His face changed from quizzical to sad. “Sara,” he said. “I haven’t thought of her for years. Whatever happened to her?”
“Your guess is as good as mine,” I said.
His name was Roger Winters, and when he heard I’d never met my mother, he shook his head. After a few seconds, he said he’d known her fairly well. “She worked part-time for me when she was in high school, and then later she came back, after she got her divorce. You knew she was married before?”
I said, “Yes.”
“I was glad she left him, and glad to have her back. She was a good worker,” he said. “She got on real well with the bees.”
His voice was soft and slow, with inflections and muted vowels that I’d never heard before. I thought of the harsh way most people talked in Saratoga Springs (my father a notable exception). I could listen to Mr. Winters talk for hours.
“I do see the resemblance now,” he said, looking at me. “You’ve got your mother’s eyes.”
“Thank you!” He’d given me my first physical link to my mother.
He shrugged — an odd twist of his right shoulder, only. “She was a great beauty,” he said. “And funny? That woman could always make me laugh.”
I told Mr. Winters I’d come to Savannah to find my mother, any trace of her, or her relations. “She had a sister, Sophie.”
“Sophie’s nothing like Sara,” he said.
“Is she here?” I could hardly believe my luck.
“Lives a couple miles from here, back toward the city. At least she did. I haven’t heard mention of Sophie for years. Used to see her in the papers with her roses, every time they had a flower show.”
My disappointment must have shown, because he said, “That don’t mean she ain’t still here, now. You might want to give her a call.”
I told him I hadn’t found her name in the telephone directory. He shrugged again. “She’s a spinster. Lives alone. Like to have her number unlisted. Yes, that’s the sort of thing Sophie would do.” He bent to pick up his hood and veil, which he’d set next to the smoker device on the grass. “Tell you what. It’s about time for my lunch break anyway. I’ll run you over there after lunch, and we’ll see if she’s still at that house on Screven Street.”
“That’s very kind of you,” I said.
“Seems like I could do that much for Sara’s daughter. How old are you, anyways? Seventeen? Eighteen?”
“More or less.” I didn’t want to have to explain why a thirteen-year-old was traveling alone.
Mr. Winters drove an old blue pickup truck with a yellow honeybee logo on both its doors. The windows were rolled down, and I was glad; the sun had emerged from the clouds, and the air swept into the truck, humid and hot.
He stopped at a restaurant on the way back to town — nothing fancy, a roadside shed — and, sitting at a picnic table outside, overlooking a marsh, I had my first taste of raw oysters.
Mr. Winters carried out a plateful of them, half-shells of various sizes embedded in shaved ice. He went back for a soup plate holding a bowl of crackers and a bottle of red sauce. He removed them and set them strategically, midway between us.
“Never had one?” he said, his face as baffled as if I’d said I never breathed. “Yankees,” he muttered.
He demonstrated the proper oyster-eating technique: he sprinkled two drops of sauce on the round gray oyster, lifted the shell, tipped it toward his mouth, and sucked it down. He set the empty shell in the soup bowl. Then he took a few soda crackers and tossed them back.
I picked up a shell, already planning ways in which to hide my distaste — subtly coughing it out into a paper-towel napkin, for instance. The little ivory and gray bodies looked inedible, and in any case, these days I had no appetite for anything that wasn’t red. I held the shell as he had, so that it didn’t spill any liquid, and I gamely sucked it into my mouth.
How to describe that first taste? Better than blood! The texture was firm, yet creamy, and it yielded a mineral essence that seemed to shoot oxygen right through my veins. Later I found out that oysters — the ones that haven’t been polluted, that is — are full of nutritious minerals, including oxygen, calcium, and phosphorus.
Mr. Winters was watching me — I felt it, even though I’d closed my eyes. I heard his voice say, “Of course some folks can’t abide the things…”
I opened my eyes. “The best thing I ever tasted.”
“That right?” He laughed softly.
“Ever.” We looked at each other with complete understanding.
Then we stopped looking and talking, and settled down to eating. We went through four dozen in no time.
You know, there are some things in life we either love or hate. No middle ground. Oysters are such things. By the way, they taste blue — the muted, salty shade of a London blue topaz.
Back in the truck, thoroughly sated, feeling oxygen moving like elixir through me, I said, “Thank you.”
He made his funny shrug again and started the truck. As we drove off, he said, “I had a daughter, once.”
I looked over at him, but his face in profile didn’t show emotion. “What became of her?”
“She married an idiot,” he said.
We didn’t speak for a minute. Then I found myself asking, “Did you ever meet my father?”
“Oh yes.” He turned the truck off the highway, into a neighborhood of old houses. “Met him three or four times. Liked him the first two.”
I didn’t know what to say.
He drove onto a quiet street of old houses, and pulled up close to a corner, under an enormous magnolia tree. Some of its blossoms weren’t open yet, and they were conical, the color of pale straw. Hard to imagine them opening into saucer-shaped white blooms, but the tree held plenty of evidence that they could, and would.
