Keeping Secrets

by Sarah Shankman

  “You shut up, Jake. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Goddammit!” he began. Emma knew he was just warming up. This was like the old days, all those other trips in the car. But this time she was driving.

  “If you-all are going to yell,” she said, “I’m gonna pull this car off on the side of the road and stop.”

  Rosalie opened her mouth and then reconsidered.

  Emma heard the echo of her own voice, sounding like she was the mother. But that’s what had been happening for some time now, this sideways slipping of power, creeping from their hands to her own, as if they’d left it lying on the ground for her to pick up. At seventeen, she thought, I’m Big Momma of us all.

  After the burst of yelling there was silence for the next thirty miles, except for Rosalie’s hiccuping and a couple of times she blew her nose.

  Nobody cares about my feelings, not even at my own mother’s funeral, Rosalie thought.

  In the backseat, Jake did the thing he did best: he sulked. He’d show Rosalie. He wouldn’t say another word for the next seven days. He’d sit his own private shivah for Miss Virgie.

  Miss Virgie’d been a nice old woman, he thought. And before she lost her mind she’d made a hell of a chocolate pie. It was too bad she’d never taught Rosalie how to cook. But nobody could teach Rosalie anything. No, Jake said to himself, as he’d said so many times the past seventeen years, Rosalie knew it all.

  The silent thirty miles stretched slowly across the better part of an hour. Highway 80 was the main street of every little town. It poked along, widening and narrowing, giving the local folks a chance to stare. Old men, closer to their own last parade than they wished, looked somber and tipped sweat-stained felt hats.

  In Grambling, a little colored boy had goggle-eyed the hearse and fumbled a sign at his chest, not exactly a cross. Voodoo, Emma thought. Then he’d mouthed the word, clear as day. Cadillac.

  Emma smiled to herself. Did Grandma Virgie ever think she’d get to ride in a Cadillac?

  Well, I’m going to, she thought. And not after I’m dead, either. When I’m somebody, I’m going to come back to West Cypress and show all those snotty girls in Delta Beta, all those girls with forty-two color-coordinated-to-their-sweaters-and-skirts net petticoats. I’ll drive through the two blocks of downtown West Cypress, then over to Cypress, waving at them from a red Coupe de Ville. I’ll wear my hair up in a twist and dress all in black.

  But for now, for today, a ride in J.D.’s state-trooper car would do. She thought about his promise to take her out for a drive in Sweetwell later. A little shiver made her shoulders hunch. She bet J.D. knew all the back roads. He probably knew every piece of gravel in the whole northern half of the state—as well as she knew this road to Sweetwell where her grandma used to live.

  Near Arcadia was a dirt road that trailed off at the edge of town. She craned her neck every time they drove past, looking for the splotches of red, though she knew they’d been washed away years ago from that place where the federal agents had riddled Bonnie and Clyde.

  How exciting their lives must have been, saying the hell with it, grabbing up handfuls of their hearts’ desire. Robbing banks, driving hell-bent for leather to make their getaways, holing up, making love.

  Emma’s outer eye checked the road ahead then. All was clear.

  She could floorboard the Studebaker like Bonnie and pass J.D. in his trooper car, daring him to chase her to who knows where with blaring sirens, flashing blue lights. Her inner eye imagined what he would do with her once he caught her. She didn’t have any bags of green, gold and silver booty to recover. What would Mr. Lawman take instead for his reward?

  She shifted in her seat then.

  “Are you tired?” Rosalie broke the silence. “I can drive for a while.”

  “Nope. I’m fine.” Fine indeed. If Momma only knew what she was thinking, and about her cousin, she’d slap her face hard.

  Did Rosalie ever even think about sex? Emma was sure they didn’t do it. She had listened at her parents’ bedroom door for years, rifled their medicine chest and dresser drawers. Not a shred of evidence.

  All she’d ever found were old pictures that neither of them would ever talk about.

  “Who is this,” she’d ask, “and that?”, pointing at a photograph of a woman with light-brown hair in a brown-and-white polka-dot dress. She had a pretty smile and looked, as the old joke went, a little bit pregnant.

