Cooley & Rose

By Terry Perrel

This gem of comic literature, a romp in the tradition of Crazy in Alabama and a love story as rewarding as Cold Sassy Tree, is a imaginative work that explore the vagaries of the human heart. Beautifully crafted and peopled by unforgettable characters, Cooley & Rose is a story that readers will long remember.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Mar 23, 2013
• ISBN: 9780989107709

Book preview

Cooley & Rose

A NOVEL

by

Terry Perrel

A.V. Griffin Books of Virginia

2013

© 2013 by Terry Perrel.  All rights reserved.

Originally published as an e-book by A.V. Griffin Books of Virginia in 2013.

Design by Terry Perrel and Sharon Swift

http://www.terryperrel.com

This book is a work of fiction.  While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.  Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Perrel, Terry

Cooley & Rose: a novel / by Terry Perrel.

ISBN: 978-0-9891077-0-9

In Memory of

E. B. and Zola Perrel

and

Alethia Griffin

and

For

Sidney E. Wenger

Woman is a miracle

of divine contradictions.

— JULES MICHELET

About the Author

Terry Perrel lives in Virginia Beach, Virginia with her husband. She is a former journalist, public relations director and freelance writer. She is author of the blog, In the Middle of It All, at http://terryperrel.wordpress.com/. Another novel, The Wyatt Sisters’ Songs of Sorrow, and a short story collection are forthcoming. Readers may reach her at [e-mail] or her website at www.terryperrel.com.

Acknowledgements

I owe many thanks to Old Dominion University and members of its creative writing faculty, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, and the Center for Creative Arts for awarding me fellowships in support of my education and the writing of this novel.

I am also grateful to have been mentored by Janet Peery, Bill Patrick, Bob Schacoshis and Lee K. Abbott.   I can’t imagine finer teachers on this earth.

Raymond Harper, Bill Facenda, Ruby Ene and the Palm Springs Historical Society helped me with historical research, and, any errors regarding 1948 South Norfolk or Palm Springs were entirely of my own making, sometimes to satisfy the demands of the plot.

I am also indebted to my (proof) readers Jean Skinner, Terri Budman and Chris Nofsinger.

Lastly, I thank my huge, blended family, especially my parents and my husband, for their support and remind them of what Rita Mae Brown once said, Writers will happen in the best of families.

Table of Contents

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Sources

A Book Club Guide to Cooley & Rose

ONE

As the May dawn broke blue and bright over South Norfolk, a milkman crossed lawns glistening with dew to deliver bottles to boxes on every porch and stoop along Chesapeake Avenue, a street lined with pink crape myrtles and large Victorian houses. In these upstairs slumbered the families of the mayor, the judge, the Presbyterian minister and other Virginia gentry, who believed their town with its sophistication and dedication to church going should be made capitol of Virginia, perhaps Hollywood moved East. Never mind its shanties along Scuffle Creek or gambling haunts at Edmonds Corner. These men and women slept undisturbed, even as tugboats tooted warnings from the Elizabeth River, the town’s cocks started to crow, and a train whistled three times, then ground to a stop in front of Townsend’s Coal Yard, raining black dust onto the ground and nearby homes.

But between Chesapeake Avenue and the coal yard ran Seaboard Avenue, the last road on the good side of the Norfolk & Western tracks, and there, in a two-story house next to Taylor’s Market, Rose Godwin fumed. She’d had it with Cooley, her husband of nineteen years. This time he had gone too far.

Not long after they had married, she realized that the two of them were natured differently. If she stood at the stove, stirring the stewpot, he’d sneak up, pat her fanny, nibble at her neck like a mosquito. As she tried to put dinner on the table, he’d pull her onto his lap and wrap his arms so his hands clasped her breasts. In bed he’d squeeze her bottom as though her flesh were made of putty. For the first few years she took his affection in good humor, laughing and swatting away his groping paws, but after a while his constant advances wore on her. All the time, Cooley, hands and fingers, pinching and poking until she wanted to scream: Leave me alone. But she didn’t. Instead, she set down rules for having relations – once a week on Wednesdays, no funny business in between. Especially French kissing. It was unsanitary, perhaps dangerous.

This morning, however, as she dreamt about cutting a slice of her strawberry cream cake for President Truman, she was startled awake, gagging and gasping. At first she thought a killer had broken into her house, but then as she squirmed and struggled for air, she realized it was her husband bowed over her, his belly bopping her forehead, her throat plugged so she couldn’t breathe.

