The Cotton Queen

by Pamela Morsi

  “Come on,” Stan said. We hurried down the stairs. “We’ll go to my place. No, that’s an hour away. We’ll find a motel.”

  We didn’t make it that far. Maybe it was because it had been so long. Or maybe I really am a slut, but when we got to his car in the shadowed lot we started again. I was so ready, I so wanted him. I couldn’t remember ever wanting a man more. He lifted me up until I sat on the car. I wrapped my legs around his waist. He was caressing my breasts. I jerked down the top of my dress, trying to make it easier for him. I let my hands explore the front of his trousers. What I found there was impressive and eager.

  The moments were too frantic and our appetites too ravenous. He bent me forward over the passenger side of the car hood and we had desperate, aching, incredible sex that had me screaming my head off with appreciation.

  After it was over, he managed to get the car door unlocked and we got inside, still breathing heavy, still half numb with pleasure and incredulity.

  “I can’t believe I had sex out in the open in a parking lot,” I said.

  “I’m never selling this car,” he responded. “I want to be buried in this car.”

  We sat there together for long moments, catching our breath, talking, kissing. The kisses were more play now than passion, but just as pleasurable. He pulled my dress down to my waist and put little love bites on my nipples.

  “I love how this dress just goes up or down so easily,” he said. “It’s quicker and more efficient than the drapes in my house.”

  “What happened to my bra?” I asked him.

  “I think I threw it down,” he said. “It’s probably out on the pavement, I’ll look for it before we go.”

  He feathered a long string of little nips and pecks from my breast up to my throat. And then he put his mouth on mine again, this time seriously. It was wonderful. I moaned aloud.

  “You are so good at this,” he said, as our lips parted.

  “No, it’s you,” I said. “You’re the one who’s doing it.”

  “Me? I’d hardly even kissed a girl before that day I kissed the Cotton Queen in that convertible,” he said. “All these years, no woman I’ve ever kissed measured up.”

  “It was a very good kiss,” I admitted. “It ranks pretty high.”

  “It does,” he agreed. “But that sex, wow, Laney, you are way off the map.”

  I smiled with some pride, but some embarrassment, too.

  “I’m not usually like that,” I assured him. “It’s just...it’s just that it’s been so long.”

  “I think we’re going to have to test that statement,” he said.

  “Test it?”

  “I don’t suppose you’re on the pill, or anything responsible and reasonable like that.”

  “I will be tomorrow,” I assured him.

  He nodded. “There’s a box of condoms in the glove compartment,” he said. “Why don’t you get one out. I’ll wear it and you can prove to me how boring you are having sex when it’s only been a half hour since you had it last.”

  “You keep condoms in the car?” I asked.

  “It’s a brand-new package,” he assured me. “I just bought them, with you in mind, I swear it.”

  “Pretty sure of yourself then?”

  “Let’s just say, I’m an optimist.”

  I got the prophylactic.

  “We’re doing it here in the car?” I asked.

  “It’s been lucky for us so far,” he said.

  He unzipped his pants and sheathed himself in the thin latex. “Come on, Laney,” he said. “Climb on and show me how boring and ordinary sex with you can be.”

  I failed dismally at any attempt at that.

  We didn’t get home until the predawn hours. There was nobody on the streets of McKinney but the garbage trucks and the paperboy, but I knew that didn’t mean that my arriving home at such a disgraceful hour would go unnoticed.

  “Are you okay?” he asked me as he walked me to the porch.

  “I’m a bit sore,” I admitted. “But it kind of feels sort of good.”

  He chuckled. “Does this mean I can call you again?”

  “You’d better, or I will be just like poor Cindy Gilbert.”

  “No,” he said, feigning thoughtfulness. “Sex with Cindy was never this good.”

  My mouth dropped open in shock.

  “Kidding,” he assured me quickly. “I was just kidding.”

  I decided that he was.

