Forget about the other employees; they had their own friends from their own training classes. Friends that they guarded like gold bullion. Shelia thought she hadn’t really made a friend in years, though she craved the connection. Just a few nights like the night outside her grandmother’s as a child, bats circling a lofted basketball high in the air almost all the way to the dirt when the circle of them swooped back up just in time to miss the smack of the ground. Shelia would stand outside with her cousins and listen to the sound of the crenellated wings, flapping like crazy, making her ache with fear. But this moment she remembered with happiness. She and her cousins and neighborhood friends screaming at the bats loud and together in the night.
“Hurry up, I’ve got to show you something,” Wendy said.
As soon as Shelia opened the stall door, Wendy had her hand out displaying a ring shaped like an amoeba with dirty-looking chips of diamonds or glass in a shiny setting.
“Wow,” Shelia said, but she meant why and reached out to touch Wendy’s hand.
“Wash your hands, girl,” Wendy snatched her hand back.
“That’s pretty,” Shelia said, concentrating on the lather on her hands so she didn’t have to see Wendy’s reflection in the restroom mirror. “Sorry it took me a minute, I had a long call.”
“Can you believe it?” Wendy said admiring her ring. “It’s not a usual shape.”
Shelia glanced at her own ring, a small quarter-carat stone, milky now from soap and lotion buildup. Not big, but real, she’d helped pick it out not yet a year ago. She could have done without one and would have if Polo hadn’t insisted. He was a good man overall. They’d moved from their hometown, and now Polo was in college getting a degree in business. Who cared if he sat and talked with his friends, a lot of them women, laughing like fools about things Shelia couldn’t know about and that never translated when they tried to explain, “Oh, you had to be there,” they’d hoot. But she was there. Standing right there. Shelia would work full-time now, but soon, it would be her turn. Soon, when Polo graduated, when Polo found a job, when Polo got established just a little, Shelia would get everything she wanted. And she believed it mostly. Except for the evenings at the tiny apartment, the unmade, fold-out couch for a bed, no cute bric-a-brac or books cocked just so on top of polished wood, no smiling faces from honeymoon pictures or matching china, but more layers of mess. Each room more junked than the last. Clothes, shoes, and the bags from the fast food they lived on strewn in every direction. We’re busy, Shelia tried to tell herself so she wouldn’t think that she was living her real life, just rehearsing. But she could hold out. Forget the picture of her second day of work, tears running in rivulets down her face, no sobbing, not at all, but tears coming with a force she couldn’t control. She told Betsy and the others in the training group that she had terrible allergies, “This happens every once in a while,” she’d said.
“But Shelia,” Betsy’d said, “your eyes are clear as day.”
“DARRYL TOLD ME he had me a surprise, but I never expected this.”
“It’s nice,” Shelia said.
“I needed to tell you that we are going away this weekend so we can’t come over.” Shelia worked with Wendy for eight months, and she’d never seen Darryl except from a distance from the car when he came to pick Wendy up in the afternoons. He was shy or tired or sick or leaving town or just coming back into town, months’ worth of reasons why they could never get together or why Wendy could not leave the house by herself. Shelia’d planned to clean the apartment, really clean, set a table, eat a meal like grown-ups, like nice people are supposed to do. The knowledge that now there was no reason to do that made Shelia unsteady on her feet.
Wendy’s pancake makeup was smeared on the bodice of her dress, all over the sleeves, but she seemed not to see it and concentrated on her hair.
“You been in here long?” Shelia managed.
“A couple minutes,” Wendy sighed, giving up on more compliments on the ring. “Do you like my hair better like this or with the bangs?”
There was no right answer. Her bangs rarely sat on her forehead and were as flat and unmanageable as cardboard, but on the other hand, the bob looked lacquered like an ear flap hat. She had ugly hair made uglier by the helmet styles she chose. Shelia wondered if she was thinking like a white person. All her life she had heard people tell other black people that they were acting white or thinking white—some had even said it about her. Shelia had always dismissed the idea as a phoney, convenient insult to hurl because it couldn’t be defended. It had not occurred to Shelia until now that a part of it might be true.