During the course of their marriage, she had often reviewed their high school courtship, belatedly searching for signs of perversity, and had come up with little. Once he had tried to put his hands up her dress, but she’d set him straight by refusing to see him for a week. After that, he behaved, stuck to kissing, an occasional brush against her breast, hand on her knee, dancing a little too close. But she saw these as signs of youthful stirrings, not depravity. Nothing like what happened this morning. She shuddered.

At the time, her mind was so clouded by near-sleep and fear, she couldn’t think what to do, so she bit him. Bit him hard. Not so hard to draw blood but perhaps to leave a ring of bruises. Not that she wanted to look. But that was the thing about Cooley. He didn’t know when to quit. Or the difference between a tart and a wife.

Another train whistle signaled its departure from the coal yard and on most days reminded Rose to start the wash. By the time she rinsed and wringed, the coal dust would have settled so she could hang out clothes and linens, but this morning, she didn’t want to touch Cooley’s dirty things. Instead, she turned on the radio and prepared to scrub the linoleum, and as she filled a pail with ammonia water, she tried to shoo Cooley from her mind, but, without will or want, she pictured him with LaBelle Hawkins, the woman Cooley visited in Scuffletown. The day before at the Grand Leader Store, she saw her wearing a red satin number cut down to there, looking like the trash that she was, and it wasn’t until the Hawkins woman sashayed past her in notions that Rose recalled the dress as one that Cooley had given her for an anniversary. One she’d refused, saying it was made for a streetwalker.

On her way home from the five and dime, the notion of leaving came to Rose as something more than a dream. She had war bonds secreted in the pocket of an old suitcase. She had a good-running Hudson and an Esso map. What could stop her? She could up and leave, go anywhere.

Many years earlier her best friend, Johnnie Rae Carter, had honeymooned in California and from there sent picture postcards: an evening sky slathered purple and pink; a field of orange poppies: a rocky canyon gold and sienna where cowboy movies were filmed: and a handsome sailor dressed in blues, saluting the American flag. California looked like a nice place to live, a good place to start over. Perhaps she could work in a fancy dress store where movie stars shopped or talk her way into a job as a file clerk for some big-shot producer. She prided herself on her ability to organize. Even her spices and canned goods on her shelves were alphabetized.

Rose hummed along as Stormy Weather played on the radio and set to scrubbing the linoleum. It would take a few days to set everything in order – to make sure all the clothes were washed, the house gleamed spic and span, and nothing was spoilt in the refrigerator. She didn’t want to leave the place a sty so that the people could badmouth the way she’d left her house. No, long after she was gone and settled, they’d talk about how Rose Godwin’s floor was so clean that Cooley could have eaten off of it.

She loved the burning smell of ammonia and the way scuffmarks and other smudges disappeared with elbow grease. As a teenager giddy with the dream of one day keeping house for Earl Cooley Godwin, Rose had viewed linoleum as a canvas and herself an artist as she dipped her mop, then danced and swirled its strings against her mother’s floor.

With age and the trials of marriage, however, her method had become less artful, more full of purpose, and now, at thirty-seven, she mopped with long, hard strokes that were sometimes broken by stabs at stubborn patches, like specks of tar. She dropped to her knees to scrape a clump with an old butter knife, careful to keep the goo off her fingernails, hating tar and all it brought to the present. For twenty-five years she’d been gone from Blue Mountain, but her mind had yet to escape the hacking coughs and appraising eyes of black-pored miners; the grunts and screams of rutting, animal and human; the crooked line of mountains and hills, memories she wouldn’t let follow her to California.

She wiped the blade, and as she returned to prying up the last bit of tar, she tried to conjure her mother’s response to the news of her leaving. She would ask why, wouldn’t understand when told, and, at that moment, Rose considered lying. Tracking in tar and having a big belly weren’t reasons enough to leave a good provider and move across country, but the thought of talking about Cooley’s ways, especially to her mother, sickened her.

Her back ached from bending, and as she straightened, then arched her spine to relieve the pain, she prayed for words of leaving. But none came.

The last freeze came in early May, destroying the annual strawberry crop and delaying the planting of others. Gardeners and farmers alike knew they wouldn’t see a ripe tomato until late July or so. Now, in the third week of the month, they shoveled manure into dirt, sowed in seeds and set out plants in soil moist from daily rain.

