Leaving Eden

by Anne Leclaire

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Praise

  chapter one

  chapter two

  chapter three

  chapter four

  chapter five

  chapter six

  chapter seven

  chapter eight

  chapter nine

  chapter ten

  chapter eleven

  chapter twelve

  chapter thirteen

  chapter fourteen

  chapter fifteen

  chapter sixteen

  chapter seventeen

  chapter eighteen

  chapter nineteen

  chapter twenty

  chapter twenty-one

  chapter twenty-two

  epilogue

  author’s note

  Leaving Eden

  A Conversation with Anne D. LeClaire

  Reading Group Questions and Topics for Discussion

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  to hillary

  For Everything

  Good morning, daddy!

  Ain’t you heard

  The boogie-woogie rumble

  Of a dream deferred?

  —LANGSTON HUGHES “DREAM BOOGIE”

  More praise for Leaving Eden

  “Tallie is a likable, energetic character, a smart girl with big dreams. . . . Leaving Eden is a light, breezy novel about serious subjects. It’s eventful, with a lingering death, a murder, a secret revealed, to say nothing of a makeover.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “Anne D. LeClaire’s latest novel is an evocative and moving story filled with women’s wisdom. If you liked Entering Normal as much as I did, you’ll love Leaving Eden.”

  —JO-ANN MAPSON

  Author of Bad Girl Creek

  “Artfully crafted characters resonate within this emotional novel detailing one girl’s ability to face the hardships of her life. This novel simmers with the diversity of small-town life—from the witticisms of the Tuesday senior citizens’ club at the salon to the awakenings of a young girl’s heart. Ms. LeClaire’s ability to make the setting and its characters come alive makes the reader feel that Eden exists beyond the pages of this novel.”

  —Romantic Times

  “Tallie is an endearing character, and the Southern banter of the ladies at the beauty parlor where she works is pitch-perfect. . . . LeClaire’s homey storytelling goes down easy.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Tallie Brock is a heroine as winning as any a reader is ever likely to meet. Her search for wisdom takes her, and us, on an achingly sweet journey filled with unforgettable characters, dazzling storytelling, and hard-won revelations that lead us to the true secrets of the heart.”

  —SARAH BIRD

  “Anne D. LeClaire paints a vivid picture of small-town life, and in Tallie Brock gives us a heroine we can root for.”

  —LORNA LANDVIK

  Author of Patty Jane’s House of Curl

  “Tallie Brock is a character with Virginia moxie, country pluck, and Hollywood ambition. If you love the great film comedies of the 1940s, settle in with this story told with down-home charm and humor.”

  —ADRIANA TRIGIANI

  “This is a beautiful story about love, mothers and daughters, and fulfilling life’s dreams.”

  —Evanston (IL) RoundTable

  “A wry, funny, and winning story.”

  —Cape Cod Chronicle

  I was asleep the night Mama left us, but I remember every detail of the moment she came home. June 21, 1988. Hot enough to poach perch in Bald Creek and officially the first day of summer, although I had already been swimming for weeks. Country 99.7 was on in the kitchen, and I was forming a trio with the Judds. “Girls Night Out.”

  Daddy had already departed for the mill when Mr. Tinsley’s taxi pulled up to the curb, belching blue. I peered through the kitchen window and saw the passenger door open and a darkhaired girl step out. She wore black flat-heeled shoes, black pedal pushers, a red and white striped sailor shirt and, cinching her waist, a black leather belt. Before I even got to wondering who she was and what she was doing here, she looked directly up at our house and—although I had been praying steady for just this moment—I couldn’t believe what was laid out right before my eyes.

  Mama had come home.

  “Thank you, Jesus,” I said. Just that. Back then I still had faith that what you asked for would surely come if you prayed with sufficient fervor, and I sincerely believed it was the power of my prayers that had brought my mama back.

  She stood there for a moment, suitcases plopped on the grass, just looking up and staring at the house, like she’d been deposited before the home of strangers and wasn’t sure whether to walk up the path to our front door or get back in with Mr. Tinsley and drive away. I didn’t give her time to make her decision.

