I had to listen carefully, and he had to tell a story with an ending so inevitable that I would then be able to tell him the first half of his story. Not only able to—forced to. The end had to come out of one possible beginning.
I’d never get the story exactly as he had imagined it. He’d have five plot points in mind, and he’d get a point for every one of them I had to use to get to his beginning. If I found a narrative path around one of his plot points, I got a point. If I said anything that contradicted something he had told me, he could stop me and I would have to go back. After I told the first half, he’d tally up the points. Then I’d tell him mine.
By the time we’d played three rounds, we were almost through Nashville. I was so tired that things were starting to look a bit surreal in the fading light. The edges of objects in my peripheral vision were running together. I was supposed to drive the last leg of the trip, as I had much better night vision than Burr, but I didn’t see how I could do it.
“I think we should stop for the night,” I said. “I haven’t been sleeping well with this trip looming over me, and I’m scared I’ll run us off the road. Let’s get a couple of hotel rooms and drive the last leg in the morning. I can call Aunt Flo from the hotel. She won’t care. She’d rather me be a day late than dead in a ditch.”
“Sure, baby,” said Burr.
I said, “I’m not putting off your meeting them. I really am too tired to drive.”
“I didn’t accuse you of anything,” Burr said. “I know you’re not looking forward to this. But if we’re serious, then I have to meet your family sometime.”
“We’re here, aren’t we?” I shot back.
“Yes, but let’s not pretend this trip is all about me and what I want, Lena. There are other factors at work here.” He kept his eyes on the road and added, “Maybe your family will surprise you. If they get to know me, maybe you and I can change their attitude.”
“Right,” I said brightly. “It would happen just that way if this was a sitcom. Very special episode. Come on, Burr. This is real life. You can’t stick a quarter in someone and push their nose and get any candy bar you like. People don’t work that way. I mean, sure, there is cause and effect, but it isn’t predictable.”
“So you don’t think a traumatic or even joyful event can make a difference in a person’s life? You don’t believe in revelation or epiphany?”
“I think people have epiphanies all the time. Usually they’re worthless. Maybe two percent of the time, someone may decide to change some aspect of their behavior. It’s like Paul on the road to Damascus. Here’s this anal-retentive control freak who likes to run around and persecute Christians. So God knocks him down and blinds him and reams him out. So he stops persecuting Christians. But—go read him. He was still an anal-retentive control freak. He changed his behavior, but I don’t believe people can change their essential natures. The things that happen to me just make me more me.”
Burr didn’t answer. After a few minutes, he said, “There’s a Courtyard off this next exit, how does that suit you?”
“Fine, if you’re paying,” I said. “Otherwise let’s hit the Red Roof.”
“I’m paying,” he said.
Burr checked us into adjoining rooms, and then he went to bring up our bags while I called for room service. I was too sleepy to go eat. We quietly ate club sandwiches in his room, and then I went through the adjoining door to mine. The rooms were pretty standard hotel fare: two double beds with a Monet print hanging above each bed. Water Lilies.
I felt sticky from being in the car all day, so I took a shower and then brushed my teeth and combed my wet hair. I changed into the soft T-shirt and leggings I’d brought to sleep in. Then I lay down in the double bed closest to the door between our rooms. We had left it cracked. Burr had a light on in there; he was reading. My eyes felt heated and gritty. I closed them, but still I couldn’t sleep.
I got back out of bed and opened the adjoining door, leaning in the frame. Burr was sitting up in the bed closest to me, with a couple of pillows propped up behind him. The bed was still made, and he was on top of the comforter, but he was wearing a white undershirt and a pair of pajama bottoms with lobsters all over them that I had given him for Christmas.
“I can hear you rustling around in here,” I said.
He put his book down on the bedside table and patted the open space beside him. “If you can’t sleep, come talk to me. I could hear you thinking in there.”
I lay down beside him on my back, and he slipped an arm around me. I rested my head on his chest. “What did you hear me thinking?”
