Love in a Small Town

by Curtiss Ann Matlock

  Tommy Lee capped the tequila bottle, slammed it down on the shelf, right in the front where anyone could see it, snatched up one of the six-packs of Coca Colas, and walked out of the kitchen. Savannah’s voice trailed after him—Savannah had a carrying sort of high-pitched voice—“Because the baby’s so close, though, we’re comin’ early and will have to leave right after the party. We’ll probably be there on Thursday. . . . ‘Course I know you’ll call me. . . ."

  The screen door slammed behind him, and he left his daughter’s voice and Molly’s country music back there in the kitchen.

  He tossed the five remaining Cokes into the shop refrigerator, popped the lid on the one in his hand, no matter that it was warm, and turned the volume on his stereo back up. He threw himself back into working on the engine. It was something he could understand. It was his world.

  But he couldn’t stop his mind. It kept spinning like a fly wheel. His hand slipped with the wrench and he scraped his knuckles bloody. He grabbed a rag and dabbed at the torn skin and cursed Molly. It occurred to him to wonder what he was most mad at—the argument with her, or all the things he hadn’t gotten said to her.

  Tommy Lee didn’t know how it had come about between them, how they got to where they could hardly say a civil word to each other, how they couldn’t even look at each other, much less touch each other.

  Molly seemed like she put up a wall around herself, and whenever he tried to reach through that wall, all he felt was cold. Most nights he would watch television until he couldn’t hold his eyes open, until he couldn’t think, because he didn’t want to think. Sometimes he’d lie there beside her and hear her soft breathing and feel her warmth, smell the woman scent of her. Molly had a certain scent all her own, a mixture of lavender and powder and woman scent, that could almost make him feel drugged. He’d know she wanted him, and he’d want her, but he’d be torn between wanting her and wanting to get the hell out of there, get up and drive off and be free from everything.

  When he really thought about it, he thought that for most of his marriage he had been torn between wanting Molly and wanting to be free. The shadow of long-held guilt seeped over him. Lately he had been thinking more and more about being off by himself. Wondering and imagining what it would be like if he was on his own. He hadn’t wished to be on his own . . . but he had thought of it.

  And now it had gone and happened.

  The CD player stopped, and he went over and started it again, turned it up even louder until the music filled his ears, and he stood there recalling how he had once been a young, hotshot mechanic on Johnny Kemp’s racing team and he and Molly had been running on fire and dreams.

  Lord, he said into the silence inside himself, where did all the fire and dreams go? Where in the world did eighteen turn into forty-three?

  Chapter 3

  Standing On The Edge Of Good-bye

  Molly circled north, avoiding the town. She kept thinking that she couldn’t believe she had left Tommy Lee, that here she was just driving along, towing Marker, and her heart still beating and the sun still shining. She felt as if something had taken hold of her, some dark force, and was leading her down the highway, down her mother’s long, crushed gravel driveway and straight to her mother’s house.

  When she caught sight of Aunt Hestie’s cottage sitting off to the right, a pain shot in her eyes and down to her chest. She averted her gaze and pulled around back of the big brown Collier home. She jumped out of the El Camino and raced up the steps and in the back door.

  “I need to use your phone, Mama.”

  She breezed past her mother, who stood at the kitchen sink in her fuchsia robe, her mouth open in surprise, and went to use the phone in the downstairs bathroom. Her mother had a phone in every single room of the house.

  Molly had four sisters, but it was Rennie she called and Rennie she babbled to, certainly not making much sense. She knew she had awakened her sister, and she thought she heard whispering in the background, a man, which was a little embarrassing but not unusual. The more lonesome a man looked, the more susceptible Rennie was.

  Rennie said, “I’ll be right down,” just as Molly had known she would. “I have to shower and get dressed. No more than an hour.” Rennie lived up in Lawton, was an economics teacher at the junior college there.

  Molly hung up and sat there with her hand on the telephone, thinking of how she was going to have to call her children. The thought made her sick. Whatever in this world was she going to say to them? Whatever in the world was she doing?

