Calling Home

by Janna McMahan

  Kids trailed back down the street in their uniforms and parade costumes. Shannon dangled her legs off the tailgate and clicked her wooden-soled sandals against her feet. She saw Kerry winding through the crowd. They had been broken up six weeks.

  “Hey,” he said when he reached the truck.

  “Hey.”

  “We’re on our way to get something to eat,” Patsy said. “You kids want to come?”

  “No thanks, Aunt Patsy.”

  “Come on, Virginia. I’m hungry.”

  They watched the women walk up the hill toward the smoky barbecue area. The red, white, and blue crowd moved like eddies in a stream clustering around eating spots. Kids had small American flags painted on their cheeks.

  “How’s the job going?” Kerry asked.

  “It’s good. I like it.”

  “You learn how to cook yet?”

  “Nobody’s complained.”

  “Yeah, but did you poison them to where they couldn’t talk?”

  Shannon kicked at him and he backed away. Her sandal flopped off. He retrieved it and slid it back on her foot.

  “You ever get your money back on that necklace?” she asked.

  “Nope. Figure I’ll keep it and give it to some girl.”

  “I bet.”

  “Your family having that big picnic today?”

  “Yeah,” Shannon answered. “No getting out of the reunion.”

  “You going to the fireworks?”

  “Reunion’s always at the park, so we stay and watch the fireworks. We play softball and stuff until it gets dark. If we were still together I’d have to drag you there with me.”

  “Now there’s a silver lining.”

  Shannon heard Liz giggle. Will and Liz walked toward them through a jam of cars. Like always, they were holding hands.

  “Hey, Kerry,” Liz said.

  “Hey,” Kerry said. “Hey, Will.”

  “What’s up, man?” Will said, disinterested.

  “Well, I guess I better get going. Y’all have a good time at your reunion.” Kerry walked off. He didn’t look back.

  “Aw, shit. I forgot about the damn reunion,” Will said.

  “You have to go,” Shannon said. “Momma expects you to.”

  “I know, but me and Jim are going fishing this afternoon. Shit. What happened to my stuff?”

  “Momma organized for you.”

  “Damn. That woman can’t leave nothing alone.”

  “Reunion won’t start until six,” Shannon said. “You can fish all day and bring Jim with you to eat. Momma said something about asking him anyway.”

  “She did. She asked him.”

  “Is he coming?”

  “Says he is. I saw him kissing Mom last night.”

  “You lie,” Shannon said.

  “Swear to God.” Will held up his hand like he was swearing on a Bible. “When he brought her home they stayed out on the porch for I don’t know how long, and when I came up from the basement to get something to eat they were out there in the swing just going at it.”

  “No.” Liz giggled again.

  “It was disgusting.”

  “Inviting him to the reunion’s serious,” Shannon said.

  “She damn well better divorce Dad before she takes up with him too much more.” There was a pause as they all thought about it and then Will said, “You don’t have to work today?”

  “Nope. Sarah said it’s such a big weekend that she needed to work it. I think she still doesn’t trust me when things get busy.”

  “All right. Tell Mom I’ll be there tonight in time to eat.”

  “Okay.”

  “Shannon,” Liz said. “You want to come over and take a look at my long dresses now? I’m not doing anything. Then I could drive us to the reunion when we’re finished.”

  Liz’s room seemed more pink and frilly than the last time. Unlike Shannon’s room, where every stick of furniture was a cast-off from some family member, everything in Liz’s room was part of a matched set. Her canopy bed was swathed in eyelet lace and flanked by two long windows with curtains to match. A white wicker chair and footstool were covered in clothes. The walls were pink and the carpet deep rose. Liz’s bed was piled high with pink pillows of every shape. Nothing even resembled the two plain flat feather pillows that slumped on Shannon’s bed. Liz had a doll collection and a big Scooby-Doo stuffed animal from Kings Island up in Cincinnati. Her night table was covered in stacks of Seventeen and Tiger Beat.

  “You sure must like pink,” Shannon said.

