Leaving Eden (6 page)

One morning when she’d been back about three weeks, Mama and I sat on the porch, drinking iced tea and playing gin rummy. A pair of beetles settled on the railing, rear ends hitched. “They’re mating,” Mama said.

“For real?” I said. I must have seen them hitched up like that a hundred times, but I’d never known what they were up to. “What are they?”

“Fireflies.”

Well, that stopped me in my tracks. I couldn’t have been more surprised if she’d told me they were buffalo. It didn’t seem possible that those ordinary brown bugs were what produced the flickering light or that something so common, so utilitarian was capable of producing magic. Mama said we see what we want to see and that most beauty was an illusion anyway. She’d been staring at the beetles when she told me this. “Change,” she said suddenly. “Fireflies signify change.”

I didn’t like the sound of that one bit. “They do?”

“Absolutely. Beetles signify change.” Mama knew all kinds of things like that. Way back, there was Indian blood in Goody’s side of the family and whenever Mama wanted to get Goody’s goat, she’d bring that up. I was hoping this time she’d mistaken the sign. I’d had about as much change as I could handle. But even when I was given a clear indication of what lay ahead, I turned my gaze and looked the other way. Back then I believed it was possible to erase something if you pretended hard enough that it wasn’t happening. In that way, Mama and I were alike.

Some days, Martha Lee came with Mama and me to the creek. While I swam, they’d spread out a blanket and play two-handed canasta and drink gin tonics from a Thermos. The mix of their laughter and cigarette smoke and Coppertone would float out to me.

When I finished swimming, I’d flop on a towel near them and pretend to be asleep, hoping they would forget I was there. I liked to eavesdrop, especially when they talked about men and sex. They’d argue about who was good-looking. Although Martha Lee thought he was overrated, Mama plain adored Elvis. She said that she’d let him put his boots under her bed anytime. Martha Lee said when she found a man whose boots were bigger than hers, then she’d let him stow them under her bed. Goody would have had a heart attack if she could have heard them carrying on. Between them they knew the secrets of womanhood, everything a girl could want to know. Mama knew how to dance, dress pretty, and flirt without looking foolish, and how to stuff a chicken and make biscuits, how to put on makeup and make everyone fall in love with her. Martha Lee knew practical stuff, like how to raise vegetables, drive a stick shift, and care for sick people. I wanted to learn it all.

One afternoon, after I’d practiced the crawl until my legs were limp, I spread my towel near them and fought not to drift off to sleep. The buzz of their words circled me. “ . . . come so close . . . the punishing weight of secrets . . . only regret I didn’t get to see Natalie’s grave . . . thought there’d be plenty of time.” Just before I fell asleep, I heard my name.

Some time later, I woke to their conversation. I kept my breathing steady, feigning sleep.

“ . . . going to tell them?” Martha Lee was saying.

Mama was quiet.

“They’ll have to know sooner or later.”

Mama gave a thin, wispy sigh. “They’ll find out soon enough.”

I forgot how to breathe.
They’ll find out soon enough
. Find out what? Then I realized it must mean that Mama was going to leave us again. I must have made a noise, because they stopped talking.

After that, I kept watch for the first sign betraying Mama’s intent to leave. I stopped hanging out with the Bettis twins and stayed right at her side. I checked to make sure the gray suitcase stayed empty. Most nights, when everyone was sleeping, I continued to sit on the porch watching homely brown beetles night-altered into something special. Change, they flickered in the dark.
Change.
I’d concentrate on erasing their message and pray for things to stay the same.

When Raylene closed up at five, I had another dollar to add to my savings. Effie hadn’t tipped me a penny, but Cora was so happy knowing where to find her ring, she slipped me four quarters.

On the way home, I stopped by Simpson’s Cash Store and picked up a couple of pork chops. My plan was to get supper ready, to make something really good. I figured maybe it’d get Daddy back on track. Although I generally stayed away from Halley’s Mill, I even considered riding out to tell him I’d be fixing something special.

