Barb hadn’t gotten the glasses, so he went to the cabinet door beneath the drawers she had pointed to, squatted, and opened it. He took out a large, blue plastic tumbler. “These…?” he asked, holding it up for her to see.
“Yeah, I…guess so.” (He came up with two.) “I wish I had some nicer ones. You know your father — Mike, I mean — used to have a very strong body odor, when he worked hard. Or even exercised. I mean, it could sneak up on you and surprise you. A couple of times, I remember, I was actually shocked — ”
“But Dad didn’t do a workout this afternoon,” Eric said. “I did.” He remembered his father’s smell, acidic, and, yes, surprising in its intensity. When Eric had been seven and eight and they’d visited Uncle Omar in Texas, he’d loved the way Mike smelled when he got home from work at the filling station and would sit Eric on one knee and Harry on the other and read another chapter from Uncle Omar’s old Tarzan books, Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar, or Tarzan and the Golden Lion, and how Mike would kind of snicker under his breath, as though it were a joke, whenever he read out a passage where the white men got mad and called the natives block-headed niggers, as though its humor went over the boys’ heads: Now, I don’t wanna hear you fellas talkin’ like that, though Uncle Omar talked that way to and about everyone, including Ralphy and Hareem and Eric, not to mention Lurlene and Mike. Sometimes Eric felt everyone was in on it except himself…
Sometimes, especially when Uncle Omar was drunk and happy, and going on about this “nigger scumbag” and that stupid “nigger son of a bitch,” and Lurlene was too busy for anybody to relax — except Omar himself — Eric would get an erection. He wondered if Hareem did, too.
“Really, I’m gonna take one later — ”
“Eric — that’s not the point!” she said it sharply and suddenly.
Eric started, feeling hurt and confused. Then he swallowed. “Hey, Barb — ?”
She blinked at him.
“—are we having an argument about somethin’?”
She kept blinking.
So he asked, “You wanna drink?”
She took a big breath. Then she said, “Sweetheart, I want a drink so bad I don’t know which way is up! I’ve been thinking about having one all the way home, and I’m standing here blaming it on you that I didn’t walk right in and get one.”
Eric said, “It’s in the living room. You want me to get it for you? Or you want to get it yourself?”
Now she swept around the table in her pink jeans and strode toward the arch into the hall. “No, I’ve got it.”
Moments later she was back with her own glass in one hand and, in the other, by the neck, the bottle of Heaven Hill. “Actually, I’m going to have it with some of your lemonade. And then we’re going to sit down and have some of this very nice dinner that you were so sweet to fix. No, we are not arguing. At all.” She sat. “I’m just a little jumpy — that’s all. Hey — if you want a chicken sandwich, you go ahead. There’s bread in the icebox — but I’m sure you know that. I’m just going to have a few slices on a plate. All right? You really remembered how grandma made her tomato salad…?”
As they ate — her glass tumbler half bourbon and — as she poured from the metal pitcher — half lemonade, Barb said, “You know we can turn the television off, but when you’re by yourself, sometimes you like to have a little…I don’t know: background noise.”
“I don’t mind it.” Really, it was kind of annoying. “But no, we didn’t watch too much TV at Dad’s.” Eric put a top slice of whole wheat bread on his chicken sandwich, then bit into it. “Mike likes video games.” The only time Mike regularly turned on the TV in his bedroom was just before going to sleep. A third of the time, it would be on when he got up. He’d only flipped it off — sometimes — when he came from the bathroom after his first middle-of-the-night piss.
“Mmm.” Barb took another sip from her bourbon and lemonade. “That’s your dad — a big kid. Video games.” Smiling, she shook her head, put the glass down, and looked at it. “You haven’t gotten so big that I should be offering you one of these, now, have you…?” She nodded toward the glass.
“Nope,” Eric said. “I haven’t.” He knew she thought of drink as something to fix the jumpiness, but he had learned — in Florida — it was something that, the next day, created it.
“Well — that’s something.” As there had been in Florida, Barbara kept a second TV in her bedroom, though not the living room. Was that, Eric wondered, a holdover from her marriage?
“You know, Barb, your boss is funny.” Eric pushed the tray toward her. “Clem was sayin’ before how she doesn’t like to meddle in people’s business. But she sure started meddling — I guess that’s what you’d call it — in mine, telling me how she doesn’t think I ought to work as a garbage man. I’m not gonna be a garbage man — just a helper.”
“Oh, good God!” Barb laughed. “That’s all Clem Englert does is meddle! Probably I should have warned you. She was going on to me about that, too — don’t pay her any mind, honey. You listen, you smile, you even say thank you. Then you go on about your business. That’s the only way you can survive down here — listen to your mother, believe me!” She laughed again.
And finally took up a piece of chicken.
Eric relaxed when she took a bite, then another.
“Why was she so bothered by it?”
“First, I think she thought you were a lot older. And second, all those black guys who live in the Dump — or work for the Chamber of Commerce, I guess — still kind of worry people down here a little. They shouldn’t. They’ve been here long enough. You’d think they’d all have gotten used to it by now.”
“Used to what?” Eric asked.
“Well,” she said, “at least as I understand it, because…well, so many of them are gay, honey.”
“They are?” Eric asked. “Since I am too — ” there, he’d said it — “that shouldn’t be any problem for me. Right?”
Barbara sat pensively and lifted a tomato wedge on her fork. “So you…” she began after a moment, “still think you’re gay? I mean, you feel that you’re…gay — still feel that way, I mean?”
Eric nodded. He’d wanted it to sound kind of light, kind of jokey: “Yeah.” It had come out pretty serious.
“I thought, maybe, it was something you’d decide you’d…I dunno: grown out of.” She ate the tomato. “You didn’t put any dill in it.”
“You didn’t have any dill,” Eric said. “We could get some.”
“Down here?” She shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
“No,” Eric said. “No — I haven’t. Grown out of it, I mean. I don’t think people do.”
“Then it’s probably good you’re here,” she said, sitting back. “I mean, I don’t see how your being here can hurt.”
Eric asked, “Does your friend, Ron…work for the Chamber of Commerce?”
“Oh, no,” she said. “No. No, Ron is perfectly normal — I mean.” She frowned. “No, I mean, he’s got his own business over in Runcible. Computer programming. This has been such a depressed place for so long, they’re trying to attract new business and things — make it more attractive. To people like Ron, and — I guess — the people in the Dump as well. You didn’t go over there today, did you?”
“No.”
“Well — you’ll probably meet Ron in the next couple of days. Actually, he’s away for a computer conference in Savannah. But he’ll be back, I think, on Thursday. You’ll see him then. He’s really nice.” How long ago, Eric wondered, had he learned that “really nice” was Barbara’s code for black. But now he was sure. “I know you’ll like him.” Of course, he’d heard her say it to disbelieving and long-suffering Grandma, three different times back in Hugantown.