Natural Bridges

by Debbie Lynn McCampbell

  I smiled. “No, Bird, that’s tradition.”

  “Like having a wedding when you’re pregnant?” she asked.

  “You want to go outside for a while?” I asked.

  She nodded. “Okay, but I want a piece of cake.”

  “Go on and get in the line then,” I said.

  “Want a piece, too?”

  “Sure. You know me and chocolate. Meet me back here.”

  When Birdie came back with our cake, I handed her a napkin and led her outside. It was a nice evening, not too humid; a breeze was blowing. It wasn’t nightfall yet, but you could see the moon coming up. Someone had turned on the floodlights, so the yard was pretty well lit up.

  We walked down the brick sidewalk that led out back. The path ran between little shrubs and flowers protected by two-foot-high lattice fencing. Most of the flowers were in bloom, but Birdie couldn’t name any except roses, and picked me one. At the end of the path, I sat down with my thorny treasure on the edge of the fountain and breathed in the night air.

  I stuck my hand in the water; it was cool and felt good. The spotlight made the water appear aquamarine like the ocean looked in Key West postcards.

  The brick rim around the fountain was only about a foot high and a few inches wide. Birdie climbed up on it, carefully balanced herself, walked all the way around, then sat down beside me. Listening to the music coming from the hall, we ate our cake.

  “Don’t get that dress wet,” I warned.

  The dress I had changed her into was new; her bridesmaid dress was hanging safely in the bathroom. One of the night nurses where Hazel worked had given her some of her own daughter’s clothes to bring home for Birdie. The dress was orchid eyelet with a full skirt trimmed in a darker purple satin, pulled tight at her waist with a matching purple sash. Her long sandy blond hair hung in curls below the bow. She was still wearing her white lacy tights and patent leather Mary Janes.

  She looked real pretty; I was proud of her that night. It always worried me that with my influence, she’d grow up being too much of a tomboy and not ever want to put on a dress or curl her hair, or play with dolls. But so far, she seemed to be as much interested in playing Momma to Waylon Jennings as she was in chasing Jimmy around the field.

  Standing on the edge of the fountain, Birdie spotted a little girl playing on the swing set, in the backyard of a house next to the civic hall. Birdie jumped down, darted to a tree, crouched and spied.

  The girl looked about Birdie’s age, maybe a little older. She was wearing a frilly blue dress and was swinging high in the air, singing. Each time she swung forward, her chubby little legs poked out from under her netted crinoline, and pointed in our direction. She pumped her little legs, swinging with all her might.

  Suddenly, the girl let herself fly out of the swing to land in the yard.

  This startled Birdie, and she drew back quickly and ducked down.

  “I saw you!” shouted the girl.

  Birdie looked at me, crouched lower.

  “Today’s my birthday,” the voice came again.

  We could see the girl more clearly now; she was standing at the fence.

  “I’m nine!”

  “Go on,” I motioned Birdie, “go on over there and talk to her.”

  Slowly, Birdie moved out from behind the tree. She walked to the fence, faced her opponent.

  “What’s your name? Mine’s Cynthia. Cynthia Louisa Wingate.” The girl smiled.

  “Mine’s Birdie.”

  “Birdie? Is that your real name?” Cynthia frowned.

  Birdie nodded, lowered her eyes, and stood quiet for a moment, pulling at her sash. “Today you’re nine?”

  “Yep. August ninth. How old are you?”

  “Eight. But almost nine,” said Birdie.

  “I’m taller and older,” said the girl.

  Birdie nodded.

  I watched the two of them, kicking dirt around with their feet, trying to think of what to talk about. If Cynthia had been a dead beetle or a multicolored rock, Birdie would have had plenty to say.

  “There’s a wedding going on in there, isn’t there?” Cynthia pointed.

  “Yeah.”

  “How do you know the bride and groom?”

  “The bride’s my big sister.”

  “She’s pregnant, isn’t she?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  This awareness startled me. I then realized the whole neighborhood must know about the Rayburn family black sheep.

  Cynthia sat back down on the grass by the fence and fanned her dress around her.

  Birdie watched her get in place, then sat down too.

