Gods in Alabama (14 page)

Fuck that. I have no right to purchase such a cheap and easy absolution. I wanted Burr to be my righteous advocate, to say it for me. Make my excuses to yourself, Burr, forgive me and love me, but don’t ask me to take that ride with you.

I would never say it because I never never lie, and saying “Yes, I killed him, oh but Burr, he raped me, he raped me” is to say that I am the victim here. That’s just not true. I’m not. You want to find the victim? Ask yourself “Who’s dead?” Arlene the victim is a lie, and I will leave the lies to lawyers.

Yeah. Okay. I admit that I had a bad time. But you know what really made me feel better, Burr? I’ll tell you what made me feel better. What made me feel better was walking up to the top of Lipsmack Hill and smashing his head in as he sang, and making him quiet forever.

I never said it. I never said he raped me. But at last, in the gray hours of dawn in the quiet, safe space after Burr became my lover, after he gave me my first orgasm, I made him say it for me.

He was dead asleep beside me, his angular face made softer by sleep, and I whispered to him, “What have I got in my pocketses?” I told him everything, moving my lips in the rising light, slowly and silently, forming every word but letting no sound escape.

“There are gods in Alabama,” I began. A practice run, because I knew the day was coming when we would play this game for keeps. I stared down at his sleeping face and took us both through it, all the way through to “Okay, I said fucking those boys was effective. I never said it was healthy.”

My open-eyed, imaginary Burr laughed at that line. I knew he would, he always did, and I played it for his laugh. And then, pristine in his dove-gray suit, my manufactured Burr at last agreed to speak for me.

“Of course, of course I know,” he said. “You hated Jim Beverly. He hurt you, he was dangerous. He went after Clarice, and when you tried to protect her, Jim Beverly raped you. He was a bad, bad man. Of course you had to kill him. He was evil incar-nate, and he raped you.” Then he grinned at me, sure he’d gotten full points in our game. He was sure he’d seen what I had in my pocketses, sure he had won.

I smiled for him, throwing up my hands as if defeated, not speaking, because I still was not ready to lie. The truth was, my imaginary Burr had lost on points. There were things that he had missed. My little last secrets.

Not least among them, Burr and Jim Beverly were brothers in a way. The only men I’d ever loved. 

CHAPTER  8

I WAS PROBABLY the only girl in the freshman class at Fruiton High who didn’t have a crush on Jim Beverly.

At first Clarice also seemed unaffected, but the sillier girls all but swooned when he walked by, as if he were every member of Duran Duran rolled into one pair of Levi’s. I didn’t get it. He wasn’t that smart and he wasn’t that good-looking. In my opinion, he was actively ugly—short and bandy-legged, monkey-faced, barrel-chested, the whole package topped with a close-cut crop of baby-fine blond hair. I shrugged off the mass crush to football insanity.

Me, I don’t think I had enough hormones running to have a crush on anyone. A boyfriend was something I wanted in a vague

“other girls would envy me” way. I couldn’t yet see any other use for one.

I was a year younger than the rest of my class, and a late bloomer to boot. The only curve I possessed was a little round tum left over from childhood. Aunt Florence called me Miss Betwixt and Between as if it were my name.

Barbie’s Dream House bored me, but I hadn’t started my period. Boys were mystical, distant creatures, but I longed for ruby-red lipstick. My mother absently handed me hers when I asked, but Aunt Florence told me my mouth looked like a baboon’s butt and took it away. Then Florence and Clarice took me to the mall and bought me rosebud blusher and gloss, and a triple-A training bra. Meanwhile, my mother stirred her coffee until it was dead cold, staring dreamily over my head while her left eye leaked clear juice.

Clarice was blooming like a tulip. I suppose I must have been jealous of her. But not much. How could I be jealous when she was so kind to me, and so different? I couldn’t aspire to ever be a Clarice. After all, she was tall where I was tiny, blond and ripe where I was dark and scrawny, outgoing and open where I was secretive and silent. She was popular and I was her dreaded barna-cle, the obstacle course on every double date, the dead fly you got with every perfect bowl of cream-of-Clarice soup.

And she had things I couldn’t imagine having. Breasts. Confidence. A real mother. Since I couldn’t imagine possessing Clarice’s life, I couldn’t have hated her. I couldn’t have.

Instead I decided to hate Rose Mae Lolley.

