Peaches and Cream
In this poignant tale set in 1960s Montgomery, a young boy faces the complexities of adulthood during his annual visit to his grandmother.
In the shallow end, I found it hard to keep my attention on Kitty Bass or the swimming lesson. I was preoccupied with the ten o’clock bus. Blink your eyes and you could miss it—a double-decker! I’d never forgive myself.
“Okay...let’s kick,” ordered Kitty—high school girl, bossy—with her usual terrible timing.
So I took my place in the row of Tadpoles, along the side of the pool, right at the two-foot marker, held onto the smooth underlip and kicked—but kept rearing my head up to look.
“Keep your head down,” barked Kitty.
Then, Buster Lang, a grade older and in Intermediate, walking by, dripping, announced offhandedly for my benefit, “Bus.”
In a microsecond I was on my feet, jumping up and down on an invisible pogo stick, catching the gleaming marvel in flashes through the trees over the Youth Center lawn—sure enough, a double-decker gearing down for the light. It came to a stop and sat there sleek and idling, and I kept looking until, with that sweet, signature groan, it made the turn into its parking space at Hatchett’s Amoco, which is all we ever had for a bus station.
Which is the thing about being a kid: you take things for what they are. You don’t compare them to anything. You don’t go, “Why do we have such a crummy bus station?” Your own place sets the standard.
So I watched the bus as long as I could, until at last it surged out into the street—leaving a longing in me, which if there’s a God I believe will be his nature since longing is always better than anything that could possibly fill it.
Mr. Hatchett, whose face did look like a hatchet but who was friendly, slow, and always busy—he did have a station to run, after all, and only Lucius to help—reigned in my mind as the prototype bus station man. The station, an extension of him, constituted an exquisitely cluttered and necessary corner of our town. Freight and packages teetered in risky stacks around the chaotic ticket counter in the back, where in between a dozen other chores Mr. Hatchett would take out a passenger’s gray rectangular ticket and stamp it—authentic Greyhound, none of that flimsy yellow Trailways crap.
So I watched the bus as long as I could, until at last it surged out into the street and turning at the train depot disappeared—leaving a longing in me, which if there’s a God I believe will be his nature since longing is always better than anything that could possibly fill it. And of course Kitty would tell my mother again I needed to keep my mind on my lesson, but frankly I hated swimming lessons and would learn how to swim, anyway.
I made my annual late August/early September pilgrimage to my grandmother’s in Montgomery that summer, 1962, when I turned ten. How different everything about Hatchett’s seemed when you were the rider! All spruced up with my suitcase, I got my ticket and put it in my shirt pocket where over the next half hour I would make sure approximately a hundred times it was still there, my mother asking after it almost as many. Then my sister and I took up lookout positions at the far corner of the station with a view way up the busy road. At last we sighted it, running about ten minutes late, towering imperially silver above the mere cars, my insides turning icy the closer it came. It was not a double-decker, but the disappointment was only momentary.
It groaned into its space, then sat purring. Lucius went right at the baggage compartments with his little tool. The door opened, and the driver stepped regally down. He smiled at me and went into the station, allowing me a few seconds to stand face to face with the little Greyhound plate, the enormous windows like eyes, feeling it like a face, something alive. Then I hurried to be first in line—not really a line, only two other people. I stood there inches from the metal greyhound riveted to the side (superior to the painted ones) and the “Leave the Driving to Us” slogan, consuming, absolutely devouring, every detail. Then I held out my ticket to the driver—the “operator,” it said inside. Elgin Lowndes, safe, reliable, courteous. I deeply admired his hole-puncher. I promise you this, you could search every store on the face of the earth (I did) and never find one like it, just crummy dime store crap.
Then up the steps I went. Few anxieties in life could rival that moment of hoping the right front seat would not be occupied. This time, to my joy, it wasn’t, and I hastily claimed it. Window seat, extreme front right, just behind the little barrier, with an unimpeded view of the driver and out the front window.
I wedged the suitcase in the netting overhead, then sat, enjoying my prestige, absorbing the feeling, waving out the window to my smiling mother and envious sister, until at last the driver scooted back in, did some ticket stuff, then reached out to close the door with the smooth, silver, finger-grooved handle. Then that ethereal hiss, a check in the mirrors, he turned the big flat steering wheel and roared us out onto the road.
