Dumplin'

by Julie Murphy

  There are, I think, lots of things wrong with that sentiment.

  I sit down to eat and liberally spread salad dressing across my plate, because on the eighth day God created ranch dressing.

  My mom crosses her legs and points her toes, examining her chipped pedicure. “How was work?”

  “It was fine. There was some old guy catcallin’ from the drive-thru. Called me sweetcheeks.”

  “Awww,” she says. “Well, that’s kind of flattering if you think about it.”

  “Mama, come on. No, that’s gross.”

  She flips the dial on her TV, turning it off. “Baby, trust me when I say that the man market narrows as you age. No matter how well maintained you are.”

  This is not a conversation I want to have. “Ron was out sick.”

  “Bless his heart.” She laughs. “You know he had the biggest crush on me in high school.”

  At least once a week since I took the job, she brings this up. When I first applied during Thanksgiving break, Lucy told me she always suspected that it had been the other way around. But the way my mom tells it, every guy in town had a thing for her. “Everyone wanted a piece of Clover City’s Miss Teen Blue Bonnet,” she slurred one night after a few glasses of wine.

  The pageant is my mother’s single greatest accomplishment. She still fits into her dress—a fact she won’t let anyone forget, which is why as head of the pageant committee and the official hostess, she takes it upon herself to squeeze into the dress as a yearly encore for all of her adoring fans.

  I feel the weight of Lucy’s cat, Riot, settle in on top of my feet. I tap my toes and he purrs. “I saw a bunch of girls doing some kind of pageant boot camp after school.”

  She grins. “I tell you what. The competition gets stiffer every year.”

  “What about you? How was the home?”

  “Oh, you know, just one of those days.” She flips through her checkbook and massages her temples. “We lost Eunice today.”

  “Oh no,” I say. “I’m so sorry, Mom.”

  Once a year, like Cinderella, my mom’s life is glamorous. It’s the life she expected to live. But for the rest of the year, she works as an orderly at the Buena Vista Ranch Retirement Home, where she does exotic things like dole out daily prescriptions, feed the elderly, and wipe their asses. Eunice was one of my mom’s favorites. She always confused her for one of her sisters and whispered childhood secrets in her ear every time my mom bent down to help her up.

  “She had her after-lunch ambrosia and closed her eyes.” She shakes her head. “I let her sit there for a minute because I thought she was napping.” She stands and kisses the top of my head. “I’m going to bed, Dumplin’.”

  “Night.”

  I wait for the sound of her door clicking shut before I bury my dinner in the trash can beneath one of those free newspapers. I grab a fistful of pretzels and a soda before running upstairs. As I pass Lucy’s closed door, I linger for a moment, letting the tips of my fingers brush the knob.

  THREE

  “I think I want to have sex with Tim this summer,” says Ellen as she plucks a cube of cheese from her lunch spread and pops it into her mouth. El has been “considering” having sex with Tim every Friday for the last year. Seriously, before the start of every weekend we debate the pros and cons of Ellen and Tim finally doing it.

  “That’s weird.” I don’t look up from my notes. I’m not a bad friend. But we’ve had this conversation so many times. Plus, it’s the last day of school and I have one final left. I’m trying to cram and El is not because she’s done with all of her finals.

  With her mouth full of candied pecans, she asks, “Why is it weird?”

  “Quiz me on this.” I pop a few grapes in my mouth and hold out a study sheet dissecting the branches of the government. “Because it’s not like a wedding. It’s not like, ‘Ohh, I like summer colors. I’m gonna do it over the summer so that I can properly coordinate my lingerie with my most preferred season.’ You should do it because you want to.”

  She rolls her eyes. “But summer’s like a time of transition. I could come back to school a woman,” she says, sparing no dramatics.

  I roll my eyes back at her. I hate talking to talk. If El was actually going to go through with it, I’d have crawled over the table to have a nose-to-nose conversation with her about every detail. But she never goes through with it. I don’t get how she can talk about the possibility of sex so much.

