Betty

by Tiffany McDaniel

  “I still do,” I said. “But why can’t I like the boots, too?”

  As soon as Fraya gave them to me, I put them on. I walked outside and didn’t stop until I was in the woods, dry twigs snapping underfoot. When I reached a clearing, I lay back on the cold hard ground, lifting my legs up in front of my face and moving them as if I was walking the gray winter sky. I suppose I liked the boots so much for the fact they were popular at school, when I myself was not. Having my feet in the boots felt as though I’d been let in on a secret.

  I went to bed that night wearing them, slipping them beneath my blanket and imagining that when Ruthis saw me in the boots the next day at school, she would want to be my friend.

  “Betty,” Ruthis said in my dream, “you’re the grooviest girl in school.”

  The next morning, I was slapped awake by Flossie.

  “You think you’re so pretty now that I’m fat and ugly.” Her face was bright red. “Those boots should be mine.”

  She yanked them off my feet. She attempted to slip her foot into one, but her stomach was in the way. Giving up, she kicked both boots across the room, then dug her fingers into her belly.

  “If it doesn’t come out soon,” she said, “I fear I’ll cut it out.”

  A few weeks later, me and her were sitting on the front porch. She had one hand in a bag of potato chips and the other on a cigarette. She’d just finished complaining about how tight the sleeves were on her light blue maternity dress.

  “And this stupid collar.” She tried stretching the orange ruffled neckline.

  It was her mother-in-law who had bought the dress, saying it would look just darling on Flossie. She would have looked more comfortable in a dress of thorns.

  “I swear if I have to wear this dress one more second—” She dropped the potato chips and cigarette to grab her belly. “Ow, oh God, it hurts.”

  I yelled in the house for Mom, who came rushing out from the kitchen. When Mom saw Flossie’s heavy breathing, she said, “Baby’s wantin’ to come out.”

  “Nuh-uh.” Flossie shook her head. “I can’t do it. I’ll just leave it in there. Ow.” She leaned over, clutching her stomach. “Is it supposed to hurt this bad?”

  “Don’t get all chickenshit now, Flossie.” Mom used the towel in her hand to slap against my arm. “Go get your father,” she told me. “We’ve got to take her to Doc Lad’s.”

  “No.” Flossie pushed past me and struggled down the steps, crying out to A Faraway Place.

  “Flossie, get back here, goddamn it,” Mom called after her.

  “I can’t hear you,” Flossie said while trying to climb up on the stage, but being unable to. “I’m too far away to hear anything.”

  What was far away was a hospital, so Breathed relied on Doc Lad, who treated patients in the back of his house, where you would be greeted by a buff-colored tomcat. The cat waited with Mom, Dad, and me on the back porch during Flossie’s delivery. Dad had sent Lint to wait at the diner with Fraya. Cutlass was the only one from his family there. He paced with his hands deep in his pockets.

  I had to cover my ears against Flossie’s screams. When her cries stopped, the baby’s started. Little shrill sounds like silverware clanking. I stepped over to an open window and saw Doc Lad cut the umbilical cord. He carried the baby to a table. As he wiped the child’s squirming arms and legs, I looked at my sister. She was drenched in sweat and her wet hair splayed across her reddened forehead. It was hard to think she was the same girl who just the year before had smacked gum and painted her toenails bright purple.

  Doc carried the child to her, but she looked away.

  “Don’tcha wanna see your baby?” he asked her.

  “Of course she’ll see the baby.” Dad stood at the screen door, which opened the room to the outside. “Ain’t that right, Flossie?”

  Dad entered with Mom and Cutlass behind him. I stayed outside looking through the open window. It seemed safer to be close to the yard in case the house was to collapse under my sister’s fury.

  “I don’t want him,” Flossie said, folding her arms.

  “What you mean you don’t want him?” Doc Lad’s eyes widened behind his bifocals as he gently cradled the child in his arms.

  Flossie stared at her son. Perhaps because of him, or because of the day itself, she raised up over the edge of the bed and vomited on the shiny shoes of her husband. Cutlass stared at the vomit and stepped back as if it would slide off his shoes. Flossie laughed sharply at him, before sniffling and reaching her arms out toward the child.

