The Orange Blossom Special

by Betsy Carter

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

When we first meet Tessie Lockhart in 1958, she is pinning her hair into a French twist, dabbing Jean Naté on her wrists, and getting ready to change her life. This widowed mother of a thirteen-year-old has decided it's time for a fresh start for both of them, time to leave behind Carbondale, Illinois, and the pain of loss. Tessie and her daughter move to Gainesville, Florida, where they discover that they aren't the only ones struggling to move forward in the wake of tremendous grief.

Betsy Carter has perfectly captured both the innocence of the 1950s, when even the complex events of our lives seemed somehow easier to endure, and the startling and irreversible changes of the 1960s. A story about the relationships people develop in the face of loss, The Orange Blossom Special introduces us to a remarkable cast of characters, all of whom are tested—and transformed—by the changes in their midst.

In her own touching and funny style, Carter shows us the unexpected ways in which strangers can become family.

Release date: June 3, 2005

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 304

Sample

The morning after the letter arrived, Tessie Lockhart dressed with care in a navy blue skirt, red cinch belt, and blue-and-white-striped cotton blouse. Instead of letting her hair lie limp around her shoulders, as she had since Jerry died, she pinned it up in a French twist. And for the first time in God knows how long, she stood in front of the mirror and put on the bright red lipstick that had sat unused in her drawer for nearly three years. She penciled on some eyeliner and even dabbed on Jean Naté.

Jerry died two-and-a-half years earlier and Tessie hadn’t given her appearance a second thought since. When he was alive, he would stroke her hair and tell her that she looked pretty, like the actress Joanne Woodward. He even nicknamed her Jo. She’d never fallen under a man’s gaze quite that way, and though she’d studied pictures of Joanne Woodward in the movie magazines and even started wearing her hair in a pony tail the way Joanne Woodward did, Tessie never really saw the resemblance. Not that it mattered. Just the look in Jerry’s eyes when he would say, “God, Jo, you are so beautiful,” that and the way he’d pull her toward him was all the impetus she needed to turn up the collars of her shirtwaist dresses, and wear her bangs short just like Joanne Woodward had worn hers in Sweet Bird of Youth.

She told her boss that she had to go see Dinah’s teacher at school and would be away for a couple of hours. Instead, she got on the bus and went to Morris Library at Southern Illinois University. She’d gone by it hundreds of times in the past thirty-six years, but had never set foot inside. Never had any need to. Now she ran up the stairs as if she were coming home.

Going to Morris Library filled her with a purpose that seemed worth primping for. Besides, she knew there’d be mostly young people there, and she still had enough vanity in her not to want to be seen as old.

“I’ve forgotten, but where is the travel section?” Tessie asked the young woman behind the front desk. “One flight up,” she answered, without looking up from her filing.

APPROXIMATELY 449,280 MINUTES after her father died, Dinah Lockhart brought home a letter that her teacher had written to her mother. The word PERSONAL was written on it in small block print.

“What’s this?” Tessie asked.

“Who knows?” Dinah shrugged, as her mother took a kitchen knife and slit open the envelope.

Dinah knew. It was a letter from her seventh-grade teacher, Mr. Silver.

Tessie read each word carefully, her lips moving imperceptibly. Dinah watched her mother struggle with the words, holding the note, written on lined loose-leaf paper, at arm’s length. She could see the vein over her mother’s left eye start to pulse, the way it did when she felt anxious.

“‘. . . crying in class . . . distracted and disinterested . . . the seriousness of the situation . . . our recommendation that you seek counseling for her . . .’”

Tessie had noticed how Dinah talked in a monotone voice and how she never seemed to be completely there. But she hadn’t connected it to the truth: that Dinah was lost. No friends, no language to put to her feelings, no way to help herself. “Distracted and disinterested,” Mr. Silver had said.

“You cry in class?” she asked her daughter.

“Yeah, sometimes.”

“How come?”

“Can’t help it.”

