Swimming Between Worlds - Softcover

Elaine Neil Orr is professor of English at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, where she teaches world literature and creative writing. She also serves on the faculty of the low-residency MFA in Writing program at Spalding University in Louisville. Author of A Different Sun, two scholarly books, and the memoir Gods of Noonday: A White Girl's African Life, she has been a featured speaker and writer-in-residence at numerous universities and conferences and is a frequent fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She grew up in Nigeria.

Chapter One

July 1959

Tacker Hart came home from Nigeria to discover a town he almost knew. The Winston-Salem of his youth was branded by Ardmore Methodist, Reynolds High, and shopping at Davis Department Store on Fourth Street, his youth green with creeks and football fields, turning white in winter with sledding and the Sears Christmas display. And then there was the depot of his father's store, Hart's Grocery, near the intersection of First Street and Hawthorne, right where Peters Creek ran. The grocery existed out of time, smelling of onions and floor wax, blooming with color in fruit displays and on cereal boxes, and sanctified by the community of regulars who stopped by for a special on ham hocks or conversation with Tacker's father or the full week's shopping and a drink from the Coca-Cola machine. Everyone was welcome, or so Tacker had thought.

Almost two years later and the air still carried the high, sweet smell of tobacco, but there was an expressway through town that nipped at the heels of West End, the neighborhood where he'd grown up, and that occasionally-where an elevated section curved near Hawthorne-threw a car over the guardrails and passengers to their deaths. Thruway Shopping Center had grown up in his absence like a film set temporarily installed, only it wasn't temporary. Tacker's mother drove out there almost every day. Wake Forest College was the new boast of the city, which was fair enough, though Tacker had no investment in it, having studied architecture at State College in Raleigh, flourishing in the competitive atmosphere of design studios housed on a huge courtyard on the north side of campus.

More changed than Winston-Salem was Tacker. He had left home a minor American hero and returned disgraced. The thought of his violent dismissal from an international assignment with the Clintok Corporation hollowed his chest even now, four months after his return.

When Tacker first got home in March, he stayed up late and slept until midmorning. On and off in the night, he woke to a perception of malignant doom, a feeling in his chest like a container filling with terror. There was no escape as the vessel filled, the sensation taking over his entire chest-filling and filling-until he thought it would explode, and then just as the container of his heart was about to burst, it did not. The terror held, containing him rather than he it. He wondered if he was having a heart attack. He would sleep and awaken and the episode would recur, as if he were coming out of nightmare into nightmare. During the day his face felt heavy. He marveled at a blooming red crepe myrtle across the street that appeared at midday to burn like fire, and yet it seemed to him that the inner light of things had dimmed. Perhaps it was merely the contrast with the tropics that he sensed, but Tacker suspected the dimness had more to do with what he had learned. The world was not just and neither God nor any teacher or coach or sponsor was going to save him. Occasionally he felt angry instead of depressed, overcome by righteous indignation. He'd done nothing wrong. But the fire flickered out pretty quickly.

There wasn't anything he wanted to do.

After dinner one evening in July, his father spoke up. "Get your architectural license. I can make a connection for you." They were in the family den. Tacker stood by the mantel, gazing at a picture he had sent from Nigeria, the country of his assignment. He had gone to help design the prototype for a high school to be replicated throughout the country and to establish American goodwill in an African nation on its way to independence.

"I don't want to do architecture right now," he said. In the photograph, he was posed with his Nigerian teammates, ten in all, graduates of Nigeria's first university, in front of a banana tree grove. His hair was below his ears because he hadn't found a barber. Tacker was the tallest, his arms saddled around his best friend, Samuel Lapido's, shoulders, a smile on his face. A local photographer had taken the picture and sold it to Tacker for a shilling. Tacker marveled that his clothes, and not just his skin, were so much lighter than the others', his figure ghosted. He turned to his parents, neither of whom was looking at him. His father wore a look of pained disapproval.

