“But Franny didn’t think my daddy committed suicide.”
She was met with silence.
“Did she?”
Rose said, “Now, Molly, I don’t believe she actually said that. And, honey, it was such a long time ago—twenty-five years or so—”
“Twenty-eight,” Molly said. “Twenty-eight years, and”—she thought for a moment—“six days.”
“Oh, Molly, my dear,” Rose said, her dark eyes moist with sympathy, “so long ago. Why worry yourself?”
Molly knew she should stop pushing, but she couldn’t. “Does Franny really think that, Parnell?”
“Molly—” But he didn’t finish; instead he shook his head in exasperation. Then he glanced at his watch. “Ladies, we were going to have lunch. Let’s do it.” He steered Molly firmly by the arm. “Come on.”
They headed toward the elevators, but very slowly to accommodate Rose’s pace.
“We’ll go to the cafeteria, if that’s all right with y’all,” he said. “It’s easiest.”
“The cafeteria. Sure.” Molly was feeling an inner turmoil way out of proportion to the news. She hadn’t even thought about Franny Lawrence in years. Why should she care what that woman thought? Or who she’d married?
She said, “Just tell me. Does she think my daddy committed suicide?”
“Molly, let it go,” Parnell said, giving her arm a squeeze.
“Let it go?” The shrillness in her own voice surprised her.
“What’s the woman supposed to think? The medical examiner, the sheriff, the newspaper, and public opinion all said it was suicide.”
“But I can’t—”
“Franny always believed it was suicide. If you’d given the poor woman the time of day back then, you’d have known that. She thought it was suicide, just like everyone else.” His voice was full of exasperation.
Molly stopped in her tracks, even though they hadn’t made it to the elevators yet. “Everyone else didn’t think that. I didn’t. You didn’t. Rose didn’t.”
She searched his face, waiting for confirmation, but he didn’t say anything. Her throat felt dry and narrow. “Did you? Parnell, you didn’t think that, did you?”
“Molly, please. Rose needs to sit down. Let’s talk about this later.”
They walked in silence until they reached the elevator. After he pushed the button he said, “Everybody has always been afraid to talk to you about this because you were so … emotional about it. Now this is upsetting Rose, and it’s upsetting me. Let’s go have a nice lunch and some iced tea.”
“Iced tea, yes.” He was right: she was overreacting. But she needed a minute or two alone to collect herself, to absorb everything. It had been too much all at once—seeing Olin Crocker and then getting hit with this news—a triple whammy from the past. “I need to stop at the ladies’ room first,” she told them. “I’ll meet you in the cafeteria, okay?”
“Sure,” he said. “Rosie, you want to go along with Molly?”
Rose shook her head. Molly was relieved; she wanted to be alone.
“Okay,” Parnell said. “We’ll meet you in the cafeteria.” He looked into her face. “You all right, Molly? You look a little peaked, sweetheart. I hope I haven’t—”
“No. I’m okay.” She turned and walked away, picking up speed once she’d turned the corner and they couldn’t see her. She had no idea where the ladies’ room was on this floor and she didn’t want to ask anyone. She walked part way around the rotunda and turned into the first corridor she came to. At the end of it was a men’s room. But no corresponding ladies’ room. Damn. This building probably had ten men’s rooms for every ladies’ room—some sort of toilet-per-capita formula to keep the female population in check.
She backtracked, nearly circling the rotunda this time. Why, of all the people in the world, would Franny Lawrence marry Frank Quinlan? She turned into an area she’d never been in, walked past some offices and around the corner to a dark corridor. Off the beaten track. At the end was a ladies’ room. Good. She just needed to sit down and be alone for a minute to absorb this. Had Franny really always believed Vernon Cates killed himself?
Molly shoved the door open and entered. A large naked woman whirled around to face her. Before she could stop herself, Molly let out a squeal of surprise. The woman was totally naked, tall, and wild-looking, with a tangle of frizzy gray hair. She had been standing at the sink, one arm lifted, washing her armpit with a paper towel.
The woman lowered her arm and glowered, her dark eyes full of outrage.
Molly’s throat constricted. “Sorry. You surprised me.”