Tessie stared at her daughter, her beautiful thirteen-year-old daughter with the red ringlets and shiny face, and saw the pleading eyes of a child about to be hit. She was not a woman likely to make hasty decisions, but as she read the teacher’s words, she was struck by one unequivocal thought: We have got to get out of here.

Tessie knew without knowing how that leaving Carbondale was the right thing. She couldn’t spend another day selling dresses at Angel’s. The smell of cheap synthetics filled her breathing in and out, even when she wasn’t in the store. Only the taste of Almaden Chianti could wipe it out. The sweet grapey Almaden, which she had taken to buying by the case, was her gift to herself for getting through another day of assuring customers that “no, you don’t look like a gosh darn barn in that pleated skirt.” Just four sips. She’d have four sips as soon as she came home from work. Right before dinner, there’d be another four sips and a couple more during dinner, and so the Chianti got doled out through the evening in small, not particularly worrisome portions. It got so that she was finishing a bottle every other night. When she’d go to buy another case at the liquor store, Mr. Grayson always greeted her the same way. “Howdy do Tessie. You wouldn’t be here for another case of Almaden Chianti, would you?”

Embarrassed that he noticed, Tessie would bow her head and pretend to be making a decision. “Hmm, sounds like a good idea. Might as well have some extra on hand for company.” Of course the last time Tessie had had company was back when Jerry was alive.

We have got to get out of here. The words moved into Tessie’s head, each letter taking on a life of its own—arches, rolling valleys, looping and diving until they sat solid like gritted teeth. She thought about their desolate dinners—macaroni and cheese or one of those new frozen meals. She’d ask Dinah how school was. “Fine” was always what she got back. Then she’d claim to have a lot of homework. Tessie would light her after-dinner cigarette, and the two of them would retreat to their rooms. Tessie’s only solace was talking to her dead husband. “What she needs is a fresh start,” she would whisper to Jerry. “What we both need is a fresh start.”

We have got to get out of here. The sentence buzzed inside her like a neon light.

Tessie and Jerry Lockhart had spent their honeymoon in St. Augustine, Florida, seventeen years earlier, in 1941. It was the only time in her life that Tessie had ever left Carbondale. The memory of that had all but faded except for the sight of Spanish moss draped over live oak trees like a wedding veil. She had never seen anything so beautiful.

Although the ads for Florida always claimed that it was so, she never really believed that it would be warm enough to swim in the ocean at Christmastime—until she was there, and then it was. So different from Carbondale, with its gray winters and ornate Victorian houses always reminding her what was out of reach.

She checked out every book about Florida that was available in Morris Library. She balanced the giant atlas on her knees and, using St. Augustine as the starting point, made a circle with her fingers north to Jacksonville, west to Tallahassee, and south to Sarasota. As she leafed through the reference books and read about the cities on the map, she found herself staring at pictures of Alachua County, swampy Alachua County, where the sun shining through the moss-covered oaks cast a filigree shadow on the boggy earth. Alachua County, whose name came from the Seminole-Creek word meaning “jug,” which referred to a large sinkhole that eventually formed a prairie.

“What a beautiful place,” she thought to herself, pushing aside any doubts about an area that was essentially named after a sinkhole. Then she read that Gainesville, in the heart of that county, was home to one of the largest universities in the United States. Pictures of the redbrick Century Tower at the University of Florida reminded her how much she liked being part of a college town. It gave her status, she thought. People in Carbondale assumed other people in Car-bondale had been schooled there, or were in some way a part of the university. She liked the exposure that Dinah got to higher education, and it thrilled her that Dinah might be the first in their family to go to college.

Could Gainesville be the place? she wondered.

Just by asking the question, she knew she’d already answered it.

That night she would tell Dinah how they would leave by Christmas and that she would begin 1959 in a new school.

DINAH LOCKHART NEVER made a precise effort to tally up the number of cigarettes her mother smoked each day, or how many minutes it had been since her father’s death. She knew these things instinctively, the way she knew to avoid stepping on cracks and knew to lift her feet and make a wish whenever her mother drove over railroad tracks. She wasn’t superstitious exactly, but why risk it?