Cooley enjoyed planting as much as eating his harvest, and as he worked his shovel into the soil, black and porous with coal dust, he paused to inhale its richness. Everything he knew about gardening he’d learned from his Papaw, a strawberry farmer and businessman. The old man had also taught him how to smoke stogies, to frog-gig at night with a cane-pole spear, to drink Dr. Pepper with salted peanuts, and to please himself with a woman.

His marriage to Rose had tested the soundness of his Pawpaw’s advice and found it wanting, but still Cooley wished he could discuss this most recent fuss with him. Almost three years earlier, however, his grandfather had passed, dying in the arms of the Widow Woods while celebrating the Allies’ victory over Japan. That day in August 1945 had been the saddest of Cooley’s life, sadder then the days twenty years earlier when his own parents were felled by the Spanish flu, then buried thirteen days apart in Riverside Cemetery.

Only weeks before Cooley’s marriage, his Pawpaw had sat across from him in a booth at McHorney’s and claimed Rose had too much starch in her. But, he’d added with a wink, maybe she’ll loosen up. After she sets up housekeeping. After the babies come. You know what I mean. At the time Cooley could only guess, but he knew his words served as warning.

Now, almost two decades later, Cooley likened his wife’s ways to the heavily starched collars on his going-to-church shirts. Though signs of a perfect wife, they irritated him, rubbed him raw, the way Rose did at times. She wouldn’t let him wear shoes in the house. She kept a doily on the ottoman. She scrubbed the floors and walls so often that the house smelled like a chemical plant.

Cooley appreciated his wife’s need for tidiness, especially since he had a lacking in this area, but he felt that she had neither tried often enough nor hard enough to conceive a child. And in this matter, he’d been more than glad to do his part since before they said, I do.

Cooley shook dirt from the roots of a potato weed, a type of thistle, which if left to grow, would produce lilac flowers by July and choke everything in the garden, and as he tossed the spiny plant aside, he thought how women were like weeds; they might look pretty and sweet, but if you didn’t handle them carefully, they would prick the crap out of you.

He recalled the look of fear, then hate in Rose’s eyes earlier that morning, and he guessed she had wanted to kill him. He hadn’t meant any harm, hadn’t planned to make her mad. In fact, he was in another world, another mind, one that thought of nothing except how she had the prettiest lips of any woman he’d seen.

Just past sun up he’d awakened from a hard sleep and needed to pee, but the warmth from the sun and a slight breeze made him too lazy to rise, so he cushioned his head against the headboard and listened to the familiar sounds around him: the angry squawks of blue jays; the chatter and spit of squirrels; the lulling whir of the ceiling fan; and the persistent puffs of his wife’s snoring.

With the edge of the sheet gathered to his chest, Cooley looked at Rose, a black hairnet cinched so tight over her ginger hair that the skin at her forehead furrowed. Except for these lines and a few patches of dried cold cream, her face was as pale and smooth as on the day they were married.

He rolled onto his side to better study his wife. Her lips, bare of make-up, were the color of her nipples -- not quite pink, yet not quite brown, and with his finger, he traced the outline of her bottom lip until she started to stir. Once her snoring resumed, he moved to her upper lip, letting his finger briefly rest at the dips in the corners and center, reminding him of the wavy seagulls his mother taught him to draw when he was a child. Rose shifted again, but before her jaws slacked in sleep once more, she licked her lips, leaving them moist and parted so he could glimpse her rosy tongue. The sight of it made Cooley think of the talk he’d heard from the guys who had served in Italy and France, how the women there were different and had ways of making a man see stars and the black beyond.

Since then Cooley had fantasized about women’s mouths and the mysteries they held. During church services his mind wandered so that he had to keep the Bible on his lap. At home he’d taken longer and colder showers. When he told his girlfriend, LaBelle, what the foreign women did, hoping to give her ideas, she’d responded with one word: Nasty. So, he knew better than to approach Rose. The one time he French-kissed her, she pushed him away and spat, threatened never to sleep with him again.

But this morning, she looked so beautiful that Cooley couldn’t stop himself. Now, flinching, he recalled her waking – the fear in her eyes, the way she chomped on him, then screamed – and he knew he’d have to pay with a month of Wednesdays, maybe more.

Although her mother lived only five blocks away on Stewart Avenue, Rose drove there, careful to avoid puddles that might cause mud to splatter, and her mind strayed from what she had to say to her mother to why her stepfather, Emmitt, hadn’t filled the potholes with gravel. But she knew not to ask. Both of her parents kept tight rein on their money. They’d been through one depression; now they were saving for another.

