Sugar Land

by tammy lynne stoner

  A minute in, he straightened up and said the most words I think he’d ever said in a row: “It might be wrong to me, but I don’t condemn what you are thinking of doing or might do with another woman. I just can’t live with all this anger about it. Maybe you hate the world for being the way it is toward folks like you. Maybe you hate me for feeling similar. I don’t know. What I do know is that you treat me poorly, and I’m sick to my stomach nearly every day. It’s making me feel like going to the places I’ve worked so hard not to go to. I see you eating yourself to death, and I want to throw it all away too, and give into my temptations. I am sorry I judged you and said some things, though I’m even sorrier to say that I got to go. It just ain’t safe for me here.”

  I shouted, “Fine!” then I pushed by him down the hallway and slammed my bedroom door. I plopped down on my colorful bedspread and cried for a full hour, unsure what to do.

  Through the door, I heard the Fiddler dragging his army bag of clothes and his suitcase behind him. He banged down the hallway, each crack reminding me how hollow my walls were.

  “The stress here is causing me to get into a state of temptation when I promised God I never would,” he shouted out with a hoarse voice, “but we were close—real close, Nana Dara, and that’s what I’m going to remember.”

  I didn’t want him to hear my messy crying voice, so I didn’t say anything.

  He yelled back down, as much as he ever did yell, “You were my friend, and I’m sorry.”

  In response, I threw an empty bottle of pop at my door.

  Ten minutes, later someone pulled up on the gravel—probably someone from his recovery program since he really didn’t have too many folks I would consider friends, except me, the cats, the pugs, and a few drinkers down at Maria’s Roundabout.

  When he left, the hurt came on me so strongly that I was afraid I’d start to eat everything there was to eat and not stop until I popped. He’d been as close to true family, by my definition, as I’d ever had. He lived with me, he loved me, and he knew nearly everything about me—though, in the end, he turned that knowledge ugly, the thing I most feared.

  “Damn him!”

  Then I got angry again. Angry with him for what he’d said and how he left, but also angry at Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton for how she’d never love me. She and I would never split the head and foot of the dinner table, with my stepchildren and my granddaughter seated between us. It was a pipe dream. Maybe, in this life, this was as far as I was meant to go.

  I breathed in slowly to calm my thoughts and sort out the hurt from the anger from the fear from the sadness. Not an easy task. I wiped my eyes and looked up at the low ceiling of my Opry, where it was yellower than the rest from me smoking in bed.

  Now I’d lost my best friend, who thought I was horrible and sinful. I sat there with that, letting myself feel what that meant. It caused me to ache all over, like pneumonia.

  Overall, I just couldn’t make sense of the mess of pain and shame and anger about love and who I was and what that meant to other people. It was like running in a maze in the dark.

  I focused on the Fiddler. The fault, I decided, was 85 percent mine on account of me being mad at the world and my fat self, which came out mostly on him since he was the most nearby part of the world. The remaining 15 percent was on him and his opinion that my predilections were, to quote the head cook all those years ago, filthy.

  That last bit—the filthy bit—made me want to punch myself in the stomach, so I didn’t stay with that feeling too long.

  With the Fiddler, I knew that I’d been a lunatic carrying all kinds of angry, and I’d made his life miserable. He didn’t leave because I’m a non-practicing lesbian—he left because I was angry with him for nothing he did wrong. That was the black rock in the swamp, and I let it wash over me: I’d chased my best friend away—one of the simplest, truest friends I’d ever had.

  Somehow I made him say to me perhaps the things I thought of myself. I hurt him to hurt me. How could I be so horrible, to all of us?

  Truffle, my dark gray cat, came up to say hello, but I couldn’t be bothered. I shooed him away, grabbed a candy bar from under the bed to calm me, ate it, then slept a sad, hopeless sleep for thirteen hours.

  × × ×

  Several days passed since the Fiddler left, and I wallowed and spiraled. Seems the Fiddler kept me stable just by being there. Maybe I did the same for him, and that’s why me coming undone on him like that shattered him so much that he was afraid he’d go back to his wicked ways, as I’d done with my food urges.

