He was saying, “Why don’t you move there, too? What would keep you here?”
“Don’t make me laugh.” Her beer can was sweating, making cold circles on her bare leg.
He scrunched his empty can into a wad, as if he had made a decision. “We could buy a house and get back together,” he said. “I didn’t like seeing you on that dance floor the other night with that guy. I didn’t like you seeing me with Janet. I didn’t like being there with Janet. I suddenly wondered why we had to be there in those circumstances, when we could have been home with the kids.”
“It would be the same old thing,” Beverly said impatiently. “My God, Joe, think of what you’d do with three kids for three whole months.”
“I think I know how to handle them. It’s you I never could handle.” He threw the can across the room straight into the kitchen wastebasket. “We’ve got a history together,” he said. “That’s the positive way to look at it.” Playfully he cocked his hat and gave her a wacky, ironic look—his imitation of Jim-Boy McCoy, a used-furniture dealer in a local commercial.
“You take the cake,” she said, with a little burst of laughter. But she couldn’t see herself moving to Columbia, South Carolina, of all places. It would be too hot, and the people would talk in drippy, soft drawls. The kids would hate it.
After she left Joe’s, she went to Tan Your Hide, the tanning salon and fitness shop that Jolene Walker managed. She worked late on Fridays. Beverly and Jolene had been friends since junior high, when they entered calves in the fair together.
“I need a quick hit before I go home,” Beverly said to Jolene. “Use number two—number one’s acting funny, and I’m scared to use it. I think the light’s about to blow.”
In the changing room, Jolene listened sympathetically to Beverly’s news about Joe. “Columbia, South Carolina!” Jolene cried. “What will I do with myself if you go off?”
“A few years ago I’d have jumped at the chance to move someplace like South Carolina, but it wouldn’t be right to go now unless I love him,” Beverly said. As she pulled on her bathing suit, she said, “Damn! I couldn’t bear to be away from the kids for a whole summer!”
“Maybe he can’t either,” said Jolene, skating the dressing-room curtain along its track. “Listen, do you want to ride to Memphis with me tomorrow? I’ve got to pick up some merchandise coming in from California—a new line of sweatsuits. It’s cheaper to go pick it up at the airport than have it flown up here by commuter.”
“Yeah, sure. I don’t know what else to do with my weekends. Without the kids, my weekends are like black holes.” She laughed. “Big empty places you get sucked into.” She made a comic sucking noise that made Jolene smile.
“We could go hear some of that good Memphis blues on Beale Street,” Jolene suggested.
“Let me think about it while I work on my tan. I want to get in here and do some meditating.”
“Are you still into that? That reminds me of my ex-husband and that born-again shit he used to throw at me.”
“It’s not the same thing,” Beverly said, getting into the sunshine coffin, as she called it. “Beam me up,” she said. She liked to meditate while she tanned. It was private, and she felt she was accomplishing something at the same time. In meditation, the jumbled thoughts in her mind were supposed to settle down, like the drifting snowflakes in a paperweight.
Jolene adjusted the machine and clicked the dial. “Ready for takeoff?”
“As ready as I’ll ever be,” said Beverly, her eyes hidden under big cotton pads. She was ruining her eyes at work, staring at a video display terminal all day. Under the sunlamp, she imagined her skin broiling as she slowly moved through space like that space station in 2001 that revolved like a rotisserie.
Scenes floated before her eyes. Helping shell purple-hull peas one hot afternoon when she was about seventeen; her mother shelling peas methodically, with the sound of Beverly’s father in the bedroom coughing and spitting into a newspaper-lined cigar box. Her stomach swelled out with Kerry, and a night then when Joe didn’t come back from a motorcycle trip and she was so scared she could feel the fear deep inside, right into the baby’s heartbeat. Her father riding a horse along a fencerow. In the future, she thought, people would get in a contraption something like the sunshine coffin and go time traveling, unbounded by time and space or custody arrangements.
