It was a warm, sunny afternoon with a little breeze and a quiet ocean. Seal and I were doing the bottom branches, stapling on the ribbons. Later I’d drive the ACE truck up beside the tree and do the top ones from the cherry picker.
Seal and I were talking back and forth while the ACE organist practiced inside The Summer House.
“They’re doing a lot of kinky stuff down at The Hand,” Seal said. “Arnelle tells my mother about it and my mother says she has all she can do to keep from asking her a hundred and one questions about it.”
“What’s wrong with asking a hundred and one questions?”
“Oh, Jesse, really. Someone says something to you like we’re having a leg-growing session at the morning service, you just catch your breath and hope you’ll get a few more facts—don’t you know what I mean? It’s like someone casually telling you God was in his bedroom the night before. I mean, you don’t say, ‘Oh, really, where?’ It’s too far out.”
“Leg growing isn’t all that kinky.”
“Leg growing isn’t all that kinky? Leg growing?”
“A lot of healers grow legs, or claim to.”
“Okay,” said Seal, “say that you’re right. Say that there are a lot of healers who are leg growers. Say that’s possible. Where do all these people come from with one leg shorter than the other?”
“They aren’t so short you’d notice,” I said. “Most healers claim a person’s one leg is a third or a half inch shorter than the other. It’s just something they say they see. They say it’s what’s causing backaches or bad feet—it’s no big deal.”
“Please spare me,” Seal said. “All of that is a little too far out for me.”
“You’re probably right,” I said. “Stick with more down-to-earth things like walking on water or parting the Red Sea.”
Seal and I stood back from the pine tree and viewed our handiwork.
“We’re heavy on white ribbons,” I said.
“We’re supposed to be,” she said. “You discourage people if you make it look like everyone gives more than you can afford.”
We took a break, stretched out on the lawn, and listened to an organ rendition of “Heaven’s Sounding Sweeter.”
In a pail next to us were the key ribbons I had to plant later, so that my father could pluck them from the tree the next Sunday, and read out an impossible dream. (“Here’s a twenty-seven-year-old sweeper in an industrial plant whose impossible dream is going into business for himself. May the dream come true! It’s—up—to—you!”)
“Speaking of impossible dreams,” Seal said, “why don’t you kick in ten dollars and see if Opal will come to life at the Cheeks’ party. She’s so timid it’s gross.”
I said, “Here’s a seventeen-year-old rich girl with her own sports car and her own swimming pool, whose impossible dream is that a sixteen-year-old girl without a pot to pee in will become socially acceptable overnight. May the dream come true! It’s—up—to—you!”
“I’m not talking about socially acceptable,” Seal said. “I’d just like to see her happy. It’s super that you’ve asked her. I’d like to see you both happy.”
“We’ll manage,” I said. I kept meaning to call Opal again, but I’d put it off. I could tell her father didn’t like me calling, and it was hard to make conversation with her, too. The other thing was my preoccupation with what I kept telling myself couldn’t be happening between Seal and Dickie.
Seal said, “Bud used to say she could be real pretty if she knew what to do with herself.”
I was even glad when Bud’s name came back into the conversation.
Seal said, “Bud loved telling me what I looked good in. He was always right.”
“Bud was only wrong once,” I said. “That was the time he thought he was wrong.”
“The poor thing doesn’t really know what to do with herself.”
“Worry about you and Dickie,” I said.
“Are you jealous of Dickie?” Seal chuckled. “I think you are.” She rolled over on her stomach and rested her head on her arm. “I gave Opal some of my things, but I never see her in them.”
“Maybe she’s too embarrassed to wear them around you.”
“She wasn’t too embarrassed to take them.”
“Maybe she wears them to Central High,” I said. “I asked Opal because you wanted me to, now maybe you ought to get off her case.”
“Maybe you’ve got the hots for her and won’t admit it.”
“Maybe it’s you I’ve got the hots for,” I said, and pounced on top of her, wrestling and laughing with her under the Good Turn Tree, rolling over finally to find my father glaring down at us.
He was dressed in Bermuda shorts, a Lacoste shirt and Top-Siders, fresh from his Sunday afternoon tennis game at The Hadefield Club. I started to make some crack about how I hoped he’d free the slaves so they could play games Sunday afternoons, too. But I decided that since Seal and I were rolling around on the lawn instead of working, it wouldn’t go over big, and I decided, based on years of intimacy with him, there was something waiting to be unleashed after he gave one of his tight, little, polite smiles to Seal.
“Jesse, I’d like a word with you. Alone.”
He began to look like a human bomb about to take off and turn into a mushroom cloud.
Seal whispered, “I bet he got beat again.”
My father was notoriously lousy at sports. Much as he tried to be the kind of good old boy Donald was encouraging him to be, he was about as at home in locker rooms, along fairways, and on tennis courts as I was in poolrooms or pornographic bookstores.
We took a walk together down the path through the elephant grass, toward our house.
He said, “On the night of The Last Dance, I want you to
