Gods in Alabama (20 page)

Unless we had company, we always ate in the kitchen. Uncle Bruster was ensconced behind the paper, and next to him, my mama was peeling the white parts away from her fried egg and hiding them in her napkin. She had ringed the unbroken yolk with petals made of torn pieces of biscuit. Clarice, across from Mama, shot me a quick look as I entered, and from her expression I could tell I looked as green as I felt. I sat by Clarice, my back to Aunt Flo, who was frying up more eggs in the bacon grease.

A platter of glistening pink bacon was emitting vile fumes, and I watched in horror as Uncle Bruster reached out blindly and picked up a piece, taking it behind his paper to devour it. I heard his thunderous crunching and longed to crawl under the table and heave and hopefully choke to death on my own vomit. Aunt Florence came to the table and slid two eggs onto my plate, cooked over hard till they were almost crunchy. They glared up at me balefully, moist and glistening with droplets of fat. I glared back.

I looked up, and Aunt Florence was still standing over me, regarding me with a jaundiced and suspicious eye. I hastily picked up a fork and began choking down the eggs. Aunt Florence remained, looming over me, watching me eat. She’d seen hangovers before, but not in me or her daughter. She was probably trying to talk herself out of identifying my malady.

“Mama?” said Clarice. “Are me and Arlene supposed to weed the strawberry patch today? Or what else needs to get done? Because I want to go on and get started. I’m supposed to meet Bud at his football practice.”

Florence was not deterred. “Arlene, are you sick?” she said.

I did not answer. I had just promised God for the seven hun-dredth time that I would not lie ever again.

“Yes,” said Clarice quickly. “She is totally sick. Bud went to shoot pool with Clint, and I brought her home in his car last night. There is definitely a very bad stomach flu going on at school, and I definitely think she has it.”

Bruster looked out from behind his paper. “You’re looking a little peaked, girlie.”

I kept my head down, forking up another bit of egg and praying.

Aunt Florence stepped away, and it was like a weight being hefted off my stomach. I gratefully set my fork down, and then started as Aunt Florence reappeared beside me. She set an icy-cold can of Coke down beside my juice and said, “Drink that, it will settle your stomach. Let me make you some dry toast. And then you go back to bed. Bruster has to run some errands for me, and I have a lot to do in the garden. Are you going to be all right by yourself, or do you need someone sitting with you?”

“I’ll be fine,” I said.

“All right, then,” Florence said. “Clarice, you can go on over and meet Bud after breakfast. You girls can weed the strawberries one afternoon this week, when Arlene feels better.”

“Poor baby,” said my mother, taking a piece of bacon to give her egg daisy a stem. “Did you get it from a boy?”

I stared blankly at her, and then Clarice launched mercifully into a stream of mindless prattle. I took sips of the wonderful, bracing Coke and had to fight the urge to hold the icy can up to my aching head.

Aunt Florence brought me toast. “You eat that,” she said.

“That will help you.”

After breakfast I went back to bed, but for the longest time, I could not sleep. I stared at Clarice’s shams and prayed and prayed and prayed. I had been raised to believe that prayer could move mountains, if only you had faith the size of a mustard seed.

“Mountains be damned,” I whispered to God. “I need a body moved.” 

CHAPTER  11

CLARICE FORCE-MARCHED everyone into cheerful small talk all through supper, but eventually she had to leave to get her babies home to bed. That’s when the real cat-and-mouse began. Florence wanted to get me alone so she could peel me like a grape, but Burr and I would not be separated. Burr wouldn’t even take the garbage out unless I came with him to show him where the big can was. And he stayed in the kitchen drying the dishes as I washed. Florence told him to leave the dishes to womenfolk and tried to shoo him out to watch TV with Bruster.

“Real men aren’t afraid of housework,” said Burr, and Florence was halfway to shooting me an approving look before she remembered he was both black and hampering the inquisition and squelched it. Then she told him the dishes didn’t need drying at all, they could air-dry in the drainer.

“All right,” said Burr, “I’ll rinse, then. Shove over, baby.” He bent deep at the knee to bump my hip with his. As I finished scrubbing each dish, I handed it to him, and he rinsed with elab-orate care, so close our elbows kept banging together as we tried to work. The message couldn’t have been clearer if he’d whipped up some epoxy and glued me to his leg.