Please, God, let no one else sit here. How I wished I had a piano or a safe or a chester drawers in the seat beside me.
Through one’s own town! That was the thing. Like seeing the place from a higher realm—the same streets, the same stores, the theater, sidewalks where you rode your bike, people you knew, walking, in their cars—you, the emperor. No stopping, no joining in today—not watching the silver spectacle but in it—not hearing that groan but making it.
Pretty soon the town fell behind and, pre-interstate, we were rolling through the country, sometimes coming right up behind a car and passing it with a beep. I looked imperiously down as we engulfed it. Nobody passed a Greyhound; Greyhounds passed you. Only one stop—Tuskegee—and about five miles out, the fingertips of fear reached me. Please, God, let no one else sit here. How I wished I had a piano or a safe or a chester drawers in the seat beside me.
We pulled in—another gas station (not as good)—and as the bumping of baggage loading went on below me, the passengers embarked, seven or eight of them. Most ignored me. One or two caught my eye, especially one woman whose acid gaze corroded me and the empty seat beside me as I sat seized with rigor mortis, trying not to look at her. She passed by. Relieved, I started breathing again, until I saw a latecomer rush out from the waiting room and start talking animatedly to the driver. I was thinking no, no, no, but he got on, stopped, sized me up—just stood there—until somebody called out “Oscar!” and he grinned over my head and sidled past.
At last, the driver got back on and closed the blessed door. We hissed and pulled away.
In Montgomery, the bus went right down Madison Avenue through Capitol Heights, passing within a block of my grandmother’s house. My father never understood why I didn’t want the driver to let me off right there. If you pulled the cord, he would stop at the next red light. I could walk the block or two with my suitcase, saving Mimi the cab fare and everybody a whole lot of trouble.
Okay, here’s what I would have missed: the last couple of miles, the city, with so many more people to see you in your glory. The driver, maneuvering one-handed through the final blocks, calling out the connections on his microphone. The triumphal entrance into the Montgomery station—a real bus station, with rows of buses—then disembarking warm-faced in the intense proximity of so much bus-ness, into that delicious diesel fragrance, and there, just at the door into the terminal, Mimi.
That’s all.
Red Taxi—always a line of them outside, not too many Yellows, though my grandfather had driven a Yellow for a year or two after his retirement. His death made Mimi a widow three years ago that summer, but I’d kept a memory of his Yellow taxi parked before the house on the street—lunch break, I guess—and of a quiet, gentle man crumbling cornbread into a tall glass of buttermilk and half eating half drinking it. Or him sitting in a metal lawn chair on the shady walk bisecting the front yard in the late afternoon, just smoking, red Lucky Strike emblem showing through his shirt pocket like a target, and the way he had smacked his lips. And I remember his deathbed, though I didn’t know it was that, in the middle room, and that oppressive atmosphere—the first time I ever remember hearing the word “cancer”—the time when it took on its malignancy, and still, when I hear the word, it takes me back to that dark airless sweet-smelling room.
The taxi let Mimi and me out into that shadycool, late-summer, midday-fried-chicken smell—up the walk and into the full olfactory symphony of the house. Cora, in a dark apron powdered with flour, stood in the kitchen cooking dinner—middle-of-the-day dinner, the big meal. I went in to greet her; she smiled, cradled the back of my head, then went back to being Cora.
That’s when I realized Mr. Johnson—a grinning, blubbery man— had materialized from somewhere. I didn’t know him very well yet, but I basically liked him—though when he sat down with us to eat, I couldn’t shake the feeling of oddness.
Of course, Mr. Dillard never ate with us—the line was distinct and formal: he would no more have intruded into our kin circle than we would have entered his room. Unthinkable. Not that things weren’t cordial, and we didn’t have our afternoon talks. Mr. Dillard had been there about as far back as I could remember, unlike the more recent arrival, Mr. Johnson, in the other room. Mr. Dillard, starched and dry; Mr. Johnson soft and blabby—some kind of a former salesman with boxes filled with old blank forms and pads that he liberally bestowed upon me and I liberally used. Evidently, he no longer worked, but Mr. Dillard did. A barber, who disappeared for work every day. Before them had been two women, one named Florella and I forget the other. Like I said, children don’t question—I was hardly aware of the word “roomer,” and didn’t have it quite separated in my head from “rumor,” which I didn’t clearly understand either, or care really: Mr. Dillard and Mr. Johnson simply had their rooms and lived there.
