Witch Ball (2 page)

"But now you've come back to Columbus. Maybe he is still here!" The wheels in my head began turning. "Have you tried to look him up? I'll bet he would love to see you again."

"He would probably be shocked to see me now. I have done a bit of detective work. He is married, and a respectable officer of the court."

"Why don't you call him, you know, just for old time's sake?"

She gave me a small smirk and said, "Isn't it time to get going, young lady? The library closes in an hour."

I put my cup in the sink and gave the witch ball a spin. Maybe it will attract Fleur's old love. He is probably good, if not exactly a spirit.

 

The library is cool, over air-conditioned. I stopped to get a drink from the fountain. The water is so icy that it makes my teeth hurt.

Eric was pushing a squeaky cart between tall shelves of books. I watched for a moment as he slipped books onto the shelves, then planted
myself in his path on the floor.

"Oh, hi," I said, as if he were the last person I expected to see. He smiled and nodded.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

He rolled his eyes and gave me a look that said,
Do you really have to ask?
"I might ask what you are doing. You do know we have tables and chairs."

"Just
lookin' for something to read." I sat crossed-legged in the aisle, sure that he would notice how my white shorts created a beautiful contrast against the dark tan of my thighs.

Eric had a halo of tight, ebony curls. The fluorescent lights above him illuminated sparks of olive and brown. Even with my tan, his skin was much darker than mine. He must have been an Arabian prince in another life.

"Not many girls spend time in the science section."

I had not even noticed what section I was in. The whole point was for him to discover me by surprise.

"I guess I'm just a different sort of girl." It isn't easy to be clever while sitting on the floor.

"Well, the library is closing in a few minutes. Why don't you take your book to the desk and check out?"

"Okay. I'm kinda' thirsty. Maybe we could get a Coke when you get off?"

He looked slightly confused. I was convinced he had noticed me hanging out in the library this summer. Maybe I was wrong.

"Sure. Meet me by the bike rack after the doors are locked."

I waited by the bike rack. He came out with Mother Goose, the children's librarian. That isn't her real name, but everyone calls her that. She has become the character, and plays it well.

"Good-byee! Good-byee!" She sings almost everything she says. Everyone in town loves her. Eric smiled at her with such affection that it made me slightly jealous.

He turned toward me, as she walked to the parking lot and got into her car.

"I don't have a bike," I said when he finally noticed me.

"I guess that limits the places we can go.
How about the coffee house on Fifth?"

Of course coffee in this heat did not sound at all great. But we were having a date...sort of.

The coffee house smelled wonderful. The aromas of roasting coffee and muffins blended into a sweet fragrance. I got an iced caramel latte. Eric ordered a bubble tea, something I had never heard of. It had a creamy appearance with tiny pellets at the bottom that looked like little berries. We each paid for our own.

"What's your name?" he asked. My heart dropped a bit. I had tried to learn as much about him as I could. He hadn't even noticed me.

"Truly."

"Cute. I like unusual names."

Columbus is a very small town. It is the sort of place where people grow up and never seem to leave. Every family has a history that is public knowledge. There are no secrets. Evidently, (big surprise) I was a secret to him.

"What are you studying?" I asked him. I actually knew the answer to this because I had been asking around. He is a history major at
The W.

"Oh, I like history. It won't be much of a career path. I'll worry about that later."

I find history a big bore. "You could be a business major. Then you would be sure to have a job when you graduate."

"Yeah, but I'm thinking of college as a time to learn something. I'm the first one in my family to go to college. It's a big deal."

"I get it. My mom says we should all go to college. It is the best place to meet your husband."

"I'm not exactly looking for a 'husband'—or a wife. But, good luck with that." I became aware that I was not charming him, as I had expected. "I
gotta go," he said and walked out the door into the miserable heat. There was no mention of seeing me again. But then he stuck his head back inside the door. "Nice meeting you, Truly," he said. Yes! He remembered my name.

 

 

 

 

 

 

G
uess I had forgotten about the time. When I got home Mom was setting the table.

"Where have you been, young lady?"

I held up a book. She frowned. "Analytical Chemistry
?"

"Yeah, it might be interesting."

She didn't say anything to that.

Dad came in looking frayed, as usual. He went straight to the wet bar and made a martini with three olives.

"Tommy," my mom said, "dinner is almost ready. Can't that wait?" He didn't answer her.

"How was your day, Gertrude?" he asked.

"Okra dokra."

"Enjoying your summer off?"

"I guess so."

"Enjoy it while you can. Life becomes a prison when you get to be an adult."

At my age, everyone wants to be older—old enough to drive, old enough to drink. We never think about being an adult. Adults are parents. They go to work. They pay bills. That seems like eons away to me now. I just want to be slightly older.

Mom put some dishes on the table. "I picked up barbeque from 'Little
Dooeys' on my way home."

Dad rolled his eyes. "You might ask how my day was, Tommy," she said.

"I'll bite. How was your day, dear?"

"Awful. It seemed like a hundred accounts were due today. One of the secretaries called in sick. The copy machine broke down around two o'clock." My mom is a bookkeeper at an insurance company. That sounds awful to me.

"Yes, well, my day was a laugh riot." I could see the martini was starting to take effect. My dad gets funnier the more he drinks. "The courthouse was overrun with elephants. A circus came to town, and when they came in to apply for their permits, they brought a caravan of animals. An elephant sat on my desk, and it shattered into a million splinters."

Of course, I knew that was not true. He probably saw one person who was so fat that they reminded him of an elephant. The story just grew from there. Dad works in the
Clerks Office in City Hall. I sometimes wonder how my parents ended up this way. Did they ever want to do something exciting?

