Bed & Breakfast Page 11

  Six

  “WELL, MERRY CHRISTMAS, sugar!” For a split-second Cam didn’t recognize the woman in the bright green pantsuit who pushed through the crowd at the Savannah airport and headed toward her, arms outstretched. “Aunt Edna,” she said as she was pulled into an embrace, felt a cool cheek, a well-trussed bosom, and hair stiff with spray. Edna, so sharp-eyed she could spot a designer knockoff at fifty paces, said, “You didn’t recognize me, did you? Not that I’d expect you to. It’s been what? Ten years? And I guess the old gray mare ain’t what she used to be.”

  Cam laughed. Part of the reason she hadn’t recognized her was because Edna’s hair, now multitoned blond, had been gray the last time she’d seen her.

  “You remember how riled your aunt gets when she fishes for a compliment and doesn’t get a bite,” Uncle Dozier said, putting his arm around Cam and giving her a squeeze, “so you’d better tell her she’s looking good.”

  Cam said, “She’s looking great. And so are you, Uncle Dozier,” though it was hard to reconcile this near-bald man wearing glasses, consciously resisting the sag of age by throwing back his shoulders, with the younger Uncle Dozier she’d kept in her mind’s eye.

  “Well, you surely haven’t changed,” Edna gushed. “You’re as snappy-looking as ever.”

  “And so are you,” Cam repeated, remembering that Southern women of her aunt’s generation complimented one another’s appearance with a compulsion usually reserved for people in show business. “It’s just that ...” She realized they were blocking traffic and stepped out of the flow of emerging passengers, “just that I wasn’t expecting you. I thought Mama was going to pick me up.”

  “Your mama’s memory isn’t what it used to be,” Edna told her.

  “None of our memories are what they used to be. What was your name again, girl?” Dozier joked.

  “Josie clean forgot that Lila and Orrie are giving a party tonight, so she’s over to Lila’s place, giving Lila a hand. Not that Lila needs the help, but you know Lila and your mother. So we volunteered to pick you up.”

  “Truth to tell,” Dozier gave Cam a wink, “we volunteered to pick you up ’cause it was the only way Edna could get herself invited to the party.”

  “Dozier, you know that’s not true,” Edna snapped, making Cam wonder how it was possible to be married to a man for fifty years and not understand his sense of humor. “So,” Edna went on, “we’re going to drive over to Hilton Head to the party before we go home. That way you’ll get to see Lila and Orrie, and Evie, too.”

  “You all right?” Dozier asked.

  “I’m fine. Just that I was expecting ...”

  The fear that she might be pregnant was like a constant hum, audible only to her, which kept her from concentrating on what was going on. She knew she’d crack if she had to get through the next few days without knowing for sure, but how would she get a doctor’s appointment at Christmastime, and on such short notice? She could hardly picture herself sitting in the waiting room of Planned Parenthood with a slew of hapless teenagers. Of course there were those home pregnancy tests, but how reliable were they?

  During the flight she’d remembered Josie’s obligatory “facts of life” conversation when she’d started her period. She’d felt smugly superior at the time, convinced that between slumber-party secrets and library research (she’d read The Kinsey Report, biology texts, and every other book about sex she could get her hands on), she knew as much, probably more, than her mother did. But Josie had finished her little lecture by saying, “If you’re ever in trouble”—pathetic euphemism!—“come to me,” and as the plane had touched down and Cam’s stomach had flip-flopped, she’d decided if Josie asked what was going on in her life, that she, who prided herself on honesty but rarely told Josie the truth, would make a new start, finally come clean and tell her everything. It was too tiring and confusing not to.

  “... expecting Mama to pick me up,” she concluded, unable to keep the disappointment out of her voice.

  “Well, if all this traveling has made you tired,” Dozier continued.

  “She’s all right,” Edna answered for her. “She was born traveling. She’d been halfway around the world when she was knee-high to a duck.” Seeing the perspiration on Cam’s forehead, she added, “Cam, sugar, shuck off that heavy coat. You don’t need that here.” And, with a deadly sideways glance at a man who’d bumped into her without excusing himself, “We’re having glorious weather.”

  “ ’Cause if you’re tired,” Dozier kept on, “we could go right on home to Beaufort.”

