Backseat Saints

by Joshilyn Jackson

  I turned at the bedroom door, let him catch me. I kissed him again, not sweet, plenty of teeth. He lifted me up, walking me back into the bedroom with my feet dangling. He threw me backwards, so I was briefly flying, the cool air a pleasure on my naked hide. I landed, bouncing against the mattress. Then he was on top of me, and I wrapped my legs around him, dug my heels into his ass, and pulled him into me. I bit down hard into the meat of his shoulder. He reared back and I dug my heels again, drawing him in.

  We rolled in the middle. I got on top and rode him like a pony. When I came it was like the sound of thick glass shattering in me, a crashing, and then I was full of bright shards that chimed against each other as they slivered up my insides with a sound like jagged bells. Then it was his turn, and I rode him down till he was nothing, till he was lying in a heap, deflated, his eyes half-closed and no one home behind them.

  He took the sex as if it were simple and delicious and carried no message, and then he slept. He didn’t even know it was good-bye. I lay beside him, smiling but not pretty. I felt it as a broad stretch of my mouth that showed my whole, panting tongue to the air, and the air tasted warm and full of musk.

  From then on, every time I took him to my bed it was good-bye like that. Just as every time he hit me was a reminder of how permanently I was going to say it.

  CHAPTER

  8

  THE NEXT DAY, as soon as Thom left for work, I gathered up Ro Grandee’s floaty skirts, her sheer, fitted cardigans, and her lace-trimmed blouses and bundled them into the washer. I added a packet of red Rit fabric dye and started the machine. Heavy-duty. Hot water. Extra spin cycle. I left Ro Grandee’s wardrobe to ruin itself and walked over to Mrs. Fancy’s in my Levi’s and the shirt I’d worn to Artisan.

  I was lifting my hand to knock when the door sprang open. Mrs. Fancy let out a peeping yip noise and hopped back. Ro would have jumped back, too, like a moving echo, but I didn’t so much as twitch. I lowered my arm and waited. Mrs. Fancy put one hand to her chest, breathing in, then covered her mouth. Her eyes got bright and her shoulders shook, and I could tell she was laughing behind her hand.

  “Lordy, Ro, you like to give me a heart attack,” she said when she could speak. “Look at your hair. I didn’t even recognize you. Why, you’re lovely all bobbed.”

  I’d been missing morning coffee for more than a week now, but she didn’t ask. She never asked. It had made her Ro Grandee’s perfect friend, but it made me angry now. Angry enough to feel just fine about all the ways I planned to use her. Even angry enough to steal from her.

  “You’re going out?” I asked.

  “I was heading to my reading club up at church. Did you—” She stopped talking and peered at my face. “Did you need something?”

  “I need to borrow your phone,” I said.

  “Oh, has your phone gone out?” Mrs. Fancy asked. She peered around the door frame to look at my house like a concerned owl, blinking against the morning sunlight.

  “No,” I said. “I need to make some calls, long-distance. I’ll pay you for them, of course, it’s just not something I want Thom to see.”

  “A surprise?” said Mrs. Fancy.

  “Oh, yes,” I said, utterly truthful. “I’m planning a surprise.”

  She leaned back, and her sparse eyebrows came together. “Come on in,” she said. Her papery hand closed around my wrist, and she towed me across her threshold. Her living room had a square of parquet by the minifoyer, too, but the carpet surrounding hers was blue. We stood on the fake wood island, and now she was looking at my clothes. “Spring cleaning day?”

  I shook my head, trying to sound sorry instead of triumphant. “A pair of Christmas socks got in my laundry.”

  “Oh, honey!” she said. “What are you going to do?”

  I waved it away. “Trinity Methodist runs a good secondhand store downtown. I’ll get some things.”

  She tutted and said, “That store is run by a bunch of dirty hippies. I bet those clothes are full of lice.”

  “I’ll wash them,” I said, impatient. “May I use your phone while you’re at book club?” I came down hard on the last two words, reminding her she had someplace to be.

  “You’ll want to use bleach, or a color-safe bleach alternative,” Mrs. Fancy prattled on, completely unreminded. “Lice eggs are so hardy.”