The mill was older than any person in town, built back before the Civil War, and it was one of only three working water-powered mills in all of Virginia, a fact my daddy liked to repeat with pride, as if he owned it instead of just working there. When I was younger, I’d go out back in the warehouse and play hide-and-seek between the rows of full sacks, stacked nearly to the ceiling. Or I’d make out the letters on the blackboard that swung overhead by the cash register, listing the things available: laying mash and hog meal. Barley and oats. Cottonseed and peanut hulls. All kinds of flour: corn and wheat and bran. I’d stand on one of the big iron scales—the one with raised letters declaring
July 3, 1894, Moydyke & Marmon Co., Indianapolis
— until someone came along to weigh me. I loved the sound of the mill, all the whirling of the belts and pulleys and elevators and the chatter of corn falling in the hopper. I liked the way every bit of wood in that place was worn smooth and how you could leave reverse footprints in the flour dust. Sometimes I’d climb up to the second story and stand at the window by the steel waterwheel, listening to the hollow sound of water coming through the run and then the soft, liquid
splish, splish, splish
of it hitting the cups. And I’d stare at the sparkle of water flicking off in the air like real rhinestones.

Just like Mama knew everything about Natalie Wood and movie-making, my daddy knew everything about that mill. He said milling by water was becoming a lost art. He showed me how to tell which grain was being milled just by the feel of it. Wheat grain was small and smooth. Corn was flat and round and bigger than wheat. Barley was easy: coarse husk. Buckwheat was a three-sided grain. Oats was a husk type. I’d try and try, eyes squeezed tight with concentration while I rolled the meal between my fingers, but no matter how I tried, I could never tell them all apart. My daddy, he’d just rub his thumb over a few grains and tell you right off, never missing.

Used to be I couldn’t get enough of the mill, but about the time I turned twelve and Mama was off chasing her dream, my feelings changed. Once, one of the farmers from out of town found me in the back feeding one of the mill cats and, quicker than you can imagine, he opened the front of his overalls and exposed his pale, wrinkled thing that made me want to puke-puke-puke. Sure wasn’t nothing to be so proud of, is what I wished I’d told him. And a few days after that, I saw a rat as big as a small-sized dog. After that I stopped spending time at the mill. And Daddy began spending more time at CC’s.

For a long time, when Mama first came back from L.A., he stayed clear of CC’s and I had hopes this good habit would stick, but after she left us, he started up again. At first I felt alone, like a real orphan. The only thing worse would have been to live with Goody in Florida. After my granddaddy died, Goody sold the house that had been in her family for three generations, moved south, and took up golf. She announced to anyone who’d listen that she lived in a “gated community,” like this was a place to be proud of instead of sounding like some sort of prison. And wouldn’t you know, the year Mama left us for good, Goody started her campaign to have me move there with her.

“We can’t have Natasha staying here with you,” I heard her tell my daddy. “She’ll be running wild in no time and turn up pregnant.” She said this like she was privy to special knowledge, like one of Etta Bird’s revelations, but the only thing it proved was how little she knew about me.

My daddy stood right up to her and said I’d be staying with him right where I belonged thank you anyway. He made it sound like we were a team. Even if it didn’t exactly work out that way, staying with him was better than any gated community in Florida with Goody, who played golf and wore gardening gloves all the time to protect her hands and spent the rest of her time warning people not to be getting too big for their britches or go getting a swelled head, which pretty much took care of both ends.

I picked out four pork chops, some fresh green beans, and a jar of applesauce. Mr. Simpson hesitated when I told him to add the total to my daddy’s bill, then lowered his voice so everyone in the universe wouldn’t hear. “Okay this time, Miss Tallie,” he said. “But you tell your daddy to come see me.”

I felt my face heat up. I knew this meant Daddy hadn’t settled up. Mama used to say Daddy was a hardworking man but no darn good with money. I felt the weight of the quarters from Cora Giles in my pocket and considered putting them toward our account. But with the Kurl closed Sundays and Mondays, I only had eight more workdays until the Glamour Company people came.

“Okay,” I said to Mr. Simpson, and grabbed the bag off the counter before he could reconsider. Just as I was settling the bag into the basket on the Raleigh, wouldn’t you know, Spy Reynolds pulled up to the gas pump in his souped-up, T-top Camaro. I felt my heart contract under my ribs.

