by Toni Graham
BELVEDERE
For I am poor and needy,
and my heart is wounded within me.
Psalms 100:22
SueAnn’s jaw pops out of its socket, and she cries out, “Oh! Ma’am, please.” The pain is concentrated and intense, as if a laser is cutting into her jawbone.
The mammography technician barely takes notice of her, other than to ask disinterestedly, “Are we compressing your breast too much?” She continues to squash SueAnn’s breast against a cold metal plate.
SueAnn pulls back from the apparatus. “It’s not that,” she mumbles. She draws a deep breath, thunks herself on the left side of her face, then cradles her chin in her two hands. “You’ll have to excuse me, ma’am. My jaw—it snapped out of joint when you pulled down on my shoulder.”
The technician says nothing, and SueAnn realizes the woman does not believe that the shoulder manipulation was the cause of the jaw slip—a “TMJ issue,” as her dentist terms the jaw problem.
“Ahh, that’s better. Back where it belongs,” SueAnn says.
“Are you ready now?” the woman says, her voice overly pleasant and artificially nurturing in the way that really means go to heck.
She says she is fine, and the technician asks her to step forward and then pulls down roughly again on SueAnn’s shoulder. This time there is a distinct pop when her jaw goes out of joint, and both she and the technician say, “Oh, no!” and SueAnn steps backward. Why in the blue Jesus does she even have to undergo this exam—she is not yet fifty, which she thought was the customary threshold for beginning the darned procedure. And there is the other thing, the thing she cannot say, and even thinking it is sinful: Who gives a fig if I get cancer, anyway? In some ways, it would be a mercy.
On one wall of the examination room hangs a large poster: Twenty Rules to Live By. Some of these consist of pay-it-forward-type good deeds, but there are also a few fun ones, like “Visit Paris,” and “Drink champagne for no reason.” But the last rule delivers an emotional blow nearly strong enough to again wrench loose her jaw: “Call your mother.” Kyle, honey, why didn’t you?
When SueAnn arrives home from the mammography center, she takes off her shoes and sits down for an iced tea and the afternoon newspaper before Gilbert comes home from work. The Hope Springs Clarion is an afternoon daily she counts on for the local scuttlebutt. But today the newspaper has instead published Tulsa news on the front page. She learns that in three weeks a time capsule will be opened in Tulsa, marking Oklahoma’s centennial. A portion of this time capsule project in 1957 included burying a ’57 Plymouth Belvedere in front of Tulsa’s county courthouse, and the car is to be publicly exhumed on June fifteenth. A picture of the pre-burial car appears above the news story. The photo is black and white, but the story reveals that the auto is actually painted gold. A gold car with fins, a ’50s American car, like something Elvis might have owned, even if he was a Cadillac man. Though she was not born until 1962, SueAnn has always felt a great nostalgia for the ’50s. Sure, she knows about HUAC and all the other stuff, but also there were malt shops and sock hops and strapless gowns with netting and crinolines, and wonderful musicals like Oklahoma! and Carousel. Poor Elvis had not yet ended up on the bathroom floor at Graceland with his pants around his ankles.
I’m going, she decides. I’m taking a vacation day from the Dollar Thrift-O and I’m driving to Tulsa to watch the gold Belvedere be dug up. Kyle would have loved this so much; they could have gone to the event together. But her son, too, rests in an underground vault. And that’s a fact, Jack.
Over dinner, Gilbert gives SueAnn the silent treatment. Her husband does not approve of her attending the Wednesday night suicide survivors group. For one thing, he prefers not to acknowledge the suicide of their son; he has made clear his belief that one should not “wallow.” For another, he thinks therapy groups are foolishness and hokum. As far as Gilbert is concerned, the fact that the therapist is from San Francisco and two of the other participants are from the East and West Coasts points directly to the airy-fairy nature of the activity. Not only that: Gilbert is miffed about her missing the Wednesday night Bible study meetings, though she still goes to church Sunday mornings and evenings. As she begins clearing the table, Gilbert finally speaks.
