Love in a Small Town

by Curtiss Ann Matlock

  “You have a tack compartment in your trailer.” Rennie slung her legs around to the opposite side of the vanity bench. “I thought you kept it in there.”

  “It leaks.” Molly was scratching the cat’s forehead, and it was purring. Rennie could hear it from where she sat.

  “What are you doing with all these books in the bed?” Rennie asked. “Isn’t it a little uncomfortable when you turn over?”

  “I don’t turn much.”

  Rennie stretched over to take up one of the books— In Tune with the Infinite by Ralph Waldo Trine. It looked really old. There always had been a lot of books around the cottage, and no doubt their mother had provided some. Colliers were big on books. Especially philosophy-of-life ones. That’s what this one was.

  Rennie was considered the most illiterate of the Collier women because she read only novels. In her view, she could learn as much about herself and life from novels as from any of those self-improvement books. Besides, she’d had enough philosophy to last her a lifetime, being the daughter of her mother.

  Once, after she’d had her miscarriage and had started drinking enough to make her worry that she might end up like her daddy, Rennie had visited a psychologist. After several visits, the whole while watching the psychologist, a thin man with a bad haircut, blink rapidly and pick at his eyebrows, one of which was almost picked out, she had decided she was more mentally stable than he was and quit going.

  Later she had visited an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, where she had felt more at ease, but she never had been much of a joiner. She had, however, cut herself off from alcohol and practiced the twelve steps, which she still did each day. She had also gone on a novel-reading spree. She supposed she could say that for a while she got addicted to novels instead of drinking, most especially crazy novels about crazy people, which made her feel much more sane, or at least that she was no worse off than anyone else.

  Another thing she had done at that time was to start eating quite a bit. It had sort of crept up on her—so easy to nibble while she read a novel. When she realized she was eating as much as half a bag of Oreos or a half carton of ice cream at a time, she had gotten very worried that she would turn into an obese person who had to be wheeled around in a wheelchair. This worry, however, only seemed to make her eat more. Time passed, and the worry abated because as it turned out she never did gain a pound. Not one pound, nor did any health problems occur. Rennie attributed this to both a high metabolism rate and God’s grace.

  Thinking of the Oreos, she tossed aside the Trine book and stubbed out her cigarette, then went to the kitchen and found the remaining half bag of Oreos and brought them back to Molly’s bed. Flopping on her side, she ate cookies and looked over all the books, making comments: “I tried to read this”—she held up Sanctuary by William Faulkner—"I couldn’t understand any of it.” She picked up another old hardback, Where the Red Fern Grows. “Isn’t this great? Remember when Mama read it aloud to us?” She read the inside flap of the Rita Mae Brown mystery and said, “I’d like to read this one when you’re done.”

  Molly didn’t have a thing to say. She just kept on petting that stupid cat, and Rennie got really annoyed.

  She tossed the book aside. “Don’t you need to be countin’ people’s money or something?”

  “I’m on vacation,” Molly said, still not looking up. Rennie started to get scared. She really didn’t think she knew what to do. She sat up and closed the bag of Oreos.

  “Mama says you won’t answer phone calls and haven’t been out of the cottage all week.”

  “I’ve been riding. And I’ve talked to you.”

  Rennie thought it seemed like Molly had been abducted by aliens, who had set this stranger down in her place.

  “Well, because you won’t talk to Lillybeth and Season,” she said, “I’ve had to. And you know Season makes me nervous. I never am certain what to say to Season.”

  “No one is certain what to say to Season.”

  Rennie waited and stared at Molly, willing her to say more. Molly didn’t even look up at her. “Well, I managed with Lillybeth and Season,” Rennie said, “but I couldn’t help Walter because I’m not the one who counts the town’s money. Walter’s worried— something about the company hired to repaint the water tower, and Kaye isn’t helpin’ him at all, because she’s busy givin’ those Country Interior parties.”

  Molly just lay there and stroked that dang cat.

  Rennie stood up, looked at Molly. The next instant she shoved at Molly’s feet. “Get up and get a shower. I’m takin’ you to lunch.”