“Hey there, Tallie,” he said. His hair was wet, like he’d just been swimming, and I was close enough to see the way the teeth of his comb had separated the strands into neat stripes. He was dressed in clean chinos and a white shirt, the sleeves rolled back revealing muscular arms. When he smiled, he looked pirate handsome, like the hero in one of Mama’s old black-and-white movies. “How’s it going?”

“Just fine,” I said, hugging the package to my chest and pretending I was pretty as my mama and thinking
shitfuckpiss
. He
never
saw me when I was looking good.

“Hot day to be riding a bike.”

“Sure is.” I never acted right around Spy. Sometimes, alone at night, I’d practice conversing with him, but whenever I saw him, all the things I’d rehearsed just stayed locked on my tongue, leaving me struck dumb and looking stupid.

“Want a ride home?”

“No, thanks,” I said. Course I wanted more than anything in the world to be sitting in Spy’s Camaro, but I wasn’t going to do it looking common as dirt. I held this picture in my mind of the first time I sat in his car: I’d be wearing a skirt and blouse—store new—and smelling of the strawberry shampoo I’d bought especially at Winn-Dixie four months before so I’d be prepared.

“Be no trouble.”

I knocked back the kickstand and straddled the bike. My head was so full of things I wanted to tell him that I turned dizzy with the weight of them.

“You could leave your bike here and pick it up later.”

“Can’t,” I said. “I got to build my legs up for swim team.”

He took a long look at me, staring directly at my legs. “You sure are building them something fierce,” he said.

I didn’t know how to take that. Could he mean my legs were getting too big? “See ya,” I said and left him standing there, pump nozzle in hand.

At quarter past five by the kitchen clock, I prepared the chops for pan-frying and cooked up some potatoes the way Mama used to, with plenty of bacon grease and onions. I set the table and waited, passing time by practicing my
Glamour Day
poses in front of the bathroom mirror, using a dish towel for the feather boa.

By six it was clear as clean glass Daddy wasn’t coming home. Sometimes I thought he forgot he even had a daughter. I finished cooking the chops, opened a beer, sat down, and ate. Occasionally, when I was alone like this, I pretended Mama was there with me. I imagined her sitting right across the table in the place I’d set for Daddy.

“Mama,” I said, “the
Glamour Day
people are coming pretty soon.”

I told her how everybody’d signed up. Even old Miss Tilly Pettijohn. I told her how I’d saved up more than three dollars and had it in the silver pitcher. I told her how Martha Lee was going to give me my first driving lesson on Monday. Then I told her a little about Spy. I asked her what she thought Spy meant when he’d said my legs looked fierce. It didn’t sound exactly like a compliment.

Finally I stopped. Having a one-way conversation with an empty plate was about the loneliest thing in the world. Lonelier than silence. Worse than not talking at all. That was when I decided to become a wild girl. Shit, I thought, I might as well have some fun before I die.

Tallie’s Book

Never marry a man who wears more
jewelry than you do.

A woman can be pretty and strong.

Everyone has a need to feel needed.

Beetles signify change.

four

I woke up with the Christmas feeling—that unexpected happy way you feel when you know something good is about to happen but you can’t recall exactly what—then I remembered it was finally Monday. I didn’t stop for breakfast, just grabbed the last doughnut from the box on the counter and pedaled over to Martha Lee’s, not even bothering to brush my hair. Sometimes it was a good thing Martha Lee didn’t care a lick about a person’s appearance.

Although it wasn’t yet eight, it was already hotter than Satan on his best day, and by the time I reached High Tower Road I was sweat-sticky and slightly nauseated from the heat. Mama would have cautioned me about heatstroke. She would have seen to it that I’d had breakfast and took water with me. But then if Mama’d been there, I wouldn’t be needing to have Martha Lee teach me to drive. I’d have had Mama. I could actually picture it. She’d make an occasion of it. She’d switch on the radio while I settled myself behind the steering wheel of her Dodge and we’d start off, her sitting next to me, telling me not to worry I’d get the hang of it, just have fun. And she wouldn’t press her foot against the floorboards to signal I needed to brake. Or reach out to correct my steering if I veered close to the centerline. She’d be singing in her off-key voice, belting it out with Buddy Holly or Sam Cooke.
You-oo-oo-oo send me.

