11/22/63: A Novel Read online

Mimi looked good—or at least no worse than she had on the day she’d come to my house and convinced me to teach full-time—but she was wearing makeup, which was unusual. It didn’t quite conceal the hollows under her eyes, probably caused by a combination of sleeplessness and pain, or the new lines at the corners of her mouth. But she was smiling, and why not? She had married her fella, she had thrown a party that was obviously a roaring success, and she had brought a pretty girl in a pretty summer dress to meet the school’s only eligible English teacher.

  “Hey, Mimi,” I said, starting up the mild slope toward her, weaving my way around the card tables (borrowed from the Amvets Hall) where people would later sit to eat barbecue and watch the sunset. “Congratulations. I guess now I’ll have to get used to calling you Miz Simmons.”

  She smiled her dry smile. “Please stick to Mimi, it’s what I’m used to. I have a new faculty member I want you to meet. This is—”

  Someone had neglected to push one of the folding chairs all the way back in, and the big blonde girl, already holding her hand out to me and composing her how-nice-to-meet-you smile, tripped over it and went spilling forward. The chair came with her, tipping up, and I saw the potential for a nasty accident if one of the legs speared her in the stomach.

  I dropped my cup of beer in the grass, took a giant step forward, and grabbed her as she fell. My left arm went around her waist. My right hand landed higher, grabbing something warm and round and slightly yielding. Between my hand and her breast, the cotton of her dress slipped over the smooth nylon or silk of whatever she was wearing beneath. It was an intimate introduction, but we had the banging angles of the chair for a chaperone, and although I staggered a little against the momentum of her hundred and fifty or so pounds, I kept my feet and she kept hers.

  I took my hand away from the part of her that is rarely grasped when strangers are introduced and said: “Hello, I’m—” Jake. I came within a hair of giving my twenty-first-century name, but caught it at the very last moment. “I’m George. How nice to make your acquaintance.”

  She was blushing to the roots of her hair. I probably was, too. But she had the good grace to laugh.

  “Nice to make yours. I think you just saved me from a very nasty accident.”

  Probably I had. Because that was it, you see? Sadie wasn’t clumsy, she was accident-prone. It was amusing until you realized what it really was: a kind of haunting. She was the girl, she told me later, who got the hem of her dress caught in a car door when she and her date arrived at the senior prom, and managed to tear her skirt right off as they headed for the gym. She was the woman around whom water fountains malfunctioned, giving her a faceful; the woman who was apt to set an entire book of matches on fire when she lit a cigarette, burning her fingers or singeing her hair; the woman whose bra strap broke during Parents’ Night or who discovered huge runs in her stockings before school assemblies at which she was scheduled to speak.

  She was careful to mind her head going through doors (as all sensible tall folks learn to be), but people had a tendency to open them incautiously in her face, just as she was approaching them. She had been stuck in elevators on three occasions, once for two hours, and the year before, in a Savannah department store, the recently installed escalator had gobbled one of her shoes. Of course I knew none of this then; all I knew on that July afternoon was that a good-looking woman with blonde hair and blue eyes had fallen into my arms.

  “I see you and Miss Dunhill are already getting along famously,” Mimi said. “I’ll leave you to get to know one another.”

  So, I thought, the change from Mrs. Clayton to Miss Dunhill had already been effected, legal formalities or not. Meanwhile, the chair was stuck into the sod by one leg. When Sadie tried to tug it free, it wouldn’t come at first. When it did, the back of the chair ran nimbly up her thigh, hiking her skirt and revealing one stocking-top all the way to the garter. Which was as pink as the roses on her dress. She gave a little cry of exasperation. Her blush darkened to an alarming shade of firebrick.

  I took the chair and set it firmly aside. “Miss Dunhill … Sadie … if I ever saw a woman who could use a cold beer, that woman is you. Come with me.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “I’m so sorry. My mother told me never to throw myself at men, but I’ve never learned.”