  “My Mom knows your Aunt Hazel from the Peaceful Palace Nursing Home. She’s a nurse there. I flew here last night for the weekend to visit her.”

  Birdie looked puzzled. “How long are you staying here?”

  “Three days. My father’s coming through on business, then taking me back home day after tomorrow.”

  “Where do you really live?”

  “In Florida with my Daddy.”

  “I know where Florida is,” said Birdie. “My uncle, the one Hazel was married to, moved there.”

  “I know. With some other woman, right?” asked Cynthia.

  Birdie nodded.

  Again, I was ashamed of the widespread knowledge of our family’s illicit approach to social norms.

  “You’re lucky,” said Birdie. “It don’t snow in Florida, does it?”

  “No.”

  “You’re lucky.”

  “I like snow,” said Cynthia.

  Birdie copied Cynthia’s moves, crossing her arms, tapping her feet, scratching her legs.

  “What about your Daddy?” asked Birdie.

  “What about him?”

  “I mean how come he don’t live with you and your Momma here in Kentucky?”

  “They’re divorced so I can live in two places if I want.”

  Birdie picked up a stick and ran it back and forth along the fence, considering this. “Do they both take you on vacations?”

  “Yes, lots.”

  “You’re lucky. Do you get to go to Disney World?”

  “Every summer and Christmas and some birthdays.”

  “Did you ever see Snow White?” Birdie looked excited to hear about this. I knew how much she loved all that Disney magic stuff.

  Cynthia hesitated. “I think so. Why?”

  “Because she’s so pretty, that’s why. I seen her on TV in a commercial and once in a movie. She’s just so pretty.”

  “Yeah, I saw her.” Cynthia fiddled with the lace on her dress.

  “You’re so lucky,” said Birdie.

  Cynthia smiled.

  Both girls were quiet for some time, and darkness was beginning to fall. I propped my feet up on the fountain edge, loosened my ankle straps, and tried making a boat out of my fork and paper plate. I put the rose Birdie had given me in my hair.

  “Hey, you know what?” asked Birdie after quite a while.

  “What?” asked Cynthia.

  “You could be Cinderella. In that pretty dress, you look like a fairy princess.” Birdie pulled at her own faded dress. “This is sort of new,” she said.

  “I used to have one just like it,” said Cynthia. “It was exactly the same. I wore it in my first piano recital last year. But I outgrew it and my Mom gave it away with some of my other clothes to some poor people.”

  When I heard this, my heart sank. It just then dawned on me that Cynthia’s mother must have been the night nurse who gave Hazel those little girl clothes down at the nursing home. My throat tightened. I hoped Birdie didn’t make the connection; she knew the dress was a hand-me-down.

  At that moment, I realized it was Birdie, more than Florabelle, more than anyone, who deserved a new dress, and I decided right then that when I got home that night, I would start making her one. Any color she wanted. Even peach.

  Suddenly, a woman called from the house, and Cynthia ran, without saying another word.

  Birdie st
ood and watched the blue silk disappear into the house. Finally, she came back over to where I was sitting. She climbed up on the rim of the fountain and stared down into the blue-green bubbling water. “I’m lucky,” she said, after quite some time, to her own reflection. Then she pulled off her bow and sash and threw them in the water to watch them sink.

  7. Just Married

  When we got back inside the reception hall, folks were dancing. I looked around and found Florabelle, dress hoisted up, dancing in circles around Jason and some of his friends. She was laughing and hollering, doing the rocking chair step to the tune of “Cotton-eyed Joe.”

  I stood off to the side and watched her whirl, supposing she had got over the cake topper. And by the way she was bouncing around, you’d never think she was two months from having a baby.

  Jason lifted her up over his head and kissed her belly, right smack on her navel. She smiled at him, reached down and held his face in the palms of her hands. This display of affection, which was for the most part uncommon for those two, seemed to excite the crowd, and everyone whistled. It was curious to me, the ready acceptance of it all. The feeling in the room was genuine happiness. Bliss without shame.