I could imagine being Rose Mae Lolley. I followed her up and down the halls of Fruiton High. I knew the routes she took to her classes long before I could go to my next class without checking my schedule. I ghosted down the halls in her wake, trying to learn her walk. At home, in secret, I practiced her pet facial expressions, like her “I am hanging on your every word, handsome boy” face, where she tilted her head left, widened her violet eyes, and pursed her mouth into a thoughtful pucker.

After about three weeks of this, me thinking I was very James Bond and undetected, I lost sight of her in a long hallway filled with banks of lockers. I continued on cautiously, knowing we were two turns away from her next class. But I could not see her anywhere. Then she popped out from in between two rows of lockers, and there we were. Eye to eye.

She hissed at me, letting her breath out between her teeth like a cat, and looked me up and down. She said in a fierce whisper,

“Quit following me, you little freak.” Then she pinched me as hard as she could with her dry baby fingers, turned her back on me, and stalked off. I had a purple and yellow bruise on my arm for days, shaped and colored like a pansy. In the dark, after Clarice was asleep, I licked it and licked it.

Before Clarice entered as a freshman, Rose Mae Lolley was easily five times prettier than any other girl in the school. In spite of that, I resembled her. A little. She was tiny, with long dark hair, like me. And we were alike in other ways, too. One of her parents was dead. Rumor had it her dad liked his beer and wasn’t in the running for the Most Stable Parent Award. But there my imagined twinhood with her ended.

I was made of bones and, when naked, resembled nothing so much as a fetal chicken. Rose Mae Lolley had genuine girl hips in spite of her tiny frame, and they swayed slowly and hypnoti-cally as she walked. Her shoulders were so frail that her high-set, pointed breasts seemed bigger than they were. She had long slender limbs that moved as if she were underwater. Her hair was as dark and lustrous as mink, falling in a thick, dead-straight sheaf past her shoulder blades. She had a full, naughty-looking mouth and huge eyes that explained the origins of the word “limpid.”

Her body seemed almost boneless in its graceful movements.

She was slow to smile, slow to speak, slow in everything she did. This may have been due, in part, to her severe anemia—

Rose Mae Lolley was so iron-deficient that her doctor had sent in a note saying she was permanently excused from ever dressing out for gym—but her languid movements looked like pure grace.

Jim Beverly called her Rose-Pop.

She’d been his girlfriend since they were freshmen, and they were juniors now. There was some hope, though. Four times, the sophomore girls trumpeted gleefully to the freshman girls in the bathrooms, four times last year they had broken up. And each time Jim Beverly had dated another girl for a few weeks. Rose Mae had not dated at all. They weren’t a stable couple, the sophomores said over and over. They would crash and burn again, and someone else would get a shot at him.

I would leave these bathroom sessions not caring a fig about Jim Beverly, and go station myself in a place I knew Rose Mae had to pass on the way to her next class. I’d quit following her, just as she’d asked. Not my fault if she chose to walk past the places I happened to be.

It wasn’t love, exactly, this obsession I had with Rose Mae Lolley, but it was passion. It felt like an animal running and tickling and scrabbling inside me, almost enjoyable. Envying Rose Mae Lolley was the warmest thing in my life.

I had a recurring fantasy. A car crash. My mother and Rose Mae’s drunken daddy on an ill-fated journey down an oil-slicked road.

They come from opposite directions. I am clinging to the passenger seat. I beg my mother not to drive, implore her. She is weaving dreamily and does not realize how dangerously fast she is going. Rose Mae Lolley is in her drunken daddy’s car. Rose and I see each other, know what will happen as the cars careen towards each other. For a split second before impact, our eyes meet.

“Oh no,” mouths Rose, “oh no, no, no!” Then we crash.

My body shatters the windshield, slides across the crumpled hoods, getting torn and wasted as it goes, smashes through the other windshield and falls, broken and dying, onto Rose Mae Lolley, whose drunken father at least cared enough to make sure she was buckled in. Rose and I are face-to-face, my ruined length pressed against her. I am taking my last breath from her mouth.

I am bleeding uncontrollably. I have the clarity and vision of a dying saint. I see the soul of my mother, a wisp of white vapor, slip free from her body. It struggles in the air like a fish trying to swim upstream, but then is sucked inexorably down into hell. I see the soul of Rose Mae Lolley’s father lose the same struggle.

And still I have not looked away from Rose Mae’s face. My saintly vision is panoramic. I see all. I feel my own soul slip its moorings.

