I got a seatmate, a church lady about my color, with a salt and pepper Betty Boop wig on that’s pushed back on her scalp a little. She’s sleeping and when we get near Wildarado she wakes up, opening her big patent leather pocketbook and looking inside.
“This yr first time on a bus?” she says to me, still looking into her pocketbook.
“No, ma’am,” I says. “I rid the bus quite a few times.”
“This is my first bus ride, old as I am,” she says. She takes out some screaming-red lipstick and runs it across her mouth.
She sneaks a glance at my belly then tries to get a look at my left hand, to see if I got a ring or not, but I’m quick. I had my hand hiding underneath my leg from the second she woke up.
“Wildarado!” the Driver yells.
The church lady sits up straight, pulls her wig down hard on her head like it’s a hat, snaps her pocketbook shut and gets off the bus without another word. Wildarado.
I got a seat to myself. I put my box onto it. It was in my lap all this time making me sweat. I fan my dress, no one sees nothing. No one’s looking.
A man comes by. Looks at my empty seat. I cough, pretending I’m sick, and he moves on down a row or two.
We stop at Gomez. Not a town at all but just a small building of whitewashed cement with small windows and nothing around it but dirt and sky and sun. The sign hanging from the building has a cross on it. Must be a church. A lady gets on, big and white, coming down the aisle sideways. She’s got a matching red flowered top and pants both made outa that stretch fabric, running tight acrosst her chest and behind. She’s carrying a paper sack and a round red suitcase held to her wrist by a red loop. Her high-heeled gold slippers got red feathery pompoms on them and the toes out. When she comes down the aisle the sleeping men wake up and look.
She eyes my seat and I cough. She coughs back, thinking she’s funny.
“These yr things, right?” Miss Big and Flashy wants to know.
“Why would they be sitting on the seat next to me if they ain’t mines?” I says.
The other people on the bus are done staring but the Driver is watching her in the rearview.
“Yr personals should be under yr seat or over yr head or in yr lap,” she goes, reciting the bus rules. Mother used to say that the only thing worse than having to share a seat with someone is when you hate your seatmate before they sit down.
“Take your seats,” the Driver says.
The Flashy Gal puts her hand on her hip and bigs her eyes at me. I big my eyes right back. She hands me her paper sack. The cans inside it cluddle together. She grabs up my dress box. “How bout you let Myrna put this up for you,” she says.
“You already half done it,” I says. My voice cuts the smile off her face but she disappears the box anyway, in the rack up top on the other side of the aisle where I can see it.
“You must have something nice in there,” she says.
“A party dress,” I says. “Me and my husband’s going to a party.”
“Myrna Carter,” she says telling me her name and sticking her hand in my face. She got a row of gold bracelets halfway up to her elbows on each arm. Rings on each finger. I shake her hand but don’t say nothing. She sits down. The bus takes off and we go down the road.
“Yr feet started swelling up yet?” she asks.
All anybody ever asked about in Lincoln was who’s the daddy and when was I getting married. “They’re a little swole,” I says.
“When I was carrying Dale Junior my feet was so big I couldn’t wear no kind of shoes,” Myrna says, “And my chest got as big as—well it got pretty big, and it was pretty big already.”
Snipes says my chest’s growd some, but my brassieres still fit.
I hold my left hand out in front of me. She’s looking at her chest but I wiggle my finger to get her attention. “I lost my wedding ring,” I says.
“Wish I could lose mines,” she says.
Billboards go by. Myrna calls out what they say as we pass.
“Stuckey’s five miles! They got world-famous pecan rolls.”
“I can read,” I says.
“It’s more fun to say it out loud, don’t you think?” she asks.
I don’t answer.
“Look! A place called the Double R Ranch where you can pick out yr own meat and and they’ll cook it up for you.”
She’s like one of them tour books except she’s talking. Mother used to do the same thing. I learned to read by her talking out billboards.
“Two miles off that road there’s the only place in the state of Texas where you will get a fair deal on a used Cadillac,” Myrna goes.
We pass more signs. She says them out loud but low under her breath. Then she nudges me hard. “Look,” she says.
