Sugar Land

by tammy lynne stoner

  I reached up over my head, pulled a blade of grass and started chewing on it. “Like what?”

  In answer, she took my free hand and put it under her striped sweater then under her bra and said, “Like this.”

  FROM THE TALL GRASSES

  I lived life on a roller coaster, going through moments of true highs—sneaking kisses in the egg store—followed by horrible lows filled with breathless terror that my parents or the neighborhood kids or the preacher might find out about us. At night, in my dreams, a gaggle of country boys stumbled on us near the creek and threw rocks at us. The rocks cracked against our skulls. They yelled “Pervert!” and “Sickening!” and “Die!” while they kept chucking those rocks with so much force that their faces were red with it.

  One of the rocks split my eyebrow and blood ran down into my eye. Another rock—so big that one of the boys had to hoist with both arms over his head—crashed into my ear and left me with a loud ringing noise. The sun shined down, bright overhead. I stumbled around, looking for Rhodie through the blood and the ringing and the sunshine. Then I saw her on the ground. They were kicking her. Rocks kept hitting me.

  Off in the distance my parents came over the ridge of the meadow. Daddy stood tall and heavy in his red flannel and black cowboy hat and Mama, with her arm wrapped through his, wore her best Sunday dress—the light pink one. Her pale nail polish glistened in the sunlight. As the boys stepped closer to me, their hands filled with rocks, my parents saw what was going on, shook their heads, turned, and left. Through the blood I watched their bodies become shadows against the huge yellow sun.

  Every morning after I had that dream I woke up covered in sweat, feeling around my head for blood, to be sure it wasn’t real. Then I’d tell myself to calm down. We would be careful and wouldn’t get caught. It would be OK.

  Rhodie would be gone in less than a week and I couldn’t let our last days go by in such a ridiculous state. Besides, I reminded myself in the darkness of my stuffy bedroom, you have no choice—you can’t stay away from her if she’s nearby. It’s just too strong.

  × × ×

  I showed up to Rhodie’s house—one of the few, I noted, without a windmill for pulling up well water—on Saturday with a huge bouquet of flowers and honeysuckle I’d stolen from various cutting gardens and fences around the neighborhood. The whole day I felt jittery and smiled so much my daddy kept calling me “cat,” as in the cat who swallowed the bird, which of course only increased my nerves.

  I knocked and she answered, wearing a thin blue dress and that butterfly scarf. As usual, the minute I saw her the rest didn’t matter—the fear, the doubt, the nightmares.

  I poked my head in. “New Mexico?”

  She smiled. “Yup, they’re all in New Mexico.”

  She clicked on the light in the hallway.

  “Wow, you got switches!”

  “We had kerosene back in our old place but my mother said that if we were moving here she wanted to have it modern, so we got a new house with all these switches. We even got heat from switches too.”

  “That right?”

  “Next, Mother wants a toilet.”

  “Imagine,” I said, doubting I’d ever see the day when we had an indoor toilet, especially since my mama questioned why anyone would bring filth into their home like that.

  Anyway, there I was, being as modern as modern could get in the most modern house I’d ever been in with a girl on her way to college. I brimmed over with pride. I felt grown up and ready for all the weekend had in store. Ready and then some.

  Rhodie put the flowers on the key table by the door, then slipped her hand between the buttons on my shirt and pulled me up the stairs to her bedroom. Candles were already lit and a tray of snack food sat on the floor by the bed.

  “So we don’t have to leave to eat,” she explained.

  The windows were open and a heavy heat rolled in.

  “It’s going to rain,” I said.

  “Supposed to be a thunderstorm.”

  “Best not answer the phone then.”

  “I know.”

  Rhodie smelled of rosemary oil, and she’d put some color on her cheeks. Imagine a girl like that making herself so pretty for a girl like me.

  She stared at me. “Your eyes look like what I think ice on Neptune would look like, all blue and crystallized.”

  The room filled with the pressure of the incoming storm. Gray clouds moved in and the sky grew as dark as midnight.

  Rhodie shut the window and turned on the fan. With the candles flickering in the grayness, it seemed as if we were in a room in the middle of nowhere, some place where no one would ever find us. We weren’t on the second floor of her parents’ white Colonial; we were in the attic of a castle or in an underground cave. Just us.

  I kissed Rhodie and moved my hands to her waist. I could feel her ribs through her dress.

  She said, “Don’t tickle me now.”

  Outside, the clouds crashed into each other, making us jump for the first few claps of thunder. We lay down on the bed and she rolled over so I could undo the buttons up the back of her dress. I kissed a patch of freckles on the back of her knee, and she asked me if my goal for the night was to find all her ticklish spots.

  “Why yes,” I said, “as a matter of fact, Miss Rhodie, it is.”

  To my surprise—especially given my nerves beforehand—I wasn’t nervous. I knew I was born to be doing what we were doing.

  Rhodie rolled back over and lifted the dress above her head. I kissed her stomach, asking her if she was ticklish there.

  “No,” she said.

  “How about here?” I asked, kissing her collarbone.

  “No.”

  “Here?” I asked, with my hand reaching up between her legs.

  “Shhh,” she said.