But Mama wasn’t there, so Martha Lee would have to do. Which was a damn sight better than taking driver’s ed with Mr. Harold-goddamn-Nelson who carried a squirt bottle of breath freshener in his pocket and drove around in the bright yellow Chevy with a
Student Driver
sign on the roof like a pizza delivery car. Even my Raleigh beat that. As soon as I wheeled into the yard, I could see a yellow slip of paper flapping on the front door. No sign of Martha Lee’s pickup.

The scrawled note said she’d been called in unexpectedly on a case—old Temple Fallon over in Mission Wales had fallen and broken her hip.
Shitpissfuck.
I ripped the note off the door and scattered the pieces in the yard. In recent years, I’d trained myself not to plan on much, which take it from me was the best way to avoid disappointment, but I’d been
counting
on this driving lesson. At this rate I’d be as old as Temple Fallon before I learned to drive. Didn’t they have nurses in Mission Wales? Was Martha Lee the only LPN in Amherst County or what?

The thing was, sick people always wanted Martha Lee taking care of them, especially dying people, although you’d think that if a person was about to die, she’d want to be looking at some sweet-faced angel type instead of someone like Martha Lee. I know when Mama fell ill, she wouldn’t let another nurse near her. Martha Lee was angel enough for her.

It wasn’t true, of course, but Mama seemed to get sick overnight. One week she was swimming with me at the creek and dancing up a storm with Daddy, and the next week she was too tired to fix cake batter. She was always slim—she used to buy her clothes in the girls’ section at Shucks Discount—but by the time school started in September, she was downright bony. She took to wearing my daddy’s long-sleeve mill shirts, thinking, I guess, that we wouldn’t notice, but instead of hiding her thinness, Daddy’s shirts emphasized it. Often, when I came home after school, I’d find her sleeping. Not on the couch or the porch glider, but in her bed, which was scarier. One day I found her puking in the bathroom. When she reached out to flush, her sleeve fell back revealing an arm so thin, it looked like it would snap if you sneezed.

“Don’t tell your daddy,” she said.

“Okay,” I said. It shamed me to think a part of me was glad Mama was sick. For sure, she wouldn’t be leaving us if she was feeling poorly.

“Promise,” she said. “Promise you won’t tell him.”

The weight of conspiracy settled on my shoulders, but I agreed to it without hesitation. Like most people in her life, I couldn’t deny Mama anything. Still, I wondered how she thought she could keep this from him. Course now I understand you can always keep from people things they are determined not to see. You can even keep things from yourself if you’ve a mind to.

The next day, when Martha Lee showed up with a pot of chicken necks and dumplings, I heard them arguing in Mama’s room. They never, ever fought, and this scared me more than finding Mama on the bathroom floor.

“Well, I’m not standing by,” Martha Lee said. When she came out of that room her lips were all tight, like her mouth was full of the vinegar milk Mama used to make corn bread. I didn’t even pretend not to listen while she phoned a doctor over in Lynchburg.

“He’ll see you tomorrow,” she told Mama.

The next day, Daddy stayed home from the mill to drive her. When I insisted on skipping school to go along, I got set for an argument, but they caved without a word. I sat between them on the bench seat of the Dodge as we headed toward Lynchburg. Usually I felt protected sitting there, the three of us tight as June bugs, but that day, wedged in between the heft of my daddy and the unbearable weightlessness of Mama, nothing felt safe at all. We drove past the Ford dealership, the video store, past the run-down house with a sign that said inside a lady would read your palms, past the converted service station where they sold silver jewelry and cowboy boots, past the whole sorry strip of fast-food places pushing tacos and barbecue and fries. All the way to Lynchburg no one even turned on the radio. Once, Mama reached over and took my hand in hers. It was lighter than smoke, like holding Pick Up sticks encased in skin, or something dead, and I pushed it away. “Oh, sugar,” she said, and reached up and brushed the hair out of my eyes, but I refused to look at her. I wished I’d gone to school after all.