Florence gave up for the moment and sat down at the kitchen table, biding her time. I glanced back over my shoulder and saw Florence the inexorable sizing me up, effortlessly containing five thousand pounds of tension in perfect, coiled stillness.

Burr and I claimed trip exhaustion and fled to Clarice’s old bedroom after Bruster trundled off to bed. Uncle Bruster kept farmer’s hours out of lifelong habit. My mother stayed dozing in the armchair at the back of the den. Florence had already fed Mama her evening meds and relocked the pill cabinet. I pecked at her cheek and murmured, “ ’Nighty, Mama.” Her eyes were half open, but only the whites were showing, and she did not respond. Florence watched us go down the hall in silence.

I took the bathroom first and brushed my teeth and washed my face. Then I changed in Clarice’s room while Burr was in the bathroom. I had just pulled my sleeping shirt over my head when I heard Florence rapping at my chamber door.

“I’m not decent,” I called, which was true on many levels, even though I was completely dressed.

“Just saying good night,” she said through the door. “I am tucking in your mama.”

“Good night, Mama. Good night, Aunt Flo,” I called cheerfully. Mama said something back, and I heard Florence say, “Here we go, Gladys.” I crept to the door and pressed my ear against it, listening to Florence’s footsteps, like percussion, giving a beat to my mother’s shuffling gait. I got into Clarice’s bed and pulled the covers up to my chin. My mother and Florence were in Mama’s room. The walls were so thin that even with the bathroom between us, I could hear Mama coughing in sharp barks like a trained seal.

A few minutes later, Burr came in. He was wearing the same undershirt and lobster pajama bottoms he’d had on briefly at the hotel.

“The water here tastes funny,” he said. He peeled off the undershirt and climbed in the bed, crawling up from the bottom to take the space by the wall. It was strange to see him lying beside me, bare-chested, in a bed. I had dated him for two years, but barring a few summer pool parties and last night, he had been, for the most part, fully clothed. Now here was this body, tucked into bed with me, smelling of Ivory soap and man. His bare chest was unfamiliar, and yet it had my best friend Burr’s head on top of it.

I was fine with it until he said, “Tight fit,” and put his big hands on me. He turned me away from him, then pulled me back so we were nestled together like spoons in the small bed, his back pressed to the wall. As he moved me, my spine tightened, and my limbs stiffened in an almost automated resistance.

“Lena, relax,” he said. “I feel like I’m holding a mattress spring.”

“I can feel you,” I said. “You’re thinking about it.”

He pulled me backwards, tighter against him, his hand low on my belly. “I’m a guy. I’m always thinking about it. At this point, I have at most four red blood cells bringing oxygen to my brain.”

That made me laugh, and the momentary tension dissipated.

Burr’s body radiated heat, and I could feel his breath stirring my hair.

I put my hand over his and settled against him. Eventually Burr’s breath evened and slowed, and his whole body grew heavy and relaxed. I stayed close to him, getting used to the feel of him beside me, counting his heartbeats. Moonlight was coming in the slats between the blinds. It was a full moon, and my pupils were so dilated from staring into the darkness that the room seemed bright as day. Burr stirred a little, and his hand shifted to my hip.

He was dreaming. His body was pressed against mine, and I could feel him wanting me even in the depths of his sleep.

I heard a bed creaking, loud in the silence of the house. At first I thought it was Mama getting up to roam, but the firm tread coming down the hall disabused me of that notion. The bedroom door swung open slowly, quietly. I narrowed my eyes to tiny slits and pretended to be sleeping while Florence stood in the doorway of the room, watching us. She stood there for a long time, three or four minutes. In the moonlight her face seemed expres-sionless. I had no idea what she was thinking.

“Arlene?” she said softly, just a breath above a whisper.

I did not answer.

“I know you’re awake.”

I was absolutely still.

“Arlene, you need to come talk to me.”

I remained silent, playing possum.

“Girl, you best get your little butt out here and talk to me!” she said, louder, and Burr shifted, making a small noise in his throat.

Florence froze in the doorway until he settled.

She whispered, “People who are really asleep don’t hold their breath, Arlene.” Then she closed the door, and I heard her heading back to her room. I lay in the darkness for a long time, staring at Florence’s sewing machine in the place where my bed used to be. At some point I fell asleep.

