Sugar Land

by tammy lynne stoner

  The night before I was to meet the Warden’s little girls, while he clomped around on the roof above me, I did something I hadn’t done since I was nineteen: I prayed that rosary. The entire damn rosary, since I needed all the help I could get.

  I offered my rosary up as a prayer to the Almighty that the Warden’s girls would not walk up to me and proceed to make derogatory comments about my rectangular stature or my big feet or my closely shorn hairdo in front of the Warden. I knew he didn’t see me the way I saw myself, but I worried that he might see me the way they saw me. So, despite the arguments in my mind in favor of bourbon over rosary, I moved over to the more comfortable light green chair in the living room, near the cactus, and prayed that rosary until my left butt cheek fell asleep—then I prayed some more.

  I dozed off with the rosary and woke up to the Warden lightly touching my hair. It was morning.

  “I didn’t want to wake you.”

  “Aw, hell! What time is it?”

  “There’s no rush—we got forty-five minutes to be at Sugar Land. You get yourself some coffee, and I’m going to go have a cigar.”

  I got up without saying anything, annoyed that I could feel him smiling about it all.

  What should I wear?

  It wasn’t a long decision; I only had my white Sugar Land shirts and two sundresses to choose from. So, the blue one with the white flowers or the dark gray?

  I was glad then that Sugar Land was the chosen meeting space because, although I wasn’t the prettiest thing going, next to tattooed prisoners with yellow teeth and hairy ears, I could hold my own. Besides, I knew also that the Warden was most comfortable at the prison. He thought of that place as a kind of retreat for children who had been beaten into dangerous adults, and therefore saw his role as part father, part drill sergeant. They were his extended family, even if they didn’t know it. It made sense that his immediate family would be meeting up there.

  I chose dark gray—the blue made me look like a giant hot-air balloon—and a pair of sunglasses with light yellow frames.

  “It’s funny,” I said when I came out. “I have three times as many sunglasses as I do sundresses.”

  “You could wear some shorts.”

  I gave him a look that let him know what I thought about that.

  “Well, all right then.”

  He held the door, and I walked through, smoothing down my hair. We strolled along Guardtown, him holding my hand. He smoked his cigar down, and I tried to keep myself calm so I wouldn’t get sweaty.

  “You all right?” he asked when we were almost up to the white buildings.

  “Yes. You?”

  “I’m just fine.” He winked, and I thought that he did seem fine. How could that be—didn’t he see that he had married a giant piece of cement?

  So there I was—just a week after my wedding—back at Sugar Land. I rubbed my finger over my teeth, in case any of the light-colored lipstick I’d put on had rubbed off. It was my Sunday lipstick and, although it felt like one more thing to worry about, it was better than worrying about not having any.

  “There they are!”

  He waved over to where their grandparents had dropped them off. The only grandparents left were on his dead wife’s side. They waved, but never made it over to meet me—not that day and not any day after. Maybe they thought the Warden shouldn’t have remarried, or maybe it hurt too much to see their daughter’s girls looking to another woman for care; I don’t know.

  The Warden walked back toward me, that big bear of a man hulking in the middle of his two wispy girls—one in pants and one in a skirt. They all held hands, strolling across the flesh-colored dirt at high noon. As they got closer, I wasn’t sure if I should stay seated or stand or what. I wished I’d brought a cigarette.

  A small plane flew overhead, and I looked up through my sunglasses, wondering how long geese feel the pull of the plane engines sucking them in before they lose the battle and get shredded. How much they struggle against a wind that will always overwhelm them.

  “Miss Dara.” The Warden cleared his throat. “This is Edna, who sleeps with the dogs, and Debbie, who sleeps with the cats.” They had two wiener dogs from the same litter and two cats of nondescript parentage who would soon be added in with my two cats. Since they slept with them, the animals had also traveled over to the grandparents’, who were dropping them by the house tomorrow.

  They smiled up at me, squinting. Debbie curtsied, as much as a seven-year-old made almost entirely of hair can. She wore a pale pink skirt and white shirt with a blue belt in the middle.

  “Daddy, can Edna and me have a race?” she asked.

  Before he answered, Edna—in the blue sailor suit—yelled “Go!” and the two girls were off across the yard.

  The Warden sat down. “Taking this in?”

  “I am.” I sat there with my legs pressed close together under the picnic table.

  “I love you.”

  “I love you, too.”

  He nodded, then turned to watch his girls. Edna, the younger one, was winning the second leg back from the wired prison fence.

  He called out to them: “Bring it on in!”

  The girls pushed harder when they realized their Daddy was watching. They stormed up to our table.

  “I won!” Debbie shouted.

  “I tripped.” Edna sulked. “You didn’t win—I just lost. It’s diff’rent.”

  The plane overhead was almost out of sight. I wondered why when I saw that plane I thought of the death of geese—why, instead, I didn’t see people off to enjoy their lives. I vowed to begin seeing things on the light side and started by turning to Edna and saying, “The best winners are the ones that lose a lot when they’re young. Life only gets better.”

  Edna looked around the penitentiary yard. She turned to me, cocked her head, and said the words that made me love her right off: “If this is better,” she said, “I quit now.”