  At the front door, he gave me a sweet little smooch on the tip of my nose.

  “I’d better go,” he said. “Your mother may start flipping the lights off and on at any second.”

  I nodded. “She’s probably sitting up for me in the living room at this very moment.”

  He laughed like it was a good joke.

  She was waiting for me. But at least she was in the kitchen. And there was coffee.

  BABS

  I KNEW THAT Laney was having an affair with Stan. I didn’t condemn her for it. In the years since she’d moved in with Robert, most of the world had changed on that issue. All over McKinney, and probably the rest of the country, couples were casually cohabiting with no consequences from the community. So, I didn’t condemn her. I did worry about her. Feminism and equal rights may have changed the way women looked at the world. But I was afraid that how the world looked at women was not all that different.

  I worried that making herself so available to him, no strings attached, made it easier and easier for him to avoid strings at all. If I’d been less interested in her happiness, I might have been able to keep my mouth shut. But I just kept talking and she didn’t appreciate it at all.

  “If you make that cow and milk statement again,” she said. “I will have to kill you.”

  She’d just gotten home from another all-night date. I’d had to take Rachel to preschool so she could get a shower and dress for her day on the job. She was working for Pete full-time now. And spending two to three nights a week keeping company with Stan Kuhl.

  I poured the dregs of the coffee into my cup. “You can’t go on like this,” I said.

  “If you don’t like babysitting, just say so,” she said, primly. “I can afford to have someone else do it.”

  “This is not about babysitting and you know it,” I said. “You and Stan can’t keep doing this.”

  “Doing what?” She feigned ignorance and then added crudely. “Oh, you mean screwing. Oh, yes, we can, Babs. We can do it a lot.”

  “You are not going to dissuade me from talking to you by being smutty,” I told her. “It’s time to either marry Stan or move along.”

  “My personal life does not concern you,” she said, very focused and businesslike.

  “You’re living in my house. I’m helping raise your child,” I pointed out. “And you’ll always be my daughter. That gives me the right to speak my mind.”

  Laney rolled her eyes. “You never fail to take that opportunity, do you?”

  “It’s time for Stan to make things right,” I said. “If he has any consideration for your reputation, he needs to show it now.”

  “Babs, women these days don’t have reputations,” she said with heaps of pithy condescension.

  “You think they don’t? You’re on your way to being the next Judy Bykowski,” I told her. “Is that what you want? Ned Hoffman would rather father a bastard than give her his name. Now she’s living with Renny, cleaning his house and working in his businesses and Renny won’t marry her, either.”

  “Maybe Judy wants to be single,” she said.

  I shrugged. “Who cares what Judy wants,” I said. “I know you, Laney. I know what you’re made of. I know what you went through with Robert. You want love, commitment, stability. Don’t even try to pretend that you don’t.”

  “I’d like to be married to Stan someday,” she admitted.

  “Someday is never going to happen unless you get firm with Stan, insist on making it official.”

  Laney’s eyes narrowed. I knew I was reall
y annoying her.

  “What do you want me to do? Ask him to marry me? I thought you were opposed to women’s lib. Isn’t the man supposed to make the first move?”

  “Yes,” I told her. “And he will. But sometimes a fellow needs a little push.”

  “I have no intention of pushing anyone,” Laney said. “I don’t have to have a husband. I don’t need a man to define my life. I’m not going to twist Stan’s arm to make him conform to some expectation of yours. You don’t know me, you don’t know Stan, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I know that making yourself sexually available to a man who has no long-term commitment is the worst kind of low self-esteem behavior.”

  “Low self-esteem? Good grief, Babs, you’re talking to me. I’m the woman in this room who actually was the Cotton Queen, not just runner-up pretending she was the real deal for all these years. When it comes to low-esteem issues, you’re the clear winner there.”

  “I certainly have my problems,” I admitted. “But I’m not some man’s hussy on call, ready to drop my panties whenever it happens to be convenient for him.”

