The Cat's Pajamas

CHRYSALIS

1946–1947

LONG AFTER MIDNIGHT he arose and looked at the bottles fresh from their cartons, and put his hands up to touch them and strike a match gently to read the white labels, while his folks slept unaware in the next room. Below the hill on which their house stood the sea rolled in and while whispering the magic names of the lotions to himself he could hear the tides washing the rocks and the sand. The names lay easy on his tongue: MEMPHIS WHITE OIL, Guaranteed, Tennessee Lotion Salve … HIGGEN’S BLEACH BONE WHITE SOAP—the names that were like sunlight burning away dark, like water bleaching linens. He would uncork them and sniff them and pour a little on his hands and rub them together and hold his hand in match light to see how soon he would have hands like white cotton gloves. When nothing happened, he consoled himself that perhaps tomorrow night, or the next, and back in bed he would lie with his eyes upon the bottles, racked like giant green glass beetles above him, glinting in the faint streetlight.

Why am I doing this? he thought. Why?

“Walter?” That was his mother calling softly, far away.

“Yes’m?”

“You awake, Walter?”

“Yes’m.”

“You better go to sleep,” she said.

IN THE MORNING he went down for his first view, close up, of the constant sea. It was a wonder to him, for he had never seen one. They came from a little town deep in Alabama, all dust and heat, with dry creeks and mud holes, but no river, no lake nearby, nothing much at all unless you traveled, and this was the first traveling they had done, coming to California in a dented Ford, singing quietly along the way. Just before starting the trip Walter had finished out a year’s time saving his money and sent off for the twelve bottles of magical lotion that had arrived only the day before they left. So he had had to pack them into cartons and carry them across the meadows and deserts of the states, secretly trying one or the other of them in shanties and restrooms along the way. He had sat up front in the car, his head back, his eyes closed, taking the sun, lotion on his face, waiting to be bleached as white as milk-stone. “I can see it,” he said, each night, to himself. “Just a little bit.”

“Walter,” said his mother. “What’s that smell? What you wearing?”