Arlene Sanders lives and writes in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. She has
received awards in many writing competitions, including the Lorian Hemingway Short Fiction Competition and
the E. M. Koeppel Short Fiction Awards. She has stories published or forthcoming in the Edgar Literary Magazine,
Mindprints and the Sound and Literary Art Book .
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“I’m Cassie Wilkes, and I have always
aired the house and powdered the bed sheets. My house is immaculate; everybody says that.
Lily Warner was here this morning for coffee. Lily smokes. I have never allowed
smoking in my house, and Lily respects that. Lily is my best friend and one of the few people who know I have
never done it with a man.
I didn’t stay long with Lily this morning, because I had to be at Deena’s at half
past nine to get my hair frosted. My hair is going grey, and I won’t have it. The frosting will blend in nicely;
no one will know. Still, I was nervous about getting my hair frosted. The coffee was hot.
“It’s entirely too late,” Lily had the gall to say to me. She was hung over,
and I still had a minute or two.
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“You’re thirty-six years old. Who cares what your hair looks like?”
“What if I meet a man?” I asked.
Lily gets mean and hateful when she drinks. “It’s too late for you to meet a man,”
she said. “And even if you did, you wouldn’t know what to do with him.”
Alcohol, I thought, turns people into monsters.
“Did you hear about Iris Orndorff?” Lily said.
“ No,” I said, though I might have said it sharply
“She’s laid up with a Mexican in Freetown.”
“Dear God.”
“Iris has always been loose with it.”
“Loose with what?”
“ Cassie.”
“Lily, I’ve got to run. If I’m late, Deena might not do me at all.”
* * *
“Your hair!” Lily said. “What in God’s name have you done to it?”
“Shut up,” I said. Why do I put up with her? I thought.
“What’s in the bag?” she asked.
“A new dress, Lillian.”
She reached right in and pulled out the dress.
“Oh, my God! It’s alive!”
“Give me the goddam dress.” I snatched it and fished a padded hanger from
my bedroom closet.
“Cassie, you can’t be serious. That looks like something Iris Orndorff would wear.”
“She got herself a man, didn’t she?”
I went into my bedroom and slipped on the dress. It’s royal blue--perfect with my
newly-frosted strawberry-blond curls—and dusted all over with tiny spectacles of something that shimmers. In this
dress, I look like a million dollars.
“You look like a whore,” Lily said.
“You’re just pea green,” I snapped.
“Cassie Wilkes, do you have a particular man in mind?”
* * *
I bag part time at Winn Dixie, and he had been coming through my line for several weeks
now with peculiar things for a man like him. He was a married man--well, he wore a ring. Mid-forties, I’d say,
| "Lily Warner was here this morning for coffee. Lily smokes. I have
never allowed smoking in my house, and Lily respects that. Lily is my best friend and one of the few people who
know I have never done it with a man." |
and his hair was grey and curly. At six-two, at least, he towered over me. All muscle, I imagined. He usually wore
heavy leather boots and faded camouflage shirts. I could tell from his ruddy complexion and kind eyes that he drank.
Judging from his cart, it seemed his wife was ill. Or maybe she had left him. Redneck men don’t buy two wooden spoons,
or tiny sewing kits with different coloured spools of thread and miniature scissors. I reached for the sewing kit
just when he did--he meant to help me with the bagging--and when his hand brushed against mine, my knees turned to
leaf lard. That’s when I knew, Lord willin’ and the river don’t run dry, that the first man for me would be him.
“You got enough for two trips,” I said to him. “I’ll carry these out for you.” I picked
up four bags and headed for the door, and I could feel Clarissa’s eyes--Clarissa was the cashier in my line that
afternoon--burning holes in the shoulders of my white cotton blouse. But Clarissa, bless her heart, is a quick
study, and she played along despite the truth that I had never carried bags for a customer, and this guy smiled
down at me, and I could see by the twinkle in his eyes that he had caught on, too.
Leaf lard is the best kind. It’s rendered from the fat that lines a hog’s
stomach, and it makes the flakiest biscuits and pie crust. I’m sorry. I don’t know why I do this--get off
the track. I’m telling you the most important thing that ever happened to me, and here we are, knee-deep
in pie crust.
Anyway, in the parking lot, I said, “In the back?” I set the bags in the
back of his rusty red pickup, and then I just stood there and willed myself to look up at him, straight
into his eyes, praying to God for help with how to do this, because God knew I wanted this man and how
much I needed help right then.
