Dress Codes for Small Towns

by Courtney Stevens

  Woods has no upper lip to speak of. Why do I know that? Because I’m staring at his mouth.

  His mouth is forming sentences about the Harvest Festival, KickFall, and the Corn Dolly nominations.

  “Who do you think will make the ballot?” he asks.

  I draw a large, ironic heart shape in the air with my fingers. “Tawny, of course.”

  “Obviously. But who else?”

  “There’s not a woman in Otters Holt who wouldn’t be happy to win the Corn Dolly. Especially if it’s the last one.”

  “Oh, it ain’t over. Not by a long shot.”

  There’s such a fine line between things Woods plans to do and things Woods has done that he assumes we’ve already saved the festival, even if no one comes out for KickFall.

  Woods props himself up on an elbow, pulls at a loose thread on his comforter. “What about you? You want a Corn Dolly?”

  “No,” I say quickly. I love the Corn Dolly and what it represents in Otters Holt, but I would never pursue one.

  I was seven, maybe eight. I’d seen an old movie—The NeverEnding Story—and as I was prone to do at the time, I obsessed over the main character. Who went on adventures. Who flew on luck dragons. Who faced shit down like a pro. Following Wednesday-night church, I marched myself into the bathroom with scissors and gave myself a haircut that resembled the main character’s. Nearly a foot of dark hair was on the tile floor.

  Dad found me. He must have said something like, Elizabeth, what have you done? And I must have said, Daddy, I’m Atreyu. Those words are hazy, but I do remember the words that followed: “Elizabeth, Atreyu is a boy. You are a girl.”

  And I didn’t understand what he meant, only that it sounded like girls couldn’t go on adventures. He dragged me kicking and screaming from the bathroom to my mother. And while I sat, calming myself on her lap, a lady, maybe Tawny or someone else, said, “Well, that one will never win a Corn Dolly.”

  I’ve known this all my life. Internalized it. And everyone else has too.

  “Oh, come on.” He digs his chin into my chest until I cough.

  I palm his head to stop him. “I’m serious. But I’d love to see my mom or Janie Lee on the ballot someday. I think they are both that invisible sort of good, ya know? Plus, with all the pressure, I think a McCaffrey on the ballot would help my dad.”

  His jaw dances with surprise. “You really think Janie Lee is an invisible sort of good?”

  “Maybe she’s not invisible . . . maybe we’re just really loud?”

  Woods gnaws on the collar of his shirt. He assesses. “No,” he says. “Neither is true. And you really don’t want to win a Corn Dolly?”

  “And have every eye in town assessing me more than they already do? Have them voting if I am woman enough for the honor? Woods, even you put me on the guys’ side of the Hexagon. I hardly think having attention on my femininity, or lack thereof, will help my dad keep his job. Plus, I would hate being paraded around town for scrutiny. Can you imagine what they would say?” I draw a banner with my right hand. “This candidate blew up a church. Vote for her.”

  He is quiet, respectful of my feelings. His shoulders are flat against the bed, his voice crawls upward like a vine on a trellis. “I hadn’t thought of that.” But in true Woods fashion, he fires another equally hard question. “How are things with your dad?”

  Another round of silence.

  “Don’t be a badass with me, Elizabeth.”

  “I’m not.”

  He pins my shoulders, laughing. I squirm. He doesn’t budge. “I’m your best friend, McCaffrey.” Well, there’s a solid boundary, I think. “If you believe us messing around on the roof excuses you from being real, you need a CAT scan. I’ve heard the rumors. I know there are people who want him gone, and I know what that means for you. Talk to me.”

  I execute a fairly sudden wrestling move that pins him under me. We’re eyeball-to-eyeball—body-to-body. Intimate. “You’re breaking the rules,” I say.

  “To call your shit your shit?”

  I don’t say anything.

  “I’ve called your shit before,” he reminds me. “And I plan to always do it. Every time I watch that gleam disappear from your eyes.”

  He has. Only once.