“Either way,” Shelia said and avoided Wendy’s eyes and smoothed her own hair back into a ponytail.
“Don’t clown me. Answer.”
“I’m not playing with you,” Shelia said and tried not to sound annoyed. “The bangs, I guess.” Wendy combed bangs across her forehead into a large curl while Shelia watched. The two of them had minutes together at most. There was no time to waste.
“Do you remember Bathsheba from the Bible?” Shelia asked.
“Bathsheba? Wasn’t she the one who turned into salt?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“That was her. God told her not to turn around, but she did and turned into a pillar of salt. That’s a screwed-up story.”
“No, that wasn’t Bathsheba,” Shelia said louder than she meant to.
“You’re in a mood, aren’t you?” Wendy began. “Angie get on your nerves?”
“I’m used to her,” Shelia said, though she wasn’t and never would be. Shelia had never before been yelled at like a trained animal. She hated Wendy for reminding her of the moment.
“Well, you’ll get a better ring. It took Darryl two years to come up with this one,” Wendy smiled, looking at her new ring.
Shelia glanced at herself in the mirror. There are few moments of cold, clear-eyed intelligence in life. Moments you will not have to return to, to reconstruct, to examine or dissect for motivation or meaning, uncomplicated by trauma or love or savage indifference. Shelia felt this moment acutely like the first merciless dive into cold water. Years later, the feeling would return to her with clarity and pain like a slap, making her sick with her own cruel impulses.
“What’s on your arm?” Shelia said in almost a whisper, pointing to Wendy’s wrist.
“Makeup,” Wendy quickly shifted her cuff down to cover her wrist. She wet a towel and began grinding her thick brown foundation into the fabric.
“No, Wendy,” Shelia began, her voice cracked. “I saw something,” Shelia stared at Wendy in the mirror.
Wendy tried to adjust her dress and sleeves, not sure whether she could trust that Shelia had seen nothing.
“Makeup, I said,” Wendy snapped and looked at Shelia’s eyes in the mirror. Shelia would have to wrestle Wendy to the ground to see her naked arm.
Shelia saw herself yank up Wendy’s sleeve. She could imagine the red and purple marks in various stages of healing, multicolored swirls like a van Gogh sky, all over Wendy’s body. When they both saw it, they could stare it down and call it what it was. But Shelia knew she wouldn’t wrestle Wendy for a truth neither of them wanted.
“Maybe I’m wrong,” Shelia said and wanted to take back her delight in Wendy’s pain. That wasn’t who she was at all, not at the bone. “I like your ring, really,” but the incredulity of how anyone could go to a jewelry store or pawn shop and choose that ugly little reminder of love’s acceptances was all over Shelia’s face.
“You got here so late, we don’t have any time left.” Wendy moved toward the door, her eyes downcast. Wendy was angry, but she would recover. There was nobody out there she could talk to either.
Shelia waited behind the closed door to give Wendy a few seconds’ head start back to their phone stations. Shelia felt tiny and bitter like early fruit. But she tried to think of the happy days she rode with her mother to pick up her daddy at Plant 3. She loved to hear the whistle that marked the end of the shift, mostly b
ecause only seconds later her father and his friends, all young men then, in their twenties and thirties, but even some of the old-timers, streamed through the double doors of the furniture factory, running like the place was on fire, running to their rides and their waiting wives and girlfriends, relief and sawdust on their faces. Shelia loved the flood of the men spreading out in all directions except back inside. Few things had been better than the breathless moment when she picked out her father from the group, the seconds she waited all day for, this uncomplicated joy. But no vision would come.
Shelia counted to five and opened the door to the ladies’ room. Just over an hour and a half to go. She could do that on her head. Of course she could pick up her bag, her book, and walk the couple of miles to her apartment. Start over in some lesser-known place. Nothing kept her tethered and trapped like a yard dog on a short chain. But unless you are there and have lived it, don’t you dare talk about how the door both opens and closes. Or how it is as simple to find the way to someplace else as it is to walk the few carpeted steps back to the cubicle, back to the headphones and the next caller in the queue.
