The Orange Blossom Special Read online

  Dinah scanned her new homeroom. She noticed the girls with their Veronica Lake pageboys and pointy Capezio flats, and the boys with their perfectly angled flattops and button-down shirts. There was a girl in the front row staring at her. She was pretty and well dressed and Dinah could swear she saw a smile play on her lips. Then Dinah’s eyes fell on the boy who sat in the front row closest to the door. She didn’t mean to fix on him, only to block out the principal’s voice and avert the curious stares from others. Was it the shoes? The shoes and the dress? Dinah’s white bucks were sturdy enough to get her through a snowstorm if they had to. These kids languished in the sweltering unmoving air as if at any moment their clothes might slip to the floor: straps fell off their shoulders, hair hung in their eyes, their shoes were cut low enough so you could actually see where the cracks of their toes began.

  After a while the boy became more than a distraction. She noticed his bluish fingernails and the spidery lines on his forehead. He had both hands on the desk and was clenching and unclenching them in an agitated manner. He’d make a fist then flash three fingers on his left hand, two on his right. The fist would ball up again and then there’d be two fingers on his left and four on his right. Over and over he would make this motion, the fingers flashing in different configurations and pointing straight at her as though he were trying to tell her something in code.

  Mrs. Widby left and Mrs. Morris put Dinah at a desk fourth from the front, on the opposite side of the room from the boy with the flashing fingers. Now as Mrs. Morris took attendance, no one paid her any attention at all, except for the boy who kept shooting his mysterious hand signals at her: four fingers on the left hand, five on the right. Dinah, no stranger to secret logic, tried to make sense of the sequences. So intent was she in figuring out the meaning of his numbers that the most obvious fact of what she had seen that morning only occurred to her during her algebra class. The boy had five fingers on his left hand, plus a thumb.

  Six fingers.

  The pretty girl from homeroom was also in Dinah’s algebra class. Her name was Crystal Landy and she had crafty brown eyes and a crooked smile. Crystal studied the new girl from Carbondale. The girl had shoulder-length curly hair and the whitest skin Crystal had ever seen. This morning, as she’d stood in Mrs. Widby’s grip, she looked stricken, as if she’d just been captured. She wondered if the new girl had noticed how the rest of the class regarded her white bucks. And that sleeveless dress with its cherry print pattern: Good Lord! It seemed downright contrary, like something you’d wear to church.

  At lunchtime, Dinah sat with a couple of girls from her classes. As Crystal Landy passed their table, each girl looked up and said, “Hey, Crystal,” in a way that Dinah knew it was important that they get noticed by her. They told her that Crystal was one of the richest and most popular girls in the school. She wore madras shirts, they said, the kind that bled when you washed them, and Harpur skirts with real leather on the belts, not the fake ones with plastic. The girls talked fast and their words blurred together. “You are from up north in Illinois. Well, I don’t think I ever met anyone from that far away,” said a girl named Caroline. Ruby, a blonde with foxlike eyes and a mouth full of braces said she’d been as far north as Tennessee to visit her cousin but they’d never gotten out of the car because her sister developed scarlet fever, and they had to turn around and come home, so she guessed it didn’t really count. Dinah struggled to come up with something clever to say back, but the best she could do was, “Tennessee. Gee that is so interesting.” By the end of lunch, word traveled through the cafeteria that Crystal Landy had dubbed the new girl the Redhead in the White Bucks.

  DINAH GOT THROUGH the rest of that day by noting the time and then counting the minutes until she could go home and get under her green quilt with its white periwinkles. By the time she’d left Carbondale, in the middle of seventh grade, her calculations of MTH (Minutes to Home) filled pages of her notebook, like fragments of a theorem. The moment she walked into the house—the daily miracle of her life, as she saw it—she would stop counting. From there, she knew it was only two minutes and forty-six seconds until she was on her bed.