  There were so many things they wouldn’t discuss, as if life were nothing more than gas bills, supper and the present. They’d never talk about the past.

  And sex: Emma had never heard either one of them even say the word. But then she guessed Rosalie thought there was no need to voice the Southern Baptist assumption that a girl would remain intact until her wedding night. She wondered what Jews thought about that, for she had finally gotten her father to say that he was Jewish, but that admission was the end of that. She certainly wasn’t going to be able to get him to talk about sex if she couldn’t get him to talk about Jews. At least she had her boyfriend Bernie’s father, Herman, to ask.

  Suddenly the little Studebaker shuddered as an eighteen-wheeler roared past. Emma tried to catch a glimpse of the trucker. Now, there was a life of adventure she’d like to know more about.

  Sometimes she wondered whether Bernie, who no more believed in Jesus or sin than she did, had been brainwashed by Rosalie. Had her mother’s ideas concentrated themselves into little green rays, glowing in the dark like the Green Skeleton of Emma’s childhood nightmares, crawled into the car where she and Bernie sat behind windows fogged by their hot breath? That was ridiculous, she knew, but they’d had their hands in each other’s pants for over a year now. Yet Bernie, only inches away from the prize, hesitated still.

  Emma had thought about it a long time and had decided that their mutual virginity was a bore, one of those conventions that people in places like West Cypress insisted upon. She’d read books. She knew that people had been doing it out of wedlock for years in places like Paris, Rome, New York. Besides, so far, what she’d experienced with Bernie had been fun.

  “Come on, Bern,” she said to him, “take me.”

  “Not in the front seat of my car.”

  “Then let’s get in the back.”

  “Very funny, Emma. I keep telling you, I want it to be special. That’s why we have the Fund—to take us to New Orleans and the Hotel Monteleone.”

  “The Fund, Bern, is going to do me a lot of good as a petrified virgin in an old folks’ home.” Patience was not a trait that Emma had yet developed; in fact, she never would. “Who ever heard of a savings account dedicated to fucking?”

  She knew Bernie didn’t like it when she talked like that. The truth of it was, Emma thought, Bernie was just chicken. They’d practiced the preliminaries over and over like his basketball drills so that he had them down pat. But put him in the game for the big play, he choked.

  Don’t be ugly, Emma, she reminded herself. Isn’t that what her daddy would say? Not about this, though. She glanced at him in the backseat, dozing. Don’t be ugly, don’t be mean. Don’t be cruel. She could just hear Elvis singing that. She wished there were a radio in the car, but Rosalie didn’t believe in such extravagance.

  “You don’t get in a car to have a good time,” was how she put it. Oh, Momma, Emma thought, if you only knew.

  Elvis knew—that you shouldn’t be cruel to a heart that was true. Was Bemie’s heart true? Of course. She had no reason to doubt him.

  And yours, Miss Emma? Is your heart true blue? Is that why you want to take Bernie into your body, because your heart is so filled with love for him?

  She didn’t know. How did you know what love was? Emma didn’t feel like she’d had a lot of practice with it. She did know she loved getting dressed up for the dances they went to. She loved getting out of the house. She loved having someone to call her own. And when Bernie went away that one summer, she longed for him, and the longing was sweet. Was
that what love was?

  But if she loved Bernie, if she really loved him, why did she get bored with him sometimes? Why did she wonder how she might feel about all the other boys she might meet, out there, somewhere, who hadn’t grown up in West Cypress? And most of all, why did goose bumps pop up all over her flesh yesterday when J.D. slipped a broad hand around her waist and whispered, “Tomorrow, let me take you for a ride.”

  She thought a lot about J.D. and his curling lip, always had since she was a little girl and caught him under a ladder in the barn at Momma Virgie’s, looking up the wide legs of her shorts.

  And now he was leading this procession across the whole northern half of the state with his blue light flashing in defiance of his mother, Aunt Nancy, who, having had her funeral for Miss Virgie in Pearl Bank, had stayed home.

