Sugar Land

by tammy lynne stoner

  “You are too hard on yourself,” she said. “You were a young woman—a scared young woman.”

  “I’ve recently come around to giving myself that forgiveness, mostly—to practicing what Eddie calls self-acceptance.”

  I put on my signal and changed lanes to pass a truck loaded down with hay, some of it flying off and hitting my windshield.

  “Hmmm,” she said, waiting to see if I had any more to say.

  I took in a deep breath, preparing to tell her about the head cook. This was something only a few people knew about, and something that had never been thoroughly discussed. Both Beauregard and the Warden acted like the matter had been shut when the head cook got sent off after that night with me and him and my piece of mug. In their polite avoidance of it, I allowed that night to somehow make me dirty—like they were kind enough to overlook my dirtiness because they loved me. Messed up but true. It’s just how my mind works sometimes.

  I started in, my hands wet on the wheel: “Then there was the head cook.”

  “At Central Unit?”

  “What we called Imperial State Prison Farm or Sugar Land for short, but yes. Shortly after I’d locked myself away—and you can see how obvious that is—he attacked me. He attacked me a few times really.”

  “What!”

  “He nearly took my honor in the most dishonorable way.”

  Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton twisted herself in her seat so she fully faced me. “Oh my dear, I am so sorry. What happened? If you want to tell.”

  I cleared my throat. “He came at me with his member out—and this was after he’d showed me himself a few times before, only now he wanted to really use what he had made into a weapon. So I cut him.”

  She gasped. “You cut him—there?”

  “I aimed there, but I caught his hand instead.”

  “Ha! Well, don’t mess with you!”

  “This relates to Rhodie. He’d gotten ahold of some letters she wrote to me and made them out to be nasty. Before that moment—and even some times after—this part of me agreed. I’d said it by the way I acted back then, all sheepish and distant, that it was OK to not care about me. That I was getting the distance I deserved for being . . . for being a pervert.” My body filled with my own strength, the power of telling my story. “But that night when I cut him, I started to find this strength—meager though it was then. And over the years, that strength grew and grew. So, in the end, his attacks were really blessings.”

  Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton reached over and ran her hand along the side of my head, like you do with a child. “Aw, hon.”

  “It was a long road after that to where I am now, but I found myself a good friend in Beauregard and a soul mate in my friend Huddie and a great man in the Warden, and then I got me some fabulous kids by proxy.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  I drove along for a minute, maybe going too slow for the freeway, feeling my emotions lining up and my life making sense. I saw how this kind of talking could give type of reality to feelings—make them tangible.

  Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton waited, not saying anything. The lights on the sides of the road zipped by over my windshield.

  “So that’s it, really.” I breathed out. “That’s my story.”

  “I love your story. You are one strong woman, Nana Dara.” She shifted in her seat again. “Now, about your friend Rhodie, you ever consider doing that again?”

  I swerved just a little. “You mean . . . the Oscar Wilde way?”

  She smiled with those flawless teeth. “Yes, ma’am, the Oscar Wilde way.”

  “Oh, not often.”

  “What does ‘not often’ look like to you?”

  I laughed. “Maybe twenty or thirty times a year.”

  “Ha! Well, you ever think about The Oscar Wilde way lately?”

  “I’m practically an old woman!”

  She sucked her teeth. “Women in my family live until their nineties. That’s twenty-five years of life left.”

  “My family doesn’t live as long.”

  “Your family didn’t turn a new side to a life of exercise and strong food.”

  I thought of Daddy when I set him up at that hospital for folks after their minds had gone, with his belly so big it hung several inches over his belt buckle. “True.”

  “You need to answer my question then, young lady.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton was about the prettiest woman in the town, but I didn’t want to lose her as a friend.

  “You first,” I said, keeping an eye on the road since her headlights were about as helpful as cataracts. “You think of it lately?”

  “Coward.”

  What they teach you in sales, Bo—the used-car salesman—once told me, is never to be the one to say the last word. Ask a question and leave it hanging. The one who answers first loses the deal. With the prowess of a used-car salesman, Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton waited, watching me.

  “OK,” I finally said, “yes, yes I have considered kissing a woman lately.”

  She smiled, popped another fig in her mouth, and rolled up her window. I rolled mine up to stop the whistle again.

  “Me too,” she said, a proud edge to her voice.

  I almost couldn’t take any more. I didn’t want to know if it was me—I mean, I did want to know, of course—but I was one breath from exploding, and what if it wasn’t me? So instead I just turned on the radio and told her to change the topic until I could have a proper amount of bourbon.

  “Bourbon?”

  “Yes,” I said. “In one hour we are going to Maria’s Roundabout.”

  “No—” she smiled—“what’s say we go to the Opry instead.”

  I gulped and nodded.

  × × ×

  I hadn’t been expecting company, much less Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton, so my bathroom was a little ripe. “Let me run to the bathroom,” I said, hoping to clean up a bit.

  “All right.”