From the front porch her mother looked up and waved.

Hey, Momma, Rose called, stepping from the car. What you doing?

Darning stockings.

Rose started up the steps. She gripped the railing and looked up at her mother beaming like a crazy woman with her upper lip caught on her dentures and her bi-focals magnifying her eyes into blue poker chips. Soon to be fifty-eight, she favored floral dresses with low-cut necks, and as usual, she wore a brooch, today a purple pansy, pinned at her cleavage. The pin, her mother said, was for modesty’s sake, but, instead, the rhinestone jewelry called attention to her breasts so abundant she had to order special foundations from Smith & Welton’s department store.

There’s tea on the counter. She stuck the needle between her lips and searched the nylon for other picks. But don’t use the new glasses. Get a Ball jar off the rack.

Except for some wear and tear and a new refrigerator, the kitchen had changed little since she’d left home. Canned goods lined the tops of the oak cabinets, an enamel roaster hung on a wall, and a ceramic house with leprechauns peeking from its windows rested on the sill above the sink. She took a jar from the drying rack and re-washed it before pouring herself some tea.

As Rose settled onto the porch glider, her mother put the strand of thread into her mouth and bit it. Rose stiffened at the sound. In home economics she’d learned that biting thread could ruin your teeth, leaving little ridges in the enamel, and since then, she’d always used small sewing scissors, which sometimes Cooley used to trim his nose hairs. Another one of his dirty tricks. Disgust waved through her.

Mama, she said. I’m going to California.

California? Her mother peered over her glasses. That’s wonderful. How long you staying?

Forever, she said. I’m leaving Cooley.

Her mother frowned.

In the distance a tractor rumbled, and Rose believed she’d rather throw herself in front of it than to sit in silence on the porch. Just as she felt as though she ought to say something, her mother spoke.

No. Her eyes narrowed into slits like the eyes of a copperhead.

I’m not like you, Mama, and Cooley’s no Emmitt. You think he’s perfect, but he’s not. He’s got a streak in him.

If this is about that Hawkins woman, you let things be. Her mother leaned forward, lowered her voice. He’s got more urges than some men. That’s his way of seeing to them. Shoot, he’s not the first man to diddle around. He won’t be the last.

Rose felt her face flush. Papaw Godwin had done the same before Mamaw died. It was as though the Godwin men couldn’t help themselves, and for the first time she wondered if they shared a disease passed down through the generations.

Three years earlier, her best friend Johnnie Rae had learned of Cooley’s affair from her husband Harry, who’d heard talk at his Chevrolet dealership and at the barbershop. She gathered additional details from her beautician, whose shampoo girl witnessed Cooley’s comings and goings around Scuffletown.

After Rose learned of Cooley’s adultery, she kept the news to herself. Since that time, she’d never spoken the woman’s name. Not once. At first she thought she could put up with his sneaking around – if he did it on the sly, if he stopped pestering her, but the whole town knew of the affair, and her shame was such that some Sundays she didn’t want to go to church. She didn’t need unspoken pity from the congregation.

What’s happened is between Cooley and me. I’m doing the right thing. Just as Rose decided to leave, a fly flew into a spider’s web woven between the porch rails, trapping itself in sticky thread. A spider sidled toward it. Rose hated bugs, but for a reason beyond her knowing, she didn’t want the fly to die.

What did Cooley do? I know he didn’t try to hurt you, her mother said. He won’t even hunt squirrel. He’s too tender-hearted.

If her mother knew, she would make nothing of this morning’s attack. She’d put up with a lot worse when Rose was a child, all so she could keep her girls fed and clothed, and with that reminder Rose’s stomach began to roil as though she’d drunk too much ginger tea.

You’re talking crazy. You can’t leave ‘cause of some little spat. Is it time for your monthly?

Mo-ther. As Rose dabbed perspiration from her head, she saw the spider spinning thread around the fly and reckoned the end was near.

You’re awful touchy. Maybe you’re pregnant, too. Your breasts hurt? Magnolia wrote me a letter from Winston-Salem. Her baby’s due at the end of the end of summer.

The way the talk flew from California to breasts made Rose light-headed, like when Cooley snuck up and wrapped his arms so tight around her she couldn’t breathe.

You’ve been married nineteen years. Close to twenty. Time you had a baby. Her mother arched her eyebrows. It’s a wonder if you still can.

