Sugar Land

by tammy lynne stoner

  “I do not.”

  “Then we are needing to talk. I’m bringing the water.”

  “The water” was a small vial of holy water blessed by the pope himself. While Baptists push back against such notions, believing things like holy water are too close to magic, Catholics—like Miss Debbie’s grandmother—believe the more magic, the better. The vial had been left to her after her grandmother died. It was the biggest gun Miss Debbie had, and that’s saying something.

  “Miss Debbie, I assure you there is no need—”

  “I am coming over.” She clicked her tongue, then yelled, “PD, don’t take your shirt off! Nana Dara, I have to go. She just can’t keep her clothes on.”

  “Like mother, like—”

  “I’ll be by in an hour.” She hung up.

  I sat on the couch, propped my feet back on my thick heels, and closed my eyes to do some relaxations that Eddie taught me. When I inhaled, I thought of a sunny field of dandelions. When I exhaled, I imagined blowing across the field and sending all those seeds flying like fairies in the light.

  I stayed calmed for about an hour—then Miss Debbie rapped on the door, causing it to clack every time.

  I yelled out, “Just come on in like you usually do!”

  I sat up from the soft back cushion, conscious of the tightness of the special socks the hospital had given me to get blood flowing in my ankles.

  That cutie PD ran in, her doll even rattier than before. “Nana Dara!”

  “Looks like dolly could use a hair wash.”

  “So could you,” Miss Debbie said, lighting a cigarette while she held the glass tube of blessed water in her tight fist. “PD, honey, you go find the kitties now. Remember, no cutting their hair.”

  PD kissed me on the cheek without being asked to and was off through the flapping screen door. I had a vague worry that she would hit the cats with her doll, but they were pretty fast felines, despite the ice cream I used to feed them.

  Miss Debbie shouted after her, “You call me if you need me, PD!”

  She hadn’t brought her oversized bag this time, just her cigarettes, her bright red lighter, and her holy water. She’d used a very pale lip gloss that morning, not her usual harlot-color and give more pious weight to the ceremony.

  “We are not to talk about the words used at the hospital. Those were wrong and wicked, and if you ask me, they are somehow responsible for Eddie dressing like a salesman.”

  I sighed from the couch, my legs hurting from my morning walk. “By saying ‘wicked’ you realize you are calling me—”

  “I am doing no such thing. Love the sinner, hate the sin.” She sucked on her cigarette and pulled over the red vinyl kitchen chair without asking. She didn’t like sitting on the rickety chair.

  “Miss Debbie,” I said, “I don’t take kindly to you hating what it is that makes me feel love in the romantic—”

  “Shush! Even without your twisted thoughts, you are nearly a sixty-year-old woman, so there is no need to discuss such things.”

  “Will you be talking such things when you are sixty?”

  Miss Debbie sighed, unable to understand what she could have done to cause God to betray her like this. She unscrewed the lid to her vial of holy water. “Here, dab this on yourself while you make the sign of the cross. You need to ask God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit to help you fight these demons.”

  “This is too much now.”

  Miss Debbie stopped mid-drag then exhaled slowly. She set the water down on the gold-rimmed TV tray next to her.

  I felt my face getting red. “Don’t you think I tried praying? And after I fell in love with a girl, I prayed harder and harder. I locked myself up in prison and I got married, but still it lingered. Do you think that might have been God’s way of showing me that there’s nothing wrong with me?”

  “I think—” she proceeded with caution—“that the Devil wears many disguises.”

  I flopped back into the couch and stared hard at her. “You think?” I calmed myself. “I’ve romantically loved three people in my life, and your daddy was one. Not meaning to bring up things, Miss Debbie, but given your record, I hardly think the judge’s robes suit you.”

  “You are family. I have every right to opinionate.”

  Maybe knowing Eddie and I were together on this gave me strength. Whatever the reason, I let her have it. “The world has enough opinions. The world defiles and beats and imprisons and sometimes kills folks like me! I want my family to be better than the world. I deserve that—I do!”

