I stood by the glass case filled with transistor radios and waited while he disappeared into the back room. He returned holding a lamp in each hand. The shades were grimy, as if they had been adjusted by a great many dirty fingers. The base of one was chipped so it stood crooked on the counter: the Leaning Lamp of Pisa. They were perfect, and I told him so. He grinned and put two of the boxed tape recorders next to the lamps. Also a drawstring bag containing several lengths of wire so thin it was almost invisible.
“Want a little tutorial?”
“I think I’ve got it,” I said, and put five twenties down on the counter. I was a little touched when he tried to push one back.
“One-eighty was the price we agreed on.”
“The other twenty is for you to forget I was ever here.”
He considered this for a moment, then put a thumb on the stray twenty and pulled it into the group with its little green friends. “I already did that. Why don’t I consider this a tip?”
As he put the stuff into a brown paper bag, I was struck by simple curiosity and asked him a question.
“Kennedy? I didn’t vote for him, but as long as he doesn’t go taking his orders from the Pope, I think he’ll be okay. The country needs somebody younger. It’s a new age, y’know?”
“If he were to come to Dallas, do you think he’d be all right?”
“Probably. Can’t say for sure, though. On the whole, if I were him, I’d stay north of the Mason-Dixon line.”
I grinned. “Where all is calm, all is bright?”
Silent Mike (Holy Mike) said, “Don’t start.”
There was a rack of pigeonholes for mail and school announcements in the first-floor teachers’ room. On Tuesday morning, during my free period, I found a small sealed envelope in mine. Dear George- If you still want to take me to dinner tonight, it will have to be five-ish, because I’ll have early mornings all this week and next, getting ready for the Fall Book Sale. Perhaps we could come back to my place for dessert. I have poundcake, if you’d like a slice. Sadie
“What are you laughing about, Amberson?” Danny Laverty asked. He was correcting themes with a hollow-eyed intensity that suggested hangover. “Tell me, I could use a giggle.”
“Nah,” I said. “Private joke. You wouldn’t get it.”
But we got it, poundcake became our name for it, and we ate plenty that fall.
We were discreet, but of course there were people who knew what was going on. There was probably some gossip, but no scandal. Smalltown folks are rarely mean folks. They knew Sadie’s situation, at least in a general way, and understood we could make no public commitment, at least for awhile. She didn’t come to my house; that would have caused the wrong kind of talk. I never stayed beyond ten o’clock at hers; that also would have caused the wrong kind of talk. There was no way I could have put my Sunliner in her garage and stayed the night, because her Volkswagen Beetle, small as it was, filled it almost wall-to-wall. I wouldn’t have done so in any case, because someone would have known. In small towns, they always do.
I visited her after school. I dropped by for the meal she called supper. Sometimes we went to Al’s Diner and ate Prongburgers or catfish fillets; sometimes we went to The Saddle; twice I took her to the Saturday-night dances at the local Grange. We saw movies at the Gem in town or at the Mesa in Round Hill or the Starlite Drive-In in Kileen (which the kids called the submarine races). At a nice restaurant like The Saddle, she might have a glass of wine before dinner and I might have a beer with, but we were careful not to be seen at any of the local taverns and certainly not at the Red Rooster, Jodie’s one and only jukejoint, a place our students talked about with longing and awe. It was 1961 and segregation might finally be softening in the middle-Negroes had won the right to sit at the Woolworth’s lunchcounters in Dallas, Fort Worth, and Houston-but schoolteachers didn’t drink in the Red Rooster. Not if they wanted to keep their jobs. Never-never-never.
When we made love in Sadie’s bedroom, she always kept a pair of slacks, a sweater, and a pair of moccasins on her side of the bed. She called it her emergency outfit. The one time the doorbell bonged while we were naked (a state she had taken to calling in flagrante delicious ), she got into those threads in ten seconds flat. She came back, giggling and waving a copy of The Watchtower. “Jehovah’s Witnesses. I told them I was saved and they went away.”
Once, as we ate ham-steaks and okra in her kitchen afterward, she said our courtship reminded her of that movie with Audrey Hepburn and Gary Cooper- Love in the Afternoon. “Sometimes I wonder if it would be better at night.” She said this a little wistfully. “When regular people do it.”
“You’ll get a chance to find out,” I said. “Hang in there, baby.”
She smiled and kissed the corner of my mouth. “You turn some cool phrases, George.”
“Oh yes,” I said, “I’m very original.”
She pushed her plate aside. “I’m ready for dessert. How about you?”
