Geraldine got the next box up. “Ain’t no private houses there today. It’s all business towers. Most of them went up back in the thirties.” A strong woman, she had a belly and made Eric think of an only slightly less hairy Jay MacAmon — with, yeah, breasts.
“Oh…Towers?” Eric was surprised, he had the feeling he should have known that. Though he’d been to Savannah a few times, he hadn’t been in Atlanta since he was a kid. Hadn’t someone already told him about the changes? But when…?
Behind him Anne was saying, “Now, please, honey, when you take these off the truck, take ’em off just like you put ’em on — one at a time. If something does go wrong, there’s no need to smash up two or three.”
“Sweetheart,” Geraldine said, “have I ever broken one of your little pottie pieces in six years of gettin’ ’em back and forth?”
“No, you haven’t. And this is not the time to start. Now”—Anne’s hand fell on Eric’s shoulder as, above them, Geraldine leaned the carton back, first to walk it into the truck bed, then to lower it on its side — “don’t forget to ask Shit about coming to Hanna’s. You gonna remember?”
“Oh…!” Eric said, and nodded, still trying to fix his mind to the fact that his adolescent neighborhood was really gone, the same way the untamed and uninhabited Gilead — the Holotas’ Gilead, Jay and Mex’s Gilead, Shit’s old Gilead — from his own first years at Diamond Harbor were…gone.
As Eric walked back along the Island’s winter bluff, hands swinging through dry, thigh-high grass, it occurred to him: yes, Anne knew his increasing tendency to sedentariness. But she’s too nice to call me on it. Then he thought (it made him smile in the evening, as gulls swooped about): And she knows if Shit says he don’t mind goin’ to Hanna’s, I ain’t gonna put up no fuss. Well, if they’re gonna bring us out there and take us back, and it’s the same people, just in a different place — he sighed with the fancied difficulty of it — it should be okay.
More and more old things were going. And the new things were just uncomfortable, not because they were embarrassing or sexual or inconvenient — just new.
The great ceramic shapes Anne made, with their metallic glaze like liquid sunlight poured around them — he looked out at the copper sea — he’d always thought were beautiful when, years back, he used to see them in the pottery shop windows in Runcible or Hemmings.
But a notion that had come to him only that afternoon — that those objects, however beautiful, had displaced his Atlanta — made them seem cold, if not somehow minatory.
[109] THAT EVENING, WHEN the kitchen in their cabin was half dark and, sighing some, as Anne had requested him Eric asked, and Shit answered, “Sure. Hanna’s got a nice place. I don’t understand them big paintin’s she does. But that ain’t nothin’ new. Let’s go.” So there was no excuse not to have their Solstice holiday at Hanna’s rather than Anne’s.
The young woman — who came to pick them up — was an Asian social science student named Ann Lee, doing a group dissertation on “community” at the University over in Mobile. (Group dissertations — that was something new since Caleb had told them about his first stay in graduate school…Or was it?) She wanted to interview both Shit and Eric about their lives in the Settlement and before.
It was one reason Hanna had been so eager that they come.
At the party in the back studio, dozens of people moved around them.
Floating beneath the beamed ceiling, glowing and glittering letters and numbers declared, “2077! HAPPY NEW YEAR! 2077!” though that was eight days off.
“Now, see,” Shit said, sitting down across from him on the edge of an outdoor wooden settee, a piece of summer garden furniture brought inside Hanna’s barn-like studio for the winter. Shit held a red plastic plate heaped with chicken and chopped kale cooked up with ham hocks and a helping of sliced beets and vinegar that, on one side, had already left red spots splattering his white canvas jacket. “We got us this pretty young lady who wants to take me back in the office, there, and ask me all sorts of questions about stuff — she gonna ask you, too, don’t worry.”
“I know that,” Eric said. “This eggnog is good.” In both hands, Eric held the cut glass cup. Nutmeg’s scent rose from brown speckled peaks of meringue folded into whipped cream and whisky.
“You keep on puttin’ it down, and you gonna be drunk as a skunk — and gassy, too. You ain’t a drinker.” Shit looked around. “Ask one of these kids here to bring you somethin’ to eat. They’ll do it. Hey — ” He called one youngster who couldn’t have been sixteen.
The boy turned and raised an inquiring eyebrow — iridescent blue.
“You wanna get this feller a nice plate of that ham? And some of them shrimps in gravy?”
The youngster, who was not local, frowned. He was wearing a thermal web-shirt — woven of coppery threads spaced as wide as fishnet. (Like Geraldine’s…) You could turn it on or off, and it would create a blanket of warmth around you, even on really cold days. Sometimes workmen wore whole suits of the stuff, bottom and top. (Someone had even given Shit a heat-net shirt a few years back, which he’d worn exactly once, shrugging it away, finally, with, Yeah, it’s warm, but I keep thinkin’ the damned thing’s gonna ’lectrocute me.) The kid’s pants also had a large transparent plastic crotch panel — when had those come in? At least two decades before, Eric had been sure Shit would have both of them wearing them in a month. That would have been just like him. (But he’d surprised Eric by shrugging them off with, There ain’t no mystery left. You know exactly what you gonna get. So why bother?) At local bars, it had taken maybe three years for men to stop joshing, “If mine was that puny, I’d be embarrassed to wear one.” It didn’t stop anyone from walking around in them, though. As several fashion commentators remarked, until it became a cliché, their popularity was mostly with rather small-hung straight guys — though there were occasional exceptions in the entertainment world — which, blue hair not withstanding, was what this very pleasant young fellow looked to be.
“And maybe some of that hop’n’john? You know.” Shit ducked his head. “Hop’n’john? Them beans and rice? And a spoonful of them chopped-up greens. You can skip the beets. I like those, but he don’t.”
“Sure.” The kid smiled at Eric, turned, and, between the guests, hurried toward the buffet table across the room, calling over his shoulder, “Hey, it’s nice to see you guys again this year.”
Eric wondered who he was, down to visit what cousin or aunt. But when your hair color (and cut) changed so radically season to season, it was hard to recognize children, given how fast they grew, anyway.
Beside Eric, solstice lights flickered in a web of red, green, and blue over a lumpy, leaning cactus. With its terracotta pot, it must have weighed almost as much as the kid.
At which point, the Asian Ann woman came up. “Mr. Haskell, if you — oh, you’re still eating. Well, we can certainly wait till you’re finished.”
“Honey, these are my thirds. I’m just playin’ with this stuff. If I eat all this mess down, good as it is, I’m gonna be fat as Ol’ Daddy Christmas.” Shit put the plate on the table between him and Eric. “Besides, I’m all interested in your questions there.” Slowly he stood.