by Janis Owens
“Fine. Brother Sloan preached,” she said, talking as she undressed. “He’s getting old, lost his place a few times, bless his heart. Carlym really needs to go on full-time.”
She was standing there in a black bra and matching panties when she said it, and I suddenly understood we were at war here and turned back to the paper, asking casually, “Where’re the kids?”
“Sim’s at Keith’s, Missy went to Dothan with Joanna, Clay’s with Cissie. He always goes home with her on Sundays. They watch wrestling together.” She hung up her dress and crawled in her side of the bed. “I take a nap.”
“So y’all ate at Mama’s?” I asked, skimming Buckley.
She yawned. “No. Not there. Took her to the Steakhouse. Go there every week with a few of the old folks. They never get out, and Clayton loves to hear them talk. It’s just something we do on Sundays.”
“Just you and Clay and Mama?” I ventured.
She rolled over on her side, “Yeah. And a few others.”
As soon as she said others, I got the picture right away: the happy family at the Steakhouse, Clayton and the old folks and the church’s richest widow, there with the young preacher, him holding her chair, complimenting her son, pouring her seconds from the tea pitcher.
“What others?” I asked.
She murmured, “Brother and Sister Sloan. Candace and Ed, sometimes. Carlym. Just the usual.”
That was all she said, curling up and sleeping the sleep of the just, while I lay beside her, stir-crazy from being inside all day, hungry from missing dinner, and furious Knute was turning my flank. I knew instinctively that if there was one phenomenon on earth that could send me back to New York with my tail between my legs in abject forfeiture, it was the slick-talking preacher with his Pauline interpretations and cunning little scriptural directives (“Be ye not unequally yoked with an unbeliever—”).
With nothing better to do, I went downstairs and ate a bologna sandwich, feeling very sorry for myself, then rejoined my wife in bed, watching her sleep, thinking she was far from finished. Her skin was very white against the sheets, with tiny lines around the corner of her eyes, smile lines, I guess they were called, her hair still thick and coarse, coming out of its stiff spray to spiral down against her cheek, a faint breath of the shy young bride whose downcast eyes had once driven me insane. After a while, she rolled over to her back so that the top of her bra showed, perfectly invisible black mesh—not the kind they recommended at Bob Jones, I could grant you that—and I sighed, knowing I was beaten without a single word, not a single volley fired.
When she saw me getting dressed for the evening service, Myra asked, ‘Are you coming?”
“Yes,” I said, knotting my tie.
She looked at me, “Why?”
“Because I’m whipped, that’s why.”
She was confident enough to be generous, “You don’t have to. Nobody’s putting a gun to your head.”
I made no reply, thinking that anyone who owned a factory and a Mercedes and a dresser full of black bras and matching panties didn’t have to bother with anything as messy as guns, but held my peace and suffered through a fairly sorry sermon by Knute that took the better part of an hour—an hour in which I counted three significantly lustful looks thrown in my wife’s direction, and that night in bed, I recommended we all convert to Catholicism.
“To what?”
“Catholicism. It’s the last bastion of true Christianity in Western civilization. I mean, Protestantism is weeny, it’s watered down, it’s been intermingled with lesser beliefs.”
“What lesser beliefs?”
“The charismatics. Calvinism. Not to mention the sleazeball evangelical circuit. I mean, really, Myra, anything goes in the Baptist Church anymore. Look at Jimmy Swaggart.”
“But he’s not Baptist,” she began. “He’s—”
“Same difference,” I said, “Protestantism. It creaks at the seams. In ten years they’ll be bleeding chickens on the altar.”
Myra was looking at me with the beginnings of concern on her face, and I went in for the kill. “I mean, if you want to raise Sim and Missy in that decay, well that’s fine, but Clayton needs to be somewhere they really believe. You know, hold fast to the teachings of Christ. Not swayed by societal mores.”
For a moment there I had her in the palm of my hand, but in the heat of victory, I overstepped my bounds. “I mean, look at Welcome. Unashamed racists, cheat on their taxes, run around, the divorce rate is the national average, if not higher—” I chanced a look to see if she was still with me.