That night they argued about what the doctor had said and what Mama should do.

“We’ve got to make some decisions here,” Daddy began.

“Oh, Luddy,” Mama said. Even from my bedroom I could hear her deep sigh. “There’s no use thinking about all that.”

“Don’t you worry about the cost,” Daddy said. “None of that matters.”

“It’s not the cost.”

“What is it, then?”

Mama spoke so soft that I couldn’t hear her and I guess Daddy couldn’t, either, because I heard him ask her what she’d said.

“It’s too late,” Mama said.

“Too late? What’re you talking about?” Daddy said. “You heard the doctor. There’s things can be done.”

“Things,”
Mama said in a flat voice. I heard the creak of the kitchen chair as she sat down and then the answering creak as he sat next to her.

“That’s right,” Daddy said.

“Like chemo?” Mama said. “Like all that poison?”

“Yes.”

“The average person with stage four lives three days longer if she has chemo. Did you know that? Three days. And for what? Losing my hair. I’m not doing it.”

“Maybe they could operate?” Daddy said.

“You mean cut me open? No, Luddy. I’m not doing it.”

“Do it, Mama,” I whispered. “Do it. Let them cut you open.”

“For God’s sake, Dinah Mae.” My daddy was a big man. I’d seen him heft two sacks of flour on his shoulders like they weighed no more than air. And he was smart about certain things. Once, he nursed a cowbird back to health, ignoring folks who said a bird with a broken wing was as good as dead. I waited for him to tell Mama she had to do what the doctor said. “Hair grows back,” he said.

“Forget it, Luddy.”

“Jesus, Dinah Mae.”

“It’s too late,” Mama said, not shouting, not even reminding him to call her Deanie.

“How do you know? The doctor didn’t say anything like that.”

“It’s been too late for a long time.”

“How long?” It sounded like he was speaking with a mouth full of broken glass.

“What does it matter?”

“How long, Dinah Mae?”

“Easter,” Mama said.

That’s how I found out Mama’d been sick for five months.

Still, I thought she’d give in. I believed that after she got used to the idea of the treatments and losing her hair, she’d decide to do whatever she had to to get well. I thought with Goody and Daddy and Martha Lee all working on her, she’d let them give her poisons or operations or whatever it took. I thought she’d do it for me, though that was the last thing I wanted.

The whole day stretched before me. I supposed I could hang around and wait for Martha Lee, but there was no telling when she’d return. For all I knew, Temple-goddamn-Fallon and her broken hip would require twenty-four-hour nursing. I thought about helping myself to a beer, but I’d made a rule about not drinking before noon. I knew alcoholism could run in families, and Mama always said drinking in the morning was the first sign of a person heading directly for trouble. Naturally I’d put that in my rule book.

Finally I got the key out from under the black stone and went inside. A mess, as usual, but I wasn’t about to pick up. As far as I was concerned, old Temple Fallon could hobble all the way over from Mission Falls and clean up after Martha Lee. I got myself a glass of orange juice and after a while I began to snoop around. It was like Martha Lee breaking her promise gave me permission. I started in the bedroom. Naturally, the bed was unmade.

There was no mirror hanging over the dresser. No makeup in sight. Not even an old tube of lipstick or bottle of dime store perfume. The only things on the dresser were a dirty ashtray, a half-empty can of Pringles, and a balled-up tissue. It was probably the ugliest bedroom in three counties.

I headed for the bathroom next and checked out the medicine cabinet. Toothbrush, toothpaste, stick deodorant, aspirin—the cheap, no-name brand—a ratty box of Band-Aids, disposable razor, and an aerosol can of shaving cream. The stuff could have belonged to a man.

I returned to the bedroom, still looking for something worth the trouble of the hunt. I opened the top drawer of the dresser, prepared to find soiled underwear stuffed there but everything was folded in neat little piles. A stack of panties and another of bras, all practical and businesslike, white cotton, nothing pink or silky like Mama’s. I checked every drawer and each one was like that, as if all the mess was on the surface of Martha Lee’s life but underneath she kept things orderly.