  “I liked pink when I did the room, but now I’m not so crazy about it. Being in this room is like swimming in Pepto-Bismol.”

  Shannon laughed.

  “But I can’t tell my daddy I hate it because it cost so much to get it this way. He said I have to live with it until I leave for college.”

  Liz threw open the double doors to her closet. Inside was a jumbled mess of more clothes than Shannon had owned in her entire life. Hangers screeched along the metal rod as Liz slid things to the side to dig out long dresses.

  “You’re a six, right?”

  “Right. Sometimes a four.”

  “Okay. You’re taller than I am, but I have more boobs, so I think I have a couple of dresses that would fall about right.” She pulled out a white dress with a thick lace overlay almost like a shawl across the shoulders. The skirt was pleated all the way to the floor. “This is called Italian pleats. This dress flows so good on stage.”

  “Did you wear it in Junior Miss?”

  “I only wore it in the Miss Adair County pageant. I was first runner-up. You can try it, and this pink one, too. It has an elastic, gathered bodice. You can yank it down a little and it should be the right length. Can you walk in heels? You look so much better on stage in heels, but if you can’t be graceful then you shouldn’t wear much of a heel. Or with that dress. You definitely can’t wear heels with that dress.”

  “I hadn’t even thought about heels.”

  “It’s good to wear them. Shows you’re poised, so you should go ahead and get your shoes and wear them around the house. You want to practice walking in them and stretch them to fit your foot so they’re comfortable. It helps to scuff up the bottoms so you don’t slip, or put masking tape on them for grip. The last thing you want is for your feet to fly out from under you while you’re onstage.”

  A lump shaped in Shannon’s throat. Performance anxiety was her friend in speech tournaments where a beating heart pulsed more words to her mouth and brain. But it would be hard to walk in heels and smile for no reason for extended periods with that same adrenaline high. She had never been judged on things like her physical appearance or grace. It seemed somehow wrong to be evaluated on those things. It made her think of livestock being judged at the state fair, but apparently she was the only person who found anything disturbing about it. At least she didn’t have to wear a bathing suit. She would not have done that.

  “Oh, believe me,” Liz said. “There are lots of tricks. You know about Vaseline?”

  “What about Vaseline?”

  “You rub it on your teeth and gums. That way your lips don’t stick to your teeth when they get dry from all that smiling. All the girls do it.”

  “That’s weird.”

  “Some girls in straight-up beauty contests take tape and they wind it around them so they look like they have this tiny little waist. But it’s only the bigger girls that do that. Besides, that’s cheating.”

  Shannon ran her hands over the dresses tossed across the bed.

  “The pink one has the prettiest skirt. Look how it moves.” Liz whisked the garment off the bed and twirled around the room with the dress flowing out in front of her. Shannon could feel herself in that dress, the smooth, silky material gliding over her skin.

  “Let me try it on.” Shannon pulled her T-shirt off and pushed down her shorts. She unhooked her bra and flung it on the bed. Liz slid the dress down over her outstretched arms. It fell into place and zipped up perfectly;
the bodice was snug and the skirt fell smoothly over her hips. Shannon was elated until she saw herself in the mirror. The skirt hung three inches from the floor, and she was barefooted.

  “Too short,” Liz said. “That means the white’s too short, too. Let’s try the blue.” But the blue dress hung funny, and after trying on every dress Liz had they both fell exhausted onto the pile of silk and chiffon on the bed.

  “I can’t believe out of all of these dresses that you don’t have one I can wear. I don’t want a homemade dress.”

  “I’m sorry,” Liz said. “Want to look at some of my short dresses? You’ll need a nice suit for the interview and it won’t matter so much where it falls on you.” She began to pull more dresses from her closet.

  “What’s the interview like?”

  “It’s not easy. You have to sit just so. Never cross your legs. Cross your ankles like the Queen of England, like this.” Liz sat on the edge of the wicker footstool. “The judges are all from out of town, so they won’t know your family or anything about you, so they ask questions to see what kind of person you are. Like what do you think you’ll major in in college and what is the most important lesson you learned from your parents. Stuff like that.”