I’m not pregnant. I’m just sick of Cooley. Big difference. She looked at the web and assumed the fly had died when suddenly from behind the spider one veined wing fluttered.

Mama, she said. I’ve got to go. But do me a favor. Don’t breathe a word to Cooley. At least not until I’m gone.

On the way home Rose stopped by Johnnie Rae’s, and when she told her best friend of her intentions, she replied, You’re not. Not really.

I am. Rose leaned back against the kitchen chair and waited for Johnnie Rae to say more but she seemed distracted. Outside the kitchen window her son, Junebug, climbed a walnut tree. The boy suffered from brittle bones and, although only twelve years old, had already broken both arms and both legs.

Once Johnnie Rae told Rose that if it were up to her, she’d tie him to a chair and keep him there forever, but Dr. Chapman said, Let him play. You don’t want a sissy boy on your hands. Her husband, Harry, had agreed. But Johnnie Rae wasn’t so sure. Heaven help him if he turned out like his father, throwing away his money on whiskey and gaming tables at Edmond’s Corner, then coming home drunk and cursing. There had been a few times early in their marriage, when he had come home with a snootful and slapped her a few times, but Johnnie Rae had put an end to that. One morning Harry awoke to find her standing above him with a butcher knife in her hand. You touch me again like that, and you won’t live to see morning, she told him.

Johnnie Rae looked back at Rose. You know, Clark Gable lives in Palm Springs. So does Bing Crosby. All the big stars are moving there.

Where’s that?

Close to Los Angeles. The desert. That’s where the stars go to get away.

Away from what? Their mansions? Their swimming pools?

Their fans, Rose. They need privacy, too.

The women knew how movie stars lived. They read magazines, had seen hundreds of newsreels. From the time they entered junior high school until Rose’s marriage to Cooley, they’d attended matinees every Saturday. At first Rose had been reluctant, since doing so went against the doctrine of South Norfolk Baptist Church, but Johnnie Rae had convinced her otherwise.

A story is a story. If the Bible and the radio can have them, why not movies? There’s nothing as sinful as what’s told in Leviticus. At the time Rose didn’t understand what her friend meant, but later that night she opened her Bible and read about acts she never heard discussed at church.

Johnnie Rae was the only child of John Raymond Page, owner of a shipyard, and his wife, Darden Scott, who, like so many Virginians, claimed relation to Robert E. Lee. Within South Norfolk the girl achieved minor fame. Although small and stocky, she could outrun the local boys and pick a quail from the sky with a single shot. She knew how to skin and gut a rabbit and danced better than the girls who took lessons. After graduation, she thumbed her nose at society by turning down an invitation to make her debut at the German Club Ball.

No matter what she did, people shook their heads and said, That Johnnie Rae Page is a real firecracker. Like the time she rode her horse, Big Shot, into the last school assembly before Christmas 1925, dressed as Virgin Mary, her belly protruding with what looked to be twins, looking for Joseph. Or another time, the first warm spring day, when she’d chained shut the school doors and posted a sign that read: Party at Ocean View Beach. Wear your birthday suits.

Rose was dazzled by the other girl’s ability to do and say what she wanted, and she understood that her confidence and audacity came from belonging among people who mattered. And that’s what Rose wanted more than anything.

But Johnnie Rae had changed with marriage. Her blonde hair scorched by too many perms had dried to straw, and her blue eyes had drained to gray. She no longer rode horses or shot guns because she didn’t want to give Junebug ideas. She detested the routine of housework, so Ethelene, a hired girl from Scuffletown, came to clean and cook. Except for going to the beauty parlor or directing the nativity play at the Episcopal Church, all she seemed to do was sit and look out the kitchen window.

Come with me, Rose said.

Johnnie Rae rolled her eyes. I wish.

Why not? You grab Junebug, and come. Before Harry loses the house and everything in it.

He wouldn’t let me take him, and I can’t leave him here. Junebug would end up with plaster of paris over his whole body. Johnnie Rae took Rose’s hand. You go, she said. You show Cooley the moon isn’t hung by his big old behind. Go on. I’ll be okay.

At Godwin’s Hardware on Lane’s Row, it was almost closing time. Business had been brisk during the morning when journeymen picked up supplies, but this afternoon, like most during the weekdays, had been quiet except for the sounds of a ballgame on the radio and an occasional customer moseying in to buy seeds or lawn fertilizer. A couple of years earlier Scott’s had introduced a lawn fertilizer, and people were