  A scent caught her attention then, and she noticed the small bottle of Lysol sitting on the side of the sink with the cap off. Her mother did that sometimes because the room was an eighty-year-old converted closet with no window.

  Suddenly, staring at that bottle and smelling that scent, Molly was remembering the first time she had ever seen the woman who was to be her mother-in-law. She had been about five and her daddy had taken her with him to the Hayeses’ farm to ask permission to fish in their pond. It had been at bare first light, and Virginia Hayes had been down on her knees and scrubbing her front porch with a brush and Lysol water. There was no mistaking that scent, and the little brown bottle sat right on the steps. Molly had thought that the strangest thing, someone scrubbing a wooden porch with Lysol, and by the front porch light, because the sun wasn’t up yet.

  She had also thought that the woman resembled the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz—coarse dark hair pulled back into a bun, dark print dress and stout shoes and an expression that sent Molly hiding behind her daddy’s pants leg, something that she had never, ever told Tommy Lee. She didn’t think it would be a nice thing to say to him about his mother.

  Later Molly had come to learn that Tommy Lee’s parents revered getting up and going to work hours before the sun, as if they would get points in heaven and the rest of humanity were slackers on the road to hell.

  Molly’s mother was of a different mind. “Only activities to relax the spirit—prayer, fishing, sex, things of that sort—should be done before eight o’clock. Anything else is extremely unhealthy” was her proclamation.

  Everyone knew that Odessa Collier, Collier being her maiden name and held through her marriages, was next to a sage. She had studied philosophy for a semester at the University of the South and published articles in New Age thought magazines. Since retiring from her bookshop, she went about lecturing at spiritual retreats up in Colorado and out in California, where such topics were eagerly embraced.

  It had been evident right from the start that Molly and Tommy Lee came from vastly contrasting backgrounds. Stand their mothers side by side, and it was like looking at night and day.

  Molly got up and went out to the kitchen and told her mother, “I’ve left Tommy Lee.” Then she laid her head in her arms on the kitchen table and cried.

  When she finally lifted her head, her mother set a box of tissues and a cup of sweet Darjeeling tea in front of her.

  “How about a bite to eat?” her mother asked, peering into the refrigerator. “I have some corn flakes . . . and there’s always toast and jelly. Oh, here’s a couple of Hardee’s biscuits. . . . How about one of those?”

  No one in their right mind ate out of Mama’s refrigerator. Things tended to stay in there for months; in the case of jelly, years. Mama truly believed that refrigeration very nearly suspended spoilage.

  Molly was in such a fog, however, that she forgot this and just nodded, and a few minutes later a microwaved Hardee’s biscuit was set in front of her. She just looked at it. Everything, the tabletop, her mother, the room around her seemed foggy, and she couldn’t seem to feel anything.

  It wasn’t until she’d had two cups of tea that she had the presence of mind to remember Marker and Ace and hurried outside to take care of them. She put Marker in the wooden fenced corral, where he could stick his neck through and nibble from the adjacent alfalfa field but not gorge himself on it. She took Ace in his carrier back to her mother’s kitchen.

  At no t
ime did she allow her gaze to stray to Aunt Hestie’s cottage, and she made no move to go over there, either. She kept wondering if maybe she wouldn’t get back in her truck and go back home, but deep inside she knew she wasn’t going to do that.

  Deep inside Molly had the sense of being atop a wild runaway horse, and the best she could do was hang on until the end of the ride.

  * * * *

  Rennie announced her arrival with several honks on the horn of her new candy-apple-red Mustang and came through the door in her lithe, long-legged stride. Mama was dressed and ready with her basket of cleaning supplies and no sooner had Rennie come in and hugged and kissed Molly than Mama was breezing out the door, heading for the cottage.

  “You two stay here and hash things over,” she said. “I’ll start on the cottage. I haven’t been over in a while. . . . It’ll need airing and who knows what all.”

  What she was really doing was getting away from Molly’s crying. Tears put Mama on edge.

  Rennie lit a cigarette and poured herself a cup of tea and said, “Okay, so what’s goin’ on, Sissy?”

