Leaving Eden (11 page)

“Nope.”

“I know,” Goody said.

“You do?” I said.

She smiled, pleased with herself. “It’s the Great Redeemer.”

“Nope,” Mama said. “But you’re close.” She and Martha Lee giggled harder, until the coughing started up.

“Well, who then?” I said. “I give up.”

“The Grim Reaper,” Mama said.

Goody stood up so fast, her chair fell over. Her chin started shaking like she’d got palsy. “You go too far,” she said to Martha Lee. “You go too damn far.”

For once I had to agree with her.

The next day Goody told Mama the dummy went or she did, and when Mama wouldn’t cave, Goody went back to Florida. Everyone thought she was spitting mad, but the night before she left, she was quiet in bed, not one complaining word about Mama or Daddy or Martha Lee. Later that night, I woke up to her crying. I just lay there pretending to sleep and listening to the scary sound of her little hiccuping sobs. “Oh, my baby,” she said once in a low, ragged voice, like she had pains in her belly.

The next day, when Daddy and I drove her to Lynchburg, she gave me a kiss on the lips and before she got on the plane, she handed me a ten-dollar bill. I almost fainted from shock. And even though I was relieved that I wouldn’t have to be sharing my bed anymore and listening to her complaining, I was suddenly sad she was going.

The Grim Reaper stayed in a chair next to Mama’s bed and pretty soon it seemed like he belonged there. Martha Lee took to dressing up his outfit. She jammed a cigarette in the mouth of the Clinton mask and set a bottle of Pabst in his hand. Once, she hung an
Out to Lunch
sign around his neck and set the hands on the little fake clock to read eight P.M. Mama pulled a rose from the bouquet my Uncle Grayson sent and stuck it in his lapel. After that, the dummy got a flower from every bunch that came into the house for Mama. Roses, carnations, and daisies covered his suit coat like some kind of badges. They stayed there even after they wilted. Before long, when people came to visit, they brought things to give to Duane, which was what Mama and Martha Lee had gone back to calling the dummy. When the preacher from Elijah Baptist came by, surprising Mama, who didn’t know about my attending there regular, he asked to be introduced and then patted his pockets until he found a stick of Juicy Fruit. Raylene brought a comb from the Kurl, one of the pink ones with
Klip-N-Kurl
in gold letters on the spine that she handed out at Christmastime. “With a head of hair like that, he’ll be needing it,” she said. Daddy was the only one who never brought anything for Duane. Then one night, he slipped a crow feather in the brim of the black hat; when he did that, Mama smiled at him like he was handing her a gift. After that, there was no stopping him. He brought a pumpkin and a little pack of cigars and a feedbag from the mill that he fashioned into a sling, like Duane had a broken arm. Later, when Mama went on the morphine drip, he made one for him, too. Mama said it was the best Duane ever.

After a while I wanted to give up on the driving, but Martha Lee told me to try it one more time, and maybe it was because I was relaxed from laughing so hard and didn’t have room for nerves, but this time it was perfect. I cranked the shift from first straight through second to third without jerking at all, easing up on the clutch like I’d always known how. The rest was easy. I didn’t even swerve all over the road like you might think I would. Martha Lee said I had a natural aptitude for steering. She promised she’d get me a book of driving rules and said we could practice again the next week. Then she took me out for pizza and ice cream.

“Don’t tell your daddy about the driving,” she said when she dropped me off. “We’ll just surprise him.” Which was fine with me. There would be less chance that he’d say I couldn’t do it. If he even remembered I was alive.

I was fixing dinner when I realized I hadn’t had the empty-hole-feeling in my belly for hours. For a fact I’d have to say it was the best day I’d spent since Mama passed on.

Tallie’s Book

Peppermint tea will soothe a sour
stomach.

Even if people act like they’re mad,
underneath they can be really feeling
sad.

