My Nora

chapter Six


Matt had listened to Nora’s tentative, halting message at least ten times in the seven days immediately after arriving in Lenora. The trip had been grueling, as always, since his destination was in the middle of absof*ckinglutely nowhere and the closest major airport was several hours away by car. The ride from the airport with his aunt, Minnie, was always painful with her non-stop chattering about people he didn’t know nor have any desire to. When she started asking about whether or not he’d met any nice girls since he wasn’t “getting any younger, ya know,” he answered vaguely and steered the conversation elsewhere.

Matt didn’t want to talk about Nora with meddling Aunt Minnie or anyone in Lenora for that matter. Liberal bunch that they were, he wasn’t sure they’d wouldn’t wig out at the prospect of browning the family tree, even if just by a shade. “It’s always hardest for the children,” he expected they’d say, and of course they would in a place that had a black population of about one percent. He’d always lived in Chowan County, so he was used to one out of every two people being some shade of brown or tan or red. It seemed natural to him. Nora would have been a novelty to his Lenora family.

Matt had a hunch that Karen might have mentioned Nora in vague terms to his grandmother but had left the details up to Matt to sort out, God bless her. She kept asking questions like “I hear you got a new neighbor. That’s so nice. Is she single?”

The folks visiting at his grandmother’s house hadn’t left him alone for more than five minutes in nearly a week except for when he was fast asleep, and he hadn’t had a chance to sneak away to call Nora back. He just kept playing back the same message over and over:

“Hi, Matt? It’s Nora. Karen gave me your number. I hope that’s okay? I took her dinner and asked if you’d made it okay, so, here I am. I’ve been outside all day watching the painters tackle the barn. It’s kind of fascinating watching them up on the ladders, but I’m a bit wind chapped now. Um … Chad was poking around your house right after you left, so I don’t know if you expected him, but I thought I’d tell you. I … well. Call me back, okay? I never showed you that painting and want to text you a picture of it if you still want to see. Oh my God, I’m rambling. I’m sorry. Hey, just checking in. Bye.”

Then she clicked off. He wanted to call her back and ask her about her painting and her barn and Chad, especially, but the best he could do was lock himself in his grandmother’s powder room and send a fairly inadequate, in his opinion, text back: “I’m not ignoring you, Nora, I swear. I’m being stalked by nosy old bitties who think smartphone technology is fascinating. Every time my phone buzzes they drop what they’re doing and run over with their reading glasses. I really don’t want these nuts witnessing me courting you over the phone.”

About four minutes later, Nora responded: “Are we courting?”

Matt flushed the toilet to justify his occupation of the room and sent back: “Feels that way to me. Your mileage may vary.”

About seven minutes later, Nora returned, “There are some things you really need to know about me. I’m not a cut-and-dried girl.”

Matt, by then hiding in the back seat of his grandmother’s town car, sent “Good. I’d like you less if you were. Don’t worry about the skeletons. They’ll stay put until I get back. If I make it back. These people are intent on nagging me to death. I have to go figure out what’s wrong with the hay baler now.”

*

“So, how often do you come to these things?” Nora asked Karen as she took in the sloppily applied fall décor in the old armory.

Karen had wanted to go out and insisted Nora join her. “I like you, Nora,” Karen had said, giving Nora a reassuring pat on the back that’d made Nora raise a brow. Nora conceded just from pure curiosity.

The armory interior looked like someone had raided the clearance artificial flower bin at A.C. Moore and went to town with their hot glue gun. Nora assessed the gaggles of women dressed in various levels of skank-chic around her, and suddenly felt very overdressed in her fitted sweater dress. Some pop hit from the nineties was blaring through inadequate speakers propped atop flimsy particleboard stands and most people in the expansive room weren’t even bothering to sway — forget about dancing.