“Not so much thinking,” he said, “as worrying. I can hear your gears grinding. Nervous about me meeting your family?”
“Of course I am,” I said. “Burr, we don’t talk much about it. This whole thing where I’m white and you’re black.”
“Because those are facts,” said Burr. “Here’s another fact: My car is a Blazer. We don’t spend a lot of time mulling that one over, either.”
“That’s because your car being a Blazer doesn’t have any consequences except a good warranty. Oh, save me from that. But you’re coming down to meet my family now, Burr. Just wanting to meet them, that says something. About us, about where we’re heading.”
Burr grinned. “Why, Ms. Fleet, are you asking me what my intentions are?”
I laughed. “I guess I am. I was thinking about that night we had that big fight and you almost broke up with me. I had this idea that you were going to propose to me at dinner. Was I way off base?”
He was silent, looking down at me. He turned on the pillow, scooting down until he was lying beside me and facing me, eye to eye. “Yeah, I was,” he said.
“Why didn’t you?” I asked. He smelled like Crest toothpaste, and under that I caught the warm smoky smell that was Burr.
“When I planned to ask you, I thought you’d say yes. Listening to you work over your aunt, I realized I didn’t know what you would say. You never do the little things that show a commitment. I wondered what made me think you’d do the biggest one.”
I thought about that for a minute. I reached into the small space between us and found his hand, taking it in mine, and said, “If we got married, things would be different. Not so much for me. I mean, my career is going to be academic, and half of them don’t care and the other half applaud our couplehood as a political statement.”
“That’s the white people,” said Burr. “Meanwhile, the black academics, half of them don’t care, and the other half see you as a white trophy bitch who has usurped the rightful place of a black woman.”
I laughed again. “I’d have to be prettier to qualify as a trophy bitch. I need longer legs and fake eyelashes. Maybe some fake boobs, too. Or any boobs, really.”
“You’re plenty pretty enough to be my trophy bitch,” said Burr. “Lena, I love you, but posit for a moment that love isn’t enough. Look at the big picture. We have the same religion, the same politics, we’re both careful with money, we both want at least two kids, and we’re best friends—that right there wipes out eighty percent of the possible divorce-level fights we could have. As soon as you discover what a god I am in bed, the other twenty percent goes out the window. That’s all the stuff that’s inside our house.
“The stuff that’s outside our house? Forget it. We’re used to it. We can bar the door and pull down our shades. It’ll be tougher if we get married. And tougher still if we have kids. But as long as it stays outside our house, we’ll be fine. I think you’re worth it, even if you didn’t have the sense to be born a Nubian goddess.”
I scooted towards him, wrapping my arms around him and burying my head in his chest. “You’re so smart, and you always say the exact right thing.”
“Good for me,” said Burr. “Now get back to your bed before I ravage you and ruin you before I have officially proposed.”
That reminded me of this story the youth minister’s wife told all the girls who came to the eighth-grade lock-in a
t Possett First Baptist Church. Clarice and I were there. In the story there was this beautiful young Baptist virgin, and she was engaged to a Baptist boy. The boy pressured her all the time to have sex, even though he knew it was wrong. He couldn’t help but ask, because he was a boy and therefore ruled by his genitalia and not responsible for his actions.
So she, like any good Baptist girl, decided to be responsible for both their actions and steadfastly said no and kept his hands below her knees or above her shoulders, as all good Baptist girls are taught to do from birth on.
The night before their wedding, they went out together to lie on a hill and look up at the stars, and he started pressuring her again. “Well,” she thought, “the wedding is tomorrow.” And she gave in. The next day her father walked her down the aisle, but there was no groom waiting at the end of it. Instead the best man read a note to her, aloud, in front of everyone. It said, “I can’t marry a whore who would have sex outside the bonds of marriage. I thought you were a better person than that.” The girl fainted and her life was ruined, the end.