“So we’re here.” He looked across at me, his blue eyes serious. “Now, your auntie, if she’s home, is someone you’ll need time to get to know. She’s one of them…ladylike women, if you know what I mean.”
I didn’t know.
“She would never in her life eat a raw oyster,” he said. “She’s the kind you see in tearooms, eating little sandwiches on white bread with the crusts cut off.”
We left the truck. The house was gray, with two stories, symmetrical and plain in design, with a large, empty yard off to its left.
“That’s where she had the rose garden,” he said, speaking to himself. “Looks like it got dug up.”
He stood slightly behind me on the front porch as I rang the bell. The porch was well swept, and the windows above it were hung with lace curtains and Venetian blinds.
I rang the bell a second time. We heard it echo inside.
Mr. Winters said, “Well, you know —”
Then the door opened. A woman in a shapeless housedress looked at us with eyes that were the same color as mine. She was shorter and stouter than me. We stared at each other. She smoothed back her chin-length gray hair, then rested her hands on her neck.
“Good heavens,” she said. “Are you Sara’s girl?”
Mr. Winters left us soon afterward, but he wrote his telephone number in pencil on an old gas station receipt and handed it to me, with a wink, as he went out.
It wasn’t an easy reunion.
Aunt Sophie, it became clear within minutes, had been thoroughly disappointed by life. Again and again, people had let her down. She had been engaged once, to a man who later left town without saying goodbye.
While her accent was similar to that of Mr. Winters in its treatment of vowels, hers was higher and harsher in tone and more correct in grammar. I much preferred to listen to Mr. Winters. In fact, as I sat on the overstuffed, uncomfortable sofa in the parlor, lace doilies perched precariously on its arms and head, I wished Mr. Winters were related to me, instead of this person who clearly loved to talk and didn’t care or know how to listen.
“Your mother” — she paused to widen her eyes and shake her head — “hasn’t been in touch with me for years. Can you imagine a sister like that? But of course you’re an only child, Arabella. But not even a Christmas card. Not even a call on my birthday. Can you imagine?”
If I hadn’t recently consumed the best lunch of my life, I might have told her that yes, I could imagine. I might have added that my name wasn’t Arabella. I might even have walked out. She was boring, and repetitive, and condescending, and selfish. Within minutes I knew she’d been jealous of Sara all her life, and I suspected she’d treated my mother badly. But the joy of discovering oysters lingered, made me forgiving and tolerant. The world wasn’t such a bad place that afternoon, even if Aunt Sophie was in it.
She sat on the edge of her chair, ankles in pale nylons neatly aligned above low-heeled black pumps, as if she were the guest in the house. She looked to be in her late fifties; her mouth had a permanent downcast purse, and her skin a sallowness that I’d expect to see in a much older, thinner woman. Yet her eyes suggested that once she’d been pretty.
Her hands were jammed into her apron’s pockets, and her elbows looked dry and red. The room was decorated in beige and white, the furniture square and uncomfortable. A glass-fronted curio cabinet imprisoned porcelain figurines of impossibly cheerful children. Not one thing in the room felt genuine.
She had a way of beginning a story, then interjecting irrelevant comments of disapproval (“Your hair is so long” was one). After a while I stopped trying to make sense of it and simply let the words wash over me, knowing I’d sort them out later, if ever.
When she invited me to spend the night it was with such reluctance, such an odd, questioning note in her voice, that I was tempted to leave. But she was my aunt. She knew things about my mother, even if they were half-articulated. So I decided to stay.
We dined on chicken salad scooped onto leaves of iceberg lettuce, with green seedless grapes for dessert. Afterward, in the spare bedroom, I felt disappointed and deflated. I took a hefty swig of tonic and reminded myself that, besides Aunt Sophie, the world contained oysters, Roger Winters, and my mother — that is, if my mother was still alive. I pulled out my journal and began to write.
Sophie had last seen my mother thirteen years ago, soon after my birth. (She didn’t say that, but I figured out the dates, lying in bed.)
My mother had shown up on her doorstep one afternoon.
“Just the way you did,” Sophie told me. “I guess people are too busy to call first.”
“Was your phone number unlisted then, too?” I asked.
“Oh,” she said, making the word last three syllables. “I don’t remember that. You know, I had to have my number taken out of the telephone directory. A man kept calling here, and he said he dialed the wrong number, but I knew from his voice what sort he was. It’s not an easy life, living alone.” And off she went on a rant about the sorrows of spinsterhood, and being too poor to live in a gated community, and how she’d had to buy her very own revolver.
Anyway, my mother had arrived in sorry shape, Sophie said. “She looked terrible, and she hadn’t even packed a bag. And she wouldn’t tell me a thing — she wanted some money, and of course I don’t have any.”