by Lynn Pruett
She came back overloaded with packages of ground beef. Because she forced all her thick hair into a hair net, her nose gained prominence, arching forward like a dolphin diving into the spray. Her head looked unbalanced. Gert dumped the packages on the counter, then knifed each one before skinning off the plastic and cracking the Styrofoam backing. The meat hissed as it hit the hot griddle. I shuddered to imagine her with a fresh-shot deer.
When the ground beef turned from pink to brown, Gert took up her dicing knife and quartered a dozen garlic cloves. She scooted the shavings into a pile. “When is your mama going out with the sheriff?”
She liked to bring Mama into our arguments. It was her way of saying if I wasn’t the owner’s daughter, she’d be the manager and I’d be the cook. “Sheriff Dodd’s a regular customer, that’s all.”
“She ought to be looking somewhere else for happiness,” Gert said.
“She’s not dating him, okay?” I scraped the cauldron hard to drown out what she might say next.
“Your mother’s been off her feed of late.” Gert moved down the grill and poked the warming sausages with a giant prong.
I glanced at the clock. My heart picked up a beat. Soon Richard would arrive and I would go on break. I pictured him like he was the day we met, standing on the deck of a speedboat, the wind whipping around his tanned chest, the flecks of gray in his hair like the rifts of foam on the dark lake.
“It’s hot as hell,” said Gert, as she threw open the back door. Late spring’s languor was starting to build on the blacktop.
A drop of sweat formed on my forehead and fell toward the chili. I lifted my head to brush it dry and saw Richard staring through the EMPLOYEES ONLY door. I blushed to my roots because I knew from his crooked grin that we were remembering another drop of sweat and how it came to be, he and I so close we shared it. I watched the drop spread on the edge of the pot and vanish.
Even without looking I knew his shirt was tucked crisply into his ironed khakis. He had a nice face, with just enough cheekbone to offset his blue eyes. He was forty-seven but still built, square shouldered, kind of shy in public like me. Our bodies talked best for us.
Gert peered down her arched nose at me. She knew the air had changed and she seemed to have got a whiff of why. She shook her head and went harumpf and muttered some evil little prayer, but I did not care because I knew what Richard and me did was absolutely right.
I tasted the chili and it was perfect, full-bodied and peppery.
Gert took off her apron and freed her thick dark hair from the hair net. Swaths of flesh fell from her shoulders and gathered neatly like balloon drapes above her hard round elbows. The rest of her looked solid, shoulders and legs muscled for action. “I’m going to ask your mother to come to church with me.”
She was gone before I could answer. Richard said Gert’s church, the Church of the Holy Resurrection, was like the kudzu weed overrunning the South. His wife attended services there daily. Mama would never brighten their door. Richard’s clean plate came in on Connie’s tray, the circle of crab apple placed dead center, like a bull’s eye.
It was cool and dark in the storeroom. I lingered in Mama’s recliner, soft gold, worn corduroy. It reminded me of the rows of corn across the valley in the fall, burnished and even. I leaned back, cradled by the soft cloth, and smiled. It was all I could do. My clothes were here and there and Richard had left me glowing again.
He had held my breasts as if they were precious and fragile, then caressed them with his mouth as if they provided succulent necessary nourishment. He did this before and after and during.
The chair felt to me like the hand of God. I was held in His great palm, the golden light of His approval washing over us as we made love. There was nothing else that feeling could be but holy.
Richard had left me a bag of chocolate kisses and I ate them one by one, letting each pyramid melt to a small spoonful of sweetness before sliding down my throat. I was insatiable for chocolate after we were together. I traded with him. He gave me silver-coated kisses and I gave him quarters for his trips to Mississippi, where he played the slots.
The door banged open and in came the cart of cleaning supplies, buckets rattling and rags swishing, followed by Gert’s heavy footsteps. I held my breath and hoped she’d leave the cart and go back to the kitchen.
She huffed loudly, paused to look back down the hall, then pushed the rear of the cart into the room. She skirted it, cursing as her hip hit the Lysol dispenser, which sent out an antiseptic spray. Off balance, her behind swished around aimed at my chair. I shouted, “Holy Moses!”