  In Carbondale, she’d enter her bedroom at 3:35. Then, as if in a trance, she’d take off her shoes and dress, rub her hand back and forth over her pillow, making sure to catch a whiff of her own hair, then pull back the covers ever so slowly. She’d run her hand over the bottom sheet, erasing any lumps or creases that might have materialized during the day, then slowly mount the bed and lie on her back. The luxury of letting her body relax, of not having to remind herself to breathe, of no one watching her, gave her such an intense feeling of relief, she had to give in to it slowly. She’d pull the quilt around her shoulders and watch out the window as the sun got duller in the winter sky. Dinah would close her eyes and let the pleasure of it wash over her. Involuntarily, her arms would flap up and down the way they did when she and her father used to make snow angels in the backyard.

  Ecstasy, that’s what you’d have to call it.

  After some time, when the sheets warmed and her body settled into just the right spots, she’d imagine herself into scenes where she was a little baby in a crib and her mother and father were sitting next to her waiting for her to fall asleep. Or she’d put herself in a pram, her father at the handle. It was cold outside, but she was warm because he’d tucked in the blankets around her. Sometimes she’d allow herself the ocean fantasy. It was a warm ocean with waves that rocked her. Each time the water washed over her, it cleaned out the poison in her body. Other days, she’d lie frozen in position for what seemed like hours and make believe that she was dead.

  Now that she was in Gainesville, Dinah was determined not to fall into that awful pattern again. When she walked home, she worked hard not to count the number of steps between home and school and purposely didn’t avoid stepping on the cracks.

  Tessie was waiting for her at the front door. She threw her arms around Dinah. “So honey, tell me everything,” she said. “How did it go?” Dinah told her about how everyone wore a white sleeveless gym suit in Phys. Ed. with their last name sewn in purple thread above the breast pocket. She talked about the girls and their funny accents and the way everyone called Mrs. Morris “Ma’am.” Then she said, “My dress, and those shoes, what a mistake. No one wears clothes like that down here. I looked like such a clod.” But she never mentioned the boy with six fingers.

  “Seventh grade in the wrong clothes! No one should have to go through that,” said Tessie. Dinah looked at her as if to ask if she was kidding. “I’m on your side, honey,” said Tessie. “C’mon, let’s find something for you to wear tomorrow.” Dinah forgot about her longing to dive under the quilt. Choosing the right outfit for tomorrow, that’s what really mattered.

  The closet in her room had a sliding door. Few houses in Carbon-dale had sliding doors. To Dinah it seemed very modern, especially the sound it made when it rolled back and forth—like electric trains on a track. “Madame, open the door please,” said Tessie as they stood in front of the closet. Dinah slid the door open slowly, as if what lay on the other side was precious and mysterious.

  By the time she showed up for school the next morning, the white bucks were in the back of the closet. This time, she wore a simple white blouse with a navy skirt and flats that had rounded toes instead of pointy ones. They would have to do until her mother said they could afford new ones. She took her seat in homeroom and caught the boy’s eye. Before he could move a finger, she flashed him three fingers. She didn’t know why, except that she was drawn to his intensity. Besides, he was the only person in the class who had made an effort to connect with her. Excitedly, he shot back four. She returned with five and he came back with seven.

  Dinah started writing down the numbers in her notebook. She’d find herself daydreaming about the significance of five. At night she’d lie in bed and run the numbers through her head. She’d add them up and look for meaning in the sum. She’d play them backward and try to make s
ense of them that way. One afternoon, while she was straining to hear what Mr. Nanny, her algebra teacher with the shoe-shaped face was saying about like terms and common factors, her father’s voice suddenly filled her head.

  The boy with fingers has nails that are blue,

  but his heart’s as pure as you know who.

  That was when the thought struck her. Her father was speaking to her through this boy. Of course that was true. For three years, she’d been trying in vain to hear her father’s voice, catch a glimpse of him in her dreams, pick up a signal from somewhere that he was watching. But nothing came. Now there was this mysterious boy with his spastic gestures. Her dad was talking to her through this boy. She’d never tell anyone, they’d think she was insane. But in her heart she knew this was so.