  × × ×

  We spent the day and night together. It rained almost the entire time, flooding down the streets outside and causing the world to smell like grass and heat. I pushed all thoughts of the police officers and those four women and the boys with their rocks from my mind, having agreed to myself to let myself be a full-on pervert for the weekend. It was as brave as I could be then.

  Rhodie’s bed was an old four-corner one, with battered up poles on each edge that she’d hung scarves on. The wood was so dark it was almost black. The sheets were the same green as the curtains, which was just a coincidence, she told me, seeing that her favorite color was actually orange.

  On Sunday morning she said, “I can’t see you tomorrow because my parents are driving me over to my cousins’ so I can say goodbye to everyone. My going off to college is more exciting news than when Jerome won the state auto show.”

  My guts dropped like a dead bird. “Then you’re leaving.”

  “Yeah, then I’m leaving. I’ll come by to say goodbye before I go, though.”

  “I love you, Rhodie.”

  She sniffled and sat up on the edge of the bed. “Shush.”

  Clasping my hand in hers, Rhodie’s crying started full tilt. I reached over to my backpack on the floor and pulled out a white handkerchief my mama always had me carry in case I got myself muddy.

  “Last time—please, Dara, please come with me.”

  I turned my head down, thinking of what going with her would mean: rejection of my family, never having children, eternal damnation.

  Rhodie grabbed my handkerchief, which was really just a cut-up piece of Daddy’s oil-changing T-shirt, and held it to her eyes. After a minute, the water seeped through the material she was crying so much.

  More to myself than her, I whispered, “I don’t think I can be that person.”

  I wanted to be that person—someone who could put love above everything else. I wanted to be brave. I wanted so much to be the girl who could go away with her. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t live in fear and isolation every day of my life. I couldn’t tell my parents they’d never have grandchildren or walk me down the aisle. I couldn’t sit out every Sunday while the rest of the
town went to church and had coffee and talked about baseball. I couldn’t be the girl who would never again have another friend to confide in about her life, all of her life.

  Rhodie, who could have quite a temper on her, answered, “You could have at least tried!”

  “Rhodie—”

  “Never mind.” She slapped the wet hankie into my hand and walked over to a piece of paper wrapped in a bright purple ribbon with those curly ends you make using the blade of the scissors. “Let’s not keep at it.” She handed me the scroll. “I drew this for you.”

  I unrolled it and held it out in front of me. It was a black-and-white picture she’d done with pen—I could tell from the way the lines crossed over and over again to make the black parts dark. The drawing was simple: a big black circle overlapping another big black circle. The oval-shaped middle, where they overlapped, was white.

  She sat down and looked deep into me, recovered now from her outburst. “There, in the middle—the white part—that’s our love.” She smiled and relaxed. “Us—two same circles—joining together with pure, protected love in the middle.”

  I nearly cried I was so happy. “I got you something too.”

  I pulled out her gift, which I’d wrapped in old newspaper—the clean bits—that I’d pulled up from the ground of that killer’s hideout down Old Spider Road. She recognized it right off and smiled that big smile of hers.

  “You sneak back down there?”

  “Here you go,” I said.

  She unwrapped it slowly, pulling out a small picture frame filled to overflowing with wildflowers I pulled from our meadow and dried and pressed. On the back I wrote, in my neatest handwriting: From the Tall Grasses.

  She nodded and laughed and cried, over and over.

  I said, “I wrote it so no one would know.”

  “I know that!” She smiled and cried. “It’s so pretty.”

  While she stared at it, almost like she was half-expecting the flowers to bloom up out of the glass, I ran my finger around the outside of the two circles she’d drawn for me. The symbol for infinity. I wondered if maybe I could do it. Maybe I could leave with her—no one would question two best friends rooming together in college.

  But to live with the worry that they might find out? No, I couldn’t.

  Rhodie pushed my hair back. “Why do you look so sad?”

  “Because it’s time for me to go,” I lied. “Your family’s due back in an hour.”

  “And Daddy drives fast.”

  I kissed her.

  Rhodie said, “You even kiss sad.”

  “I’m going to miss you.”

  Looking at her bedspread, she said, “You’re not even going to think about coming with me, are you?”

  “I love you,” I said.

  “Is that a no? Because if so, that is one messed-up reply.”

  “I just can’t be that kind of person.”

  “We can be those people. We are those people!”

  After weeks of hearing the same thing, I finally snapped. “Rhodie, you want to be defiled? You want to be shamed and maybe even murdered? That’s our future. We are living in a little dot on the Texas map. If it weren’t for Permian Oil, Midland might not even be here. This is where we are, who we are.

  “Folks do whatever the hell they want to do around here,” I went on. “We are like baby moles set out in the middle of a field for anyone to swoop down on. And there’s no protection. People like us, girls who kiss girls, we got nothing to stop life from becoming a full-on nightmare. No family, no friends, no God, and not even the police, who are supposed to be protecting folks.”

  “But we’d be together,” she said, oversimplifying everything in that romantic way she had.

  Sighing, I rolled her picture back up, wondering how I could go from utterly happy to utterly forlorn in such a short time. Maybe that’s the thing about having a strong emotion—it opens the door for all the others.