  When she sees that I haven’t taken the bait, she glances down at the paper. “The three branches of government.”

  “Executive, legislative, and judicial.” I decide to give her a crumb. “Plus, having sex doesn’t make you a woman. That is so freaking cliché. If you want to have sex, have sex, but don’t make it this huge thing that carries all this weight. You’re setting yourself up for disappointment.”

  Her shoulders sink and her eyebrows pinch together. “How many senators and representatives serve in Congress?”

  “Four hundred and thirty-five and one hundred.”

  “No, but yes. You got it backward.”

  “Okay.” I repeat the numbers under my breath. “And it doesn’t matter what time of year it is as long as it feels right. Right? I mean, winter is cool, too, because you’re all like, ‘Oh my God, it’s so cold. Body heat.’”

  She laughs. “Yeah, yeah. You’re right.”

  I don’t want to be right. I don’t want El to have sex before me. Maybe it’s selfish, but I don’t really know how to handle her doing something I haven’t. I guess I’m scared I won’t know how to be her friend. I mean, sex is serious business, and how can I navigate her to places I’ve never been?

  I want to tell her that she should wait. But she and Tim have been dating for almost a year and a half and she still blushes every time she talks about him. I don’t know how to measure love, but that seems like a good place to start. And I don’t know that I’d be asking her to wait for any other reason than me.

  As I look over my review, Millie walks down our aisle of tables with a trayful of food and her best friend, Amanda Lumbard, not far behind. Millie and Amanda together are basically one giant moving target that says MAKE FUN OF US.

  Amanda’s legs are uneven, so she wears these thick corrective shoes that make her look like Frankenstein. (At least according to Patrick Thomas.) When we were kids and she didn’t have her shoes yet, Amanda just limped around, her hips swiveling up and down with each step. She never seemed bothered, but that didn’t stop people from staring. The nickname thing is pretty lame if you think about it. Frankenstein was the doctor, not the monster.

  Millie waves, and I quickly lift my hand as she walks past us.

  El smirks. “New friend?”

  I shrug. “I feel bad for her sometimes.”

  “She seems happy to me.” El asks me a few more study questions as we finish our lunch. “What system is in place so that no part of the government becomes too powerful?”

  “Checks and balances.”

  “So, hey, how was work last night? How’s Private School Boy?”

  I twist the loose wire from the spine of my notebook around my finger. “It was good.” I glance down at my cafeteria lunch. “He’s good.”

  I want to tell her about his shitty friends and his new facial hair, but I’m not sure how to bring it up without sounding like I’m a total nut who saves his nail clippings in a jar underneath my bed. Last night I had to recount my register three times because he kept walking by.

  “I like Sweet 16 and all, but I’m kinda jealous that you work with guys, too.” She drops her half-eaten carrot into her plastic bag and seals the zipper. “I still can’t believe we’re not working together.”

  El would never let me forget that I’d ruined our after-school job plans by taking the position at Harpy’s. But if she didn’t intuitively get that I didn’t really want to work at a store where I couldn’t even fit into the clothes, then I didn’t want to bother explaining it to her. “Why do you care about work
ing with other guys? You’re the one who just told me you wanted to do it with Tim.”

  She shrugs me off. “It’d be fun is all.”

  We finish lunch, and I take my government final. And that’s it. Tenth grade is over. The parking lot is all primal cheers and tires screeching. But I don’t have it, that sense of progress. Instead, I feel stuck, waiting for my own life to happen.

  FOUR

  My mom’s car is in the driveway when I get home from my last day of school. As I slide my car into park and pull the e-brake, I lean my head against the headrest. I love my car. Her name is Jolene and she is a 1998 cherry-red Pontiac Grand Prix, given to me by Lucy.

  Inside I follow the sound of rustling upstairs to Lucy’s room, where my mom’s teal ass is wiggling in the air. Teal because she’s been wearing the same designer tracksuit that an ex-boyfriend gave her six years ago. She calls it her “loungewear” and, second only to her Miss Teen Blue Bonnet crown, it is her most prized possession.

