Suddenly, Last Thursday
© 2002-2004 by M. Christian
 

Even in the clearest, coldest water, gardenias are the white of a virginal bride a only short time ñ their purity and innocence turning weary yellow then bitter brown in days.  Days, yes, but if you had the patience to watch unblinkingly -- but seconds, it always seemed, if you turn away and then back: life before, nothing but dead petals after. 

Looking at her, faded crinoline in the hard light of morning, I felt shame that I had faulted in my patience.  If I hadn’t continued on my rounds, hadn’t allowed routine to take me away from this gardenia in the asylum sunroom then perhaps she would have stayed full, rather than continue to drain. 

The day was warm, threatening hot, but the threat was prescient in that room: the glass magnified the sun, and I would have said something, anything, to keep her in a better environment, a cool bowl of water rather than a hothouse, but I indulged her.  Something about the heat, about the dancing waves that lured perspiration out of every corner of the body, that seemed to quell her hysterias.

“What is it about the foods that begin the day, doctor?” She looked up at me from the chaise lounge, her indicating with an aquatically tired gesture a breakfast tray on the terra cotta floor tiles beside her: pancakes and syrup, a half glass of orange juice, a half grapefruit , barely touched, hardly eaten , quickly lusted after by a slow circle of fat flies.  “Too sweet for any dessert, but we expect, crave them. Dreams, doctor, maybe dreams hunger for sugar, for syrups and compote, maybe thatís why we can tolerate such sugars only in the mornings.”

Gardenias and then, with those words, a child’s plaything: a porcelain plaything outliving some child, then adult, then matron.Life burned away, but beauty preserved like a doll still beautiful despite ages on a shelf , but in her case the flame wasn’t age, but rather some unknown trauma, some daylight nightmare, a cryptic brutality that turned a girl into crisped petals and cracked china.

“You have been good to me, doctor,” she said, looking up at me from under a cream colored sun hat, flashing at me eyes the color of polished amber.“To everyone else I’m just another monkey in this zoo, but you, doctor, you look and you see me. For that, kind sir, I am eternally grateful.”

She looked again at the breakfast tray, as if seeing the crystallizing syrup, the feeding flies, thick juice for the first time.Those amber eyes widened, for a moment seeing not discarded food and dirty dishes but something else.  Rather than the tray, the food, she looked up at me. “You deserve kindness, doctor, gratitude for the humanity in your lovely eyes. I would cure myself of this madness if it were in my power, because that would be the best gift to give you, but I cannot. I would demonstrate myself to you in other ways, but I can tell that would not be a gift you would appreciate, as I will always be patient to your doctor.”

My face flushed red, my mouth too full of things to say, so silence was the only thing that made it out.

“Beyond a healthy will, which I cannot give, I know what you want, doctor.  Ha!  I know your real desire, doctor, I know your scientific hungers, so I will, despite my horrors, give you a taste this morning of what occurred, what happened that Thursday last, the beginning that has ended here, with you, and this place.

“But, doctor, before I begin I must tell you of what I have learned.  The real lesson. We all have hungers, doctor, we all crave and pursue: yours is truth, to solve the puzzle. But with the smallest taste appetites can grow, doctor, they can become something large and terrible and consuming.”

She paused to brush gently at her faded skirts, smoothing the material: an echo, a memory of how things must have been, before saying, “There’s a road . . . “

***

There’s a road up by the highway, you may have seen it, that rounds a low hill. A perfect place, Sebastian, said. Sebastian, my brother, said.

Somewhere a book said that just as we all wish to consume something we also have something to give.  Tragedy is when you live your life without discovering what it is you have to give.  Cruelty is when you have something to give, but do not , and Sebastian?  Sebastian was neither tragic nor cruel, but something else: a man without definition, a man with appetites, but also with a true gift, greatness to give.  Sebastian is my brother and if you ever had the pleasure or misfortune to make his acquaintance then you, too, would know that definitions fail to catch him. Sebastian was my brother, and Sebastian was Sebastian.