  Puberty was reason number one Dad and I stopped being Dad and I. Reason number two was the Spandex Junkwagon Moms, a group of moms from church who push strollers and wear Lululemon when they aren’t working out. One afternoon—I was thirteen, maybe fourteen—Woods was playing the piano in the sanctuary, and I was lying on a pew, listening, and tossing a football up to myself, when they appeared without warning. They took the football as a desecration of holy space and me as the son of Lucifer. They staged a coup, and after all the back-and-forthing, a small issue became a large issue in which I was at the center. Five families—five wealthy families—left our church, citing the reason as the unwillingness of Scott McCaffrey to discipline his sexually confused daughter. Principles, they claimed. Hypocrisy, they gossiped.

  If I had a daughter like that I’d demand she wear girls’ clothes.

  If I had a daughter like that I’d send her to one of those camps.

  If I had a daughter like that . . . they said.

  My father had a daughter like that, and it became apparent to him, and later to me, that I wasn’t the daughter he wished he had. Or maybe, I was the daughter he initially wanted—after all, he’d purchased the football and Nike gear—but in a battle of me versus the church, the church was the heavyweight champion of the world. His job, our house, the family reputation: all meant I needed to stop playing football and start playing on Jesus’s terms. (My father and Jesus being synonymous entities.)

  Which was the exact wrong thing to explain to Billie McCaffrey.

  I decided that church members would never tell me what to do again. (Jesus could have his say—I was a person of faith; I just wasn’t a person of legalistic bullshit.) Those women threw stones over a football and a girl who girled differently from them. That’s the real problem—not people leaving the church, not Christians acting like Pharisees, not making up rules that don’t exist.

  Publicly, Dad held his ground about me. His daughter could wear what she wanted. His daughter wasn’t disrespecting the sanctuary. His daughter was his daughter. Privately, my dad sided with them, and Mom sided with me.

  I know. Because that’s the moment he started trying to change me into someone else.

  Mom’s take on the situation was that those five families—she actually called the women “rich bitches”—didn’t deserve to be part of our congregation, and they could mosey along. Dad’s take was that Mom should dutifully bake and take a casserole to Margaret Lesley’s house when she found out she had breast cancer. Mom made the casserole because of the cancer, but she made Dad deliver it to that Spandex Junkwagon because of me.

  The one person who realized how much Dad’s betrayal burrowed into my heart was Woods. I’d had a dad who I loved and respected. After that, I had a holy man who slept in a room down the hall.

  Woods and I never made an arrangement about hiding these weaknesses. But we fell into a pattern. He’s strong. I’m stronger. We’re strongest. We act as if there are no failures, and we focus on the horizon. But I’d allowed him one true conversation about football and judgmental assholes, and he was now jonesing for another over my nongleaming brown eyes.

  What would I say? There’s no gleam because I’m scared we’ll have to move or that even if we don’t, I feel so close to misstepping, to losing everyone. Even him, my oldest and easiest friend. Please don’t kiss me again. Please tell me what to do. Write me a plan on Einstein. Predetermine the course of my life.

  Instead, I release my wrestling hold on Woods and say, “You keep interrupting the best show on television, and I need you to stop.”

  We return to our side-by-side, temple-to-temple position. Woods isn’t done. “You’d tell me if it was all too much, right? Because I swear to God, McCaffrey, if you’re being a stoic
bitch about this, and I find out later you’re suicidal or using your saw to cut something other than two-by-fours, I’m gonna give you a real tombstone. You hear me?”

  I nearly cave. I nearly open a vein and tell him everything. That I’m scared that if we fail at rescuing the Harvest Festival my dad will be ousted by the deacons and we’ll have to move. And even if we don’t have to move, I’ll ruin this perfect thing—this Hexagon of people—because I don’t understand what I want and need. I wish we could hook our brains together with an HDMI cable so he could just know, and I wouldn’t have to say.

  Janie Lee raises his window and crawls into the room and saves me.

  “What’s on the TV?” she calls.

  Woods and I separate quickly, patting the space between us. Janie Lee vaults over Woods and lies down. She folds her hands over her stomach and there we are. Three peas in a pod, watching a television made of books.

  “There’s a variety show on,” I suggest. “A cappella group.”

  They take the cue. The three of us are singing a mash-up of Adele and David Guetta when Woods’s mom opens the door. “Morning, Billie. Janie Lee.”