  “You look at everything through your own weird, warped view of the universe. You, drop your panties? Not a chance. Tell me, did you ever in your life have sex just because you wanted to?”

  I felt myself blushing. “If I did I was very young,” I told her truthfully. “And I’m certain that I never allowed my own carnality to trump my responsibility as the mother of a young child.”

  “Give me a break,” Laney said. “My relationship with Stan doesn’t hurt Rachel. She loves Stan. And he loves her.”

  I nodded. “I believe he does love her. But that’s not enough to make him marry you. For that he has to love you.”

  “What a crappy thing to say!”

  “What a crappy reality that it’s time you faced,” I shot back. “Has the man ever once told you that he loved you? Has he even mentioned marriage in casual conversation?”

  Laney blanched and I knew I was exactly right. It was killing me to wound her. I felt I had no choice.

  “Sweetie, I don’t want to hurt you,” I said. “I love you. But I worry that while you’re wasting time making inroads on this highway to nowhere, you’re not meeting any men who might actually want to marry you, to make a life with you. You’re missing a man who might be interested in being more than Rachel’s buddy, someone who’d be willing to be her daddy.”

  She shook her head, refusing to see it. “Stan and I are very happy with our relationship,” she insisted. “We like where we are and how it’s going. When the time is right to move things up another notch, we will. Until that time, you should just butt out. You’re wrong about me and Stan. You’ve got it completely wrong.”

  But the weeks turned into months, turned into years and Stan made no move to elevate their now rather well-known affair to anything legitimate. I took no pride in having been right.

  In the summer of 1991, the doctors came up with a new name for what ailed Doris. She’d been living with non-A, non-B hepatitis for almost five years when the specialist, Dr. Berlin informed Acee, with a bit too much self-congratulation I thought, that his wife was McKinney’s first case of Hepatitis C, a heretofore unidentified strain of liver inflammation.

  “How did she get it?” I asked Acee.

  He shook his head.

  We were sitting together in the hospital waiting room. He’d brought her into emergency. For several days her belly had been swelling and she looked six months pregnant, but she hadn’t wanted to see the doctor. This morning when her brain was so foggy she couldn’t figure out how to make the toaster work, Acee had finally convinced her that they had to have help.

  “She doesn’t have any of the risk factors for this,” he told me. “She’s never had a blood transfusion or used drugs. She’s never had a sexually transmitted disease and she tests negative for all other types of hepatitis. The doctors are stumped. Doris simply shouldn’t have this disease. But she does.”

  Acee looked tired. He looked old. He looked scared.

  “The doctor assured me that this problem she has with thinking and remembering is temporary,” he said. “The inability of her liver to function properly is causing toxins to build up. One of them is ammonia and it rises and accumulates in the brain, making her muddled.”

  I nodded, sympathetically.

  “She isn’t able to really eat anything,” Acee continued. “She was down to ninety-three pounds before she started retaining all this fluid. Dorrie weighed one thirty-five when I married her.”

  “Oh, I’m sure she was lying to you about that,” I told him, feigning snideness. “Doris weighed one hundred forty pounds if she weighed an ounce. Her hair alone probably accounted for half of that.”

  Acee chuckled. I was glad to give him even the briefest of respites from the worries that drained him.

  “Thanks for coming here,” he said to me. “I called the boys, they’re both on the road. When I couldn’t get Laney on the phone...well, I know it’s probably not good manners to call my ex-wife to hold my hand. But you’re the closest friend I could think of.”

  “I’m glad you called me,” I assured him. “And you’re right, we’ve always been close friends.”

  The disease, or what they knew about it, seemed very confusing and complicated. It progressed very slowly, they assured us, but Doris was very far along. They’d only just discovered its existence, but she may have been walking around with it for twenty years. They could treat it with interferons, but the prognosis for someone Doris’s age with her level of infection was very bad.

