Sugar Land

by tammy lynne stoner

  So I wrote her one final letter, hoping maybe she could read it over my shoulder:

  My Sweet Rhodie,

  This afternoon the mail came and, in it, a letter from your daughter telling me you’d died. I’m glad you had children and a husband and a life where people mourn you. I’ve been mourning you in my way for years, too many years.

  Anyway, I never said I was sorry. I’m saying it now, and hopefully you’ll get the message. I am so so sorry.

  I should have written you from prison. I should have gone to your graduation—well, maybe . . . Either way, I left you when you stood up for me and when you needed me, and I am sorry. I left you because I didn’t want to be those women in prison with my cousin Earl, and I left you because I didn’t want to be the one the preacher sat in the entryway, away from all the rest. I didn’t want to go to Hell, but really, I didn’t want to live in Hell—and that’s what I thought would happen. I was a coward about it and then, in many ways, created my own type of Hell.

  I want you to know, though, that all these years later, Rhodie, you are still in my blood. You run around inside my body—in my mind, and behind my eyes, and through my heart. I will always love you, I think. I hope you are at peace. Sleep well, my beautiful, beautiful girl.

  Your Dara

  PEPTO DISMAL

  In 1954, two years after my Rhodie died, I was visited by the cutest baby I ever saw. I wasn’t a baby type, but this baby and I had a special bond, right off.

  The father was a scrawny thing, with his hair too slicked back for his skinny neck. He wore a baseball cap pulled down so low that it shaded his face, and a scarf wrapped high up on his neck. The baby still had undecided blue eyes, though I had a feeling they might stay blue. The father didn’t introduce himself. He just stepped up on to my porch—me wondering if he had some kind of delivery, maybe milk. With eyes lowered, he gestured that the Fiddler should take the baby up to me.

  “What on God’s earth?” I said.

  The Fiddler shrugged and plopped the baby down on the bulge of my belly, a perfect bounce of blubber. The baby—who I felt was a girl—looked over at me with only a slight wobble of her head, sweet thing.

  “Well, aren’t you cute?” I asked her. “Why’d your daddy bring you here?”

  The father didn’t make a move, so I finally said, “You there, I think it best you come take your child.”

  When the father stepped up to take her back, he looked me dead in the eye. Those eyes looked familiar. Eyes that were almost black.

  I looked up at him. There was something I recognized in the way this man stood. I’d noticed it walking up, his swagger.

  And that’s when I got it. With all the blood dropping fast to my swollen feet, I saw that this man standing before me was my step-daughter—the one I thought I’d lost to her wanderings around the country: Edna.

  “Tip your cap back,” I said with a little quiver.

  He did and yup, it was her.

  Where has she been? Why is she dressing like a man? Is she in trouble with the law?

  A tumbleweed rolled across the empty space inside my chest. It hurt, that spiky thing inside my ribs, and made it impossible to speak. I just sat there, dumb and fat, as my stepdaughter turned with the baby and walked back down the gravel that led up to my double-wide. I watched her go, thinking I must be wrong, but knowing—as a mother, even a second mother, does—that I wasn’t wrong. That was her.

  “What’s going on, Nana Dara?” the Fiddler asked.

  Still too stunned to talk or move, I stayed where I was and thought through it. Edna wasn’t the sort to be in trouble with the law—Miss Debbie, maybe, but not Edna. She was too logical for all that. So why was she trying to be a man?

  My mind played out a montage of memories, all the times that added up now: her wanting to play baseball, not softball; her refusing to cross her legs or carry a purse; her always playing with the boys—that birthday party when she’d wanted the boys to come but I didn’t allow it. I even caught her once strapping a scarf tight around her breasts before she went out. She explained to me that it was because they played rough, and she wanted to make sure she didn’t get injured. At the time I was just happy not to have to worry about her with boys, like I had with her older sister.

  Then the big memory hit me: her prom. She hadn’t wanted a boy’s body to press against hers. She asked me what was wrong with her, and I did nothing to ease her mind. I just left her hanging there with all her doubts.