  “Mrs. Fancy,” I said, “I know how—”

  She grabbed my arm and interrupted, her gaze bright. “You know, we’re of a size. I bet I have some things you could wear!”

  That derailed me, the idea of heading into my gun store shift later in one of her old-lady pantsuits, stretched out in the bum and with matching sweaters that had three-dimensional, sequined scenes of forests in the fall and snowmen at Christmas.

  It must have showed on my face, because she started laughing. “Not what I wear now, you silly. I’ve kept my favorite things for years now. You’d look darling in my old peasant blouses or my mod minidresses. I see girls your age in outfits like the ones I’ve saved all the time. The stores call it vintage, but that’s only so they can charge more.”

  She seemed perfectly content to natter on about fashion until I grew old and withered up too much to wear a minidress.

  “I’d love to try your things on,” I said, and I grabbed the edges of my shirt and pulled it off over my head. She stopped talking. Her gaze flicked to my soft cotton bra, then lower, taking in the slow-fading patterns, olive and mustard and palest sunrise blue, that were still mapped across my breasts and belly.

  Her gaze skittered off me sideways, and she put one hand to her throat. I half expected her to close her eyes and loudly chant a recipe for fruited Jell-O mold or tell me how to get wine stains out of the carpet, some small, domestic spell to ward away the ugly story my skin told.

  Instead she said, “Come away from the windows, or you’ll be giving the postman a treat.”

  She walked away from me, through the den and down the hallway that led to the bedrooms. I followed in my jeans and bra, my old T-shirt crumpled in an angry ball in my left hand, saying, “You’re missing your book discussion.”

  “Never you mind,” she said, and went on into the guest bedroom. Phil came in with me, and he jumped up on the flowered comforter. He yowled at me, sensing the tension that Mrs. Fancy was delicately ignoring.

  She opened the closet and started pushing things aside. “I haven’t saved much of anything from the last ten, fifteen years. My knees put me in ugly shoes about then, and I stopped caring. Anyway, eighties fashion is like jumbo shrimp or pretty ugly—what do you call those things, where it can’t be both? But the seventies, that was a fun time for clothes. Look at the colors! I have quite a few dresses from the fifties and sixties, too.” She flipped through the hangers until she came to a row of brightly colored blouses. She pulled out a poet’s shirt in bright blue floaty cotton and turned to me. I reached for it, but something on my face made her hug the blouse to her chest.

  “You’re different, Ro.” It was more than Ro Grandee’s own husband had noticed, even when I was naked and riding him. Points for that, at least.

  I steeled myself, and then, more for expediency than for Mrs. Fancy’s own sake, I pulled Ro Grandee’s face on over mine, blanking my eyes and upping the wattage of my smile. My body curved into her good-girl’s Catholic posture. Immediately I felt the mistake. I could not empower her this way. Ro was suicide, and slipping her skin on was as delicious and fatal as the first drag off a cigarette after days of being quits. If I did it enough, I would no longer be able to help it.

  In a single moment of looking through the tissue-thin filter of Ro’s eyes, I recalled what it felt like to love Mrs. Fancy. I could see how each thing she had felt regularly had put lines in her face, all her favorite feelings permanently remembered by her skin. Now her eyes crinkled up, and the vertical creases around her mouth deepened. These particular lines were so fixed that she must have made this face at least a million times before I met her. It was concern, tempered with such
love and ready mercy that it had to have originated for her children. She was making it for me now.

  I shook Ro off me, fast, and said, “Let me try that shirt on.”

  She took the blouse off the hanger and held it out to me, but she did not let go. We stood joined by it, each holding a shoulder.

  She searched my face, and then she said, “You’re leaving your husband.” She spoke quietly, but her tone was plain: She was crowing.

  “Do you see me packing?” I said. Good Lord, what an awful choice of words. “My things, I mean. I am not packing my things.”

  But Mrs. Fancy’s mind was not on guns and double meanings. Her fingers clutched her half of the blue blouse and she said, “Who are you calling that you don’t want him to see, long-distance? Someone you can go to? When you leave him?”