She was smiling. “Gabriel, you idiot,” she said and turned over. “You had me going there for a minute. Catholicism
I tried to salvage it. “No, no, listen. They have a centralized government. They keep a balance between the spirit and the letter of the law. They let the alcoholics meet in their basement—”
“They don’t allow divorce,” she inserted with a laugh.
I rolled her to her back. “And what’s wrong with that? Read Matthew Read Mark.”
“I’m not arguing,” she said, but it wasn’t good enough.
“No, you’re not arguing, but you’re running around with a preacher, taking him out to dinner while your husband starves—”
“While my husband pouts”
“I was not. I was reading the paper. But I tell you one thing, I don’t think it’s too damn funny the way you’re doing it right in front of the children.”
This was enough to get her to roll to her elbow and look at me levelly. “I’ve been going out to dinner with Cissie and Clay and the others for years, and your presence or your absence isn’t going to stop me from having a perfectly innocent—”
“Innocent, my ass,” I snapped, and overrode her by simple volume. “Does he or does he not pull out your chair, pour your tea, ingratiate himself to Clayton?”
She answered patiently. “The waitress pours my tea, Carlym and Clayton are friends, yes, and he does pull out my chair, as he does for your mother and all the other ladies—”
“But I bet he doesn’t enjoy looking down Mama’s dress half as much as he does yours,” I inserted, and her patience finally began to show a little strain.
“Gabriel, honey,” she said, “if I was you, I’d spare myself the agony of applying my own lack of sexual maturity to every other man I met.”
She had no more than gotten the words lack of sexual out of her mouth before I was kicking the covers off the bed, taking my pillow with me, and as I went through the door, I fired my last volley, a real killer, but what can I say? I was getting my tail whipped. “Yeah, Myra, well if I was you, I’d remember a little more of my ancient history, and how the last time you indulged in a little casual adultery, you not only wound up pregnant, but catatonic.”
There was a sound at my back as if she’d thrown something, a pillow (or maybe the clock), and I found myself at the top of the stairs, faced with the age-old dilemma of where to sleep. The living room couch was the logical, time-honored choice, but it was way downstairs, so I crept into Clayton’s room and crawled into the lower bunk of his bed.
He must have felt the movement, for he hung his face over the edge of the top bunk, a few inches above me.
“Gabe?” he whispered.
I sighed. “Yes.”
He was regarding me very solemnly. “You and Mama have a fight?”
I sighed even louder, but what could I say? “Yes. You heard?”
“No.” His head disappeared, but his voice was still close. “Daddy used to sleep in here when they’d fight.”
I suddenly found myself smiling in the darkness. “Did he really?”
“Yeah,” he yawned. “But he never made it till morning. Bed’d be empty when I woke up.”
Well, that was Michael all over, but this was Gabe, and I settled in for a long siege. When my eyes adjusted to the light, I saw that the walls were covered with posters of Sylvester Stallone, whom I remembered from a boxing movie I’d seen in Indiana.
“Who?”
“Rocky.” I pointed to one of the posters.
His voice was a tiny bit incredulous. “You mean Rambo? Ain’t you ever heard a Rambo?”
“Oh. Yeah. Rambo. Yeah, I heard of him.” However, I didn’t tell him what I’d heard and tried to be agreeable. “They made a lot of them, didn’t they? Two or three?”
“Three,” he said. “They’re filming the fourth one right now. In Israel.”
“Oh.”
After a few moments, he offered, “I like Vietnam.”
It was a strange way to put it, I like Vietnam. I mean, what was there to like? It was like saying: I like Charles Manson. I enjoy newsreels of Buchenwald. I have a collection of human skulls.
His face was suddenly upside down again, watching me. “Were you there? Uncle Ira was.”
Well, it was just the kind of war you’d expect Ira Sims to be involved in, and I shook my head. “Educational deferment.”
“Oh,” he said and disappeared again.
I had the feeling I was losing points here, and to Ira Sims of all people, and was irked enough to flex my historical muscles a little, throwing out bits and pieces of detail I remembered, not from the history books, but from the headlines.
