Sugar Land

by tammy lynne stoner

  I thought on it. Dammit, she had something.

  Miss Debbie smiled and blinked her blue eyes several times. “Think about it, Nana Dara. That might very well be the first big thing she learns from us—how to lie to her friends.”

  Just then, as if that sneaky stepdaughter of mine had it all rigged, baby PD let out a thin, frail cry.

  “You ponder that,” Miss Debbie said, smashing her cigarette out beside a few half-burnt candy wrappers. “I’m going to go feed your granddaughter. If you want to, you can stay and hold her.”

  I’ll give it to her, Miss Debbie sure was good. “Of course I want to hold her.”

  “I’ll be back in a second to help you up.”

  So I let it go, but even as I did it—even as I knew I was doing the best I could in the moment—I felt like I’d just poured a little water on a dangerous seed just looking for some place to pop up.

  FASHION

  Eddie disappeared for a few months after leaving us with PD, no doubt to grieve. But then she stopped by. She was about to take off on a project to help administer the new polio vaccine in schools all around Texas. She ran the statewide project, doing the scheduling and lining up the nurses and whatnot. It felt nice knowing that, partly thanks to my stepdaughter, there would be fewer children who would grow up like President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose young legs had been crippled up in the big outbreak of 1921. Thirty-five years later, and we were finally vaccinating against it.

  Eddie looked very dapper when she came to see us—if that word can be used for females. She wore a suit with an ascot and carried a new black briefcase filled with alphabetized school lists. Her spunk reminded me a bit of Rhodie, though still I worried about her dressing so manly.

  I thought about how the word “pervert” had become the word “invert” in open-minded circles, of which there were few that I saw in Sugar Land. Outside Sugar Land, I hoped that the change of word came along with a change of sentiment—and it wasn’t just folks were just being more polite about it all.

  “You seem distracted today, Nana Dara,” Eddie said.

  “Just ate too much beef last night. Always leaves me feeling separated from myself the next day.” I looked over at her, leaning forward in my wobbly chair. “You all ready for your trip?”

  “They got me that car out there,” she said, pointing to a long white automobile that was hers for the duration of the project, “and a string of nice hotel rooms, so I’m set.”

  “Sounds exciting.” Me thinking: you are out there caring for all those children, but you leave your child with someone else. Then I mentally slapped myself for thinking that. Asshole.

  “Not sure if lines of crying children are exciting.” She slicked back a piece of her hair.

  At the time, I knew that if there had been a homosexual vaccine like the one they developed for polio, I would have gone around to schools poking children with needles so they would grow up and fall in love with who folks thought they should fall in love with. Make life easier. Of course, now, I’ve come to believe that each and every life has the number of trials it is destined to have, and, if you take one away, another one fills its place. Your life is your response to these trials. No life is easy, and no life is hard; it’s just what adjectives you choose to use to describe it.

  “You write me when you can,” I said.

  “I will.”

  “Try to send me a postcard with the picture of the town on it. I’ll collect them and hang them down the hallway or something.”

  “I don’t know how you’d fit anything else on your walls.”

  I smiled. “I have my ways.”

  “’Bye, Nana Dara.”

  “’Bye, Eddie.”

  With a professional’s nod, she pulled up her heavy briefcase and walked out to that white car. I stood at the door with a few cats winding around the loose fabric of my housedress, amazed that this girl I’d helped raise had the independent spirit in her to go out on her own and earn her way all by herself—and in a man’s hat to boot.

  NEW PICTURES OF MY GIRLS

  A full season later, Eddie knocked on the clacking door of my Opry. The rains had started, making Texas bloom as only Texas can—with waves of endless wildflowers. Flowers pushed up through the planks of my deck and in between the gravel on the road and around the wooden poles of everyone’s crazy mailboxes. No one minded if the dogs tinkled all over those flowers, or if kids picked them in greedy handfuls since there were always more. Miles and miles of them.