  “I’m not leaving him,” I said, but her eyes were as bright and round and hopeful as a spring robin’s. “I’m thinking things over, is all.” Her reaction made me ashamed to be taking advantage of her. But not enough to stop me. A lie came to me then. It wasn’t a lie I’d planned. I’d heard something like it on Oprah once, and it tumbled down out of my memory straight into my mouth. I opened wide and let it out. “I want to talk to some people back in Alabama, the ones who knew me before I met Thom. I want to remember who I was before.”

  She narrowed her eyes at me. “That sounds like shrink talk.” She didn’t sound like she held with that. She probably didn’t hold with Oprah, either.

  I said, “I don’t have the money for a shrink. I’ve been… talking to my pastor.” The pastor at the Grandees’ church was a wobbly-necked fellow who dyed his hair shoe-polish black. His office smelled like tuna fish and ranch dressing, and Joe and Charlotte Grandee’s tithe paid a goodly piece of his salary. He was a social club Presbyterian whose sermons were written to butter open the wallets of his wealthier congregants; a drunken barn cat could fart out better advice than I would expect to hear coming out of the other end of that man.

  Still, I could tell Mrs. Fancy liked this idea, even though she said, “Are you sure your pastor hasn’t been talking to a shrink?” She still held tight to the blouse with one hand. The hanger dropped from her other hand to the floor, and she didn’t even notice. “At least there’s some God behind it. I don’t trust that muddled-up Freud stuff. Such a pervert! Ladies wishing they had penises. Why, I never heard of such. The only penis I ever wanted was properly attached to Mr. Fancy, where I could get some good use out of it.”

  A muffled squawk of laughter got out of me. She’d surprised me for the second time in as many minutes, and she didn’t look a bit sorry. She had a sly smile pulling up one corner of her mouth. She leaned in and smoothed back a piece of my hair, tucking the end behind my ear so she could look me directly in the eye. My surprise held me still for it.

  “I had a good marriage, Ro. In all ways good, and it made everything else good, too. I’m not ashamed of that. It’s what I want most for you.” She petted back the other side of my hair, her fingers lingering as she tucked it behind my other ear. “Leave him. Today. My church works with some people that would hide you. They run a facility for women in… your situation.”

  “Women in my situation, huh?” I said, wry, shaking my head at both the idea and her delicate phrasing in a room where my bruises were so loudly displayed. I breathed in deep, through my nose, and smelled her baby powder and mothballs and the drifted-down scent of yesterday’s baking. This was Mrs. Fancy’s territory, and until this moment, I’d assumed only Ro Grandee had a place here.

  In the house where I grew up, the kitchen had belonged to my mother. The air said so with vanilla and cinnamon, the same way the orange blossom soap in the bathroom made that place hers, too. The den was Daddy’s. He filled it with the smells of salt and beer and the angry sweat that comes from watching your team lose hard at baseball. The bedroom smelled mostly his as well, and the hall where he’d worn down the carpet pacing and drinking on the bad nights. My room was mine, so it smelled like me, which registered in my own nose as nothing.

  The day before she left, my mother had gone into her kitchen and packed a PBJ and red grapes into my brown paper lunch bag. She should have put a hunk of mutton in, or sliced kiwi, feta cheese, some strange food I’d never seen, to prepare me for her long-planned disappearing act.

  She gave me only my usual lunch, my usual quick kiss good-bye, and I ate that lunch. I brought home the bag to reuse the next day. My faith that there would be a next day’s lunch was so basic, I didn’t even think of it as faith.

  Maybe she had gone to a shelter. She’d been a woman, as Mrs. Fancy said, “in my situation.” I had no way to know. She’d gotten out of a bad marriage, but she hadn’t taken me with her so I could learn the route. She hadn’t even dropped a trail of bread crumbs for me to follow. She’d only set my mouth, giving me her taste for called saints, good books, and angry men.

  My throat felt closed. I couldn’t open it to answer Mrs. Fancy. I’d come here to steal from her, but now a connection formed in my head, sudden and complete: I would steal from Mrs. Fancy and go to California. It felt true. Predestined, even, as if my mother had left me a secret something else: her ability to see the future, so mighty a gift that I didn’t need cards.