  Edna’s figure got smaller and smaller down the street until she turned and disappeared. I sat there, wrapped in mystery and confusion, unable to call her back. The Fiddler tapped my shoulder and told me that Edna had given him a note when I was playing with the baby.

  “Well hand it the hell over!”

  “Here you go,” he mumbled.

  I unfolded it faster than a child tips a Christmas stocking.

  Nana Dara,

  I’m leaving tomorrow for quite a while. It’s just too tough. The baby is mine. I wanted to bring her to meet you since I know you and Miss Debbie are often on the outs, and Miss Debbie is going to adopt and raise her. She will be a great mom.

  That this baby came from me has to be kept a secret.

  The baby will still be your granddaughter this way—and I’ll be her aunt. My life can’t be the kind a baby grows up in.

  She sure is sweet, though. I want her to have a good mother. I can’t raise a baby and stay sane. I don’t expect you to understand, but I hope you will try.

  —E

  The thing my eyes settled in on was the line: That this baby came from me has to be kept a secret. I cringed, knowing that secrets have a way of working themselves out of tight spots, of popping up somewhere else where the dirt is softer. Maybe since my secret didn’t see the light of day all those years ago, I passed it along to this child. I should have been honest and told people that once, back in 1923, I loved a girl who loved me back, and it changed everything. I should have told her that, despite preferring the company of woman, I didn’t live a false life with her daddy—it was just like having hamburger when you want steak. I should have said something.

  I sighed and held the letter in my hand until the paper softened. The night grew dark. The light flickered behind me near the overpopulated fly strip. An owl hooted with that hollow sound they make on quiet nights. And I knew what I had to do.

  “It’s time we deal with the consequences of secrets,” I said to no one.

  “Fiddler!” I called out. “Did you put the radio back in my truck? I’m going a full county over, and I don’t feel like making that kind of drive without a little music.”

  × × ×

  Nearly an hour later, I heaved up to Miss Debbie’s trailer and rapped on her aluminum screen door. “Miss Debbie, you get yer ass over here right now and open this door!”

  “Nana Dara?” Miss Debbie shuffled to her door like a Chinese woman on bound feet. “Shush! The baby is sleeping.”

  And that’s when it truly became real—not real in my mind, but real in my emotions. There was a baby. She was here. I was a grandmother.

  “When were you gonna tell me about the baby?”

  “You haven’t come out here to visit me in three years since that whole misunderstanding with me calling you plump, and this is all you can say?”

  “Roads move two ways, Miss Debbie!” I put my arms out firmly, hands on hips. “You ever seen the inside of my Opry?”

  She chewed her gum as loudly as ever in that pantsuit that clung to her thighs like brown Saran Wrap. “I know Eddie wrote you a note.”

  “Well, we could talk too. You think about calling me? We have these things called phones.” I stopped. “By Eddie you mean Edna, right?”

  “Do you know after Daddy died and I got married I’ve only seen you maybe a handful of times. Now you want me to keep you up on what’s going on?”

  “Stubborn,” I muttered.

  “Kettle,” she shot back. But then she softened in a way I ha
dn’t remembered her softening before. She sighed and bumped the door further open with her hip. “You can come look at her, but don’t touch—it took me a solid half hour bouncing her up and down and making choo-choo noises to get her down. And yes, Edna is now going by Eddie and dressing the part—much to the Devil’s delight.”

  I stood in the doorway like I was making a statement—no one is leaving here until we settle this!—so Miss Debbie’s sudden invitation to come see the baby made me feel a little ridiculous. I tried as best I could to switch from crazy country woman to stable grandma.

  “She sleeps in the nook here—the crib fit perfect. Eddie found it for her.”

  I relaxed my stance a little, wondering how I’d let so many years go by. But I knew. I wrote Miss Debbie off long before the Warden had died, sometime between her first cheerleading practice and that weekend she took the Warden’s car and drove off to Georgia with her boyfriend. I let her go since she needed authority, and authority was the Warden’s terrain, while I drifted back and forth between being stepmother and babysitter. And, of course, it didn’t help that she pulled her trump card on several occasions, reminding me that I was not her “real mom” and never would be.

