Leaving Eden

by Anne Leclaire

  Daddy wasn’t home, and I was far too edgy to settle down. I spent a little time cleaning up the kitchen. After a while, I decided to bike over to the creek. All the other kids would be at the lake, the girls lying around in new bathing suits and oiling themselves up, the guys showing off, swimming out to the raft and diving in, making a big deal out of it. There’d be music playing on every blanket. I didn’t belong. Being without a mama made me different. Half the time, people acted like I was a special case, and the rest of the time, they acted like I should be used to having a mama who was gone, like that was something a person could get accustomed to. No one ever talked about her, or asked me one thing about her.

  When I felt lonely like that, I tried to imagine the future and the day I would come home from Hollywood. It’d be in the summer, maybe, and I’d be on a short break from filming a movie that was opening at Christmas. The Eden Times would do a story about me and take a picture that they’d feature on page one. People would ask for my autograph and I’d sign one for everyone. Taylor Skye. I’d write it out in serious blue ink, not something tacky like purple. And I’d be extra nice to everyone, even Elizabeth Talmadge, who’d have grown fat by then, have a head full of split ends, and no longer be queen of anything except the cash register at Winn-Dixie.

  I pulled on my old swimsuit from last year, which was too small and rode up my butt. There wasn’t much in the cupboard so I made myself a PB&J and grabbed a can of Coke. I considered taking a beer, but by the time I got around to drinking it, it would be warm. Warm soda tasted a sight better than warm beer. I was flipping up the kickstand on my Raleigh when a blue DeSoto pulled up. Wiley Bettis. For once without Will.

  “Hey, Tallie,” he said. He opened the door and got out.

  “Hey, yourself.” It was strange to see him without his twin, like half of him was missing. “Where’s Will?”

  “At the pond.”

  “Why aren’t you there?”

  “Didn’t feel like it. Where you off to?”

  “Swimming. The creek.”

  “Come on, I’ll give you a ride.”

  Wiley had this decrepit ’57 DeSoto someone had stripped the plates off and left for dead in the Winn-Dixie parking lot. He’d towed it home and spent the entire previous summer rebuilding the engine. Wiley’d gone through grammar school in the slow reading group, but he was some kind of genius when it came to engines.

  “I’ll bring you home, too,” he said, staring at the ground where his toe was busy working a hole in the grass.

  For heavens sake, Wiley Bettis, I wanted to say. Straighten up and look at me. One thing I knew I would demand in a boyfriend—not that I ever considered Wiley boyfriend material— was that he be able to look me straight in the eye. Mama said you couldn’t trust someone who didn’t, and I put that in my notebook, too.

  “Okay,” I said. A girl didn’t have to worry about how she was dressed when she rode in an old DeSoto with a front seat patched with duct tape.

  When we got to the creek, we headed straight for the water, both of us grateful to be getting cool. Wiley didn’t do any of the dumb things boys usually did, like splash you, or dive under water and try to lift you on their shoulders or swim between your legs, their hands brushing against your tits like being in water gave them permission to touch you in a way they would never try on dry land. After a while we got tired of swimming and we spread out my blanket and sat down. Then I split my sandwich with him. He refused the Coke, to my great relief, since I didn’t know how I’d drink it after his germy lips touched the rim. Then we swam again. We’d been coming to the creek every summer since we were old enough to go without our mamas. Will and Wiley were our only neighbors, and the three of us had played together as long as I could remember, mostly riding bikes or building forts in the field behind their house. Being without Will changed everything, like Wiley was someone new. Course, any fool could see he liked me. I wished there was a way I could switch his deep affection for me with Spy Reynolds’s apparent indifference. It was a mystery to me why things like love couldn’t be equal. Why, when someone loved you, you couldn’t just accept that love and return it in equal measure. My theory was that one person always loved the other more. Even if they were both in love, one person was more the lovee and the other the lover. Like my daddy and my mama.

  I was lying on the towel, conscious of the way my bathing suit was riding up my butt and wondering if I should pull it down or if that would only serve to draw Wiley’s attention, when he started talking.