  The cats came up to say hello or, rather, to make sure they approved. I introduced her to them: Pillowcase, Licorice, and Mr. Honky Tonk. “There’s more cats—and some pugs somewhere around here—so watch your step,” I warned. “Meanwhile, help yourself to a libation—there’s some ice in the icebox.”

  I left her with the brood and headed to the bathroom. Kneeling down to clean my toilet with the door shut behind me was about as feasible as squeezing a parrot through a keyhole, so I stood up and did the best I could to stab at the brown ring around the inside.

  “Oh hell,” I said, deciding instead to bite off a piece of soap and spit it in there in the hopes of covering up everything with some bubbles and scent.

  The trouble with biting soap is that you can’t really rinse it out without stimulating more soap. Great, I thought, now I’m foaming at the mouth.

  I stepped a hard foot into my white metal trashcan to compress all the tissues in there, folded the hand towel in three parts, and pulled the bath curtain—all wild circles in blue and green—as tight as I could against the wall. That looked better.

  When I walked out of the bathroom, Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton held out a glass of bourbon on ice for me. She had one for herself, too.

  “I found these nice glasses in your cabinet, along with a shocking number of tuna cans.”

  “Low in calories,” I explained, adding, “I view my need to eat that much tuna as an atonement of sorts.”

  “I can see how you would, bless your heart.”

  The pugs shuffled in, chasing each other, their legs like tree branches tapping across the floor. One of them ran into the wall where it narrowed before the hallway.

  “Not the smartest beasts,” I said.

  She smiled and sat down on the couch, leaving room for me.

  I was so nervous that I guzzled my bourbon and suggested we go out for a cigarette.

  “Sounds modern,” she said.

  “What else should we do after The Trials of Oscar Wilde but be modern?”

  Once we were outside on the back deck, w
ith me in my easy chair and her on the red vinyl chair I’d pulled out for her from the kitchen, she lit her cigarette off mine, looking at me over the burning embers, with me not sure what the hell was going on. We put our glasses on the white plastic bucket that served as my side table. I followed the line of old Christmas lights that wound around the edges of the porch. The crickets gossiped.

  “Those blue eyes,” Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton said, drawing in a deep lungful.

  “I didn’t know you smoked.”

  “Honey, we all smoke.”

  I smiled and hoped I wasn’t sweating too much.

  “I’ve always had a lot of respect for women who don’t wear lipstick,” she said, looking at the pale orange smudge on her cigarette filter. “Though I prefer the way I look with it on.”

  Then I did something I hadn’t planned out. I leaned in and said, “Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton, may I kiss you?”

  She pulled in a short breath and said, “I could never resist good manners.”

  And it was that easy. After thirty-five years, it was that God damn easy.

  She held her cigarette out to the side. I bent in and I kissed her.

  She set the pace, kissing me slowly. The way we kissed was a form of asking each other if it was OK to get a little more intense. I moved my hand up to the back of her head, gently, and she leaned into me. We kissed like there was nothing else anywhere, like we were floating together in space.

  Just as the emotions started getting a little overwhelming, Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton pulled back. “Whew.” She took a drag. “I vowed if the chance ever came up again, I’d do it. I am so glad I did.”

  “Well I guess you have completed your dare,” I said, feeling like I was just a challenge she’d given herself.

  She smiled. “Oh, you are sensitive, bless your heart.” Then she leaned in and kissed me again, putting her free hand on the side of my face. Her mouth was soft and confident. I liked the taste of bourbon and cigarettes, and the smell of her tea rose perfume.

  “This is as good as a perfect lemon meringue pie.”

  “Well, good,” she said. “Now kiss me again because I can never get enough pie.”

  × × ×

  We spent the next half hour kissing before she said it was time she got home. She was flushed and I could tell she was trying to pace this out.

  “I hoped you were the kind I could kiss,” I said.

  She smiled. “I figured you might be.”

  I blushed. “Lemme drive you home.”

  “Then you’ll have to walk back.”

  “I like walking.”

  She kissed my cheek, and we walked out to her car. And during the entire ride to town, the beautiful Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton’s hand burned a mark on my thigh the same way holy water marks the possessed—deep, hot, and permanent.

  HOW LONG?

  Whenever I babysat for little dark-eyed PD, we’d click on the news. After a particularly informative program, PD later told her mama and her third-grade class that the people who did sit-ins for Civil Rights were “he-roic.” In turn, Miss Debbie called me and told me that the news was now banned in her house. I considered asking Miss Tanya May Rogerton if she knew someone who could make PD a little black-baby doll, but came to my senses.

  Then the Freedom Riders came through the South in 1961—these brave folks, both colored and white, who vowed to break racial lines everywhere they went. But the deeper they went, the harder it got for the group, who were mostly Yankees. When they hit Burlington, Alabama, the Public Safety Commissioner there gave the KKK a full fifteen minutes to beat them before the police moved in. And when they did, they mostly arrested the Freedom Riders, many who had their faces broken before being thrown in jail, where they were tormented by the officers.

  The Riders moved on to Montgomery, Alabama, where five more had to be hospitalized after two hours of rioting. Dozens of people were injured. There were little colored children walking around fearful they’d be spit on and hit on the back with ropes.

