A Garden of Earthly Delights (12 page)

The man came back carrying three bottles of pop, all orange. As he drove he drank his, making loud satisfied noises. The girls drank theirs down as fast as they could.

“Ain't this good for a hot day?” he said, sighing.

They were nearing the town now. To Clara and Rosalie this town was very big. It was ringed with houses that were not farmhouses and buildings that did not seem to have anything for sale in them. There were areas of wild land, then more houses, a gas station, a railroad crossing, and then before them on an incline was the main street—lined with old red-brown brick buildings that reared up to face each other.

“You girls never said where you were goin. I bet you're goin to the show.”

“Yeah,” said Rosalie.

“You like them shows?”

He had slowed the car. It came to a stop. Clara was surprised to see nothing much about them. They had just crossed the railroad tracks and now there was a great field with old automobiles parked in it.

“The show don't begin till five o'clock, so you got lots of time till then. Two cute little girls like you. You want to come visit at my house?”

They sat in silence. Finally Rosalie said cautiously, “We got to be home again fast.”

“How fast is fast?” the man said loudly, trying to make a joke. He was pressing against Clara while he talked. “Only this minute got into town; you ain't already goin back, are you?”

“I need to get somethin for my leg, my leg hurts,” Clara said. She was leaning over against Rosalie to get away from him.

“Does your leg hurt?” the man said in surprise.

“Stings real bad,” said Clara. She could sense Rosalie listening to her, puzzled. Clara did not know what she was saying but her voice seemed to know. It was not nervous and it went on by itself. “It hurt when I fell down yesterday and made me cry.”

“Did it make you cry?” the man said. He put his hand on her knee, cupping it gently. She stared at his hand. It had small black hairs on its back, and fingernails that were ragged and edged with dirt; but it was a hand she felt sorry for. “A little girl like you oughtn't to be workin in the fields. There's a law against it, you know. They can put your pa in jail for it.”

“Nobody's gonna put my pa in jail,” Clara said fiercely. “He'd kill them. He killed a man anyway, one time.” She looked at the man to see how he would take this. “He killed him with a knife but I'm not s'post to tell.”

The man smiled to show he did not quite believe this.

“I ain't s'post to tell,” Clara said. “They let him go 'cause the other man started it an' my pa was only doin right.”

She looked at the man. A strange dizzy sensation overcame her, a sense of daring and excitement. She met his gaze with her own and smiled slowly, feeling her lips part slowly to show her teeth. She and the man looked at each other for a moment. He took his hand away from her knee. Something strange seemed to be happening but Clara did not know what it was. She seemed to be doing something, keeping something going. The sun was warm and dazzling. Then she forgot what she was doing, lost control, and her smile went away. She was a child again. She leaned against Rosalie to get away from the man's smell.

“We got to get out now,” she said.

Rosalie tried the door handle. “That door opens hard. It's tricky,” the man said. His face was damp and he kept looking at Clara. “You got to be smart to open it.…”

“It don't come open,” Rosalie muttered.

“It's a little tricky.…”

Clara held her breath because she didn't want to smell him. He leaned over to tug at the door handle, pretending to have trouble with it.

“Open it up!” Rosalie said. Clara's heart was pounding so hard she could not say anything. The man grinned apologetically at her, his face right up against hers, and finally he got the door open. Rosalie jumped out. Clara started to slide out but he took hold of her arm.

“Listen, little girl,” he said, “how old are you?”

Clara slashed at his hand with her nails. He winced and released her. “Goddamn old asshole!” Clara cried, jumping out. “Go fuck yourself ! Take this—it ain't no good!” She threw the glove at his face and ran away. She and Rosalie jumped the ditch and ran into the field, laughing. She could hear Rosalie laughing ahead of her.

They hid behind one of the junked cars. The man was still parked by the road. Clara peered through a yellowed, cracked old windshield and watched him. He leaned around, looking outside like a lost dog. Clara pressed her knuckles against her mouth to keep from laughing.

“Think he's gonna tell the police?” said Rosalie.

“My pa will kill him if he does.”

Finally he closed the door and drove away.