  Up ahead in his spick-and-span clean black-and-white car, J.D. pushed his state-trooper hat back, easing it off the wide red mark it left on his forehead. Because the mark reminded him of the stigmata his father wore, the sun-reddened neck and arms sticking out from his snow-white torso, the sign of a man who worked out-of-doors, he’d leave the hat off for the rest of the drive.

  * * *

  The Sweetwell Baptist reminded Emma of her Uncle England’s church where she’d sung “Sweet Hour of Prayer” when she was a little girl. It was small and plain and poor, the dark-brown pews scarred with the boots of generations of little boys who’d rather have been outside. The mint-green walls were peeling.

  It was different from St. Jude’s, where until yesterday she’d attended the only funeral of her life when one of the Catholic neighbor children had passed too close to a kerosene stove. She loved St. Jude’s stained glass, the gold, the lace of the altar cloth, the sharp musty smell of incense that somehow made her think of small furry animals burrowing in the ground. The Southern Baptist Convention did not subscribe to such pomp or passion and wrinkled its collective nose at the actuality of frankincense and myrrh.

  There was, however, that once that the Baptist Church had come alive for Emma—when Ricardo Martinez had come to preach a revival at West Cypress Baptist. Ricardo Martinez, dressed in pink and black. Ricardo Martinez with the shining dark eyes and the beautiful black hair.

  Rosalie began snuffling loudly and Jake shifted in his creaking pew, bringing Emma back from that Baptist church to this one. In front of them, J.D. turned to see what was going on. Or that was what he made it look like—curiosity and concern. But Emma caught the glance he gave her, the glance from beneath long dark lashes that made her knees go soft and warm.

  That’s who J.D. looked like, she thought. Ricardo Martinez. And both of them looked like Elvis.

  She knew Elvis was white trash from Tupelo across the Mississippi state line, but ever since she’d seen him on the TV she’d thought, If that’s trash, I’ll take a dump truck full.

  Ricardo Martinez had made her feel that same way, that brown-skinned Mexican man of God who’d come to lead the West Cypress First Baptist revival meeting when she was twelve years old.

  When he preached, pounding brown fists on the pulpit, his voice had raised her to the heights and then dropped her into chasms where the hellfire and brimstone glowed. Up and down, his baritone rhythms went, up and down. After the sermon he had sweated through his jacket and leaned heavily against the pulpit, spent. Then he issued the invitation, a personal invitation, to come to him and yield, and in so doing to give oneself to the Lord.

  Emma had never believed a word she’d heard in all those years she’d been made to attend the First Baptist Church. She’d begged her daddy to take her across town where she’d heard there was a synagogue, where it would be different, wouldn’t he please, but no, he shook his head, your momma says no one would like you then, I’m sorry, Emma, no.

  And suddenly this same Emma had found herself standing up and marching right down that West Cypress First Baptist aisle just like she believed in the Lord and was willing to take him as her personal savior, which she did not and had no intention of doing. But when Ricardo begged her in that hoarse honeyed voice to come to him, she hadn’t seen that she had any choice.

  A deacon had led her behind the pulpit and up a little stair where she took off most of her clothes and put on a long white gown. She stood with Ricardo in front of the whole congregation in the baptismal, which was like a big fish tank half filled with cool water. The curtain was pulled back so everybody could watch, and she wondered whether her robe had floated up. Were her panties showing? With every eye in the whole congregation watching and some mouths working, “Do Jesus, praise the Lord,” Ricardo took her in his arms and said, “Just relax, this isn’t going to hurt.” She was dizzy with her faith in his words. He pulled her close. She could smell his sweet breath. Then he plunged her beneath the cool water. One hand was under her back, the other over her nose. But she held her breath, which she’d never learned to do in the Cypress Natatorium. She held her breath and prayed that he would hold her in his arms forever.

  But all too soon he lifted her, her hair streaming, and gave her the kiss of Christian fellowship in the middle of her forehead. The spell was broken. He released her from his grasp and from his thrall.

  After that her friends had wanted to know what it felt like to be truly saved, and Emma said it felt like being in love. They could have thought she meant being in love with the Lord. The Sunday School teachers talked a lot about that. But Emma’s friends knew her too well and gave her funny looks. Emma, the word went, was a little weird. She knew she was. For one thing, she asked herself a week later when she’d had time to dry off and cool down, how many baptized half-Jews could there be in this town?