  I opened the door to Eddie wiping her tiny feet on my shredded welcome mat. With those flowers behind her, she looked like a painting from one of those Impressionist painters—the ones who used dots of paint to give everything life.

  “Eddie! Hello. You done with your project?”

  “Nearly. Just working my way to this part of the state. This is my day off. I get one a week.”

  “Well, I’m glad to see you. Come on in.”

  I waved her and her briefcase—looking much less shiny now—in. The door dropped back a few times and never did latch itself shut. “How are you?”

  “I’m good, Nana Dara. I’m good. I just came back from seeing PD and Miss Debbie. That little girl is so sweet.” She looked up with those deep brown eyes of hers. “I came by, though, because I have a favor to ask. Do you have a minute?”

  “I have several of them—enough to be strung together into a full day.”

  “I only need a few.”

  She nodded and moved past me, wearing a pair of blue men’s pants and a yellow button-down, tucked in with a somber belt. I smelled some tangy cologne and wondered if she went to a barber to get her hair shaved up the back of her neck like that.

  I moved past her to the couch, gesturing that she take a seat in the empty chair near the door—the chair that had been in the Warden’s house. “Careful, you might remember that it used to twirl. Now it just sort of careens from side to side when you sit down.”

  “Thank you.”

  Eddie looked at all the knick-knacks I had on my wooden shelf and the paintings on the walls. She pointed to some old magazine images of sunset that I’d framed in green wooden frames. I’d hung them in what Good Housekeeping called a “grouping.”

  “New?”

  “I like to keep it fresh.”

  “You surely do,” she said.

  She sat down in the yellow chair, looking tired. The pugs ran by, wheezing while they were chasing each other, letting out a pitiful yelp every now and again as if to prove they really were dogs.

  “So, Nana Dara . . .” she said, rocking forward.

  “Shoot.”

  “You know that I—that I have an unusual sense of fashion.”

  “I can see that.”

  She blushed a little. “It’s how I’m comfortable.”

  “I understand,” I said, then I asked her what I’d been dying to ask her for some time: “But isn’t it hard for you?”

  “It’s hard for me with other people sometimes, yes, but it’s easier for me with myself. And in that way, then, it’s ultimately easier with other people—since I am being myself. Is that making sense?”

  “Mostly.”

  She clasped her hands in front of her, on her knees. “When I see pictures of myself when I was made to behave and look a certain way, I feel angry. I hated myself so much in those dresses, with my hair in ribbons, that even now it is too much to look at.”

  I gulped and held back a wave of hot guilt for not having stood up for her against the Warden’s very strict demands that his daughters dress like proper southern ladies. Indeed, if I’m being honest, I might have pushed on Edna a little hard myself, hoping that she wouldn’t turn out like me. I remembered tying ribbons in her hair while she stared straight ahead in the mirror, sometimes with hate-filled tears rolling down her cheeks and sometimes with eyes as dull as death. I remembered all those fights over shoes and stockings and haircuts. More than once, the Warden had even taken her over his knee to tame her—not that that ever
truly works, it seems.

  “I’m sorry,” was all I managed to say.

  “I understand now why you did what you did. It’s OK. But that leads me to my favor . . .”

  I nodded.

  “Can you take down any pictures you have of me when I was Edna? I’ll give you new ones.”

  “Consider them stowed.”

  Eddie let her breath out and relaxed back in the wobbly chair. “I’ll send you a picture or two of me out in the field, with the nurses.”

  Here I raised an eyebrow, but held my tongue. The nurses?

  “I’ll take the photos I have from the frames, but leave the frames ready for those new pictures.”

  I totally understood her position. Before I’d fully embraced my destiny as a large woman, I’d tried dieting. And every time I did, I asked the Warden to take down those pictures he had of me when we were first married and I was trimmer. Those images showcased my current failure—how far out of control I’d let myself go. Eddie was trying to form who she was now—not who she was as compared to who she used to be. Basically, Eddie did not need her skinny pictures up.