  “No, we could not,” Edna insisted. “I swear he’s like a hibernating bear since he’s retired. Can’t budge him to go anywhere but to the blessed hardware store. And this isn’t going to be a fancy party. Just cocktails and hors d’oeuvres from six to eight. Lila’s trying out this new catering service that I’ve heard is real good. A little overpriced, but that wouldn’t matter to Lila. I guess you know they’re in high cotton now. Who would’ve thought that Orrie would make something of himself? I don’t mean to be hateful, but he didn’t look like much of a catch when Lila married him.”

  Dozier said, “Still doesn’t look like much of a catch to some.”

  “Well, I’m sure I don’t know what it takes to impress you, Dozier,” Edna said. “After all, Orrie’s going to be in the state legislature.”

  “Representing every developer who wants to turn a marsh into a golf course or a jetty into a marina,” Dozier croaked.

  “Oh, Dozier, hush up. Take Cam’s coat and bag and let’s get this show on the road.” Edna eyed Cam’s black turtleneck sweater and slacks. “Don’t worry about how you’re dressed. People don’t dress up the way they used to, not even for the holidays. Why, I remember when Mawmaw wouldn’t let us go shopping without we put on white gloves. You look just fine. Doesn’t she look just fine, Dozier?”

  “Pretty as a picture, but a little tired. Like I said, we could go on home, put our feet up, talk some.”

  “Personally, I don’t care what we do,” Edna said with martyred patience, “but I know Cam would like to see Lila and Orrie’s place and Lila and Josie are expecting us, and I just think it would be selfish to mess up their plans.” This, Cam remembered, was quintessential Aunt Edna. Edna never said, “I want”; she always got what she wanted by seeming not to defer to the wishes of others. “We’ll only stay for an hour or so, then we’ll carry you and your mama back home. Now let’s go get your luggage.”

  “I was afraid it might get lost, so I just brought this carry-on and this shopping bag.” She handed her carry-on to Dozier, folded her coat over her arm and followed her aunt into the crowd. Edna pointed out the features of the new terminal and commented on the crush of people as though it were an accomplishment. “You won’t believe all the changes, Cam. We’re getting bigger and bigger. We’re on the map now.”

  “Guess that explains why all these fool Yankees want to come down here,” Dozier grumbled. “Did your mama tell you that they’ve got tours goin’ around our neighborhood now? Can’t step out your own front door without a carriage full of tourists gawking at you. One of them was so bold she came right up into our garden with a camera.”

  “Those fool Yankees, as you so ungraciously call them, are what’s keeping me in business, Dozier. Wait’ll you see my gift shop, Cam. You’ll be so proud of me.”

  “They’ll buy anything. Shells they could’ve picked up on the beaches, bags full of moss they could’ve snatched from the trees.”

  “And speaking of buying foolishness, who bought a paddle fan with one of the blades missing last week?”

  “I’ve got a blade sitting in the attic will fit right into that.”

  “Sitting next to the windup gramophone and the ice chest you retrieved from Mawmaw’s? I swear, Dozier ...”

  The terminal doors opened and Cam caught the pervasive smell from the paper factory. People always said it smelled like rotten eggs, and though the odor was undeniably foul, it hit her like the olfact
ory equivalent of an old song—so full of associations that it almost seemed pleasant. She and Edna stood on the curb while Dozier went off to get the car. “Oh, how’s Peatsy?” she asked.

  “I’ve been too busy to get to the hospital, but your mother and Lila went this morning and they say she’s hanging on. Doctors are still trying to decide if she should have a bypass, but women do much worse than men when they have a heart attack. Did you know that?”

  “I guess I did.”

  “Did your Mama tell you that Grace Koch died?”

  “I don’t think so.” Cam scoured her memory. Who the hell was Grace Koch?

  “I tell you, Cam”—Edna shielded her eyes, looking past the parking lot to where the sun was setting beyond the rim of trees, and dropped her voice as though she were talking to herself—“when you’re over seventy it’s like you’re in a war zone. All of your friends are going or gone. It may sound cold but I’m not in any hurry to be visiting hospitals. I mean, what good can you do there? You’ve just got to ignore them—ignore it—otherwise you can’t keep on.”