Nora had thought she’d be a dancer up until college. Drawing was an elective she took for fun. First class in, some professor figured out she had talent and guided her toward studio art. She changed her major after determining art would be a better long-term career. Still, she was a dancer at heart and the awful music just wouldn’t do for her. She looked around for the deejay and found a middle-aged woman sitting behind a plastic-covered card table squinting at CD cases.

“Oh, they have these things about once every quarter to raise money for the local veterans,” Karen finally responded, scanning the crowd studiously as if she was looking for someone in particular who was not the deejay.

“Admission is a bit steep, huh?” Nora gazed toward the “open bar,” which had turned out to be stocked with little more than fruit punch, fizzy caffeinated beverages, and store brand bottled water. She’d seen at least two “gentlemen” taking surreptitious nips from bottles sheathed in brown paper bags tucked into the back pockets of their baggy pants. Nora wondered what else they possibly had stored in those droopy bottomless pits and whether the contents could be loaded with bullets and discharged. She swallowed hard and tried to compose herself. Guns and small boats: her two favorite things.

“Yeah, guys cost five dollars more, though. The boy-to-girl ratio is always off.” Karen’s shoulders perked up a little and mouth spread into a smile after her eyes landed on some faraway corner of the room. “Hey, I’ll be right back,” she said, giving Nora a pat on the shoulder. Nora sighed and edged her way through the scattered clusters of aluminum folding chairs arranged around the periphery of the armory and found a completely vacant area near the hallway leading off to the bathrooms. She pried her phone out of her tiny purse and opened her photo folder to forward an image: “Here it is, Matt. It’s a small file, but it gives you a general idea.”

A man in the middle of the room started whooping as Nora hit “send” and there was a cluster of people starting to congregate around someone flailing about in the middle of the circle. Nora worried someone might be having a seizure or heart attack, but as no one was making any moves to seek medical assistance, she quickly dismissed the idea.

“What in the world?” she mumbled, craning her neck as far as she could to see through the crowd, but not being interested enough to actually abandon her seat. She didn’t need to, anyway. The person creating the commotion made it to the end of the makeshift Soul Train dance line that had clustered around her, and it was evident what all the fuss was about. The chick had apparently been nipping from a forty of her own as she was unabashedly doing some odd dance that was a raunchy combination between the worm and a dry hump against the floor. Fortunately, her Spanx covered anything scandalous.

Men were holding dollar bills up in the air for her triumphant arrival at the other end of the room and that seemed to have a horse-and-carrot effect and made the dancer wiggle faster. Near the wall she stood up and wiped dirt off her ample bosom and chapped knees. Next, she snatched the offered cash with the dexterity of a professional and turned to look behind her to see who followed her in the line. “Oh! Ain’t none of y’all follow me? Y’all trifling. Y’all don’t know how to do a line. I shoulda went to Gyrations tonight. I coulda got a Long Island tea. Forget you triflin’-ass — ” She grunted and stomped off in her stocking feet with a few of the more inebriated suitors in her wake.

As the clump of gawkers cleared, Nora’s phone buzzed and she looked down to find a message from Matt: “As awesome as I expected. Wish I could see it in person. The dog looked like he had a dragon tail, is that right? Hey — are the lights on at my house? I called Karen to ask her how that pipe is holding up but she’s not answering.”

Nora looked up through the dispersed crowd and found her raven-haired bespectacled accomplice on the other side of the room having her tonsils probed by Chad Dillard’s tongue. He looked like he was trying to swallow the poor girl’s head whole — some sort of misguided T-Rex who wasn’t quite sure of where the meat was. Nora suspected that he, like most of the men at the mixer, was drunk.

Nora felt conflicted, and that was an unusual sensation for her. Normally she created an action plan quickly and stuck to it. Should she break up the lip-lock knowing Matt wouldn’t approve of his sister’s involvement with the groping letch or let Karen, a grown woman capable of making her own bad decisions, carry on as desired? Her phone buzzed again. “Hey. She’s not answering her cell, either. Was there a dance tonight?”

That Nora could answer with honesty. “Yes. We’re at the armory.”