  Molly gazed into Rennie’s golden green eyes a moment, looked out the window for another moment, then said, “I can’t talk about it. Let’s go help Mama.”

  Rennie looked somewhat startled. Molly scooped up Ace and slipped on her sunglasses and waited for Rennie to go first out the door. She kept her eyes averted from the cottage. Each time she caught it in full view, her eyes squinted and ached, even though the cottage sat in the deep shade of tall elms.

  Mama was fiddling at the electric fuse box. Rennie waltzed around, looking into the living room for an ashtray and then opening cabinet doors, checking out the contents.

  “You know, I read of a man who found a painting by Monet—or one of those famous painters—in his family’s old barn. Has anyone ever really checked this place out?”

  Molly, still wearing her sunglasses, stood in the middle of the tiny kitchen, until Mama nudged her and told her to start opening windows. She went on wearing her sunglasses until she had to select fresh sheets out of the linen trunk. She removed them in order to see well enough to make certain there were no spiders in the trunk.

  The cottage was old, an institution in the Collier family, something of a shrine to womanhood. It had belonged to Mama’s aunt Hestie Collier, built for Hestie by her father on the occasion of her separation from her husband because her father had not wanted Hestie, or any of her three sisters, to return home once they’d left. Aunt Hestie had gone through with her divorce and never remarried but had lived in the cottage until her death, sharing it whenever need be with one or the other of her sisters or their daughters. Thus it had remained all the years since, specifically stipulated in Aunt Hestie’s will as the place of refuge for Collier women made destitute by separation, divorce, or widowhood.

  So far in all those years Mama had been the only widow in need of the cottage, and there was debate on whether her brief episode could truly be counted as widowhood, because Mama had been separated from Al Moss at the time he got run over by his own car.

  There was no air-conditioning, but in the shade of the tall elms and with the blinds and drapes pulled, the temperature wasn’t too bad at the end of May. Molly didn’t know how anyone stood it later in the summer, when it was common in southwestern Oklahoma for the temperature to soar beyond one hundred. She and her sisters had lived with Mama in this house in the summer, but she couldn’t recall how they had stood the heat.

  “We went up to town a lot, to Blaine’s soda fountain,” Mama said. “And then I broke down and went back with Stirling that last time. It got to be July, and we were dyin’ here. Stirling had a brand-new air-conditioned travel trailer. He was a roughneck in the oil patch then.”

  Molly remembered that, remembered them all staying in the tiny trailer. Sometimes Mama and Stirling would spend the night in Mama’s Impala station wagon. Mama lined the back windows of the Impala with aluminum foil for privacy. Molly thought it said an awful lot about her mother that the last man she had married had been ten years her junior and named Stirling Stirling.

  Mama held the record for use of Aunt Hestie’s cottage. She had been married four times to three different men, having married and divorced Molly and Rennie’s daddy twice. With these three men, Mama had had five daughters: Kaye, the eldest, and then Molly and Rennie, Lillybeth and Season. Each of these daughters, even the first, had been conceived during the reconciliation after a fierce argument. If Al Moss hadn’t been killed before he and Mama had had a chance to make up that time, no doubt there would have been at least six daughters.

  At the moment, Mama sat on the floor of the cottage living room trying to get the little television, a fan, a radio, and two lamps to work off one electrical outlet. Rennie was in the kitchen, wiping dishes.

  Molly, holding a rag and the cleaner she’d been using to wipe the bathroom, stood in the doorway of the small hall and gazed at her mother. Suddenly she wanted to run away. She had the strong urge to go out to her El Camino and get in it and drive west and just keep on going. Away from everything that she was.

  She said, “Mama, I don’t need to use all those things at once. I’ll just plug and unplug as I want to use things."

  Mama was pushing the electric plugs into a plastic multiple outlet. Built in 1922, the old cottage had only a single outlet in each room, and even those had been added long after the cottage had been built.

  "It’ll be fine,” Mama said. “I’ve done this before. It’s just that you have to get these plugs pushed in just right.”