  On a Saturday afternoon, Dinah was downtown with her mother when they passed by the movie theater on Main Street. There was the boy with six fingers waiting in line with his parents. “I see someone from my homeroom,” whispered Dinah. “I’m going to say hi.” Delighted that her daughter had made a friend, Tessie watched as Dinah ran up to the boy.

  “Hey,” she said, not looking him in the eye.

  “Hey,” he answered in a low drawl.

  “What movie are you seeing?”

  “Rock-a-bye Baby, you know the one with Jerry Lewis,” he smiled.

  “Well, enjoy the movie,” she said, running back to where her mom was waiting.

  Tessie noticed both parents beaming at their boy who was so popular that a pretty redheaded girl came over to say hello to him.

  Dinah could barely catch her breath as she said to her mother, “They’re going to a Jerry Lewis movie, can you imagine? A Jerry Lewis movie.” She must have repeated that four times that day. That boy, those words, they stirred something inside of her.

  That night, she took out her notebook and went through the numbers from the first day. Three: “Are you there?” (three words). Four: “I am here always” (four words). Five: “Are you talking to me?” Nine: “This is the only way that I can now.” For the first time since he died, Dinah felt her father’s presence.

  From then on, she would come to school each day filled with questions for her father. “Are you happy?” she’d send Eddie a three finger sign. “I miss you and Mom,” he’d answer with five. She and Eddie became like silent lovers, so contained in themselves they never noticed that anyone else was watching. But Crystal Landy was watching. On a day in early March she caught up with Dinah as they were walking to algebra class.

  “Hey,” she said, nudging Dinah’s arm.

  “Hey,” she said back, wondering why such a popular girl would even bother with her.

  “So what’s going on between you and Eddie Fingers?”

  “Eddie who?”

  “You know, the freaky guy in homeroom with the . . .” Crystal made her eyes go crossed and wagged her pinky in Dinah’s face.

  Dinah giggled. She’d never thought of him that way.

  “What do you mean what’s going on with us? I don’t really know him.”

  “Well I see all that crazy stuff you do with your hands. Everyone does. You in a secret club or something?” Crystal used her forefinger to move a piece of her sprayed hair off her face.

  Dinah heard a tinge of want in her voice, and at that moment she realized that she had something that Crystal Landy couldn’t have. Mostly she was aware of what Crystal had that she couldn’t.

  CRYSTAL’S FATHER, MAYNARD LANDY, owned a group of liquor stores, Landy’s Liquors. It was where people went to shoot the breeze, plan the tailgate party, reclaim lost dogs and parrots. You can bet that Landy’s Liquors figured one way or another into Saturday night for anyone who grew up in Gainesville. Maynard liked to boast that he was responsible for at least three weddings, and uncountable births. When his customers went on vacation, they would send Maynard picture postcards. He kept every one of them, from the Trevi Fountain to a milk truck in Wisconsin, taped over his cash register. Among them was a framed letter from a University of Florida alumna.

  “I won’t go into the gorey details,” it read, “but let’s just say that if it wasn’t for your store I don’t think that little Landy Williams would have entered this good earth on July 29, 1954.” Maynard would watch people read that letter, then laugh his nicotine laugh and start counting backward on his fingers to September. “It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what this girl was doing during homecoming weekend, now does it?” He was a hard man to read, always friendly and laughing, but decidedly opaque when it came to his own feelings. When people like Anita Bryant or Rocky Graziano passed through town, Maynard and his wife, Victoria (“If you call me Vicky, I swear I’ll scream”), would get their hooks into them and have them to a dinner party at their grand house in the Cypress Woods section of town. That’s the kind of people they were.

  Maynard Landy came by his money honestly. “The House That Landy’s Built,” as he liked to call it, was one of the biggest in Gainesville. There was a kidney-shaped pool in the backyard and the only cabana in the neighborhood. By anyone’s standards the place was deluxe. There was a sunken living room decorated in all white— “The Graziano Room,” they called it because they used it only when a famous person passed through. There was a soda fountain in the real living room, and a built-in television set that swiveled into the adjacent den. The bath in Victoria and Maynard’s bedroom had a glass wall that looked onto a palm tree and a hibiscus bush growing outside their window. “It’s like bathing in Bali Hai,” Victoria Landy would say, repeating the decorator’s intention.