  Quicker than you could say Sam Hill, I lunged forward, screen slamming behind me. “Mama,” I cried, and flung myself in her arms, hugging her so close it made her gasp. What I really wanted was to wrap my legs around her waist and my arms around her neck, the way I used to so she would have to carry me up to the house, but I was way too old for that and— I realized suddenly—now as tall as she. That smashing hug had to suffice.

  I didn’t see then how tired she looked, just how pretty. Even then, nearing her forties, she was the prettiest woman in all of Eden. And, if you believed some people, Spring Hill and Redden, too.

  You see, Mama was the spitting image of Natalie Wood. Not everyone my age knew about the actress who was Queen of the Screen in the 1960s, how they’d charcoaled her skin so she could play a Puerto Rican in West Side Story, how the crazy bathtub scene in Splendor in the Grass didn’t have to be faked. I knew all that. I was raised on Natalie. Mama had even named me Natasha, which was Natalie’s pet name, a fact not many people knew.

  Mama was five feet tall, exactly like the actress, and had the same dark hair and black velvet eyes and perfect, pouty mouth, so alike they could be twins. People were forever telling her this, and although she made quick to deny it politely in public, her mirror just reflected back the same truth. Which I guess was what started all the trouble. Trouble that began, though I wouldn’t know this for years, began back before I was even thought of.

  “Did you get it?” I screamed. “Did it happen?”

  “Shush, baby,” she said, and then she held me out at arm’s length and looked me over. “You’ve grown up.” She eyed my bosom. “Up and out.”

  She’d missed my birthday back in May. I was twelve and, like I said, nearly as tall as she was. For that instant—her commenting on how I’d changed since she left—I wanted to feel as I truly should have felt. Mad at her. For everything. For deserting us, no matter how urgent the cause that took her away. For missing my birthday. For not being there when I’d started my period, and, too embarrassed to ask my daddy for help, had to ask old Mrs. Harewood at the drugstore whatever to buy. Most of all, I wanted to be angry at her for leaving me alone, the only girl in all of Eden without a mama, except Rula Wade, whose mama died birthing her and even she had a step-mama, though one only eleven years older. I wanted to be mad, but I couldn’t. All that anger just melted like spring ice off Baldy. It’s gospel that no one could stay angry long at Mama. It always was.

  “Your daddy inside?” she asked. I couldn’t tell if she was hoping he was or wasn’t.

  “At the mill,” I said. For sure, Daddy hadn’t the least idea that Mama was coming home today. I sent off a prayer that he wouldn’t stop at CC’s Bar and Grill—a dive a lot more bar than grill.

  Mama drew a deep breath and lifted a hand to shade her eyes
as she looked around. “Spring in the Blue Ridge,” she said. “It surely shows the Lord’s gift with a paint box.” Then she said she regretted missing the redbuds in bloom and the dogwood. She said dogwood in blossom looked like “sulfur moths floating over the fields.” Like she was telling me about the dogwood blossom and redbuds. I wasn’t the one who had left. What I needed to know was where she’d been and exactly what she’d been doing. I was hungry for details beyond those three-line messages scrawled on the back of postcards.

  Before I could say a word, she headed into the house and from that moment on she acted like she hadn’t been anywhere more exciting than Lynchburg. While she unpacked and got reacquainted with the house, she asked me a hundred questions about my school and friends and how I had celebrated my birthday. (Which she hadn’t forgotten after all. She gave me a little purse covered with beads she said were sewn by hand. Inside was a tube of real lipstick. The six-dollar kind. It made me sick with impatience to think it was summer and I’d have to wait until school to show it off.) Naturally I tried to tell her everything that had happened in the past six months, but when I asked her if she got the part in the movie she just said, “Did you see me riding up here in any Cadillac?” I kept pushing for details, but she deflected my questions with a weary, “Later, sugar.” I believed her, believed I’d be learning everything before long, and so let things be. Maybe I shouldn’t have, but that day I didn’t have a clue four years would pass before I’d learn all the things my mama wasn’t telling. By then—by the time I’d unraveled mysteries that took me clear across the country—I’d be bearing secrets of my own.