There’s a billboard with a cowboy on it.
“I met my Dale at the rodeo,” she says. Her voice goes lower, more private. “It was love but not true love. You know what I’m talking bout, dontcha?”
“Me and my husband, Clifton, we got true love,” I says.
“Yr lucky,” she says, “All me and Dale got is five kids.”
“Five is luckier than none,” I says, thinking of Teddy and June.
“Five is luckier than six,” Myrna says. There’s a meaning to what she’s saying but I don’t catch it. I’m looking out the window staring hard at the land going by and trying not to look at her big face in the reflection. She’s talking to the back of my head.
“Want one?” she says. Something warm and metally touches my arm. She’s pressing a beer at me. A freshly opened can of Pabst. “It’s warm, but it tastes better warm,” she says.
“No thanks,” I says.
“If yr thinking it’ll hurt yr baby, it won’t,” she says.
I shake my head no and she drinks it herself in long slow swigs. When she’s through, half her lipstick’s left on the rim.
“You gonna tell Myrna yr name?”
“Depends on whatchu gonna use it for,” I says and she throws her head back and hoots.
“Keep yr voice down,” a man riding towards the front says.
“Keep yr shirt on, honey,” Myrna calls back. We giggle together.
“Billy Beede,” I says.
“Got a nice ring to it. BB. Like a gun. Fast.” She glances at my belly. “I didn’t mean nothing by that,” she murmurs.
“I got a husband,” I says.
“Course you do. Pretty gal like you. Course you got a husband.”
When we stop at Frankel City two little boys run down the street to meet the bus then stand there with they hands behind they backs just looking and grinning. When the bus takes off they throw rocks that ping ping against the sides and tires.
“If they break a window I’ma jump off this bus and whip them,” Myrna says. They keep throwing rocks but they don’t break nothing.
After Frankel City comes Truscott then Flagg. There ain’t nothing out there but flat reddish-brown dirt and scrubby bushes and sky. And heat. There ain’t no people. Some cows. No clouds. I wonder if my stomach’s gonna get any bigger before tomorrow. Even if it do I’ma fit my dress. By hook or crook. I’ve decided but I gotta get the baby to decide too. Don’t grow no more today, I says to it, making the words in my head then swallowing them and sending them down straight into the baby’s head. Don’t grow no more today. Hold off yr growing until after the honeymoon then you can grow all you want. The baby hears me. I can feel it hearing and listening to me, the mother, and saying yes. It’s a good baby already.
“I wonder if this land round here was ever crowded,” Myrna goes. “You know, if like, millions and millions of years ago this part of the world was a busy place. Sorta like Dallas, or New York City, you know. Bustling with Stone Age activities, Stone Age skyscrapers, cave people, you know, in they animal skins, hurrying hither and yon, shoulder to shoulder. You know there’s a place in Mexico where they got evidence of the visits of spacemen.”
“How about that,” I says. Myrna’s eyes are set wid
e apart. They’re bright blue colored and she’s got pasted-on lashes and lots of green eye shadow. The start of a sunburn on her cheeks. Lines from too much worrying around her mouth.
She finishes her beer, stands the empty out in the aisle and, easing off her slipper, brings the heel of her foot down on the can, making a little tin pancake. She puts the pancake in her department store shopping bag. Lots of other pancakes, red, white, and blue, in there.
She fiddles with the lever on her armrest, cocking her seat back once. Twice. A little boy in the seat behind her begins to cry.
“I’ll tell you about me,” she says. “It makes me feel good talking and the story’s interesting so it won’t hurt none.” Myrna Carter’s Hole is her mouth. She can talk to you or to herself. It don’t matter. Some of her talking is nice, though, and she did ask about the baby.
“I can tell you the minute to the day my Dale quit loving me,” she says. “I’d just had Daleen. Dale Junior, Dale-two, Dale-three, Dale-four, and Daleen. I’d just had her. And sure, I was big. I’d put on weight with each kid, so I was five times as big as I was when me and Dale locked eyes that first time. Dale ain’t no Charles Atlas though, I mean, he ain’t the boy who gets the sand kicked in his face, but he got a gut three times the size of mine. And there he was laughing.”
