“Thanks, Jake.”
“Anytime.”
I left. I felt much, much better. It was still gloomy, purple, with a promise of a light but steady rain, but there was a little wind, as if what was in the offing was something better. It was July. It was early for hurricane, but possible. My hurricane kit does not include window tape and batteries and bottled water and radios. I buy ice and liquor, do all the laundry, vacuum the house. I watch the television until the comic, brave reporters doing everything they are insisting we not do — these are invariably women reporters, I’ve noticed — are blown in their sexy yellow sou’westers from the frame. When that goes off, watch the ocean and pray for direct hit. I went home.
25
BEFORE I HEARD OR saw anything I felt a humidity that was unusual in a closed house and then immediately smelled a smell that was entirely strange in a closed or open house, and it was a wet sweetness that announced, a second before she appeared herself, in a terry-cloth robe cinched tight, with her bare feet and bare chest matching in their dark, moist, firm contrast to the terry cloth — and over that a towel turbaned on her head making her look like Queen Nefertiti, the same rig my mother wore — Patricia Hod.
She stood there with her lips pursed in mid-gesture, waiting for me to decide things. I stood there too long, so she went on to her (my) room as she had been going.
I followed her into the room, where she was at work in the mirror doing something to her eyebrows. I still couldn’t come up with anything to say. I managed to remember that she had somehow appeared here the first time as well without benefit of telltale car.
“What did that prove, and what does this prove?” Patricia Hod said.
I wrestled this one right to the floor and held it there best I could: “I was nervous and now I’m not. Or now I’m—”
“Now you’re lonely. Now you’re brave. Now you’re a man. Now you’re a true coward. You blew it. Do I have it right?” And she turned back to the mirror in her tall white Nefertiti headdress and readdressed her eyebrows, arching them and licking a pencil and holding it braced against her forehead with a little finger out in space like an outrigger for balance, the way a Southern pulp heroine would drink a Coke from one of the little bottles you can’t get anymore, at least not the returnable kind with the proper mix in it. You could in the days when they had cocaine in them and you had people, innocent, solid people like this girl and not unlike me, for example, addicted to them, especially in the morning, in lieu of coffee — people who would graduate at some point in the day to liquor and reinvoke, or reinvent, the South. What was left of the South, its reinvention or its convention, was in her errant, gorgeous, hi-ho little finger, which stood out like a vestigial antenna in the perfumy air of her. This still air was separated from the air of the Atlantic Ocean by an Andersen window and Corning fiberglass and Georgia-Pacific T-I–II siding and Wal-Mart house paint. On this side of all that, her finger was poised in the charged humid air of a showered fresh woman who wasn’t — it just barely was occurring to me — freshly showered for nothing. “What are you standing there like that for? Don’t fripper it up,” she said, turning and coming to me, a little less brave-looking herself.
In standing my ground I signed a little contract with fine clauses I did not want to read then or ever. I kissed Patricia Hod, and she was kissing me, with ink.
I did not fripper it up.
There is central air conditioning and there is another air, not central, not conditioned. I was resting easy in it, deigning not fripper.
26
AND WHAT OF MY MOTHER? What of the Doctor who bade me become seer and sayer and has had to content herself so far with a visionless architect shacked up with his cousin? She does not disapprove. She does not despair. Potato salad comes to mind.
My mother, the Doctor, is capable of a kind of iconic metonymy that will steer her, and you, if you allow it, through the complex dance of despairing, fretting, bourgeois others about you. If you can have metonymy when those about you are losing theirs, she implies, you’ll be a man. She does this not infrequently with food. In a case I am thinking of recently, it was potato salad.
There was a family reunion of sorts scheduled — unique in this our fractured dissolute clan. There has not been an earnest reunion under that name that purported to include all living members of this kennel since a time I vaguely recall that included, among other things, some beer bottles left in a freezer too long, resulting in frozen ropes of beer and glass that resembled small intestines, with children playing with the intestines and adults cussing and others laughing and those cussing going to Jake’s and those laughing continuing to laugh and the children getting cut as they were warned not to. That was a long time ago. There was a snake shot on the beach during that convocation, as I recall. Snakes now know the health hazards of appearing on the open beach. There has most certainly not been a reunion that included our upland lessers — Winn and Sasa and Patricia Hod, among others — since then.
But lo! Patricia Hod was already, like the Yankees torturing our boys during the Wawer, down heah, so someone called the question. A reunion. An unheard-of reunion that just happened to tacitly acknowledge that the uplander clan we should include was already present in a vigorous and apparently lasting knot of first-rate consenting incest. “Potato salad,” my mother gets on the phone from Hilton Head to say. “You do that. I’ll do that. And Sasa will do that. Then, well, we have it.”
“We have what, Mother?”
“A reunion, with enough potato salad.”
“I see.”
“I have never, Son, had the courage to do what I really wanted to do.” She let this ride out there for a while. I refused to question her meaning. I knew the meaning. As her man Taurus would show you the nadir of sexual opportunity on a lost bayou and an institutional assortment of ur hippies to scare you back into the batter’s box, my mother would show the hapless relations potato salad on the hands of the incestuous. The Dinah Shore covered dish on the Sade plates. “Have Patricia make a hot German style if she will, or you make it, and I’ll do, you know, my Joy of Cooking mayo with potato in it, and Sasa can do that, too, or …”
I waited. She never completed the sentence.
“Bye.” She was gone. It was the same bye Sasa had used: curt, frisky, looking-forward-to-something farewells coming from these profoundly disappointed women happily marrying children to cousins.
Potato salad in the South is nothing less than the principal smuggler of cholesterol into the festive, careless heart. It is pure poison beneath the facade of bland puritan propriety. It is the food of choice at any fond banquet of smiling relatives who celebrate tacitly among themselves the dark twining of two of their promising youth. My mother thinks this way instinctively. She can provide the deconstructive grid, but she prefers just doing it. And I must say she is good at it.
At the reunion there were the three bowls of potato salad, and they were provided by the mother of the son in the incest tango, the mother of the daughter in the incest tango, and the son and the daughter in the incest tango. The four of us ate the three potato salads Communion-style until we were Confirmed to the gills.