"Minis," said Gigi. "In the real world they're called miniskirts."
"Don't they make people stare at you?"
"Stare. Drive for miles. Have car wrecks. Talk stupid."
"You must like it. Reckon that's what they're for, though."
"You explain your clothes; I'll explain mine. Where'd you get those pants, for instance?"
"What's wrong with them?"
"Nothing. Listen, you want to argue, take me back."
"No. No, I don't want to argue; I just want to… ride."
"Yeah? How fast?"
"Told you. Fast as I can."
"How long?"
"Long as you want."
"How far?"
"All the way."
The desert couple was big, Mikey said. From any angle you looked, he said, they took up the sky, moving, moving. Liar, thought Gigi; not this sky. This here sky was bigger than everything, including a woman with her breasts on a tray.
When Mavis pulled into the driveway, near the kitchen door, she slammed the brakes so hard her packages slid from the seat and fell beneath the dashboard. The figure sitting in the garden's red chair was totally naked. She could not see the face under the hat's brim but she knew it wore no sunglasses. A mere month she'd been away, and for three weeks of that time couldn't wait to get back. Something must have happened, she thought. To Mother. To Connie. At the squeal of the brakes, the sunning figure did not move. Only when she slammed the Cadillac door did the person sit up and push back the hat. Calling out, "Connie! Connie?" Mavis hurried toward the garden's edge. "Who the hell are you? Where's Connie?"
The naked girl yawned and scratched her pubic hair. "Mavis?" she asked.
Relieved to learn she was known, spoken of, at least, Mavis lowered her voice. "What are you doing out here like that? Where's Connie?"
"Like what? She's inside."
"You're naked!"
"Yeah. So? You want the cigar?"
"Do they know?" Mavis glanced toward the house. "Lady," said Gigi, "are you looking at something you never saw before or something you don't have or you a clothes freak or what?"
"There you are." Connie came down the steps, her arms wide, toward Mavis. "I missed you." They hugged and Mavis surrendered to the thump of the woman's heart against her own. "Who is she, Connie, and where are her clothes?"
"Oh, that's little Grace. She came the day after Mother died."
"Died? When?"
"Seven days now. Seven."
"But I brought the things. I have it all in the car."
"No use. Not for her anyway. My heart's all scrunched, but now you back I feel like cooking."
"You haven't been eating?" Mavis shot a cold glance at Gigi.
"A bit. Funeral foods. But now I'll cook fresh."
"There's plenty," said Gigi. "We haven't even touched the-"
"You put some clothes on!"
"You kiss my ass!"
"Do it, Grace," said Connie. "Go, like a good girl. Cover yourself we love you just the same."
"She ever hear of sunbathing?"
"Go on now."
Gigi went, exaggerating the switch of both the cheeks she had offered Mavis.
"What rock did she crawl out from under?" Mavis asked.
"Hush," said Connie. "Soon you'll like her."
No way, Mavis thought. No way at all. Mother's gone, but Connie's okay. I've been here almost three years, and this house is where we are. Us. Not her.
They did everything but slap each other, and finally they did that. What postponed the inevitable were loves forlorn and a very young girl in too tight clothes tapping on the screen door.
"You have to help me," she said. "You have to. I've been raped and it's almost August."
Only part of that was true.
SENECA
Something was scratching on the pane. Again. Dovey turned over on her stomach, refusing to look out of the window each time she heard it. He wasn't there. He never came at night. Deliberately she drove her mind onto everyday things. What would she fix for supper tomorrow?
Not much point to garden peas. May as well use canned. Not a taste bud in Steward's mouth could tell the difference. Blue Boy packed in his cheek for twenty years first narrowed his taste to a craving for spices, then reduced it altogether to a single demand for hot pepper.
When they got married, Dovey was sure she could never cook well enough to suit the twin known to be pickier than his brother, Deek. Back from the war, both men were hungry for down-home food, but dreaming of it for three years had raised their expectations, exaggerated the possibilities of lard making biscuits lighter than snow, the responsibility sharp cheese took on in hominy. When they were discharged and back home, Deek hummed with pleasure as he sucked sweet marrow from hocks or crunched chicken bones to powder. But Steward remembered everything differently. Shouldn't the clove be down in the tissue, not just sitting on top of the ham? And the chickenfried steak-Vidalia onions or Spanish?
On her wedding day, Dovey had stood facing the flowered wallpaper, her back to the window so her sister, Soane, could see better. Dovey held up the hem of her slip while Soane drew the seams. The little brush tickled the backs of her legs, but she stood perfectly still.
There were no silk stockings in Haven or the world in 1949, but to get married obviously bare-legged mocked God and the ceremony. "I don't expect he'll be satisfied at table," Dovey told her sister.
"Why not?"
"I don't know. He compliments my cooking, then suggests how to improve it next time."
"Hold still, Dovey."
"Deek doesn't do that to you, does he?"
"Not that. He's picky other ways. But I wouldn't worry about it if I was you. If he's satisfied in bed, the table won't mean a thing." They laughed then, and Soane had to do a whole seam over. Now the difficulty that loomed in 1949 had been solved by tobacco. It didn't matter whether her peas were garden fresh or canned. Convent peppers, hot as hellfire, did all the cooking for her. The trouble it took to cultivate peas was wasted. A teaspoon of sugar and a plop of butter in canned ones would do nicely, since the bits of purple-black pepper he would sprinkle over them bombed away any quiet flavor. Take late squash, for example.
Almost always, these nights, when Dovey Morgan thought about her husband it was in terms of what he had lost. His sense of taste one example of the many she counted. Contrary to his (and all of Ruby's) assessment, the more Steward acquired, the more visible his losses. The sale of his herd at 1958's top dollar accompanied his defeat in the statewide election for church Secretary because of his outspoken contempt for the schoolchildren sitting in in that drugstore in Oklahoma City. He had even written a hateful letter to the women who organized the students. His position had not surprised her, since ten years earlier he'd called Thurgood Marshall a "stir-up Negro" for handling the NAACP's segregation suit in Norman. In 1962 the natural gas drilled to ten thousand feet on the ranch filled his pockets but shrunk their land to a toy ranch, and he lost the trees that had made it so beautiful to behold. His hairline and his taste buds faltered over time. Small losses that culminated with the big one: in 1964, when he was forty, Fairy's curse came true: they learned neither could ever have children.
Now, almost ten years later, he had "cleaned up," as he put it, in a real estate deal in Muskogee, and Dovey didn't have to wonder what else he would lose now because he was already in a losing battle with Reverend Misner over words attached to the lip of the Oven. An argument fueled in part, Dovey thought, by what nobody talked about: young people in trouble or acting up behind every door. Arnette, home from college, wouldn't leave her bed. Harper Jury's boy, Menus, drunk every weekend since he got back from Vietnam. Roger's granddaughter, Billie Delia, disappeared into thin air. Jeff's wife, Sweetie, laughing, laughing at jokes no one made. K. D.'s mess with that girl living out at the Convent. Not to speak of the sass, the pout, the outright defiance of some of the others-the ones who wanted to name the Oven "such-and-such place" and who had decided that the original words on it were something that enraged Steward and Deek. Dovey had talked to her sister (and sister-in-law) about it; to Mable Fleetwood; to Anna Flood; to a couple of women in the Club. Opinions were varied, confusing, even incoherent, because feelings ran so high over the matter. Also because some young people, by snickering at Miss Esther's finger memory, had insulted entire generations preceding them. They had not suggested, politely, that Miss Esther may have been mistaken; they howled at the notion of remembering invisible words you couldn't even read by tracing letters you couldn't pronounce.