  “What’re you doing after high school?”

  “Haven’t decided,” I said. “We still have another year of high school.” Of course, I knew all right. Like I said, I was running off to Hollywood. I planned on leaving the day after graduation, not that anyone would be missing me. Certainly not a daddy who’d clean forgotten I was alive. “What about you?” I asked, like I didn’t already know he’d end up working at Chaney’s Garage, fixing cars for his uncle. Just like Will would continue on at Winn-Dixie, where he bagged groceries on weekends. Spy Reynolds and Elizabeth Talmadge and all the others who lived over by Carlton’s Way in two-story houses with screened-in porches would go off to college. Someone like Ashley Wheeler might have the gumption to open a little bed-and-breakfast and hope to get the business of the tourists on their way across to the Blue Ridge. The rest—even the smart ones—would be teachers and accountants, bank tellers and store clerks, and would get married and have children and start the cycle of life in our town all over again.

  People in Eden didn’t have one stick of imagination. They couldn’t picture a life beyond the present circumstance or geography. Mama was the only one I knew who had the capacity to dream. A person’s as big as her dreams, she used to say. Her scrapbook was full of actresses who’d come from humble beginnings and transformed themselves into famous stars. Joan Crawford was born poor in San Antonio, Texas, and was once a telephone operator before she became an actress. Her real name was Lucille Le Sueur, which Mama thought sounded like the name of a stripper. Mama said we could learn a lot from the glamorous stars of the thirties and forties. She said those women knew how to invent themselves before people like Cher or that awful Madonna were even born.

  No one I knew had the imagination to dream. Or to even think of reaching for the sky. A perfect example of this was the school play. Just before school closed for the summer, we held a big meeting to decide what next year’s play would be, which was a complete waste of time as far as I was concerned since we all knew it would be You Can’t Take It with You. As long as anyone could remember, there were only two plays ever done at the high school. That one and Our Town, which we had just performed. This year Mr. Nelson, who taught driver’s ed and civics, was the Drama Club adviser because Mrs. Franklin, our English teacher, was pregnant. So he held this meeting and made us have this big vote for something already set in stone. Which shows you what happens when you’re a civics teacher. Like you have to prove “democracy in action,” which was his favorite phrase.

  I guess that was what made me raise my hand. “Why don’t we do something else?” I asked. “Do you have a suggestion, Tallie?” Mr. Nelson said, as if he were going to actually consider it, even though it came from me. He made a big show of pretending to be fair—democratic —but he had his favorites and he made it clear I wasn’t on that list. Every time I got an A on a test— which was most of the time, truth be told—he handed me back my paper and said, “Tallie Brock, an A,” with this great surprise in his voice, like How did that happen? He was the only one who didn’t treat me special ’cause I didn’t have a mama.

  As a matter of fact I did have a suggestion. I wanted us to do Spoon River Anthology, this really great play about all these dead people in a cemetery who get to talk and tell their stories. The character I liked the most was this old woman who talked about dancing in Chandlerville and raising children and living a full life. “It takes life to love life,” she said. I just loved that line. It sounded exactly like Mama. I decid
ed it would be my motto forever. I was thinking about that when I offered my suggestion to Mr. Democracy in Action.

  “What’s it about?” said Elizabeth Talmadge, who, wouldn’t you know, was the president of the Drama Club as well as Queen of the Universe. When I explained, someone said, “Dead people. How creepy,” and Elizabeth said, “Morbid,” and then the whole room got quiet. “Let’s put it to a vote,” Mr. Nelson said. He made a big show of counting hands and then announced that next year’s play would be You Can’t Take It with You.

  Wiley had stopped talking and the sun was directly overhead and I thought about dragging the blanket over beneath a willow to get some relief, but it seemed like too much trouble so I lay back and closed my eyes. It was funny being there without Will. Wiley stretched out on his stomach on the other side of the blanket, and I inched way over on my side so we wouldn’t touch by accident. Even quiet, men take up more space. Not just on things like blankets and chairs. It was like they required more air.