  “Wanna dance?” I felt an elbow in my rib and looked into the all-too-familiar face of Dwayne Crabtree, Jason’s brother, the best man. Dwayne came into Clem’s station a lot for gas, and it seemed like it was always when I was working and he always needed something done like his windshield washed or his brake fluid checked. Something where he could stand off to the side and leer at me while I was busy. A couple months back, I had finally just flat refused to put air in his tires, told Clem that Dwayne just wanted to stare at my ass. So ever since Clem started checking Dwayne’s air pressure, he quit asking us to do it.

  “No thanks, Dwayne,” I said, staring up at his large, awkward frame. “Where did you ever find a tuxedo big enough to fit you?”

  Dwayne was six foot four and a half, two hundred and fifty some pounds, as strong and as smart as an ox, and just as mean as a bull. I once saw him pull a federal mailbox up out of a concrete sidewalk outside the post office in Stanton and heave it through the back car window of a guy who spit on his truck tire.

  “We rented them out of a store in the Lexington mall.” He stuck his thumbs through his suspenders, leaned back. “Don’t I look sharp?” he asked and grinned his stupid grin.

  I just looked at him.

  “Come on, dance with me.”

  “I said no thanks.” I turned my attention back towards the dance floor. Hazel had Birdie out there twirling her around, trying to teach her the steps. I started to leave, but Dwayne grabbed my arm.

  “Lighten up,” he said, and winked. “You need to relax. What, don’t you like to dance?”

  “I love to dance, but I just don’t feel like it right now.”

  “All right, all right,” he said, shifting his weight to his other foot. He reached in his back pocket and brought out a can of Skoal, and staring at his hands, he mumbled, “But you sure look pretty in that dress.” He pinched out a small bit of dip and packed it in his lip. His next words were even more muffled. “And that eye shadow brings blue out in your eyes like the sky.” He looked up and smiled, as if he thought he’d said something accidentally beautiful.

  I excused myself and headed for the rest room. Once inside, I spit on a few sheets of toilet paper, and wiped at my eyes until all the makeup was gone. I hated wearing it anyways; I always felt smothered by it. When I had it all off, I stepped back and stared at myself in the mirror. I looked thin, and the way the dress was cut gave me a waist and almost suggested a bust the way the bodice gathered at the sleeves. I really didn’t look half bad.

  Just then, the door swung open with a crash against the wall, and the woman we had hired from Lexington to take photographs staggered in, twisted her ankle, and grabbed me to stop a fall. “Hell of a party, ain’t it?”

  I nodded.

  Then she pulled down her panty hose, and hovered over the toilet, without closing the stall door. “I was married once,” she said. “Ten years, then off he went.” She fumbled with the paper dispenser.

  I left the bathroom. I wanted the night to end; I wanted to go to bed. But I knew I’d have to stick around and clean up. That was the odd thing about weddings, and graduations, or anything that you work for, plan, and organize. It comes, it goes, then the ones who are celebrating take off with a wonderful memory all fixed in their minds forever, and everyone else has got nothing but the mess to remember it by.

  The deejay was now trying to gather up all the single guys and girls for the garter belt and bouquet toss. I was surprised Florabelle had even bothered with a garter belt. But she was smiling and poking a leg out from under her dress, teasing Jason, so I figured she had. I also couldn’t help but imagine that her poking her leg out like that from under a dress was probably what started this whole thing in the first place. An inch of attention went a mile for Florabelle.

  I was standing near the cake, which was nearly gone, when Daddy walked over to me and picked up a piece.

  “Why ain’t you out there?” he asked.

  “What, you in a hurry to marry me off?” I asked. “Who would mow your grass on Saturdays?”

  He chewed a bite of cake, mouth open, and said, “I’ll worry about my grass; you worry about your future.”

  I stared at him. He looked decent, for a change, in his navy suit and tie, closely shaven and hair combed. We were so used to seeing him in his work shirts or overalls, and it wasn’t often that we even saw him after he had showered. He really wasn’t bad looking for his age. He was forty-six his last birthday. We had tried talking him into wearing a tuxedo for the wedding, but he didn’t see the need for spending the money. His suit, though, looked nice.

  “Daddy, ain’t nobody around here I’d have.”

  He grinned. “Sassy as you’ve been lately, ain’t nobody here who’d have you.” He licked some icing off a Styrofoam plate. “But get on out there and have you some fun.”