It was a warm, bright afternoon. Both girls forgot about the man in the car and looked around, ready to be surprised and pleased. The junked automobiles all around them looked as if they had crawled here and died; their grilles were like teeth lowered into the earth. The girls walked along, bending to look inside at the tattered seats and the torn upholstery. Once Clara slid into an old car and turned the steering wheel, making a noise with her mouth that was supposed to be the sound of an engine. She tapped at the horn but it did not work.

“I'm gonna have a car like this, only a real one,” she said.

They kept smiling, they didn't know why. Nothing smelled bad here. There was only a faint metallic odor, and the odor from occasional pools of oil. No smell of garbage or sewage. A few dragonflies flew about, but no flies. And every car was something new to look at. There were old convertibles with the tops half ripped off, as if someone had attacked them with knives. There were old trucks that looked saddest of all, like tough strong men who couldn't keep going. There were red cars, yellow cars, black cars, the paint peeling and rusty or overlaid with another color so that the two colors together made a third strange color that was like a wound. Clara could not examine anything close enough. They had come to town and already they were seeing things they'd never seen before. Windows everywhere were cracked as if jerking back from something in astonishment; the cracks were like spiderwebs, like frozen ripples in water. Clara stared and stared, and what she saw got transformed into new, strange things. A piece of rubber was a snake, sleeping in the sun. A scraped mark on a car was a flower, ready to fall into pieces. In a yellowed car window was a face that might have been under water, so blocked out by the sun behind it that she could
not make it out—it was her own face. Clara and Rosalie stared at everything. They kept smoothing their dresses down, wiping their hands on them, as if they'd been invited to visit and were ashamed of the way they looked.

“This one here—lookit. What's wrong with this?” Clara said sadly. The car was a dull, dark blue and looked new to her. She tried to imagine her father sitting in the driver's seat, one arm hanging loosely out the window. They looked under the hood and saw some weeds: no engine. “My father used to have a car like this, in Florida,” Clara said.

They climbed up on the hood of one old truck, then up on the roof of the cab. The metal surface was hot and smelled hot. On the roof of the truck was an old tire. Clara sat on it and hugged her knees.

“Why'd you act so funny with that bastard back there?” Rosalie said. Her freckles gave her a sandy, quizzical look. “You acted real funny.”

“I didn't either.”

“Yes you did.”

“Like hell I did.”

“You talked different—like Nancy or somebody.”

“I never talked like Nancy!”

“I was scared, I thought you an' him were gonna leave me,” Rosalie sneered. “Thought you were gonna run off with him.”

Clara laughed contemptuously, but she felt nervous. She knew what Rosalie meant but was just as puzzled over it as Rosalie was.

After a while they jumped down. Rosalie lost her balance and had to push herself up off the ground with one hand. She made a face as if she'd hurt herself. “You all right?” Clara said. But Rosalie straightened up and was all right in the next instant. The religious medal her father had given her showed now at the throat of her dress, catching the sunlight.

They made their way through the cars and came out to the road.

“Clara, you afraid?”

“No.”

They came into town on the main street, heading right in. Both felt their knees tremble a little. Their eyes grabbed at people's faces
as if looking for someone they knew. Once in a while people stared back at them. A boy of about sixteen, leaning against a car, watched them go by and grinned at them.

“Thinks he's so smart,” Rosalie muttered.

They lingered in front of store windows, pressing their hands and noses against the glass. When they moved on there were spots where they'd touched the glass. They stared at the bottles and boxes and pictures of handsome people smiling out at them in the drugstore window, and at the old dead flies at the bottom, and at the strange green thing made of glass with water in it that hung down from a gold chain. The smell of food made their mouths water violently. They moved on slowly, fascinated by the great confused display in the five-and-ten window. Clara tried to look at everything, every mysterious object, by itself. There were skirts and dresses laid out, and socks, and lamps, and spools of thread, and purses, toys with wheels, pencils, book bags like the kind they had noticed other children bringing to school in the past. Pearl necklaces, silver bracelets, jars of perfume, lipstick in gleaming gold tubes. And bags of candy, cellophane bags so that you could see the chocolate candies inside. Clara's eyes ached.