  I missed having someone to tease in the morning, and eat sandwiches with at lunch, and share beverages with at night on the porch. All my margaritas were too damn sweet with irregular salt rims that slunk down into the booze and ruined everything—besides, who drinks margaritas alone? Bourbon, sure, but not margaritas.

  I missed the Fiddler every minute of the day, and I hated myself for not being able to be settled with my title of “widow.” If I’d have closed off my romantic heart and not had secret thoughts about Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton, I would have my best friend here now. Why did I need this kind of love?

  As I was thinking, up drove Miss Debbie. I heard the gravel fly off in a million directions, followed by the characteristic creak of her car door. She walked right on in before I could even get up, calling out, “You got anything to cool me off?”

  “Hello to you too, Miss Debbie.”

  She sniffed the air like I used to sniff the Fiddler’s goat milk. “What stinks?”

  “Probably something from the cats.”

  She looked inside the small drawer on my side table, where I kept the tools to keep my callused feet under control. “What’s all this?” I redirected.

  “Gin and tonic?”

  She shut the drawer and cracked her gum. “Two lime wedges—give them a squeeze first.”

  Miss Debbie’s legs were lean and strong, accented by her white clunky shoes. She wore a tight-fitting paisley skirt and a long-sleeved yellow blouse with way too many bracelets. That woman always looked good, even with a blob of melted crayon on her back.

  “Come with me,” I said, and we walked into the kitchen area.

  “Where’s the Fiddler?”

  “Gone.”

  “That T-shirt scare him off?” She pointed to my Watch Them Beans! shirt.

  “It was just time.”

  I unscrewed the tonic water in the sink, in case it exploded. One of the pugs wheezed past me, his tongue hanging out the side of his mouth. He fumbled over to collect some attention from Miss Debbie, who had no interest in dogs.

  I yelled over my shoulder, “I don’t have lime.”

  Miss Debbie ran a finger along the edge of her mascara while the pug sat sideways on the floor at her feet. “You have lemon?”

  “No.”

  “Orange?”

  “No.”

  “Any fruit?”

  “No.”

  “You always have fruit.”

  “The Fiddler had fruit.”

  “You have marshmallows—and clearly,” she said, finally taking off her rhinestone sunglasses to look me over, “lots of them.”

  The pug gave up and wandered into the back room, no doubt to jump up on my bed—an action that required considerable effort from that plump little thing.

  She asked, “So what happened with the Fiddler?”

  “Gone.”

  “All these years, whenever I ask you questions of a personal nature you answer impersonally.”

  She was right. That’s how I operated.

  I thought about the Fiddler and wondered if things would have been different if I had confided to him my troubles with food and my attraction to Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton before that secret became a boil. I should have tried—the worst that could have happened happened anyway: I lost him.

  I took in a breath and gave it a try. “The Fiddler said I’d gotten overly angry of late, and that it was too much for him to be around, me nitpicking and whatnot.”<
br />
  “What are you angry about?”

  I wasn’t ready to go into all that just yet, so I simplified. “My weight.”

  “That must generate quite a bit of anger then,” she said with her eyebrows raised as I walked over.

  I jammed the glass into her hand. “Here.”

  As usual these days, she was carrying the biggest vinyl bag I’d ever seen. It was white with black curved handles that fit over her shoulder.

  She pushed her finger into my side. “You are really putting it on, Nana Dara.”

  “Didn’t I ever teach you manners?”

  “You told me not to lie.”

  “There are such things as omissions in polite conversation.”

  “Since when are we polite?”

  When she leaned back something crinkled. She reached her hand behind the seat cushion and pulled out a big bag—not the little bag—of nougats, empty.

  She shook the bag in the air. “Evidence!”

  “If you are going to talk about my weight, you might as well go.” I started to stand.

  “No more mentions of weight, I swear!”