“You could just talk to Pastor Russ once in a while,” he says. “What’s wrong with Oklahoma people? And what’s wrong with trusting in the Lord for help?” He pours himself a cup of coffee, splashing the tablecloth. “Next thing, you’ll go Hollywood, come home wearing them big sunglasses like I seen your doctor wearing.”
SueAnn says nothing, but she thinks, saw. She attended Tulsa Community College for only one semester, but she tries to better herself, and she has come to realize she has always been smarter than Gilbert, anyway. Sometimes when she comes home from the therapy group, SueAnn goes straight to the computer and googles some of the words Dr. Jane and David and Holly have bandied about during an evening session. They use words like “paradigm” and “synchronicity,” and once Dave even said something about hegemony, which at first SueAnn had been unable to find online, as she had not known how to spell the word. They do not talk down to her or indicate that they think she is dumb; rather, they assume she is following their conversations, when in fact sometimes she is not. She usually sits next to her fellow Oklahoman, a widower named Clay who drives down from Ponca City once a week for the meetings. She senses an unspoken bond between them: they do not see “Okie” as a dirty word. SueAnn still remembers what Connie Chung said when she came to Oklahoma City after the bombing. Chung had been overheard calling Oklahoma “backward,” motivating some construction workers to spray paint the Porta-Potties at the bombing site “Connie Chung’s office.”
Gilbert glares at her, apparently waiting for her to say something.
“Pastor Russ is a good man,” she says, “and I do turn to the Lord, but there’s something about being with other people who have, you know …”
“It’s morbid!” Gilbert says, pushing himself away from the table and leaving the kitchen with his coffee. She cannot reproach Gilbert for not wanting to think of Kyle’s death; Gilbert was the one who found their fifteen-year-old son in the garage and had to cut him down.
SueAnn picks up the remote and switches on the TV in the adjacent family room—a phrase that stings, now that her only child is gone—so she can occupy her mind while she washes the dishes. She has been advised in the grief support group that anything is better than letting the mind “run the same tapes over and over again.” Dog the Bounty Hunter’s leonine head takes up the entire television screen, his bleached and mulleted pompadour blowing in the Kona breeze as he drives a criminal to the hoosegow. Dog begins to philosophize, as he often does just before he turns in bail jumpers.
“It’s just like what happened in Romeo and Joliet,” Dog says. The criminal in the car stares ahead impassively. SueAnn knows Joliet is a prison; Dr. Jane would say something about Dog’s frame of reference. Dog Chapman’s muscular arms are massive as redwood trunks and adorned with armlets and bracelets. Her husband would never wear jewelry, but she can remember when his biceps were as enormous as Dog’s. She was only twenty when she married Gilbert Smith, and with his high Choctaw cheekbones and thick black hair, at the time he was the most dazzling man she had ever seen. In those days oil-rig men were still considered particularly desirable catches, and Gilbert had been a roughneck in Houston and had also worked a couple of times on a derrick fire crew with Red Adair.
If Gilbert is balding and if his powerful arms have gone soft and his hard abdomen morphed into a beer gut, she has dimpling on her rump and her breasts have begun heading south. At least I wear an underwire, she thinks, a rarity in Hope Springs. In the Dollar Thrift-O, she daily observes women wearing polyester pants and voluminous flowered shirts, the women’s breasts drooping close to their waists because they wear cheap cotton bras with no wire.
Gilbert is hammering something in the basement, so after she finishes the dishes and turns o
ff the TV, SueAnn opens the door at the top of the stairs and calls down that she will be back a bit after nine. She hustles out of the house, not wanting to be late for the grief support meeting. I’m going to keep mum tonight, she decides, not feeling up to undergoing scrutiny. Dave will probably do most of the talking in any case; the New Yorker has an opinion about everything.
SueAnn opens the door of the Silverado and climbs into the driver’s seat and snaps a Hank Jr. CD into the player. She once expected more for her life; when she was young, no one could have convinced her that she would work in Dollar Thrift-O and drive a truck. As a girl she never dreamed of being a supermodel or a singer in Nashville, but she assumed her destiny was something a little grander than being a store clerk. Though she feels a bit disloyal for another of her yearnings, it is also true that she imagined ending up somewhere other than Oklahoma. But she never took the fantasy far enough to imagine where she would go and who or what might possibly take her to someplace like California or New York. She did, though, imagine she would have many children, not that she would have to wait ten years to carry a baby to term and that she would never again conceive. She would especially not have expected to outlive her own offspring. As she starts the truck’s engine, she pretends for a moment that she is driving a Plymouth Belvedere, a golden car with glamorous fins like a shark on wheels, her son sitting in the passenger seat, singing along with Hank Jr. in Kyle’s recently changed voice, a smooth, pure tenor.
