Sunday, May 21, 2006

Midnight at the Oasis

She was awakened by a cat. The mewing that had suddenly turned into a roar sent her lashes fluttering open effortlessly. She sat up in the bed, draped in Elliot’s crisp white sheets (he refused to sleep on anything of any other color). She stuck her toe out from the sheet, wiggling it in the chilly night air. The breeze from the fan rustled the linens and licked her foot. She giggled lightly. Elliot simmered from his sleep. Through squinted eyes, he made out the delicate outline of her face, soft lips, feathery lashes. He closed his eyes and slid close to her. He laid his head in her lap, his arms about her waist. She hummed as he rested against her. She stroked the curls on his head, leaning back on the wall. She closed her eyes, resting on the wallpaper that she knew her hair would stain.

The wind from the fan danced from her toes to her face, kissing every inch of the side of her body through the sheet. It hummed her favorite tune, that of summers in the city as a child, of popsicles on the beach, of water bottles in the car on road trips in college, of ice that Elliot would slide down her back, to her thighs. She lost herself the hum of the fan, thirsting for days past. As the breeze rotated, shunning her face like an absent lover, her eyes opened. She blinked as she glanced around Elliot’s studio, the posters, stained couch, dinosaur mugs in the kitchen. She gazed at the clock, whose red glow quickened the pace of her heart. 12.03. Time to go to Midnight.

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Barbeque

I squirmed in my spot on one of the roots of the largest tree in Cousin Pip’s suburban backyard. Great aunt Annie sat next to me in a plastic lawn chair that had grown soft in the heat and crooked under the weight of her buxom body.

Annie’s cane slumped over, skimmed the plastic chair, and hit my leg. It kissed my thigh and left drops of sweat on my skin like leopard spots. Annie yawned. She reached deep into her bosom and pulled out an ancient handkerchief. She dabbed her lip with it.

“Sure is hot today,” she said in her low, husky voice. Each of her words was heavily scented with her Southern geography.

The anchor of my mom’s side of the family, Annie had lived in Virginia all of her life and never had any intentions of leaving, even when my grandmother found affordable housing up north fifty years ago. At 79 now, the only place Annie would voluntarily move to was the Pearly Gates.

I gave her an obligatory nod of consensus about the heat as I looked up at the tree, whose leaves hadn’t rustled with a breeze in hours. I peeled the cane’s wooden handle off of my leg and lay it down on a root next to me. A stream of sweat trailed down the back of my neck, tickling my flesh like the absent wind. I slapped it away, smearing the moisture into my skin.

I tapped my foot on the root and dug into the dirt with the tip of my shoe, wishing I’d gone with my mother to pick up more sodas from the store. She’d volunteered to go awfully quickly and practically sprinted to the car before I knew what had happened. It’d been her idea to come to the barbeque; it was her idea to come to Virginia. My father and I were perfectly happy living near my grandmother in New York, but eight years ago my mother decided to move down south, closer to the rest of her family. “Closer to her roots” was how she put it, as she packed up my childhood in a cardboard box labeled “Shadie’s Things.” Dad never got accustomed to Virginia and headed back to New York on the next plane out of Richmond. Now Mom had fled the barbeque, unjustly leaving me to my own devices.

I glanced around the yard, searching for someone, something, anything interesting.

In the middle of the yard, my mother’s first cousins, Pip and Bill, brothers, ten years apart in age, prepared the grill again after a round of hotdogs had finished. The fire burned low as Bill, a tall, dark man with a round tummy, poked the charcoal rocks with a stick he’d hacked off a tree. He stood back and jabbed swiftly, shielding his voluptuous mustache with his unusually hairy arm.

Pip, much lighter in color and skinnier than his older brother from years of cigarette smoking, judged the size of the flame. He held a can of lighter fluid to his flat chest and curled his lip in curiosity.

“A lil’ more?” Pip asked, holding up the can. Bill nodded. Pip spewed the piss yellow fluid on the charcoal. They watched jubilantly as an Olympic flame rose between the grill’s grates.

“Be careful,” Bill’s wife Diane called from the kitchen window as Bill started poking at the fire again. He brushed her off with a nod and a smirk.

My eyes slid left, to where the children were playing on Pip’s rusty old swing set. All four of his children were grown up now, so the only use the set got was during the annual summer cook out. Aunt Tammy’s son, Joaquin, climbed up the ladder, his eyes shining. He lay down on his stomach and stretched his arms in front of him like Superman.

“Wheeee!” He screamed as he slid down. But he stopped abruptly, right in the middle. Bewildered, he looked around and started crying. He tried to crawl down the rest of the way, but he couldn’t move since his shirt was trapped on a sharp line of rust. Aunt Tammy took her time walking to him. She ripped him off the slide and set him down on the ground, where he ran off immediately.

By the picnic table, under a dogwood tree, Cousin Benjamin cradled his wife’s hand in his. Susan—his fourth wife in five years—squinched up her face in displeasure of the heat. She was fairly pretty, with short black hair and slanting brown eyes. Her plunging tank top revealed that her babies would never go hungry and her tapered ankle jeans obeyed her body’s many sinews. Must have been a struggle to get those on this morning, I thought.

Susan whined about the heat to Ben, demanding that they go inside the house or her makeup would melt and send her face sliding onto the grass. Ben just smiled, but not particularly at Susan. I traced his grin across the yard to Julia, a friend of Aunt Tammy’s from church who’d come along to the cook out to pick up any young, family-oriented, single man she could scrape off Pip’s yard. She might stand a chance, I thought. Ben would be flirting with some other woman—probably wife number five—before the coleslaw could start to melt.