  After lunch, she pleaded exhaustion from the trip (trip from exactly where?) and went in to take a nap, not even bothering to change the rumpled sheets, a fact that revealed how tired she was. The linens were gray with grime, and Mama always was finicky about towels, corners, toilet seats, such like. I had tried my best while she was gone, but it was amazing how much work a house required. And I had school, too, which was supposed to be a girl’s full-time job.

  Mama slept through most of the afternoon while I waited outside her door, edgy with unsatisfied curiosity, and fretting about Daddy’s maybe stopping at CC’s. I plotted about how to get word to him. So he would be prepared. So he would come straight home without detouring for a drink or three. Finally I called the mill, an act so bold it had occurred only once in our family history, when I was knocked out cold by a pitched ball in P.E. But on this of all days, he couldn’t be reached.

  I could have saved myself the trouble. As if he had some special radar where Mama was concerned, Daddy came directly from work. When he walked through the door she was sitting at the kitchen table, freshly showered and dressed in a becoming pink blouse. The second he saw her he wasted no more time getting mad than I had.

  “Welcome home, Dinah Mae,” he said.

  “Deanie,” Mama said.

  “Dinah. Deanie. Whatever, darlin’.”

  It amazed me how a man could welcome his wife back like that without one single word about what she’d been doing since January. Course, Daddy always was a fool for everything about Mama. He thought she hung the moon. His sister Ida said he would carry Mama around on a pillow if it would make her happy. He displayed his love so openly I was embarrassed for him. I thought it was plain silly for a man to act so crazy over any woman. Even Mama. But I guess it’s hard to express what there was about Mama. It was as if her even noticing you was a favor, though not in a conceited way. It was just her manner. Long before the phrase ever entered the vernacular, Mama ruled.

  Daddy’s overalls were dirty, and there was flour dust on the back of his neck, creased with a line of sweat. I wished he’d washed up before he’d come home. He was a big man, my daddy, but he always seemed to shrink when he was with Mama. Even though he was capable at the mill and with any kind of machine, around her he was all helpless thumbs.

  At last, I thought, we’ll find out everything.

  To my disappointment, Daddy didn’t seem to share my fiery interest in what Mama’d been doing. He was happy to have her back and made it plainer than two sticks. He hadn’t been home more than fifteen minutes when they disappeared into their bedroom, not even bothering to glance my way to see if I was watching. At first all you could hear was talking, and once Mama laughed and that set her off in a coughing fit. Then nothing came from that room but silence. They didn’t care a whit that they’d left me sitting alone.

  I went out to the porch and picked up Gone With the Wind, which I was reading for the second time that summer. I loved the first sentence and knew it by heart. “Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were.” Mama was exactly like that. Loaded with charm. But beautiful, too. Feature by feature. Truly, Mama’d put Scarlett to shame. Whenever I pictured scenes from the book, it wasn’t Vivien Leigh I was seeing. It was Mama.

  I was at the part where the army was driven back to their winter quarters in Virginia and Christmas was approaching. Ashley Wilkes was on furlough, and Scarlett was frightened by the violence of her feelings for him. She loved Ashley “to desperation,” a phrase that thrilled and frightened me every time I considered it. Violence and desperation didn’t seem like good things to associate with love. In books, uncontrollable love might sound romantic, but in real life it was sure to be messy. Dangerous. How dangerous, I couldn’t imagine, though I was to find out.

  I read and reread the paragraph describing how the war had changed Ashley, but I couldn’t concentrate. A honeybee kept circling the swing, driving me crazy with its buzzing, but what was really pulling my attention was the silence from behind the bedroom door. I didn’t need any road map to tell me what was going on. I picked at a scab on my knee until it bled and was sure to make a scar, then sucked the blood off my finger and made up my mind that I wouldn’t even speak to Mama when they reappeared.