  Miss Debbie puckered up her lips. “You reap what you sow, Nana Dara.”

  “You deserve infertility?”

  She huffed. “That’s different! Those are uncontrollable things! You were with Daddy, why couldn’t you just be with another man after him?”

  I settled my eyes on hers, to make sure she heard me. “Because a secret that deep grows around you like a cocoon will eventually makes you choose—either emerge as a butterfly or die in a thick, brown coffin of your own making.”

  “Aren’t you a little old to be a butterfly?”

  “You saying I’m not too old for a coffin?”

  “I didn’t say that!”

  My face flushed so red I felt it down through my chest. “You love the way other people see our family more than you love the way I feel.”

  “That’s a big, awful lie!” Miss Debbie stomped into the kitchen to put some water in a mason jar for an ashtray.

  It got quiet for a minute. I practiced imagining my fields of dandelions.

  Miss Debbie slowly walked back in. She looked so old all of a sudden.

  No one said a word—a stand-off.

  “You ever try chewing tobacco?” I finally asked, knowing the best thing to do when you hit a wall is stop running into it.

  “What?”

  “Chew.”

  “Good heavens, no.”

  “Why not?”

  “Ladies don’t use chewing tobacco.”

  “In some countries, ladies do. And in others, they have to wear bags on their head—for religious reasons.”

  “That is done by tribes who are not following the one true God.”

  “That’s what they say back at us.”

  Tired, Miss Debbie dropped her cigarette into the water. “Nana Dara, please.”

  “I’m just saying that I have been questioning things a bit these last forty years. We have lots of silly beliefs—all of us.”

  “Well, I will stick to what has been believed for two thousand years, not what you have thought on now and again over forty.”

  “To each their own.”

  PD slammed in through the back door. “Mama!” She was crying, holding her doll in one hand and her face with the other. “The kitty scratched my cheek!”

  Miss Debbie stood up, gave me a look that said my cats were also the Devil’s, and walked with PD into the kitchen. “PD, sugar, because the kitty can’t talk, he needs to let you know when he’s scared or feeling that someone is being too rough.”

  “I was just showing Mr. Honky Tonk how to walk on the top of Nana Dara’s easy chair.”

  “Band-aids?” Miss Debbie yelled over the sound of water from the faucet.

  “Try the junk drawer.”

  She pulled and pulled, finally yanked the over-stuffed drawer open. “You got a bike in here too?”

  A few minutes later PD, with a fresh band-aid on her cheek and about an inch of red around her eyes, walked back into the living room with her mama.

  “You OK, baby girl?” I asked her.

  “I am.”

  “It shouldn’t scar,” Miss Debbie told us.

  I leaned toward PD. “But if it does, it’ll make you look tough.”

  PD smiled a little. Miss Debbie rolled her eyes, took PD’s hand, and walked out. “Really, Nana Dara?”

  “Calm down now, Miss Debbie.”

  “We got to be going.”

  They moved so quickly that I didn’t have time to get up and walk them ou
t.

  Miss Debbie turned to face me through the damaged screen of my door, giving me the look you give animals when you aren’t sure if they are feral. “I don’t get you or this thing. I was willing to blame the medications, but you had to push. Why couldn’t you just let well enough be? Why can’t anyone just let well enough be anymore?” She pursed her lips until they were white. “From this day forward, there is to be no mention of this, or I will cut off the blight that threatens the branch.”

  And she left, PD turning around to wave bye-bye to me on their fast walk to the car.

  × × ×

  Despite the threat, I tried a few times afterwards to bring the subject up with Miss Debbie, but she shut the conversation down with an impressive string of smoker’s coughs, her convenient and temporary emphysema.

  So went the next few months, with my body gradually getting strong by doing exercises like lifting sacks of rice from the ground to my waist then up over my head. I repeated “What you are is what you have been. What you’ll be is what you’ll do now” fifty times a day. In my free time, I made birdhouses using some tools the Fiddler left and sold them at the market with Eddie when she was in town. Seemed she had a lady friend in El Paso.