She dropped a cigarette pack and gasped, covered her mouth, and crossed herself like Catholics do. Then she lunged toward the light switch and turned it on.
“Thanks, I needed that.” I crossed my legs.
Her face was dark red and she collapsed into a swivel chair that bucked like an unwilling horse. I dared not move.
We sat a minute or two staring, me getting paler and more naked than I’d ever been while her face shifted through all the shades of the color spectrum. When we discovered neither was going to yell again, we relaxed, breathing in tandem. Gert picked up the pack of Marlboros she dropped. “Could you reach me them matches?”
They had fallen underneath my chair, too far back for her to reach without some major contortions of the flesh. Her knees loomed like white boulders. She ought to be required to wear pants. I tucked my feet under my butt and posed my hands as if they were fig leaves. “Could you wait to have a smoke until after I leave?”
Gert tapped the cigarette on her knee. It bounced up and down as she sucked her cheeks between her teeth and began to chew them. She was addicted. I would have to move first, before Mama came down the hall wondering where the kitchen staff was. Our restaurant was smoke-free, no smoking allowed. None. Mama was willing to lose a customer here or there to keep her restaurant clean. My father had smoked all his life and it had killed him, so she was zero tolerance on cigarettes. Gert knew her job was in danger.
My lavender bikinis dangled from the knob on the closet door. A sigh heavy as an old woman’s came from my lips. Would Gert tell on me?
I reached over and palmed the underwear. As I inched them up my thighs, they rolled into a stretchy string. I flushed. My movements were obscene, as if Richard were still there while Gert occupied a ringside seat.
I tossed her the matches. She lit up, inhaled, and blew the letters of her name in smoke at the ceiling, a hazy E dissolving on the too-bright bulb.
I smoothed out my underwear, taking time to line up the small triangles in the front and back before skittering over to Gert’s chair and snatching the bra from its leg. I fumbled with the bra’s front hooks. Richard preferred that kind. None of his passion put on hold while he clawed at fasteners he couldn’t see.
“Pretty titties,” Gert said.
I blushed and retrieved my uniform.
“Cigarette?”
I shook my head, then said, “Sure.” I’d smoked until Richard complained about my breath.
“You know, girlie, you’re going to hell in a handbag.” Now that Gert had had her fix, she puffed up, lording the situation over me, her usual grand toady self.
“That’s my business.”
“You’re screwing a married man. You’re twenty—”
“I’m twenty-one.”
“You done had a baby.”
“I did not. I did not have a baby.” No one, not even my friends, had ever guessed the truth about Heather. I inhaled, my fingers shaking. The smoke came back up through my nose.
Gert took a long slow draw, her eyes shutting as she relished the pleasure of nicotine hitting her cranium. I thought of dinosaurs, grand in body, tiny of brain, settling for so little.
Gert smiled. “You think I don’t see them stretch marks on your titties?”
The overhead bulb was unbearably bright, highlighting in pale purple the faded darts along my breasts, indelible reminders I’d take to my grave of a pr
egnancy I had to forget. In private I sometimes looked at them because they were proof that I had borne a child. Deep down, my body remembered the stretch, the way my hips opened, the pain of milk not drunk. Wasn’t skin supposed to replace itself every seven years?
No one else had noticed. Not Richard. Maybe only women would know. I finger-combed my hair. “At least I won’t end up working as a go-go dancer.”
Gert laughed. “No, but you could end up with a can of Lysol as your best friend.”
The phone rang, the sound I’d been waiting for. Richard’s call that came after he got back to work. I lifted the receiver after the fourth ring, wishing Gert was gone so I could tell him about my bizarre experience with her, when he blurted, “I’m getting a divorce,” and hung up the phone.
Gert saw my face, its sudden dark tinge, and walked out. My break was long over but I couldn’t go back to the heat of the kitchen. I picked up the bag of chocolates and ate five or six kisses, chewing and swallowing without tasting. I wanted to go to Richard and say, Don’t get a divorce. Think of us. We are fine. I’d almost told him the truth about Heather, but keeping secrets from my secret lover added a sweetness that was almost unbearable.