  “Morning, Mrs. Carrington,” Janie Lee and I say together.

  She never seems surprised or fazed at two girls lying in the bed with her son, but today she’s wearing an untraceable expression. Euphoria? No. Anticipation? Maybe. Hesitation? Yes.

  From behind her back, she produces a newspaper. After popping her son in the forehead, she says, “I believe this is what you’ve been waiting for.”

  We sit up. I polish a little smudge on my boots—try to play this moment of anticipation cool. I hope to see Mrs. Clare McCaffrey in Times New Roman letters. Woods snatches the newspaper and reads the headline aloud: “Corn Dolly Results Announced.”

  He follows with three names:

  Mrs. Tawny Jacobs

  Mrs. Caroline Cheatham

  Miss Elizabeth McCaffrey

  If Janie Lee’s mouth could catch a thousand flies, mine could catch a million.

  Woods tugs his hat toward the bridge of his nose. “Hot damn, Elizabeth McCaffrey, you’re on the ballot.”

  15

  A man from Cambridge, of learned intelligence, published something called Littlewood’s Law before I was born. The professor claimed mathematical proof that miracles occur once a month. Per person. Give or take. I don’t know if this is science’s doing or God’s, but I am positive Billie McCaffrey on the Corn Dolly ballot is nothing short of miraculous. Last I checked, in the court of public opinion, I’d burned down a church.

  With the unexpected news, my house has been downright festive. Mom fixes ribs, which is a banner that screams Special Occasion. Dad drinks a glass of champagne—an actual glass of alcohol—and invites the Hexagon and Grandy over to picnic. He’s so stinking proud he’ll have to pray for forgiveness all the way through the Harvest Festival.

  I’m too stunned to be proud. Too concerned I might screw this up to enjoy anything more than their company.

  Elizabeth McCaffrey, born 1999—d. ? R.I.P.: Corn Dolly Nominee.

  By four thirty, paper plates are loaded with ribs and carbs. Napkins dance away from the picnic table at the wind’s insistence. Mom plugs in festive white lights over the pergola even though the sun still hangs high above the tree line. When everyone sits, Dad lifts his glass. Aluminum beverages rise to shoulder height all around me. I duck my head and stare at my fork tines.

  “To Billie,” Dad says.

  “To Billie,” everyone repeats.

  I am not the sort to cry, but I am nearly persuaded. Janie Lee, who is sitting directly across the table from me, puts an UGG on my boot, taps. Tears plop from her chin to her tank top and a quiet little “I’m proud of you” passes across the table like a scoop of mashed potatoes. At the other end, Woods winks and licks his lips. Possibly over the spicy rib seasonings. Possibly because he’s spinning ideas into gold. How do I turn a nomination into an award? he’s thinking.

  Davey occupies the seat to my right; Mom, the one to my left. They have both wordlessly side-squeezed me. My dad seems taller than Molly the Corn Dolly. He stays tall through the whole meal, lavishing praise on everyone.

  “You’ve all worked so hard,” and “People were bound to notice,” and “I’m proud of you.” He doesn’t hand these things to me alone; he speaks them to the whole Hexagon, and that makes me even happier.

  When Mom says, “You’re the first teenager ever to be nominated,” I know she is trying to remind me that it might be a group accomplishment, but I need to own some of the excitement for myself.

  I don’t care if I win a Corn Dolly, but this, this full feeling in my soul, I’d like to keep it. Otters Holt is my home, and these people are my family.

  One by one, they all tromp off to Saturday night plans. Grandy first: beauty sleep. Woods next: he’s playing the piano for services tomorrow and hasn’t practiced. Mash and Fifty follow, citing some Fantasy Football thing. Davey sticks around, making sure the trash is out, the lights are unplugged, and the propane tank is reattached to the grill.

  “You working at the elementary school after church tomorrow?” he asks.

  “If I don’t die of shock in my sleep.”

  He leans in close. The stubble on his cheek grazes against my face. “You deserve this,” he whispers, and then he is off and away; the Camaro has left the drive.

  “You’re very red,” Janie Lee comments.

  I’ve been red-faced since I saw the newspaper.

  “Let’s go somewhere,” she says.