  “Hmm,” Shannon said. “Let’s see…what do I want to major in? Biology or entomology or some sort of natural science.”

  “They’ll like that. Girls who want to be doctors or lawyers and save the world rank real high in their book.”

  “My most important lesson I learned from my parents…don’t get married, it won’t work.”

  “They won’t like that last answer.”

  As if on cue, a wedding veil tumbled down from the top shelf of the closet. Liz picked it up, put it on her head, and pulled the thick tulle down over her face. She stood, arms limp, looking at herself in the full-length mirror.

  “My mother got this at a yard sale,” Liz said. “I used it to play dress-up when I was little.”

  Shannon watched from the cluttered bed.

  “My parents would kill me if I ran off and married Will.” She stared at herself in the mirror like someone who had never seen their reflection before, tilting her head from side to side in a quizzical way. “We’ve talked about it, you know. Eloping. Going to Smokey Mountains.”

  “Don’t you want to go to college?”

  “I don’t know,” Liz said. “I guess.”

  “But you’ll have so much fun at college. Don’t you think about that?”

  “Not really. I think mostly about missing Will. My parents are making me go to some school in North Carolina, Queens College or something. I think it’s an all-girls school. Daddy signed me up. It’s where Mommy went to school.”

  She suddenly ripped the headpiece off and flung it up into the top of her closet. “Why’d you break up with Kerry?” she asked. She snapped hangers and clothes to one side.

  “Because he wants to get married and I don’t.”

  “He asked you?”

  “Not straight out, but I know what he’s thinking. Asking me if I’d ever want to live on a farm and stuff like that…” Shannon let her voice trail off out the open window of Liz’s room. Outside, across City Lake, men were setting up the fireworks they would shoot off later in the evening.

  “Don’t you ever want to get married?” Liz asked as she plopped a dress and a suit on the bed beside Shannon.

  “Someday. When I’m finished with school and the right guy comes along, but I don’t think about it much. I want to be old when I get married. Like thirty or something.”

  “God, then you’ll be too old to have babies.”

  “Maybe I don’t want babies. Maybe I’ll be a career woman.”

  “You really don’t care about having a family and a house?”

  “I’m not interested in spending my life taking care of some man and a bunch of kids, if that’s what you mean. Ever wonder why all these women around here bitch nonstop? Because all they do is take care of everybody else. They don’t have anything of their own. I want a job. I want my own money. I don’t want to ever depend on a man.”

  Liz lowered herself down onto the crinkly heap of dresses and Shannon joined her. “I mean, look at my mom,” Shannon continued. “She’s not stupid or anything. She could have probably made a lawyer or something, but she got pregnant young and never had a chance to do anything. I want to travel and see the world. I want to eat in fancy restaurants and wear nice dresses.” Shannon fingered a bit of chiffon to illustrate her point.

  “Well, I hope you get what you want, but I don’t think I could be happy unless I had a family,” Liz said somberly.

  After exhausting Liz’s cache of dresses, the girls went through shorts and tops, selecting an outfit for Shannon that Liz no longer wanted. They drove to Miller Park, and as they topped the hill they looked down on all of Shannon’s relatives spread out over the picnic area.

  “Wow,” Shannon said. “I think every relative I have must be here.”

  “There’s a bunch of them all right,” Liz said. “How many people are in your family?”

  “My momma has seven brothers and sisters and my grandpa has a bunch of brothers and sisters, too. There’re always about a hundred people at these things.”

  As they walked to the food area they noticed kids chucking rocks into the park’s lazy creek. Horseshoes rang, men laughing and yelling at each toss. Some sat in lawn chairs, smoking and telling stories. Four picnic tables had been dragged together to make one long buffet, and women scooped ice into jumbo plastic cups, lining them up on one end of the table. Other women removed cling wrap and aluminum foil from bowls and casserole dishes.

  “Hey, Granny,” Shannon said and kissed her grandmother on the cheek. “All that foil sounds like rain sprinkling on a tin roof.”

  “I reckon you’re right,” Ruby said. “Where’s your brother?”

