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.
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
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
“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
“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,
“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
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
“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.”
