Suicide's Girlfriend (4 page)

The thick tires of Mr. and Mrs. Scotty's auto rolled past his bedroom window, and for one moment his room became dark, but then the light returned.

Suppose Peggy Dixon called and said that Joe did not wish to go to the barbecue today, but that she and Oyekan might go anyway?

Oyekan wanted to see Joe, of course, but he had such news today and lately, Joe appeared most often deep in thought, and, then, to draw him forth, Peggy Dixon would begin telling noisy tales; after Oyekan's Honors' presentation, it had been the story of a drunken cousin, drowned in an attempt to retrieve a bottle of whiskey from a flooded building called a “fallout shelter.”

Ho, ho, ho, this made Joe and Peggy laugh and laugh.

Oyekan was sorry, but he did not see the humor.

That same night, at Peggy's apartment, he and Peggy and Joe had watched an old television program in which a man received a wound and discovered himself to be a robot. As if they saw themselves in the robot man who did not know himself to be a robot, Peggy and Joe cried. They cried! They laughed! Sometimes Oyekan did not understand Peggy and Joe at all. Oyekan was no robot! His blood ran hot in him, thank you very much! Joe was a good friend, a good man, but if Oyekan were Joe, he would not act so silly before Peggy Dixon. He would not rush off to Micronesia, leaving her to be sought after by other males, no way!

Maybe Joe did not like Peggy so well after all. In Joe's place, Oyekan would write Peggy poems and take her interesting places—perhaps on a motorcycle like Lee Hillis's, certainly not in a rusty Datsun F10 with gravel and squashed fast food containers in the back. He would show good posture and never fall down on the floor laughing during the
Saturday Night Live
television show, an act Oyekan witnessed after Joe and Peggy believed him gone, after the robot television show.

He had been wrong to watch. His dear friends. They had not even wanted him to leave. All the way to the door, Peggy teased, “Won't you stay on just a bit, Oyekan, now we're having such fun?” Peggy Dixon's eyes were flecked with green. She spoke with the accent of the American South, her voice soft and deep as pillows. Down the dark little hall she called to Joe, “Joseph, come on out here and instill a little guilt in this friend of yours, so he won't go breaking up our party.” Peggy had held in her fingers the cloth of Oyekan's jacket so that his hand might not fit through the sleeve. The two of them had stood there, together, watching for Joe to appear at the end of the hall, but Joe had never come and, eventually, Peggy let go of the sleeve. She looked beyond Oyekan, out the apartment door, her gay voice suddenly sad. “You didn't like me telling that story about Roy drowning in the fallout shelter, did you?”

“You are a good storyteller, Peggy,” Oyekan said, “but I think your stories have the problem that they lie. They pretend to ask only for laughter. This is not right. A story may lie and lie, but all its lies must tell the truth in the end.”

“Whoa!” Joe stood at the end of the hall, his feet clad only in athletic stockings. “It was so quiet out here I figured you'd gone, Oy!”

“I'm trying to get him to stay, Joe,” said Peggy. She turned back to Oyekan, smiling. “Come on, now, we'll make you a fine big bowl of popcorn. Popcorn with butter on it!”

But Oyekan left. That he might stand in the open, second-story stairwell of the apartment building across the way and, leaning over the balustrade in a manner that caused passersby to stare, observe whether or not Peggy and Joe behaved differently in his absence.

They watched television, made popcorn.

Then a neighbor had threatened to call police officers if Oyekan did not move along, and so he had missed whatever came next.

Where were they now, Peggy and Joe? Oyekan looked at his digital watch: 1:23
P
.
M
. The clock radio beside his bed read 1:31. They might be late, or not yet due.

The previous fall, when Joe and Peggy came to Mr. and Mrs. Scotty's for dinner—the night Oyekan met the younger couple—why, no sooner had he and Mrs. Scotty stepped into the dining room to insert the clever extra piece in Mrs. Scotty's shiny table than Joe and Peggy had begun to kiss! And not in a polite way, but with hands moving, mouths open!

Would they be doing this now?