Highway 18
As usual, we weren’t exactly doing what you might call good business at Holly Acres, and as usual, I was slouched in the doorway on the phone with Maggie Rogers. I knew that I should make some Jehovah’s Witness friends and I wanted to, but Maggie and I clicked. We’d park and watch from lookouts on Brushy Mountain Road the few twinkles of amber light in our tiny town below. We had the same sense of humor and the same inability to appreciate our peers. When Wendy Jenkins jazz-danced at our school assembly to “The Entertainer,” Maggie said that was all she ever needed to know of hell. Still I knew that one day, we would have to part the ways, me as a real Jehovah’s Witness with only Jehovah’s Witness friends and she with her own friends in college or miles away in one of the cities she’d lived in when her dad was in what their family called his uncertain phase. For now, I needed someone to talk to and talk as long as I pleased. In a few minutes, Matt’s chubby girlfriend with the black mane of hair she touched to make sure you noticed it, would show up and hijack him to her mother’s Impala. Tim, the cook, was already smoking whatever he had handy behind the Dumpsters. Without Maggie, I’d just be standing around here alone, waiting for the imaginary rush of customers with their stock-exchange money raised in the air walking out with brightly colored boxes of chicken like department-store gifts.
“Damn, there’s the whore,” Matt yelled. I’d learned to ignore him, and I would have then if I hadn’t been supposed to work the cash register. If I had a dollar for every girl he called a whore, a dyke, a loser, a bitch, I’d quit this job and watch television reruns like any self-respecting teenager in the 1980s. Matt spotted a good-looking woman, knew he was minutes from rejection, and lashed out first. But Shelby was a working girl, so they said, the real deal waltzing into Holly Acres chicken like anybody else.
“I gotta go,” I whispered into the receiver, not waiting for Maggie to reply. I’d call her later. We talked mornings on the way to school, every day in our classes, evenings while I worked, and at night after my shift was over. Tonight I would actually have something to tell her.
“Somebody’s going to hear you one of these days,” I said, glaring in Matt’s direction.
“I want them to hear. Hell, people need a little bit of truth,” he chuckled, looking around for Tim to hyena-laugh with him. I rolled my eyes. Matt would die standing there, if anyone dared share any real truth about him.
By the time I got behind my register, Shelby was already in the restaurant hunched into the refrigerator like if she searched hard enough she might find buried treasure, her shorts inched up on her legs revealing the soft W of her bare behind. Shelby didn’t look at me or at Matt but held to the light, like a jeweler, a couple of the see-through containers of mashed-potato salad and a few sad desserts. Kentucky Fried Chicken had the monopoly on takeout chicken in our town, and our particular tastes just couldn’t compete. Besides, our stuff wasn’t very good. Shelby placed a container of slaw on the counter. I should’ve warned her. Our trash was full of untouched, unexpired slaw. The nicest thing we heard from customers about it was it had a “funny taste.” Shelby stretched, lifted her skinny arms above her head, the expanse of exposed white belly growing before our eyes. She could have been a porn star or in a better world the most popular girl at Central High.
“Hey, Shelby,” Matt crooned, managing to sound both nasty and stupid.
“Hey there,” Shelby said. If I didn’t already know Matt, I would have thought she was glad to see him.
“Well, who are you?” Shelby teased, leaned in my direction against the counter. She was just tall enough that her boobs had a convenient shelf.
“I’m fine,” I said, though I quickly realized that I’d answered the wrong question.
She was pretty close up, not a porn-star hard face at all, but delicate with a twitching bunny mouth. I’m not sure what I was expecting, maybe some reptile deadness in the eyes, maybe a world-weary sigh at every mundane little thing. I don’t know, but she surprised me. If this were a bad movie, I would have rubbed both eyes with my fists not sure of what I was seeing.
“Are you new?” Shelby’s accent was thick, a farmer’s daughter from the tired jokes.