  When they finally came out—all rumpled and giggly— neither of them had the good grace to look shamefaced. Daddy sat down at the table and drank a Pabst while Mama set about making dinner. Fried ham steak, sweet potatoes, and creamed corn. When I smelled the ham frying, I felt my resolve to stay silent soften, and then the little seed of anger melted into relief. You see, it wasn’t that Mama was heartless. She was just care-free, and that could feel like plain not caring.

  I sipped a Coke, and felt something clenched loosen inside my chest. Mama was here, cooking dinner and flirting with Daddy. All was well in my world. We were a family again, not just a daddy and his daughter trying to be one, with a mama off somewhere on her way to becoming someone else.

  Later, after dinner, we all settled in on the couch and Daddy switched on the TV. Outside, the Bettis twins were cranking by on their dirt bikes. Wiley called for me to join them, but I was staying exactly where I was, snuggled in next to Mama. We watched Wheel of Fortune and a rerun of Moonlighting. Although she wasn’t our type, Mama and I both agreed that Cybill Shepherd knew a thing or two about looking fine. “That girl’s got attitude,” Mama said, like it was a good thing.

  Midway through the show, Daddy swung her feet up into his lap, like he had a zillion times. “Size five,” he announced to the room, his voice swollen with awe and pride, as if he were both surprised and personally responsible for the miracle of her tiny feet. I swung my own feet up. “Size eight,” I said. We all laughed.

  Everything was exactly the way it had been before Mama left.

  For weeks, I stayed edgy as a kit fox, alert for any sign Mama was unhappy or getting ready to head off again. But she didn’t. She stayed on for another six months. Until she left us for good.

  one

  1992

  The promise of beauty—the kind of real personal beauty that can transform a person’s life—arrived in Eden, Virginia, on the fourth Thursday in June.

  As usual I arrived through the rear door of the Klip-N-Kurl, and so a few minutes passed before I caught sight of the sign in the front window. I’d been worki
ng at the Kurl since school let out. Mostly I did chores: swept the floor, cleaned the sinks and mirrors, refilled the shampoo and conditioner bottles, dumped the ashtrays, straightened out the magazine table, that sort of thing. Because I wasn’t licensed, that was supposed to be the extent of it, but once in a while, when she got behind, Raylene let me do a shampoo or a comb out.

  I found soaping a head of hair pleasurable. You would be surprised to discover the wide variety of hair. Thin. Coarse. Thick. Wiry. Growing in ways that defy imagination. Hair with three natural parts, or platinum streaks there since birth.

  It is not false pride when I tell you that my hair was my best asset, though I’d cut it that spring—a mistake that never would have happened if Mama’d still been with me. I’d started out planning to give myself a little trim, like Elizabeth Talmadge’s new do, but getting it so the sides matched wasn’t as easy as you might think, and Raylene had to fix up the mess. I’d vowed when it grew out never to cut it again. Just trim the dead ends. I planned on wearing it down over my shoulders, like Kim Basinger, an actress I continue to admire even though that town she bought went bankrupt.

  “Morning, Tallie,” Raylene said. She was working up a head of suds on Sue Beth Wilkins. An unfortunate mop of hair topped the list of Sue Beth’s sorry features. Some of the meaner boys in our class called her LB—short for Lard Bucket—but a kindhearted person like Mama would call her sturdy.

  Mrs. Wilkins was sitting over by the dryers flipping through the style magazines. Raylene caught my attention in the mirror and gave a quick eye roll. You had to feel sorry for Sue Beth. Every year in late June—when they held all the practices that led up to tryouts for next year’s Flag Corps—her mama dragged her in and, armed with pictures she’d clipped out of some teen magazine, set Raylene to work. Sue Beth wasn’t in the least consulted about this and had told me herself she didn’t want to be a Corps member—as if that were even a remote possibility. The whole time she sat in Raylene’s chair she looked about as happy as a rain-soaked rooster. It was clear as crystal Sue Beth wasn’t going to make the Corps or the cheerleaders or the Sparkette twirlers or much of anything else except maybe, maybe the chorus. It wasn’t just her weight, which certainly wasn’t any asset. It was her whole yard dog look, which—having Mrs. Wilkins for a mother—you could understand.