  The jarring of Molly’s body made the cat jump from her belly and cast an annoyed gaze at Rennie. Molly said, “I’m too tired.”

  Rennie said, “When was the last time you washed your hair?”

  Molly looked at her, but almost as if she didn’t really see Rennie.

  “Don’t look at me like that, Sissy,” Rennie said.

  Molly blinked. “I was just tryin’ to remember when I washed my hair.”

  That sent Rennie practically into a fit. She gave a scream and shoved again at Molly’s feet really hard. “Don’t do this, Sissy! I can’t stand it. Maybe I should be able to, but I can’t. You’re just bein’ selfish, and you aren’t supposed to be the one to do that. I’m the one who can do that, but you can’t!”

  Rennie realized she was yelling then, clenching and unclenching her fists.

  Molly said in a small voice, “I know. . . . I just don’t know how to stop.”

  Rennie looked at her a long minute, then said, “I need you, Sissy. Maybe that isn’t fair, but it’s just the way it is. I need you.”

  “Oh, Rennie,” Molly said.

  Rennie gazed at her. Beseeched her with her eyes, and even as she did it, she thought to herself, I am beseeching you, which was one of those words she would never say.

  Then Molly said, “Okay,” and slowly, as if it were a very hard thing to do, shoved herself up from the bed.

  Rennie jumped ahead to the bathroom to get the water running and lay out a towel. She put the shampoo right into Molly’s hand. She started to close the door on her way out, but then left it partially open. She stood there, outside the door, listening for a moment to Molly beginning to wash. There was a tiny fear inside of her that Molly might fall . . . or do something like drown herself. But she would have to look up into the shower spray to do that, which seemed unlikely. Molly never had liked to get her face sprayed.

  Satisfied that Molly was truly washing, Rennie was so relieved that she felt like crying. Instead she went into the kitchen, took the telephone out of the refrigerator and dialed Tommy Lee. Of course he was surprised at her call; she heard it in his voice.

  She said, “Are you depressed, Tommy Lee?”

  “Well . . ." There was a long pause; no doubt he was very surprised by the question, but then he answered, “I guess I am, a little.”

  “Good,” Rennie said and hung up.

  She knew it would drive him crazy. She savored that. She had nothing against Tommy Lee, as far as it went, which wasn’t very far because she never had gotten to know him well. Since she was a little girl, Tommy Lee had simply been there, at the edge of her life. He had always been Molly’s Tommy Lee, as if he never had wanted to belong to the rest of them.

  Still, Rennie didn’t hold anything personally against him, except that he was a man and at that moment she wasn’t at all happy with men. For as long as she could remember, Rennie had wavered between adoring men and. hating them, and never did the emotion correctly match the situation she was in with a man. She always adored a man when she should hate him, and hated a man when she should adore him. She really wished she could find a middle ground.

  She stuck the telephone back into the refrigerator, then went back to get the bag of Oreos and to pick out some clothes for Molly. She would make Molly fix up, too, put her makeup on her if she had to.

  Chapter 11

  Halfway Down

  Squinting and feeling shaky inside
, Molly paused to put on her sunglasses before following Rennie out the door. The air felt heavy, pressing. Her gaze fell on Rennie’s back. Wearing a sleeveless shell and jeans, Rennie looked more college student than professor. “What are you doin’ down here on a weekday?” Molly asked her.

  “I don’t have any classes on Thursday or Friday now that it’s summer,” Rennie said.

  Molly paused. “Is this Thursday or Friday?”

  Rennie, opening her car door, looked over the roof at her. “It’s Thursday.”

  "Oh."

  Molly had lost track of days after Monday evening, when she’d left Tommy Lee again and come back to ride Marker beneath the bright moon. She had ridden half the night. She thought she had ridden Marker again one morning, but she couldn’t remember which morning. She thought it was just that morning that she had roused herself enough to consider riding. Then, half dressed, she’d lost heart. Wearing only a denim shirt, panties, and boots, she had trudged out and let Marker into the big grass pasture and brought her saddle and pad inside and gone back to bed.

  She had spent most of her days and nights in bed, sleeping and reading and praying. And hiding, from time as well as from everyone else.