One winter afternoon two years ago: a time with Joe and the kids. Tammy was still nursing, and Kerry had just lost a tooth. Shayla was reading a Nancy Drew paperback, which was advanced for her age, but Shayla was smart. They were on the living-room floor together, on a quilt, having a picnic and watching Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Beverly felt happy. That day, Kerry learned a new word—“soldier.” She teased him. “You’re my little soldier,” she said. Sometimes she thought she could make moments like that happen again, but when she tried, it felt forced. They would be at the supper table, and she’d give the children hot dogs or tacos—something they liked—and she would say, “This is such fun!” and they would look at her funny.
Joe used to say to anyone new they met, “I’ve got a blue collar and a red neck and a white ass. I’m the most patriotic son of a bitch on two legs!” She and Joe were happy when they started out together. After work, they would sit on the patio with the stereo turned up loud and drink beer and pitch horseshoes while the steak grilled. On weekends, they used to take an ice chest over to the lake and have cookouts with friends and go fishing. When Joe got a motorcycle, they rode together every weekend. She loved the feeling, her feet clenching the foot pegs and her hands gripping the seat strap for dear life. She loved the wind burning her face, her hair flying out from under the helmet, her chin boring into Joe’s back as he tore around curves. Their friends all worked at the new plants, making more money than they ever had before. Everyone they knew had a yard strewn with vehicles: motorcycles, three-wheelers, sporty cars, pickups. One year, people started buying horses. It was just a thing people were into suddenly, so that they could ride in the annual harvest parade in Fenway. Joe and Beverly never got around to having a horse, though. It seemed too much trouble after the kids came along. Most of the couples they knew then drank a lot and argued and had fights, but they had a good time. Now marriages were splitting up. Beverly could name five divorces or separations in her crowd. It seemed no one knew why this was happening. Everybody blamed it on statistics: half of all marriages nowadays ended in divorce. It was a fact, like traffic jams—just one of those things you had to put up with in modern life. But Beverly thought money was to blame: greed made people purely stupid. She admired Jolene for the simple, clear way she divorced Steve and made her own way without his help. Steve had gone on a motorcycle trip alone, and when he came back he was a changed man. He had joined a bunch of born-again bikers he met at a campground in Wyoming, and afterward he tried to convert everybody he knew. Jolene refused to take the Lord as her personal savior. “It’s amazing how much spite Steve has in him,” Jolene told Beverly after she moved out. “I don’t even care anymore.”
It made Beverly angry not to know why she didn’t want Joe to go to South Carolina. Did he just want her to come to South Carolina for convenience, for the sake of the children? Sometimes she felt they were both stalled at a crossroads, each thinking the other had the right-of-way. But now his foot was on the gas.
Jolene was saying, “Get out of there before you cook!”
Beverly removed the cotton pads from her eyes and squinted at the bright light.
Jolene said, “Look at this place on my arm. It looks just like one of those skin cancers in my medical guide.” She pointed to an almost invisible spot in the crook of her arm. Jolene owned a photographer’s magnifying glass a former boyfriend had given her, and she often looked at her moles with it. Under the glass, tiny moles looked hideous and black, with red edges.
Beverly, who was impatient with Jolene’s hypochondria, said, “I wouldn’t worry about it unless I could see it with my bare naked eyes.”
“I think I should stop tanning,” Jolene said.
The sky along the western horizon was a flat yellow ribbon with the tree line pasted against it. After the farmland ran out, Beverly and Jolene passed small white houses in disrepair, junky little clusters of businesses, a Kmart, then a Wal-Mart. As Jolene drove along, Beverly thought about Joe’s vehicles. It had never occurred to her before that he had all those wheels and hardly went anywhere except places around home. But now he was actually leaving.
She was full of nervous energy. She kept twisting the radio dial, trying to find a good driving song. She wished the radio would play “Radar Love,” a great driving song. All she could get was country stations and gospel stations. After a commercial for a gigantic flea market, with dealers coming from thirty states, the announcer said, “Elvis would be there—if he could.” Jolene hit the horn. “Elvis, we’re on our way, baby!”
“There’s this record store I want to go to if we have time,” said Jolene. “It’s got all these old rock songs—everything you could name, going way back to the very beginning.”
“Would they have ‘Your Feet’s Too Big,’ by Fats Waller? Joe used to sing that.”