  “Give ’im here,” she said.

  “You got a name for him yet?” Dad asked.

  “Nova,” Flossie said, staring down, but not at the child. “Nova.”

  “What the hell kind of name is that?” Mom asked.

  “It means sudden bright star,” Flossie answered before handing the child back to Doc Lad. “My arms are tired,” she said.

  After leaving Doc Lad’s, Flossie placed a distance between herself and Nova. It was as though she was not the mother and he was not her child. Recognizing this, the Silkworms hired a woman to take care of Nova. Her name was Mrs. Anchor and she was an older lady who just the week before had worked at the butcher’s. She had been behind the counter cutting porterhouses, which Cutlass’ mother had come in to order. While waiting for the steaks to be wrapped, his mother struck up a conversation with another customer in which she expressed the need for hired help.

  “I raised eight of ’em of my own,” Mrs. Anchor said as she handed the steaks over to Cutlass’ mom. “It wouldn’t be nothin’ for me to do it for someone else. I’ve been wantin’ to hang up my cleaver for a while now. You pay me same as I get here, and I’ll do the job for ya, and do it well, too.”

  Mrs. Anchor was glad to be rid of the butchering job.

  “I don’t have to bother with my braids gettin’ in blood,” she said, having taken her two long braids out of their bun to wear them slung over her shoulders. Only the ends of her hair were still auburn, the roots having turned gray and coarse like corkscrewing wires that stuck out around her crown.

  Mrs. Anchor did her job of caring for Nova with the efficiency of an emotionless robot, but still Nova believed the hired woman to be his mother. Flossie had chosen not to nurse her son, so Mrs. Anchor would feed him with the bottle, her large rough hands clutching him. It was her red-nosed face Nova saw morning, afternoon, and night when she read him a bedtime story while Flossie lay beside a man she did not love.

  “Now that the baby’s out,” Flossie told me, “all Cutlass wants to do is to have his pleasures.” She paused, twisting her wedding ring around her finger. “You know why they call ’em hus-bands, Betty? Because they’re like a band wrapped around your body until they either squeeze you to death or you cut the knot.”

  After giving birth, Flossie lost the weight relatively quickly. She found her own indulgences in the new wardrobe choices Silkworm cash afforded her. For all the money Mom thought Flossie would give her, Flossie gave her little. Perhaps only to rub it in, Flossie would come to visit in her shiny Mercedes, which she always reminded us was not plain green but forest green.

  “It’s a limited-edition color,” she’d say, flipping her hair back over her shoulders.

  She’d started going to get her hair shampooed at the salon in Sweet Temper. It was why she always smelled of honeysuckle.

  “Isn’t it fabulous?” she’d ask.

  Mom tended to clean for an entire week before Flossie said she would be stopping by. It was the way Flossie looked at everything in the house, as if it was all so disappointing.

  There was a routine each time Flossie visited. As Mrs. Anchor sat and bounced Nova on her legs until he laughed, Flossie would look at the sofa cushion. Deciding that the clean cushion was too dirty for her to sit on, she’d take the newspaper from off the side table and unfold it.
She would lay it on the cushion as Mom watched her.

  “It’s okay.” Dad would reach across and tap Mom’s knee. “Our little girl’s a fancy one now.”

  He smiled because it was the only thing he thought would help. Flossie would look at him before slowly sitting on the newspaper. It always crinkled beneath her as she sat.

  “The Silkworm vineyard is doin’ good business, I presume?” Mom had made a habit out of asking as she looked at Flossie’s expensive purse.

  Flossie would purposely play with her nails to show us how manicured they’d become.

  “We’re havin’ an awful go of payin’ some of the bills.” Mom would look from Flossie to Dad, then back again. “With your father’s aches and pains, we could really do with some help.”

  “Oh, Mom, I wish I could, but I am only Cutlass’ wife,” Flossie would say as she tucked her shiny hair behind her ears, showing off her diamond earrings.

  “That’s okay.” Dad patted Mom’s knee again. “We understand, don’t we?”