“This your private rest room or something?”
“No, I just wasn’t expecting it.” Keeping her eyes averted from the woman’s nakedness, Molly hurried past her and into one of the stalls. She closed and bolted the door, and sat down. Oh, to be alone—it was such a relief. Just a minute or two and she could collect herself. She leaned forward and closed her eyes. Franny Lawrence. The woman who would have married Vernon Cates. The woman who would have been Molly’s stepmother if her father had lived two more weeks.
Outside the door, the naked woman was muttering something under her breath. Molly didn’t want to listen, but she couldn’t help it. “Little Bopeep,” the woman was saying, “has lost her sheep, and can’t tell where to find them.”
Oh, God—a crazy woman. She should have known. She should have walked out the second she saw her. Well, now she’d just wait until the woman was gone so she wouldn’t have to deal with her.
She sat quietly, breathing deeply, trying to calm herself, but it was difficult with the noises outside—the splashing and sputtering and angry mumbling: “Leave them alone and they’ll come home and bring their tails behind them.”
Parnell and Rose would worry if she took too long. After the scene she’d made, they’d probably worry anyway. Who could blame them? For a few minutes there Molly had felt something terrifying—a stirring of the old madness from that bad time of her life after her father was killed—that crazy, obsessional, grief-filled time. She had thought she was long past that; it was scary to discover how close to the surface it all still was.
She sat up and pushed her hair back, surprised to find that her forehead was clammy with sweat. Lord, there was no fooling your body, was there? No pretending to your sweat glands that everything was just fine when your world was in upheaval.
Outside the door, the water had stopped, but the woman was still muttering in a voice that sounded like the angry buzzing of bees, or like a pot of fury boiling over and sizzling onto the burner.
Suddenly the woman’s voice rose to a conversational level: “Don’t happen to know the second verse, do you?”
Oh, God.
The woman mumbled a little, then said clearly, “It starts Little Bopeep fell fast asleep and dreamt … she dreamt some damn thing.” There was a moment of silence before the voice came louder, more aggressive: “Didn’t really have to pee, huh? False alarm.”
“Are you talking to me?” Molly said.
“Who else is here?”
“I’m okay.”
“I know who you are,” the woman said.
“Oh?”
“You don’t recognize me.”
Recognize her? Oh, no, not this again. Lately it happened all the time. Molly ran into people who seemed to know her, but she would have sworn she’d never seen them before. It terrified her because it reminded her of Aunt Harriet’s Alzheimer’s, but she rationalized her own lapses as simple overload, a lifetime’s accumulation of more names and faces than the human brain was designed to hold. “No,” she said through the door, “I’m afraid I don’t.”
“I’m Tin Can’s friend.”
“Tin Can?” Of course—Tin Can, the bag lady. One of the homeless women she’d interviewed. “Oh, you’re a friend of Emily Bickerstaff.”
“Is that her name?”
“Yeah. You don’t know her name?”
“On the street, we use stree
t names.”
Molly looked at her watch. She’d been gone ten minutes. Parnell and Rose would be waiting for her to get there before they went through the cafeteria line; she needed to go. She stood and zipped her pants, buckled her belt. There was no avoiding this woman. She unbolted the door and stepped out.
The woman was standing at one of the two sinks, getting dressed. She had put on black high-top tennis shoes, jeans, and an undershirt. Now she was pulling on a dirty plaid flannel shirt. Without looking at Molly, she said, “If a half-wit can be a friend.”
Molly stood in front of the other sink to wash her hands. If she did it quickly maybe she could escape without any more talk.
“You knew she was retarded, didn’t you?” the woman demanded. “Why’d you want to talk with a retard?”
Molly said, “I like Emily. I worry about her.”
“But not enough to do something about it, huh?” the woman said.
It was a direct hit, a guided missile right to the center of what Molly hated most about herself. She looked at herself in the mirror and liked nothing she saw there—the thin, pale face, the dark hair, which looked flat and lifeless, except for the alarming new white hairs that were springing up every day—curly and coarse and unwelcome among the smooth black strands. She was tempted to strike back at this crazy woman, to say, What about you? You doing anything about it? Instead, she turned on the water and pushed the lever on the soap container. Nothing came out. She felt like weeping. “No soap.”