“C'mon, let's go in,” Rosalie said. She pulled at Clara and Clara hung back. “What's wrong, you afraid?”

“I don't want to go in.”

“What? Why not?”

She stared at Clara contemptuously, then turned to go in. Clara watched her push the door open and walk right inside as if she had been doing things like this all her life. After a second she hurried in behind Rosalie. Rosalie said, “I been in stores like this lots of times.”

There were a few other people browsing through the store, all women. Clara and Rosalie followed one young woman who carried a baby, anxious to imitate her. She paused to examine a pair of scissors. Clara came up to the counter after the woman left and looked at the scissors, wishing she could buy them. Nancy would like her better if she brought her back a present like that.

She felt the dime in her pocket again. Her fingers were beginning to smell from it. Rosalie had her mother's black change purse out. She counted the coins inside. “I guess I'm gonna buy somethin,”
she said. Clara looked around shyly. A salesgirl was leaning across a counter to talk to another salesgirl. Both wore cotton dresses and looked quite young. Clara stared at them, trying to make out their conversation; she could not imagine what it would be like to be one of those girls.

“I'm gonna work in one of these places someday,” she said to Rosalie.

“Yeah, lots of luck.”

Rosalie was examining tubes of lipstick. She handled them carefully and with respect. The salesgirl, a woman of about twenty-five, watched them without much interest. She had glamorous red lips and arched eyebrows. Clara stared at her until the girl's expression changed to let her know that she should look at something else. “These are all nice,” Rosalie said, loud enough for the salesgirl to hear. Clara stood behind her, a few feet from the counter. She was fascinated by the way everything gleamed. The lipstick tubes were made of gold. There were some small plastic combs for sale, all colors; they cost only ten cents. Clara wanted one of the combs suddenly, but she had intended to buy Roosevelt a present with part of her dime.

“I wish I could get one of them,” she muttered in Rosalie's ear.

“Go on, buy one.”

“I can't.…”

“I'm gonna buy this one,” Rosalie said. She handed the tube of lipstick and the fifty-cent piece to the girl. Clara watched each part of the procedure, so that when she was a salesgirl she would know what to do. She thought she could do it as well as this salesgirl, who was a little slow.

“Thanks an' y'all come back,” the girl said tonelessly.

Rosalie walked over to another aisle and Clara followed her. Rosalie took the lipstick out of the bag and dabbed some on her mouth, then she rubbed her lips together. “You want some?” she said to Clara. Clara liked the way the lipstick smelled. It was a smell she could not place, something new and glamorous. “I better not, Pa might get mad,” she said sadly.

“Hey, why didn't you buy one of them combs?”

“I only got a dime.”

“What're you gonna buy, then?”

“Some toy for Roosevelt …”

“Hell, get something for yourself.”

They came to the toy counter. A fat blond woman with cheerful pink cheeks was in charge. “Can I help you little ladies?” she said. Clara and Rosalie did not look at her. Their faces were warm.

“How much is that there?” Clara said. It was the first time she had talked to a salesgirl and her words came all in a rush.

“That airplane? Honey, that's twelve cents.”

Clara stared at the airplane. Then she realized she could not afford it. “I can give you the two cents,” Rosalie said, nudging her.

“No, never mind.”

“Oh, Christ …”

Clara could feel the salesgirl and Rosalie watching her. She pointed to a bag of marbles. “How much is this?”

“Honey, that's a quarter. That's expensive.”

“Go on and buy the airplane, what the hell,” Rosalie said. She was leaning against the counter in a way that surprised Clara; she looked as if she'd been shopping in stores like this all her life.

“How much is this?” Clara said, pointing at something blindly.

“Honey, that's got real rubber tires, you see them? That's expensive.”

Clara swallowed. Her face was hot. She would remember this moment all her life, she thought—the colorful toys, her sweaty fingers closed about the dime, the saleswoman's pity, Rosalie's contempt. “This one,” she said, “what about this?”

“That's just a dime, honey.”

It was an ugly little doll without clothes. Clara did not want it but had to buy it. “Here,” she said, thrusting the dime at the woman. “I'll buy this.”