To still himself, Oyekan noted the previous day's high and low temperatures in his journal. The coldest day of the year since Oyekan's arrival had been January twenty-third. He used to imagine reading from the journal to his family. Everyone would laugh at such cold, his stories of foolish American university girls, the loss of his new penny loafer shoe in the first snow. Back then, the journal drew him on, it extracted the gifts he wanted to share. Now, he felt the others would understand nothing of his recent entries; and the early entries no
longer amused him, showed only what a bumpkin he had been.

The ringing of telephones still made Oyekan jump. Even when one knew one was to receive a call, even if one waited with the hand holding the phone, the ringing happened behind one's back, nasty as Oyekan's auntie's monkey throwing its messes. Oyekan put his fingers in his ears as he walked into the recreation room. He had lived twenty-two years without a telephone and never felt the lack. This would be a rule in his U.S. home: No telephone!

“Are you ready?”

“Peggy,” said Oyekan. The high school graduation photo of Lee Hillis sat on the stereo. It seemed that daring, golden boy offered advice. Oyekan could say, “I have a surprise for you and Joe!” But, in fact, he said only, “I am thinking perhaps I will study this afternoon, Peggy.”

“Oh, Oy!” Peggy cried. “Mr. and Mrs. Hillis helped plan this! Besides, I personally know the picnic features ham, potato salad
slathered
with mayonnaise, and watermelon from Texas! Chocolate brownies with chocolate icing! Food our kidnapped ancestors ate to ease their aching hearts!”

Kidnapped ancestors. As if both descended from slaves.

Joe Hart took the phone from Peggy. “As you can see, Oy, she's wired,” he said.

“Wired.” Which meant, Oyekan knew, excited.

“My, my!” Peggy called as he walked briskly around the car and slid into the backseat. Embarrassed, tantalized by the possibility that she truly did believe his haircut handsome, he said, sternly, “You do not wear your seat belt. Either of you.”

Peggy laughed. Her lips bore the hot red color of the flowers planted by Mrs. Scotty that very morning.
Geraniums
. Her hair was sleek today, bound into a tiny, most elegant knot at the base of the neck; and, to his surprise, she wore a long skirt similar to that worn by
women of his own region. She pulled at the seat belt. “I do believe I'm getting fat as a hippo!” she cried.

“No, no,” Oyekan began; but there were Joe's eyes in the rearview mirror, watching, and they flickered away as if Joe did not mean for Oyekan to see.

Too late! Oh, terrible, terrible. Joe now knew what lay so deep in Oyekan's heart, and so did Oyekan.

Heart jumping, mouth dry, Oyekan hurried on: “Now, I first became a stick in the U.S. You may see this in photos from the Thanksgiving Day. My skin became gray like ash, my clothes no longer fitted!” He forced himself to look, once again, into the mirror, and to grin. “Now, however, I am a slick dog, man! I eat Mr. Scotty's chocolate chocolate chip ice cream each dinner. My belt is size thirty-four inches. This morning, Mrs. Scotty tells me I cannot wear my old shirts anymore. I am not decent!”

Peggy Dixon smiled at Oyekan over her shoulder. “This one boyfriend to my mama, now he
loved
ice cream. That was Floyd Barstow. Y'all remember Floyd, the one she was carousing with the time she met up with Daddy and
his
honey on that painfully narrow bridge—”

Joe interrupted with a laugh, “And Floyd's car and your dad's car got wedged together—”

Peggy Dixon clapped her hand over her mouth.

“Go on,” said Joe.

She shook her head. “No. I don't want to tell that. Oy, you tell us something sane and good. Tell us . . . what you hear from home. Tell us news of your Biki.”

Oyekan smiled, but pretended to take the words of Peggy Dixon as outcry, in no way a genuine request. He was sick at heart, and this—American politeness! They thought betrothal crazy, but that their politeness required they act as if Biki were his heart's desire, that he had chosen her for the foolish reasons they chose each other! In this way, they were bad as children—worse! Like monkeys trained to drink tea from a cup.

Joe slowed the car. “We want ten nineteen. Ten twenty-seven. And . . . this must be it.”