Mimi would ask if I was ready for my coffee and laugh that silly conspiratorial laugh of hers. And I never for one second worried about stunting my growth. Just got it while I could.
But I had no precedent for a roomer at the table. Cora, terse and surly though Mimi didn’t seem to notice, brought in the food, then disappeared.
Tall glasses of iced tea set in glass coasters—stirring in the sugar that mostly resettled into a little dune on the bottom (Mama put the sugar in while the tea was hot and said she couldn’t understand why anybody wouldn’t), shrimp salad, chicken, fried apple pies, and freshly sliced peaches. No vegetable crap, no mush—this was Mimi’s house. And of course the whipped cream which Cora lathered up with a hand beater in a particular white bowl with a blue ring around it. Mountains of it. Followed by my Royal Cup. Which of all the indulgences of the place topped the list. Partially because of the forbiddenness—but also I really liked it. Mimi would ask if I was ready for my coffee and laugh that silly conspiratorial laugh of hers. And I never for one second worried about stunting my growth. Just got it while I could.
“Old bachelors”—that’s what they were to Mimi, especially Mr. Dillard—nothing condescending or condemnatory in it, that’s just what they were. Neither seemed to have any relations or acquaintances. Christmases—pre-Mr. Johnson—when we all came over with presents and Mr. Dillard stayed in his room to be coaxed out only briefly for ambrosia: the pathos of that didn’t hit me until years later. The one time I entered his room, on some official errand (and even then had to be prodded), I remember his brush and comb and hair oil and watch on the dresser—everything neat and clean—and his smell. He had clean, smooth hands. A barber’s hands. Everybody good went to Heaven, they told me, and I used to think about good Mr. Dillard there, sitting on some incorruptible porch—doing what I did not know.
Mr. Johnson continued to eat with us—not every time, but occasionally. A few remnants of silver hair spidered over his shiny speckled head, his glasses wobbly. He less wore them than kept them vaguely in the vicinity of his face. He often went about, like Mimi, without his teeth. They had the same smushed-in comic-book faces.
It took three days for him to really get on my nerves. He and Mimi seemed to be always whispering and giggling. Cora went about her work briskly—cleaned up the kitchen, swept and mopped, and left about two o’clock in her hat, a dress-up ladies’ hat, carrying her daily paper bag.
No such thing as boredom at Mimi’s. The “back room” where she slept had, besides the bed, an old trunk filled with books and clothes, old photographs, a coin collection, two metal Popeye savings banks that ingested dimes and wouldn’t open until they were precisely full (ten dollars, I think)—and lots of my father’s childhood drawings and marginalia-decorated schoolbooks. A little fleet of his old balsa-wood models sat crowded in a high cabinet—mostly airplanes but a few ships. Cora had once shown me the secret compartment he had made in the bottom of a gray destroyer where he hid his cigarettes (them things kill you). And of course, his desk—buggered-out keyhole on the paint-splattered fold-down flap—opening into a wondrous array of little drawers and cubbyholes that still held his stuff. I spent afternoons lying atop the scuppernong arbor, not even coming close to eating myself sick, or on the shady front porch, in the platform swing or lining up chairs playing bus, or reading the new batch of comic books I bought every day in my mid-afternoon trek to the drug store-smelling drug store—working through the two creaking racks. I bought ten a day—mostly dime-sized but sometimes fifteen cents or War and Peace-sized for a quarter—usually got a foot-long hot dog and/or malt at the Dairy DeeLite, then returned with my treasures in the sublime afternoon.
We heard a commotion in the hall and looked up to see Mimi, an ample woman who spent most days in a shapeless house dress with big pockets, come pattering past the door, half giggling, half squealing, with the tittering Mr. Johnson in pursuit.