I folded the pants of the blue uniform, then the pebbly top, and dropped them into the laundry basket. In the closet, I found my white blouse and khaki shorts. If Richard got a divorce, his wife would reign as pity queen until the next man threw away his worn-out wedding vows. Everyone would know about us. And what about us? Was there any kind of future for Richard and me?
I went outside to finish the chocolate. Heather was jumping rope on the blacktop. She’d tied one end to the door handle of a patrol car and had a trucker turning the other. Soon I was turning the rope and she was chanting, “My mother and your mother hanging out clothes/My mother punched your mother right in the nose,” her blond hair flipping up and down at the ends. My little lie had gained fifty pounds.
My virginity vanished quickly, not in a progression of stumbling steps but suddenly one night, at the river, with a boy I barely knew. It was the last weekend before ninth grade. Already the water had started to cool but Darryl, my cousin, dared everybody, even us girls, to go skinny-dipping. Darryl stood on top of the big rock, silhouetted against the red sky, and hollered like Tarzan, beating his chest and making his other parts shake. Right then a boy I did not know slipped a Styrofoam cup into my hand and wrapped his fingers around mine. I smiled and he smiled back. We gave each other sips of peach brandy, our hands twined around the warm cup. Soon I was giggling. When the brandy was drunk, the boy pulled his white T-shirt over his head, then stepped out of his jeans. Without a word he walked up to the big rock and dived. Minutes passed, it seemed, before I heard his splash.
Behind a thicket of junipers, the other girls giggled as they stripped. I picked up the boy’s clothes. His shirt held the faint smell of tobacco. I undressed, crossed the small beach, and walked straight into the water, as if nudity was my common appearance. The other girls followed, running, laughing loudly. The boys hooted.
My skin tingled as water crept up my thighs and on up over my shoulders. The others were swimming further out, where several rock islands formed a cove. I parted the water with my hands and let the ripples break coolly on my breasts, frog-kicking shivers all the way to my toes.
On the far bank, fireflies blinked like a thousand tiny lighthouses, fluid and various, a thousand destinations. The boy appeared silently from underwater, the sudden gleam of his limbs beneath the surface a shock. I treaded water. He swam on. His arms, white in the moonlight, rose up and beckoned with each arc of the crawl. I soon matched his strokes and we crossed the current, heading for the rocks. I veered toward a willow. The long wet leaves brushed over me like fingers as I glided toward the trunk. Overhead, the branches rocked in soft rhythm, a murmur of river and cove. The boy slid close. His warmth surprised me but my skin welcomed it. He kissed me and I kissed him while my whole body shivered from the cold, the warmth, the water, the night air.
Heather is my baby. I feel she is only mine. The boy faded distantly until I couldn’t remember the color of his hair, the slant of his shoulders, if he was tall or smart or fun or cute. I couldn’t see him in her at all as she tired of jumping and raced into the truck stop for a drink. I left the rope dangling from the sheriff’s door and picked up my bag of chocolate.
Even Darla and Connie don’t know that Heather is mine. That was the first lie, or the beginning of it. I ate another kiss. One lie led to another. It was an addiction, perhaps as great as that to cigarettes, just as deadly, accumulating like tar in the lungs. Soon breathing would be impossible. Soon speaking would be impossible. I’d suffocate myself with my own lies, my mouth clogged with fabrication. My body could function and I’d smile, plastic as a TV actress, desirable, of course, because of what I presented. But I’d know I was dead.
I passed the cash register in the dining room and snuck breath mints from the candy shelf. Heather and Mama shared a booth with Sheriff Dodd. A bowl of chili and a half-drunk sweet tea sat in front of each of them. Mama’s spoon was coated with the greasy red residue but Sheriff Dodd’s was licked clean.
Mama laughed, at some stupid joke no doubt, the lines around her eyes transformed into good-humored crinkles. She had naturally curly brown hair and smooth skin that she maintained with Dove soap and lots of cold cream. She liked clear nail polish, nothing tacky, and had this air of aboveness, like she was running the truck stop out of the goodness of her heart, not economic necessity. The truckers said “Ma’am” when Mama walked by and put their napkins in their laps and never ever made any lewd suggestions to her. I should be so lucky. Heather lounged on Mama, a wet Sugar Daddy in one hand.