“Honey, they’ve got everything. Why, I bet they’ve got a tape of Fats Waller humming to himself in the outhouse.” They laughed, and Jolene said, “You’re still stuck on Joe.”
“I can’t let all three kids go to South Carolina on one airplane! If it crashed, I’d lose all three of them at once.”
“Oh, don’t think that way!”
Beverly sighed. “I can’t get used to not having a child pulling on my leg every minute. But I guess I should get out and have a good time.”
“Now you’re talking.”
“Maybe if he moves to South Carolina, we can make a clean break. Besides, I better not fight him, or he might kidnap them.”
“Do you really think that?” said Jolene, astonished.
“I don’t know. You hear about cases like that.” Beverly changed the radio station again.
“I can’t stand to see you tear yourself up this way,” said Jolene, giving Beverly’s arm an affectionate pat.
Beverly laughed. “Hey, look at that bumper sticker—‘A WOMAN’S PLACE IS IN THE MALL.’”
“All right!” said Jolene.
They drove into Memphis on Route 51, past self-service gas stations in corrugated-tin buildings with country hams hanging in the windows. Beverly noticed a memorial garden between two cornfields, with an immense white statue of Jesus rising up from the center like the Great White Shark surfacing. They passed a display of black-velvet paintings beside a van, a ceramic-grassware place, a fireworks stand, motels, package stores, autobody shops, car dealers that sold trampolines and satellite dishes. A stretch of faded old wooden buildings—grim and gray and ramshackle—followed, then factories, scrap-metal places, junkyards, ancient grills and poolrooms, small houses so old the wood looked rotten. Then came the housing projects. It was all so familiar. Beverly remembered countless trips to Memphis when her father was in the hospital here, dying of cancer. The Memphis specialists prolonged his misery, and Beverly’s mother said afterward, “We should have set him out in the corncrib and let him go naturally, the way he wanted to go.”
Beverly and Jolene ate at a Cajun restaurant that night, and later they walked down Beale Street, which had been spruced up and wasn’t as scary as it used to be, Beverly thought. The sidewalks were crowded with tourists and policemen. At a blues club, she and Jolene giggled like young girls out looking for love. Beverly had been afraid Memphis would make her sad, but after three strawberry Daiquiris she was feeling good. Jolene had a headache and was drinking ginger ale, which turned out to be Sprite with a splash of Coke—what bartenders do when they’re out of ginger ale, Beverly told her. She didn’t know how she knew that. Probably Joe had told her once. He used to tend bar. Forget Joe, she thought. She needed to loosen up a little. The kids had been saying she was like either Kate or Allie on that TV show—whichever was the uptight one; she couldn’t remember.
The band was great—two white guys and two black guys. Between numbers, they joked with the waitress, a middle-aged woman with spiked red hair and shoulder pads that fit cockeyed. The white lead singer clowned around with a cardboard stand-up figure of Marilyn Monroe in her white dress from The Seven Year Itch. He spun her about the dance floor, sneaking his hand onto Marilyn’s crotch where her dress had flown up. He played her like a guitar. A pretty black woman in a dark leather skirt and polka-dotted jacket danced with a slim young black guy with a brush haircut. Beverly wondered how he got his hair to stick up like that. Earlier, when she and Jolene stopped at a Walgreen’s for shampoo, Beverly had noticed a whole department of hair-care products for blacks. There was a row of large jugs of hair conditioner, like the jugs motor oil and bleach came in.
Jolene switched from fake ginger ale to Fuzzy Navels, which she had been drinking earlier at the Cajun restaurant. She blamed her headache on Cajun frog legs but said she felt better now. “I’m having a blast,” she said, drumming her slender fingers on the table in time with the band.
“I’m having a blast, too,” Beverly said, just as an enormous man with tattoos of outer-space monsters on his arms asked Jolene to dance.
“No way!” Jolene said, cringing. On his forearm was an astounding picture of a creature that reminded Beverly of one of Kerry’s dinosaur toys.
“That guy’s really off the moon,” Jolene said as the man left.
