites mixing in schools, with the Supreme Court deciding that segregation by color was unconstitutional. That had already caused a stir at Overton High School—a big one—and the Overton Weekly Press had carried an editorial by Ben Colquitt, the publisher, calling for impeachment of the justices of the Supreme Court.

  Yet, what Marie was doing was harmless, I reasoned. She was playing school. It was like babysitting. Games. Nothing more than games. If children—black or white or yellow or red or Mars green—learned to read while playing games, then the game was good. Besides, she wasn’t mixing the races. The children she taught—babysat, played games with—were black. There wasn’t a white or yellow or red or Mars green among them.

  Marie brushed her fingers over my palm. She said, “You’re sweating. Are you hot and bothered because I’m touching you?”

  I pulled my hand from her grip and wiped it across the leg of the blue jeans I wore.

  “Give it back,” she commanded.

  I obeyed.

  Marie giggled. “I love the way you take orders.”

  “What did you want me to do?” I asked in exasperation.

  She pushed my hand away from her. “Just testing,” she said. “Actually, I’ve finished.”

  I did not speak for a moment, then I said, “What did you see?”

  “Wonderful things, Cole Bishop. Wonderful things.”

  “What?”

  “I’m not sure I should tell you.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you won’t think they’re wonderful.”

  “What does that mean?”

  She leaned against the door and gazed at me.

  “What?” I insisted.

  “You’re going to be very famous, Cole. Very famous.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Many things. A teacher, I think. You’re also going to be in some kind of spotlight, but you won’t understand it. You’re not that smart.”

  I closed my hand, rubbed my fingers over my palm. “None of that makes any sense at all,” I said forcibly. “In the first place, I’m not going to be a teacher, unless I have to do some courses as part of the job. I’m going to be a football coach.”

  She giggled and looked away, then giggled again. “You may be a teacher in some little school that stays on academic probation, but you’d be a jerk as a football coach.”

  “Why?”I asked.

  “Because the boys you’d coach would want to hear something other than once-upon-a-time stories they quit thinking about when they discovered why they wake up in the morning with erections.”

  “Good God,” I muttered.

  “Did I embarrass you?” she asked casually.

  “You’re damn right, you did,” I sputtered. “Girls don’t talk like that.”

  “But I’m going to be a doctor,” she protested. “I need to know such things. An erection’s nothing but lots of blood filling up the penis.”

  “My God,” I whispered.

  She laughed easily. “Actually, I think you’re going to make a great teacher, Cole. Sometimes you surprise me. You remember when you got to raving about reading that Erskine Caldwell book, The Sacrilege of Alan Kent? I’d never heard of it, and you’d read it. I skipped the rest of my classes that day and went to the library and checked it out and read it that afternoon.” She paused. “I just thought you should know.”

  We were nearing my home. I drove with both hands on the steering wheel, my body pulled up close to it, my eyes focused on the road. Marie began to hum again, tonelessly. She sounded like someone I’d read about—an insane person in an asylum who stared at a brick wall with peeling paint and made guttural noises in her throat. I tried to think of the name of the book, but couldn’t.

  I saw my home in the distance.

  “That’s where I live,” I told her, nodding.

  She sat up, peered through the car window at the house. “It’s pretty,” she said softly.

  “Just a farm,” I mumbled.

  I drove past the turn-off, hoping I would not be seen by my parents or Toby. Marie settled back in her seat.

  “You ready to take me home?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “Why’d you ask that?”

  “Because you don’t know what to do with me.”

  “You’re right about that,” I told her.

  “Is there a cemetery around here?” she asked.

  “There’s one back toward town,” I answered. “Goes back before the Civil War. Why?”

  “Let’s go there. I like cemeteries.”

  You would, I thought.

  The cemetery was on the crest of a hill, under a cluster of pine and oak. Briars and underbrush covered the borders. I stopped the car near it. There was just enough light left from the day to watch darkness fold around the stones. Marie pulled the shawl around her neck.

  “You cold?” I asked.

  “No,” she told me. “Let’s get out.”

  She opened the car door and stepped outside and began to wander among the tombstones. After a moment, I followed her.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said in a soft voice. “What’s the name of it?”

  “People call it the Breedlove Cemetery,” I answered. “Used to be a lot of Breedloves around here, my mama said.”

  She kneeled to examine one of the leaning markers, read in a whisper, “Daniel Breedlove, age three. Now resting on the bosom of God.” She paused. “Do you think he is, Cole Bishop?”

  “Is what?” I asked.

  “Resting with God.”

  “I do,” I said. “He was just three. Wasn’t old enough to do any wrong.”

  She stood, looked around, a sad, pensive expression on her face. “Do you know what I learned from Jovita?” she asked.

  “No. What?” I said.

  “In a lot of cemeteries, blacks were buried in the woods around white cemeteries,” she replied. She looked at me. “Did you know that?”

  “No,” I replied.

  She did a slow, full turn, her eyes moving over the stones as though memorizing them. “All right,” she said. “I’m getting cold now.”

  In the car, she said, “Would you have helped me—teach, I mean. If I had given you time, would you have helped?”

  The question stunned me. It was as though my thoughts of Jovita’s children had traveled from my brain, down my arm to my hand and she had seen them puddle in my palm. “Maybe,” I answered. Then: “I guess I could still do it, if you want me to.”

  “I’m not doing it anymore,” she said solemnly.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “We’re in the South,” she answered. “Jovita won’t let her kids come any more. She’s afraid of trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “God, Cole, how would I know that? You’re from here. You tell me. It’s the South. What good are little Negroes when the cotton’s been picked and the turnip greens are boiling? Or whatever it is all you rednecks say.�
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  “I’m—I’m sorry,” I stammered, not knowing what to say.

  “Can you tell me something?” she said.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I never see a single one of you around a black person,” she said. “I never hear any of you ever talk about anybody who’s black, unless it’s some sickening joke. Why is that, Cole?”

  I wanted to tell her something profound and understandable, but I had no words to offer, other than the feeble excuse of “It’s just that way.” I knew Marie would rip such words apart with the keen blade of her tongue, scatter them in sarcastic laughter, so I kept them to myself. How do you admit to someone that you have fallen lock-step in the march of behavior of your own Lilliputian world? She would not have had patience to hear of childhood friendships with blacks, of the long days of play and field work, and she would not have accepted the excuse that, as we grew older, we simply separated, went our own way following our own color, losing ourselves in the preening of whoever we thought we were. In that time—in the 50s—with the rubble of wars still cluttering much of the world and with the rumor of change waiting around every corner of our imagination, we seemed to have time only for ourselves. We were, I suppose, too busy filling the space of our smallness to think of anything larger than the moment we were in.

  When I did not answer her, Marie said, “It’s all right. I learned something.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “I learned this is not where I want to be, not where there’s so much wrong, so much to be afraid of. How can you be yourself when all you’ve ever been taught is to be like everybody else?”

  I did not respond to her. She was right. It was what everyone I knew had been taught—to be like everyone else. It had always been that way. Always.

  “Cole?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Can we be friends? I’d really like that. We could turn that school upside down, the two of us. We could have a great time, just playing games. It’d keep us from being bored to death. You wouldn’t know it, but I’m a great actress—like my mother. She used to work with an amateur theater in Washington. She loved playing those pitiful southern women that Tennessee Williams writes about. If you ever listen to her, she still sounds like she’s on stage. Her favorite word is mendacity. It’s in one of his plays.” She paused and looked at me. “Do you even know what that word means, Cole Bishop?”