  As I led her toward the line of kegs, pointing out various faculty members along the way (and taking her arm to steer her around a volleyball player who looked like he was going to collide with her as he backpedaled to return a high lob), I felt sure of one thing: we could be colleagues and we could be friends, maybe good friends, but we’d never be any more than that, no matter what Mimi might hope for. In a comedy starring Rock Hudson and Doris Day, our introduction would have undoubtedly qualified as “meet cute,” but in real life, in front of an audience that was still grinning, it was just awkward and embarrassing. Yes, she was pretty. Yes, it was very nice to be walking with such a tall girl and still be taller. And sure, I had enjoyed the yielding firmness of that breast, cupped inside its thin double layer of proper cotton and sexy nylon. But unless you’re fifteen, an accidental grope at a lawn party does not qualify as love at first sight.

  I got the newly minted (or reminted) Miss Dunhill a beer, and we stood conversing near the makeshift bar for the requisite amount of time. We laughed when the dove Vince Knowles had rented for the occasion poked its head out of his top hat and pecked his finger. I pointed out more Denholm educators (many already leaving Sobriety City on the Alcohol Express). She said she would never get to know them all and I assured her she would. I asked her to call on me if she needed help with anything. The requisite number of minutes, the expected conversational gambits. Then she thanked me again for saving her from a nasty fall, and went to see if she could help gather the kids into the piñata-bashing mob they would soon become. I watched her go, not in love but a little in lust; I’ll admit I mused briefly on the stocking-top and the pink garter.

  My thoughts returned to her that night as I got ready for bed. She filled a large amount of space in a very nice way, and my eye hadn’t been the only one following the pleasant sway of her progress in the print dress, but really, that was it. What more could there be? I’d read a book called A Reliable Wife not too long before leaving on the world’s strangest trip, and as I climbed into bed, a line from the novel crossed my mind: “He had lost the habit of romance.”

  That’s me, I thought as I turned out the light. Totally out of the habit. And then, as the crickets sang me to sleep: But it wasn’t just the breast that was nice. It was the weight of her. The weight of her in my arms.

  As it turned out, I hadn’t lost the habit of romance at all.

  7

  August in Jodie was an oven, with temperatures at least in the nineties every day and often breaking a hundred. The air-conditioning in my rented house on Mesa Lane was good, but not good enough to withstand that sort of sustained assault. Sometimes—if there was a cooling shower—the nights were a little better, but not by much.

  I was at my desk on the morning of August 27, working away at The Murder Place in a pair of basketball shorts and nothing else, when the doorbell rang. I frowned. It was Sunday, I’d heard the sound of competing church bells not too long previous, and most of the people I knew attended one of the town’s four or five places of worship.

  I pulled on a tee-shirt, and went to the door. Coach Borman was standing there with Ellen Dockerty, the former head of the Home Ec Department and DCHS’s acting principal for the coming year; to no one’s surprise, Deke had tendered his resignation on the same day Mimi tendered hers. Coach was stuffed into a dark blue suit and a loud tie that looked like it was strangling his plug of a neck. Ellen was wearing a prim gray outfit relieved by a spray of lace at her throat. They looked solemn. My first thought, as persuasive as it was wild: They know. Somehow they know who I am and where I came from. They’re here to tell me.

  Coach Borman’s lips were trembling, and although Ellen didn’t sob, tears f
illed her eyes. Then I knew.

  “Is it Mimi?”

  Coach nodded. “Deke called me. I got Ellie—I usually take her to church—and we’re letting people know. The ones she liked the best first.”

  “I’m sorry to hear,” I said. “How’s Deke?”

  “He seems to be bearing up,” Ellen said, then glanced at Coach with some asperity. “According to him, at least.”

  “Yeah, he’s okay,” Coach said. “Broken up, accourse.”

  “Sure he is,” I said.

  “He’s going to have her cremated.” Ellen’s lips thinned in disapproval. “Said it was what she wanted.”

  I thought about it. “We should have some sort of special assembly once school’s back in. Can we do that? People can speak. Maybe we could put together a slide show? People must have lots of pictures of her.”

  “That’s a wonderful idea,” Ellen said. “Could you organize it, George?”