“There never is.”
Molly rinsed her hands under the cold water and then leaned down to splash some water on her face. When she lifted her dripping head, the water ran into her eyes and broke up her reflection, refracting it into pulsing, kaleidoscopic astral shapes that slowly drained away and materialized, inevitably, back into the same pale face.
She dried her face and hands with a paper towel, then rummaged in her bag to find a lipstick.
The woman was buttoning her shirt, but it was going to turn out unevenly, Molly could see.
“Has that thing come out in the paper?” the woman asked. “What you were writing about Tin Can.”
“No. It’s not for the paper. It’s for my magazine, and it’s not finished. I’m doing several interviews over a year.”
“Oh, yeah. To see what happens to them, huh? Who lives, who dies, who wins the lottery, who finds a job, who gets AIDS, who gets sober—all that?”
Molly didn’t answer; she was running the lipstick over her mouth.
“And these ‘interviews’ make you some sort of expert, huh?”
Molly paused, her mouth half painted. “No. But the women tell me about their experience and I write about what they tell me.”
“Well, la-ti-da. Their experience, huh?” Finished dressing now, the woman looked Molly over with a mocking grin. “So your heart bleeds for them and you think you understand the experience.” She uttered the last word with more bitterness than Molly had ever heard packed into one word.
Stung by the woman’s contempt, Molly didn’t respond. She took a paper towel and blotted her lipstick.
The woman moved closer. “Lady, you don’t know diddly squat about Tin Can’s life.” She flicked her hand against the purse dangling from Molly’s shoulder. “You got your expensive leather handbag stuffed with credit cards, and you got your gold watch and your lipstick.” She smacked her lips together in a parody of Molly blotting her lipstick. “You don’t know shit!”
Molly felt a wave of fear; the woman was invading her space, touching her. She resisted the urge to move away. “I do the best I can. I listen and I think I do understand. If you’re worried I won’t get it right, why don’t you talk to me? Tell me what I should know.”
“Some things you can’t tell anyone.” The woman looked at Molly with disgust and shook her head in dismissal of the whole subject. Then she leaned down and pulled out of her bag a long white cloth coat with black spots on it—a cow design.
In a flash of recognition, Molly remembered the coat and the big, hostile woman who was with Tin Can when Molly first approached her at the Salvation Army. “You’re Cow Lady,” she said. “Tin Can talks about you all the time.”
In the mirror Molly saw the woman’s face reflect a small smile.
“Yeah. You remember the coat, not me. You didn’t look at my face, just what I was wearing. When you’re on the street people don’t look you in the eye.”
Molly nodded into the mirror, watching the woman button her coat.
“When you first come in here,” the woman said, “you looked like Little Bopeep just lost your sheep, or your best friend.”
“Yeah. I’d just gotten some … news. Something from the past that upset me.”
The woman picked up her big bag and slung it over her shoulder. “Here’s something I know for sure: don’t look in that rearview mirror. Ever. You do it, you’ll be sorry.”
Molly was still watching her in the mirror. “That’s probably good advice, but I don’t know how to stop myself from doing it.”
The woman shrugged and headed toward the door, muttering, “Little Bopeep fell fast asleep and dreamt … oh, shit, what was it she dreamt?”
Molly turned around quickly, wanting, for some reason, to stop her. “I’m Molly Cates. What’s your name? Your real name.”
The big woman paused with her hand on the door. “I don’t want to be in the paper,” she said.
“No. I just wondered what your name is.”
The woman stood there, her chin stuck out pugnaciously. “Why? What’s it to you?”
“Well, we have a friend in common. When I see her again I’d like to say, “Hey, I ran into your friend.’ But I don’t like calling you Cow Lady. Just like I don’t like calling her Tin Can.”
“Well, that’s what I want to be called, and you ought to call people what they want,” the woman said.
Surprised by hearing from this woman a sentiment she often expressed herself, Molly looked at her with new respect. “I agree. I’m sorry.” She leaned down and pulled a card from her bag. “Here’s my name and phone number in case you change your mind and want to talk sometime.”