  “All right,” I said.

  I looked at Miss Debbie now, her eyes smiling somehow, and I wanted to reach out and tell her that I was sorry I’d been so distant and caught up in what it meant to be a mom like every other mom—a woman like every other woman—so much so that I felt like I was pretending all the time. But I just couldn’t make myself move that quickly, so I nodded to her with a small smile and stepped in from where my big body had been blocking the doorway.

  Miss Debbie’s living room looked a little different than the last time I’d seen it—she’d replaced her big, glass bulb lamp with a lamp that looked like it had a puffy skirt for a shade. The shade was wider than the two-tiered side table it sat on. Strange.

  She also got herself a new white-and-red floral couch. I use the term “floral” loosely here, since those flowers were crazy elongated things, like what might grow in some prehistoric era when the oxygen was too high.

  I said, “So, Edna stopped by to see me, with the baby.”

  “Eddie,” she corrected.

  “Eddie, right.” I cleared my throat. “Oh—and why is she dressing like a man? Is she hiding from something?”

  “Only God’s good graces.”

  “What?”

  “She pretends to be a man.”

  I stepped back. “Oh.”

  “Tea?” she asked, letting me know that the subject had just been dropped.

  I nodded, dumb as a cow. “Three sugars.”

  “You go on and look at her while I get your tea.”

  I walked over and looked down into the crib. Bumper stickers from different states were plastered over the solid pine headboard part. The baby was sleeping peacefully with her arms outstretched like Jesus himself. She had a rash on her forehead, poor thing. Miss Debbie had wrapped her hands in tiny mittens so she wouldn’t scratch at it.

  Even with that rash, she was beautiful—so beautiful that she didn’t seem real. She looked like one of those perfect babies they put in ads, like a picture taken in a perfect house with a perfect family somewhere, not here with all us misfits.

  “Isn’t she gorgeous?” Miss Debbie asked as she walked up, looking as close to peaceful as I’d ever seen her.

  “She is.”

  “You know she’s mine, right? That’s all she ever needs to know. She doesn’t ever need to know that Eddie gave birth.” Miss Debbie squinted her blue-shadowed eyes in that threatening way she could do.

  “I get the gist. Only how—”

  She grabbed her highball glass off the counter. “Come here, outta earshot.”

  I followed her back into the living room. “Eddie dated this man but only one of them was serious—and you know it wasn’t her. Well, he was leaving for basic training and she decided it would be all right to give him a send-off. One time. No harm.”

  I nodded, still dumbstruck by all of this.

  She continued on: “You know I can’t have kids on account of my female troubles. And Eddie can’t have a kid on account of needing to be something unnatural—which, I can assure you, I am not OK with from a religious perspective—but it got me this little one here. That’s the deal. Eddie, deviation though I feel she is, can stay involved as ‘Aunt Eddie’ as long as the secret stays kept.”

  “How does Bo feel about it?”

  “He couldn’t be happier. He’s down at the car shop right now, says he’s gotta work even harder if he’s gonna put this one in good shoes. He thinks bad shoes are the root of a lot of adult difficulties.”

  “He’s a smart man,” I said. “Is Edna all right then?”

  “Eddie, Nana Dara, Eddie. And yes, she’s all right.” Miss Debbie lit a menthol. “If by being ‘all right’ you mean selfish to the gates of Hell.”

  I sat down and gestured for the Warden’s eldest daughter—the one he thought might go to secretary school someday—to pass over her cigarette and, ignoring the bright red lipstick on it, took a deep drag. My whole body laid back and relaxed with the exhale.

  “PD must never know who gave birth to her.”

  “Wait now, what’s her name?” I asked, trying to slow down Miss Debbie’s aggression.

  “PD.”

  “What’s that mean?” I handed her cigarette back.

  “Patricia Delilah. Eddie says it stands for Pepto Dismal on account of her warped sense of humor. Says she was so sick during her pregnancy that she decided to call her that. I, of course, changed that.”

