Sugar Land

by tammy lynne stoner

  “You with us?” Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton whispered.

  I leaned up. “Oh yes, sorry—just lost in thought. What’s the conversation?”

  “Miss Debbie was just saying how she spent three months in clown school years ago.”

  “No surprise there.”

  Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton leaned back on the armrest of the velour chair that I was being sucked into while Miss Debbie refilled our drinks from a fancy glass pitcher. Catching the time, she set the pitcher down and ran off to grab the noisemakers that we were going to need in two minutes. “The countdown!” she shouted. “Get ready, folks! The countdown has begun!” Then: “Five-four-three-two-one!”

  Midnight hit, and we all yelled and tooted our horns. Bo and Miss Debbie kissed, while Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton gave me a wink. Eddie gave PD a big kiss on the head.

  From across the room, Miss Debbie said, “It’s nice having you join the adults this year, PD!”

  “Thanks, Miss Debbie,” PD said, looking sleepier than a kitten wrapped in a yarn ball.

  Then Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton, innocent of what she was doing, asked, “How’d you get the name PD?”

  Eddie smiled. “Oh, I named her that.”

  “You named her?”

  Miss Debbie hiccupped and blurted out, “Well, Eddie there is part aunt, part mama.”

  I blanched. PD stepped back and furrowed her forehead up in question. Bo, moving quicker than he had ever moved, clapped his hands and asked if anyone wanted to take some cookies home. Eddie cleared her throat over and over.

  Miss Debbie, two sheets to the wind, did her best to cover by saying, “Just since Eddie’s around all the time! She’s like a second mother to PD here. Right, PD?”

  PD didn’t answer, and her mother seemed not to notice. Instead Miss Debbie started handing us cookies for the road, busying herself to get away from that moment as quickly as she could.

  Eddie stood up. “Midnight has come and gone. Guess it’s time to head out now.”

  Bo held the door open and nodded goodbye to Eddie, his eyes meeting hers to let her know that he’d do his best to stop this conversation from going any further.

  Miss Debbie, Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton, and I had a post-party martini, concocted by Miss Debbie before I had had the chance to refuse. And that’s when it happened, when PD asked Miss Debbie about her comment about Eddie—just when we thought we’d gotten away with it.

  PD looked up from the floral couch. “So what did you mean tonight? Is Eddie my aunt or my mother?” This thing was not uncommon in Sugar Land.

  Miss Debbie headed into the kitchen with a stack of dirty cups. “PD, there is no need to start looking for mysteries—you do, and I’m going to ban those books you’ve been reading.”

  PD stood up in her cowboy boots and walked past the overflowing ashtrays to the kitchen. Still in the velour chair, I leaned myself over as far as I could to get a view of them in front of the crazy brown-and-orange striped wallpaper Miss Debbie had installed herself a while back. Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton tapped me on the shoulder, and I raised my finger to tell her to hold on—I needed to pay attention to the conversation about to unfold.

  Even looking at the back of Miss Debbie, you could see how nervous she was. She shifted on her cork heels while PD stood at the opening of the kitchen area and crossed her skinny arms.

  PD said to her mother’s back, “Something is in the air, and I need to know.”

  “There’s nothing!” Miss Debbie yelled, a little too loud, before helping herself to some Danger Ranger residue in the bottom of one of the glasses.

  PD, having been raised by the best, yelled back, “You need to tell me!”

  Whether it was just too hard to keep the secret any longer or whether Miss Debbie was in the middle of another blackout, who knows. But whatever the reason, she turned to face PD and she told the truth. “Eddie is both your aunt and your mother,” she said with a fast, intoxicated exhale.

  PD’s arms dropped. “I don’t understand.”

  Miss Debbie looked stunned, like she couldn’t believe she had just said that. “I’m drinking again, sugar. Let’s talk in the morning. I am not making sense!” Her face flushed. Her hair unraveled. “Besides, I need to take some Flexeril for my cramps.”

  “Mama, you only get your period once a month,” PD said.

  “No, honey,” she said, “I bleed every day.”