Things had been taken away from Dinah, so the things that were there counted. Things like the fourteen honey-locust trees and sixty-two squares of sidewalk on her block.

Two-and-a-half years earlier, when Dinah was eleven, her father had dropped dead of a heart attack. “It came out of nowhere,” her mother told her when she picked her up from school that day. There was a foggy look in her mother’s eyes. She hugged Dinah close to her and said, “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Gone, just like that.” Dinah pictured the heart attack racing around the corner, hoisting her father under his arms and hurrying him off. In the days after, teachers and parents of friends would tell her that her daddy had gone to heaven. Dinah would close her eyes and try to imagine her father up there in pillowy clouds with the doting angels, but nothing came. Besides, her mother refused to buy into paradise. “He’s gone, honey,” she would say. “Now it’s just you and me. We’re all we’ve got.”

When she was little, Dinah’s father used to wrap her red curly hair around his finger and call her his little Boing Boing Girl. He was always making up names like that. This nickname stuck, and Dinah turned into the personification of it. Skinny and agile, with her dad’s thin shoulders, she had a laugh that kept going like marbles spilled across the floor. Her mother, whose bloodline was swamped with melancholia, would watch her daughter with wonderment. “Thank God you inherited your father’s good nature,” she would say. Dinah knew what she was expected to answer. “Yes, but I’ve got my mom’s good looks.” They would both raise their eyebrows in that what-can-you-do face and Dinah would giggle, secure in knowing that she was her father’s daughter.

Now, her mouth had become fixed in a tight line. Since her father died, everything changed and yet nothing was different. Dinah woke up in her narrow bed every morning and went to the same school with her same old classmates. “You’re still my Boing Boing Girl,” her mother said one day, her stiff voice trying to sound jaunty.

“Sure am,” Dinah answered, trying to sound as if the bounce was still in it.

Inside her, things were mounting that she couldn’t control: the way her socks needed to be arranged by color in her dresser drawer; the sixteen times she would run her brush through her hair at night, the eleven times in the morning. These were the things she could depend on when everything else seemed to be coming untethered.

TESSIE SPENT THE entire bus ride back to work practicing how she’d tell Dinah of her decision. “Guess what? We’re moving to Florida!” Too abrupt. “Can you imagine moving far away from here to a new house, and a new school?” Too scary. “Given all that’s happened here, a change of pace would do us both some good.” Too vague. She floated through the rest of the afternoon at Angel’s, her head filled with what she’d read in those books: the Spanish architecture, the Seminole Indians, the fact that the average temperature was seventy degrees.

“Well somebody’s in a good mood today,” said Irene the cashier, her brown eyes buggy with expectation. Irene, Irene the talking machine, was what Jerry used to call her. The noisiest person in Southern Illinois. Tessie stared back, knowing how it would irritate Irene if she didn’t give her an answer. Then she picked up a sweater that had been thrown back on the display table and studied the price tag. “Seven dollars for a cashmere, now that’s not bad at all.” Irene smiled and waited for more, but Tessie had given her all she was going to give.

Tessie got through her days at Angel’s by taking cigarette breaks and remembering the rhymes that Jerry used to make up about her coworkers:

Edna McGee in the tight red sweater,
Loves herself, loves her boobs better.

Smelly mean old Warren Nash
Keeps the books but hides the cash.

That night she repeated the doggerel to Dinah. “They still make me laugh,” she said. “I can hear his voice and see the little laugh lines around his eyes when he said them.” Then she told Dinah how she talked to Jerry every day. “I tell him about you, I ask him questions. I know he can hear me.”

“You’re lucky that way,” said Dinah. “I can’t find him.”

Tessie paused and took a drag on her cigarette. “I’ve been thinking about us moving to Florida. There’s this place called Gainesville. It has those grand oak trees I’ve told you about and it’s a university town, like this one. The difference is it’s warm year-round.”

The way it had been with Dinah lately, Tessie had no idea what she would say. Dinah stared at her and Tessie looked back, expecting to see that scorched look in her eyes.

“You mean leave Carbondale and never come back?” she asked.

