Mockingbird (19 page)

“I don't want to talk about it.”

Greg took his hand off my stomach. “Okay.” I moved his hand up and put it on my left breast. I didn't feel sexy anymore, I felt cold and frightened. But I refused to waste the chance Sugar had made for me. “Oh, Christ, that felt good,” I said. “We should have done this before, Greg. I don't know why we never did this before.”

“You were never like this before. You've changed.”

I tried to smile. “In a good way, I hope.”

“Zat remains to be uncovered by ze analysis,” he said Freudianly, sitting up in bed. I pulled the sheet up over my breasts. “Don't get me wrong,” Greg said. “The sex was good. Really good. I've slept with sexier women who weren't nearly so good in bed.”

“I hear a ‘but' coming.”

He laughed. “But . . . yeah. Tonight . . . it was fun, but it wasn't really you, was it, Toni? It was you and something else. Your voice—I never heard you talk that way before. Slow and lazy. Never seen you walk that way. But your mother did, sometimes.”

“Momma?”

“Not that I didn't like your mother. But I sure never wanted to sleep with her.”

“I can understand that.”

“Used to scare the hell out of me, to be honest,” Greg said.

“Me too,” I said.

Momma. Momma in me like a cancer, in my bones and brain and lungs.

All in all, you couldn't call my evening with Greg a success. The sex had been fun while Sugar was in me, but embarrassing
afterwards. Worse, the idea of marrying a man who saw so much of Momma in me gave me the shivers. Besides, what kind of father would Greg make? Up at all hours, joining amateur blues bands or practicing stage magic or heading down to Austin to audition for a bit part in an independent movie. No job, no income, no set course in life.

No. Once I had been rejected, it was easy to see I had never really wanted him.

With Bill Jr. and Greg out of the running, that left only the dark horse, Rick Manzetti. Though even he was more interested in Momma than he was in me. He returned my phone message and said he would try to make it to Houston early in June to collect some of the Little Lost Girl stories.

The night after my date with Greg I was sitting in the garden with Daddy and we were talking. It was dark and warm under the canopy of live oak . I hadn't yet laid in the summer's supply of Deep Woods Off to repel the mosquitoes, so I had rummaged through Momma's drawers upstairs until I found half a bottle of Skin-So-Soft to wipe down with. The first grapefruits of the year had come in from the Rio Grande valley and I had squeezed us a couple of glasses of juice.

“Daddy, why did you love Momma?” I asked.

He was quiet a spell, and I let him be. “Just loved her, I reckon. And she needed me. It's a great pull, to be needed.” He took a sip of juice. “I don't guess there's a man on earth could live with your Momma if he didn't love her pretty good.” Daddy smiled. “Then we had you and Candy. I sure wasn't going to leave my girls.”

I had some of my grapefruit juice. Fresh-squeezed it is so much sweeter than you would imagine if you only ever had the canned stuff.

“Your momma used to say, ‘Men! You can't live with 'em, and you can't kill 'em.'”

“Remember her apron?” I said. “The Way To A Man's Heart Is Through His Chest.”

“I believe she was about the smartest person I ever knew,” Daddy said. “Not school-smart, not like you. But she had a way of looking at things that was different from anybody else. You could walk down a street a hundred times with a hundred different people and see the same road; but when you went with Elena, she'd make you see it new.”

“I hate that,” I said. “I don't like it when things change. I don't think Momma ever saw a thing for what it was. I mean, which song is really the mockingbird's own? It isn't enough to keep pretending. There has to be something solid and real and true and forever. Momma couldn't hold herself together two hours running. If she was happy, she saw one thing. If she was sad, she saw another. One day she was a good mom to us; the next day she was a failure. Was I a bad kid, a good kid, ornery or cranky or dutiful or what? Every time I looked back it seemed like the landscape behind me flipped around.”

“You were a good kid,” Daddy said. “A good, ornery kid.”