  “I’m home,” I say, panic creeping into my voice. “What are you doing in here?”

  She stands upright and exhales, pushing hair off her forehead. Her face is red with heat and the blond wisps around her forehead have curled into ringlets. “The funeral home finally got that urn we ordered, so I called it a half day. Thought I’d come home and get a head start on all this.”

  I drop my backpack in the hallway and take a few steps into the bedroom. “A head start on what?”

  Mom plops down on the bed next to a stack of housedresses, all starched and hung on Lucy’s yarn-covered hangers. “Oh, you know, clearing Luce’s stuff out. God, she was a pack rat. You can barely open her drawers. You know, I found your grandmother’s wedding veil. I’ve been looking for that thing for ages.”

  My lips twitch into a smile. “Oh yeah?”

  Mom claimed ownership of my grandmother’s wedding gown while she was in hospice. It never would have fit Lucy, so there was never really any argument. Except for the veil. The veil could fit anyone. They fought over it for months until Lucy’s nerves had worn so thin that she gave up. Then a few years ago, the thing went missing.

  It was my mom who was always harping on her, but this sort of feels like maybe Lucy got the last word.

  It wasn’t like that all the time. The two of them weren’t always at odds with each other, but those moments stand out more in my memory than the Friday nights I would come home and find them both giggling on the couch over their favorite old movies.

  “So what are you going to do with all this stuff?” I ask.

  “Well, I guess I’ll be donating it. You know how hard it is for women of size to find clothing, so I’m sure someone will greatly appreciate it.”

  “What if I want some of it? Not to wear. Just to keep.”

  “Oh, Dumplin’, you don’t want these old muumuus. And all that’s in the dressers are underwear, slips, and newspaper clippings.”

  I know I should be over Lucy being gone. It’s been six months now. And yet I keep expecting to see her on the couch with Riot in her lap or doing her crossword puzzles in the kitchen. But she’s not. She’s gone. And we don’t even have any pictures of her. The reality of her body wasn’t something she liked having reflected back at her in the form of a photograph.

  It scares me. Like, if I can’t hear her or see her, I will somehow forget her.

  At the age of thirty-six, weighing in at four hundred and ninety-eight pounds, Lucy died. She died alone of a massive heart attack, while sitting on the couch, watching one of her shows. No one saw her die. But then again, no one outside of this house really saw her live. And now there’s no one here to remember her. Not in the way she’d want to be remembered. Because when my mom thinks of Lucy, she only remembers how she died.

  That’s why the idea of my mom disassembling her room like a traveling exhibit takes this echo of pain and turns it into something new and fresh.

  Mom pulls open the drawer on the nightstand and begins to sort papers into different stacks. I can see her mind working. Keep, toss, maybe. Some days I wonder which pile I fall into.

  “Can you just not?” I ask. “This is her room.”

  My mom turns to me with this incredulous look on her face. “Dumplin’, this is an entire room that we’re allowing to collect dust. And pageant season is here. I’m going to be hard at work all summer. It’d be nice to have a room to sew costumes and create set pieces without the whole house being overrun.”

  “A craft room?” The words are bitter on my tongue. “You’re wanting to turn Lucy’s room into a craft room?”

  She opens her mouth, but I don’t stick around long enough for her to respond.

  At Harpy’s, Bo is at work behind the grill with his earbuds in. I lift my hand to wave at him as I walk by. “Happy summer, Willowdean,” he says a little too loud. His lips are sticky and red and something I would very much like to taste.

  Kissing Bo. The thought embarrasses me. I want to melt into a puddle to be washed down the kitchen drain.

  Up front, Marcus is already at his register.

  “You beat me here,” I say.

  “Tiff’s been dropping me off early because of practice.”

  Marcus and I have always sort of been extras in each other’s lives. He’s a year ahead of me, and we’ve gone to school together since we were kids. I know him in the same way you know your best friend’s cousin: by name and face. When I started at Harpy’s, it was nice to work with someone I at least recognized, and now I guess we’re friends. He and Tiffanie, the captain of the softball team, started dating at the beginning of the year and in a matter of weeks their lives had fused together like a set of suction cups.

