Keeping Secrets (14 page)

Some of the Norrises hadn’t started out from West Cypress that morning, but from fifty miles farther north in Pearl Bank. That was where two days earlier they’d held Virgie’s funeral number one.

“Well, I hope Nancy’s happy now that she’s made us all late. It’s bad enough to keep all those folks in Sweetwell waiting three days. They’re probably standing on one foot and then the other.” Rosalie was twisting her handkerchief so hard that the monogram had disappeared.

“Momma, I don’t think Aunt Nancy kept them in Pearl Bank on purpose. Aunt Flo said her kids overslept. Then the bacon burned, and two collar buttons just disappeared off the face of the earth.”

Rosalie jerked her damp handkerchief to her face and dabbed at a fresh flow. “You taking her side now,” she cried. “I guess I could have expected that.”

“Ro.” Jake tentatively placed a hand on his wife’s shoulder, but she pulled away smartly as if she’d been burned. “For the lovamike,” he exploded.

The blood rose in Jake’s face. He shoved himself back into the plastic seat. They were all crazy, he thought. Well, what did you want from Baptists? Jews, sensible people like himself, buried their dead, sat shivah and mourned for seven days, and it was over. But not Southern Baptists and not Norrises and not in West Cypress, Louisiana.

Now Rosalie was picking up an old thread of grief as if it were a stitch she’d been worrying and had for a moment dropped. “I knew it, I always knew it ever since we were kids.”

“Now, Momma.” There was a warning then in Emma’s voice, but she kept her eyes on the road. She didn’t need to look to see whether Rosalie was crying. The tears had been falling like spring rain determined to flood for four days now, ever since the word had first come that Grandma Virgie had passed on. She didn’t need to listen either. She knew what was coming next.

“Momma always loved her the most because she was the baby.”

“Now, you know that’s not true,” Emma said.

Rosalie ignored her and went on. It was her story. She’d tell it her way and as many times as she liked.

“Virgie loved you, Ro,” Jake tried once more from the back seat, making a special effort, like putting on his dark suit. It occurred to Emma that sometimes her daddy didn’t say this many words in a month.

“But not like she did Nancy,” Rosalie insisted. “She was the favorite. She got sent to school.”

“Because they had more money by the time she was grown. You’ve said that yourself,” Emma countered, wondering why she tried.

Rosalie shook her head and, giving up on the handkerchief, fumbled for a tissue in her black plastic purse. “Nobody sent me to school. I had to work for everything in this world I ever got.”

“Christ!” Emma exclaimed. The taillights of the hearse in front of them had popped on, signaling danger. Emma pumped the brake and shot a quick look behind.

They didn’t call Highway 80 Old Bucket of Blood for nothing. It was a two-lane roller coaster built by that honorable thief and friend of the common man, Huey P. Long. Like Huey it specialized in making mountains out of molehills and throwing blind curves.

Emma checked her rearview mirror again. She could see the whole Norris clan rear-ending one another until they were all squashed together in a great ancestral jam.

“Be careful!” Rosalie said, pulling out of her grief to deal with the here and now. “You always drive too fast.” She paused a moment. “And don’t take the Lord’s name in vain.”

Emma glanced at the speedometer. She was doing thirty-five.

What can we talk about to change the subject, she wondered, before I have a screaming hissy fit?

Being a Southern girl, she put her mind on automatic pilot and the niceties fell out of her mouth. “It was a beautiful funeral, Momma. I know Grandma would have been proud.”

“She did look pretty in her powder blue, didn’t she? It went so nice with her silver hair.”

“And that white casket,” Emma added with a measure of pride. She had picked out the coffin, Rosalie being too nervous to choose, afraid they’d sell her something over the limits of the paid-up burial policy.

“I bet Nancy told everybody at the funeral in Pearl Bank that she made the arrangements.”

“But, Momma, they know. They know you’ve been paying for that policy for years.”

“I guess so. I just hope they appreciate all the trouble I went to.” Rosalie snapped her purse shut in exclamation.