  “Thank you,” Eddie sighed.

  I smiled a teary-eyed smile, experiencing one of those rare moments when I really felt like someone’s mother and not just the person who supported the Warden in his love of his children.

  “You know what?” I said. “You inspire me.”

  Eddie turned her dark eyes down and blushed again. “Really? I couldn’t tell how you stood about my . . . fashion choices.” She cleared her throat, clearly about as good in emotional situations as me.

  “I’d like you to come by again when your project is through and sit for a while. Have some sweet tea. What do you think?”

  She brushed a piece of hair behind her ear. “I would love that, Nana Dara.”

  I realized then that I’d never really asked Eddie over. Maybe if I want folks to visit, I ought to ask.

  I looked over at her then, and I saw her. I didn’t see my stepdaughter wearing some kind of costume; I saw who she had become, ugly belt and all.

  “Bring me those pictures yourself.”

  Eddie stood up and smiled. She adjusted her button-down to be sure it didn’t blouse too much. “Will do.”

  After she walked out, with a wave and a slap of the door behind her, I moved around the Opry taking down pictures of Eddie as Edna. In one of them Edna had been maybe fifteen years old. She was sitting on our old porch swing, looking off after a long fight with the Warden to get her into the pink get-up he’d chosen for her to wear to the VFW. I took the picture because Edna had been one of those young girls who could be so beautiful when she was angry. I ran my finger over it, knowing now how many different ways there are to be beautiful.

  × × ×

  The next day, the Fiddler came home from a day-labor job—painting some bridge or another.

  “Howdy, Nana Dara,” he said on his way in, sweat rings like lazy polka dots on his gray work shirt.

  “Fiddler.”

  There was something easy but nervous about the Fiddler that made our relationship easy but, well, nervous. He always needed my permission to do anything—maybe because I had the power over his housing situation or because he didn’t trust his own mind or because he’d had the kind of childhood that seemed to include shoes and lamps being thrown at him across the room.

  “Let’s have margaritas,” I said, making my way over to the kitchen.

  The Fiddler smiled and moved from nervous to easy, now that he knew what was expected of him, which was to make margaritas.

  “You know I make a good one,” he said, rubbing his unrelenting beard the way some folks rub a cat’s head.

  I smiled and redirected myself back to the living room, where I plopped on the couch with a thud. Unlike some, I didn’t go in for thin couches on peg legs, no matter what the trend. I still loved that sturdy mustard couch from the Warden. The sun drifted down behind my recently tie-dyed curtains, and, when I looked over, I could almost see him sitting there with me again, teasing me about my socks. Then, like steam in a breeze, the Warden disappeared.

  The Fiddler asked me, “You ok?”

  I yelled over the noise of him breaking ice up in a dishtowel on the countertop. “Eddie stopped by today and asked me to take down the pictures of her in those dresses we always put her in.”

  He pounded away. “All right.”

  I yelled, “Eddie doesn’t want to be reminded of Edna right now. So I took the pictures down since she asked, but I doubt Miss Debbie will take her pictures down.”

  I smelled the limes in the air after he cut them up. That smell always made me happy.

  The Fiddler shook the ingredients together in his antique cocktail mixer. “Why not?” he shouted back.

  “The simple answer? Because Miss Debbie is Miss Debbie.”

  The Fiddler walked in with our margaritas, his cowboy hat tipped back now. He sat down carefully, adjusting to the way the chair tilts before it settles, and sipped his drink, crossing his long legs out in front of him.

  “What can you do about it?”

  I sipped. “Not sure really.”

  The Fiddler looked over at me with a hopeful glint in his small eyes. “Maybe nothin’?”

  “Nothing?”

  “This might be between them—these pictures and where they should go.”

  “I want to help Eddie.”

  The Fiddler leaned back after testing to be sure the chair wouldn’t give way, and sipped again.

  I, meanwhile, had an idea. An idea I would have never entertained in my youth, but now I was an older lady—a widower even—I felt somehow above the law. “I’m going to sneak in and take the pictures down.”