“That road” he said to me a year, maybe a year and some months, for the world rarely listens to real anniversaries, “is perfect.”  Where it curls around the low hill, he did his building., Because Sebastian is the oldest by some years and some months, because I rarely pay attention to details of time, Mamma and Poppa left him some money.  Not enough for true luxury, but more than enough for a man like Sebastian to begin.

Mamma adored Sebastian.  She would sit in the drawing room in the afternoons and simply talk about Sebastian like his was a face that decorated the lobby of the Odeon and not her flesh and blood.  “That Sebastian” she would saw, fanning herself and sipping the sweet drinks that I would make her, “is a man like no other,”  and I would agree, for I, too, say his as a face that could possibly flicker and shine in a matinee. 

Pappa did not hate Sebastian, but he did not love him the way Mamma loved him.  Pappa would talk about Sebastian like he wasn’t in the same room or even standing right there before him , right there.  “That boy ,” he’d begin, though Sebastian was not old, but certainly not a boy “ , is too different for this world, and I would agree, for I, too, saw him as I saw no other man I had ever met, or seen.  Sebastian was an angel face, but he was also a man with cold marble eyes equal with his movie screen beauty. 

I did not hate, nor did I adore him with blushing cheeks, as did my Mamma. Sebastian was the boy who picked wildflowers and sprayed their petals on my bed one morning.  Sebastian was the boy who put a dead frog under those same covers.  My brother would, for no reason, call me a beauty like no other , singing poetry about Helen of Troy and the names of movie beauties like Elizabeth Taylor for no other reason, he said, than my face was caught an evening light “just so” but he was also the boy who told his friends, my friends, complete strangers that my legs swung wide and often, sometimes for trinkets, sometimes for coins, mostly just because I liked it.

Later, after many summers of petals and dead frogs, we both traveled to the big school in New Orleans. In a big house dripping with ivy, a yard pressed under lethargic willows, we moved forwarded in our lives.  I discovered the fabrics, cosmetics, perfumes, and laughter of being a woman.  I also learned both the power and the shame of being a woman, how I was what men wanted but that they also hated me for that wanting. 

In high rooms framed by curling iron balconies, and in steaming kitchens, Sebastian discovered something as well: he discovered pans and pots, flour, starch and sugar; temperatures, coolings, spices, and flavors.  With first whispers then with pleas Sebastian’s audience of students and teachers asked for new and better delicacies.  Nothing seemed impossible for his tea and table spoons, his measuring cups and ladles or his,  yes, his hands, I suppose , though watching people eat what he put in front of them you would swear, as did I, that there was something beyond simple cooking involved in his recipes.  Angel, devil, my brother put all of himself into what he prepared, and as he cooked, and as more and more people sampled his wares, Sebastian, asked for and received greater and greater rewards.  Sebastian, it seemed, had discovered his gift, as well as the cruelty in not rewarding it to the hungry.

Our parent’s death, the result of an interaction between their habit of a Sunday morning drive after services and an early freight train, came, for Sebastian at least , at a fortuitous moment in his education: between experiments with sautes and bouillabaisse a teacher, whose own specialty was baked goods and sauces, was discovered bent over a hot stove with Sebastian’s own baster between his buttered buns.  Much was ignored, much was denied, but too much had been done of both and politely, Sebastian and I, my guilt solely by familial association, were asked to leave.

But Sebastian’s dismissal from the school did nothing to remove the beautiful expression from his perfect face.  Leaving me to put our parentís affairs in their orders, and to make the arrangement for their internment, he spent long days driving in the country, looking for something he wouldn’t specify.

The day of the funeral, the minister praising their goodness, denying their own guilts with much better conviction that the school had done for their students and teachers, Sebastian drove me many miles beyond the city, into the rolling hills.  At a certain point, where the road rounded a low hill, he stopped the car and said: “a perfect place.  A perfect place for what I want to do --- what I was born to do.”