  She would push a plug into the adapter on one side, and the plug on the other side would slide out. Ace sat beside her, watching, blinking his slit eyes, as if pained by the procedure.

  “Well, that adapter’s cracked,” Molly pointed out. Then she added, “It could let off sparks and right there’s the rug. It could start a fire, Mama.”

  “The rug’s real wool. Wool is naturally fire retardant.”

  Molly gazed at her mama, who sat on the floor as easily as a teenager, one leg drawn up and the other spread out.

  Mama was a Collier, a family with a propensity for producing girls and retaining youthfulness. Everyone said the Collier girls never looked their ages—and included in this group was not only Mama but her daughters, all Colliers, too, no matter their maiden or married names. Molly had always suspected that the reason her mother had never stayed married was because being a Collier had been so important to her.

  Mama was beautiful still, with snow white hair worn in an elegant bun and pale, pale skin that seemed to glow. Of course, she wasn’t the age she declared—she was sixty-three but claimed fifty-seven. She had shaved off the six years back in her forties and refused to own up to it even today. She easily passed for fifty-seven, except when Kaye admitted to forty-four, and she insisted on doing this grandly, which made Mama first giving birth at thirteen. That really looked tawdry.

  Sweat trickled between Molly’s breasts and dotted her upper lip. Her mind ran a picture of herself screaming at her mother to stop it. To just get out and leave her alone.

  She set the rag and cleaner on the table, turned around, went into the back bedroom, and stopped just inside the door.

  Thin slices of afternoon sun slanted through the wide metal blinds of the west windows and illuminated dust particles in the air. Flower-sprigged wallpaper, double oak spool bed, lady’s vanity with a big rounded mirror, growing smoky now with age. And the scent—it seemed to permeate the cottage—that of old wood and paint and perfume and tobacco. Pleasant but heavy, like the scent of an old widow woman freshly dressed for church. Each time Molly moved a curtain, opened a drawer, lifted a bed sheet, the scent wafted up around her.

  She had developed a headache and was certain it was caused by the scent. And by battling the thoughts and memories of Tommy Lee and herself that kept pushing and shoving at the edges of her mind. The struggle against the memories was so arduous that it made her feel dizzy and light-headed.
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  Feeling dizzy right then, she stepped over and switched on the old black metal fan setting on the steamer trunk. It rattled for two seconds and then, to Molly’s faint surprise, it went to whirring smoothly and oscillating back and forth. Blowing away the lonely scent and Molly’s dizziness.

  Tugging her denim shirt out of her jeans, she unbuttoned it, held it wide, allowing the fan to blow on her sweat-dampened lacy bra and breasts. Turning, she went to the mirror and looked at herself standing there, with her shirt hanging open and her lavender bra showing.

  Rennie, her cheeks flushed and tendrils of hair damp around her face, came to lean against the doorjamb and gave a flop of a dish towel. “Well, the kitchen is clean enough. Probably won’t matter much, after Mama starts an electrical fire and burns the place down."

  She threw the dish towel over her shoulder and brought a cigarette to her lips, took a deep draw and blew out gray smoke. Her movement was graceful and feminine, despite the cigarette. Rennie was by mutual agreement the prettiest of the Collier women. She had wonderfully high cheekbones and a figure that allowed clothes to flow right over her with nice curves but no sharp angles. Her hair was an auburn blond, without a strand of gray. She may or may not have dyed it, only Miss Clairol knew, which drove Kaye wild.

  At first glance a person would take Rennie for as young as twenty-five. She always had kept up with the latest styles and looked great in tight jeans and midriff tops. Once you got a close look at her face, however, you could tell she was much older. Smoking gave her lines around her lips, and there was a certain sad knowledge of the world in her golden green eyes. Most men thought this was really sexy. Molly thought Rennie was about the saddest-looking person she knew.

  “Remember Kaye and you and me sleepin’ in that bed,” Rennie said, gesturing toward the bed, “and Lillybeth in the dresser drawer?”

  Molly said, “I remember you wetting the bed every other night. I got to where I slept on the rug. Can you spare a cigarette?”