He took it up with passion, getting very excited, stopping to hang his face upside down to make a point, or get bodily out of bed to show me a map, and when he finally ran out of steam around two, I was left alone in the darkness, tired and disappointed, wondering why the youth of America were romanticizing a stupid little piece-of-shit war like Vietnam. Nobody won; nobody should have; we didn’t have any business there in the first place.
I sighed hugely and tried to sleep, but in the end, sometime around five, crept back to our bedroom to find Myra scrunched into five down pillows, sleeping like a baby, and at that point, I wondered why I’d ever been born.
“Myra,” I said, shaking her, and she sat up.
“Gabriel? What’s wrong, are the child—”
“They’re fine,” I said, then sighed again. “Listen, I’m sorry I said that about adultery. It was a cheap shot.”
She was blinking as if disoriented. “What time is it?”
“It’s five-fifteen. Listen, you can go to church all you want, but those sleazy underwear have got to go. You hear?”
For a moment she only looked at me. “You woke me out of a sound sleep to lecture me about my underwear?” she asked.
I nodded. “Yes. That’s exactly what I did. No woman wears underwear like that unless she’s asking for it.”
She pushed her hair out of her eyes and looked at me a little longer. “That all?”
“Yes.”
She curled back into her pillows and I lay down beside her.
“Well, are you getting rid of them?” I asked hopefully.
Her voice was kind. “No, I’m not. They cost too much for me to just to throw out, and furthermore I’ve got some sets that don’t even have underwear, they’re just garters, and I’ll wear them too when it suits me.”
I closed my eyes on this, knowing how Red must have felt when Temple Drake asked him to dance, knowing the bullet was as well as in his head already, and said, “Myra, honey, why do you want to do me this way? I love you.”
“I ain’t doing you no way,” she said. “Whether or not you trust me is your business; it’s nothing to do with me one way or the other. You want an enabler, get yoursef a dog.”
And that was the end of that. She was asleep in two minutes, and I never closed my eyes a wink. So maybe that was why Missy’s new shoes for the Sweetheart Banquet set me off at breakfast.
They were blue, magneta blue, and she told me she’d had to go to four different malls to find them.
“Why?” I asked, as in why bother, but she went and got her dress and held them together.
“See? A perfect match. Isn’t it incredible?”
“Very nice.” I allowed and was sipping my coffee when I noticed the price on the box. I set my cup down. “You paid ninety-six dollars for one pair of shoes?”
She was eating a granola bar, stuffing her backpack with books, and shrugged. “Sure.” When she saw my expression, she paused. “They’re John Jerro.”
“Oh. John Jerro” I said and shook my head, then looked at her. “Missy? Do you realize how long it takes some poor sucker at Sanger to clear enough profit to buy his children shoes? Dimestore shoes? Two-dollar-ninety-eight-cent shoes?”
She shook her head.
“Well, it takes them forever because they never can, sweating seventy-hour weeks, living off bologna and credit, and if I was you, I’d think twice about living like a princess off their misery.”
She took one of the shoes out of the box and turned it over in her hands. “They’re magenta blue. I looked all day. They match my dress.”
I stood up to pour more coffee. “Well, honey, you can wear ‘em if you want to. I mean, they’re your feet, but as far as I’m concerned, ninety-six-dollar shoes are an abomination before God, and people who wear them will burn in hell.”
Myra came in on the tail-end of this conversation, and with the capacity for long suffering she must have acquired from her years on Magnolia Hill, made no reference to the conversation other than a polite request of my presence in the bedroom, please.
Something in her voice told me another battle was at hand, and I pretended nonchalance.
“Let me finish my coffee,” I said, and she made no reply, only the sound of her feet as she went up the stairs.
I gave her a few minutes to stew, then found her upstairs, stripping our bed.
“D’you need to talk to me?” I asked. “I’m supposed to be at Sanger at nine.”