  “How’d you do on your finals?” Marcus asks.

  I shrug and glance back to catch Bo watching us from behind the heat lamps. He doesn’t look away. My stomach turns. “I was there,” I say. “That should count for something. What about you?”

  “Good. Studied with Tiff. She’s visiting colleges this summer.”

  I understand that life after high school is probably something I should be thinking about, but I can’t picture me in college and I don’t know how to plan for something I can’t imagine. “What about you? Are you going to look at schools, too?”

  He twists his visor to the side and nods thoughtfully. “I guess.” The bell above the front door rings back and forth as a few guys from school file in. As we’re waiting for them to look over the menu, Marcus gazes past them and out the front window, and says, “My girl’s gettin’ out of this town and all I know is I’m going with her.”

  Clover City is the type of place you leave. It’s love that either sucks you in or pushes you away. There are only a few who really make it out and stay out, while the rest of us drink, procreate, and go to church, and that seems to be enough to keep us afloat.

  Since we close late on Fridays and Saturdays, my mom is asleep by the time I get home. Once I’ve turned off all the lights and have locked the back door, I tiptoe down the upstairs hallway and double-check that she is asleep. Light snores curl out from beneath her door as I let myself into Lucy’s room, careful to avoid any creaking floorboards, and begin to search through my mother’s piles.

  There is plenty of junk and stacks of newspaper clippings about people and places I will never understand. I hate that there are things—trivial things, like why she needed a newspaper clipping about a cookbook author who’d be visiting the library—that I never knew to ask Lucy about.

  Her funeral was the worst. And not just for the obvious reasons. Half of Clover City showed up because what the hell else is there to do? I guess they all expected to see her folded into a casket like some kind of cautionary tale. But the sad truth was that we couldn’t afford the more expensive wide casket. So, despite my mother having a total meltdown over her inability to give her older sister a “proper funeral,” Lucy was cremated.

  But I don’t like to remember her funeral. I like to remember things like the time she took me to my first dan
ce class when I was in third grade. My leotard barely stretched over my protruding belly and my thighs touched no matter how hard I begged them not to. I was too fat. I was too tall. I didn’t look like all the other girls waiting to go into class.

  Since I refused to get out of the car, Lucy came to sit in the backseat with me. “Will.” Her voice was smooth like warm honey. She tucked a loose hair behind my ear and handed me a tissue from the front pocket of her housedress. “I’ve wasted a lot of time in my life. I’ve thought too much about what people will say or what they’re gonna think. And sometimes it’s over silly things like going to the grocery store or going to the post office. But there have been times when I really stopped myself from doing something special. All because I was scared someone might look at me and decide I wasn’t good enough. But you don’t have to bother with that nonsense. I wasted all that time so you don’t have to. If you go in there and you decide that this isn’t for you, then you never have to go back. But you owe yourself the chance, you hear me?”

  I only stuck with it for the fall, but that didn’t seem to be the point.

  In Lucy’s sock drawer, I find a small box of cassette tapes—all Dolly Parton. I choose one at random and put it in the stereo on her nightstand. I lie back on her bed and listen with the volume turned down so low it sounds like a murmur. Lucy loved Dolly probably more than anything. And I guess Ellen and I do, too.

  Mrs. Dryver is maybe the best-known Dolly Parton impersonator in this part of Texas. She’s got the petite physique and voice to match. Since Lucy was the vice president of a regional Dolly Parton fan club until a few years ago, their paths crossed on a regular basis. It’s hard for me not to believe that my friendship with Ellen wasn’t somehow fated long before we were born, back when Dolly was still a poor nobody in Tennessee. Like El was some kind of gift that Lucy had always meant for me.

  It wasn’t just the look of Dolly that drew us in. It was the attitude that came with knowing how ridiculous people thought she looked, but never changing a thing because she felt good about herself. To us, she is . . . invincible.