  × × ×

  We went through the growing pains folks go through. I found out when I could reprimand the girls and when exerting my authority would threaten to paint a bright red circle around me as the one member of this family who didn’t really belong. I came to know when I could remind the Warden that I came in late to the structure of all these people, and sometimes I just needed time to myself—and when such a reminder would sound like I didn’t love his girls like I should. And I worked out when I could ask how their time was at their grandparents’ house without sounding like I was trying to compete, which, truth be told, sometimes I was.

  Then my second rosary came. Edna was just turning nine and was so skinny that we dressed her in clothes for girls much younger than she was, even though they were too short in the sleeves and too high in the dress line. Her hands were always dirty since she was a bright girl filled up with this drive to understand the world from grub worms up.

  The Warden and I had told Edna that she could have three kids over for the night to celebrate her ninth birthday. Only she decided that two of the three friends she wanted to invite were boys—and the Warden told her flat-out no.

  Edna shut herself in the room she shared with Debbie. I knocked and asked if I could come in.

  She shouted in that way that only young children can, without care for the neighbors, “No!”

  “Please.”

  “I don’t want a birthday party!”

  I stood with my hand against the door, as if I could feel something through the thin wood. After a moment, I walked in.

  Edna, her thick brown hair in a mess, was face down on her bed. Her fourteen stuffed animals were off in the corner, all looking over at her with great concern.

  She sniffed. “I don’t want a party if the boys can’t come.”

  “Do they want to come?” I asked.

  She rolled onto her side, away from me, and said slowly, “I don’t know.”

  “Why don’t you just have your one girl friend over then?”

  She rubbed her face against the pillowcase. “No one
has one person over for their birthday!” She flopped onto her back and stared up at the ceiling, her face blotchy from crying. “Let’s just cancel it. I’ll tell everyone you won’t let me have one.”

  To my shame, I felt a pang of dread that folks would hear that the Warden’s new wife wouldn’t let his daughter have a birthday party. I said, “Are you sure?”

  “I just want to know what’s wrong with me!” she shouted, crying hard, that deep kind of cry.

  I stood up and pushed a few strands of hair behind my ear. Clearly this was beyond my experience.

  To me she was a spirited, smart little girl, though there was something in the distance she had with the rest of the world that I understood. I stood by her bed. Edna sniffed an irritated sniff then lifted her messy head and handed me the pillow. She rolled over to cry into the bedspread.

  “I don’t want a party,” she said, muffled and sad.

  “Well you need to have one,” I said, making the rookie mistake of caring more how other people saw me as a parent than how my stepdaughter saw me as a parent. “You’ll have fun. I promise. I will invite those three girls, and that’s that.”

  “I won’t,” she cried. “I’ll sit there and not say a word the whole time!”

  She went silent. After a few minutes, I left the room.

  I did host that party. And it was horrible. The neighborhood girls came dressed in their finest regalia and brought fancy gifts and stacked them up in a pile while Edna, who had refused to wear anything other than her pants and a brown blouse, sat with her back to everyone, facing the wall in the living room.

  That night—the night after her terrible party—I prayed another rosary that I wouldn’t be such a selfish asshole. And after I was done, I went in to her bedroom.

  Edna scowled at me from her sheets.

  “I was wrong and you were right,” I said. “I’m sorry, honey. So sorry.”

  Edna softened. We didn’t hug or anything, but she nodded in a way that let me know that she had accepted my white flag. I left her room wondering how many people I would hurt because I cared what others thought.

  × × ×

  It wasn’t until 1939 that I prayed the rosary for the third time since my youth. The subject of this rosary: Debbie’s junior prom.

  This time, I offered up my prayers not for Debbie’s tenuous sixteen-year-old virginity or her safe transport to and from the dancehall, but that I would manage to help her with her make-up without her ending up like the Creature from the Black Lagoon. The only make-up trick I had was wearing sunglasses instead of mascara.

  That night, a breezy spring night that made all the sheets on the line look like ghosts, I stayed downstairs and said the rosary. I prayed for the Almighty to intervene and endow me with make-up skills by dawn.

  The next morning, I was greeted with proof that God did truly exist when the Warden surprised Miss Debbie and me by reserving a spot at the Sally Joan make-up counter for Miss Debbie to get her outer lids and the rest of it done professionally while I just stood there, complimenting. Praise be!

  Who knows what became of Miss Debbie’s virginity, but the way she looked when she left, I have no doubt it was the flag to be captured that night. It reminded me of that one time Rhodie asked me to dance, her holding her hand out, saying, “Dance with me. No one can see us.”

  Me blanching. “I can’t. I don’t know who would lead.” What a donkey’s behind.

  Miss Debbie adjusted her purple corsage after her date did his best to slide it on her wrist. “Daddy, you know Brian. And Brian, this is my . . . Nana Dara. My daddy’s wife.”

  And that was how it happened—that was how I became Nana Dara. I wasn’t her mother—never could be—but I wasn’t really her stepmother either. I was Nana Dara.