The story made a huge impression on me at the time. I kept running it over and over in my head, the betrayal, the public humiliation. “Never, never,” vowed the girl who would later fuck her entire sophomore class, “no, never, will I have premarital sex.” Which of course was the youth minister’s wife’s whole freakin’ point.
The next night, as Clarice and I lay in our twin beds at home, I couldn’t get the story out of my head and go to sleep. I couldn’t stop seeing myself as the bride, standing there alone in my white dress, hearing that note read aloud to the entire town of Possett. I saw myself trying to stagger away, back up the aisle of Possett First Baptist. Then the congregation would rise as one and stone me to death.
“I can’t imagine how horrible it would be,” I whispered to Clarice, but that was a lie. In actuality, I was imagining it over and over, with me in the starring role.
“That girl was lucky,” said Clarice.
“Lucky?” I said.
“Oh my Lordy, yes, so lucky. What if she hadn’t done it with him? What if she’d actually married him and only found out way, way later when they had kids and she was totally stuck?”
“Found out what?” I said, not getting it.
“Found out that he was the kind of person who could do something so mean to someone he was supposed to love,” Clarice said.
I told the story to Burr, but by the end he was barely listening. He was smelling my hair and his hands were roving and I lost the thread of it. I caught his hands in my own, between us, and we were very close together. “Back, devil,” I said.
Burr growled like a bear. Then he took one of his hands out of mine and pointed emphatically at my room. But I did not move. My body, pressed close to his, was tired and limp and easy. I felt as malleable as warm wax. I thought, “Why not now, here, at a moment of my choosing.” If I chose it from this place, so quiet and still, it seemed possible that it could be nothing more than love and sin.
Burr was right when he said I had other reasons for going home. He was getting what he wanted, but it was incidental to my own agenda. I was on the way back to Possett, and once there, I planned to lie, so my deal with God was as good as broken. I let go of his hand and wound my arms around him and kissed him, pressing myself bonelessly into him, quiescent and pliable.
He said my name into my mouth, maybe as a warning, but I broke the kiss and said, “Do you really want to question this? Do you really want to have some sort of talk right now?”
He kissed me again and I took that for no. I let my hands run over his body and wound my legs around him. Something broke in him then, and he slid one arm under me, around my waist, pressing me up and into him. He was moving me, and I felt such strength in him, in the flex and retraction of the muscles under his liquid hot skin.
I looked up at him, stayed with him, although I felt sleepy and slow, as if I were half a beat behind as he was surging. There was pleasure in the heat of him against me and then in me, pleasure in his pleasure, and over it all, this blanketed feeling of safety, as if he were storming all around me but I was lying quietly in the eye, moving with him, painlessly alive and present.
After, we lay looking at each other in the light from the bedside lamp, solemnly, for quite some time. Then he reached over me and clicked it off. I closed my eyes and was almost instantly asleep.
CHAPTER 6
I SPENT THE last week of summer before my sophomore year at Fruiton High sitting in front of the television. When school started up again, I knew I would have to see Jim Beverly. He would be sauntering through the halls, passing out his easy grins like party favors. I’d smell his spoor in every room of the building. Even now, miles away from him, I couldn’t bear to think that he was somewhere alive in the world, breathing in and out, probably having a wonderful time torturing mice or beating up a baby.
A world with Jim Beverly in it was a constant wash of gray tones that shifted around me as the morning talk shows faded into a four-hour block of soap operas. The heated conversations about love and betrayal were white noise, mercifully blanketing my thoughts. One morning as I lay mutely on the rug, I happened to shift my dull gaze heavenward and gasped, my TV trance broken. There, in glorious Technicolor, glossy and thick, clinging to the ceiling by his six hairy feet, was the grandfather of all Alabama roaches.
In Chicago, when someone says, “Eeek, a roach!” they mean a prim little buglet is mincing its way up the wainscoting. In Alabama those same words mean something completely different.
