Love, Cajun Style Read online

  “I was looking for something I didn’t already know,” Evie said.

  I looked at Mary Jordan, who was coasting in the middle. Seemed to me there was a big contrast going on between all that poetry she’d been reading and Doug and his friends laughing their heads off at Evie.

  “All right,” Mary Jordan said. “Last week Doug had to get a new driver’s license. We were at the Dairy Freeze. When he took out his wallet to pay, I grabbed it from him to check out his picture.” Mary Jordan paused, taking so long I wondered if she was ever going to finish her story.

  “And?” Evie said.

  “And when I opened up his wallet, there was a condom inside.”

  “What did you do?” I asked.

  “I threw his wallet at him and stormed off down the road.”

  “What did he do?” Evie wanted to know.

  “He got in his car and followed after me, yelling through his rolled-down window for me to get in.”

  “Did you?” Evie asked.

  “No. I walked the rest of the way home.”

  “Did he follow you the rest of the way home?” I asked.

  “No. He gave up after about four blocks.”

  “He should have followed you the rest of the way home,” Evie said.

  We kept riding our bikes at a steady pace, my body so slick with sweat I was sure I was going to slip right off my seat.

  “He called,” Mary Jordan told us.

  “Did you talk to him?” I asked.

  “No. Mama answered the phone. I told her to tell him I was in the shower.”

  “How many times did he call?” Evie asked.

  “I don’t know. A couple, I guess.”

  “He should have called more than a couple,” Evie said.

  I agreed with Evie, and I might have said so if she hadn’t yelled, “Car!” just about the same time I heard it, too.

  Evie pedaled in front of us and cut over to the shoulder. We followed behind her, me hoping to the heavens I didn’t know a living soul in the approaching vehicle. As the white Lincoln slowly passed us, I looked up, not recognizing the car or its two elderly passengers who were shaking their heads.

  “To liberation!” Evie yelled in the car’s wake. She held her legs straight out to the sides and let out a loud whoop. I brought my bike up to a good coasting speed, then lifted my feet to the edge of the seat and slowly stood, mooning the world.

  “Go, Lucy!” Evie yelled.

  A blue Subaru turned around the bend, heading toward us. As the car sped past, Mary Jordan let go of her handlebars and held her arms out to the sides, flaunting her bare chest. The car honked its horn several times before disappearing behind us. We squealed and laughed, Evie and I both shocked at Mary Jordan’s bravado.

  As we rode on, I recalled one of Mama’s forty-five records Evie and Mary Jordan and I used to play over and over until we had all the words memorized. Riding side by side with my two best friends, I held one fist up to my mouth as if it were a microphone. “Hello, everybody, this is your action news reporter with all the news that is news across the nation.” I made my voice as low as I could, mimicking Ray Stevens’s. “On the scene at the supermarket there seems to have been some disturbance here.”

  Evie and Mary Jordan were laughing so hard they both had tears streaming down their faces.

  “Pardon me, sir, did you see what happened?” I held my fist out in front of Evie.

  “Yeah, I did….” She leaned into the imaginary microphone. “I was standing over there by the tomatoes and here he come, running through the pole beans, through the fruits and vegetables, naked as a jaybird. And I hollered at Ethel….I said, ‘Don’t look, Ethel.’ It was too late. She’d already been incensed.”

  Evie pedaled faster. Mary Jordan and I kept up, racing beside her, the three of us singing out as loud as we could, “He ain’t rude, boogie-dy, boogie-dy. He ain’t lewd, boogie-dy, boogie-dy. He’s just in the mood to run in the nude.”

  Snooze Button

  Tante Pearl is Daddy’s older sister. She lives in a cypress-sided bungalow along Pigeon Bayou, though I don’t know why it is they call it that. I’ve never seen a pigeon in those parts. As Mary Jordan and Evie and I climbed off our bikes, Tante Pearl’s dog, Moses, ran to greet us, his bushy tail bounding back and forth. Moses and Tante Pearl have lived together for almost fifteen years, and as far as I know, he’s the only male she’s ever shared her living quarters with. She says he’s a collie. He looks more like a mix between a German shepherd and a bulldog to me.