  “Sometimes you seem sad, Nana Dara,” she said on one of her visits.

  “Truthfully, losing the Fiddler took its toll. The Opry feels so big now.”

  “Well, what makes you happy?”

  “I used to enjoy singing in the church, like I’d done before the Depression.”

  “Then you ought to do that again,” she said.

  I nodded, knowing I needed to do something to keep this weight off—knowing sadness drives me to eat. So I went to church—and that’s when I saw Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton again, sitting with a grouping of nondescript, widowed church hens all wearing bold glasses like they were at a fashion show. Was she a widow?

  When I saw that she saw me seeing her, I nodded and blushed like a high school boy. It was awkward, but her smile told me that she found it charming, and I felt a bit of my old pre-changing-room-mirror confidence swelling back.

  From up in the choir loft, I watched Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton more than I watched my hymnal, especially during the homily, which was about the “new promiscuity” that was taking over America like “a pestilence.” Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton sported what Miss Debbie called a “gaucho,” which is to say a baggy one-piece pantsuit. Hers was bright red with extra-loose pants that came mid-calf and cinched in at the waist. The shirt portion held on a little tighter with a U-shaped neck and sleeves that came halfway down her forearms. It was so well tailored that you forgot how daring it was to wear to Sunday service. I assume she added the pearls to tame it down.

  When she saw me coming down the staircase from the church loft after the service, she made her way through the powder blue ties and white bonnets and flip-dos to me.

  “Why, Nana Dara,” she said, her smile shiny with those perfect white teeth of hers. How anyone can have perfect white teeth and be a Southerner, tempted at every turn by tobacco, coffee, and tea, is beyond me—but she did.

  “Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton.”

  She looked me up and down. “That’s not one of my dresses, I see.”

  “Sears,” I confessed.

  She held a hand to her chest, grabbing for her pearls. “You dare say that in a place of worship.”

  I smiled back. “I needed bigger seams.”

  “Is that why you haven’t come in for any more fittings?”

  “Sadly.”

  “Bless your heart, but that’s my job.” She leaned in. “If I lost every customer that needed seams let out, I’d be out of business, for sure.”

  “Well, you sure don’t seem to need your seams let out,” I said, with immediate regret.

  “That”—she leaned in—“is the optical illusion that a good seamstress makes happen.” She stood back up again. “How you been treated?”

  “Oh, me? Good.”

  She turned her head down for a minute and looked me dead in the eye. “When seams stretch, it is either because someone is being treated too well or not well enough, but never just ‘good.’ So which is it—you having grand times or scant times, Nana Dara?”

  “Scant,” I said.

  She let out a satisfied breath. “These times come and go, you know.”

  “That’s the rumor.” I stood there for a minute, not sure what to say. “How is life treating you?”

  “Well, I have three weddings coming up, one with nine bridesmaids—nine.” She leaned in again. “The bride’s family are Imperial Sugar people.”

  “Very nice.”

  “Let’s hope.”

  PD saw me and ran over with her doll in the air, its hairpiece now half-melted and its dress stained purple on the one side. She was still a tiny girl, skinny like Eddie had been, with those nearly black eyes of hers and that straight dark hair—no doubt to Miss Debbie’s chagrin. I can hear her now saying, Nothing a permanent won’t fix.

  PD stopped just in front of me. “Hi, Nana Dara. I think I could figure out which voice was yours up there.”

  “You have a good ear then,” I said. “PD, this is Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton.”

  PD held out her petite hand, and they shook. “Hello.”

  “Why, hello.”

  “PD, honey,” I said as she gave my leg a hug the way she always did, “how you liking school?”

  She looked up at us, making her big eyes look even bigger. “I love school!”

  “Good,” I said. “I loved school too.”

  PD turned to Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton. “You look like an angel.”

  “It must be my white hair.”