  Miss Debbie dropped the nougat bag on the floor and started in about how much she and PD are loving to sing together lately and how Bo plays guitar and PD bobs back and forth, messing up the words to anything by Elvis.

  “She’s cute as a bug!”

  “I know she is.” I smiled. “And how’s Eddie?”

  She sighed. “Still living a book written by the Devil.”

  “Eddie been by to see PD?”

  “Eddie travels to El Paso a lot now—for some reason.” Miss Debbie let it go at that. “But she makes sure to visit PD every week if she can.”

  “You think it’s hard on Eddie?”

  Miss Debbie stiffened up, the way she does. “Maybe from time to time. But that was the choice she made. She made her choices.”

  “You think she made the choice to be the kind of woman who can’t raise her own child?”

  “Let’s be clear here: she could have raised her own child if she’d stop dressing like the Mayor.”

  Eddie was here on this road in life for a reason, I told myself, and so was I. Maybe we were put together to help each other through our circumstances. So I asked Miss Debbie, “Now what if I told you that you had to start wearing men’s suits, and I told Bo that he needed to slip on a dress?”

  “If everyone else was doing it, I imagine we’d hop right in line.” She puckered her lips a bit. “Besides, I can make any outfit work. Nana Dara, Eddie lives a selfish life. Simple as that.”

  “By my way of thinking, Eddie did the most selfless thing a mother can do—she let her child be raised by someone else to spare the child any pain.”

  “Pain caused by the mother.”

  My neck got hot. “Do you think it’s possible for folks to live a happy life without the love of a spouse, if they are able to get themselves a spouse?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “So you’d wish for your sister to die alone?” I said, thinking: For me to die alone, too?

  “She’d have had PD.”

  “Until PD got married.”

  “This is someone who first got herself pregnant, then handed her baby over so she could pretend to be a man!”

  Miss Debbie got so angry that I was afraid she’d crush the glass in her hand. This seemed about as close as we could sidle up to the whale without touching it, so I let it go.

  “Calm down now, Miss Debbie. I’m just trying to practice some of those Christian values you are always preaching.”

  She smiled one of her fake smiles, the kind she reserves for bad waitresses and adulterous men in church. “Let’s agree to disagree. Better, let’s agree to bury this subject. It is dead. Agreed?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  With some clear effort, Miss Debbie relaxed. She took a big sip of her drink and breathed deeply, shifting back to a stable mood. “You need to come see PD more often. You are her grandmother. And that’s why I’m here—to invite you out for New Year’s.”

  “I thought that invite was standing each year.”

  “It is—I’m just reminding you.”

  “And leaving PD with Bo?”

  “Can’t I come see you every now and again without it being like this?” Miss Debbie paused, then looked me in the eye. “Now about New Years. Answer me, true—can you drive anymore?”

  “What?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Can you fit behind the wheel?”

  “Miss Debbie!”

  “Nana Dara, I am being serious now. If not, Bo can come get you.”

  I didn’t answer her. Of course I could fit! Though it was getting a little tight.

  I crunched some of my ice with my teeth. “How is Bo?”

  “Loving his cars. If it weren’t for PD, he might sleep down at the shop every night.”

  I raised an eyebrow but didn’t say anything.

  “He’s good. He’s good. You know he is,” she said.

  “All right, well, we’re caught up with how everyone’s doing, so you best get going.” I felt an urge for some cookies.

  Miss Debbie slapped her knees. “Nana Dara!”

  “Now I know you’d love another gin and tonic, but you need to go have dinner with your family.”

  “They are your family too. Besides, it took me an hour to get here!”

  “I’ll fill up your glass and you can take it back with you.”

  “All right. I’m worried about you, you know.” She stood up and smoothed out her paisley skirt.

  “I’m OK.”

  I filled her glass with mostly tonic and walked it back to her just as she slid her sunglasses back down from her hair.

  “Sincerely though,” she said, “it stinks in here. You best look around for lost food items.”