  Cam did think it sounded a little cold. And she had never heard Aunt Edna say anything that smacked of this sort of introspection. She reached out to take her hand, but Dozier drove up in his late-model black Lincoln, Glenn Miller’s “String of Pearls” blasting from the radio. “For mercy’s sake, turn that down, Dozier,” Edna said, getting into the front seat and gesturing for Cam to get into the back. “His hearing’s going,” she informed Cam loudly, as though Dozier weren’t there.

  “It’s okay,” Cam said, “I like the big bands.” It had been years since she had ridden in such a gas-guzzling boat of a car and she relaxed into the soft upholstery as they pulled in behind a van with a bumper sticker showing a Confederate flag and warning I DON’T CARE HOW YOU DID IT UP NORTH. At the tollbooth Dozier paid his ticket and talked about the weather with the black attendant in the purple nail polish, then they drove though straggly pines that only partially masked an industrial park, across the railroad tracks, past the Dixie Crystals sugar factory, through the sleepy collection of houses, gas stations, churches, and schools that made up Port Wentworth. Accustomed to Manhattan’s glitzy advertisements for fur coats, Broadway shows, museum exhibits, concerts, men’s designer briefs showing bulging crotches, Cam smiled at a billboard asking REMEMBER WHEN WE SAID “GOD BLESS America1” AND MEANT IT? and another advertising a turkey shoot at a Baptist Church.

  In the gold and crimson sunset the river shone like a mirror and as they crossed a little bridge, Edna pointed to the Savannah skyline downriver. “You haven’t seen that new big bridge, have you?” she asked. “It’s really something. ’Course your mama and Dozier are tree-huggers. Hate to see any progress. They’d like us all to be laying in hammocks and driving buggies.” They passed the WELCOME TO SOUTH CAROLINA sign, driving through what had once been the richest rice paddies in the British colonies and was now a wildlife preserve, then crossed a new freeway and took old Highway 17.

  She could remember driving this road right after she’d got her license, barefoot and racing hell for leather across the state line to the bright lights of Savannah in a car full of friends so dumb and hungry for excitement that they’d thought “Live fast, die young, and have a good-looking corpse” was a funny line. On summer nights that big fat moon would shine like a spoon, the air would be heavy with honeysuckle and desire, the ferns and vines so fast-growing they’d threatened to snake right over you if you stood still. That verdant lushness was dormant now, but to Cam’s eyes the muted greens, browns, and grays still looked summery. The crude roadside stands and lean-tos promising “Fresh Peaches,” “HomeGrown Tomatoes,” and “Vidalia Onions” on signs that looked as though they’d been painted by a child had always been there, but now there were full-size billboards advertising time-shares, retirement “plantations,” discount stores, and malls. She took it all in, paying just enough attention to keep the conversation going with an occasional question—not a difficult task since Aunt Edna was of the generation that confused tireless vivacity with charm. The wooded road was slashed by a superhighway and in the waning light she saw the turnoff sign to Hilton Head.

  “They’re gonna push this highway all the way west to join up with 1–95,” Edna told her, “so we’ll be able to get here even quicker.”

  “So we’ll be able to hurry up and wait,” Dozier mumbled. “ ’Fore I die they’ll probably have Japanese trains crisscrossing the islands.”

  “In addition to the golf classics, they have these Renaissance retreats here now,” Edna said. “Even the president comes down. Not that we particularly want to see him.” The median was well planted and tended, the signs, pointing to the markets, the library, the post office, hotels, and restaurants, were partially concealed by palmettos and tastefully discreet shrubbery.

  After a few miles they turned off a traffic circle and stopped at a kiosk. Dozier told the guard that they were going to a party at Orrie Gadsden’s, the guard checked a list and waved them on. They cruised by stables, a golf course, man-made ponds silvery in the moonlight. The lights of sprawling houses twinkled through banks of trees. This was her sister Lila’s life—a timeless round of sunshine, shopping, cocktail parties, volunteer meetings, golf, and boating. Of course it wasn’t “the real world,” but so what? Where had adventurousness landed her?

  “So you must be, mustn’t you?” Edna said.

  “Must be what?” Had she been talking out loud?

  “Hungry. I said you must be hungry.”