A few months before he did it, Kyle had excused himself from the dinner table, saying he needed to do some research on the ’net for a report about the 1950s he was writing for his history class. “I don’t know why they think we should care about any of that crap,” he complained as he scuffed away from the table.
SueAnn had said, “Don’t cuss,” overlapping Gilbert as he said, “Watch your mouth, or do you think you’re too old for the strap, sport?”
Half an hour later SueAnn knocked on Kyle’s bedroom door but entered before he said come in. Her son was hunched over the computer, his head framed by the Kid Rock concert poster on the wall, wearing headphones and the black hoodie that made him look like one of the street thugs pictured on the front of his rap CDs. Her philosophy was: Don’t fight with teens about clothing or music—save your energy for the big stuff. Glancing up at her, Kyle swiftly minimized the screen on his Mac, then shut down the computer entirely. He tipped one of the headphones away from his ear with a rough gesture.
“Knock loud!” he said, his sullen face inflamed as much from acne as annoyance, the poor kid. Inexplicably, she heard a Bill Haley song emanating from his headphones, muffled but recognizable, I’m gonna rock I’m gonna rock. Kyle bared his teeth at her like a growling dog.
Vexation overtook SueAnn as suddenly as a May tornado, and she found herself lurching forward and pulling down her son’s black hood, yanking the headphones from his ears. “Don’t sass me!” she said, and when Kyle only smirked and reached to pick up the headphones, she struck him on the shoulder and blurted, “You’re a bad news bear!” She hit him a second time, harder, then left the bedroom as hastily as possible, too ashamed to apologize.
The truck runs out of gas shortly after SueAnn leaves the house, making her more than half an hour late for the grief support group. She has to wonder if Gilbert left the tank empty to sabotage her. As she walks into the church fellowship hall, SueAnn glances into a room off the hallway, a room Dave told her serves as an A.A. meeting place. She hears people laughing intemperately, followed by myriad simultaneous fits of coughing. She knows that many recovering alcoholics smoke heavily, trading away their lungs for their livers. Even in the hallway, she can smell the strong aroma of burning coffee. Another burst of loud laughter—what on earth is so funny about alcoholism?
She hurries past the recovering drinkers and into her own meeting room, where she takes the empty chair next to Clay.
“I didn’t even know Reed had a gun,” Holly says. “My god, it was an enormous shotgun—where did he manage to hide the thing?”
Dr. Jane looks over at SueAnn, but does not smile or wink at her as she usually does when SueAnn arrives. The rebuke is minimal, but SueAnn realizes she is being scolded for her tardiness.
Holly says nothing more after her rhetorical question and sits with a vacant expression on her face. After a few moments of silence in the room, Dr. Jane says, “SueAnn, has anything come up for you this week that you’d like to share with us?”
The words fly from SueAnn’s mouth; her vow of silence seems to have had no legs. “I can’t take Gilbert’s disapproval anymore,” she says. “Since we lost Kyle, Gilbert’s like a bully.”
Dave asks if she has tried to talk with her husband about his behavior.
“He would never tell me what’s bugging him, even if he knew what it was,” SueAnn says. Everyone looks at her, waiting for clarification. She continues. “If Kyle had shot himself like Holly’s fiancé did, things wouldn’t be so hard for Gil.”
Holly flinches sharply in her chair and says, “What do you mean?”
“It’s the fact that Kyle hung himself that Gilbert can’t handle,” SueAnn says. “He just don’t—he doesn’t think that’s very manly, though he’s never really said so. And there’s been talk in town that maybe Kyle was hanging himself for a sexual thrill.” SueAnn knows what she does not now reiterate: Kyle’s hanging was not an act of autoeroticism gone wrong or any other kind of accident; he left a note.
