Page 99 - The Geography of Women

The Geography of Women 85

Act 4

The Saleman’s Wife’s Lover’s Tale

Wilmer Fox, it turned out, played a mean piano. In the
two weeks from his arrival on the twenty-first a June,
1964, the first day a summer, the day after my twenty-
fifth birth day, right before the Fourth a July, he had fast
become the playin partner a the Reverend Mister Jimmy
Banks toodlin on his sax. Together they were better n
almost anybody on the radio. The Reverend played a
bluesy melody line on his sax an Wilmer sittin at the key-
board tickled his way underneath an around it till his left
hand was kickin out a back beat an his right hand was
playin the same staccato chord way up on the eighty-eight
makin rock ‘n’ roll come outa my Grandma Mary Kate’s
upright Steinway that sounded like Jerry Lee Lewis hisself.
You coulda knocked me out with a feather why so many
a the girls I grew up with showed up with their fiancés or
husbands, carryin covered dishes an picnic baskets full a
white cloth napkins an silverware an china plates, along
with brown paper bags filled with fireworks to amuse the
excited kids who marched like stairsteps behind them.
Curiosity, I guess, killed the cats, an over-powered
their sniffiness. The presence a Wilmer Fox at my house,
charmin everybody in town, helped more than a parade, I
think, to interpret me somehow so they could understand
at least as far out as their headlights could see. God only
knows how Wilmer Fox sold me cleaner than a Hoover

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