Sheriff Dodd’s cropped hair slowly came to attention on his pinky clean scalp. His cap hung on the corner of the table, above Mama’s knee. “That’s a mighty big girl to be sitting on her mama’s lap,” he said.
“She’s my baby. When she’s fifty years old, she’ll still be my baby and she can still sit on my lap,” Mama said.
Heather smacked her lips.
“I wasn’t allowed to eat candy before supper,” I said, feeling the dig though Mama didn’t mean it. That’s what got me angry. Once Mama took over Heather, she didn’t seem to think I had any feelings for the baby. It was like giving birth was an anonymous act. “You must be getting soft in your old age.”
“You need glasses, honey,” Sheriff Dodd said. “That’s one firm woman.”
A faint blush appeared on Mama’s face, as if she and Sheriff Dodd shared a common cord.
I couldn’t believe it.
I stood above her brown, softly waved perfection of curls and aimed nasty thoughts at them, snarls to catch her comb on. She slid Heather off her lap and turned toward me, giving him a better profile. He reached toward her chili with his spoon and said, “May I?”
She nodded as he dug in, with the manners of a cur.
I had to get out of there.
If I could get quarters, I would take them to Richard, and we’d talk about our future. Having something to offer seemed necessary. We were in new territory now, him and me. The truth would spread like wildfire and torch this place Mama had built. Unless I stopped it now. “Mama, I need ten dollars for the rest of the day.”
“It’ll come out of your salary.”
“I know.” I resisted saying, What salary?
“Take a ten and mark it down in the ledger.”
“Can’t I have quarters?”
“We’re low on quarters in the register.” Mama’s voice was so even, I couldn’t help but be impressed. But her cheeks rose and deepened past a pleasant blush. Her eyes were blue flint. “Ten dollars is ten dollars.”
“Don’t be a grump,” said Heather.
I went to Mama’s office, knowing she’d be out front with Sheriff Dodd long enough for her skin to fade to a more pristine shade. I used the tiny key to click open the cash drawer, took out a roll of quarters and put in the ten. I had to have
them. They were my reason to call Richard, which I never had done before. We had to talk. To protect us from the people we feared so much, our customers and friends in Maridoches. The quarters fit into the valley between my breasts.
Richard was not taking any calls, I was told when I phoned Logan’s Yard, which meant he was probably at home. I headed out toward his house but my stomach got queasy, too much chocolate rush. So I cruised off the highway and headed up an old road and thought about glasses of milk. Soon I passed brick houses with mowed yards and old tires planted with marigolds. I drove higher and higher up a mountain that began in Georgia clay and rose over the state line, combs of southern pines spiking its soil.
A vaguely familiar scent drifted in the window, the smoky scent of damp wood and pine needles untouched by the sun. It was the same thick air that had surrounded me in the days after Heather’s birth. Mama had arranged for me to wait out my pregnancy with Aunt Leola up on Sand Mountain. That year, Daddy was in and out of the Birmingham hospital, so he did not see my shame, but he wrote me funny notes about his confinement. Mama ate herself fat to convince everyone at home that she was pregnant.
My birthing screams were partly anger, partly pain, but they marked the end of my bliss. Mama made me walk every day, even those first days when walking and sitting were so painful. She made me walk until we flattened a path through the broom sedge to a granite slab jutting over the valley. Then she made me sit flat on the warm rock for fifteen minutes morning and night.
“Help you heal,” Mama said, as she nursed my baby.
It is seven years and I am not healed. Shame hovers around our front door, threatening to come in and break up our house, if I dare say what is in my heart. When I see my little girl hugging Mama tight and hear her, every night across the hall, praying to keep Mama safe, my stomach churns like a washing machine. She is pretty and has hazel eyes. Her light hair is like mine. I am so close but I can never hold her like I want to.
Eventually the afternoon heat reached the pines and filled the car. I had to do something. I knew what lying felt like, invisible ankle cuffs weighing me down. But telling the truth would be freedom to own my life. Mama was wrong to lie about Heather. I would tell the truth about Richard and me. Then watch me fly! It was strange to think what I needed really mattered. I mashed that pedal to the floor before I could chicken out and start to consider everyone else first, as Mama had taught me to do.