  In the cottage time didn’t matter. There was no clock in the cottage, no way to tell time, unless she turned on the television or radio, which she didn’t do. There was nothing in the cottage to tell what day or even what year this was, at least no year after the invention of electricity. While the driveway leading to the highway could be plainly seen from the front windows, the highway itself was obscured by tall weeds and brush. Other windows looked out on the alfalfa field and the pastures. No electric lines were visible, no other houses save Mama’s, which was equally old, only Molly’s and Mama’s vehicles, if she chose to look toward them, which she didn’t.

  The cottage seemed to comfort and protect her, as if it were enveloping her like a big, warm hug from a grandmother. Both of Molly’s grandmothers had died before she was born. Grandpa Harry had remarried Vivian Mae, who had hated children and just about everyone else, but Stirling’s mother, Miss Annabelle as they had all called her, had taken them all on as her grandchildren. They had seen Miss Annabelle only rarely, but on those occasions she had always had milk and cookies for them and had told them stories of the “old days” of the Indian nation. Miss Annabelle had been half Cherokee. The cottage seemed now as quietly comforting as Miss Annabelle and her warm cookies and soft voice had been.

  Sometimes in the middle of the night, the sweet musky scent of the cottage even woke Molly, and she would lie there thinking about her life. She’d begun to realize that every time she caught the scent, her mind would fill with memories and her heart with feelings she couldn’t understand. It was as if the scent brought them. Sometimes she embraced the memories, and sometimes she wished they would leave her alone.

  Tommy Lee hasn’t called.

  Molly thought this as Rennie drove out from beneath the tall elms and up onto the blacktop shimmering in the heat. She couldn’t think of why Tommy Lee should call. He didn’t want her. She knew that, and that was why she had left him, and since she had left him, he surely wasn’t about to call her.

  * * * *

  They decided on the Main Street Cafe, but Rennie wanted to drag Main once before stopping. “I want to show off my new car.” The day was hotter than blue blazes, but Rennie left the windows down so they could wave at people they knew.

  Molly didn’t care. She felt sweat beginning to trickle between her breasts and wondered if she would care about anything ever again. Then she sort of picked up because she wondered if she might happen to see Tommy Lee. The thought unnerved her, and she tried to sink back into her nothingness, but that was hard to do, what with riding in a red sports car in the bright sun and Alan Jackson singing “Gone Country” on the radio.

  Main Street was about all there was to downtown Valentine. It was the state highway running right through the middle of town. The grain elevator at one end and the gin at the other were bookends for the town in between. The street was wide, a leftover from horse-and-buggy days, and cars parked head-in at an angle up to wide sidewalks along the four-block area of businesses. Beyond this was the Sonic drive-in, the Dairy Freeze, and the Hardee’s, which had come in only the past fall, and for which Mama gave daily thanks.

  Tommy Lee and Molly used to walk these streets, going to either the Dairy Freeze or the Sonic almost every day for lunch during high school. Of course, that had been the old Sonic; there was a brand-new one now, also built last fall and made to look more like the fifties than the original.

  Tommy Lee was the only boyfriend she had ever had.

  Molly didn’t feel much like waving at people. She felt more like hiding behind her sunglasses, but a person couldn’t be with Rennie for more than a few minutes before being dragged along by her playful spirit. Pretty soon Molly was right there waving a hand with Rennie.

  “Hi, Mr. Stuart!” Rennie called and waved. “How’s the stiff business?” Mr. Stuart was the funeral director. He waved back good-naturedly and called for Rennie to come see him; then he laughed real big.

  Rennie called to Mrs. Wood and Mrs. Fellman, seventy-two-year-old twin sisters who still dressed alike. Their clothes were circa 1950, wide-skirted dresses with stiff petticoats and little pillbox hats. Mrs. Wood always carried a black purse and Mrs. Fellman a red purse. They were entering Blaine's Drugstore but paused long enough to give little waves. Then Rennie tooted the horn at young Sonny Hornbuckle in his ranch’s one-ton dually coming out from a side street, hauling a load of cattle.