At some point, Mimi would come out with her afternoon Co-Cola—a frosty napkin-wrapped six and a half ounce (she didn’t even recognize the existence of anything else) and sometimes Mr. Johnson, too, if he wasn't closed in his air-conditioned room, watching game shows. Mr. Dillard had neither air conditioner nor TV. He would ask me about my comic books, but obviously knew nothing about the Doom Patrol, or the Fantastic Four, or the Riddler, or Lex Luthor, or anything else. One afternoon I went inside and caught Mimi and Mr. Johnson in the little laundry room between the kitchen and middle room, up against the washing machine, kissing. They stopped when they saw me—they giggled—he called her “Peaches.” I got a Coke and didn’t know what to make of it.
The Edge of Night. The dark title angled across the TV screen and the organ mourned. It was the only time besides Lawrence Welk I remember Mimi’s TV ever being on—in the middle room as Cora ironed. Ironing fascinated me, and I could sit on the bed for the longest time watching her while she would talk about her husbands and her children and all the things and places she wanted to do and see. Only to me, of course—she froze into silence if anyone else came in. She would always find something—threadbare hand towels or old handkerchiefs, usually—in the chifferobe for me to iron. I was working on a brown-singed handkerchief one afternoon—sprinkling, ironing, folding with mathematical exactness—when we heard a commotion in the hall and looked up to see Mimi, an ample woman who spent most days in a shapeless house dress with big pockets, come pattering past the door, half giggling, half squealing, with the tittering Mr. Johnson in pursuit. Cora ignored it, or tried to, only caught my eye for an instant with a funny look, like the garbage needed taking out, that she wore the rest of the day, come to think of it.
When we went to Wade’s market, up across Madison Avenue, that afternoon, I confided to Cora that I was sick of Mr. Johnson and asked if she was, and she just snorted and made a face and said it wasn’t any of her business. On the way back I brought up the subject again, asked her if she had seen them kissing, and she said she didn’t go looking because—and this was all that mattered—it just wasn’t one bit of her business. People ought to keep their doings to themselves and if they felt like doing something, it wasn’t somebody else’s business if they went off somewhere and did it. Two people want to kiss—let them do it. They want to run around and act like fools—let them do it. The way she saw it, everybody ought to do what they wanted to do and go where they wanted to go, and nobody had the right to tell anybody else what they could do or where they could eat or where they had to sit. The way she saw it. This answer actually took her the whole way back to say, but she stopped talking abruptly as we came up the steps of the front walk. When she left a little later, having put on lipstick, she squeezed my shoulder, cupped the back of my head like she did, and gave me a smile.
I had been looking for a bus driver uniform; when I came to Mimi’s we always made at least one expedition downtown, and our mission this time was to find one. I agonized over what I would do if they only had Trailways. Mimi suggested Mr. Johnson might come with us, and I suppose my reaction did the job of banishing that idea.
Of course, I had to get ready. The greater part of my toilette was taken up with shaving. I squirted out big clouds of Barbasol (which Mimi kept in the bathroom cabinet for me) and slathered it thickly all over my face, including my forehead and halfway around my neck, then shaved it off with an unbladed safety razor a half dozen times or so. Then did my hair—Wildroot so thick my hair oozed milky cream and would later harden into a grooved helmet. When I was ready, I went into the back room and caught Mimi undressed in the little hallway where her closet was. Holy Cow! She squealed and reached for her housecoat. Only a glimpse, mind you—and it wasn’t the shock of seeing my grandmother transformed into a mammal—it was her hair. I had never—you understand what I’m saying? never—seen Mimi with her hair anywhere except bunned up on her head, and there she stood with it flaming halfway down her back. I tell you, the only thing missing was the Bernard Herrmann score.
But when she came out a little later, re-bunned and in a proper dress with her teeth in, all was forgotten, and we headed up to Madison Avenue (Mr. Johnson holed up in his room) to catch the bus.
Not remotely a Greyhound, but still the pale green city bus had its appeal. Mimi sat, but I stood, eager to be the first to pull the cord before our stop, though it was unnecessary. We were getting off at the fountain on Dexter Avenue, where all the buses stopped. I pulled it all the same—and could see the driver’s eyes cutting up in the visor mirror over his head.