  “I’d be happy to try.”

  “Get Miss Dunhill to help you.” And before the suspicion of more matchmaking could even begin to cross my mind, she added: “I think it will help the boys and girls who loved Meems to know her hand-picked replacement helped plan the memorial assembly. It will help Sadie, too.”

  Of course it would. As a newcomer, she could use a little banked goodwill to start the year with.

  “Okay, I’ll talk to her. Thank you both. Are you going to be okay?”

  “Sure,” Coach said stoutly, but his lips were still trembling. I liked him for that. They went slowly down to his car, which was parked at the curb. Coach had his hand on Ellen’s elbow. I liked him for that, too.

  I closed the door, sat down on the bench in the little dab of front hall, and thought about Mimi saying she would be bereft if I didn’t take over the junior-senior play. And if I didn’t sign on to teach full-time for at least a year. Also if I didn’t come to her wedding party. Mimi, who thought Catcher in the Rye belonged in the school library, and who wasn’t averse to a nice boink on Saturday night. She was one of those faculty members the kids remember long after graduation, and sometimes come back to visit when they are no longer kids. The kind who sometimes shows up in a troubled student’s life at a critical moment and makes a critical difference.

  Who can find a virtuous woman? the proverb asks. For her price is above rubies. She seeketh wool and flax and worketh willingly with her hands. She is like the merchants’ ships, that bringeth food from afar.

  There are more clothes than the ones you put on your body, every teacher knows that, and food isn’t just what you put in your mouth. Miz Mimi had fed and clothed many. Including me. I sat there on a bench I’d bought at a Fort Worth flea market with my head lowered and my face in my hands. I thought about her, and I was very sad, but my eyes remained dry.

  I have never been what you’d call a crying man.

  8

  Sadie immediately agreed to help me put together a memorial assembly. We worked on it for the last two weeks of that hot August, driving around town to line up speakers. I tapped Mike Coslaw to read Proverbs 31, which describes the virtuous woman, and Al Stevens volunteered to tell the story—which I had never heard from Mimi herself—about how she had named the Prongburger, his spécialité de la maison. We also collected over two hundred photographs. My favorite showed Mimi and Deke doing the twist at a school dance. She looked like she was having fun; he looked like a man with a fair-sized stick up his ass. We culled the photos in the school library, where the nameplate on the desk now read MISS DUNHILL instead of MIZ MIMI.

  During that time Sadie and I never kissed, never held hands, never even looked into each other’s eyes for longer than a passing glance. She didn’t talk about her busted marriage or her reasons for coming to Texas from Georgia. I didn’t talk about my novel or tell her about my largely made-up past. We talked about books. We talked about Kennedy, whose foreign policy she considered jingoistic. We discussed the nascent civil rights movement. I told her about the board across the creek at the bottom of the path behind the Humble Oil station in North Carolina. She said she’d seen similar toilet facilities for colored people in Georgia, but believed their days were numbered. She thought school integration would come, but probably not until the mid-seventies. I told her I thought it would be sooner, driven by the new president and his attorney-general kid brother.

  She snorted. “You have more respect for that grinning Irishman than I do. Tell me, does he ever get his hair cut?”

  We didn’t become lovers, but we became friends. Sometimes she tripped over things (including her own feet, which were large), and on two occasions I steadied her, but there were no catches as memorable as the first one. Sometimes she’d declare she just had to have a cigarette, and I’d accompany her out to the student smoking area behind the metal shop.

  “I’ll be sorry not to be able to come out here and sprawl on the bench in my old blue jeans,” she said one day. This was less than a week before school was scheduled to start. “There’s always such a fug in teachers’ rooms.”

  “Someday that’ll all change. Smoking will be banned on school grounds. For teachers as well as students.”

  She smiled. It was a good one, because her lips were rich and full. And the jeans, I must say, looked good on her. She had long, long legs. Not to mention just enough junk in her trunk. “A cigarette-free society … Negro children and white children studying side by side in perfect harmony … no wonder you’re writing a novel, you’ve got one hell of an imagination. What else do you see in your crystal ball, George? Rockets to the moon?”