  Tante Pearl’s car wasn’t in the driveway.

  “Now what do we do?” Evie said.

  “Find something to put on,” I said, knowing Tante Pearl always left her house open.

  “If I fit into your aunt’s clothes, I’ll kill myself,” Evie said.

  My aunt was probably the largest woman I’d ever known.

  We laid our bikes in the grass alongside the house and ran inside. Mary Jordan and Evie waited in the kitchen while I padded my way back to the laundry room. On the shelf above the washer and dryer was a stack of beach towels. I reached up and took three down. Just as I turned to leave, I noticed Tante Pearl’s fishing pole leaning in the corner next to the back door. Next to her fishing pole was another fishing pole, their lines tangled up together. The only person I’d ever known my Tante Pearl to fish with was me. My fishing pole was at home in the garage, somewhere behind the lawn mower and the Weed Eater and some tools for Daddy’s motorcycle. At least that’s where I thought it was.

  I couldn’t remember the first time my Tante Pearl took me fishing. It just seemed like something we’d always done together. But then I realized, if someone were to ask me when was the last time my Tante Pearl and I went fishing, I couldn’t recall that, either.

  I don’t know that Mama has ever been fishing. And if my daddy ever went, it was before I was born. They both smell real nice and their clothes are always clean. Tante Pearl isn’t like Mama or Daddy. Sometimes she smells like the ocean, like saltwater and fish and sweat. And sometimes she smells like the earth, like pole beans and cabbage and muddy dirt. She has long, shiny brown hair she braids down her back, and wears men’s army fatigues and blouses with no sleeves.

  When I was little and Mama and Daddy would go out, Tante Pearl would take me to her house to spend the night. She’d pack up sandwiches for dinner in a five-gallon pail and drive us to the beach with our fishing poles. We’d watch the sunset and tell each other stories. When we’d get back to her house she’d pay me a quarter to brush out her hair, which I was more than willing to do so that I could stay up.

  I didn’t brush out Tante Pearl’s hair anymore. I didn’t fish anymore with her, either. And seeing those poles up next to the door made me wish I did. It hadn’t dawned on me before that my Tante Pearl would go fishing without me.

  When I brought the towels into the kitchen, Mary Jordan and Evie were standing at the counter eating from a bag of wedding cookies, their fingers and mouths covered in powdered sugar. The sight of my two best friends standing in my aunt’s kitchen butt naked got me to laughing so hard, tears stung my face.

  “What’d you do? Fly to Mexico and back?” Evie said.

  I tossed them the towels, still laughing. We wrapped the terry cloth snugly around ourselves. Then I took tumblers down from the kitchen cabinet and filled them with iced tea from a pitcher in the fridge.

  We settled in around the table and drank our tea. Evie gulped hers down in a hurry and started chewing on the ice. I could tell she was thinking. “Who do you think he was planning to use that condom with?” she asked, getting right to the point.

  Mary Jordan shifted slightly in her chair, unsticking the backs of her legs from the green vinyl. “I think that’s what’s bothering me so much. If I knew exactly why I was mad, I’d be better at acting mad. It’s like there’s different degrees to being mad, and I’m not sure which degree I’m at.”

  Evie helped out, holding up a finger in the air. “One, he’s already hav
ing sex with someone or else he’s planning on having sex with someone other than you. Or two,” she said, extending a second finger, “he’s hoping to have sex with you, and he wants to be prepared.”

  Mary Jordan nodded her head real slowly. “Right,” she said.

  “Which do you think it is?” I asked.

  “I keep thinking if he was having sex with someone else, I would know. All someone has to do is yawn funny in this town, and everybody hears about it.”

  “There’s one more scenario,” I offered. “Maybe he just wanted to have it in there for the other guys to see.”

  “Maybe,” Mary Jordan said.

  “I had a dream a couple of nights ago,” she went on to tell us. “Usually I don’t remember my dreams. But this one was different. Like I wasn’t really sure whether I was dreaming it or it was actually happening.” Mary Jordan tucked her hands underneath her legs. She wasn’t looking at me or Evie. She was just staring off at nothing. “I was dreaming that I was sleeping,” she told us. “And I just wanted to keep sleeping, it felt so good. But then the alarm clock started buzzing, not really buzzing, more like cawing, like a bunch of crows. And I knew I could either turn it off and get up for school, or hit the snooze button.”