  “He said he’d be here in time to eat.”

  “That needs to be in the next five minutes or he’s going to be out of luck. You can eat his food, Liz.”

  “That suits me, Mrs. Spurling,” Liz said. “Can I help do anything?”

  “Why don’t you girls go around and tell everybody to get a plate,” Ruby said. “We got to bless this food and eat before it all gets cold.”

  Shannon walked up to a group of men comparing wounds.

  “You know you ain’t a real Spurling if you got all your fingers,” one of Shannon’s uncles said. Five men held out hands, all missing parts of one or more fingers. “That’s what working with wood does to you.”

  “I lost this finger in the crosscut when I was cutting out a headboard. Prettiest piece of cherry you ever saw.”

  “Jigsaw got the tips of these two.”

  “Hell, y’all, that ain’t nothing compared to losing an eye.” Shannon watched Liz’s face as one of the Spurling brothers popped out his glass eye and held it in his hand. “Fish hook,” he said to Liz.

  They all laughed when Liz turned pale and walked away.

  “Y’all are bad,” Shannon said. “Grandma said it’s time to return thanks.”

  They all nodded and moved toward the food tables. Shannon found Liz down by the creek telling the kids to come on. When the family was gathered, Shannon’s grandpa, Clyde, asked everyone to bow their heads while he asked the Lord to bless the food.

  The table was organized with meats first. Hamburgers, hotdogs, fried chicken, and slabs of ham were followed by giant bowls of green beans, beefsteak tomatoes, squash and broccoli casserole, cucumber, macaroni and potato salad, macaroni and cheese, creamed corn, lima beans, peas, and new potatoes. Chips, pickles, light bread, and rolls were followed by an entire table of desserts—Kentucky bourbon pie, pecan pie, fried apple pies, brownies, German chocolate cake, Italian cream cake, ambrosia, and blackberry and peach cobblers. There were even a couple of ice cream churns whining over by the light pole where there was an electrical outlet.

  The women filled children’s plates and settled little ones down to eat wh
ile the men went through the line. Afterward, the women went through the line for themselves and perched along the benches on the picnic tables to talk and shoo flies away from the food. Shannon and Liz sat on the ground and listened to their conversations.

  “So, Virginia,” Patsy said. “Didn’t you invite Jim to come?”

  “I did, but I guess he’s still out fishing with Will.”

  “You been seeing a lot of Jim lately?” Lovey asked. She was Virginia’s youngest sister. Lovey and her husband Blue and their passel of children lived on Blue’s family farm.

  “We’ve been going out some,” Virginia said.

  “Don’t listen to her,” Patsy said. “He’s been taking her all over tarnation. They go to the movies in Louisville and out dancing in Lebanon. He picks her up at the factory. He even gave her a radio for the kitchen.”

  “You’ve got the biggest mouth,” Virginia said, but something about the way she said it seemed pleased by her sister’s disclosure.

  “He sounds like a catch,” Margie said. This was Virginia’s next-youngest sister.

  Grandma Ruby screwed up her mouth while she listened to the conversation. Her granny would never say anything in front of relatives, but Shannon knew she wanted to ask the question on everyone’s minds—when was Virginia going to divorce Roger? Ruby had told her daughter more than once that it was wrong to date until she and Roger were properly divorced. Virginia had told her mother to mind her own business.

  Shannon’s uncle Wayne moved to the dessert table. His Vietnamese wife, Trang, hovered behind him.

  “Ginnie, can I get past you to get some of that pie there?” Wayne asked.

  Virginia stood her ground and the group fell silent.

  “Don’t call me that,” Virginia said.

  “Oh, sorry,” he said, not raising his head from his dessert inspection. “I still think of you as that pretty little girl.”

  “Shut up, Wayne.”

  Wayne and Trang moved along the table while everyone watched. He took slivers from four different desserts. Trang chose a slice of watermelon. The coolness between Virginia and her brother tinged the happy atmosphere, and when the couple walked away, Trang’s long black braid swinging past her knees, the conversation took a bitchy turn.