They were in a quagmire and Tacker had put them there, but he was too sunk to pull anyone out. Even with his father kindly opening a door, he could not walk through it. He left the house for a walk around the block but walked much farther than that, all the way to the tobacco warehouses at the end of Trade Street, where he lay back on an overflowing bag of tobacco leaves, half intoxicated by the scent, and looked up at the stars. Why couldn't he feel proud? He'd stood up for what he'd believed, hadn't he? But Tacker was accustomed to triumph. An inglorious sacking left a man wholly alone. When he got home after midnight, the lights in the den were out but his mother had waited up for him. She picked up just where he thought he had escaped.

"What are you going to do?" she said, peering through her new wing-tipped glasses. When Tacker was a boy his mother had worn nylon dresses with pearl buttons all the way down the front and he'd thought she was the most beautiful person in the world.

"I don't know."

"You have been home all spring and half the summer. People are beginning to wonder what's wrong." She rose from her seat. "You have to move out and get a job. This is too hard on us."

"Maybe I could work at Hart's." Tacker rubbed the back of his neck. "Maybe I could manage the store."

"I don't know about that." His mother's lips wrenched to one side of her face. "You haven't demonstrated very responsible behavior lately. What happened to you over there?"

Tacker looked at her. "I learned that there's a world outside this town," he said. "That we're not the be-all, end-all of the universe."

"Who's we?"

"This country, the way we live."

"How do we live?"

"Superficially."

"Well, Mr. Universe, I'll leave the question of your employment to your father. I don't much like being called superficial. I gave birth to you, in case you've forgotten that particular tidbit." She smacked the door open on her way out of the room.

The next morning, Tacker got up early. He had nowhere but his parentsÕ house to go, no car, no job, but he had a few hundred dollars saved. He walked to a diner at the corner, picked up the Winston-Salem Journal, went in and ordered breakfast and coffee, opened the paper, and scanned the classifieds for houses to rent. His finger stopped at a house on West End Boulevard. His parents had moved to the newer Buena Vista neighborhood while he was in college and his dad had opened a second grocery, sleeker and more hermetic than the old HartÕs. Tacker had eaten half of his breakfast and drunk three cups of coffee when he folded the paper and started walking to the old neighborhood, with the intention of reclaiming his territory. He passed Hanes Park, where he had joyfully suffered four hot summers practicing with the varsity football team, learning how to escape gravity. He had played wide receiver, but this morning he cocked his arm like a quarterback and sent the phantom ball soaring to his younger self on the field, airborne to haul the leather in and press it to his heart. If working at HartÕs as a teenager had instilled in Tacker a sense of democracy (ÒMeet every customer with respect,Ó his father had said, though now Tacker could see that not everyone was actually included), football had taught him fair play, a concept also apparently defunct.

West End was notoriously hilly, and Tacker angled up a side street. The rental house occupied the corner of West End Boulevard and Jarvis Street, an old foursquare, a style popular at the turn of the century, two storied, perfectly square, a mere five blocks from the original Hart's. This one was upright, stately, and composed, and the porch seemed to invite him in. He could see into the spacious sitting room and an adjoining dining room. Another room opened to the right, a music room or library with built-ins. In the backyard, he found a separate wired garage, a perfect place for the motorcycle he dreamed of buying. He'd lusted for one since the days of riding a Schwinn New World as a kid.

Tacker headed to the nearest service station, dropped a dime in the phone, and called the number in the paper.

"Hello. Calloway here."

"I'm calling about the foursquare," Tacker said, giving his name.

"You and your wife?"

"Just me."

"I had in mind renting to a family. It's big for one person."

Did his voice betray his bungled last year? No one knew but his parents, yet Tacker suspected everyone could see through him. But on the phone?

"Might be better if we met," Calloway said.

The man's office sat right where Summit Street wheeled down to converge with West End and Reynolda near the old Daniel Boone marker. Tacker took a seat across from Calloway, who had a washed-out look and round shoulders.

"It's actually my mother's house," he said. "Tied up in a trust. So you understand why I'm particular about it."

"Of course. It's a great house." Tacker felt more confident.

"What did you say your name was?"

"Tacker Hart."

"The football player?"

"Once upon a time."

"So you can catch a ball. How about minor repairs? Can you keep up a yard?"

"I'm pretty handy," Tacker said.