She opens a beer, offering it to me. I shake my head no. She drinks.
“How come he was laughing at you?”
“Not at me. At a joke,” she explains, swallowing her beer down fast and jiggling the near-empty in her hand. There’s a quarter-size stain of beer on her blouse. “His brother Jimmy comes over and they’re sitting around watching wrestling, you know, Saturday morning. I’m in the kitchen but I can hear what they’re saying.”
She got me listening to her now. Her big chest breathing smooth, her wide elastic three-snap belt coming unsnapped at the bottom. Her hair, the same red as the doodads on her shoes, is whipped high like cotton candy.
“Jimmy was telling a joke,” she says, continuing, “ ‘How you f— a fat girl? Roll her in flour and look for the wet spot,’ that was Jimmy’s joke. Dale didn’t have to laugh. And I’m fat and standing in the kitchen thinking, Dale, please don’t laugh. And he didn’t. Not right away. Then he like, leaned his chair back so he could see me watching him, fat in the kitchen and begging him with my eyes not to laugh and you know what he does?”
“He laughs,” I says.
“Minute to the day, anything he felt for me was over and I knew it.”
“That musta hurt,” I says.
She looks me up and down. “No one ever called you fat, I’ll bet,” she says.
“They called me other stuff.”
“I got the last laugh on Dale, though,” Myrna says. Her voice turns low. Lower than when she was talking about the cowboy billboard. Like she’s dragging her words behind her on a rope. “He thought he was gonna get me with kid number six. He knocked me up, but Myrna got the last laugh.”
She takes two fresh cans out the bag, opening both and handing one to me. She touches her can to mines. “Cheers,” she says and we drink.
“You in trouble?” she asks. Her voice is so low, so right-in-my-ear that I almost don’t hear her. “If yr in trouble, I know someone who can help.”
I turn to the window and sleep.
When I wake up we’re stopped. There’s a faded red wooden depot with a windmill water-pump in front. A small sign, plain and white with faded black letters:
Three Mexican cowboys, small and handsome in they clean just-bought duds, get on.
Myrna gives them a low whistle. She’s peeling an orange with a Case knife. The skin comes off in one long spiral. She sees me looking at it and hands it to me.
“You good with dreams?” she asks and right away she starts in with the telling. “I had me a dream once that I was sleeping and my breasts fell off in the middle of the night. Both of them.”
I fiddle the orange peel, squeezing the dimply skin, making it spray. She divides the orange, juice going everywhere, and gives me half.
“Had me another dream,” Myrna goes on, “dreamt I made a phone call. A whole slew of numbers. Longer than just long distance. Phone rings and rings. Then the party picks up. On the other end guess who it was? It was me. I’d called my own self up. I knew it was me cause I could recognize my voice. But I couldn’t understand what the f— I was saying, scuze my French, ha ha, it was like I was speaking in another language.”
“Huh,” I say.
“Got any idea what it all means?”
“Nope.”
Sometimes I dream of Mother and me driving. She’s got on her jewels and a fur coat. She asks me to read out the signs and I can’t read none of them, or she’s wearing a long evening dress, gets out the car and walks into a river. When she was living her voice was low and deep, like riding on a gravel road, but in my dreams when she talks her voice is high-pitch. I wonder if, when they pave the supermarket over, I’ll still dream of her.
“I bet you got interesting dreams,” Myrna says.
“I don’t never dream of nothing,” I says.
“Mostly I dream of my kids,” Myrna says.
I eat my orange. When Laz heard I was pregnant, he got excited, like it was his even though he knew about Snipes and me. He showed me in one of his Encyclopaedias. A baby, just starting out, looks like the section of an orange. I’m eating this orange but don’t you grow none, I says to the baby.
The bus rolls on fast. Myrna’s got a slip of paper close to her chest, hiding the words from me.