  Rosalie had been so proud of her. Jake had said nothing, shrugged and frowned. This last year when she told Bernie the story, he’d said, “You mean you did it because the preacher turned you on?”

  “Sure, Bern. Why else would I do it?”

  Why else indeed? Just like now. Why else would she be staring at the back of J.D.’s head as if she were going to burn holes through it?

  Finally the preacher finished what was the second tribute to her grandmother’s life, a life long and good (and hard), that Emma had heard in as many days. The organist played “The Old Rugged Cross,” one of Virgie’s favorites, as the congregation filed by the open casket for one last look, thank God, the very last look at Virgie Norris’s remains.

  After the burial in the churchyard next to the grandfather Emma had never known, J.D. brushed past her and whispered, “Come with me in my car, now.”

  Emma nodded. It took her fewer than two minutes to get Rosalie and Jake tucked into the backseat of Aunt Florence’s Oldsmobile.

  “Aunt Flo’s driven all the way here by herself. We ought to keep her company on the way to the dinner,” she’d said, slamming the back door, glancing off the front, and then bouncing in a ricochet away.

  “I’m gonna come along with J.D.,” she called, just as the black-and-white car pulled up. J.D. threw the passenger door open, and one, two, even quicker than that, Emma slipped inside. They were Bonnie and Clyde, making their getaway. Rosalie gave her an openmouthed look that said an awful lot without any words, but Emma’s practiced eyes went guileless and clear in return. Then J.D. stepped on it, and they were gone. Emma blew a kiss as they hit the boundary of the churchyard. As a little girl she’d sent away for one, and only one, picture of a movie star—because, like herself, she had blonde curls. Blow a kiss, she was sure that was what Betty Grable would do.

  * * *

  It was forty-five minutes since they’d watched that white casket lower, wobbly, into a fresh hole. J.D., who did indeed make it his professional business to know every back road in the northern half of the state, had them parked under a big cypress tree. On one side was a deep bayou and on the other a cotton field. Nothing except the two of them was moving, as far as Emma could see.

  And moving they were. J.D., a grown man with none of Bernie’s reticence, was unafraid of speed.

 
“J.D., I swear! Slow down!” Emma protested as he cut off the ignition and grinned, kissed her, tenderly at first, then with an insistent tongue. Next he grabbed the hem of her green-and-black watch plaid dress and pulled it straight over her head.

  “Why?” he laughed, his big but clever fingers stripping off her white cotton underwear. “Is someone around here giving out speeding tickets?”

  He did slow down for a minute, though, long enough to grab a blanket out of the trunk and spread it in the grass right beside the water.

  Emma stopped in midflight and stared at yet darker smears on the blanket’s midnight blue.

  “What’s the matter?” J.D. teased. “You afraid of a little nigger blood?”

  Emma frowned and was opening her mouth to speak her mind when J.D. grabbed her so hard the little curls of hair on his chest left imprints on hers.

  “Now, don’t you start lecturing me about the niggers, Emma,” he warned. “Fancy airs you put on for such a skinny gal.” And then he tickled her in the ribs. “That’s what comes of Aunt Rosalie marrying a Yankee. That’s what my momma always says.”

  “Momma, momma, momma.” Emma laughed and pushed J.D. (who let her) back on the blue blanket and sat on him as if she were strong enough to keep him down. “Momma, momma,” she sang again.

  The only idea they’d ever agreed on was that both their mothers were crazy, unless, of course, you counted as an agreement their as yet unspoken but mutual desire for each other’s flesh.

  “Don’t worry about the blood,” he whispered into her ear a little while later after he’d taken his tongue out of it. “It was just a joke. But I think it’s time we added your cherry to it, if you haven’t already given it to that boy Bernie.”

  Emma just smiled. That was for her to know and for him to find out.

  Something rustled just then in the tall grass. Emma started and sat up.

  “Never mind,” J.D. said, and reached across her. His hard cock bobbled against her cheek as he stretched for his brown twill pants.