  “I went down to the police station a while back and overheard my cousin Earl talking with another police officer . . .” I started.

  “Yeah?” She straightened up on the bed, wearing just her white bra with the sheet wrapped around her lower body.

  “They talked about how they’d taken these girls—girls like us—into the jail for the night. Four women, really. They talked about the things they did to them and how these women would never speak about it because it would be worse to be what they are than to call out such horror.”

  “The police did what?”

  I looked at her, though I could tell she already knew. “They did that.”

  “What? We need to go down and file a complaint! You can go to court—you heard them confess. You are a witness to—”

  “Dammit, Rhodie, no! Think about those women—I’d be calling those women into the light.”

  She shook her head. “It’s not right, though.”

  “And this is why we can never be together, not in the long term: you think you need to fight what’s not right, even though it might mean hurting folks—”

  “—and you just duck your fool head under!” Rhodie grew so angry that her hands shook. She stood up and threw some of my clothes around, looking for her nightgown.

  “Stop!” I said, catching my underwear with my outstretched arm to prevent it from landing on the tall cactus in the corner of her room near the window—the one with the small needles.

  “You want to let those women go without any help?”

  “There is no help,” I said. “If anything, they would be sentenced to jail time.”

  Rhodie gave up looking for her clothes and plopped back down on the bed. She grabbed my hand, half angry, half sad. “I’m just talking about me and you, two friends going away together.”

  I kissed her cheek. “I’m sorry.”

  She sighed. “I wish you thought with your heart more than your fool head.”

  “I do love you.”

  “I know that.” She softened and touched my face with her warm fingertips. “I know that. Now kiss me good, since this is goodbye.”

  I leaned over and kissed her. Lost in the middle of a kiss—one that tasted like peppermint from brushing our teeth—neither of us heard the bedroom door open.

  “Rhodie Marie!”

  It was her mother, and there we were in a messy bed with our hands on each other’s faces, kissing in that hungry way.

  “Mama!”

  Rhodie sprung up. She should have grabbed the sheet first, but she didn’t, so she stood there, naked from the waist down in her white bra with her hair sticking up on one side and a kissing mark low on her neck. I stayed put and scrunched down into the sheets a bit, enough to cover my belly and my breasts.

  “What in the name of all that is holy is this?”

  “You know that Dara was coming over to—”

  “I knew she was coming over. And now I see clearer why.”

  Rhodie’s mother had a little Mexican blood in her, all of which seemed to drain away, leaving her as pale as sun-bleached bone. She grabbed her stomach, where her dress was held tight by a belt, and clutched one of the posts of Rhodie’s bed for support.

  My body turned to ice, frozen and cold and ready to crack into pieces.

  Her mother turned to the door and yelled at Rhodie’s brother, “Go help your father unload the Model T! Go back out—git, now. I need some time with your sister. Go!”

  While her mother’s back was turned, Rhodie managed to snag her nightgown from her vanity chair and put it on. I gestured for her to get my shirt and she shook her head, not knowing where she’d just thrown it. The muscles in her face flexed and her eyes were wide.

  The world slowed down. This trembling started inside me, as if panic could become a real, visible physical condition. It grabbed hold of my ribs and my throat and my hands and my legs until they all shook. The bed sheet jittered with my shaking. Fear had overtaken me.

  My mind exploded: thoughts of my parents finding out, the preacher being told, my friends in high sch
ool hearing. The weight of it all made me dizzy and I gagged and coughed, trying to figure out whether I was going to vomit or stop breathing. And through it all, I shook like madness itself.

  Her mother turned back to us, a bit more composed now. This was a woman who snapped chicken necks and delivered her son long after the doctor said one of them wasn’t going to make it. This would not break her.

  Her shiny black hair, pulled up high on top of her head, dripped a bit from the rain outside. Her pale pink cotton dress stuck to her, showing her bra and her skin through.

  “We came back early,” she said. “The storm.”

  Rhodie nodded, looking so hollow I thought she might topple over.

  Her mother let go of the bedpost and took in a deep breath. “I worked my whole life to get you here, Rhodie. When I was your age, I couldn’t go to college. I could not, but I told myself that if I ever had a daughter, she—she will go.” Her black eyes burned into Rhodie. “Do you know how many college students are girls these days? Eight percent. Eight in every hundred students are female. You understand me? You are one of those eight. You are going. You are going to be a teacher or a nurse, or something! You will make it.”

  With a sudden shift, her mother got sad, that deep sadness, and shook her head. “A lifetime of planning this. You know what your daddy said? He said you’d be unmarriageable with higher schooling. That it’s unladylike to be educated. I told him—and it took years and years of telling him over and over—I told him that that wasn’t true anymore. I told him, and eventually he listened to me, and we got you into school. We did! We all did. And look here at what you do. This.” She shot a sickened look my way, and I felt shame so deep that it left a hot scar inside me.

  Rhodie clasped her hands in front of her yellow nightgown. The windows and curtains were closed, but we could still hear the rain coming down in streams.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “You are more than sorry. You are disgusting, and you have something wrong in your mind! Your whole life for this.” She looked my way again.