Dexter Avenue. The capitol on the far end—I knew from school—was where Governor Patterson was. First stop, Kress—the candy counter a fabulous array of bins from one of which the woman scooped up my usual maltballs (Mimi got orange slices) and weighed them on her scale, and we walked to the Greyhound station with our white bags, eating. At the terminal, I slipped into the back to ogle the buses while Mimi inquired about the uniform. Disappointingly, they didn’t have any for sale, and wouldn’t have had children’s sizes anyway, so Mimi bought a pin-on Greyhound insignia and we went back and tried several stores—H. L. Green’s, Newberry’s, Kress again—finally ended up at Montgomery Fair, where Mimi demanded an audience with the manager who said he didn’t think there was any such thing as a kid’s Greyhound bus driver uniform, but maybe we could get a play Air Force uniform and make some modifications. I wasn’t too happy about it, but it seemed to be a that-or-nothing situation, so I agreed. Then we had lunch at the Elite Café (I got a dollar’s worth of dimes, which I later fed avariciously into the bottomless Popeye bank), and then we saw Snow White at the Empire.
I’d be starting to school pretty soon, wouldn’t I? Yes, I gloomily answered. You don’t like school? I told him I liked summer better, that if I had my way, it would never end
When we got home, Mr. Dillard was on the porch, just sitting. He sort of scowled and didn’t say much, but a few minutes later when I came back out in the blue uniform with my officer hat and Greyhound pin, he turned friendly and said I looked topper. I arranged the chairs into rows, punched his ticket with my dime store hole puncher, took my seat in the front and drove, calling out cities on a toy microphone—until some kids from next door came to the edge of the yard and started jeering at me.
I felt suddenly very foolish—I hated them—and slunk back inside in shame and changed. Mimi was lying down (euphemism for out cold), and Mr. Johnson was closed in his room, game show on, air conditioner throbbing. So I checked to see if the kids were gone, then went back and sat down on the porch swing with a pomegranate from Mimi’s tree.
Mr. Dillard said I ought not let them bother me, if I wanted to wear my uniform I ought to by golly do it. They were just a bunch of loudmouths and who needed them? He said he could see I was a bright lad who could entertain myself, and that was all that mattered. Most people let you down anyway, in the end. All their nonsense and carryings-on, you were better off without them. Losing your dignity—nothing worse than that.
I asked him why he didn’t have a wife and family, and he said not everybody did, and he was one of the ones that didn’t. And I liked him way better than Mr. Johnson. I’d be starting to school pretty soon, wouldn’t I? Yes, I gloomily answered. You don’t like school? I told him I liked summer better, that if I had my way, it would never end. He just laughed and said he wouldn’t miss the hot weather—and that school was the most important thing in the world—that what you called somebody that dropped out of it was a fool.
Friday came, and that morning Mimi sent Cora and me to get a watermelon. Cora said she thought the ones at Piggly Wiggly were better than the little round green ones at Wade’s, so we went down there and she thumped on them and we got a big striped one. It was heavy, but she toted it, holding it like a baby, the block and a half home.
Mimi had done some major excavation in the ice box, as she called it, to clear a space, and Cora slid the melon in to chill until that afternoon. We ate dinner, she cleaned up, then got her things together, and we had a minute in the kitchen where she knelt down to my level and said she hoped I’d always stay ten years old and just the way I was, though she knew folks didn’t. She put her hand behind my head, in her way, and we said goodbye. She wouldn’t be back till Monday and I was leaving Sunday.
White-palmed Cora, dusted with flour, filled with dreams.
I missed her but had the watermelon to look forward to. For some reason, watermelon was a big deal to Mimi, and she dropped tantalizing references to it all day, building up the anticipation. Finally, about five o’clock, we spread newspapers over the old sagging wooden table in one of the clearings in her jungle back yard, and Mr. Johnson exhausted himself to wheezing hauling the chilled prize down there. Mr. Dillard, just home, said no thanks he didn’t care for any. Mimi, with a long carving knife, made the initial incision, and the melon split open with a pleasing rip—then she quartered it and we shook salt on it and ate it—all except half a piece, which Mimi said she would put in the ice box just for me to have tomorrow. All she wanted was two bites.
