Life After Life

by Jill McCorkle

  I hugged my orange alpaca sweater close as I waited there with Kathryn. I wanted to tell her how lucky she was to have had such a relationship with her mother, but it was clear that she knew this. She held firmly to her mother’s hand for as long as she was able, and then when the men came to take her mother away, she reached for my hand as we followed them out. I will miss them both very much.

  [from Joanna’s notebook]

  Lois Flowers

  The best table is over by the window, a big glass window and you can see the whole city just like a bird soaring in the sky. White linen and candles and yes, just a little champagne. Knives and forks and ice in crystal and a crystal ash tray, too, the filter smudged with her latest color—Claret, a perfect color, one of her reds. All of the colors on the chart (every chip!) may be taken a little darker or a little lighter. You can match clothing, makeup, accessories, and interior decor to colors on your chart. Don’t ever remove the tags until you check your purchase in natural daylight as well as artificial light. Daylight. She can feel the daylight, and even this high up and behind all that glass she can hear the birds and some music. There is lovely music and a bathroom attendant, too, they shake hands and brush cheeks, what’ll I do when you, oh thank you ever so much, thank you for your assistance. A plaid should always have at least two of your colors. The second eye color catches the glints, streaks, and flecks in your eyes. Her daughter has green flecks like her father; she is an autumn. Beautiful rusts and greens and golds and new shoes and homework. Do you have homework, honey? Daylight and Chanel No. 5, cheek to cheek, so lovely, too, and there is music and there are lots of little goodies over there on a big silver tray, over there by the big window, all shapes and sizes of beautiful and delicious canapés and the light fixtures are exquisite and there’s music, always there is music, and colors and colors and beautiful colors. Just the right colors for a busy woman on the go, high heels click click click on that polished marble floor, and if she stands perfectly still, she can feel the building sway, the whole city below her is so bright and beautiful it leaves her light-headed and she feels the building sway, back and forth like a song, like a slow and easy swaying song.

  C.J.

  (Carolina Jessamine)

  SPEAKING OF THINGS NEVER to tell your kids: How about where you were fucking at the time of conception? How about that? Or how about what everything costs? It costs this to feed you and that to clothe you. I wish I could send you to summer camp, but it costs too much and so does a bike and so does a house that looks worth a shit. Even the best intentions (the shitty day camp through the recreation department and the jeans that are the copy of what everybody else is wearing) still leaves you feeling like an undesirable—an unwanted thing to be put in the next room while all the Mr. Wrongs come and go, like anybody even believes there is a Mr. Right. Her mom once had a date with a Mr. Wright and what a joke that was. Yeah, whatever. Fuck your brains out. She didn’t say it but that’s what she was thinking.

  Her name is Carolina Jessamine, named for a native vine—close kin to Confederate jasmine, both hardy thriving plants that will take over a structure in no time at all. You want to hide something ugly, just plant jasmine and then watch the ugly thing disappear. Her name is beautiful or so people say but maybe they wouldn’t say that or think it if they knew how she got it—one of those things she shouldn’t know, but her mother was too stupid or too unaware or something to know better. Her mother was fucking in the arboretum, right over there where C.J. goes out to smoke every day on her break. Her mother is buried just beyond the very spot—talk about never going anywhere, talk about a really small and limited life. Her mother told her that the whole time she was making love in the arboretum, she was staring up at that beautiful lush vine and the little silver tag that named it: Carolina Jessamine.

  Wow, thanks, Mom. If her father—unknown creature that he is—had only flipped her over and fucked her from behind, C.J. might be named Splitbeard Bluestem or Hairgrass or Common Phlox. Talk about too much information. And did her mother even tell her about the plants beyond that? The purpose the splitbeard bluestem serves to control erosion, the silvery seed heads bursting to hold on and take root and never leave or the brackish-loving hairgrass on underground runners, popping up unexpectedly like a bad nosy neighbor. It made her think of what it must look like down below, the moles and voles tunneling along; it made her think of learning all about the Underground Railroad, people escaping, disappearing, resurfacing into a whole new place and life. It makes her inhale a long deep breath just to even imagine it. Now the crossvine is in bloom, orange and red trumpets straining for sunlight. She takes one of those good cleansing breaths Toby talks about when they try to get people to do yoga and it is peaceful, a whole roomful of old folks breathing deeply and chanting—one sounding like a sewing machine and another a squirrel.

  One billion angels could come and save her soul. She loves that song and might have it tattooed around her wrist when she saves some money. Then later she could add: Please, don’t leave me here around her ankle.

  But her mother did leave her. She didn’t give a shit. And the longer C.J. lives, the more amazed she is at how little of a shit so many people really give beyond their own little orbits. It makes her laugh to think of Stanley Stone who just the other day suggested to Marge Walker that she give everybody a break and come stare into his navel for a while instead of her own. These old guys are crazy, but there are some good ones. Better than what she had in a mother.