“Have a safe trip back home,” I said, but I didn’t move.
He didn’t move either. “Thank you,” he said.
He broke eye contact first.
“Clouding up, looks like,” he said, and when he raised his eyes to the
horizon, I saw that they were the silver-blue of harebells that grow in my rock garden.
“Are they calling for rain?” I asked.
“I ain’t seen you here before,” he said.
“You’ve seen me. I just got my hair done different. I bag on Tuesdays and Fridays.”
He glanced at my hair, and I could feel my face flush into its warmest pink.
“Maybe I’ll see you next Friday,” he said.
“I’m Cassie.”
“John Mills,” he said.
“Mr. Mills,” I nodded.
“John.”
I smiled politely, turned, and headed back toward the store.
“Cassie. . . .”
You know how your heart stops? That ever happen to you? I turned around.
“I live over to Bentonville,” he said.
“Bentonville,” I said.
“Other side of Limeton.”
“Limeton.” What, in God’s name, do women say to men?
“I bought a new dress,” I said. And then my face must have turned barn red.
He grinned. “You got some place to wear it?” he asked.
“No.”
* * *
How we got from Winn Dixie that afternoon to Sully’s on Route 66 that night,
I’m not real clear about. I drank ginger ale, and he was on his third Budweiser. I didn’t know how to do
what I was doing, and all I could think of was just to tell him I didn’t know, but of course I couldn’t
do that.
But after three Buds, he was talking more easily, and at some point around
then he said, “She’s gonna die.”
“What?”
“My wife. Been sick a long time now.”
“John, I’m sorry.”
“You married, too?” he asked.
“No.”
“Ever been?”
“No.”
“Why not? Pretty woman like you. You look like a million dollars in that
new dress, too.”
If Lily could hear this, I thought.
“I don’t know . . . about men,” I said.
He knew instantly. I could see it in his eyes. And he was surprised, and I
could see that, too.
“You never been with a man? Is that what you’re saying?”
I lowered my eyes.
| "“Okay,” I said, and he unzipped the blue dress, and I let
it fall to the floor. Then I took his hand and led him to my room. He lay down on my bed. Uncertain about
just about everything, I sat next to him, hoping he couldn’t see me tremble." |
“Damn, Cassie, how old are you?”
“Thirty-six.”
He reached both his hands across the table to me and turned them, palms up.
Finally, I put my hands in his.
* * *
We drove to my cabin in Etlan, and after we walked inside, he said,
“We’ll just take it easy-like.”
“Okay,” I said, and he unzipped the blue dress, and I let it fall to the floor.
Then I took his hand and led him to my room. He lay down on my bed. Uncertain about just about everything,
I sat next to him, hoping he couldn’t see me tremble.
“You can put your hand on my chest, if you want to,” he said, and I did.
“That feels good, Cassie,” he said, and he wrapped his arms around me and pulled me close to him, but
it was me who kissed first. He was slow and gentle with me, using his hands and his lips and his tongue.
In this way, he all but brought me to the point of climax, so when he eased himself inside me, the pain
swirled into pleasure I almost couldn’t bear.
In the morning, he was still there, but sleeping. I pulled the covers
up around him and tiptoed out of the bedroom, and I have to tell you this: coming out of that bedroom
was like Christmas mornings when my brothers and sisters and I were little kids. We’d tiptoe into the
living room, and the Christmas tree would be all sparkly, lights twinkling, and presents would be
wrapped in shiny silver paper with red ribbons.
Of course, in the living room this morning, beer cans were strewn
across the coffee table, and the blue dress lay in a heap on the floor. I picked it up and carried it
to the window and watched the morning sun make it shimmer all over again. My body was filled with a kind of
quiet peace that I had never known before.
On my back porch, I watched the sun festoon blood-red beams on green pines.
Harebells gleamed silvery-blue like his eyes. Fresh, sharp air filled my lungs, dew spangled all, and
mourning doves skirled among branches and nut-brown cones.
“ There’s a man in my house,” I whispered to the sun. “And the musky
smell of sex. Beer cans, tobacco. And the toilet seat is up.”
I picked up a cigarette butt and inhaled its scent, all quiet in my heart.
Then I swept a slick of grey ashes across the pulse point on my wrist and left it there.
* * *
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