  We tumbleweed to our bikes and pedal furiously down the drive without so much as an explanation to Mom and Dad. River Run Road is short and pockmarked. We weave back and forth, avoiding as many potholes as we can. Sometimes our hands are on the bars, sometimes high in the air; we take back road to back road, which eventually spits us out near Molly the Corn Dolly and the dam overlook. I am windblown and spectacularly happy. The light bends golden and glowing over the horizon and trees. Perhaps I’ve been alive seventeen years. Perhaps three hundred. On a day like today, age is irrelevant: existence is infinite.

  The leaves aren’t afire yet, but the orange and red and yellow of autumn are on preorder. One more rain and Otters Holt will start to explode with colors. Molly the Corn Dolly greets us. A family, using a tripod, snaps a quick photo before piling back into a Suburban.

  Janie Lee points toward the overlook. “The dam?”

  I pedal in that direction, and once we arrive I toss my bike in the grass, walking directly up to the concrete barrier. I bend over to see the water. The deep blue and frothing lake is a mirror for the sky, but it is not transparent. Visibility stops within inches of the surface. Beautiful things are often muddy.

  Janie Lee is beside me. “There,” she says of a barge carrying coal or maybe limestone.

  I nod, hoping the light will hold long enough for us to watch it go through the lock.

  A towboat chugs forward, pushes the barge to the left, nearly to the shore. Even from this height, the cacophony of water and machinery keeps us from speaking. When the barge is in place, the towboat backs downriver and the massive lock doors inch closed. Turbines grind and water slips out of tiny holes, starting the laborious process of changing the water level inside the lock. All because someone effing brilliant imagined a seventy-five-foot elevator for boats.

  Concrete and steel.

  Water sucking, snorting, draining, or filling.

  Magical engineering at its very best.

  I feel a strange kinship with this incredible but very normal feat. Isn’t it as unlikely as I am? Isn’t it magic the same way me being nominated is magic? I say as much to Janie Lee.

  “Billie,” Janie Lee protests.

  “Shhhhh.” The water levels are almost flush with the other side of the Tennessee, the enchantment almost at an end.

  “Don’t ruin today with your doubts,” she tells me.

  They aren’t doubts. They’re questions. Why the sudden shift in
town opinion? How did someone who has been called dykish so often she practically answers to it make it onto the ballot? The Corn Dolly is not a beauty contest, but raw beauty is always a consideration. Gerry called me beautiful. I am trying to think who I would call beautiful. My mom. Jeanelle. Mrs. Carrington. They are polished and pearled and feminine.

  Janie Lee. Those long legs covered by skinny jeans that get lost in her UGGs. That black sweatshirt of mine she grabbed from the garage, the front hoodie pocket slight torn. It matches her hair. Matches the heavy mascara highlighting her eyes. Yes, she’s beautiful. Maybe even striking.

  But I am the girl-who-isn’t-a-guy who lives perpetually on the guys’ side. A brother, a dude, a . . .

  I climb onto the concrete barrier as though it is the chest freezer in my garage and swing my legs. Janie Lee follows. It is now almost too dark to see anything more than the shadowy outlines of the other side of the lake. We’ve lost complete sight of the barge. But we let ourselves be absorbed by nature around us. Chirping crickets and scrambling squirrels. They are harmonizing in a nearby stand of trees. A barred owl sings the song of a whinnying horse. Somewhere below us, a fisherman revs a boat engine and heads home to clean his catch.

  “Can you believe it?” I ask.

  “I can. You’ve done a lot of things to put yourself in that position, friend.” She reels off a list that is basically one item: helping old people.

  “It doesn’t seem like enough.”

  “Don’t be silly. Just enjoy it. Your mom is happy. Your dad is positively enraptured. I swear, B, it’s like he just got to baptize the whole town. Accept the fact that people see the real you.”

  The real me is a cloudy, fuzzy thing these days.

  “Are you excited? Even a little?” she asks.

  “I’m . . . overwhelmed.”

  “And delighted?”

  “It still feels like a fluke, you know? Maybe we shouldn’t talk about it.”

  She swings sideways. Puts her feet up on my thighs and shoves her hands in the hoodie pocket. “You know what we should talk about?” A pause. “Woods.”