The car was silent for a few moments. Green pines, sweet gums, oaks floated by. A bunch of brown-and-white dairy cows clustered, staring over a fence into the highway as if they were counting trucks or had something on their minds.

Then Emma’s thoughts leapfrogged over the top of the long hearse up ahead to the highway patrol car with its blue light flashing. She could imagine J.D. with his sunglasses on and his black nonregulation curls escaping from his wide-brimmed brown hat. J.D. looked more like Elvis Presley than any man she’d ever known. Her boyfriend, Bernie, had almost the same black hair, but not those eyes, not that mouth. That was what made her shiver when she thought about J.D., the curve, just like Elvis’s, of that wide mouth.

“Do you think she minded all this moving around?”

“Who?” Emma had to drag her mind back into the car.

“Momma,” Rosalie answered.

“You mean leaving Sweetwell for Pearl Bank to live with Aunt Nancy and Big J.D.?”

Out of the corner of her eye, which she was trying to keep on the rear end of the hearse, Emma saw Rosalie shake her head.

“No, I don’t mean that. I mean shipping her body from Nancy’s to Cypress and the funeral parlor for the fixing, then back to Pearl Bank for that service Nancy insisted on.”

“Those were her last friends there in Pearl Bank,” Jake said, but Rosalie turned and shot him a look that made him hush.

“And then all the way back to Cypress for
my
funeral. Now over to Sweetwell, where I guess somebody’s got to say a few more words before we put her in the ground beside Pa. Well,” said Rosalie, dabbing at her eyes, “I hope Nancy’s happy with all this running around.”

“At least the weather’s cool.” Emma was just making conversation, trying to lead Rosalie in another direction. “At least it’s not August.” And then she fanned herself with one hand at the thought of three open-casket funerals in that heat when dogs lay motionless for days and tomatoes burst open by themselves sitting out in the sun.

But Rosalie would not be redirected from the worn path she was traveling on. “You know, I wouldn’t have minded so much if Nancy had taken good care of her, seeing as how she was getting all of Momma’s Social Security.”

“For Pete’s sakes,” Jake said, still not having learned his lesson. “Nancy didn’t starve her to death.”

“You shut up, Jake. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Goddammit!” he began. Emma knew he was just warming up. This was like the old days, all those other trips in the car. But this time she was driving.

“If you-all are going to yell,” she said, “I’m gonna pull this car off on the side of the road and stop.”

Rosalie opened her mouth and then reconsidered.

Emma heard the echo of her own voice, sounding like
she
was the mother. But that’s what had been happening for some time now, this sideways slipping of power, creeping from their hands to her own, as if they’d left it lying on the ground for her to pick up. At seventeen, she thought, I’m Big Momma of us all.

After the burst of yelling there was silence for the next thirty miles, except for Rosalie’s hiccuping and a couple of times she blew her nose.

Nobody cares about my feelings, not even at my own mother’s funeral, Rosalie thought.

In the backseat, Jake did the thing he did best: he sulked. He’d show Rosalie. He wouldn’t say another word for the next seven days. He’d sit his own private shivah for Miss Virgie.

Miss Virgie’d been a nice old woman, he thought. And before she lost her mind she’d made a hell of a chocolate pie. It was too bad she’d never taught Rosalie how to cook. But nobody could teach Rosalie anything. No, Jake said to himself, as he’d said so many times the past seventeen years, Rosalie knew it all.

The silent thirty miles stretched slowly across the better part of an hour. Highway 80 was the main street of every little town. It poked along, widening and narrowing, giving the local folks a chance to stare. Old men, closer to their own last parade than they wished, looked somber and tipped sweat-stained felt hats.

In Grambling, a little colored boy had goggle-eyed the hearse and fumbled a sign at his chest, not exactly a cross. Voodoo, Emma thought. Then he’d mouthed the word, clear as day.
Cadillac
.

Emma smiled to herself. Did Grandma Virgie ever think she’d get to ride in a Cadillac?