  “Which did you do?” I asked.

  “I woke up before I could find out,” Mary Jordan said.

  “To an alarm?” Evie asked.

  “No. I just woke up.”

  Mary Jordan shrugged her shoulders and looked down at the table. “What would you have done?” she said.

  “I would have hit the snooze button,” Evie said. “I always hit the snooze button.”

  I knew Mary Jordan never hit the snooze button on her alarm. Her clock radio was plugged in on top of her dresser on the other side of her room so that she had to get up to turn it off.

  “What do you think the dream’s telling you?” I asked.

  “Maybe that condom was like the alarm, something to get my attention, like a warning, and I’ve got to decide what I’m going to do.”

  “Don’t turn the alarm off, then,” Evie said.

  “Evie’s right,” I said. “If you hit the snooze button and ignore the alarm, you could end up in a situation you might later regret.” I thought of my own situation the summer before and knew how my body had played with my mind. “Remember Tommy?” I said.

  “I remember.” Mary Jordan laughed. “But sometimes it feels so good just to be held. To feel like someone really loves you.”

  “We love you,” Evie said defensively.

  “Do you think Doug really loves you?” I asked.

  “I think he does,” Mary Jordan said. “He tells me he does. A lot.”

  I scooted sideways in my chair so that I was facing Mary Jordan. “Does he tell you when he’s kissing you and you all are making out? Or does he tell you sometimes when he’s just watching you study, the way you turn a pencil over in your fingers the way you do, or the way you tuck your hair behind your ears and swoop those big eyes of yours up at the world?”

  Mary Jordan looked at me curiously, but didn’t say anything. Evie didn’t say anything, either.

  I got to thinking about Tommy. He’d told me he loved me, too, and for a while I was certain I loved him back. Tommy wasn’t athletic like Doug. He wasn’t as smart as Doug, either, though I thought he was smart enough. I liked Tommy because of his voice. Tommy sang with the chorus in a Christmas program one evening at school during our sophomore year. After the chorus performed a couple of songs together, Tommy stepped in front of the microphone, his black hair swooping over his dark eyes, and crooned about chestnuts roasting on an open fire. Jack Frost wasn’t nipping at my nose, but something like love was nipping at my heart. I decided right then and there I was going to make him fall in love with me. So, on Christmas Eve, Evie and I snuck into his car, a ten-year-old Honda Civic, which was parked in the driveway in front of his family’s garage. It wasn’t locked. We crept up to it from the hedges in front of the house and left a small package on the driver’s seat. The package was a chocolate Kiss wrapped in a small box. On the little strip of paper coming out of the chocolate Kiss, Evie had written my name and telephone number. Lo and behold, a couple of days later he called. He wasn’t sure who I was. After I told him my last name, he looked up my picture in the yearbook and decided we could meet at the Dairy Freeze.

  We ended up going together for almost three months. I liked the way he looked. I loved the way he sang. And kissing him felt better than anything I’d ever known. From my limited experience and understanding, I thought I had all the ingredients as far as love was concerned. Then Tommy’s dad got a job in Houston with an oil refinery. I got caught up in the whole emotion of him moving away, and thought my heart would shatter into a thousand pieces.

  Tommy and I went driving around the night before he left. He was playing a Nirvana CD that he liked real well, and singing along with it. After a while he pulled off to the side of the road and the two of us hiked down the wooded hill to a sandy spot along Rummy River. Mama says nights in Sweetbay are as sultry as John Coltrane on saxophone. It’s easy for bodies to stick together. Mama’s right, because that night I was with Tommy Pierre, I’m sure our bodies were stuck together a lot closer than my mama would have liked. The moon was close to being full, and we were kissing each other good. Then he said it, those three words I’d been waiting for. Just as I was fixing to say, “I love you, too,” we heard a bunch of car doors slamming at the top of the hill. Before we knew what was happening, the entire Trudeau High baseball team came storming toward us. As soon as they saw us, one of them kindly asked us if we’d leave, saying something about them initiating the freshmen players. Tommy wanted to find out what the freshmen were going to have to do, so we made up the hill like we were leaving, but then we snuck back down and hid behind a big cypress. All four of those rookies took every stitch of clothing off. The only naked boys I’d ever seen before were the ones in the magazines Evie kept under her bed. Seeing them in the flesh was a whole lot different. They’re kind of like breasts; not a one of them looks the same.