  “A little.” If anything more than a saltine cracker passed her lips she’d upchuck. Late-model cars, mostly of U.S. manufacture, were parked on either side of the road and a young man in black pants, white shirt, and a black bow tie waved them down. “Guests for the Gadsdens’ Christmas party?” When Dozier nodded, the young man said, “I’ll park the car for you, sir. The house is right there. The one with all the lights.”

  “We know,” Edna said with sweet condescension, “we’re relatives.”

  Dozier held his arms akimbo, waited for each of the women to take one, and they started walking toward the house. A middle-aged couple, the woman’s gold sweater set and the man’s plaid sports coat bright in the decorative lights of house and shrubbery, walked ahead of them up the circular drive.

  “Edna, honey,” Dozier said, steering her toward a flagstone path at the side of the house, “don’t you remember Lila asked us to come through the back door?”

  “Why should we go in through the back door? We’re not the help.”

  “Lila said she wanted us to come to the kitchen first, that way the family can all say hello without disrupting the party.”

  But the front door had already opened, emitting a bray of laughter, and Orrie, glad-handing the man in the plaid sports coat but looking past him, called out, “Well, if it isn’t Cam.”

  As Lila looked in the kitchen door, her smile, wide and bright as her lipstick, froze. Josie was fiddling with the garnish on a platter of shrimp while the caterer, tense with impatience, hovered behind her. “Mama,” Lila said, “you really aren’t needed in here. Come out and circulate.”

  Cuba, wiping down an already spotless countertop, said, “Sure. Go on out, Miz Tatternall. Nothin’ for you to do in here.”

  Nothing for you to do either, Lila thought, angry with herself because she’d given in to Josie’s entreaties to hire Cuba for the evening because Cuba needed the extra cash for Christmas. There were several leaders from the black community, mostly educators or ministers, on her guest list and, being sensitive to what they might feel if the only other blacks were those serving food, she’d specifically hired this caterer because she knew her helpers were young white men and women. Cuba had showed up looking like the maid in some colorized forties comedy, wearing an aqua rayon uniform tight as sausage casing, with a starched white apron bigger than a salad plate that pouched out over her belly. She said she’d bought the outfit specially for the party and had looked hurt when Lila had told
her to just help out in the kitchen.

  “I was wondering if there’s trouble with Cam’s flight,” Josie said. “It’s already six-thirty, so they should be here by now. Maybe I got the time of the flight wrong. I guess I should’ve written it down.”

  “Short-term memory loss, Miz Tatternall. Saw a program ’bout it just the other day. At our age it best to write everything down.”

  “But I’m sure it was supposed to arrive at five,” Josie repeated. “So they should have been here by now, shouldn’t they?”

  Lila said, “I don’t know. And I don’t care. I’ve got over a hundred guests to see to.” She knew she sounded snappish but she didn’t care about that either. Even with the responsibility of the party, she’d devoted most of the day to her mother. She’d taken her to the hospital to visit Peatsy and sat for what seemed like hours with Peatsy’s son, Waring, and his “companion,” a darkly silent Santo Domingan who could barely speak English. Peatsy, drugged out in a bower of tubes and machines, hadn’t even known they were there. Then her mother’s bridge partner, Mary Gebhardt, had turned up and she’d been roped into going to lunch at Plum’s. That had taken another hour and a half because people kept stopping by their table to ask after Peatsy. Lila’d been so impatient her throat had constricted and she’d barely been able to swallow her she-crab soup. Sometimes when she was with her mother and her mother’s friends, listening to their “who’s married, who’s dead, what’s the price of detergent” conversations, she felt as though she were being buried alive.

  Years ago, when Mawmaw had first started to lose it and Aunt Edna had distanced herself and let Josie shoulder most of the responsibility, she’d thought Edna terribly selfish. Middle-aged people weren’t that far away from being old themselves, she reasoned then, so why couldn’t they show compassion? But now that she was over forty herself she understood the awful sense of time running out that made you want to distance yourself from the older generation. She’d wanted to yell, “Y’all are retired, but I have things to do!” Her impatience had made her feel so guilty that she’d suggested that she take Josie back to her place, let her pick up her things, then carry her on back to Hilton Head so she wouldn’t have to drive over by herself.