  PINNED IN, SAWED OUT, LIGHT SEEN

  Sunday morning I woke up and smelled the funk Miss Debbie had complained about. I sniffed around until I figured it out. That stench was coming from me or, more specifically, from inside one of my rolls of stomach pudge where my sweat and some crumbs got trapped. When I flattened out my roll, I saw a red patch of irritation. On closer inspection, I saw lines of gray smudge that had a smell to them.

  I was molding.

  Horrified, I climbed into the tub and did my best to reach all my creases, but to my shock, I could no longer reach my backside—the biggest crease of them all. I had grown too big to wash my own ass.

  × × ×

  By the day of New Year’s Eve, a week later, I had to call and cancel on Miss Debbie since I was having trouble getting behind the wheel of my truck.

  “But I drove out there to ask you in person!” was her first response, followed by, “And PD is looking forward to seeing you. Plus I just put fresh butter in the butter bell.”

  “I can’t make it. I have to do something.”

  “What? You have hardly any friends, especially with the Fiddler gone. I still don’t understand that one.” She paused. “Unless you can’t drive. Are you too big to drive now? Wait, don’t answer that. I’m going to have Bo get you. He won’t mind. He has a new engine he wants to test out anyway. Bo! Bo, baby, can you get Nana Dara? She’s unable to drive herself.” I knew she was gesturing to him that I was too fat to squeeze in behind the steering wheel. “OK, he said yes. Put on one of your nice, new dresses and bring some acorn squash,” she said, like I just had acorn squash on hand. “And ice.” She hung up.

  My head spun trying to figure out how to get out of this. I walked out to my truck, opened the door, and held my breath in as deeply as I could. I grabbed my chub with my left hand and held it up, pressing up against my breasts, and tried to slide in. For the third time in two days, I checked to see if the seat could move back any further. It couldn’t.

  I exhaled, and my fat fell down on the wheel. I was in, mostly. I could do this—so long as I didn’t need to make any hard lefts or rights with the steering wheel. I struggled back into the Opry and
called Miss Debbie, who said I was in luck—Bo hadn’t left yet.

  “Good. I’m driving myself over.”

  For those of you not from the rural South, sometimes the driving can be fast, with empty roads and bright blue skies—or it can take forever, with deep potholes and cotton trucks and big green tractors. I’d gotten a long driving day when I had to stop for some rodeo cowboy hell-bent on crossing ten steer on a single rope.

  While me and my weighted-down Ford idled, the heat came up from the truck’s guts under the metal hood, despite the chilly day. The clouds gathered and I hoped for rain to cool down the engine, but no such luck. Meanwhile, those steer took their good God damn time crossing with Jimmy Cowboy tugging the gentlest of tugs and chewing on turnip greens.

  I stuck my head out the window. “Can you get them moving? I’d like to see midnight tonight.”

  “Sorry, ma’am. You just can’t rush ‘em.”

  I couldn’t wait one second more, so I swerved around the cattle and pressed the gas down—then ran straight into a hay truck. I heard the crash before everything got dark on me.

  × × ×

  The nice folks at the hospital took a slew of X-rays and settled me into a room. I’d been there for about ten minutes when PD, still as sweet as pecan pie, walked in hand-in-hand with Bo, who was graying even more around the temples in that handsome way some men grow old.

  Little PD was apparently wearing the clothes she wore for bug digging, which let me know that this was serious since Miss Debbie had rushed over before she made sure her little girl didn’t look like a little boy. Behind them Miss Debbie stomped in, wearing those sunglasses that were as big as the fish bowls you could win at the carnival for three bull’s-eye ring tosses.

  She cried out, “Nana Dara, first Daddy then you!”

  Bo waved to the nurse in the corridor, saying it was OK—Miss Debbie was just a little passionate, is all. He closed my hospital room door.

  I sat up as best I could. “The Warden had a stroke. I had an accident. And, in case you haven’t noticed, I’m not dead.”

  “You need to get your life together,” she said and stood over my bed like the messenger of death herself.