She didn’t bother to turn, only yanking off the pillowcases, her voice a story-telling murmur. “Gabriel,” she said, “I never had anything when I was growing up. Nothing that didn’t come out of a bag of hand-me-downs, or off the sale rack at the Dollar Store, and that was once a year at Easter.” She paused to gather me in. “So when I had my children, I promised myself that one day when I could, I’d provide for them better than was provided for me—”
“Ninety-six-dollar shoes?” I interrupted. “Come on, Myra, you’re turning Missy into a Cracker American Princess here—”
“And” she continued, “if it takes ninety-six dollars to make Missy feel pretty enough to go to one of these stupid banquets, I will spend it. In fact, I will spend five-hundred-and-ninety-six dollars if that’s what it takes. She’s my child and it’s Michael’s money and it’s nothing for you to worry with,” she tossed the stripped pillows on the bed, “one way or the other.”
On that, she gathered the sheets in her arms and left to sort the laundry, and as she passed, I made one small counter charge, rolling my eyes to heaven, murmuring, “Once a babygirl, always a babygirl”
She stopped and looked at me a full ten seconds, then turned, but her parting shot was lethal: “And once a Mama’s boy,” she drawled, “always a Mama’s boy.”
Well, I had a nasty history with that little phrase, dating back to my days on Magnolia Hill, and it cut like a knife, so deep that I really laid in for the siege this time, foregoing Sanger to retreat to my maps and molding books with no word of explanation at all. I stayed holed up there all day long with no interruption from Myra, no conciliatory advances at all, noting she left in the car at one-thirty, and for all I knew could have been meeting Knute at the Day’s Inn.
But when she finally returned, it was with a carload of groceries, so I figured Mondays must be grocery-store day around here.
Around seven hunger finally drove me inside, and I was nosing around the refrigerator for some of those brand new groceries when Mama walked in the kitchen, all dressed up in her Sunday best, and I straightened up. “What’re you doing here?”
“The shower, baby,” she said. “Where were you yesterday morning?”
“Whose shower?”
“Cindi Frye’s. Myra
’s got the house sa pretty. Where have you been, anyhow? She said she’s been at it all day.”
“Oh,” I said, eating a handful of grapes. “I’ve been upstairs. Writing.”
Her face assumed its here-we-go-again roll, and I was annoyed. “Why do you get that idiotic look on your face every time I mention my book?”
She collected an armful of crystal punch glasses off the counter. “Son, how many of them books you ever written?”
“Well, I haven’t finished it—”
“How many you ever published?”
“I said I haven’t fin—”
“How many you ever made one red cent on?”
I just looked at her, and I guess she thought her point taken, for she took the cups and left me there for my wife to finish off. But when she came in for the cake a few minutes later, she said nothing at all, just a cold, pointed silence, till Clayton happened by, and she turned on him.
“Clay? I toldju to stay upstairs. It’s seven o’clock; the ladies’ll be here anytime. Now get going.”
He said something about being hungry, but she was shooing him away till I had a sudden brainstorm and stepped in.
“Run get your coat, son. I’ll take you to a movie.”
He looked interested, but said, “I done seen it. Me and Keith went Friday.”
“This is different. It’s about Vietnam. We’ll have to hurry. It starts at eight.”
At the mention of the word Vietnam, he hit the stairs in a dead run, and I smiled. The movie I was talking about wasn’t in the local theater. It was Hearts and Minds, a documentary I remembered being impressed with a hundred years ago, that I’d seen advertised in the Democrat, playing at the University Box Office in Tallahassee.
My kindness to her son seemed to have softened Myra, and she asked in a small, contrite voice, “Are you hungry?”
“No,” I said and she came over and slid her arms around my waist.
“I’m sorry I called you a Mama’s boy/’ she murmured against my neck, but I just leaned against the counter and ate the grapes.
“Don’t worry it. I been called worse.”
“Not by me,” she said, and I would have liked to have sustained my cool aloofness a little longer, but she was standing there rubbing against me, admitting defeat, so I gave in and kissed her and was pressing for more, but she pulled away, saying, “Gabriel, Gabriel, here. The ladies are in the living room. Your mama’s here.”