  “Ha!” I laughed. Edna and that weird sense of humor she had. My chest felt heavy with how much I missed her then.

  Leave it to Miss Debbie to break the mood. “Nana Dara,” she started in again, “to be clear, PD is mine. She is my baby. I love her like mine—I love her because she is mine, and she can never know. This baby is mine.” She put both hands on her hips. “I need you to understand that.”

  I looked across the living room at the ceramic Santa that had been in a bowl on Miss Debbie’s end table for years now. One of its white-gloved hands had broken off. The other one was held on by fraying scotch tape.

  “Nana Dara, you with me here?”

  “These secrets are bad, I’m telling you.” I leaned back.

  She shrugged.

  “What I don’t understand is why Edna isn’t raising her own daughter?”

  “She’s my daughter!”

  “Calm down, Miss Debbie, before your hair falls.”

  “Can you imagine, Nana Dara, can you imagine not wanting to be fully in a girl’s body then finding out that body is pregnant—the most feminine thing a woman can do?” Miss Debbie crushed out her cigarette and looked at me like I had no feelings whatsoever. Like I was an alien, which I just might be.

  “I can understand that—as best I can. But my question is, why can’t Edna—Eddie—why can’t Eddie just be Eddie and be her mother?”

  “Because we live in a small town in Texas. Because this is 1954. Because loving this girl would mean Eddie never loving a woman—if you get me. If anyone found out they would take Eddie to jail and take sweet little PD away. Bad enough she had PD out of wedlock.”

  So Eddie turned out like me.

  “What a mess,” I said, shaking my head.

  With fire in her eyes, Miss Debbie lit herself another cigarette. “Mess! This baby is a blessing from God, not a mess. He’s given me what I cannot have. I think of it this way: Eddie is getting herself the life she wants, and I’m getting myself a baby. Praise the Lord!”

  “When did you find the Lord, anyway?”

  “He was never lost—I was. The Lord helps me keep on the straight and narrow path in my abiding love for Bo and for the simple pleasures in small-town life.”

  The thick brown stripes on Miss Debbie’s pantsuit made her look even harsher than she usually looked. I don’t know why she grew up so harsh, really
I don’t.

  “Nana Dara, are you even listening to me?”

  “Now who’s gonna wake the baby?” I said, using my low voice. “And I am listening. But now you listen—I am not going to lie. If that baby ever asks me who her mother is, I’m going to tell her. Nothin’ good comes from lies!”

  “What do you know of them?”

  “Maybe more than you know,” I said.

  “A lie is a lie. A secret is just a secret. This is a secret.”

  “I’m not going to argue with you. I am not keeping a secret. I am not lying. Either way, it ends here.”

  At that point, I thought it would be dramatic to rise from Miss Debbie’s pink velour chair and see myself out, only I didn’t count on the chair having such a sinking cushion, so when I tried to get up I found myself stuck. Miss Debbie tapped her ashes on the carpet and smirked over at me struggling to stand up.

  “Jesus. Look at us!” she laughed. “You’re too damn fat to get up from a simple chair, and I am acting like a scared cat.”

  Miss Debbie flashed her mostly straight teeth at me, and I knew something was up—she was being too damn nice. She walked over to me as I settled back down into the velour and offered me the last drag of her cigarette.

  “So let’s tell her the truth. Only thing is—” she fake-frowned—“we’ll have to be sure PD doesn’t tell any of the kids at school. I mean, how would they understand? Even if we could get a four-year-old in PD’s future kindergarten to understand the complexities of intimate human nature, would her friends understand? The church? Would she be shunned out there?” She paused dramatically. “Well, you know the folk in town, what do you think?” Before I could answer, she continued: “So we can tell her but then she’ll have to keep the secret or have an impossible and friendless life.”

  “I’m not blind,” I said. “I see.”

  Miss Debbie sipped her drink. “So that is the choice: we keep a secret from her, or we tell her—and then we make sure she keeps the secrets from her friends.”