“Oh, you’re with her? That’s reassuring. Don’t get into any trouble. Ask her to check that pipe to make sure the seal is good when she gets home, please.”

“I will.”

“That’s goodnight, then. I’ve been recruited to work the Blu-ray player for family movie night. It’s as fun as it sounds.”

Nora felt as if she’d been pulled off the ledge at the last minute and sighed her relief. When she looked up again, both Chad and Karen were gone. Nora sat there in her hard chair for a while, fidgeting and refreshing the email on her phone, and occasionally glancing around at the dead crowd that seemed more intent on staring at each other from their own chairs than doing any actual mingling. Well, she wanted to get to know Chowan County culture. This was her chance.

She blew out a raspberry, shrugged, and when Sugar Hill Gang’s “Jump On It” began playing through the rattling speakers, she ran out to the middle of the hardwood court and did what the men on the track instructed.

Of course, Nora didn’t notice the camera flash going off behind her as she danced because it was in her nature to do so with abandon. She popped and locked with her eyes closed, opening them occasionally to find that people were closing in on center-court around her, busting some moves of their own. She may have even taken a swig or two of smuggled-in malt liquor when it was being passed around, because that was the only way to account for the fact that she’d entirely missed the big black camera being wielded by the reporter from The Albemarle Times that had taken not one, but two unflattering shots of her contorting her sweaty body into gravity-defying poses.

When she woke up around noon the next day, after having been dragged off the dance floor by an agitated Karen at around one A.M., she turned on her phone to find at least seventeen missed calls and messages. From Bennie:

“Bitch! Oh my god. You know, it’s a good thing I run a web search on you every day as your agent. What’s this? You went out dancing with the bourgeoisie last night? Your mug is all over your local newspaper’s website and some jackass made a video of you dancing like Carlton Banks and put it on YouTube. I’ve done some damage control and linked the article to your fan page so it looks intentional, but OMG, why can’t you just hide and be mysterious like other hipster artists? Now, quit rubbing elbows with the huddled masses and Do. Some. Work!”

Nora didn’t even know she had a fan page and thought maybe she should pay Bennie after all. From Matt:

“Had fun last night? I subscribe to the paper and get alerts on my phone when the new editions go live. I would have been jealous of all the homeboys grinding against you if it weren’t for the fact that I’ve already seen your moves in person. Hey — ‘Cell Block Tango,’ right? Took me that long to find out who ‘Lipschitz’ was. We watched Chicago last night. My oma likes Richard Gere.”

She blushed hard at that. And from Hattie:

“Ooh, chile! You must have been cuttin’ up something terrible last night. If everyone in the county didn’t know who you was before they sho do now.” Hattie ended her voicemail with a cackle that gave Nora the distinct impression that she had in a couple of hours of dancing developed unwanted notoriety.

Well, hell.

There were numerous other messages from people who’d read the paper and surfed to her website out of curiosity and then, finding her to be a legitimate craftsperson, wanted to know about the availability of certain works. What Nora wanted to know was who had told the reporter her name, and that turned out to be easy to figure out. After she chugged down a couple of scalding mugs of black coffee and ate the previous day’s biscuit leftovers dry, she pulled on her rubber boots and hooded windbreaker and flung herself into her car to drive to the electronics shop.

Nora fumed all the way there — a full eight minutes south on Highway 32. It wasn’t that she was angry that she’d been caught in an embarrassing situation: she’d been captured on film doing much more entertaining things. In fact, the year she graduated from college one of her classmates filmed a short documentary about creatives and their outward appearance. The filmmaker encouraged them all to delve deep into why they chose to emphasize certain features. Nora insisted that she didn’t actually pay all that much attention to how she looked, but the filmmaker, an astute young man named Corey who probably would have been as successful as a therapist as he was as a cinematographer, gently informed her that if that were true she wouldn’t spend so much time each day engaged in the artful manipulation of her hair.