  Miss Debbie, walking as sternly as she could, retreated to her bedroom where we all heard the loud click of her door lock. Maybe she forgot I was there, but PD didn’t ask me anything. She just ran down the hallway and yelled outside Miss Debbie’s door, “We are not done!”

  “We better get going,” I whispered to Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton.

  She nodded and we tiptoed out. On the way home in the car, I explained everything. The pregnancy and the transfer of the baby and how I found out and kept the secret.

  “Well, this was bound to come out.”

  I ran my hands along the leather seats in her car, hoping to comfort myself somehow. “I’m worried that Eddie will wander off again. That she’ll just up and leave to avoid what is bound to be an awful situation.”

  “Well,” Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton said, her voice as soft as pulled cotton, “people do what they need to.”

  “I don’t want her to go. We got a routine going now. She helps me with my birdhouses every Saturday. We talk on the phone. We have tea.”

  Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton reached over and rubbed my knee, causing the car to veer onto the bumpy side of the road. “I know, hon. But she always comes back.”

  “So far,” I sulked.

  I worried I might lose Eddie permanently—that she might not make it through this revelation. There is probably a shame that some women carry who give up their children, especially when, for all intents and purposes, they could have cared for them. In this case, it would have meant living a lie, but to most folks, that would be a small price to pay for being with your child. Of course, most folks don’t understand what toll those kind of lies take, how you blacken out pieces of who you are until you are nothing but an empty space of sad.

  There was no real right or wrong here. There is only what was: Eddie would die if she lived any other way but truthfully—to keep PD would have meant death for her. And this way, having Miss Debbie and Bo raise her, at least she got to be PD’s aunt—though, it seems, maybe only for a short decade.

  × × ×

  Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton came and got me the following morning to take me to Miss Debbie’s to help clean up—as I’d said I would. She left me at the door and went down to her shop, where she had a meeting planned with a nervous bride. When I walked in, PD was wiping down the Formica.

  “She’s not up yet,” she said, her eyes all bloodshot.

  While I dumped out the ashtrays into a paper bag, PD loudly clanked all the glassware she was washing until Miss Debbie finally stumbled into the kitchen, shielding her eyes.

  “You put brighter lightbulbs in here to teach me a lesson, PD?”

  PD groaned. “Why do hangovers always surprise you, Mama?”

  “Good morning!” I waved cheerfully from the living room.

  Miss Debbie reached into the pocket of her pink robe and pulled out her pack of cigarettes.

  PD stood her ground. “Our conversation from the night before is not finished.”

  “Shush,” Miss Debbie said.

  “Miss Debbie, tell me the truth. What is going on?” PD crossed her arms, looking much older than she was—maybe from her stubborn streak or maybe from the way her hair refused to have any wave whatsoever.

  Miss Debbie took a drag and cleared her tar-coated throat. “I am not getting into this,” she announced.

  PD took a step toward her mother, her Nutter Butter T-shirt so thin around the waist that it was nearly see-through. “Then I’m going to Aunt Eddie to get to the bottom of all this.”

  “You most certainly are not,” Miss Debbie screeched, stubbing her cigarette so har
d that it broke in half before it went out.

  “I am old enough—”

  “You better move your butt right back to your bedroom—”

  “You’ll just have to take care of cleaning up the place yourself, Miss Debbie. I am going.”

  The Look washed over Miss Debbie, who could go toe to toe with Joan Crawford any day—that is, if Hollywood wasn’t the Devil’s playground. But then she softened. “Please, PD,” she said.

  My jaw dropped open. PD stopped short. Miss Debbie had said please. For a minute no one knew what to say. I could tell by the way PD looked that she was struggling between what she needed to find out about her aunt and giving in on account of such a monumental thing that her mother had just done.

  Finally PD said, “I’m sorry, but I have to find out what’s going on.”

  Miss Debbie slammed down her Daffy Duck glass after swallowing the last bit of last night’s cocktail, deftly avoiding the rosemary. She turned to face PD and me, just as I was shimmying one butt cheek at a time onto a stool at the kitchen bar. “Would you want her to be your mother?”