  I lay there considering this and after a while—in that dreamy space where you’re not quite asleep and not totally awake—I started pretending it was Spy Reynolds lying there. It’s funny how the power of wanting something can slip right over into believing that it is. Once, I heard Mama tell Martha Lee that it was the things we were denied that we wanted the most. And, judging from the way I wanted Spy, that was surely true. After a while I could picture him being there so clear that when I felt a shadow block out the sun, when I felt a hand touch my arm, I believed it actually was Spy. As his fingers traced down to my hand and then interlinked with mine, my stomach got that nervous feeling like before a swim meet or when I had a big test in school. But not exactly like that. Then, still holding my hand, Spy reached over with his other hand and turned my face toward his. I knew he was going to kiss me, and at that moment—stuck in my dream—I knew I’d let him. Judging from the talk in the girls’ locker room, I was the only one in the class who’d never been kissed. Practicing on your own hand isn’t the same. Then I smelled peanut butter and heard Wiley’s asthmatic breathing and knew it wasn’t Spy at all. I sat up and pulled away.

  “I got to be getting home.”

  “Okay,” Wiley said, not looking at me.

  Neither of us said a word all the way to my house.

  Martha Lee called after supper. When I heard her voice the receiver turned slick in my hand. I opened my mouth to tell her how I was sorry about taking the money and how I really had planned on telling her about it and how I’d pay her back before the end of the summer, but before I could open my mouth she was saying how bad she felt about not being there for my driving lesson and asking how about next Monday, would I like to do it then, and so I said yes and we hung up before I could even mention the fifteen dollars.

  That night I had trouble falling asleep. All mixed up with the funny feeling I had about taking the money from Martha Lee and my disappointment about not learning how to drive was how I’d felt lying on the blanket at the creek, expectant and, I don’t know, open in a way, and believing that it was Spy with me and then the disappointment of Wiley, the peanut butter smell of him. Being a wild girl wasn’t as easy as I’d expected.

  When I finally fell asleep, I had the old dream about the carnival magician. Except it was Spy Reynolds, and he was holding out a deck of cards for me to choose from and when I did, it turned out it wasn’t cards he was holding but all the photos of Mama and Martha Lee. And Daddy was there, too, pointing me out to Wiley Bettis, who had a badge on his chest and a pistol on his belt and had come to arrest me for stealing.

  Tallie’s Book

  Drinking alcohol before twelve noon is a sign of trouble.

  You can’t trust a man who won’t look you in the eye.

  Alcoholism runs in families.

  It takes life to love life.

  A person’s as big as her dreams.

  It’s the things we’re denied that we want the most.

  five

  It was “Seniors’ Day” at the Klip-N-Kurl. Back in January, when things were slow, Raylene decided to offer a 5 percent discount on Tuesdays to customers over seventy. The shop filled every week, crowded with old ladies like Miss Easter Davis, who barely had enough hair to fiddle with in the first place but who believed growing old was no excuse for letting yourself go. The main topic of conversation was disease and digestion. Brittle bones. Plumbing problems. Incontinence. Hattie Jones, who was usually first in line waiting at the door for Raylene to open, was an expert on that problem. “I always peed my pants when I got to laughing,” she’d say, “but now all it takes is one good sneeze.” It gave me the creeps.

  Raylene didn’t mind Tuesdays. She preferred them to lice season, when half the kids in the grammar school came in for treatment and she’d have to get all armored up with gloves and a full-length plastic gown like she was in some sci-fi movie. “You can’t be too careful,” she’d tell me. She said lice could jump amazing distances. She said they actually preferred clean hair ’cause they lay nits on the hair shaft. Raylene knew everything about lice, but it made me itch just watching her go to work on some kid’s head. De-licing was almost as bad as doing perms. She hated the tediousness of rolling all of those tiny curlers, but more than perms or lice season, Raylene hated repairing the damage customers did at home. “Kitchen beautician,” she’d say when someone called in wanting her to fix a home cut or color. Once she got a panicky call from Ruth Evans, whose head was smoking. I’m not kidding. Smoke was actually rolling off in waves. “Serves her right,” Raylene said before she calmed Ruth down, explaining how the chemicals in the drugstore coloring kit had mixed with the minerals in the Evanses’ well water and that was what caused the smoke.