  “This is criminal behavior we are discussing here.”

  I tsked and pulled up the leg of my coveralls to scratch my knee. “This is just the removal of a few offending photographs.”

  “Breaking and entering and theft.”

  “How else can I get Miss Debbie to take those pictures down?”

  “Call her?”

  “When did talking ever get me anywhere with Miss Debbie? Do you know once, when she was maybe fourteen years old, we spent an hour discussing how skirt length can define a person, and you know what she did? She said ‘yes, ma’am,’ the way people do, then I watched her through the front window go out to her friend’s truck, open the door, take a pair of scissors from her purse, and cut that hem up a full three inches before hopping in the truck and skidding down the street. Call her? Clearly you don’t know Miss Debbie. Talk is just that.”

  I sensed the Fiddler growing nervous at the mere hint that I might want to do something against the rules.

  “You want me to top off your drink?” he asked.

  “Is a penguin the butt of a bad joke?”

  The Fiddler stood up on his scrawny legs, took my glass, and walked in to top us off. He called back to me, “Maybe you could ask Bo to take the pictures down?”

  “Bo? If that man had a backbone when he met Miss Debbie she has long since driven it out of him.”

  The Fiddler walked back in, focused intently on not spilling our drinks, and handed me my glass.

  The kind of indignation that is fueled by liquor took hold of me. “It’s just not right that Miss Debbie would cause Eddie such grief.”

  “Do we know she has?”

  “We can assume.”

  The warmth of the margaritas gave me a strange kind of clarity.

  “It would be torture to go over and see yourself in what you think are your worst moments plastered all over someone’s trailer.”

  The Fiddler nodded in his beat-down way. I knew he knew there was no point talking to me, but still I continued to convince him since I needed his help.

  “Tell me you see my point!”

  “I do, I see your point.” He chewed an ice cube.

  “She and Bo are polka dancing tonight and they dropped PD off at Bo’s crossed-eyed cousin’s place, so we can get i
n and out.” I was so excited by the plan that I didn’t pace that second margarita and drank it like water. “We’re going to sneak in there, Fiddler, you and me, and get those pictures—for Eddie! Miss Debbie always keeps a spare key in the boot out front. It’ll be easy.”

  The Fiddler didn’t say anything as he walked to the kitchen to refill our glasses.

  “You hearing me?”

  “All right,” he said, with his back to me. “Tomorrow.”

  “No, now. I could be dead tomorrow. You can’t deny an aging woman her dying wish!”

  The Fiddler, charmed by my infallible logic, got a little twinkle in his eye. He swigged down his margarita and said, “All right, let’s get them pictures.”

  He held the door, and we wobbled to my truck. I bent over as gracefully as I could, set the nearly empty glass on the edge of my porch steps, and gestured to the truck with wide arms. “And we’re off!”

  Forty-five minutes later, after a few rousing renditions of radio favorites, I clicked off the truck lights and coasted stealthily up the gravel to Miss Debbie’s trailer.

  The Fiddler whispered loudly, pointing to his gray work shirt. “We should have worn black.”

  “These are fine,” I said, patting my dark blue coveralls.

  It must’ve been 10 p.m.. Music played out from nearby trailers and more than a few lights from TVs lit up the night, but not a soul outside. Perfect.

  We crouched over and slinked up to the porch. I reached inside the boot—no key. I turned it upside down and slapped it against my leg. Nothing fell out. Dammit.

  “She must’ve taken the key,” I whispered.

  “OK, let’s go home,” the Fiddler said.

  “No! We’re breaking in.”

  I took three steps to the right and tried the front window. Locked. I tried the two on the side which were hidden by six-foot bayberries, but no luck there either.

  “Nana Dara!” the Fiddler called from the front edge of the property, refusing to go past the front yard.

  Ha! One of the windows on the other side sat open a few inches. That would have to do.

  “I need more height—get on over here!”