  Rennie remarked, “You know, if Sonny don’t keep rocks in his pockets, he’ll blow away.”

  “I know, but that boy can eat. When he came over for Colter’s graduation party, I saw him put away five country ribs, four fajitas, a big plate of beans, and two pieces of Texas tornado cake, and you know Kaye’s Texas tornado cake. Mafia men could use it instead of a cement block.”

  “Did you hear my speech?” Rennie said. “I said, ‘Sonny don’t keep.’ What is it about comin’ back here that makes me slip in my language? I do not speak that way up at school.”

  Rennie pulled into the lot of the four-bay car wash to turn around. Molly’s gaze fell on the brick VFW hall across the road. We were going to have our twenty-fifth anniversary there. That they wouldn’t be having the party seemed strange. Molly didn’t know how she had come to the place where she was.

  Molly had never slept with anyone but Tommy Lee. She had never even come close. She had once kissed Sam Ketchum, almost by accident. Once when she was fifteen, she and Tommy Lee had been mad at each other for two weeks, and she had gone to a party and kissed a boy named John. Those two chance kisses were the sum total of her sexual experience with other men. She had never felt the hands of another man, never felt another man inside her. Actually, the only other males she had ever seen naked in her life had been her own sons, and she had not seen them that way since they were eight or nine years old.

  My experience is so limited.

  Then Rennie was pointing at the water tower back behind the car wash. “Walter said they started, then left. He said why, but I guess I wasn’t listenin’ too well.”

  Ropes hung from the top of the tower, and there were rusty patches where some of the peeling silver paint and graffiti had been removed. Molly thought she probably should care about whatever the problem was, but she had trouble doing so.

  She was looking again at the VFW hall and thinking that at a family reunion, if their family ever had one, things would be so odd if she and Tommy Lee weren’t together. She thought of Tommy Lee, of his blue eyes and his hands. How would sex be with another man?

  The prospect was more frightening than enticing. She wasn’t certain she could have sex with another man. She had run the list of men that she knew through her mind, and none of them were in the least attractive to her, except Sam. Sam was quite attractive, and she could almost see herself naked against him. Maybe. She wasn�
��t certain she could get naked with any man besides Tommy Lee. She wasn’t twenty-five anymore. Things had shifted downward. Of course, maybe she didn’t have to get naked. A lot of times in the movies people didn’t get naked. She wondered if any man would find her attractive.

  It occurred to her that she had suddenly started being preoccupied with thoughts of sex.

  Then Rennie was heading back through town and the hall was left behind. They passed Ryder’s Auto Parts, and Molly tensed, scanning the vehicles out front, checking for the Corvette or the old Chevy pickup Tommy Lee usually drove when getting parts. She didn’t see either and was foolishly disappointed.

  The next instant Rennie pointed at a tall cowboy type coming out of Longmarch’s saddle shop. Crisp straw Resistol, crisp red shirt, crisp Wranglers, carrying a saddle over his shoulder as easily as he would a loaf of bread. “Good golly, he looks like he should be in the movies.

  “Rennie . . . don’t you stop!”

  But Rennie was already stopping and the next instant called, “Hi, cowboy.”

  The man looked up from throwing his saddle into the back of a beat-up Dodge pickup. Then he gave a slow grin and came toward them.

  Rennie was saying, “You sure look familiar to me. I’m Rennie Bennett.”

  “I might know you,” the cowboy said slowly. Molly wasn’t looking at him, keeping her arm resting on the open window, but she heard the interest in his voice. It sounded like he said his name was Pete Seeger. Tommy Lee liked the music of Pete Seeger. She rubbed her blouse at the sweat tickling between her breasts and then realized she’d put a wet spot on the silk.

  The next moment the cowboy was squatting down and looking right into the car, and Rennie was saying, “This is my sister, Molly.”

  Molly had to look over at him and say hello, so as not to be rude. He looked a bit like Clint Black.

  The cowboy touched the brim of his hat and said, “Nice to meet you.”

  Molly thought that his mother had taught him manners. Covertly, she pinched Rennie’s hip. Rennie did a little flirty chitchatting before she drove on.