  And Joanna is a good friend for sure. There’s somebody who lived to tell the tale, turned it all around. Her mother could have done that, too, but of course she didn’t. She didn’t have the courage. It is hard to even think about her mother, to picture her. Once upon a time she was beautiful and the pictures of her as a young girl would have surpassed anyone in this town, but it doesn’t take long to age when you’re poor and abuse your body. You can go from young and beautiful to looking like shit, like that dried-up potato chip Toby is always talking about. That was C.J.’s mom, the dried-up undesirable chip at the bottom of the bag, and by killing herself she made sure C.J. wouldn’t have it any better or would have to work like hell to even get a chance. And now here she is, twenty-six years old, and she has done just about everything there is you can do without any college education. She has waited tables and scrubbed houses and washed the old flaky, filthy hair of the elderly. She cuts their old hard nails and doesn’t say a word about skin so dry and hard it could cut you and old yellowed nails you need a chainsaw to get through. “Does that feel good, sweetie?” she will ask while rubbing lotion into their old worn-out feet. Some call them Pat and Mike. Some call them the old dogs. One calls them her little tootsies.

  “Does that feel good?” She has asked that question often enough. An easy thing to do, and there was a time when she did it to get what she needed and wanted. Some people might call it prostitution or whoring, but she figured it was no different from what a lot of women are doing right there in their little married houses. Hmmmm, I really want to go on that trip, so let’s fuck him good and hard tomorrow night between Lost and the late news. That’ll be good for something. She has worked as assistant to a local caterer and so she has heard plenty. The girls in the black pants and white tops are invisible as they reach and fill the glasses, especially a girl like her whose skin color is questionable. What are you? people want to ask. Are you part Indian? Are you Hispanic? Her tattoos don’t show in the long sleeves and she wore no earrings or bracelets to those events, her hair pulled back in a tight ponytail. After a few passes of the glasses on silver trays, she was totally invisible, nothing more than a hand there to serve.

  “What did you have to do to get him to buy you that?” one woman asked, her voice shrill and girlish and they all leaned in close.

  “He gets a blow job on his birthday and that’s it.” Giggles. Acknowledgment. Amen.

  “What about Valentine’s? I do birthday and Valentine’s Day.”

  And what they don’
t know is how the men do notice when you fill the glasses. Some mumble so you have to step close, but take note. They don’t mumble with other men. They don’t mumble with their wives. One followed her to the kitchen and down the basement stairs where the wine was kept. “I’ve never made love in a wine cellar to a beautiful young woman,” he slurred, and she told him that today wasn’t looking so fucking good either and she pushed him aside and got herself back into daylight and fresh air as quickly as possible.

  Sometimes at cleaning jobs, she turned on the TV for company. This was before she got pregnant with Kurt and she was all alone. She liked the Spanish channel. She doesn’t know a word of Spanish other than hola, but it was easy to know what was happening. You’d be an idiot not to get it. She was taking a break and watching that Spanish soap opera, the man meeting his mistress while the wife was in a coma in the hospital. And then the real man was right there in the real house looking at her, and his wife was not in a coma at the hospital but shopping for their upcoming tropical vacation. And she could see right through that window. She had felt him watching her before and finally she ended up saying, I don’t do windows, but I can do you. The beginning. And actually it was a good beginning, or it seemed good. It felt good, and she even let herself imagine such a life, to imagine the safe draping warmth of someone who gives a shit, a suitcase packed for a tropical vacation.

  She worked for a living. She worked to live. And what scrutiny of her performance. Her performance was discussed openly, her name and number passed along from hand to hand, the same hands holding their glasses out for a refill from the faceless no name with the bottle. She’s real good, they say. Who’s your girl? they ask. Who do you use? The key word is use, isn’t it? So often that’s the key word. But once they decide a girl is good, then she is invisible and she can scrutinize them. They sit at their computers or in front of their mirrors and leave little notes before dashing off to the next stop.

  And then the girl is left to look and plunder their things. How open their lives are. The box of condoms that never gets touched, week after week after week there in his top drawer, which is always left open for you to close. The thousands of tubes of things that promise to make her look better. The shoes heaped in the closet and invitations crowding the fridge—so many addresses she recognized where she had also knelt before the great porcelain altar and scrubbed their shit and piss and vomit, swept free all those loose hairs.

  Real clean people are often overcompensating for some really bad shit and really dirty people just don’t care. Which is worse? Flip a coin.

  One thing she learned is that there are a lot of men who made it a point to swing by the house while she was there. Some of them remembered her mother. Some of them complimented her. They said how she knew their houses better than their wives did. One said how she knew his body much better than his wife did. She knew their secrets. It wasn’t hard. On that soap opera, the mistress was scorned. That was not hard to do at all and it was also not smart to do. Now that man was scared. He was thinking: I can’t win. Ding, ding, ding—you are absolutely correct, Bob, you can’t fucking win. He won when his wife hired her. He won the first time he ever ripped her clothes off and threw her there on the master bedroom bed and fucked the living daylights out of her. Oh yes, does that feel good? He never had it so good. She was a tool—his favorite tool—right in there with his putter and Weed Eater and espresso maker, the high-tech blender for the margaritas she never got offered. So sure, go ahead, bring your scrawny white ass on and fuck me; it won’t mean one goddamned thing.