  Children.

  I couldn’t help but think of Huddie. How Huddie had managed to keep something as sweet and gentle as a dove safe inside his ribcage, despite the mental, emotional, physical, and, most certainly, spiritual beatings he took.

  On the night the Riders made the news, rather than keep my odd, smoky pain to myself, I called Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton and asked her to come over. She didn’t ask me why; she just said she needed a minute to fluff her hair.

  When she reached my screen door, her eyes concerned, she asked, “You all right?”

  “Come sit with me,” I said.

  She followed me to the couch. We sat, then I leaned over and moved the needle of my phonograph to start up an old record from the 1940s featuring “American Folk & Blues Singer Lead Belly.” I held up the album cover so she could read it.

  “This man singing here is that old friend of mine named Huddie, who folks call Lead Belly. I’m playing him on this night, when those people are out there trying to change a world filled with so much hate—a world that hurts children for doing nothing more than being born and hurts adults for crossing imaginary lines. I’m playing it in memory of Huddie, and I wanted to share it with you.”

  She leaned back. “Thank you.”

  I closed my eyes and listened to Huddie’s voice pushing out from that tiny place he kept safe. I thought about him as a baby being rocked by his mother, and how a mother would feel knowing she’d brought a colored child into a world of such hate. Typically, folks feel joy at the news of a pregnancy, but did she?

  With my eyes closed, sitting there in the moonlight coming in across my quiet home, I got lost in his music. I forgot that Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton had joined me, and I started crying. I cried for Huddie and for those people whose houses were being burned and churches blown up, and who rocked their dying babies as they were being ignored at the doors of hospitals. I cried for the Freedom Riders, some who might never make it back home to their safe places.

  I cried for Eddie, and worried about her out dressed like a man. I prayed that she would never be arrested. I wondered if people had ever spit on her, and I was glad then that she could hide if she needed to—that she could pull her bobbed hair forward and slip on a skirt if she ever had to.

  Under it all was the eternal question: why couldn’t folks just let people be who they are, with all the fairness entitled? I mean, God dammit.

  Meanwhile, Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton scooted closer to me. She put her arms around me, and I let her hold me while I quietly cried and Huddie sang on. Her touch helped the hurt find its way out a little faster. Allowing this connection to someone I loved balanced the scales against hate, and I had a revelation that this small act—this love realized—would, in its very tiny way, make the world a better place.

  MAMA WHO?

  We all met up at Miss Debbie’s for her annual New Year’s Eve party, ready to welcome in 1962: me and Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton, Eddie, Miss Debbie, Bo, and PD, who was ten—all bones and moods.

  Nearly adolescent, PD managed somehow to be simultaneously sullen and serene. She settled on the armrest of Miss Debbie’s rose-and-white floral couch, right next to her Aunt Eddie. For the festivities, she’d chosen her orange cowboy boots and even French braided her hair.

  While PD drank lemonade from a glass covered with pictures of mushrooms, we all took cocktail-glass swigs of some stiff beverage dreamt up by Miss Debbie, something she called A Danger Ranger. The Ranger part is on account of the sprig of rosemary she put in every glass. The Danger part, she explained, is the rest of the drink.

  Eddie took a generous gulp of her drink, moving the rosemary out of the way with her thumb. She looked up at PD, and I wondered what it must have felt like to hold your newborn baby, to breastfeed your newborn baby for only one hour, then pass her along—whether Eddie felt emptiness or relief or shame or anger or nothing at all. Not that it’s any of my business—mostly.

  “I like your braiding,” Eddie said.

  PD nodded
and spun her finger around the ice cubes in her lemonade. “Mama taught me.”

  “I saw your mama’s jack-o’-lantern do from last Halloween. Miss Debbie sure can do hair. Pity about the rain, though.” She smiled. “Nothing sadder really than a sunken, melting pumpkin running orange rivers down the side of someone’s face. Not a good look. Not at all.”

  “I can hear you, Eddie,” Miss Debbie yelled from the kitchen. “I can hear you clear as a bell in a metal room!”

  Bo smiled, shaking his head. “Your mama just dreams big,” he told PD. “She’s a romantic.”

  “It’s true,” Eddie agreed. “Miss Debbie is a romantic. Why, during her short life, she has fallen in love twenty-six times—Bo here was number twelve and number twenty-six.”

  Bo tipped his invisible hat without moving away from the door-jamb, a cup for chewing-tobacco juice in his right hand.

  “You know what they say,” Miss Debbie said while she walked over to give Bo a flirty peck on the ear, “save the best for last.”

  “And twelfth,” PD added, smiling with those crowded teeth of hers. Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton slapped her leg and laughed, and I couldn’t have been prouder than I was right there, sitting with my ragtag family, sharing Danger Rangers and jabs.

  Eddie adjusted her hat. During our private talks, she refers to herself as the “third sex,” meaning she doesn’t feel like she’s a man or a woman. I can’t quite follow all that, but I respect it. I figure, who am I to be telling people who they are, when they seem to know perfectly well.