  PD tipped her head, her ponytails flipping as she did. “If I had two wishes, one of them would be to be an angel—only not dead.”

  Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton smiled. “And the other?”

  “A donut the size of all of Sugar Land.”

  “Yum,” Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton said.

  Miss Debbie called out for PD across the room. “Come on now, PD! Your daddy’s got a customer coming by. Let’s go, Nana Dara. Hup!”

  PD tucked her doll under her arm, and I wondered how much longer she’d be carrying it around. Poor stinky thing.

  “Nice meeting you,” PD said to Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton. Then she held her badly damaged doll up for her to kiss its melted head, and God as my witness, she did.

  Tired of waiting, Miss Debbie and Bo, in his tight bolo tie, came over to get PD and me.

  When they walked up, I started the introductions. “This here is Miss Debbie. Miss Debbie, this is my dressmaker, Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton.”

  “Rogerton? Was Billy your husband?”

  “For twenty-six years.”

  Miss Debbie stopped in her tracks and took Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton’s hands in hers. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “It’s OK. It’s been quite a few years now.”

  “Your husband bought several cars from my Bo here.”

  Bo nodded while I was busy thinking: Hot damn, she’s a widow!

  “Oh yes!” Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton flashed her smile. “I know about you, Bo. Billy loved his Mustang. He’d take that thing to town more than he’d take me, bless his heart.”

  “Can’t separate a man from his car any more than spider from its web.” Miss Debbie dropped her hands. “I love your outfit. Did you do that yourself?”

  “All you need is a pattern.”

  “All I need is a pattern and a bona fide miracle to make that happen. I would love to meet with you about some new clothes.”

  “Miss Debbie,” I said, “you’ll need to get Bo to build you a shed out back if you get any more clothes.”

  “He is handy with a hammer.” Miss Debbie leaned in to Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton. “I am coming to see you, mark me.”

  “I look forward to it.”

  “Come on now, Nana Dara.”

  They went ahead without me. PD skipped alongside them as Bo reached out for Miss De
bbie’s hand.

  Wanting to keep talking, I gestured to my Sears dress. “This flower pattern too big for me?”

  “They make a statement.”

  “That was my goal.”

  “Well, you met it.”

  “I’m going to drop more weight soon, and then I’ll come get fitted.”

  One of her widow friends came over and pulled her away, but not before she said, “Don’t lose it all. A little weight looks good on you.”

  × × ×

  A week or two later, a box arrived at the Opry. The return address label was stamped with the same red woman in the same red dress that Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton had painted on her mailbox. I nearly tripped over my little black cat, Licorice, racing back into the Opry with that box. I cut through the Scotch tape with my long thumbnail and wiggled off the lid to find a beautiful pale blue dress wrapped in white tissue paper. On a piece of cardboard with the red woman stamped on one side, Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton had written:

  Nana Dara—

  Here is a brand new dress, with a guess at measurements—it is my gift. You can thank those nine bridesmaids. When you feel right, come see me. I have a fabric that would look nice on you for a second dress, too.

  Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton

  I put that card in my icebox—in the empty spot where my ice cream container used to sit—to encourage me when I wanted to fill that space again. Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton! Imagine that.

  After putting the card away, I lifted a few more bags and did laps around my yard, but I was still fidgety. Since it was only 8:30 p.m. I decided to call Eddie. It rang twice.

  “Eddie?” I said, coiling the sticky cord of my phone around my finger.

  “Nana Dara?”

  “All right, now that we’ve settled who is who, I wanted to call and tell you that I am down another thirty-five pounds so far.”

  “Nana Dara, I am proud of you.”

  “Why, thank you.”

  Eddie cleared her throat. “So, what are you up to?”

  “I’m in the choir.”

  I paused, wanting so badly to talk with her about Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton, but just unable to make the words come out. Even though I had a kindred spirit in Eddie, all those old fears rose up again and closed my throat. I saw then—again—how much of this really had to do with me more than everybody else, not that some didn’t play their part.