Tessie shook her head yes. The ash that dangled from her cigarette fell to the floor.

Dinah thought about how her days had become about walking home alone from school every day, then climbing into bed. She recognized that it could be different somewhere else where people didn’t know about her father, and the teacher wasn’t writing notes home about her odd behavior. She felt her face soften into a smile.

“That could be okay,” she answered. “I might like that very much.”

Her smile made Tessie remember how the warming sound of her daughter’s laugh nourished her in ways that nothing else did. “I’ll give notice at Angel’s tomorrow,” she said.

Three years after his death, Jerry Lockhart took up residence with Tessie and Dinah in a cedar-shingled Gainesville house with its upside-down V roof. Here, Tessie became bolder about talking to him, not bothering to whisper anymore. She welcomed him in the morning and blew a kiss to him at night. She would ask for his opinion in arranging the furniture—“What do you think, the couch under the window or facing outside?” She accepted his compliments on her initiative. “What choice did I have? She couldn’t keep on the way she was. I think she’ll be better off here.” And she made him some promises. “I’m going to be the best mother I can. And the drinking. I’m worried about the drinking.” During the last couple of months in Carbondale, the four sips of Almaden had become eight, and so on, and she had begun stashing empty wine bottles in the laundry hamper, waiting until she’d accumulated six or seven. Then she’d wrap them in double-lined grocery bags and drive them to the large trash container outside the Bee Wise supermarket. She told herself she did that because she didn’t want to be a bad influence on Dinah, but in truth, she was ashamed that the garbage men might see the bottles day after day. “I’m going to cut down on that,” she said meekly, looking skyward. “Maybe you can help me.”

In this new place, the sun bore down, softening the cold edges of her memory and making hope a dim possibility. Tessie could feel it in her step and see it in the way her eyes took on definition, separate from the rest of her face.

The night before Dinah started school, the two of them had schemed like schoolgirls about what she would wear. Tessie held up a piece of clothing, then pretended she was doing a television commercial. “This fine white blouse, with its perfect Peter Pan collar, is guaranteed to make whoever wears it the prettiest and the most popular girl at Auberndale Junior High School. Tired of snow pants and woolen sweaters? Try our Florida delight, a pumpkin-colored chemise with white piping.” Finally, all that time spent at Angel’s had paid off. Tessie couldn’t remember when the two of them had laughed so much together, certainly not since Jerry had gone. They finally decided that the sleeveless dress with the red cherry print and brand-new white bucks with white socks would be perfect.

Before school the next morning, Dinah Lockhart brushed her hair in front of the bathroom mirror and hummed the Davey Crockett song to distract her from counting the number of strokes. She practiced smiling in the mirror and studied her lips as she said “Nice to meet you.” She could be a whole different person in this place. She could walk barefoot in the backyard, and there was a tree house in the vacant lot across the way. Her father had never been to Gainesville, Florida, so this town wasn’t his the way Carbondale had been. Here it was easier to make herself believe that he was somewhere watching over her, maybe even helping her out on the first day of junior high. She would no longer expect to walk out of school one day and find him waiting for her in the car.

Tessie came into the bathroom and studied Dinah’s face in the mirror. She saw her daughter’s eyes brimming with eagerness and stroked her hair. “Knock ’em dead, baby,” Tessie said as Dinah walked out the front door, noting the soft clopping sounds her daughter’s new white bucks made against the bare wood floors.

Dinah walked the three blocks to school alone; at thirteen, she was too old to have her mother come with her. Stolidly, she walked into the principal’s office. “I’m Dinah Lockhart, the new girl in seventh grade,” she said. Mrs. Widby, with her gray hair in a bun, and a large bosom that sank down to her waist, grasped Dinah’s shoulders with her spiky fingers. “Ah, yes, Mrs. Morris’s homeroom. I’ll escort you.”

“Class, this is Dinah Lockhart,” said Mrs. Widby in her drowsy, formal manner. “She has come to us from Carbondale, Illinois. I want you to be gracious and extend her a welcome.” All the while she spoke, her fingers dug into Dinah’s arm.

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 . . .