  A couple of the older players on the team pulled out a stack of inner tubes they’d stashed behind some trees. Sure enough, each one of the freshmen had to float their bare bottoms down that river. Rummy River isn’t like one of the bayous. Its current will carry you a good five miles through town before slowing down enough for you to paddle your way to the shore.

  “I just hope they don’t hit any rocks,” Tommy said.

  “Or meet up with any gators,” I added.

  Most of the players I didn’t know very well, but two of them were in my geometry class. I knew I’d never be able to look at them the same again. I was right. Funny how that works. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t meet their eyes, and yet it wasn’t their eyes that were giving me the problem.

  Tommy said he would call, but he never did, which made me think he never really loved me, either. Mama says boys tell you they love you sometimes, because their bodies get confused. Maybe my body had gotten confused, too. My heart didn’t break into a thousand pieces after he left. Instead, I realized all the things he didn’t do. He didn’t want to hear my stories. He didn’t ask me questions. He didn’t smile when I was talking to him. He didn’t hug me out of the blue just to make me feel good. His hugs were always a preamble to something else. And after he was gone, I wondered if he ever knew me at all.

  All this reverie shifted my thoughts right back to Mary Jordan. I hoped Doug loved her. I hoped he loved her with all his heart. I also hoped with all my heart he could see the things about her that she overlooked in herself. Everyone knew Mary Jordan was smart. But she was more than just smart. She had something gentle inside her. Maybe it was the way she could catch a lightning bug, hold it up to her ear as if she could hear it talk, then ever so slowly open up her fingers and let it fly away. Evie and I would never let ours fly away. We’d trap them inside jars that we’d set on our nightstands. No matter how many holes we’d pok
e in the lids with a ballpoint pen, the bugs would always be dead by morning. Or maybe it was the way Mary Jordan had cried when Evie’s dad walked out. Evie never cried. In some ways, I think Mary Jordan cried all the tears Evie never could.

  I finished my tea, my head still deep in thought, when Mary Jordan said, “So what do we do about our clothes?”

  “We have to get Doug back,” Evie said.

  “How?” Mary Jordan asked.

  Evie said, “I’m not sure.”

  As we sat thinking about what we could do, Tante Pearl pulled up. Her car door slammed, and within seconds she walked into the house, carrying two grocery bags.

  “Hi, Tante Pearl,” I said.

  She set the bags of groceries on the counter and turned to us with an inquisitive look on her face. “Why is it you girls are wearing my linen closet?”

  “’Cause Doug Hebert swiped our clothes,” Evie told her.

  “We were swimming,” I explained.

  “We didn’t have our swimsuits,” Mary Jordan added.

  Tante Pearl said, “So I gathered.”

  She began unpacking the bags of groceries, setting sausage and spinach and beans on the counter. “What are you going to do about it?” she asked us.

  “That’s what we’re trying to figure out,” I told her.

  Tante Pearl reached into her grocery sack and took out a bag of flour and a bag of suger and a bottle of Tabasco sauce.

  Evie got to looking at that Tabasco sauce, and her eyes started grinning.

  I said, “What?”

  “Trudeau Tigers are playing the Leeville Lakers Friday night. Home game.” Evie had one of those smirks on her face she gets when she’s thought up something good.

  “So?” Mary Jordan said.

  “Could be a hot night in Sweetbay,” Evie went on. “Could be a mighty hot night.”

  “What are you saying?” Mary Jordan wanted to know.

  “Players bring their uniforms to the locker room.”

  “Go on,” Mary Jordan said.

  “Coach has them run a couple of laps on the field to warm up before they dress out,” Evie explained.