  At least the pace was slow on Tuesdays. None of them wanted their hair blown dry. They wanted to sit under the dryer and talk. They were there for conversation as much as anything. For sure they weren’t there for speed. One thing about old people, they weren’t in any hurry. Not like Saturdays, when everyone was in a rush and we’d have to grab a sandwich and eat it in five minutes flat, swallowing without allowing time to chew.

  Old people acted like they had all the time in the world instead of like their sand was almost through the glass. Slow as snails, most of them. And small. People shrink when they get old, have you noticed? As if life were leaking out of them inch by inch.

  I couldn’t picture Mama old. Not Mama who brought music with her wherever she went and could stand on her head and turn cartwheels like a cheerleader. Couldn’t picture it any more than she could picture herself losing her beautiful hair to chemo. When it was clear she wasn’t going to do anything the doctor or Daddy wanted, everybody accepted the fact that Mama wasn’t going to fight. That’s when I knew I’d have to battle for her. First thing, I went to the Eden library and read every book they had on the subject of cancer, which wasn’t much. Then I talked Martha Lee into driving to Lynchburg and buying bottles of vitamins. A multi and all the antioxidants. One thousand milligram capsules of C. Smaller ones of A and E. I mixed up so much juice for Mama it was amazing she didn’t turn orange. And I cooked up all the food Goody said Mama’d craved in childhood—things like grits and whipped potatoes, sweet potato pie and milk toast—made them even though she couldn’t eat much anymore. “That looks so good, sugar,” she’d say when I carried in a plate of cheese grits. “Just put it down and I’ll try it later.”

  One of the books I read said prayers held the power to cure, so I started going to the Baptist Church, the one out on the back hill, thinking maybe that was what was needed. Elijah Baptist was so different from the Methodist Church, it was like going to Disneyland. To begin with, everyone dressed up. The little girls wore party dresses with frilled lace on their socks, and the boys wore ties, every one of them from the youngest to high school seniors. The ladies wore hats and sang loud, like each one thought she was Aretha Franklin. They called each other “brother” and “sister” and all through the sermon shouted out things like, “That’s righ
t,” and, “Thank you, Jesus.” There was a large choir, too, and when they sang, you just wanted to rise right up out of your seat and dance, even if you were in church. One man played the drums and another blew a trumpet. The preacher’s name was Reverend Tillett and he was tall as a tree and sounded exactly like Jesse Jackson. Sometimes, right in the middle of the sermon, he’d march straight from the pulpit and parade down the aisles like he was the drum major of the Eden High School Band. I was the only white person there. They were all nice to me, though, and when the Reverend Tillett found out about Mama, he included her in the healing prayer, calling her “sister” and asking the Lord to cure her. The ladies hugged me. Real hugs, too. Not fake. They held me close like I was kin.

  None of it made a g.d. bit of difference. Not Mama’s comfort food or the vitamins or the prayers of the Reverend Tillett and the people at Elijah Baptist. Mama kept fading right before my eyes. I was desperate by the time I thought of going to see Allie Rucker.

  Allie lived outside of town, and everyone in Eden knew she was a witch. Once, Wiley dared us into riding our bikes out to her cabin, where people said she made moonshine in a genuine copper still. We planned on shouting things about her being a witch and throwing eggs at her house, but when we got there we were so spooked that we just turned around and came back. According to what folks said, Allie knew everything. She could tell whether a pregnant woman was carrying a boy or a girl. She knew how to get rid of a baby you didn’t want, or how to get a baby if you wanted one and weren’t having any luck in that department. She knew spells and how to put the hex on a person. How to make a man crazy with loving you, if that’s what you wanted. Maybe Allie Rucker was a witch, like people said, but with everything else failing, a witch was exactly what was required.