  So, if for no other reason than to avoid Daddy’s hounding, I walked out to the floor, and of course Florabelle spotted me, and aimed the bouquet right at me. Out of reflex, when something comes flying at your face without warning, you grab at it, and that’s just what I did.

  And that’s what Dwayne Crabtree did, when Jason flung the garter right at him, just like a rubber band. He grabbed at it, waving it high above his head like he’d just intercepted a play.

  So there we were. Out there in front of everyone, me sitting on a chair, legs crossed, men whistling, Dwayne kneeling in front of me, making every kind of suggestive comment or gesture he’d ever seen, heard, and memorized, and Hazel with her Polaroid.

  The hardest thing in the world I’ve ever done was to sit there and be a good sport and pretend to be having a good time. Dwayne working the garter up over my knee, inching it up my thigh, all his brothers egging him on.

  When he leaned in close enough, through my teeth with a smile I said, “One inch higher and I’ll kick your nads so far up that folks will be shaking you for weeks to get them back down.” I knew I shouldn’t have come right out and said it, not being ladylike and all, but I’d had my limit.

  Dwayne froze. He removed his hands, threw them up over his head again, fists clenched, and beamed. Touchdown. We received a pretty hearty applause; I bowed my head a little, relieved of my duty, and walked off the floor.

  I guess all the excitement was beginning to work on Jason and Florabelle, because it was then they decided to leave, the traditional way. He swept her up, dress, veil, baby and all, and they trailed towards the front steps of the hall.

  Hazel and Momma moved about, handing out little peach-colored netted bags of birdseed that Birdie had put together which we later discovered was fertilizer instead, and a lot of people complained of their eyes burning that night. The deejay played the Rolling Stones’ “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction,” and as they stumbled giddily to Jason’s truck, folks pelted them with the
seeds.

  I stood on the front porch steps and watched them spin off, stirring up dust down Highway 15. As they pulled away, I read the message on the back window. “Just married,” it said. How true, I thought, just married, and nothing else. No morals, no savings, no plans, no regards to the new responsibilities whatsoever. Just married.

  Away they went, Pabst Blue Ribbon cans and balloons tied to the bumper, soaped windows and shoe polished bumpers declaring their greenness, boasting their beginnings. From the radio antenna, a condom waved like a pennant.

  8. Passing Through

  “What the hell we got coming here?” asked Clem, pointing up the road. He had just come out of the cashier’s office with a box of quart-size oil and transmission fluid cans for me to refill the dispensers out by the pumps. He stood, squinting, arms full, as what looked like a purple U.S. Mail jeep bounced up the road and pulled into the station. It wasn’t often that out-of-towners would happen by the station; Clem did pretty well just serving the locals. But every so often, folks would get off of 402 to see Natural Bridge State Park in Powell County, that was advertised on a billboard, and they’d wind up getting lost trying to get back on the interstate.

  I was hosing down the pavement, trying to dilute some coolant that had leaked out of a Volvo wagon that had just been in for a radiator patch. A fan blade had broken off and had cut through both the radiator and the hood, and Clem had to send the guy on to a dealership in Lexington since we didn’t have the right size fan in stock. If the guy had been a local, Clem would have mentioned Jake’s junkyard, which was just about three miles up the road, but it was a whole family traveling north from Atlanta, and years of experience had taught Clem that folks from the city, who drove foreign cars, didn’t trust junkyards. And Jake, Clem knew, didn’t trust American Express cards.

  As the grape-colored vehicle pulled up to the pumps, I shut off the water hose, and walked over. “Regular?” I called out to the driver, from the front of the jeep. Through the glare off the front windshield, I could make out three people.

  I walked past the open window on the driver’s side to get to the gas tank, hesitated, glanced inside the jeep. The driver was a young guy, probably close to my age, with sandy blond hair, kind of wavy, and a suntanned face. I expect that aside from Jim Palmer, whose baseball card I had carried in my wallet for almost nine and a half years, this guy was the most handsome I’d seen. He was wearing baggy, khaki shorts, no shirt, and his brown, hair-free, muscular chest made me uncomfortable.