Toni Morrison - Paradise

Early Times didn't help. The tears wet her chin, crept down her neck anyway. What it did eventually was knock her out.

Mavis woke felt-mouthed, ugly, unfocused, and knew she was ravenous because the sun, watermelon red, looked edible. The screaming blue horizon that surrounded her was minus invitation or reproach and supported by a billion miles of not one thing. There was no choice. She relieved herself as Dusty had taught her, got back in the car to wait for another one to pass by. Bennie was smart; she never left anywhere without a dripping box of food. Mavis felt her stupidity close in on her head like a dry sack. A grown woman who could not cross the country. Could not make a plan that accommodated more than twenty minutes. Had to be taught how to dry herself in the weeds. Too rattle-minded to open a car's window so babies could breathe. She did not know now why she had run from the gold links coming toward her. Frank was right. From the very beginning he had been absolutely right about her: she was the dumbest bitch on the planet.

During the wait, in which no car or truck or bus approached, she dozed, woke to awful thoughts, dozed again. Suddenly she sat up, wide awake, and decided not to starve. Would the road girls just sit there? Would Dusty? Bennie? Mavis looked closely at the surroundings. The billion miles of not one thing had trees in the distance. Was this grass or a crop of some kind? Every road went somewhere, didn't it? Mavis collected her purse, looked for her raincoat and discovered it was gone. "Christ!" she shouted and slammed the door. The rest of the morning she stayed on the same road. When the sun was highest, she turned into a narrower one because it offered shade. Still tarmac, but not enough room for two automobiles to pass without using the shoulder. When the road ran out of trees, she saw ahead to the left a house. It looked small but close and it took a while for her to discover it was neither. She had to negotiate acres of corn to arrive. Either the house was backwards or it had no driveway. As she drew closer she saw it was stone-sandstone, maybe, but dark with age.

At first there seemed to be no windows, but then she made out the beginning of a porch and saw the reflection of huge windows on the ground floor. Circling to the right, she glimpsed a driveway leading not to the front door but around to the side. Mavis turned left. The grass near the porch was tended. Claws gripped the finials on either side of the stone steps. Mavis climbed the stairs and knocked on the door. No answer. She walked around to the driveway side and saw a woman sitting in a red wooden chair at the edge of a vegetable garden. "Excuse me," Mavis called, her hands funneling around her mouth.

The woman faced her, but Mavis couldn't tell where she was looking.

She was wearing sunglasses.

"Excuse me." Mavis moved closer. No need to shout now. "I broke down a ways back. Can anybody help? Is there someplace I can call?" The woman stood up, gathering the hem of her apron in both hands, and came forward. She wore a yellow cotton dress with tiny white flowers and fancy buttons under an apron of what looked like sailcloth. Her low-heeled shoes were unlaced. On her head a widebrimmed straw hat. The sun was beating hard; a hot wind kicked up, turning back the brim of her hat.

"No telephone out here," she said. "Come inside." Mavis followed her into the kitchen where the woman dumped pecans from her apron into a box by the stove and removed her hat. Two Hiawatha braids trailed down her shoulders. She slid out of her shoes, propped open the door with a brick and took off her sunglasses. The kitchen was big, full of fragrances and a woman's solitary mess.

Her back turned to Mavis, she asked her, "You a drinking woman?"

Mavis didn't know if a drink was being offered or solicited.

"No, I'm not."

"Lies not allowed in this place. In this place every true thing is okay."

Startled, Mavis breathed into her palm. "Oh. I drank some of my husband's liquor a while back, but I'm not what you'd call a drinking woman. I was just, well, wrung out. Driving so long and then running out of gas."

The woman busied herself lighting the stove. Her braids fell forward.

"I forgot to ask your name. Mine's Mavis Albright."

"People call me Connie."

"I'd appreciate some coffee, Connie, if you got any."

Connie nodded without turning around.

"You work here?"

"I work here." Connie lifted her braids from her chest and dropped them behind her shoulders.

"Is any of the family here? Seem like I knocked for the longest time."

"No family. Just her upstairs. She couldn't answer the door if she wanted to and she don't want to."

"I'm headed out by California. You think you can help me get some gas back to my car? Show me the way out of here?" The woman sighed at the stove but didn't reply.

"Connie?"

"I'm thinking."

Mavis looked around the kitchen that seemed to her as large as her junior high school cafeteria and that also had swinging wooden doors. She imagined rooms full of rooms beyond those doors. "You all ain't scared out here by yourselves? Don't seem like there's nothing for miles outside."

Connie laughed. "Scary things not always outside. Most scary things is inside." She turned from the stove with a bowl and placed it before Mavis, who looked in despair at the steaming potatoes, over which a pat of butter melted. The Early Times drunk turned her hunger into nausea but she said thank you and accepted the fork in Connie's hand. Anyway, the smell of the coffee was promising. Connie sat down next to her. "Maybe I go with you," she said. Mavis looked up. It was the first time she saw the woman's face without the sunglasses. Quickly she looked back at the food and poked the fork into the bowl.

"What you say me and you go to California?"

Mavis felt, but could not face, the woman's smile. Had she washed her hands before warming up the potatoes? Her smell was walnuts, not pecans. "What about your job here?" Mavis forced herself to taste a tiny bit of potato. Salty.

"It's by the sea, California?"

"Yeah. Right on the coast."

"Be nice to see water again." Connie kept her eyes on Mavis' face.

"Wave after wave after wave. Big water. Blue, blue, blue, yes?"

"That's what they say. Sunny California. Beaches, oranges…"

"Maybe too sunny for me." Connie got up abruptly and went to the stove.

"Can't be sunnier than here." The butter, salt and pepper mashed into the potatoes wasn't all that bad. Mavis was eating rapidly. "Go for miles and don't see a speck of shade."

"True," said Connie. She placed two cups of coffee and a pot of honey on the table. "Too much sunshine in the world. Vex me. Can't take it no more."

A breeze swept through the kitchen door, displacing the food smell with a sweeter one. Mavis had thought she would gulp the coffee when it arrived, but the satisfaction of the hot, salty potatoes made her patient. Following Connie's example she spooned honey into her cup, stirring slowly.

"Did you think up anything about how I can get me some gasoline?"

"Wait awhile. Today maybe, tomorrow maybe. People be out to buy."

"Buy? Buy what?"

"Garden things. Things I cook up. Things they don't want to grow themselves."

"And one of them can take me to get some gas?"

"Sure."

"Suppose nobody comes?"

"Always come. Somebody always come. Every day. This morning already I sold forty-eight ears of corn and a whole pound of peppers." She patted her apron pocket.

Blowing gently into her cup, Mavis went to the kitchen door and looked out. When she first arrived she was so happy to find someone at home she had not looked closely at the garden. Now, behind the red chair, she saw flowers mixed in with or parallel to rows of vegetables. In some places staked plants grew in a circle, not a line, in high mounds of soil. Chickens clucked out of sight. A part of the garden she originally thought gone to weed became, on closer inspection, a patch of melons. An empire of corn beyond.