  “Sure, but it’ll probably take a little longer than integration. Who told you I was writing a novel?”

  “Miz Mimi,” she said, and butted her cigarette in one of the half a dozen sand-urn ashtrays. “She said it was good. And speaking of Miz Mimi, I suppose we ought to get back to work. I think we’re almost there with the photographs, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And are you sure playing that West Side Story song over the slide show isn’t going to be too corny?”

  I thought “Somewhere” was cornier than Iowa and Nebraska put together, but according to Ellen Dockerty it had been Mimi’s favorite song.

  I told Sadie this, and she laughed doubtfully. “I didn’t know her all that well, but it sure doesn’t seem like her. Maybe it’s Ellie’s favorite song.”

  “Now that I think about it, that seems all too likely. Listen, Sadie, do you want to go to the football game with me on Friday? Kind of show the kids that you’re here before school starts on Monday?”

  “I’d love to.” Then she paused, looking a little uncomfortable. “As long as you don’t, you know, get any ideas. I’m not ready to date just yet. Maybe not for a long time.”

  “Neither am I.” She was probably thinking about her ex, but I was thinking about Lee Oswald. Soon he’d have his American passport back. Then it would only be a matter of wangling a Soviet exit visa for his wife. “But friends sometimes go to the game together.”

  “That’s right, they do. And I like going places with you, George.”

  “Because I’m taller.”

  She punched my arm playfully—a big-sister kind of punch. “That’s right, podna. You’re the kind of man I can look up to.”

  9

  At the game, practically everybody looked up to us, and with faint awe—as though we were representatives of a slightly different race of humans. I thought it was kind of nice, and for once Sadie didn’t have to slouch to fit in. She wore a Lion Pride sweater and her faded jeans. With her blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail, she looked like a high school senior herself. A tall one, probably the center on the girls’ basketball team.

  We sat in Faculty Row and cheered as Jim LaDue riddled the Arnette Bears’ defense with half a dozen short passes and then a sixty-yard bomb that brought the crowd to its feet. At halftime the score was Denholm 31, Arnette 6. As the players ran off the field and the Denholm band marched onto it with their tubas and trombones
wagging, I asked Sadie if she wanted a hotdog and a Coke.

  “You bet I do, but right now the line’ll be all the way out to the parking lot. Wait until there’s a time-out in the third quarter or something. We have to roar like lions and do the Jim Cheer.”

  “I think you can manage those things on your own.”

  She smiled at me and gripped my arm. “No, I need you to help me. I’m new here, remember?”

  At her touch, I felt a warm little shiver I did not associate with friendship. And why not? Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes were sparkling; under the lights and the greeny-blue sky of a deepening Texas dusk, she was way beyond pretty. Things between us might have progressed faster than they did, except for what happened during that halftime.

  The band marched around the way high school bands do, in step but not completely in tune, blaring a medley you couldn’t quite figure out. When they finished, the cheerleaders trotted to the fifty-yard line, dropped their pompoms in front of their feet, and put their hands on their hips. “Give us an L!”

  We gave them what they required, and when further importuned, we obliged with an I, an O, an N, and an S.

  “What’s that spell?”

  “LIONS!” Everybody on the home bleachers up and clapping.

  “Who’s gonna win?”

  “LIONS!” Given the halftime score, there wasn’t much doubt about it.

  “Then let us hear you roar!”

  We roared in the traditional manner, turning first to the left and then to the right. Sadie gave it her all, cupping her hands around her mouth, her ponytail flying from one shoulder to the other.

  What came next was the Jim Cheer. In the previous three years—yes, our Mr. LaDue had started at QB even as a freshman—this had been pretty simple. The cheerleaders would yell something like, “Let us hear your Lion Pride! Name the man who leads our side!” And the hometown crowd would bellow “JIM! JIM! JIM!” After that the cheerleaders would do a few more cartwheels and then run off the field so the other team’s band could march out and tootle a tune or two. But this year, possibly in honor of Jim’s valedictory season, the chant had changed.