Like most things in life, driving isn’t hard once you get the knack of it. Getting the knack is the hard part.

nine

For the next three days I rode over to the creek straight from the Kurl, and it had nothing to do with the record high temperatures we were experiencing or my need to get cooled down. Truth was, I didn’t want cooling down. I wanted to feel the heat in my belly again, the way I had when Spy was looking at me. For sure, I knew I should be staying away from Baldy and this shameful temptation to display myself, but you couldn’t have kept me away if you tied me to a kitchen chair and double locked the door. Some mighty force inside was pulling me, like in science class when we watched the little black filings swoop across the lab table to the horseshoe magnet. “Magnetic attraction,” Mr. Brown told the class. He said it was an irresistible force of nature. That’s how I felt. Like I had this urgent force building inside me, and the lodestone drawing it was Spy.

Just thinking about the possibility of him being there made my thighs feel heavy and my belly get warm, but he never came. Not once. Wiley was there the second day I went there, but Will was nowhere to be seen. He acted like such a goof that I finally asked him what the hell was the matter, was he having the curse, which was one of the things the girls in school call being in your moon. He turned red and said what was the matter with
me
, I was the one acting like she was on the rag, which is one of the gross things the boys call your moon. Goody said sometimes men could be crude-crude-crude, and Wiley was proving her right.

When Spy didn’t appear on the third day, it occurred to me that he might have gone to Virginia Beach and that was why he hadn’t come back to the creek. Va Beach was what the popular kids all called it, like it was their private oh-so-cool name. Their special code. But if one of the regular kids said it, they’d look at them like there was snot running down their chin. Going to Va Beach was a summer tradition for kids going off to college in the fall. They’d rent a house for a weekend and would party-party-party, then they’d spend the rest of the summer bragging about how wasted they got. I wouldn’t go if they asked me, and not only because Elizabeth Talmadge would have wrangled herself an invitation even if she hadn’t graduated yet, and I’d have to spend the weekend listening to her make fun of my clothes. During lunch period, she always made a big deal about how there was a clothing sale at the church thrift shop in town and maybe I should check it out. She did that even before Mama took sick.

The Queen of the World was the one who started calling me Bullwinkle, after that stupid cartoon with the moose, because my real name is Natasha like one of the characters on the show. I told her I was named for Natalie Wood, and she said, Oh, really, how droll, which is the phony way she talked sometimes. Mama said Elizabeth teased me because she was jealous, which is the kind of thing mamas have to say to their kids. “Right, Mama,” I said. “Elizabeth Talmadge, who is the most popular of all the popular girls, who lives the perfect life in a perfect house and wears perfect clothes, Elizabeth Talmadge who is Queen of the Universe, who is probably Queen of the Whole Solar System, yeah, Elizabeth Talmadge has plenty of cause to be jealous of Tallie Brock. She probably cries herself to sleep every night, she’s so envious of me.”

Mama told me that sarcasm wasn’t becoming, and then she said there wasn’t a soul alive who lived a perfect life or was perfect, least of all a girl who tried to humiliate others.

Anyway, when Spy didn’t show up at the creek, I was feeling that irresistible attraction so strong that before I could stop myself, I phoned his house just so I could hear his voice. The first time I called, his mama answered. She sounded so whispery, I could barely hear her. The second time, I swear she said, “Sarah, is that you?” I remembered what Rula had said about Sarah’s funeral and I hung up while she was still asking who’s there and was it Sarah. I tried one last time, at night, when I thought for sure Spy’d answer, but this time I got Mr. Reynolds and he threatened to call the police if whoever it was didn’t stop harassing them. I knew you could get these things to attach to your phone that’d show who was calling and that would be all I needed, so I stopped.

Finally I decided the best thing to get Spy interested was to wait until I had the nine by twelve Glamour Pic of me transformed into a star. I’d find a way for Spy to see that picture if I had to mail it to him. Everything depended on the photo. Both getting to Hollywood and getting Spy.

Just because I was preoccupied with Spy didn’t mean I’d given up my idea of going to L.A. I figured it out at night when I couldn’t sleep. When Spy was at UVA working toward becoming a lawyer, I’d be developing my career. We’d come back to Eden to be married. Ours would be the biggest, most important wedding Amherst County had ever seen.

My mama and daddy never had a wedding, which was another thing Goody used to rant on about. I must have heard a thousand times how she’d been cheated of seeing Mama dressed in white and going down the aisle. They had this argument so many times, I could recite it by heart.