I found the pictures in the bottom drawer. There were tons of them, some so old, they were black and white. They were of Mama, going back to the time when she was a little girl. Baby pictures of her and my Uncle Grayson, school pictures, and a bunch of snapshots taken of Mama and Martha Lee lying on a blanket at a beach and several of the two of them in front of a Christmas tree. There was a Halloween picture: Mama in a flapper dress, sporting a headband and cigarette holder, Martha Lee as a gangster, with a dummy propped between them wearing a hat with a wide brim and holding a fake machine gun. Duane. Just looking at it, my chest got full of stones.

Toward the bottom there was a picture of the three of them: my mama, daddy, and Martha Lee. I didn’t know when it was taken—shortly after I was born, I guessed, because there was a baby carriage in the corner of the photo. They were all holding hands, my mama in the middle. Daddy and Martha Lee were staring straight out at the photographer and looking like this was not their idea. I wondered how they got Daddy in the shot anyway. He always said he’d rather face the business end of a shotgun than have his picture taken. Mama looked so happy. Sometimes I almost forgot just how beautiful she was.

After a while, I put the photos back, just like I’d found them, and headed to the kitchen to refill my orange juice. I drank it slow so I wouldn’t get sick pedaling home, then rinsed the glass. I wasn’t even mad at Martha Lee anymore, just lonely and sick in my heart from looking at the pictures.

I was setting the glass in the strainer when I saw the First Federal envelope lying on an open shelf by the refrigerator. There was a wad of cash sticking out in plain sight, right there where any thief could walk right in and take it. I intended to walk away but I was sick with wanting for that money. It drew me to it, like I was hypnotized the way I’d once seen someone at a carnival I’d begged and begged my mama to take me to. The main show was in a tent, and there was a magician dressed in a shiny black suit with a red silk lining to the jacket and a narrow string tie like a cowboy might wear. After he did some dumb card tricks any four-year-old could figure out, he asked for a volunteer from the audience. When no one moved he chose Nell Mosley and kept at her until she climbed up on the stage, half laughing and making little brushing motions in the air with her hand. He got her to sit up on a tall stool, then he swung a watch in front of her face and told her she was getting sleepy, sleepy, sleepy, repeating this until she closed her eyes. He told her to stick her tongue out, and she did. Then he told her to get up and quack and waddle like a duck, which she did, too, right there in front of everyone, waddling around the stage in her ugly yellow dress, not even stopping when everyone screamed with laughter. I almost peed my pants I was so relieved it wasn’t my mama up there quacking.

I had nightmares for a week after that, each one about a man turning all of us into animals. Mama was a cat, my daddy a mule, and I’d been turned into a cow, which was the worst thing of all.

Now, just like Nell Mosley watching the magician’s watch, I stared at that money.
Glamour Day
was less than a week away. You can ask her for it, a voice told me. She’ll give it to you, if you ask her. That was absolute fact. Martha Lee would have given me about anything. But the money was all mixed up with disappointment over the driving lesson and seeing all those pictures of Mama.

There must have been a hundred bills in that envelope. I only took two. A ten and a five. Just what I needed and not one dime more. After, I pedaled straight home and put the money in the syrup pitcher. I thought I’d feel relieved that I had almost enough money, but I didn’t. Taking from Martha Lee was different from lifting penny candy down at the Cash Store. Martha Lee was kin. Or close to.

Daddy wasn’t home, and I was far too edgy to settle down. I spent a little time cleaning up the kitchen. After a while, I decided to bike over to the creek. All the other kids would be at the lake, the girls lying around in new bathing suits and oiling themselves up, the guys showing off, swimming out to the raft and diving in, making a big deal out of it. There’d be music playing on every blanket. I didn’t belong. Being without a mama made me different. Half the time, people acted like I was a special case, and the rest of the time, they acted like I should be used to having a mama who was gone, like that was something a person could get accustomed to. No one ever talked about her, or asked me one thing about her.