“She was just so sad, Daddy.” Unexpectedly I found myself starting to cry. “She was so sad all the time. I used to hate her so much for getting sad like that. I used to think there was something I could do, if only I wasn't so stupid or stubborn or willful. If I could just be good enough, she'd be happy and then she wouldn't—”

“Baby,” Daddy said, “it wasn't your job to take care of us.”

“But I never had a chance, did I? It was Angela, it was the Little Lost Girl up in Canada, and there was nothing I could have done.”

“A team falls apart when everyone is trying to do the next man's job. You have to trust the people around you, Toni.”

“What if you can't?” I wiped my eyes with my shirtsleeve. Daddy didn't answer.

“Do you think I'm like her?” I said.

Daddy thought. “Some. And I think you're like me, some. But mostly you're like you, and you will cut your own swath in the world.” He took my hand and gave it a squeeze. “So don't you blame your problems on me, you hear?”

I sniffled and laughed.

“Your momma even foxed me about her epitaph,” Daddy said. “Did you know that? We were talking, oh, maybe six months before she died. She was pretty sick. The night before we were supposed to go into the hospital for her checkup she says, ‘George, I have an announcement to make. I've been thinking about you tonight, George, and I have decided to inscribe my tombstone in your honor.' And I said, ‘Is that right, old lady? And what are you going to write on it?' And she looked me dead in the eye, very serious, and said, ‘She Had Great Stuff, But Struggled With Her Control.'”

I have a confession to make.

The day Rick Manzetti came over for the first time, Pierrot never climbed out of the chifforobe and whispered in my ear. I made that up.

I know it seems like a lie, but I swear it isn't. If I had written down what really happened, that I got to feeling worse and worse, and more and more scared, that I felt the Riders' stares from across the room and chickened out and told Rick I couldn't sell, you wouldn't have understood. You would have thought I was just getting emotional. You wouldn't have felt the animal terror in my heart. I had to make you understand, had to make you feel what it was really like. Because what I wrote back then, about the weight of Pierrot tugging on my dress, his mean little voice in my ear—that's the truth. It didn't happen, but it's the truth, I swear it. I swear it.

—Which is what Momma would say.

Oh God, I don't know, I don't know. Am I turning into a liar, just like her? That's what Greg said, he said I was like her. I let Sugar in, just as she would have.

But
I'm not her.
I know I'm not. I know I'm not.

Is it possible she was right all those years? That all the time I thought she was lying, she was telling the truth, but I just didn't understand it? I didn't want to hear it?

Who was the liar? Who told the truth? Who is writing this, her or me?

I thought when she died that I would be rid of her at last, but I'm not. It's like Carlos said: alive she was a monster, but dead she's inescapable.

Oh God, Momma. Please let me go.

It wasn't only my baby that grew within me all through that hot spring; I was carrying my mother too.

We were nearing the end of May, and snake weather had come in earnest: air so humid you couldn't strike a match in it; heat so intense you could see your shadow sweat. The skyscrapers downtown shimmered and smoked in the hazy air. When it rained, the air was blind with water for twenty minutes. Afterwards the streets smelled of oleanders and boiling tar.

The Saturday after my disastrous date with Greg I went over to Candy's apartment to help mail out wedding invitations. I was dreading the visit. My sister has a thing about not using air conditioning. Even Momma, though she left the house doors open, would at least run the a.c. in her Oldsmobile. Candy just drove with the windows down.

Candy lived on the top floor of a shared house. She had no kitchen table because she had no kitchen (she shared the one downstairs). So we sat on the floor on either side of her coffee table to work. Candy wrote up the invitations; I addressed the envelopes. We each had a glass of iced tea with a wedge of lime. Candy, curse her, was sitting cross-legged in a halter top and a pair of panties. I was wearing a Men's Size XL Astros T-shirt and a pair of awful navy-blue polyester maternity shorts that itched on my abdomen. “This is unbearable,” I said, interrupting my own story about my date with Greg. “I can't come over here anymore. I feel like a boiled prawn.”