  “Is this why you are always jealous that Aunt Eddie and I like each other?”

  Miss Debbie huffed. “I’m not jealous. I just sometimes think you love her more than you love me.”

  PD rolled her eyes. “Mama—”

  “I am telling you—no, honey, I am asking you to stay here with me and let this drop.” Miss Debbie walked back over, her heavily lined eyes taking on that watery-drunk look.

  PD lowered her head, guilty, but still reached for the book bag that was sitting beside me on a stool.

  Miss Debbie’s voice jumped an octave. She turned to face PD with that crazy look in her eyes. “I was the one who stayed up with you when you cried all night—you don’t remember it, but you used to have nightmares. Fierce nightmares, PD, and it was me staying up with you, running my fingers through your hair. Me cleaning up this entire house when you had that stomach flu, not your aunt.”

  “Miss Debbie,” PD sighed. “I’m not running away—”

  “You might as well!” To emphasize her point, Miss Debbie took another dramatic gulp from her glass. “This is about loyalties! If you go to her, you might as well stay there.”

  “What?”

  Miss Debbie set her drink down in a hurry and walked slowly into the kitchen area, right across from where I was sitting at the bar. “No! No! I don’t mean that. Just please, stay.”

  “I’m sorry,” PD said quietly, not making eye contact with her mother. “I have to go.”

  “Fine!”

  “Miss Debbie—” PD said.

  “And I am not Miss Debbie, I am your mama!” she yelled, then walked over and grabbed a new cup—Minnie Mouse—from the cabinet. She dumped in a glistening stream of gin from an open bottle on the counter, skipping the ice and the limes and the tonic. “I am your mama,” she repeated, a little sadly, as she took a sip.

  “I know,” PD said.

  Miss Debbie sighed. “OK. OK. Pass me them corn nuts behind you, PD, and sit your ass down next to Nana Dara so I can explain.”

  PD hooked her book bag over one shoulder, passed her mama the corn nuts, and sat down. Miss Debbie tore the bag open with her coffee-stained teeth and poured a few corn nuts into her mouth. She never ate them, she just sucked the salt from them, then spit them out, claiming she’d wreck her fillings if she were to go any further.

  “I didn’t give birth to you, honey.”

  “What?”

  “Your Aunt Eddie met a man heading into basic training. She had relations with him.”

  “Oh,” was all PD managed.

  “Yes. And then she had you, but she felt she couldn’t raise you.”

  “She could have done it . . .”

  “This was ten years ago. Hell, PD, even now a woman raising a child alone—it’s just not done.”

  PD was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “But I look like you—”

  “Yeah, you do. You look like me, and you look a lot like Eddie when she was your age. Funny how raisin’ someone gives them your mannerisms so even though you might look more like one person, you act more like another and the acting overrides the looking—”

  “Didn’t she love me?”

  “Of course she did.”

  PD let her book bag quietly slide off her shoulder and fall to the floor between us. Miss Debbie crinkled the empty bag of nuts. I could see her trying to look casual, like this was all a perfectly natural part of life—and I could also see behind that that she was scared to death.

  She forced a sigh. “Now go run to the store and get me some more corn nuts. The barbecue kind.”

  Miss Debbie’s face looked suddenly pale and dried up. Her neck had that flush I recognized as the beginning of a crying spell, so I squeezed PD’s shoulder and told her I’d take her to the store now, if we could borrow her mama’s car.

  “You and I can talk some more on the way, if you want to,” I said.

  Miss Debbie waved that the keys were still in the ignition. We said goodbye but she only nodded, her face turned away from us.

  PD and I slid into her pink Buick, both a bit shell-shocked, and drove to the Quickie Mart a few miles past where the road got paved. PD didn’t say anything for a very long time. We just sat there in that silence, listening to the car bump and complain.

  “My whole insides are filling up,” she finally said, looking out the window. “Did you know too, Nana Dara?”

  “I knew and I’m so sorry. You don’t deserve this, baby. I’m sorry.”