“Me and Dale, we look across our kids at each other,” she says. “We used to look at each other and there weren’t nothing in between. Now we look at each other across our kids. Five kids. And each time we had one it was like this piece of Dale got born that I didn’t even know was there.” She sags back in her chair, handing me the piece of paper she’s got.
“Doctor Parker, in Gomez,” I says, reading.
“He’s at where the bus stops. Where I got on, that’s where his clinic’s at,” she says.
“He a friend of yours?”
“He can help you if yr in trouble,” Myrna says. Her voice on the rope dragging in the dirt behind her. She tells me about how Doctor Parker is nice, how you have to spend the night, how it don’t hurt, and other things.
“My husband and me ain’t in trouble,” I says. But she upends her last beer, not listening.
She sits straight ahead in her seat, putting both hands on her armrest and cocking herself slowly back, three times, until she’s laying there almost horizontal. Her flattish belly, where her baby was once but ain’t no longer cause she got the last laugh, stretches out long when she stretches out. The boy sitting behind her starts crying again.
We get to Royalty with its big gold shimmery sign right outside my window. Myrna gathers up her things quick.
“Stay sweet, Billy Beede,” she says.
“You too,” I says.
She walks down the aisle, fluffing herself like a Miss America would, walking down a runway. She gets off the bus and, after looking around, heads toward a taxicab.
Across from the depot there’s a little piece of train trestle, rusted metal coming from nowheres and going to nowheres. The bus takes off again and the trestle disappears behind a car dealership. Mother tolt me once how when a person jumps off a bridge, on their way down, before they hit the dirt or the water or whatever, they got plenty of time to reconsider. I remember her telling me that. And I remember not believing her. Folks fall too fast.
WILLA MAE BEEDE
This song’s called “Willa Mae’s Blues.”
My man, he loves me
He bought me a diamond ring.
My man, he loves me
He bought me a diamond ring.
Well, his wife, she found out, she says my pretty ring don’t mean a thing.
My man, he loves me
He bought me a Cadillac car.
My man, he loves me
He bought
me a Cadillac car.
Well, his wife, she seen us driving, and she saying we done gone too far.
She got the paper, she my man’s ball and chain.
She got the paper, she my man’s ball and chain.
She put her big foot down, bought me a ticket on the very next train.
ALBERTA SNIPES
I got Zekiel on my tit, Daniel on my knee and child number seven bout to bust out me any minute. Ruthie, Joshua, Adam and Eve, they with they daddy over in Lubbock, gone to spend money we don’t got at the circus. Clifford wanted us all to go, he got real serious about it but I put my foot down cause here I am ready to drop this child. “You want me to drop this child in the middle of the circus?” I ast him, cause that’s what I felt like would happen if I went. I would smell them elephants and, you know, the heavy smell they got would make me drop this child and there I’d be, having number seven not in a hospital. And after Clifford promised me seven would be born in a hospital too. “Can you hold that child inside another day?” Clifford ast me and I just had to laugh. This one ain’t due till next month although you would think, looking at me, that it’s overdue. If he a he, he gonna be Moses, if she a she, she gonna be Esther. “When you gonna start your work for Doctor Wells?” I ast him. There’s a doctor in Midland who hired Clifford to make him a black doctor bag–style coffin and Clifford come home yesterday with a look of pride on his face that I only seen once before, when Ruthie was born. He worked all day and night, drawing and redrawing the pattern for the coffin and then this morning, all jumpy, talking about how it’s Thursday and all of a sudden wanting to take us all to the circus. I tell him Thursday comes every week and the circus’ll be back soon enough but Doctor Wells may drop dead tomorrow and if we don’t got his coffin ready the Wells family will have to put their Doctor in a regular box. At least go pick out the wood for it or something, I tolt him, but all he wanted to do was take us all to the circus. I wasn’t about to go. Not in this heat. We got a thermometer on the side of the house that says it’s a hundred and two. But I let them all go on. Daniel cried at first but he can go next time. Clifford piling the children in the Ford and looking like he wanna tell me something before he goes, but just kissing me on the lips and saying how he’s gonna bring me something pretty back.
Getting Mother's Body Page 6