  I tried to keep my face still, to not let my expression show Mrs. Fancy a map that she could read. Not California, I reminded myself. I had no reason to believe Jim Beverly had landed there.

  Mrs. Fancy was waiting patiently for me to answer. I said, “A shelter won’t take Fat Gretel.”

  “My son could take Gretel. He has a fenced yard and a lonely German shepherd,” Mrs. Fancy answered promptly, like she’d thought this out years ago and was five steps ahead with arguments and logic front-loaded to shoot down my objections.

  I looked down at my feet and said, harsh and raw, “I only want to borrow your phone.”

  She looked like she wanted to say something else, but she read the mulish shape of my mouth correctly and settled for, “Try the blouse on.”

  I pulled it on and turned to the mirror hanging over the old-fashioned dresser. The shirt was soft cotton, long, but it gathered at the waist with elastic and showed my figure. It had a drawstring neck and bands of pale yellow ribbon and embroidered flowers near the ends of the sleeves, the conservative side of seventies hippie wear. My mother’d left a closet full of clothes like this in Fruiton.

  Wearing it, I could see that the new haircut hadn’t given me high cheekbones, it only showed them off. They were hers, like the down tilt to my mouth and the sharp-etched line of my collarbone. I blinked, long enough for it to be more like closing my eyes against the sight of my mother’s child. Still, it was better than seeing Ro. At least my mother had gotten out of her marriage alive, something that was utterly beyond Ro Grandee.

  “This will work. Thank you,” I said.

  Mrs. Fancy was already flipping through hangers, pulling out peasant blouses with angel-wing sleeves and button-down disco shirts with nipped-in waists. She laid them out on the bed in a pile, six or maybe seven of them, then added a couple of pairs of embroidered belled jeans and three minidresses in bright, mod patterns.

  “What about shoes?” Mrs. Fancy asked.

  “I’m good on shoes,” I said instantly. The last thing I needed was for Mrs. Fancy to go digging in her old shoeboxes. One of them would feel way too heavy and rattle with loose bullets when she lifted it. I felt my gaze flick to the box that held my Pawpy’s gun. I willed myself to look away, but not before I realized a couple of the shoeboxes on that side stuck out an inch or so beyond the rest because I’d stuffed my mother’s library book behind them.

  Mrs. Fancy did not notice, though. She was caught up staring at her own box of secrets on the other side. Her head was down, and her body had canted itself slightly toward it. I didn’t much want her thinking hard on that box, either, since I was planning to loot it.

  I said, “Help me carry this stuff back to my place. I’ll make coffee?” trying to pull
her away, but she didn’t move.

  When at last she spoke again, her voice had changed to something small and strangled. It didn’t even sound like hers. “Did you know that my daughter, Janine, had another child? Before she had little Robert, I mean. Years ago. She had a baby with that bad man I told you she had married.”

  I’d guessed this. I’d also guessed that it had come to no good end. Mrs. Fancy’s box held mementos from a babyhood and nothing more: booties and a clip of hair, but no first attempt at ABCs, no child’s ballet shoes, no dried flowers from a pressed corsage. If my mother, out in California, had boxed up souvenirs from my childhood, then hers would end with a bag of baby teeth shaped like shoepeg corn and a five-sentence book report on Beezus and Ramona.

  “I didn’t know,” I said.

  She turned and walked away to the other end of the room. She twisted open the blinds and looked out the window that faced the backyard, her back to me and the closet. Our houses were called starter homes, but there were more retired folks in our neighborhood than young couples. Ender homes, more like. The backyard had a flat space near the back windows where a swing set could go. Mrs. Fancy had a birdbath there with a pansy patch around it. She said, “That’s why she married so young, hardly more than a baby herself. Ivy came too early. Poor little thing. Poor little both things.”

  Her voice was steady now, loud enough for me to hear her even with her back to me. Each word came out formal and precise, like she’d been invited to speak to the Rotary Club six months ago and she’d been practicing this talk in her bathroom mirror.

  “The baby’s lungs didn’t hardly work, but that sweet thing tried very hard. She’d twine her fingers around my pinky and clutch on. That’s why Janine named her Ivy. She was born with that fierce grip.”