Leaving Eden (8 page)

That night I couldn’t sleep. I lay in bed, thinking about the stuff I’d buried in the backyard and wondering if it would have helped Mama. Wondering if it was just what she needed. Wondering if I had gotten rid of the very thing that would have healed my mama. Wondering if I really had thrown away the Queen of Cures.

Tallie’s Book

Twins have powers.

It’s hard to figure out what will kill you
and what will cure you and how to
know the difference.

People shrink when they get old.

six

At noon, the temperature hit one hundred on the First Federal thermometer, and by five, when we finished up with the last Seniors’ Day discount customer—not
one
of them tipping, like “discount” meant “permission to be cheap”—it only dropped to eighty. Raylene got real bossy and said it was too hot for me to be riding my bike. Even when I said I wasn’t a baby, she insisted on tying the Raleigh to her car bumper and driving me home.

There was a note on the table from Daddy saying he was taking a truckload of grain over to Redden with one of the Halley brothers and he’d be home after dark. Well, what else was new? I might as well have been living alone.

There was nothing on TV except reruns, so I got out my rule book and put in a couple of things I’d heard from the ladies at the Kurl, like what Hattie Jones’d said about nylon panties and Easter Davis’d said about raspberry tea. Stuff like that. Then I got myself a beer and went out and sat on the glider. It was too hot to eat or read or do much of anything and there was no telling when my daddy’d be coming home. Finally I finished up the beer, grabbed my bathing suit—which was way too small and probably doing damage to my woman parts—and rode over to Baldy, pumping easy and walking the uphill parts so I wouldn’t get a stroke. That time of day, it was quiet at the creek. No one was there but me. I left my bike leaning against a tree. It must have been the heat or the beer or something, because the next thing—without even thinking about it—I stripped to the skin, tossed my bathing suit on the ground, and dove right in the creek, inhaling sharp at the first touch of water on my belly, then stretching out and enjoying the absolute freedom of it. If Goody could have seen me she’d have said I was cheap, cheap, cheap. It was continually amazing to me that someone as fun loving as Mama had been birthed by Goody, who, before she moved to Florida and took up golf, was hard as dirt. Goody wouldn’t know a good time if it walked up and bit her. She maintained you were sinning if you so much as held a deck of cards. Not Mama, though. If Mama’d been there, she would have been skinny-dipping right along with me, shouting and laughing at the pure joy and freedom of it. Mama just loved swimming. She said she was in her element when she was in water. That was about the only way she differed from Natalie. For a while I swam laps (breaststroke and crawl), then I flipped over on my back and floated faceup, just staring at the sky, enjoying the slippery sensation of the water against my skin. It reminded me of how I felt nights when I’d sit on the porch glider and open my pajama top so the evening air could cool me down.

Off in the distance I heard the whistle of the six o’clock heading toward Roanoke. Train whistles always made me think of my granddaddy. He’d been a physician for the Southern Railroad. A railroad man head to toe, Mama said, even after he’d had to quit because he’d developed a weak heart. Granddaddy used to have a model train set up in his living room and he’d play this cassette recording of train sounds that about drove Goody mad. When I was little I’d sit on his knee and listen to him talk about the days when trains ruled. He had a whole head full of train stories and loved to tell them all. Especially the one about how once an entire train got buried in a tunnel cave-in under Richmond. That train was probably there to this day, he’d said, with everyone still in it, a piece of information that gave me nightmares for a week. Were the people still sitting in their seats or were they crowded against the windows, trying to get out? How long had it taken for them to die?

The other thing Granddaddy knew about was trees. He could tell a white oak from a red. He could look at a stump and tell you how old it’d been when it was chopped down, and its dry years from the wet ones. I thought everything in the world would be different if Granddaddy were still alive. Just like it would be different if Mama hadn’t gotten sick.

By October, Mama was spending most of her days watching the soaps and reruns of
Roseanne
and
The Golden Girls.
Martha Lee had arranged for County Health to bring over one of those mechanical beds with a button you could push to raise the head or the feet. Daddy hated it, but Mama called it her throne. Sometimes, I’d lie there with her. After a while, she’d send me to get the hairbrush off her dresser. I was a fool for Mama brushing my hair. She’d start with her fingers, lacing them through my hair, pulling it back from my face and lifting it off my neck. Then she’d take the brush and begin, nothing impatient or snappy—not even if there were snarls—just long, gentle strokes that calmed us both. Later, on nights when I couldn’t sleep, I’d pretend she was making those even, slow strokes and just the thought could lull me off.