Dr. Jane spends several minutes making a few generic replies to SueAnn’s comment, but no one else says anything further. After a bit, Dave speaks. “I tried the Viagra,” he says, blushing deeply and looking at his lap. No one says anything, not even Dr. Jane, who looks down at her wristwatch, and the silence seems to go on for a long time. Then Dr. Jane says, “It’s nine o’clock—we’ll have to pick up next Wednesday.” Everyone immediately stands, the scraping of chairs on the floor the only sound in the room.
Pastor Russ is off on a rant against homosexuals, again. The minister is preaching to the choir, all right, SueAnn thinks. Every time he says the word “abomination,” there is a flurry of nodding among the congregation and a few utterances of “Praise Jesus” and “Amen.” Gilbert sits uncharacteristically still next to her in the pew, not fidgeting or scratching himself as he often does during the sermon. He is an active guy, and sitting motionless does not come naturally to him. She knows Gilbert agrees with Pastor Russ’s condemning remarks against homosexuals and that he is profoundly disturbed by the note Kyle left. “My own son, a fairy” was her husband’s initial response to Kyle’s note. She knows she is neither a good enough Christian nor a worthy enough human being to be able to forgive such disloyalty toward their child. And Gilbert most certainly does not want anyone in town to know about the note and its revelations. He tore up the sheet of paper before the 911 responders arrived.
“Leviticus 20:13!” shouts Pastor Russ, waving his arms in a manner that SueAnn cannot help but think of as stagy. He pulls a crimped handkerchief from his breast pocket and wipes at his brow. Since Kyle died, more and more frequently she senses that nothing around her is authentic, that everything might be a giant con. Pastor Russ continues: “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death! Their blood shall be upon them!”
SueAnn figured out long ago that what is accepted as fact is often just not true. “Ain’t Necessarily So” has always been her favorite song from Porgy and Bess. When Pastor Russ begins railing against the homosexuals, she sometimes fantasizes that Libby Payne, the organist and vocalist, might suddenly launch into the song, her tight red curls bobbing up and down as she pounds the keyboard, knocking the congregation off kilter. But she knows Libby would be more likely to sprout horns than do something like that, and probably no one in the chapel shares SueAnn’s secret doubts about Scripture. People call Oklahoma the Bible Belt, which SueAnn finds an accurate description. Belts can be good—they keep one�
��s pants where they belong. But belts can also be used as a garrote.
She joins the congregation in singing “I Know That My Redeemer Liveth,” her mind absenting the chapel. At the time she gave birth to Kyle, the obstetrical community, particularly in a rural town like Hope Springs, still entertained some odd ideas about infant development. She remembers being told that babies were born blind; that the smiles of a newborn were not smiles at all, but crude reflexes or even gas on the stomach; that babies could not comprehend anything adults said to them. She had always suspected these beliefs were false—heck, her old Australian cow dog could understand everything she said. And in fact Kyle proved SueAnn’s suppositions to be correct. Two seconds after he was born, he grabbed the stethoscope out of the doctor’s hand, instigating a roar of surprised laughter in the delivery room. Some blind kid, SueAnn remembers thinking. And her baby son knew the word “bottle” when he was only a few weeks old. She would say, “Are you ready for your bottle?” and he would turn his flossy head, hyper alert, an expression of undeniable awareness in his clear blue eyes, an old soul. Oh, Kyle.
Sometimes in her heart of hearts, SueAnn cannot help but have a particularly wicked thought. What if Pastor Russ is a homosexual himself. Maybe he’s like that pastor in Colorado, Ted Haggard, or even like that senator in the airport men’s room. Those guys had played people like a two-dollar banjo. She looks closely at Pastor Russ, looking for traces of effeminacy, but sees none. But Kyle was not effeminate, either. Though he said in his note that he had come to realize his sin of homosexuality, SueAnn thinks probably her son was just confused. Wasn’t fifteen too young to know whether you were homosexual or not? She wishes he had been able to talk with her about things. Call your mother. The sad reality, though, is that at the time she probably would have referred him to Pastor Russ for counseling. She closes her eyes. Jesus, please give me strength, Lord.