“That’s why we eloped, Mama,” my mama told her. “Luddy and I couldn’t face the prospect of the circus you were hell-bent on providing.”

“What’s wrong with wanting to see your only daughter married in style?” Goody said. “Just tell me, what’s the sin in that?”

“Don’t pull that ‘only daughter’ crap on me,” Mama said right back. “It’s not my fault you didn’t have more kids.”

“Perhaps I should have,” Goody said, straightening her wrinkled neck. “Then I might have had a daughter with a bone or two of gratitude in her body, a daughter who
appreciated
all the sacrifices her mama made instead of throwing it away on some bit of mill-hand trash.”

Mama got the dangerous look she wore whenever Goody was mean about Daddy. “If you’re so all-fired hot to have a wedding in the family,” she said, going for the place that would hurt Goody most, “then you should tell your precious Grayson to get married.”

“You leave Grayson out of this,” Goody said.

My Uncle Grayson lived in Atlanta, where he was an accountant for some big company. He lived with another man, his housemate, according to Goody, who told people Grayson was waiting to find the right woman, a woman good enough for him, not the first piece of trash to swing her skirt across his path. Goody said that, but it was common knowledge Uncle Grayson wouldn’t ever be getting married. At least not in any wedding that Goody’d want to be within a million miles of.

Mama loved him, though. “You ever need anything, sugar, you call your Uncle Grayson,” she said when she was real sick. She told me lots of things I should do when she was gone, like finish school and follow my dream and not let anyone get in my way or tell me I couldn’t have the life I wanted. I couldn’t bear to listen at first, and at the end, with the morphine and all, what she said didn’t make sense. She’d say things like, “Listen to the bark of trees,” and, “Bite the vein of life,” and other stuff that sounded crazy. Sometimes she’d look straight at me and smile and call me Sasha. At first I thought she was having trouble with my name, but then she’d say it again. Clear as can be.
Sasha
. “It’s me, Mama,” I’d say. “Tallie.” “I know, dear,” she’d say, and call me Sasha again.

The shame of life is we’re only given one chance at everything as it passes by. If I could do it over again, I’d take back every mean-hearted thing I ever said to Mama. And I’d concentrate on everything she said and I’d write it all down careful, word for word. Then I wouldn’t have to try to recall it all from memory. And I wouldn’t have to be always listening to the women at the Kurl and conversations in the girls’ room at school for things to be putting in my rule book, things a girl needed to know to become a woman. I’d get it straight from Mama.

By that November, Mama wasn’t eating enough to keep a bee alive. She stopped listening to TV because the noise hurt her. She didn’t even want music, music that’d been like blood in her veins—country and Elvis and all the oldies. She asked us to turn it off. She wanted peace, she said. She needed quiet. During the day, she lay drowning in the folds of her blue robe, her lips chapped and cracked. Sometimes she’d ask for little pieces of ice that she’d hold in her mouth till they melted. In the night, I’d hear her moaning. “I’m here, darlin’,” Daddy’d say. “Right here.” He’d taken to sleeping on the floor beside her mechanical bed.

“She’d be better off in the hospital,” the doctor told Daddy one day.

“She wants to stay right here,” Daddy told him. “In her home.”

“Can’t you make her go?” the doctor asked. “Can’t you make her see the sense in being there where we can regulate things?”

Daddy kind of smiled. “Not a person alive can make Dinah Mae do something when she’s got her mind set.”

Then the doctor said something about “lungs to bone to brain,” and I ran out of the house before I could hear any more. It made me worse than sad to see Mama like that, but I didn’t cry. I was afraid if I started I’d never stop, and I think that was when the hard black thing first took root in my chest, a thing that hurt, like a rib was broken or missing.

It made my heart about break to look at Mama’s feet. Her perfect, size-five feet, feet that had danced the boogie and enraptured my daddy, had turned ugly, swelling nearly double and fatter than Effie Webb’s and hers spilled over the tops of her shoes. When she was on morphine, Mama kept telling us her feet were cold but when we covered them with a blanket, she got fussy and told us to get rid of it. “Take off my shoes,” she said and, no matter how many times we told her she wasn’t wearing any, she kept after us to take them off. “Okay, Cookie,” Martha Lee’d finally say, “we’ll take them off,” and that would calm Mama down.