“You're hot?” Candy said, surprised. I glared at her. My skin was slippery with sweat under my arms and between my legs and behind my knees. “I've got a fan, Toni. Just a minute.”

“Did you know my blood volume is going to go up by thirty percent over the next four months?”

“You mentioned that a few times. Is that why you're hot?”

“No, I'm hot because it's incredibly hot in here. The blood thing is why I'm even hotter.” The fan was new and lightweight, a twenty-dollar Target special. Candy set it on the floor behind me, turned it on, and watched all the wedding invites blow gaily off her coffee table. Careful repositioning followed.

She sat back down before her stack of blank invitations. “Tía Gomez next, right?” Sweat glistened on her forehead, and among the nearly invisible hairs on her upper lip, and between her breasts. The skin showing between her halter top and her panties was as brown as her tanned arms. “So Greg really said it was like screwing Momma, hey? Ouch.” Candy looked at me. “You put on Sugar, didn't you?”

“How did you know that?”

“Sugar was Momma's idea of sex. Here's the card for Tía Gomez.” I stuck it in its envelope, sealed and stamped it. Candy wiped her sweaty hands off on her halter top so she wouldn't get blotches on her next note. “I bet that's your idea of sex, too.”

“What?”

“Sugar.” I didn't answer. “That isn't sex. That was Momma.”

I thought of the silks in Sugar's cubby back at the house, and the tiny crystal bottle of perfume.

“That's the great Texas lie.” Candy put down her pen and stood up. Her attic room was small, with a sloping ceiling. She walked to the window at the front and looked out over the crepe myrtle which had not yet begun to bloom. I wondered if anyone passing could see her, standing there in her underwear. Then I wondered if she would care. “The great Texas lie says we trick men, we cheat and lie and trap them. We lure them into marriage. Pink toenails and a ribbon in your hair, like tying a trout fly. That's Sugar's style,” Candy said. “I never believed that.”

“I guess we don't either of us like to lie, do we?”

Candy said, “If you want good sex, start with Mr. Copper. Don't look so astonished, Toni. Your trouble is you think about money too much. You only think of Mr. Copper's power one way. But he's about seeing things exactly as they are. There's no make-believe when you see through Mr. Copper's eyes—Hang on. I want to show you something.” She walked to the dresser beside her bed and pulled open the bottom drawer.

The ice in my iced tea clinked and wobbled as I held the cold glass against my cheek. The fan passed back and forth across my sweaty body.

“Every time you go to the grocery store you see rack after rack of women's magazines trying to sell you the secret of ‘How to Get a Man,'” Candy said. “‘What Men
Really
Want in Bed. How to Turn Him On.' All of them full of ads for moisturizer and pantyhose and deodorant and crap. Like Daddy says, when a man is trying to sell you something, be careful.” Candy came back and dropped a stack of porn magazines on the table. HOT LEZZIE LICKS! screamed the top magazine. Two naked blondes knelt together to French kiss with their boobs touching. The taller one was looking at the camera.
Want to help us cum?
read the caption.

“Candy!”

“
Hustler
isn't trying to sell anything,” Candy said. “Not to you and me, anyway.
Hustler, Velvet, Club International
—they measure their success by how often their readers jack off per issue.” She flipped open the magazine. “‘If you want to know What Really Turns Him On, here it is, straight from the horse's—'”

“Candy!”

“—mouth.'” She grinned and reached over my shoulder, flipping past the table of contents. I had a confused impression of buff-colored skin, blonde hair, pouting mouths, large breasts, many kinds of underwear, women holding their vaginas open. Mouths, lots of mouths: red-lipsticked ones, smiling ones, tongues stuck out toward cocks, mouths slack with passion, bitten lips, kissing, one mouth dripping with saliva. Little hot needles of embarrassment prickled across my face and my eyes slid off the pages. I couldn't make myself look, and when I did look, I couldn't take much in. The pictures were gone too fast, I looked away before I had time to understand them.