  Not long after, Edna and the Warden started calling me Nana Dara too, and then the folks at church. The name spread faster than crabs in an all-boys school, and within the year even the folks bagging up my ice cream were calling me Nana Dara. It matured me, this name and the status that went with it. I was no longer a girl from an egg store who left to cook at a prison, then became the wife of the Warden. I was Nana Dara, God dammit. I had my own place in this world.

  × × ×

  Two years later, the same year they bombed Pearl Harbor, I was presented with a situation that required I say the rosary for the fourth time since my teen years. I said this rosary for the Almighty to give me the strength to know how to console little Edna when she didn’t go to her prom. You need to remember, this was the 1940s, and prom could turn you into a princess or a spinster overnight. Trust me on that.

  On the night of the prom, the Warden huffed and looked off at the pink clouds. “I’m going to head to the movies tonight.”

  In that moment, I knew how much harder it was for men sometimes. No matter what, they had to hold up the heavy walls of society for fear that everything would otherwise cave in and hurt their families. They had to swallow their tenderness and let themselves sail away from softness.

  After he left, Edna and I sat on our unpainted porch swing, me pressing up beside her with my hot body. I put on the radio and pulled out a bottle of champagne from a cardboard box I’d put out on the porch earlier. I popped the cork without too much trouble and poured us each a mason jar.

  “Nana Dara, I’m only sixteen,” Edna said, her brown eyes looking as intense as they always did.

  “This is a special occasion. Tonight is the first night you and I get to spend alone as grown women. And for that I am glad you didn’t go to prom.”

  “I wasn’t asked.”

  I nodded, and she sipped her champagne in the yellow light of our porch light. The crickets chatted about their day, and one of the chickens from a few houses over came up to peck at the weed sprouts in our front yard.

  I wondered why Edna hadn’t been asked to prom. Unlike me, she had hair as thick as a horse’s mane and perfect teeth and could sound out almost any song on the piano. Sure, she could be full of fire every now and again, but what sixteen-year-old isn’t?

  “Later on you’ll meet someone special—like your father—who will recognize how special you are, Edna.”

  She nodded, clearly unconvinced.

  I moved to the wicker chair across from the swing, pulled out the upside-down trashcan that we used as a table, and suggested we learn a little poker. Edna smiled so big and true in the afterglow of the fireworks that she looked like another person.

  “Only if we can bet!” she said.

  “That’s the only way to play.”

  I shuffled loudly for effect and arched a fancy bridge.

  “The trick to poker is the poker face, but it’s also the poker fingers and the poker feet. You can’t let your face or the other parts of your body reveal that you’ve told a lie. We all do it—we all want to get that lie out, so we tap our fingers or move our feet around or do something that lets other people know. The body and the soul—they want to be honest,” I said. “You have to work at it to be dishonest. But that’s part of poker. That’s what we call bluffing. To be great at poker you have to lie with your entire body.”

  “I can do that,” she said.

  I spread out the cards and wrote down what hand beat what other hand on a sheet of paper for her to use.

  First two games I won, both with aces high.

  “Why don’t I deal the next hand,” Edna said, smiling.

  “Now I’m not sure what you are accusing me of, but all right, your deal.”

  Halfway through our third game, and our second glass of champagne, we moved inside. I set the fans up in a way that wouldn’t blow the cards around, and suggested we liven up the bets by a nickel—and liven up the drinks with a little gin.

  “A bite of it, as they say.”

  “Well, sure.” Edna shuffled the cards while I made us drinks. I heard her stop. “Nana Dara,” she called out to me, “I was asked to go to the prom tonight.”

  I didn’t turn around from the silver tray we called our ba
r. I just let her talk.

  “I was asked by this nice boy who plays trumpet. But I didn’t want to go. I told him I couldn’t go. I, ah, it would’ve just felt too strange—I don’t know how to say this, but to dance with a boy against this body . . .”

  And there it was: my moment to come clean and tell Edna how much I understood, how I felt the same way. That my daydreams about Rhodie kept me going through the odd days when I didn’t feel a true, deep sense of intimacy with the Warden. I could tell her that it would get easier. That there are moments of real love if you let them in—and that, after a few years, you might feel more and more true about it. That she’d learn somehow to do the dance or look for someone who didn’t like to dance very often.

  But instead I swallowed my secret again and handed her a glass.

  “This here is a French 75,” I said.

  I felt her looking up at me with those nearly black eyes, wanting me to say something.

  “You dealing?” I asked.

  Edna took a sip. “Sure.”

  We were quiet for a minute while I battled out what to say. I knew she was thinking that I was troubled by her and that pressure made it harder for me to figure out what words to use. What I came up with was this: “All I can tell you is that I support whatever settles into you right.”

  Edna nodded real slow, keeping her eyes on the bubbles in her mason jar. She said, “I feel like there’s been a great injustice done to me somehow.”

  “An injustice?”

  She paused. I watched her thoughts move around behind her eyes as the fans clicked and whirled.

  “But I guess there’s more injustice in the world than fleas in the bayou,” she finally said.

  I nodded, not exactly sure what she was talking about, wondering if maybe it was the beverages causing her to talk crazy—and anyone who has had a French 75 can attest why I made that assumption.