By then the house was a mess. I could imagine what Goody would say if she got a look, but Mama didn’t care. “Housekeeping’s an overrated occupation, sugar,” she’d say. “There’re more important things in the world than a clean floor.” Like what? I wanted to ask. Tell me, Mama, tell me all the things that are important. Tell me everything I need to know. I longed to turn off the TV and climb up on that narrow throne next to Mama, adjusting it so the foot part was high, and ask her everything I wanted to know. Things I needed to know then and things I’d need to know for the future.

First I’d ask her kitchen questions, like how long to cook butter beans and how to make cobbler so it doesn’t sit heavy after you eat it. And I’d ask how a person would know for certain when another person likes her, and then I’d start on love questions. How did you know when you were in love, and was sex love different from marrying love? Did you need to know exactly what to do when a boy kissed you, or did instincts take over? I’d ask her if you could trust instincts when it comes to love, or did they just land you in a hog pile of trouble. Should you really marry a man because his smile made you crazy?

Then I’d ask her to tell me everything about those months she spent in L.A. I’d ask her where she lived out there and what it was like to work at a real Hollywood studio. I’d listen with both ears so I’d have a head start when I landed out there. I’d start with the pile of postcards she’d sent home and I kept in a cigar box under my bed. There was one of the big
Hollywood
sign, which was not actually a real sign, but giant white block letters sitting on the side of a hill. On the back, Mama’d written that it used to spell
Hollywoodland,
and before the last four letters had rotted away a starlet had committed suicide by jumping off the final “D.” And back in the ’30s, another actress had jumped off the “H.” It gave me the chills just looking at that card. There was another postcard of the Walk of Fame, which was this sidewalk outside a theater in Hollywood where famous actors got to put their handprints and footprints in the cement. The card she sent had the prints of Jane Wyman and Henry Fonda and Jack Nicholson, and—believe it or not—Natalie Wood. The date
12-5-61
was etched in the concrete next to Natalie’s little handprints, along with the imprint of a pair of high heels, so small they looked like they belonged to a child. Course, now they have big stars outlined with brass and the actor’s name set in the middle. The person doesn’t even have to be real. It can be a cartoon. Like Mickey Mouse, which doesn’t seem right to me.

Mama sent me a picture card of the arched gates in front of Paramount—“my studio,” she wrote on the back. Another time I got a picture of Mann’s Chinese Theatre with a message that said she’d had lunch in the commissary the day before and Kelly McGillis had sat at the next table. As lonely as I’d been for her, it made me smile to think of Mama in Hollywood having lunch with a real star. I’d asked her about the lunch with Kelly McGillis once, figuring I’d start there and work into what she’d been doing the entire time she was there, but all she said was, “Oh, sugar, that’s all water past the dam.” Maybe to Mama it was, but not to me. I had things I was needing to know. Another time I asked Mama for her foolproof cobbler recipe, but all she said was that it wasn’t always necessary to have precise directions. Often as not things turned out just as good without them, she said, and that was as true of life as it was of cooking.

I never got to ask Mama all the questions I had in mind. I’d just be getting started—warming up with the household things, like the secrets for making a good cake—when it seemed something always stopped me. She’d fall asleep. Someone would stop by. One day, we were sitting there and I was all set to begin, but before I could even ask my first question, the back door opened and Martha Lee came in. She looked at my mama with a steady, appraising gaze before she caught my eye. Then she smiled and switched from being a nurse back to being Mama’s friend.

“Hey, Cookie,” she said right off to Mama. “You up for a Dairy Queen?” Which meant I wasn’t invited. Going to the Dairy Queen was their special code for getting high. Before she’d given up on getting Mama well, Martha Lee would bring over weird stuff from the health store in Lynchburg, like an industrial type juicer that must have cost a fortune. She’d make these gross drinks with carrot juice and parsley and wheat grass and protein powder and other stuff that reminded me of Allie Rucker’s cure I’d buried in the backyard. Mama wouldn’t touch it. She’d just laugh and say she’d prefer a beer. Martha Lee had long ago let go of trying to talk Mama into what she should or shouldn’t be doing. And if Mama wanted to get high, Martha Lee’d bundle her up and carry her to her truck, which she’d outfitted with a quilt and so many pillows that there wouldn’t have been room for me even if they’d wanted me along. An hour or two later, they’d return, glassy-eyed, silly, and stinking of pot. Like I couldn’t figure it out.

