Tiffany McDaniel - The Summer That Melted Everything

“I’ve never worn anything so short.” She giggled as if it came from the very small of her back.

Sal took the scissors from her to cut the remaining roses from the bush. These he would gently and softly tape to her legs.

The sun is hot and the boy is nervous as he moves his hand up the girl’s legs, toward the thighs that already know his name by heart.

“Sal,” she whispered, “my Sal,” while I, nobody’s Fielding, stood close enough to know I was forgotten.

“Did you know it’s my birthday?” She grabbed Sal’s hand. “And this is the best gift ever.”

“Sal, you swimmin’?” I spoke, if only to remind myself I still existed.

“You go ahead, Fielding.” He let Dresden lead him to the bench amongst the roses.

I tried to splash some water their way as I jumped from the diving board. Failing, I hung on the side of the pool, watching the two of them share the same smile as he leaned in and smelled the roses on her chest.

I dived under the water, nearly swam the length of the pool on that one breath. When I resurfaced, I heard Dresden talking about her construction paper makeup.

“Mother would be angry if I got into her makeup. I do it for her. Try to be prettier. I thought I’d put on some makeup and try to be prettier. She blames me, you know. For Father leaving. She says he left because of my leg.

“She hates my leg. She hates that I won’t be able to follow in her ballet footsteps. She says I’ll never be asked to dance. I think that’s the worst thing to tell a girl. That she’ll never dance.”

Sal began to remove the construction paper from her face. She didn’t try to stop him. The tape made soft sounds as he gently pulled it from her skin, the paper falling in a pile of color at their feet. Once every piece was removed, he held her face, his hand perfectly sized to her cheek as if the make of them individually was had in the creation of them both at the very same time

“I hope you’re infinity, Dresden Delmar.”

She sighed, “You know, I shouldn’t even be talking to you.”

“Because I’m the devil?”

“Because you’re … not white.” She struggled to say that very thing. “Mother says I am to stay away from you. She says my leg makes me prone to trash.”

“I’m trash? But I know Tolstoy and Shakespeare and…” his voice disappeared. A frown on his face as if the air was bad. An incident really, entangling him like wire wrapped around his teeth, back down to his ribs.

“I’m sorry, Sal. I didn’t mean to … it’s just, well, I don’t think you’re trash, but Mother’s Old South, you know?”

“I see.” He smiled for her sake. “If you’re not supposed to be talking to me, then I don’t suppose you’ll dance with me?”

She looked about to burst at that very question. A golden rise about her as if she could already feel herself being spun around, held, waltzed across a ballroom. Then suddenly she lost her smile as she stared at the white roses in front of her.

“Those are Mother’s favorite. But she’s the one who says I can’t dance with a black boy. It serves her right to lose her roses to my dance.”

She grabbed the scissors and without hesitation cut the white roses so quickly and with so much eagerness, she’d be cutting a new one before the old one even had the chance to hit the ground.

Rose by white rose, she taped his dark skin, until he was someone she could dance with. Sal in the white way, but not the right way. And yet it would not lower him, he would not let it. He was going to be dancing with Dresden Delmar, and everything else was outside the heaven of that.

“Fielding?” she called to me. “Would you turn on the boom box? There under the patio table?”

I pulled myself up out of the pool, shaking the water off my hands before lifting the box up on top of the table. I found the local station and turned up the volume. I suppose it could’ve been any song. In memory it is always Alphaville’s witchy ballad of youth. “Forever Young.”

Arms around each other, they placed the trust in their feet as they closed their eyes. Her face tucking into the white roses on his. I watched them until she kissed him. Lips on lips and I dived into the pool, staying under until I thought my lungs would burst into bright, turquoise shards.

When I surfaced, I saw the smashed birthday cake dropped on the concrete by the pool. Red rose frosting and cake as white as the white high heels clanking on that very concrete. Alvernine, come with her green polka-dot dress and its silk that clung to her braless form and her sexy-as-hell curves.

And sexy is what Alvernine was, with her full lips and slim cigarettes. She was a woman known to turn an ashtray into a tool of seduction. Her heavy brow made her eyes seem pillowed in a sort of jungle-cat way. I thought, there is where men go to die. There is where they are devoured by the jaguar.

Though it was from her Dresden got the red hair, Alvernine took to dyeing her own a light strawberry blond, ironing it straight and smooth. And while she was covered in freckles just like Dresden, Alvernine lessened her darker freckles and successfully hid the lighter ones on her face with makeup, which she would also apply to the freckles on her body.

What it must’ve been like to be such a woman’s daughter. No wonder Dresden felt hideous and imperfect in the presence of her mother, who by her own guilt had failed to ever call her daughter beautiful.

As Alvernine stood shaking in fury before Sal and Dresden, I didn’t know what she was more upset about. The cut roses or having caught her daughter dancing with a black boy.

I pulled myself up out of the pool just as she was reaching for Dresden.

“You stay away from her.” Sal raised his fist as if he were willing to use it.

“Don’t you dare try to intimidate me.” Alvernine pointed her finger in his face, her nail perfectly filed and polished in a spectacular red. “I’ve dealt with your kind before, believe me. Now, you get away from my daughter. And you get my roses off of you.”

She ripped the roses, the white petals tossing into the air and falling around them as the closest thing to snow to have ever fallen in the middle of a heat wave.

“Momma, don’t hurt him,” Dresden pleaded, her frightened hand reaching through the falling petals toward her mother.

“This is all your fault.” Alvernine grabbed Dresden’s hand, jerking her. Sal tried to pull Dresden back to him, but Alvernine pushed him away. In the struggle, Alvernine yanked a rose off Dresden’s chest. As she clutched the rose in her hand, she stared at the bruise that’d been revealed on Dresden’s skin.

“What is that?” Alvernine squeezed the rose in her hand until the petals looked like guts oozing between her fingers. “This boy give you that bruise?”

“No, Momma.” Dresden was giving her softest tone. “You did.”

“Nonsense.”

“When you hit me, Momma.” Dresden barely spoke above a whisper, I knew, for her mother’s sake.

“A slap here and there. We all have slaps done to us. I did. Nothin’ to cause a bruise like that. It was this beast. This devil, he’s done this to you.”

“They’re more than slaps you give me, Momma.” Dresden began pulling the roses off herself. “You don’t remember because you drink more than you should.”

As Alvernine stared at the bruises, she dropped the one rose she held. It landed on the ground like a wadded-up tissue. She blinked over and over again. A robot malfunctioning and desperately trying to get her system back to its perfect way.

“You’ve hurt me, Momma. You’ve hurt me and—”

“No.” Alvernine spun around, her hands up to her neck and its choker, like a pearl noose. “I would never hurt you.”