Closer to the house, Tia Juanita stalked about barefoot, holding her pregnant tummy over her flower-print mu-mu dress. She spat strands of her long hair out of her mouth as she muttered in Spanish to Tammy, cursing the hellish heat.

After years of Juanita’s living with Aunt Tammy’s family as a servant, last year, Tammy claimed that Juanita was actually her long lost sister by several marriages and removals. But we all knew that it was just that Juanita had come horribly close to being deported and Tammy didn’t want to give her up. Juanita married an immigrant man shortly after the debacle, but Tammy wouldn’t allow him to move into her house so Juanita wouldn’t get distracted from her duties. Tammy almost bit her tongue through when he moved down the street eight months ago.

An uneven scream rang out from the grill. I whipped my head around and watched as the flame reached high, much higher than Bill had expected. Small streams of smoke danced from his singed eyebrows as he furrowed them at Pip, who just laughed. Diane walked out of the house to Bill, shaking her head, mumbling, “Now, didn’t I tell you?”

From a significant distance away from the flame, Pip showered the grill with more lighter fluid and flailed a breaded catfish toward the fire. He missed, and the fish flopped onto the grass.

I smirked and shook my head, trying to calculate what the odds were of my being adopted from a wealthy family on the West Coast, who owned a mansion, a dog and blazing mutual funds.

“Don’t do that, Shadie,” Annie hissed at me suddenly.

I looked up at her, squinting as the sun reached my eyes through the branches of the tree. “Do what?”

“Think that way about your family,” she replied, hosing down the ripples of her neck with her hankie. “They might be all you have one day.”

I raised an eyebrow at old Aunt Annie. What exactly did she know? She hadn’t seen much of the world outside of Virginia.

I looked out at my family again, trying to measure similarities, wondering how it was possible that they had all been so normal to me when I was a child. University couldn’t have changed me this much.

I closed my eyes and whisked sweat from the bridge of my nose. I opened them and jumped; Cousin Benjamin posed before me.

“Hellll-lo, Shades,” he said, pursing his lips.

“Hi, Ben,” I replied curtly. I leaned over on the root to look around him, searching for Susan.

Benjamin leaned against the side of the tree, attempting debonairness, until his sweaty palm slipped off the bark. He stumbled, tripping over another of the tree’s long roots. He feigned a chuckle as he straightened himself up. I looked up at him, following his lanky legs, up to his wire neck. He smiled down at me, reminiscent of those strange men that children are instructed to promptly run away from and my psychology texts dissect for personality disorders.

“So,” he continued nonchalantly. He crossed his arms and very carefully rested his shoulder on the trunk. “I see puberty has treated you well. How old are you now?”

“Eighteen.”

“Oh, legal are you? You seein’ anybody?” His bushy eyebrows jumped up and down disturbingly behind his Malcolm X glasses.

I blinked at him, wondering where he’d gotten the audacity to pull this one.

“Yes,” I stated with the confidence of a martyr. “He’s a soldier, actually.”

Not a total lie. A guy I’d liked in high school who’d joined the army came to see me at university one day last year. He took me to a movie and deflowered me in my dorm afterwards. I hadn’t seen him since, but no one needed to know that.

“He’s away now,” I continued, “but we might get married when he gets back.”

Benjamin raised his hands as if surrendering in a robbery. “Okay, okay,” he said. He turned to walk away, but looked back at me first. “Let me know if that doesn’t work out.”

With an exaggerated wink, he waltzed away like a pimp in one of those seventies movies. Until he tripped on a stray branch.

I sighed and shook my head again, but stopped quickly, remembering Aunt Annie’s chide.

“It’s okay,” Annie said, looking down at me. “He actually is a jackass. I’m ashamed to call him my nephew.” She smiled, but made sure to not show any of her dentures. I giggled.

I looked up at the sky, trying to match its clear blue with the color of ocean water, neither of which I’d seen in a while, especially not at school where life itself dims to grey. I followed the sun’s rays from the sky, watching as they scattered around the backyard, encircling my family.

At the picnic table, Aunt Tammy braided Tia Juanita’s long hair into an endless French braid. They sang baladas softly to entertain Juanita’s unborn while Julia tossed a ball with Joaquin, advertising her own maternal instincts if any single, family-oriented men were watching.

Cousin Pip soaked piles of paper towels in the drink cooler. Bill held an icy can of beer to his brows with one hand and raised the other to the sky as Diane prayed to Jesus that his eyebrows grow back quickly. I wondered where he’d gotten the beer. I really could have gone for a cold one, but no one in the family drank, for religious reasons, of course. I’d learned to justify alcohol with the concept of moderation and other valid arguments.

“Jesus’ first miracle was turning water into wine, wasn’t it?” I’d teased my mother as we drove back home from my university earlier this summer. Mom just laughed. She had to agree with me.

Benjamin sat with Susan at the picnic table, slathering her hotdog with slightly melted coleslaw. Susan smiled pleasantly, stroking Benjamin’s thick, curly hair behind his ear and adjusting his glasses. I hoped she knew what she was in for. I also wondered if wife number five would be anything like her.

Standing, I picked up Aunt Annie’s cane and handed it to her. “I think the hotdogs are done,” I announced, smiling.

Annie grinned a toothless smile back at me as she grasped the cane. She struggled up from her chair, leaning on the cane with the confidence she’d have in a brick wall. I held her arm and limped along side her, suddenly hungry for Cousin Pip’s famous fried catfish. I’d save some for my mom; she would want some eventually.

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Introducing...


I've finally caved to the insufferable boredom of the English countryside and began a blog. Vous êtes ici. C'est tout...

*All works here are ©2006 by V. W. Young