Well, I’m going to, she thought. And not after I’m dead, either. When I’m
somebody
, I’m going to come back to West Cypress and show all those snotty girls in Delta Beta, all those girls with forty-two color-coordinated-to-their-sweaters-and-skirts net petticoats. I’ll drive through the two blocks of downtown West Cypress, then over to Cypress, waving at them from a red Coupe de Ville. I’ll wear my hair up in a twist and dress all in black.

But for now, for today, a ride in J.D.’s state-trooper car would do. She thought about his promise to take her out for a drive in Sweetwell later. A little shiver made her shoulders hunch. She bet J.D. knew all the back roads. He probably knew every piece of gravel in the whole northern half of the state—as well as she knew this road to Sweetwell where her grandma used to live.

Near Arcadia was a dirt road that trailed off at the edge of town. She craned her neck every time they drove past, looking for the splotches of red, though she knew they’d been washed away years ago from that place where the federal agents had riddled Bonnie and Clyde.

How exciting their lives must have been, saying the hell with it, grabbing up handfuls of their hearts’ desire. Robbing banks, driving hell-bent for leather to make their getaways, holing up, making love.

Emma’s outer eye checked the road ahead then. All was clear.

She could floorboard the Studebaker like Bonnie and pass J.D. in his trooper car, daring him to chase her to who knows where with blaring sirens, flashing blue lights. Her inner eye imagined what he would do with her once he caught her. She didn’t have any bags of green, gold and silver booty to recover. What would Mr. Lawman take instead for his reward?

She shifted in her seat then.

“Are you tired?” Rosalie broke the silence. “I can drive for a while.”

“Nope. I’m fine.” Fine indeed. If Momma only knew what she was thinking, and about her
cousin
, she’d slap her face hard.

Did Rosalie ever even think about sex? Emma was sure they didn’t do it. She had listened at her parents’ bedroom door for years, rifled their medicine chest and dresser drawers. Not a shred of evidence.

All she’d ever found were old pictures that neither of them would ever talk about.

“Who is this,” she’d ask, “and that?”, pointing at a photograph of a woman with light-brown hair in a brown-and-white polka-dot dress. She had a pretty smile and looked, as the old joke went, a little bit pregnant.

There were so many things they wouldn’t discuss, as if life were nothing more than gas bills, supper and the present. They’d
never
talk about the past.

And sex: Emma had never heard either one of them even
say
the word. But then she guessed Rosalie thought there was no need to voice the Southern Baptist assumption that a girl would remain intact until her wedding night. She wondered what Jews thought about that, for she had finally gotten her father to say that he was Jewish, but that admission was the end of
that
. She certainly wasn’t going to be able to get him to talk about sex if she couldn’t get him to talk about Jews. At least she had her boyfriend Bernie’s father, Herman, to ask.

Suddenly the little Studebaker shuddered as an eighteen-wheeler roared past. Emma tried to catch a glimpse of the trucker. Now,
there
was a life of adventure she’d like to know more about.

Sometimes she wondered whether Bernie, who no more believed in Jesus or sin than she did, had been brainwashed by Rosalie. Had her mother’s ideas concentrated themselves into little green rays, glowing in the dark like the Green Skeleton of Emma’s childhood nightmares, crawled into the car where she and Bernie sat behind windows fogged by their hot breath? That was ridiculous, she knew, but they’d had their hands in each other’s pants for over a year now. Yet Bernie, only inches away from the prize, hesitated still.

Emma had thought about it a long time and had decided that their mutual virginity was a bore, one of those conventions that people in places like West Cypress insisted upon. She’d read books. She knew that people had been doing it out of wedlock for years in places like Paris, Rome, New York. Besides, so far, what she’d experienced with Bernie had been
fun
.

“Come on, Bern,” she said to him, “take me.”

“Not in the front seat of my car.”

“Then let’s get in the back.”

“Very funny, Emma. I keep telling you, I want it to be special. That’s why we have the Fund—to take us to New Orleans and the Hotel Monteleone.”