During the break, the waitress passed by with a plastic bucket, collecting tips for the band. Beverly thought of an old song, “Bucket’s Got a Hole in It.” Her grandmother’s kitchen slop bucket with its step pedal. Going to hell in a bucket. Kick the bucket. She felt giddy.
“That boy’s here every night,” the waitress said, with a turn of her head toward the tattooed guy, who had approached another pair of women. “I feel so sorry for him. His brother killed himself and his mother’s in jail for drugs. He never could hold a job. He’s trouble waiting for a ride.”
“Does the band know ‘Your Feet’s Too Big’?” Beverly asked the waitress, who was stuffing requests into her pocket.
“Is that a song, or are you talking about my big hoofs?” the woman said, with a wide, teasing grin.
On the way back to their motel on Elvis Presley Boulevard, Jolene got on a one-way street and ended up in downtown Memphis, where the tall buildings were. Beverly would hate to work so high up in the air. Her cousin had a job down here in life insurance and said she never knew what the weather was. Beverly wondered if South Carolina had any skyscrapers.
“There’s the famous Peabody Hotel,” Jolene was saying. “The hotel with the ducks.”
“Ducks?”
“At that hotel it’s ducks galore,” explained Jolene. “The towels and stationery and stuff. I know a girl who stayed there, and she said a bunch of ducks come down every morning on the elevator and go splash in the fountain. It’s a tourist attraction.”
“The kids would like that. That’s what I should be doing down here—taking the kids someplace, not getting smashed like this.” Beverly felt disembodied, her voice coming from the glove compartment.
“Everything is should with you, Beverly!” Jolene said, making a right on red.
Jolene didn’t mean to sound preachy, Beverly thought. Fuzzy Navels did that to her. If Beverly mentioned what she was feeling about Joe, Jolene would probably say that Joe just looked good right now compared to some of the weirdos you meet out in the world.
Down the boulevard, the lights spread out extravagantly. As Beverly watched, a green neon light winked off, and the whole scene seemed to shift slightly. It was like making a correction on the VDT at work—the way the screen readjusted all the lines and spacing to accommodate the change. Far away, a red light was inching across the black sky. She thought about riding behind Joe on his Harley, flashing through the dark on a summer night, cool in the wind, with sparkling, mysterious lights flickering off th
e lake.
The music from the night before was still playing in Beverly’s head when she got home Sunday afternoon. It was exhilarating, like something she knew well but hadn’t thought of in years. It came soaring up through her with a luxurious clarity. She could still hear the henna-haired waitress saying, “Are you talking about my big hoofs?” Beverly’s dad used to say, “Oh, my aching dogs!” She clicked “Radar Love” into the cassette player and turned the volume up loud. She couldn’t help dancing to its hard frenzy. “Radar Love” made her think of Joe’s Fuzzbuster, which he bought after he got two speeding tickets in one month. One time, he told the children his razor was a Fuzzbuster. Speeding, she whirled joyfully through the hall.
The song was only halfway through when Joe arrived with the kids—unexpectedly early. Kerry ejected the tape. Sports voices hollered out from the TV. Whenever the kids returned from their weekends, they plowed through the place, unloading their belongings and taking inventory of what they had left behind. Tammy immediately flung all her toys out of her toybox, looking for a rag doll she had been worried about. Joe said she had cried about it yesterday.
“How was the dentist?” Beverly asked Shayla.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” said Shayla, who was dumping dirty clothes on top of the washing machine.
“Forty bucks for one stupid filling,” Joe said.
Joe had such a loud voice that he always came on too strong. Beverly remembered with embarrassment the time he called up Sears and terrorized the poor clerk over a flaw in a sump pump, when it wasn’t the woman’s fault. But now he lowered his voice to a quiet, confidential tone and said to Beverly in the kitchen, “Yesterday at the lake Shayla said she wished you were there with us, and I tried to explain to her how you had to have some time for yourself, how you said you had to have your own space and find yourself—you know, all that crap on TV. She seemed to get a little depressed, and I thought maybe I’d said the wrong thing, but a little later she said she’d been thinking, and she knew what you meant.”
Patchwork Page 27