In the morning Florence was filling the house with the smell of eggs frying in bacon grease by the time Burr and I were up.

Clarice’s old alarm clock said it was after seven, so I knew Bruster would have already left for work. I wrapped myself in my robe and turned my back while Burr pulled on his running shorts and a T-shirt. When I looked back over my shoulder, he was laughing at me. I grinned back at him and then hid my face in my hands.

We went out through the den and into the kitchen. Florence was standing at the stove, cooking, and she did not turn around or look at us when we came in. Her shoulders were set, and her spine was ramrod straight. She was like the poster child for angry good posture.

“Where’s Mama?” I asked.

Florence shrugged. “In her room getting dressed. She already ate.”

“I came to say good morning, Aunt Florence,” I said. “I’m going to hop in the shower.”

“You can sit down and eat a breakfast,” she said. “Yours is almost done, Arlene.” I obediently sat, and Florence spoke to the window over the stove. “How do you take your eggs, Burr?”

Burr said, “Like Lena’s, over soft.”

Florence said, “Arlene likes them over hard.” She picked up her spatula and lifted two eggs out of the cast-iron skillet. They had been cooked until the edges looked like brown lace. She dumped them on a plate and snatched up some bacon from the drainer and threw that beside them. She slopped grits onto the plate and then grabbed a biscuit so hard she smashed its top in. She marched over and banged the plate down in front of me, but immediately picked it back up, saying, “Or she used to ten years ago. I guess you would know better than me how she likes her eggs now.” Her mouth was back in its hard, tight line.

“They look fine, Aunt Flo,” I said. “I like them both ways.”

But she was already taking away the plate. She dumped the whole breakfast in the trash and got four more eggs out of the fridge.

She cracked them violently into the iron skillet, and they sizzled and popped in the bacon grease.

“I haven’t cooked the girl an egg in ten years,” said Aunt Florence, picking out bits of shell. “It’s not like she would call me up and say, ‘By the way, I like my eggs a new way now.’ It’s not like she was thinking I would ever cook her an egg again.”

Burr raised his eyebrows and mouthed “Wow” at me. I shrugged.

We sat quietly while Florence abused the food and threw it onto plates. Then she slammed the plates in front of us. “I was going to say to you, Arlene, that you can run to bed all tired and hold your breath, but sometime you are going to have to sit down and talk to me. But then, see, I realized, thinking about it, that I am wrong. You seem to have lived just fine ignoring me for ten years long-distance, so what’s a few days ignoring me in my face.”

And with that, she headed out the back door towards her garden.

I popped out of my chair and was after her before she left the carport. “That’s not fair, Aunt Florence. I call home every Sunday, and most weeks more than that.”

Burr had gotten up after me and followed us outside. Aunt Florence whirled around to face me, and I took an involuntary step back. I ran into Burr, who stood his ground, a solid wall of warmth at my back.

“You think you are such a smart little missy, but you are not that smart,” said Florence. She was so angry that her grammar cracked and shattered. “You don’t talk to me about nothing, Arlene, not nothing, and you know it. You sit up there all high and mighty in your Yankee town, thinking I am some ignorant old countrywoman, but I know you, smarty britches. I know why you won’t talk to me or come home. And maybe I am dumb like you think, because I keep believing one day you are going to stop punishing me and forgive me. But I guess I am wrong about that, too, you resentful little turd.”

“Forgive you?” I said, dumbfounded. “Aunt Florence, I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about, and I am certainly not punishing you.”

“Really?” said Florence, her voice flooded with disbelief, and she looked at Burr for a long, ugly moment. “Go hold your breath in the house, Arlene. Nobody wants you out here.” She turned her back on me and stalked off towards her garden, and this time I did not follow her.

Aunt Florence had been filling in blanks. I, more than anyone, ought to have known she would. I managed to go through life never lying by pausing in the right place, and people almost always filled in what they wanted. Clarice had taught me that. So Florence thought I had stayed away from Possett for ten years because I was mad at her because of some ancient fight or something she had made up in her head. And how was I supposed to fix that? I had no way to absolve her except the truth. I saw Jim Beverly for a moment in my mind’s eye, lying in the earth, waiting for his Rose-Pop to come and find him. I shook my head, shook it away. How could I tell her? So far I couldn’t even confess to Burr.