The day was hot, though not as hot as this day, doctor, and I was still in my black dress from the funeral, but I still felt a deep chill as Sebastian spoke those words: the feeling of ice, of goosebumps, on a heated day.  With his gift, and the pleasure he felt in withholding it, my brother had found the ideal location.  I didn’t want to go with him, to help him in what he wanted to do, but I did nonetheless.  Sebastian was many things, doctor, but most of all he was my brother.

Then he began to build.  From the city he hired teams of big, sweaty men to come up with him to that low hill, that spot along that road, to lay brick, hammer nails, lift great beams, and pound sheets of corrugated steel.  That summer was not just hot, it was the hottest; the air was not just humid, but rather the most humid anyone could remember as having felt , but still Sebastian was there, helping those brawny men lay, hammer, lift, and pound until piles of bricks, nails, beams, and corrugated steel grew into the architecture of Sebastian’s desire.

I helped him as much as I could.  At first it wasn’t a place for a lady, but I still came up every day with a lunch of potato salad, fried chicken and beer for him and the workmen.  But when it was finished, I was there right beside him when he took down that crudely painted OPEN SOON banner to put out an OPEN sandwichboard.

The name of the place was Sebastian’s idea, of course.  If it’d been up to me I would have certainly named it something else, say French , those lovely, pretty words that would be on the lips and tongue like sweet cakes and lemonade, not something crude like those words that Sebastian chose to hang out front.  But that was Sebastian, you see: he knew all those pretty French words, but to him, and what he wanted to do, what mattered more was what was on the plates, and not that the place settings were guided, or even that clean.

Like his menu: chalk on blackboards , and what was on those slates in simple block letters GRITS, HOMINY, BISCUITS, CORN ON THE COB, and most of all, those three letters, doctor, those three very special letters: BBQ, as in BBQ CHICKEN, BBQ RIBS, BBQ PORK.  “If it walks,” Sebastian would say, “I’ll cook it -- and if it talks, I’ll serve it.”

Serve them he did, doctor.  At first it was long nights there in the cool darkness of the place: Sebastian in the kitchen, slicing, stirring, feeding the ovens, the grills, the air heavy with sweetness, with honey, with butter, with the sound of crackling meat, the sputters of fat and grease on the coals.  I would write on those blackboards, trying to improve Sebastian’s simple lettering with my own feminine swirls and arcs.  In the kitchen, Sebastian was a magician: turning bleeding raw meat into delicacies glowing with spice and glazes, transforming raw vegetables into steaming feasts shimmering with butter.  Watching him, through clouds of aromatic steam, I remember feeling the bite of jealousy, that my brother was in his place, performing his talent, when all I could do Ö all I could do was write down what he was doing.

It wasn’t long before people started to come.  How they heard I don’t know, because Sebastian didn’t advertise or even talk to many people about what he was doing up there on that road.  Maybe the wind shifted one day, and that rich steam from his roasting meat, the alluring scent of his cooking vegetables reached down to the city, into the noses of a lucky few, and maybe those few told their friends, until the smells of Sebastian’s magic, or just their rapturous description of them, spread throughout the whole of the state. 

People came.  Sebastian stayed in his kitchen, doing his magic. People came, and people ate.  Soon there were too many for us, and so I hired a pair of colored girls to help with the taking of orders, cleaning tables, washing up, while I walked around, dressed in my finest, making sure everyone was happy.  I like to think that some of them came up that road to that little brick and iron building to see me, but it’s a sad little dream, doctor, because they came and they ate: their faces never turned away from the BBQ, their grits, their hominy, their biscuits and ears of buttery sweetcorn.  But I stayed.  I stayed because Sebastian needed my help, or I hoped he needed my help, and  I didn’t have anywhere else to go.