"Thirty-five a month?"

Midmorning, Tacker was in the basement of his parents' house, digging through boxes of college leftovers. He found towels and a few old dishes and kitchen essentials, all of which he stuffed into a laundry basket and hauled up to his room. His mind sped. The cloth he'd brought home from Nigeria-he could see the girl he'd bought it from, under an umbrella, her entire inventory consisting of two bars of soap, one pack of cigarettes, and four yards of indigo-dyed cloth. It could be a curtain.

A week later, on a hot August morning when his mother was out shopping and his father was at work, Tacker wrote a thank-you note and scribbled his new address at the bottom, walked to the bus stop with his suitcase and duffel bag, and waited. It seemed riotously funny that at age twenty-five he was running away from home, but the back side of funny was a welcome feeling of honor. He figured himself a pilgrim out to slay the dragon of his failure.

He spent his first night on the floor.

The next morning he scouted out a secondhand store full up with dressers recently cycled out of Baptist Hospital. They were metal and light. Of the two mattresses he could choose from, he took the one that came from someone's guest room, or so he was told. He picked up the metal dresser, carried it onto a bus, and put it in the house. The mattress was a bigger challenge, especially considering the hills he was going to encounter. For a fee of two dollars, a kid at the store offered to help him walk it to the foursquare twelve blocks away. Tacker didn't relish another night on the floor. At noon and ninety degrees they started out, trying to hold the mattress under their arms. But they kept losing hold of it. Tacker thought of the men he'd seen in Nigeria, pedaling bicycles, balancing mattresses on their heads, uphill and down. How had they done that?

"Let's try it on our heads," he said.

They jousted to get the mattress up and the weight distributed, and off they went. When they met folks on the sidewalk, they were forced to stop or tuck into an alley. Halfway to the foursquare, the kid backed up, not looking where he was stepping, and fell into a ditch. The mattress toppled, landing in the grass with a muffled thud.

"I think I twisted my ankle." The kid stood and tried to put weight on it. "God Almighty," he yelled, slackening back to the ground.

"I'll run back to the store and get someone to come pick you up," Tacker said.

The kid looked like he was going to cry.

"I'll pay you anyway."

The kid wiped at his eyes.

Fifteen minutes later Tacker was alone with his mattress, feeling fortunate to be on a side street. But it was a pitiful fortune, almost sublimely tragic. He used to be good at everything-in that other life when he won high school football games and picked up scholastic and civic awards, then excelled in college, finding himself in his senior year recommended by the department head, Professor Cabera, a dapper Argentinian with a vision that transcended North Carolina, for a choice international assignment with the Clintok Corporation. It had come to him like a perfectly thrown pass, a brilliant opportunity to further his career, though once he got to Nigeria he had found himself much more interested in the place itself, its cacophonous yet serene atmosphere.

He pulled a tall blade of grass from its green sheath and put it in his mouth. A rumble of thunder and a dark cloud encroached in the western sky. Tacker hauled the mattress up and stood it next to a tree. His arm span was just wide enough to match the width of the mattress and grab hold of the sides. He put his head in the middle of the bed and tried to hoist it, but he was too close to the tree. He tried again, and this time he managed to get it up, but the thing slipped from his grasp and slid down his back. Across the street, two women his mother's age stopped to watch. He tried again. The thing wobbled and Tacker had to shift it a little and brace his legs to keep it on his head. When he thought he had it, he took a step. Another. Five steps. He was back on the sidewalk. But the mattress hung in the front and he couldn't see very far ahead. Not only that, it kept snagging on nearby branches. He went slowly. A breeze came and it felt good, but then there was another rumble of thunder. He couldn't turn his head. There was no way but forward.

Turning onto First Street with a mattress on his head, Tacker's vision of himself as heroic pilgrim was pretty well fried. First was precipitously steep and the sidewalk way too narrow. A car horn blared and a DeSoto Firedome glided past, its finlike fenders bright in the sun. Finally he got to West End; only one more block. He swung out right into the center of the street. At the foursquare, he stepped up onto the porch, slid the mattress off his shoulder, and stood it against the front windows, slipping down beside it.