  I drove on. We pulled into the store lot. There’s some redneck code that says if you own a huge truck with big tires and a gigantic payload—like the two in the Quickie Mart parking lot—you have earned the right to take up multiple parking spots, so I had to park clear around back. PD made no move to get out after I parked.

  “How could you lie to me, Nana Dara?”

  “I omitted, which is really a white lie. But yes, still a lie.” I felt like an idiot for splitting hairs just then. “Peanut, I lied because I didn’t want you to have to lie. You couldn’t have told anyone who your mother was, if your mother was your aunt.”

  “That would have been my choice though. You gave me no choice.” PD ran a long pale finger along the edge of the silver radio. She had the kind of fingers sensitive people have. “I just wonder now who I can trust.”

  “This may not come off right,” I said, “but you know this was all done out of love.”

  “I’m not ready to hear all that just yet.” PD shifted toward the door with its bold silver door handle. “You need anything?”

  “No, I’m all right,” I said.

  PD slammed the door, the way you had to in order to get it latched. I watched her walk around the gray concrete back of the store, hoping Miss Debbie was all right.

  A while later PD, walked back across the sunny blacktop with her head down. Her cowboy boots crunched the ground, getting louder the closer she got until she creaked open the door and sat down.

  “They didn’t have any,” she said—and I wondered if they had some corn nuts but PD just didn’t want to get her mama any right now.

  “Let’s go to the Opry,” I said. “Take some time to relax. Eat some grapes.”

  We drove on in silence until PD asked if she could turn on the radio, and we listened to some Conway Twitty. Forty-five minutes later, we turned off the road and onto the dusty gravel—or “unadopted roadway” as the city planning folks called it—leading down to the Opry. Driving up I realized that my powder blue prefab looked like it had been dropped from the top of a mountain and settled crooked. Thing had seen better days. I best keep selling those birdhouses and picnic tables if I was ever going to fix her up.

  We parked and walked in. I sat on my mustard-colored couch while PD pulled over the kitchen chair. Like her mama, she didn’t care to sit in the wobbly chair either.

  “Tell me the story,” she said.

  So, there with the late-day
sun streaming low in the front window, I let the whole story pour out. I told PD how I’d lost touch with my girls until the day Edna showed up as Eddie, carrying PD as a little baby. How I knew right off there was something special about PD—or something about her and me. I told her about the note and my conversation with Miss Debbie to keep things secret.

  I went on to tell her how I had a secret that I’d swallowed when I married the Warden—the grandfather who’d died before she was born—and how I felt often like I’d been living a lie, a necessary one, but a lie all the same. How that secret affected things. How Eddie—as Edna—opened up to me on prom night, but I hadn’t been brave enough to confide my lie and change the direction of our family away from shame.

  “But if you had, then maybe I’d never be,” she said.

  I leaned back into the couch, stunned. “That’s true.”

  The sun slipped down a bit. I could already tell it was going to be one of those nice, cool Texas nights, when the air comes in smelling like honeysuckle instead of dust.

  A few mobiles over, someone put on some Mexican music.

  “OK,” PD said, leaning into the red vinyl chair back. “That all?”

  My guts actually quivered, I was so nervous. I closed my eyes and I said it: “I am a lesbian.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  I opened my eyes and looked at her. “I mean I like women the way most women like men.”

  “Oh. Mama’s not going to like that.”

  “She doesn’t.”

  “She knows?”

  “Yes.”

  PD paused for a minute. She dropped her head then looked up with her dark brown bangs in her eyes. “Is Aunt Eddie one too? Is that really why she didn’t keep me?”

  “Yes.”

  I hoped that PD would come hug me maybe, or tell me it’s OK and that she still loved me—then I chastised myself for being so selfish at a moment like this.

  “What the hell kind of family is this?” she asked.

  “Your language has sure gotten colorful.”

  “Sorry, Nana Dara.” She looked blankly across all the art on my walls. “I know it would be hard and all, but why couldn’t Aunt Eddie just try to raise me?” she asked, her voice sounding like a little girl’s, with me having to remind myself that she was a little girl. “Wait. Did Miss Debbie force her to hand me over?” Her face hardened. “Seems like something Mama might do.”