  “The way I like to explain the liver,” Dr. Berlin said, “is that it’s like a window screen. It has lots of little bitty holes. Fluids pass through the liver the way air passes through the window screen. Now, if a fly hits that window screen and dies there, well that plugs up a few holes, but doesn’t really affect the airflow enough to notice. This hepatitis C is like a huge swarm of flies hitting the screen and dying there. There’s so many tiny fly corpses, that everything just backs up on either side, practically nothing gets through.”

  Dr. Berlin’s folksy explanation may have worked wonderfully on ignorant, uneducated country people, unfamiliar with modern medicine. I found it condescending at best. And the image of poor Doris filled up with dead flies was extremely disturbing to me and not a bit comforting to Acee.

  It was midafternoon when her sons arrived. I waited in the hallway so they could have time with their mother alone. Laney showed up, anxious and frazzled.

  “I was in and out of meetings all day,” she told me. “I saw Acee’s number on my phone, but I figured he was just calling me to set up a lunch.”

  “It’s okay, Laney,” I told her. “You’re here for him now and I know he appreciates it.”

  That was true. When he came back to the waiting room, she ran into his arms. He held her tightly and cried against her hair.

  I know that some would say I treated Acee unfairly when I married him. I had even felt that way myself many times, stung by my own guilt. But at that moment, seeing the relationship between father and daughter, I knew that I’d given Acee a gift, a very valuable gift. For that alone, our marriage had been worth it.

  Later that evening they did a needle aspiration of Doris’s distended belly. They drew off a liter of fluid making her much more comfortable and able to sleep.

  I held her hand and sat with her while the three men and Laney were huddled in the corner, in consultation with the doctor.

  “At this point, the only thing I can suggest is a liver transplant,” he told them.

  “They transplant livers?” Laney asked. “I’ve only heard about hearts and kidneys.”

  “It’s new,” the doctor admitted. “There are only a few hospitals in the country that perform the operation. I’d recommend Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.”

  “All right,” Acee said. “So we take her to Baltimore? In an ambulance or what?”

  “No, we’l
l put Mrs. Clifton on the transplant waiting list,” he said. “I can get her listed there tonight. We keep her here a few days to get her stabilized then we’ll send her home.”

  I could hear Acee’s sigh of relief from across the room.

  “She gets to come home,” he said.

  “Yes,” Dr. Berlin told him. “If...when she gets close to the top of the list, you two can fly up there and wait nearby.”

  “Mom’s never been that far from home before,” her eldest son pointed out.

  In fact, she never did go that far.

  Doris got better and went home. She followed the doctor’s instructions to the letter, trying to get ready for the surgery. It was as if she were in training for the Olympics, and Acee with her. Doris took medication. Watched her diet. She walked every day. She had a couple of bouts of peritonitis and returned to the hospital several times to have fluid buildup drawn off. But she seemed to be getting better.

  Then it was all over. She awakened Acee in the middle of the night and told him that something was very wrong, her back felt hot along the line of her kidneys and her lungs were congested like a really bad cold.

  He raced her to the hospital. Within an hour she’d slipped into a coma. She died the next day.

  LANEY

  SOMETIMES YOU lose people before you ever fully realize how much they mean to you. That’s how it was with Doris. She was more than just the woman my stepfather had married. In my life she’d been the unmother, the grown-up, worldly-wise female who, unlike my real mother, always knew the right things to say and when to say them.

  “Don’t you worry,” she told me once. “Stan really loves you. How can he help it, you’re so good for him. Just give the boy time. I was in love with Acee almost twenty years before he ever thought of marrying me. And most of that time he was married to somebody else.”

  I knew she was right. I knew she was. But in the deepest, darkest part of my heart, I feared Babs might be right, too. Stan had gotten comfortable in our relationship. He liked having me as his...ah...girlfriend? too old...companion? too young...date? too insignificant...lover? too much information. I feared that I was, as Babs had so unkindly phrased it, his hussy on call.