“Talk? Why?”
“Because I’m interested.”
“Well, I’m not.”
“Okay.” Molly held the card closer to her, trying to tempt her. “But take it. Just in case.” Molly looked her in the eye for the first time and was not surprised by the anger she saw there, but she was surprised by the glitter of intelligence and defiance.
The woman took the card and, without glancing at it, dropped it into her big bag. Her body seemed to relax, as though her erect quills had suddenly flattened. “Well, then.” She pushed the door open and walked out.
Molly turned back to the mirror. She still didn’t like what she saw there. “Don’t look in that rearview mirror,” she whispered to her reflection. “You’ll be sorry if you do.” But she knew she was going to look. Come hell or high water, she was going to talk to Franny Lawrence. After twenty-eight years of avoiding her. “Twenty-eight years,” she whispered into the mirror, “twenty-eight fucking years.” Oh, God, here she was mumbling to herself, raving just like any other old bag lady.
She sounded every bit as crazy as Cow Lady, and every bit as angry; she was just better at concealing it in public.
IF WISHES WERE HORSES, BEGGARS WOULD RIDE.
IF TURNIPS WERE WATCHES, I WOULD WEAR ONE BY MY SIDE.
AND IF “IFS” AND “ANDS”
WERE POTS AND PANS.
THERE’D BE NO WORK FOR TINKERS!
—MOTHER GOOSE
It has been a quiet Monday evening under the deck at the Creekside Grill. Sarah Jane Hurley is wide awake when Lufkin sticks his head under the deck just after the Grill has closed. She crawls out, dragging her bag behind her. She is pleased to see him because he is carrying a brown paper grocery bag with some heft to it.
Together they head down the bank toward Waller Creek. They can see where they are going very w
ell because the moon is full. The bank is dangerously steep and overgrown, but just south of the deck a muddy rut of a path descends to the creek. Lufkin, hugging the grocery bag to his chest, runs down it, his boots slipping and sliding in the muck. Sarah Jane takes it slower. She is wearing old high-top tennis shoes with the tread worn off and no heels to dig in, so she inches her way down, grabbing on to bushes as she goes, trying to avoid the debris scattered along the path: filthy, stiffened old blankets, broken glass, crushed Styrofoam containers, brown paper bags with empty liquor bottles inside, piles of human feces.
At the bottom the limestone rocks, flat and white, reflect what little of the moonlight filters down to the creek bed. It feels colder down here so she buttons her long black and white coat all the way up to her neck. The night is unusually damp and chilly for May.
They walk along the creek to the base of the Fourth Street Bridge where Tin Can stands over the rusty oil drum she uses to cook on, poking at the fire inside with a stick. She is humming tunelessly and smoking a cigarette. Her dry, mouse-colored hair hangs in clumps around her face. The fire illuminates her flat-features—the scarred upper lip and nose, which she claims were joined together when she was born. She wears only a T-shirt and baggy jeans rolled up on her stubby bowed legs. She starts to smile as they approach, but stops just short of opening her lips. The calico cat she is cradling in one arm looks up; his eyes are flat yellow disks, each one reflecting a single miniature fire.
“Got a good fire going here,” Tin Can says in a singsong voice, “but Silky and me, we got nothing to cook. Y’all got something?” She looks at Lufkin because he is a likelier source of handouts and because he is carrying a grocery bag.
Lufkin sets his bag down on the ground in front of her. “Fair maiden,” he says, “inscrutable feline, I brung home the bacon—four T-bone steaks and the finest French wine—Le Thunder Chicken. What say you, me pretties?”
Wine again! Sarah Jane brightens up. It’ll be a good night for forgetting.
Tin Can quickly puts a hand over her mouth and giggles. Sarah Jane knows she covers her mouth because she is sensitive about her two missing front teeth. Even when Tin Can had pneumonia last winter and nearly died, the first thing she did when she came to in the Emergency Room was to cover her mouth. This vanity in a retarded old hag amazes Sarah Jane. Three years on the streets has erased all remaining shreds of her own vanity. She is a hopeless crone, past redemption, and she knows it.
All the Dead Lie Down Page 4