  The perfect affair is kind of like the perfect murder. Unlikely. There are always telltale signs. There are always bread crumbs—even the most minuscule—leading to the main event. Sometimes she cleaned everything up and sometimes she didn’t. Or doesn’t. Sometimes she doesn’t.

  Nothing is free. That’s what she likes to say and truth is she is a real good deal compared to what they’ve got and are paying for. She watched one woman coming and going, so curious as to how she could be so unaware, slinking about in leggings designed for a teenager—a woman way too old to be sporting camel toe—but there she was doing it and maybe that was what first hooked him, cheap pussy, though not cheap for long. Get that ring and slip of paper and then nothing is free, is it? It’ll cost later. It costs a big-ass house somebody else needs to clean and two snotty kids, an expensive car and a trip to wherever and that’s just the beginning. This was why C.J. wanted out of the business; she didn’t want the life of a trumped-up whore, call it whatever you please. She was never standing on street corners or in clubs over near the military base. She was in a motel waiting for some very well-respected white-collar big deal about town. She was known for her discretion and for a period of time, her trademark costumes. She could do a schoolgirl because she was young and she could do a dominatrix—in fact she liked that one because if their old clammy hands were tied, they couldn’t put them on her. She could look like a young boy, slick her hair back, no makeup, a thin cotton tank hanging loosely, small breasts bound in a tight tube top so they weren’t even noticeable. One man, the one people would rise up shocked to hear, brought her grapes from his garden in the summer and liked to watch her put them in a galvanized tub and step and mash them, just enough to fill a pewter goblet and raise it to his thin gray lips. He fancied himself a man of God, and in the eyes of the town he was a man of God—but he was also a man of kink, which she sometimes whispered just as he came, eyes rolled back in whatever part of the deal he found ecstatic. He had once read about a priest in Boston who had offered his hardened self as a sacrament, demanding the young man at his mercy to suck away his sins. Eat, drink, that kind of shit, and he said that kind of shit, too, his big beefy hands clutching the sides of her face. There, too, it was like she was invisible, a helpless tool. How foolish to think he might offer up his salty unleavened cock and get away with it, but he did, and she took his offering and paid her bills and enrolled herself in a course at the community college, and she wrote down everything that happened. Every night she ever performed—schoolgirl and bad girl and timid boy and black girl and Indian girl—such a repertoire; she recorded it all. The who, the when, and the where. It was her security. It was that simple. And if she ever needed to use it, she would. She would open Pandora’s Box and let loose the varmints and vile diseases. She will do whatever she has to do to give Kurt a better life than the one she was given.

  “How wet can you get for a trip to Myrtle Beach?” that same asshole who had followed her into the basement asked at a different event. Myrtle Beach. Get real. Even if she thought there was anything that might make him worthwhile, Myrtle Beach?

  “For you?” she cooed back in his stinking face. “I am nothing but the Sahara Desert.” So many of them just assume you might want it, that you can easily be bought and rung up for this or that. If so-and-so fucked you, then I have to as well. But that’s their own ugly reflection, isn’t it? Never satisfied. Staring up at the sun and blinding themselves while they step in shit and on land mines. She believes in watching her feet step by step by step—see the snake before it sees you. See the cliff face, the hole, the man with the knife or crazy wife or misguided dick.

  Parental law: do unto others what was done to you. That’s just fucking wrong. In this way, C.J. has thought maybe her orphanhood was a blessing. With her mother’s death, she knew that she never wanted to do anything to Kurt like what was done to her.

  Her mother did leave a note: Please forgive me. I can’t take it anymore.

  The only thing interesting her mother ever told her was about how long ago when people gave up their babies, they often sewed little trinkets of things into the clothes they wore or the blanket that wrapped them so that someday, if the parents changed their minds, they could find and reclaim their children. Her mother said she had learned this from a nun who once filled in as a substitute teacher, a kind woman who tried to teach the children manners. C.J.’s mom got a good glimpse of Catholicism while she herself got a cr
eepy pervert. No wonder people can’t agree on religion. But still, stupidly, after her mother died, C.J. had sat and felt the pockets and hemline of everything her mother owned looking for a message or something she might find hopeful there in the worn musty heap of her belongings.

  Once when she really wanted camp, the money suddenly appeared. One day it was impossible, her mother’s shoulders slumped forward as she delivered the news without making eye contact, and then the next day there was laughter and excitement and she had an ink stamp with her name on it, a footlocker, and directions to Camp Ton-A-Wandah.

  Weren’t you ashamed? she asked her mother later when she figured out what was going on. Good things always coinciding with the smells and sounds of sex.

  “Yes,” her mother said. “I was ashamed. But I have always been ashamed so what’s the difference. I don’t want that to be your story.”

  Her mom said it was impossible to cross lines, to have people see you and accept you in a whole new light. She said that the one girl who was nice to her growing up had lived in the house by the cemetery; she was a plain simple girl with a huge birthmark that made her very shy.

  Her mom had told her that it does get easier. Eventually they see you with a look of recognition, but then it’s too late. You’ve got a bad husband or two and kids and an addiction or all of the above. The simple rule: some get saved, but most don’t. The choices are important before the years begin to go so very fast.