I watched while Martha Lee carried Mama outside and got her settled in the pickup. Martha Lee had the radio cranking. Bobby McFerrin was singing “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” which was about the dumbest song in the universe, as if it were possible for a person to
decide
not to worry.

“We’ll bring you back a milk shake,” Mama promised.

Okay, Mama,
I should have said,
have fun
, or anything nice, but all I could say was, “Don’t want one,” in my coolest voice, knowing she’d bring one anyway. And when she smiled and asked for a kiss, I pretended not to hear. Everything inside me loved Mama, loved her to distraction, but since she’d gotten sick there were days when I couldn’t help being mean-hearted. Once, I told her I was planning on going to Florida and moving in with Goody, but Mama just grinned wickedly and said to go ahead if that’s what I wanted. One day Martha Lee found me crying out by the willow ’cause of something mean I’d said to Mama. I felt like a baby, but she told me to go on and cry all I wanted. She said salt cured everything, whether it came from tears or sweat. She said I wasn’t mean, just hurting, and that’s why I said the things I did. She said my mama understood. I wanted to believe her.

When the two of them headed off, Mama waved. I didn’t wave back. A pair of Spring Azures the size of small moths fluttered around my ankles.
Bugs with birds’ souls,
according to Mama. October was late to be seeing butterflies, even in Virginia. In science, Mr. Brown told us they flew thousands of miles each year.
Thousands.
I thought that was as close to a miracle as it was possible to conceive. If you smudged the dust off their wings, butterflies couldn’t fly, yet they migrated through thunderstorms and windstorms on those translucent wings, flying till they reached Mexico and places like that, flying all that distance for no apparent reason except to end up where they started in the first place. How was it that something so delicate could stand so much, and someone like my mama, who used to be able to swim more than a mile and boogie all through the night and still be ready for more, got sick? Why was that so?

Once, Mama told me in Mexico or Africa or someplace like that there were women who made pictures out of pieces of butterfly wings. Imagine. The Spring Azures were circling my feet, and I could see how their wings would make a beautiful painting. Without thinking about it or planning it, still mad because Mama and Martha Lee had left me behind, I stomped on them. Right away I lifted my foot, but it was too late to take it back. Was that how it felt to be God? Did he ever regret making someone die? And who was he, anyway, to be sitting up there deciding things like who got to live and who got the shaft?

Thinking about the butterflies and Mama and all the times I’d been mean to her made me too sad to stay in the creek, no matter how good the water felt against my skin. I waded to the bank and padded ashore. That was when I realized I’d left my towel hanging on the line at home. I was reaching for my T-shirt, figuring I’d use that to dry off, when I got this creepy feeling, this
knowing
I was being watched. Someone was standing off in the trees. For a second, I was scared. Goody was always warning me about men lurking about looking for girls like me, men involved in white slavery, though when I asked her to name one girl who’d ever been kidnapped, she couldn’t. I was remembering Goody’s warnings when I suddenly
knew
who was watching me. Like overnight I had developed special radar, the kind of radar Daddy used to have for my mama that let him know where she was without anybody having to tell him. Or like I’d developed Etta Bird’s ability for revelations.
Spy.
It was Spy hiding in the trees. Spy watching me for sure.

My heart contracted under my ribs. Course, I should have yelled at him or held the T-shirt tight around me, but I didn’t. I stood up straight—back to him—and shook my hair out, just like I was home alone in my room. I could feel his eyes on me, his gaze heating my legs, shoulders, hips, and ass, warming all the places the creek had just cooled. I shook my hair again. Then I turned full to him.
Cheap, cheap, cheap,
Goody shouted in my head, but I didn’t feel one bit of shame. The skin on my belly and tits grew tight, like my body was growing beneath its skin, swelling up like I’d been stung by bees. I was heating in secret places. Goody’d say I was turning into trash. No better than Bitty Weatherspoon, she’d say. Like she’d predicted all along. I didn’t care. I was heating up and could have stood by Bald Creek forever, stood there and taken in the peculiar feeling that was a cross between ache and pleasure. I was turning into a wild girl, all right. I moved like a motion picture in slow motion, letting Spy have a real good look. Then I thought of Mama and imagined her watching me. Heat scalded my face, and pleasure flowed clean off my body. Too late, I turned and covered myself. I was the most shameless girl in all Virginia and I didn’t need Goody to tell me that.