“Not really,” I said. I’d been working for two years. Nearly every shift, sometimes as much as a full-time job during the week, but I’d never seen Shelby in the restaurant or anywhere else in town. But no way you could spend much time in Carboro without hearing about her. I’d wanted to get a good look at the woman who did that. In our small Southern town not much stayed secret. The latest rumor was that Jamie Johnson, the blackest boy in school, had tried to pick Shelby up at Margie’s, the black nightclub in town. Shelby, perched on a bar stool like a little white bird, her blonde hair crested and fluffed, most of her pale legs exposed like she was comfortable, like she belonged there. Jamie bought her a drink, while the other men waved encouragement. I’m sure they must have thought it hilarious that this black ugly boy thought somebody was interested. How embarrassed he’d been to find out she wasn’t for real and that nothing she said or did could be trusted.
“Baby drumsticks, honey, with a little cup of barbeque sauce, okay?” Shelby said.
I was about to call the order over my shoulder but Matt must have gone to get Tim, and both of them were standing there looking dumber than usual. I could only see them from the waist up, the top halves of their bodies in the opening where we put the orders, looking like redneck puppet theater. They were fine, good boys, I guess. If you ignore that they turned anything into sex. Don’t get them started about the size and heft of the taters, the ooze of dish-washing liquid into the larger-than-life tubs they washed the trays in. I laughed at them at first, in the girl way, Stop it, ya’ll are so gross. But it got old fast. About the ninth time I saw Matt put chicken breasts on his own flat chest, prance and mince around the cooking area, it just wasn’t funny anymore.
Matt fumbled in the chicken warmer for the drumsticks. The crinkle of the stiff paper we used to catch most of the grease underneath sounded like he was fumbling for Valentine candy. He grabbed a few baby drums, shook the large metal tater tray, shifting the fried taters side-to-side, shaking up the potatoes to keep the flour from sticking under the hot warmer light, in a way I’m sure he thought manly. Usually Matt would hand me the orders, but there he came, rounding the corner to the front counter, without his paper hat.
“This is for you, baby,” Matt held onto the box but inched it closer and closer to Shelby across the counter.
She didn’t reach out to take it but watched Matt’s face, her expression flat, her eyes clear and unblinking.
“I’m playing with you, baby,” Matt said as he sent the box toward her chest like he’d loosed a wind-up car. “Here then,” Matt waited, hoping Shelby would say she was sorry, that he was hilarious after all.
“Thank you, honey,” Shelby smiled at me. “I’m going
to eat it here.”
Shelby took the first booth in the dining room, the only table I could see from behind the counter. She twisted one leg under the other on the cheap pressed-wood bench and spread her paper napkin in her lap picnic style.
IT WAS AS GOOD A TIME as any to wipe down the tables in the narrow dining room. I grabbed the lump of soapy rag we kept on the shelf under the cash register and tried not to meet Shelby’s eyes. The cheap industrial carpet in front of the bathroom doors had worn thin, making the floor look dirty no matter how many times we vacuumed. Nobody cared. We all understood that this job wouldn’t last, that one day in the not-so-distant future we would pass by this very building, that would then be a Tantastic or Yount Insurance, without even a flutter of recognition. The only real believer was our fool manager: “If you have time to lean, you have time to clean,” she’d snarl, if she saw you idle. Too many times I had to clean the tater-prep area, my ragged finger in the slimy joints and crevices of the two-tiered pan. Or worse, I had to scrub the wire chicken racks the boys dunked into the washing-machine-sized fryers, my brush grazing the surface, crusted grease and skin flying upward like welder’s fire.
I wiped the tables and seats down my side to Shelby so I could see if she made motions to leave.
“You go to West Wilkes?” Shelby said.
I nodded to her.
“That’s good, you should stay in school,” Shelby ate her chicken wings like a rabbit, with the tips of the fingers on both hands.
“Where did you go? To school, I mean,” I said, wrapping the rag around my hand like a boxer.
“Who cares,” Shelby smiled between chews. “All I know is I’m getting the hell out of this town. I can tell you that much,” Shelby said. “I’m thinking Florida. Someplace warm. Never been there though,” Shelby stopped and gestured with her chicken wing. “I did go to Georgia when I was five with my daddy and his sister. Most of it I don’t remember.”
“I’ve got a cousin in Atlanta, but she hates it,” I said. I couldn’t think of anything else to add. I’d never been anywhere either.
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