I said I wished we could eat watermelon every day, and Mr. Johnson said when they were married I could come live with them and we would. Mimi giggled and told him to shush. Mr. Johnson giggled too. Then Mimi wadded up the soggy, seed-speckled newspaper, and I went to set out the shells around the birdbath, for the cardinals and wrens and blue jays.
I buried myself in my comic books on the front porch alone. All the back-to-school crap was in the stores. Depressing. Already Friday—Daddy coming to get me Sunday.
That night Mama called. She talked to Mimi for a minute, then I got on the line and told her what I’d been doing—some of it, anyway: the ersatz bus driver uniform, the hat, the Greyhound insignia, Mimi and Mr. Johnson getting married.
That’s the thing about being a kid: it’s all bigger than you. And how deceptive the world can be. It looked like summer, felt like summer, smelled like summer—but summer, in truth, lay on its deathbed, and just ahead, over the next hill, stretched the uncharted land of fifth grade.
The line went silent. Mimi did a little dance, wearing a silly expression and gesturing to me. Then finally: What? I wasn’t sure if I should repeat the news—then Daddy was on the phone saying, let me speak to Mama.
She laughed a high-pitched laugh and half-heartedly scolded me as I handed her the receiver and it was: I can do what I want to—I don’t care about all that stuff—you can’t tell me what to do—until they finally hung up. We didn’t talk about it, and I started going back through my earlier comic books until I fell asleep.
The next morning, I was sitting on the porch with my coffee when a white car came down the street, slowed, and turned into the driveway. Things that you’re used to looking at up close look different from a distance, and it wasn’t until it came up even with the house that I realized it was the Buick, and Daddy, cigarette in mouth, was looking out the driver’s window at me!
I panicked. For a second I almost threw the coffee cup and saucer off the side of the porch, then sort of decided not to, the “sort of” causing me to spill the coffee all over the chair and floor, then hurried guiltily inside just as Daddy was opening the car door. In the kitchen I panicked again—he would see the evidence in the sink! Did I have time to rinse and dry them and put them away? No! So I slid them under the bread cabinet. Meanwhile, hearing the ruckus, Mimi and Mr. Johnson came in from the back porch and stood in the little laundry room looking at me. What’s the matter? Mimi asked me, and I said Daddy’s here!
You could see the change come over Mr. Johnson’s face like the edge of night. You couldn’t say he went pale because he was already chalky white—but that happy goofy look evaporated and suddenly, instead of a cheerful toothless old fellow, he looked like a scared toothless old man. He quickly slunk away through the back hall to his room, and I heard his door close about the time the front door opened and Daddy’s voice called out, Mama?
He came through the middle room.
It’s only Saturday, I complained.
Well, that’s all right, he said, it’s just a day early. Mama, I need to talk to you.
They went into the back room and just as he closed the door I caught something about giving this child coffee, stunting his growth, but the rest of it was muffled—a pretty good argument that peaked then dribbled out after about twenty minutes. Mr. Johnson’s door remained shut. Quiet as death within. Finally Daddy came out and told me to get my stuff together (sixty-something comic books heavier) and I cried, robbed of a day, and hated Mr. Johnson so much I would gladly have killed him, but what could I do? Daddy just tapped on Mr. Johnson’s door, disappeared inside his room for five or ten very quiet minutes, then came back out.
That’s the thing about being a kid: it’s all bigger than you. And how deceptive the world can be. It looked like summer, felt like summer, smelled like summer—but summer, in truth, lay on its deathbed, and just ahead, over the next hill, stretched the uncharted land of fifth grade.
Which actually turned out to be a very good year.
We rode home mostly in silence, the highway so commonplace from a car, watching the cotton rows like tornadoes, Daddy flicking his ashes out the vent window.
About the author
John M. Williams left full-time academia in 2015 and has since served as a mentor in the Reinhardt University MFA program. He was Georgia Author of the Year (First Novel) in 2003 for his novelLake Moon. He has published several essays, reviews, and stories over the years, and has had several co-written musical plays locally produced. He published nonfiction books in 2019 and 2023, and, most recently, a novel,End Times, in 2023. He blogs at Word From Elsewhere.
This is gorgeous!