Rose’s eyes widen.

She is fine and whole, unscathed. A tear spills from my eye at the unfairness of it all. She is a bitch and a pincher who has everything. I have nothing, and now I die, alone except for her, and she sees me only as a disgusting pile of bleeding flesh that is soil-ing her. My soul rebels. It does not float up; it swims as hard as it can, trying to force itself back into my crumpled form.

But that body is dead, useless, and my soul turns instinctively to the closest source of warmth. It burrows deep into Rose Mae Lolley’s body. So surprised, so unprepared is she, that her soul is shoved out almost immediately. It is a dirty gray thing, so insubstantial it neither sinks nor rises, just puffs out of existence like smoke.

Then I am looking through beautiful limpid eyes at the dead thing pressed on me, and I shove it away.

There was more. Handsome firemen getting me out of the slag heap of twisted metal with the jaws of life. The drunken father’s surprise million-dollar life insurance policy. Clarice, taking my hand and saying, “At last, a friend who is my equal.” The homecoming crown. And yes, in this fantasy, I inherited Jim Beverly. He mainly stood by me at school events where I was being feted and whispered things in my ear like “Rose-Pop, you are so different now, so sweet and fine! Before I was only with you for your looks and because you were easy, but now! I must have the whole package!”

But the crash was the main thing, the part I played over and over, lying in my bed after Clarice was asleep, licking the place where my pansy bruise used to be.

In October, Jim Beverly and Rose Mae broke up again. He buzzed around Clarice, but she was dating a boy on the baseball team pretty consistently at that point, so he settled on a chirpy redhead named Dawna from the sophomore class. She had him for three dates, and then he was back with Rose again.

After he ditched her, Dawna wasn’t so chirpy anymore. I don’t remember seeing her around much after that. She all but dropped out of the popular kids’ social rounds. Or maybe it just seemed that way to me, watching from the fringes of the social scene. I was there only because Clarice invited me to go along with her. And because of Aunt Florence’s insistence that Clarice double with me until she was sixteen. So I went to the movies and the games and all the good parties with Clarice and her friends, and I had a string of dates who owed huge favors to Clarice’s baseball boyfriend.

The weather was turning cold, and watching Clarice organize our winter wardrobes, I was suddenly struck by the fact that I had never seen Rose-Pop naked. No one had, except presumably Jim Beverly. All fall she had dressed in long flowing skirts and silk blouses with poet sleeves. The fabrics were so sheer and flut-tery, you didn’t question but that these were warm-weather clothes. Still, they covered her from neck to knees.

Now, as winter came, she changed her look, sporting black leggings that fit her lithe body like a second skin, topped with clingy sweaters. Except for her face and hands and sometimes her neck, I never saw her skin. When she wore a skirt, she’d put on opaque tights, avoiding even the appearance of flesh. And thanks to her doctor and her so-called anemia, she never had to change for gym. I began to wonder if I wasn’t buying a pig in a poke, fantasy-wise. What if she was covered with horrible chem-ical burns? Or warts? Or bright red patchy birthmarks so that, naked, she looked like a pinto pony?

I couldn’t get to sleep at night without the fantasy, I was that addicted to it. I would drift off as I imagined living inside Rose Mae, but as I slid into sleep, it would all turn terrible. I would unbutton Rose Mae’s blouse with Rose Mae’s fingers, only to find my new bouncy little titties were Ziploc bags of cherry Jell-O stuffed into her bra. Rose Mae’s chest was as blank and flat as a boy’s. I would rip the bra off and see two shallow pockets of scars, as if something with long-clawed hands had scooped my breasts away, and then I would wake up again, lathery and panicked.

I had to investigate. But how? The girl never took her clothes off. At one point I considered staking out her house, but I was foiled by the logistics: I would need a ride to Fruiton and a ride home. A hiding place. Binoculars. A camera. To not get shot by her drunk daddy. I prayed she would try out for the school play so I could catch her in the dressing room. I cursed her for not being a cheerleader like all the other super-popular girls, so I could hide and watch her as she put her uniform on.

Finally it happened almost by accident. Rose had 11:10 lunch, and every day she and a gaggle of cronies would stop by a certain girls’ room to fluff their hair and put on fresh lipstick before sitting down to eat with their boyfriends. They would look under the stalls for feet and, if no one was there, indulge in a bit of quick and nasty gossip while they preened.