I dream of travel, foreign ports, and exotic destinations. Like Aunt Fleur, I want to experience life, especially life very far from
Columbus, Mississippi. The Tombigbee River flows next to the city. Once upon a time riverboats cruised past Columbus on their way to New Orleans, maybe on to South America. I wish I could have seen them. I could have hitched a ride to somewhere else, anywhere else.

"Y'all can sit down now," Mom said.

Dad poured a few more inches of gin in his glass and brought it to the table.

"Gertrude, you were later than usual today,'"
Mom said while looking down at her plate. Her tone is casual. This is a statement that is really a question. I know she is fishing for more information. Mom is horribly overprotective. She has always been that way. How much trouble could anyone get into in this place?

"Yeah.
The library, you know."

"
Jesus
, Kay. Let the girl alone! Better to have her reading than hanging out with that crazy old
lady
." My dad is always on the brink of exploding. Adulthood must be as awful as he claims.

"I know what time the library closes," she said between clenched teeth. "I thought she should have been home earlier."

"Well, I went to the coffee house with a friend."

"What friend?" She looked up. She was way too interested.

"Just a boy."

They both stopped chewing and stared at me. I don't know why this was so shocking.

"Did you get in a car with that boy?" I could see that mother was angry. I had no idea why.

"No. We walked."

"What boy?" This time Dad was concerned.

"A boy who works at the library.
His name is Eric."

"Eric what?"
My mother can place everyone in their proper class and category with the answer to two questions: What was his mother's maiden name?, and What does his father do for a living?

"Eric Alexander. He's a sophomore at
The W." I thought this would make her happy, him being a college boy and all.

"Alexander?!
Who are his parents? His father isn't Hunter Alexander, is he?"

"How should I know?  I just met him."

My parents exchanged meaningful glances. Dad took his cocktail into the living room and sank into the recliner in front of the TV. He would probably remain incommunicado for the rest of the evening. This was his pattern.

As we cleared the table, I said, "Mom, my head hurts. Can I have an aspirin?"

"Just wait awhile. It'll go away."

That was her pat answer. She acts like aspirin is heroin, or something. But she was right. It did go away.

Then, surprisingly, my dad looked over the pages of
The Commercial Dispatch
. "Oh, my Gawd! A teenage boy committed suicide yesterday! Can you imagine that? Hanged himself in his closet."

Mom was less shocked by this news. "Those teen years are hard," she said this with no emotion.

"Gertrude," said Dad, "did you know him? Skip Daigle? He was on the track team at Columbus High. Only a year older than you..."

"I don't think so. I've been to a couple of meets, when the two schools were up against each other. But I don't remember him."

The truth is that I am not at all interested in sports. I sometimes go to games, or sporting events to look at boys. That is where I first saw Eric. That "Skip" boy may have been there, but I didn't notice him.

Mom went into the kitchen and began slamming the cabinet doors and rattling the dishes. It sounded like a hurricane in there. When she came out her eyes were red.

I went into the dining room to help with the clean-up.

"What's wrong, Mom?"

"Oh, nothing."  Of course, everyone knows that 'nothing' means 'something bad'. She was quiet for a minute then started talking. "I guess I was just thinking about that poor boy's parents, how sad they must feel."

I didn't know what to say. I doubt that she even knew the family at all. "It'll be Okay, Mom. They'll get over it."

Evidently this was the worst possible thing I could have said. She turned to me and glared. "A mother never gets over the loss of a child. She remembers every birthday, every milestone that ever happens. She never forgets how old they would be, what grade they would be in. Her love for that child never dies." She turned back into the kitchen.

Dad dropped his eyes back to the pages. Now, the only sound was the rattling of the newspaper, and the occasional clinking of the ice in his glass.

Mom came out of the kitchen and said, "I ran into Lenora Leigh this evening at Lil' Dooey's. She lost her daughter, Emma, a year or two ago. Lenora looked so drained, so old." Mom gathered the last dishes from the table. "I remember her from high school. She was always impeccable, beautifully dressed."

Dad had nothing to add to this. Neither did
I. He sat back in his chair; the TV's lights flickered across his face. A re-run of "Mayberry R. F. D." was on, but he never seemed to look at the screen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I
waited a few days to return my book on analytical chemistry. I hadn't opened it. Eric was behind the desk. "Did you like it?" he asked.

"Oh, yes. Very informative; I learned a lot." What I actually learned is that it is much better to check out thinner books. Those science journals are awfully heavy to carry comfortably in my backpack. Way too hard on my back.

"Are you planning to hang around for a while? We could get something to drink when I get off." Yeaay! I think he is asking me on a real date.

"Sure." I tried to sound cool, but my voice went up an octave or two.

We went back to the coffee house. This time he paid.

"Eric, why did you choose The W?"

"It's a good school."

"Yeah, but you were a big track star at Columbus High. Most boys would have gone to Mississippi State, at Starkville. Sports rule there."

I was trying to learn as much as I could about him. After all, he is my soul mate. No matter that he hasn't figured that out—yet.

"The W" is the local nick name for Mississippi University for Women. Men have enrolled for a few decades now, but the name has not changed. I think it might be embarrassing for guys to admit that they graduated from there. They may have to do some explaining if they leave Columbus. Strangers could possibly assume that they were once women.

"Sports!" He made a small spitting sound with the word. "I am finished with sports." Then he smiled, as if a less disgusting thought popped into his head. "Anyway, what guy wouldn't want to be surrounded by women?"

"Surrounded by women" is a bit of a stretch. Sure, there are lots of "women" studying there. But, like many
women's
universities, it attracts a fair amount of lesbians. Not all, of course, but more than most co-ed schools. They come from all over the state to study there. Maybe it's easier to be yourself when you are far from home. Most kids lie to their parents, just a little bit, trying to please them.