  Mom would frown at Flossie until Flossie clicked open her purse and got out a few dollars to hand to Mom.

  “My, how generous my daughter is,” Mom would say.

  It was usually at these times that Dad stood and picked Nova up from off Mrs. Anchor’s lap.

  “How ’bout I show my grandson a rainbow?” Dad would ask as he carried the smiling Nova on his hip.

  I would always follow, leaving my mother and sister to glare at each other. I wasn’t angry with Flossie like Mom was. Perhaps only because Flossie continued to wear the bean pod necklace beneath her expensive blouses.

  “You ready for some magic?” Dad would ask Nova once the three of us got outside.

  I’d take Nova so Dad could get the garden hose and turn it on. Then we’d stand with our backs to the sun while Dad held the hose up, placing his thumb over the spray of water so it came out in a fine mist. As the sunlight hit the drops of water, a prism of color would arch into a rainbow in our backyard.

  Nova always got so excited that I had to hold on tight to him so he wouldn’t jump out of my arms as he clapped his tiny hands and smiled.

  Nova was too young to make anything more than sounds, but Dad would still ask, “What’s he sayin’?”

  I didn’t know what Nova was saying nor what he was thinking, but I knew what I had thought at that age when Dad would make us water hose rainbows in the backyard.

  “He thinks you’re God,” I said to my father.

  THE BREATHANIAN

  Man Shot in Penis

  A ghastly story unfolded this morning after a man was rushed to Doc Lad’s with a gunshot wound to the penis. The man is in fair condition. The news sent a shock wave through the community as people questioned whether the gunshot was connected to the mysterious Breathed shooter. Upon further investigation, the man was discovered to have been shot by his wife with her pistol after a domestic argument. “I didn’t want to tell on her at first,” the man said. “But then I thought I wouldn’t be able to tell on her if she shoots me in the head.”

  38

  If it be a daughter, then she shall live.

  —EXODUS 1:16

  Everyone called it Fraya’s Famous Fudge. I’ve never forgotten the blue gingham pattern of the sugar bag. The way the paper crinkled as she poured the sugar out to measure it. She’d make the fudge in the diner’s kitchen at night. A chocolate chip for each yellow tile on the counter. She let me add the vanilla extract that she would sometimes put on her finger and wipe on my neck.

  “Perfume,” she’d say.

  It was the spring of 1969. Richard Nixon was in office. The first U.S. troops would eventually withdraw from Vietnam. And men, other than my father, would land on the moon. But that would come later. It was spring and all I really knew about 1969 was that I was fifteen and my sister always dropped enough sugar on the floor to catch on the hems of her bell-bottoms.

  Swish, swish.

  She’d turn out the lights and turn the radio on. Then we would dance as her fudge set up to be sectioned for serving the next day. She danced like a wolf with a secret. Or maybe that’s how all older sisters look when they dance in the moonlight.

  She wore a lot of brown when she wasn’t wearing her yellow diner outfit. She wore a lot of brown, orange, and tan. Sturdy colors that would make one think she was a woman of chicken wire cartilage. Sometimes when I dream of Fraya, I dream of her in a brown suit with an orange scarf tied at her neck. She’s at a desk and she’s very important. The owner of a company making things I have a feeling are metal.

  Other times, I dream she’s a mother in a simple cotton dress. A woman with her hair up in a ponytail and two toddlers, one clinging to each of her legs as she holds and stirs a mixing bowl in the crook of her arm. Batter already on the end of her nose while she smiles as if she has mapped heaven and found it is a straight shot through dirty diapers and glasses of half-drunk juice.

  More often than not, I dream she’s a white cat in a blizzard. I always lose her in the way snow can fall. I can only hope she has seen the way I have loved her all of these years.

  Fraya will never be 1970, 1971, or any year after. She will always be 1969 Fraya because that is the year she died. In the afterlife, will she still wear her hair the same as last I saw her? Just long enough for short curls. Will she still be wearing brown tops and bell-bottoms as if 1969 never ended? Will her eyeliner be too dark, her lips too pale, will gold hoops swing from each of her earlobes, which are no older than twenty-five?