Oyekan peered up a long driveway to a large and angular home. Tending the barbecue grills on the wooden porches that wrapped the house were Mrs. Scotty, and Professor McCall, too, her lower half encased in a pair of vast and surprising pink pants.

The car came to a crackling stop on the gravel drive. Miserable, ashamed—what right did he have to be angry with Joe?—Oyekan tried to make a little laughter for his friends: “I am the apple of Professor McCall's eye.”

Peggy Dixon smiled as she bent down for the big covered bowl at her feet. “Is Oyekan practicing his ironing?” she asked. An old joke. All three laughed as they climbed from the car. “Irony is commonplace in modern literature,” the teacher of American novels had told Oyekan's class; Oyekan had misheard.

Peggy Dixon set her bowl on the roof of the car. Sunshine shot through its translucent contents. That would be her gelatin dessert filled with pears and the delicious fluffy bits called marshmallows.

“I'm tired of irony,” Peggy Dixon drawled. “I do believe modern literature could use more ironing.”

“Hey.” Joe laid his hand on Oyekan's arm. Forgiveness? Oyekan glanced toward Peggy Dixon, busy rolling up her window.

“Joe,” Oyekan began in a quiet rush, “if you believe I have overstepped—”

“This is Lee's shirt, isn't it?”

Oyekan looked down in confusion at the shirt front. “Yes. You see, Joe, Mrs. Scotty . . .”

Joe shrugged. “Forget it, man. I just wondered.” He winked. “It looks good on you.”

“So be it, Joe,” said Oyekan, though he did not believe the wink of his friend sincere. “So be it. Do you wish me to carry your dish, Peggy?”

Joe laughed, his head turned toward Peggy Dixon, now busy with the hiding of her purse beneath the front seat. “Peggy's a big girl, Oy,”
he said. “Hell, she
used
to pick me up and carry me into the bedroom whenever the urge hit her.”

“Joe!” Peggy rose from the car with a movement too quick, and bumped her head on the roof; but Joe did not stop to offer apologies. Joe crossed the lawn, through girls in blue jeans, and men in turbans, dashikis, Muslim women in their headdresses of gray and black wool. Under high pine trees, a group of Indian students played volleyball. “Hey!” called a plump girl in a purple sari as Joe passed through their game, but play continued uninterrupted, a score was made.

“Oh,” Peggy moaned. Oyekan did not wish to look at her. The image of Joe in her arms—his heart shook his chest, it was swollen, inflamed. He did not know whether he wished to weep on the shoulder of Joe or smash his fists into his friend's face.

“Look at this,” he said angrily and indicated with a jerk of his head a girl of Mexico he had met on another such occasion. Big yellow streaks in her dark hair that made her look like a tiger. A chubby girl who, it seemed to him now, always had behaved as if she thought herself better than the other internationals because her country sat next to the U.S. Today she wore a leopard print bikini and stood beside the diving board, shivering, jiggling her knees and shoulders. “Such a fool, to come in such clothes” he said.

Peggy shook her head, then whispered, “She probably got her sights set on some fellow at this picnic, Oy, and she's putting all her merchandise on the counter. Who's she got to love her here, poor thing, all her folks back home?” Peggy sighed. “Now where do you suppose a body's to put a dish? I do hate the first minutes at big parties. Someday, somebody—I
know
it—is going to mistake me for help and send me out to wash up glasses!”

Oyekan softened at this admission. She was so pretty, so kind, and here was her forehead all wrinkled with worry. “Not at this party, Peggy, though here we maybe are all potential dishwasher material!” He laughed. “Do you know, such a thing did happen at Mr. and Mrs. Scotty's golfing club? In the coat room, a member asks if I might bring his car!”

“No!”

He held up a finger, tapped the air. “I only report this to show it happened, and still I live.” He smiled. “Undiminished, yes?”

“Undiminished,” said Peggy. “You . . .” She dragged her long fingernails along the back of one of her hands. Faint trails of roughed skin remained when she finished, and she looked up from them as if surprised, and embarrassed, too. “You . . . do you think she's pretty, Oy, the Mexican girl?” she asked, and then, before he could answer, “Do I ever remind you of anybody from home?”