It made me jealous sometimes, the way Martha Lee did everything for Mama, but I was glad, too, relieved that I didn’t have to do things like change the diapers she had to wear or clean up the snot that ran out of her nose when she was out cold from the morphine, stuff that I couldn’t do no matter how much I loved Mama. But Martha Lee didn’t mind a bit. “Come on, Cookie,” she’d say in this straight voice that wasn’t the phony kind people sometimes used, like they were talking to a retard instead of a sick person. Her voice was soft and made the back of my throat ache just to listen to it. “Let’s get you cleaned up and in a new outfit and then I’ll put some lotion on your back.” Then she’d bring in a basin and cloth and wash Mama all over and put on a clean gown, one of those ugly things that tie in back like they make you wear in hospitals. She’d brush Mama’s hair and tie it back with a ribbon, and put a little blush on her cheeks, and while she was at it, she put some on Duane’s Clinton-mask cheeks, too. That always made Mama smile. Martha Lee’d tell Mama she looked as pretty as a carnival doll. “You, too,” Mama’d say back. There was not a cold chance in hell anyone would ever be mistaking Martha Lee for a carnival doll, but watching her with Mama I could understand why sick folk might believe she was an angel.

Anyway, with
Glamour Day
a key part of my plan to get Spy to love me, I was so het up, I couldn’t sleep the night before the team of trained professionals was finally set to arrive. I’d close my eyes and picture the blonde in the poster, then I’d put myself in her place, the pink boa draped around my neck. Then I’d open my eyes and check the bedside clock to see how much longer I had to wait. It felt like morning would never arrive. Daddy rolled in after one. Last call at CC’s, I thought, and stared up at the ceiling, at the stars Mama’d stuck there. She’d put them there when I was ten. A whole constellation that glowed faintly in the dark, with moons and planets complete with little rings. I didn’t see them at first and when I finally noticed them, she said they’d been there for a week. “Why didn’t I see them?” I asked her. “You weren’t expecting them,” she said. “Sugar,” she said, “you got to keep your eyes open for the unexpected. Especially when it’s been right in front of you all the time.”

I could tell right away it was one of Daddy’s noisy nights. Sometimes when he came home from CC’s, he wasn’t too bad, but that night I followed his progress through the kitchen, falling over every chair, then into the bathroom. I prayed he wasn’t too drunk to aim true, because I was so g.d. sick of wiping his pee drops off the floor, I could puke. I’m not the maid, I wanted to tell him. Finally I heard him fall into bed and pretty soon he was snoring. My daddy was the champion snorer. If they had medals for it, he’d have gotten the gold. “Your Daddy’s not a bad man,” Raylene told me once. “He just needs someone to take him in hand.”

He woke up before I did. When I walked into the kitchen, he had the coffee made and was frying up some eggs, although you had to marvel that he could walk straight, never mind handle a fry pan. “Early bird gets the breakfast,” he said, and poured me a mug, then—surprise-surprise-surprise—he gave me the eggs he’d been cooking for himself. He was happy as a pig in shit, whistling like crazy while he fried up more eggs for himself. I’d eaten half my breakfast when I really tuned in, and that was when it hit me. He was whistling that old blues song, “I’m a Man,” the one Mama knew meant he was working himself up to apologize for some harm done.

I shoved the eggs around the plate, my appetite flown straight out the window. It’s nothing, I told myself. He’s probably only feeling bad for staying out half the night and drinking up the bill money while the Cash Store cuts off our credit and I go around in midget’s clothes. It’s nothing. But in my belly, it didn’t feel like nothing. When he sat down to eat, he stopped whistling, but guilt lay on his face, plain as white on rice. On the pretense of getting more coffee, I took a look out the window to check on the truck, see if it was smashed up, but it was the same as usual, just the one fender bashed in. It’s nothing, I told myself again, searching for reassurance. Then I remembered Rula Wade and how her daddy’d married a woman half his age. I knew women hung around CC’s. I looked across the table and stared at him, trying to picture him with anyone but Mama. The closed place deep inside my chest got a little tighter. He’d finished his eggs and was taking up the tune again.