  It was Thursday morning when her body was found by the cook of Dandelion Dimes. He told the sheriff Fraya wasn’t up at her usual time of 5:30 a.m. to fry bacon for Hank. Hank was a wide-eyed, coffee-brown feline with swirly stripes of tan and a broken tail. Fraya had found him as a kitten wrapped in a handkerchief in the hollow of one of the elms that line Main Lane. She named him Hank for the handkerchief. He was a small thing like Fraya and she liked having him around. He had become the pet of the diner as well, greeting customers at the door. He would live a long time after Fraya. Later, I would see a photograph of the diner taken in 1984. There amongst the fading yellow was an old fading cat. Still small, still wide-eyed, still looking as if he were waiting on Fraya to come home to him.

  The cook prepared the kitchen for the day, thinking Fraya had slept in and would be down soon. But when the first customer came in, Fraya had yet to make an appearance. So, the cook went up to her place and found her lying in bed with her hand in an empty Miracle mayonnaise jar. Her hand was clenched into a fist and was swollen so much they couldn’t remove it from the jar without breaking the glass. After they unfolded her fingers they found a smashed honeybee, its wings broken. The stinger was stabbed into her palm.

  When the sheriff came to our house to deliver the news, I thought of the night before when I’d been with Fraya.

  The day had started with me going to school, but I was nauseous, dizzy, and had a pain that would come and go deep in my belly. I thought it was only the heat of a warm spring.

  Walking the halls of school that day, I clung to the lockers to feel their cool metal while Ruthis and the others said, “Look at Betty. She’s got her war paint on.”

  It was the same old line, but I still wiped my lipstick off on my sleeve.

  “Betcha she’s a whore like her sister Flossie,” they said. “Good-time Flossie. Good-time Betty.”

  I cut class and headed to Dandelion Dimes, but there were customers waiting in line. Fraya told me to come back after closing.

  “We’ll make the fudge together,” she said.

  I ended up in Teddy’s Electrical Goods, where Teddy himself let me cool off in front of the fans while I watched Dark Shadows on one of the televisions. I went over to explore the typewriters. I pretended to type as Teddy helped a man by the name of Grayson Elohim choose between chest freezers.

  “I want a
big freezer,” Elohim said. “To hold the meat I butcher.”

  Teddy showed Elohim the biggest freezer he had. Elohim climbed in to see if it was roomy enough.

  “I’ll take it,” he said.

  I left the store and headed to the river. After I removed my clothes, I circled in the water under the swings of the wild grapevines that hung from the tree limbs. Then I floated on my back, remembering how my father had told me about a zoo that had gone belly-up and released its animals into the hills. I imagined lions and tigers stalking the river edges. A jungle of exotic creatures and native deer.

  Through the arching tree limbs, I watched a purple balloon rise to Vickory. As the sun set, I dried on the river edge, sitting with my chin on my knees. I dressed and headed back to Dandelion Dimes. Fraya was saying goodbye to the last customer. She let me hang the CLOSED sign on the door.

  She wanted to rest her feet before we made the fudge, so we went up to her apartment. The window was open and Hank was already on the roof.

  “Silly cat,” Fraya said as we climbed out onto the roof beside him. The three of us looked up at the sky. When Fraya began to poke her finger at the stars, I asked her what she was doing.

  “Those lights up there.” Poke, poke, poke. “We’re told they’re all nuclear reaction and energy,” she said like a scientist. “Stars, the romantics call ’em. But they ain’t stars. Stars don’t exist for us. Somewhere out there is a world that we’re the insects to. Someone in that world has caught us. This planet we call home is really just a jar they keep us in. A big jar to us, but a small jar to them. Those lights are our airholes showin’ through to the light of the world we are too small for. I’m pokin’ more airholes for us to breathe. Sometimes I think we’re all gonna suffocate. Help me, Betty. Help me poke a hole big enough for us to fly out of.”

  I gently poked at the sky, before I started to stab it.

  “Easy now, Betty.” Fraya grabbed my hand and laid it across her stomach. As she played with my fingers, I looked at the scar on her wrist. I asked her if it hurt when she cut herself.