  The older of the two Landy children, Charlie, lived in an all-blue bedroom with a painted blue wooden desk, a blue toy box, and three pennants on the wall—one from the newly minted Los Angeles Dodgers, another from the University of Michigan, and a third from the New York Giants football team. This wasn’t because Charlie rooted for teams that were from three completely different parts of the country, but because all the pennants were blue, another of the decorator’s inspired details. Crystal’s room was painted in what the decorator called “Crystal Pink.” There was a pink telephone, a pink shag rug, a pink stereo. Even the hangers in her closet were pink. Maynard would tease Crystal: “If you ever get a sunburn, we’ll never find you in there.” Victoria saw the pink and blue motifs as strokes of genius. “He had all his creative juices flowing,” she would say of the decorator when showing off her children’s rooms to guests.

  Maynard never forgot that he was short and thickset with droopy turtle-like eyes, and that the redhead on his arm was as statuesque as Gina Lollabrigida. Even after two children, Victoria was still the most beautiful woman he had ever met. “Maynard is the brains of our family,” she would say with a half smile. “All I have to do is keep up my appearance.” She said it because it seemed to explain everything, and because Maynard liked hearing it. Maybe she even believed it herself.

  Every Saturday morning, Victoria had her hair done at the fanciest beauty parlor in town, J. Baldy’s. And once a week, she had a massage therapist come to the house. “Suppleness is the most important thing,” she would instruct Crystal, with the assumption that her daughter had the same grooming ambitions as she did.

  Maynard came from a poor family. The men on his father’s side helped to build the Seaboard Airline, the railroad line that connected the southeast to the northeast along the Atlantic coast. His father, Matthew Landy, would tell stories about how they had to dig up the trenches and use landfill to hold back the ocean water. The first passenger train that came down those tracks from New York to Miami was called the Orange Blossom Special, and Maynard and Charlie shared a fascination with it. They saved matchbooks and key rings from it, and built a model of the orange, green, and gold locomotive that sat like a trophy on a special table in the living room.

  Like most American towns in the early part of the century, Gainesville was built around its courthouse and transportation hubs. The downtown was a grid of commercial and government buildings, most
of them redbrick with tin roofs, and everywhere the lanky Laurel oak trees. Gainesville had long been serviced by railroads that carried away lumber and phosphate and replaced the citrus and cotton crops that still hadn’t recovered from the record-setting freezes of the 1890s. When word came that the town would be a stop along the route, the dream was that some of the rich folk traveling south would stop off and leave some of their money behind. Matthew shared that dream. When he rode the heaving work trains up and down the budding mainline, he would imagine the office buildings and hotels and banks and saloons that would inevitably grow up around the new station. He squirreled away a piece of his wages, and in 1927 he bought a little corner lot some five blocks from where the new station was to be built. Then came Black Friday and the Depression, and while work on the tracks went on, building in the rest of Gainesville, as in the rest of the country, screeched to a halt.

  But the Orange Blossom Special turned out to be its own little works project. Matthew took out a loan from one of Roosevelt’s new programs and built a liquor store on that corner lot. He called it the Rest Stop, figuring travelers stopping over would need a little something to wash away the fatigue from a twenty-hour train ride. That’s not what happened. Instead, the store became the crossroads for those working at the budding businesses that sprang up around the station.

  When Matthew died of a heart ailment at age fifty-two, he left the store to Maynard who changed the name to Landy’s Liquors. Later, when he acquired three other liquor stores in nearby towns, he gave them his name as well. “Hell,” he said, “it’s like getting married, I might as well.”

  Crystal learned early in life about expensive jewelry. Her mother would stare tenderly at the five-carat diamond Maynard had given her and say, “Now that’s class.” About moisturizer, she cautioned, “Hands tell more than half the story.” And she was forever telling Crystal horror stories about sudden weight gain and pot-bellied “tummies.”