Nora tried to argue with Corey that she wasn’t vain and that her hair was no more important to her than the shoes she selected each morning or the smock she wore to protect her clothes. But one evening, staring into the bathroom mirror in Elvin’s cramped apartment, she discovered something important about herself. Instead of the post-coital glow on her forehead and cheeks or the smudged mascara streaking her skin, what she paid most important to in that glass was how her slick, shiny hair had become disheveled during their lovemaking and that it needed immediate repair.

At that time, Nora’s hair fell to her bra band. She straightened it regularly, and curled it to the perfect amount of flip and bounce. She’d always been careful with her hair and spent nearly as much money on its upkeep as she did on painting supplies, although she’d never done the math to figure that out. Standing there in that bathroom, overly concerned with the condition of her hair rather than the state of her lover, she knew Corey was right. The next day, in front of twenty peers and one rolling camera, Nora shaved her head. She found, however, that her hair didn’t stop being a constant concern. Instead of wanting people to notice it and admire it, she spent an untenable amount of energy trying to get people to ignore it. Five years after her “big chop,” her hair was the same length it had been when she shaved it, but completely different in appearance. Nora handled it as little as possible, and by extension, prevented people from seeing it. Bennie regularly criticized her unwillingness to show what was beneath her multitude of scarves, but Nora wasn’t ready to defend her hair or be judged for what she didn’t do to it.

Nora’s anger at Chad was due to her belief that he was diverting attention toward her so that his own deeds were ignored. She wondered just what happened between him and Karen the night before that had Karen rushing out of that gymnasium so quickly with a look of disgust on her young face. It was better if the deed surfaced while big brother was away so he would have time and distance to burn off his anger.

Unfortunately for Nora, and probably fortunately for Chad, he wasn’t at the appliance shop when she arrived. “Hey, can I help you?” The woman behind the register counter wore some sort of hot pink stretchy infant wrap over her plaid flannel shirt. If it weren’t for the fact she was cradling the bottom of her ample chest with one arm, Nora wouldn’t have been able to tell there was an actual infant in it.

“I’m looking for Chad,” Nora said cautiously, watching the expression on the woman’s face shift from idle curiosity to disdain.

“Oh, me too, honey,” she said, patting what seemed to be the baby’s bottom and rocking from foot to foot repeatedly. “He was supposed to install some satellite dishes yesterday and didn’t come in. Haven’t seen him this morning. Anything I can do for ya? Ooh ooh! Weren’t you in the paper this morning?”

Nora ignored the last question. “I needed to ask him some questions about … ” Nora read the attentiveness in soon-to-be former Mrs. Dillard’s face and remembered what Matt had said about her fickleness. It seemed wise to keep her in the dark. “My dish installation,” she finished, fondling the price tag on a lockable deep freezer. It was actually reasonably priced.

Patricia picked up the pen chained to the register and poised it over a scrap of receipt tape. “What’s your number? I’ll have him call you whenever he comes in. Can’t promise when that’ll be.”

“That’s fine, it’s not pressing. It really has more to do with picture quality than the installation itself. I can just call the satellite company … ”

“No!” Patricia shrieked, scaring her baby awake.

Nora raised one brow at her.

“Shh-shh,” she cooed to the squawking baby. “You got to give us a chance to fix it before you get them involved. If they get too many folks calling them directly they might pull our contract. That’s a big chunk of our business.” Patricia was starting to get frantic and was rocking the infant way too quickly in the wrap. Her hazel eyes looked wild and nearly manic, but that may have had to do with sleep-deprivation and not so much Nora’s plight. “We try to do right by folks but you got to give us the chance to fix it.”

Nora started backing toward the door, twirling her key ring around her index finger. “Um, can you just have him stop by whenever you get a hold of him? I’ll just hold off on that phone call.”

“You got it. I’ll find him even if I have to close up the shop. He’ll be out there first thing next week.”

“Thanks, Patricia. I’m counting on it.” Nora left the woman to her crying baby and headed home to paint before the muse left her. She had an idea.