I had never seen an Alabama roach when my mother and I moved back down to live with Aunt Florence, Uncle Bruster, and Clarice. I was just a kid. My second night in their house, I went into the hall bathroom to brush my teeth. Before, I remembered it had had kid wallpaper with fat baby dinosaurs scrubbing themselves in bubbly bathtubs. I guessed Aunt Florence had put the wallpaper up after she had Wayne. It had been primary colors, very boyish. But like his bedroom, the whole bathroom had been purged of anything remotely Wayne-like. The walls were now a soothing mental-institution pink, and the dinosaur shower curtain had been replaced by a pink plastic liner. On the floor was a loopy throw rug. It was striped in bright pink and blue and yellow and shaped like a tropical fish. The floor was made of tiny white tiles, like rows and rows of square teeth, scrubbed so aggressively that the grout between was almost as white as the tiles.
I opened the drawer by the sink and saw that Clarice had Angel Gel toothpaste. This was a kid toothpaste, new on the market. My mother, back in the days when she bought toothpaste, always bought regular old Crest. Angel Gel was pale pink and opalescent, and I squirted a generous measure onto my brush.
Something caught my eye, a large black spot on the Pepto-Bismol hand towel. Just as I looked towards it, the spot launched itself, spreading, shooting towards me with a buzzing, mechanical hiss. It landed on my toothbrush. Its mouth unfolded, separating into four parts, and it clipped a neat slice out of my pink toothpaste.
I threw the toothbrush away from me, hard, and then the whole world went into slo-mo. I watched the toothbrush spinning through the air, and as it fell, the creature clinging to its tip launched itself off the bristles, spreading its wings again and zooming in agonizing detail towards my head.
I fled shrieking down the hall, and that was my introduction to the Alabama roach, also known as a palmetto bug. Ever since that moment I have hated them with a black passion. The thought that one might touch me while I was sleeping, or run over my foot as I walked upstairs, haunted my summers.
This one, now on the den ceiling, was close to four inches long. He was hanging upside down right over my face.
I rolled quickly away and ran for the kitchen. I had the house to myself. Uncle Bruster was on his mail route. Aunt Florence was out working in her huge vegetable garden, where she spent most of her mornings. This was before she thought to put a lock on the cabinet where Mama’s meds were kept, so she had dragged Mama down to the garden to keep an
eye on her.
Clarice was sunbathing in the yard. She had wanted me to lie out with her, but I had chosen to mope inside, pale and sweating in three layers of black clothes.
On top of the refrigerator, Aunt Florence kept a noxious green spray bottle full of a solution called Dead Roach. It’s always been my theory that Alabama roaches are organized. The poisoned ones run home so their families can eat them while they’re dying. The babies take tiny bites, ingesting enough to get a resistance to whatever killed Daddy. But they couldn’t resist Dead Roach. It was vicious. Warnings all over the back label advised that its fumes alone could blind you and the actual liquid could melt human flesh. If a pregnant woman came within fifty feet of it, she would probably bear a child with fangs and chitinous wings.
I ran back into the den with it and sprayed up, coating the monster. He shivered and clung and then fell to the floor. I kept spraying him as he ran in ever decreasing circles. I saturated the rug. The cloying burnt-sugar smell of poison clouded the entire room. But still he kept crawling, around and around, his movements disjointed, like the lurching of a cheaply made windup toy. He was dying by inches, and it seemed to go on for a long time.
I took off my shoe, intending to finish the job manually, but I couldn’t seem to bring myself to smash him. He was pitiful, and I started to feel sorry for what I had done to him. He was so strong-willed, so determined to live, and he had no chance. He was like me, poisoned inside and out, only he was doing a better job of staggering on. I sank into teen melancholia and lay on the floor beside him, keeping him company until he inevitably lost his battle.
That’s where Clarice found me. Lying on the floor next to his corpse, clutching my shoe to my chest, rocking myself and sniveling. Clarice smelled like baby oil and exasperation. She prodded me gently with one pink-tipped toe.
“Arlene,” she said. “When’s this going to stop?”
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