Betty

by Tiffany McDaniel

  “Happy now?” Mom stood in the doorway behind us.

  “I love it.” Flossie took off her shirt and put on the bra. She touched the small cream bow in between the cups, which were too big.

  “I’ll grow into ’em,” she said before I could say anything.

  Mom shook her head and went downstairs.

  “I’m gonna show Fraya.” Flossie darted across the hall into Fraya’s room.

  Fraya was sitting on her bed with her diary. I could see musical notes she had scribbled on the page. She was trying to match her voice to each.

  “Lookee, Fraya.” Flossie whirled in the room for her. “Ain’t it beautiful?”

  “You can’t walk around in a bra, Flossie,” Fraya said. “Your brothers will see you.”

  “So?” Flossie pulled at the straps, showing her first hint of discomfort.

  “Never let your brothers see you half-dressed,” Fraya said. “It’s a sin. You’ll make God scratch His own eyes out until He’s blind for all eternity.”

  “There’s no brothers around,” Flossie said.

  Fraya pointed at Lint’s feet sticking out from under her bed. I bent down to see Lint placing a rock on the floor.

  “Lint don’t count,” Flossie said, catching her image in the dresser mirror. She smiled at her reflection before leaning in to kiss it.

  From that winter into spring, the bra became Flossie’s prop. When she reenacted scenes from movies, she would take off the bra and use it to slap her imaginary male lead’s face. Once warmer weather arrived in March, she would lay on A Faraway Place and sunbathe in the bra and a pair of shorts. Every time Fraya told Flossie it was inappropriate, Flossie would roll her eyes and say, “The bra is just like a bathin’ suit top. Geesh, Fraya. You’d think you were a hundred years old.”

  Later that day, while Flossie was sunning herself, I sat on the stage, writing a story about the way Fraya had walked into the woods, carrying a small piece of paper in her hand.

  The girl went off, I wrote. No one knowing where to or why. She simply walked into the woods, disappearing behind the trees until I could no longer see her or the blue skirt of her dress.

  As I turned over on the stage to lie on my belly, my shorts were yanked down. I looked back to see my sister’s grinning face.

  “What are you doin’?” I pulled up my shorts.

  “I wanted to see if you have a tail,” Flossie said.

  “You know I don’t. Besides if I had one, you would, too. We’re sisters, Flossie.”

  “We don’t look it though.” She held the strands of her light brown hair, twirling them around. “They say your dad’s black.”

  “He’s your dad, too, stupid.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “My green eyes might be from a man who has movie star skin and a vault full of emeralds.”

  She put her shirt on before hopping off the stage. She said she was going into town to meet up with some girls at the movie house. She didn’t ask me if I wanted to go. She never did when she was with her friends.

  Once she was gone, I went inside the house to get one of the biscuits Mom had made earlier. On the kitchen counter was a pile of lemon pulp, but none of the skins. I found only an empty pitcher in the refrigerator.

  “Mom? Where’s the lemonade?” I called throughout the house.

  Only the floorboards creaking above answered me. Grabbing one of the biscuits, I walked up the stairs. I found Mom sitting ever so straight on the edge of her bed. Her feet and legs were pressed tightly together. The lemon skins missing from downstairs were fastened with safety pins over the images of the lemons printed on her baby blue dress. On her head was the same bright yellow cellophane we would use to wrap our spring baskets each year. The cellophane was over her head, neatly tied at the front of her neck like the little scarf she’d wear into town when she wanted to look particularly fine.

  I could see her face through the transparent wrapping. Her makeup was clownish. The bright red lipstick. The thick mascara. Two circles of blush on her cheeks like moons against the white face powder. All of it given a tint as if inside the cellophane there was a separate light, one that turned my mother yellow. I wasn’t taken aback by seeing her with cellophane on her head. I was used to her filling up the tub and saying she’d rather drown than live. Her unplugging a lamp and wrapping its cord around her neck saying it was the last of her. Dad told us she didn’t mean any of it. We thought he was right because she never carried through. The tub would be drained, the lamp would be plugged back in, and she would go on with whatever it was she had been doing before the incident took place.

  I ate the last of the biscuit while I watched her breath steam the inside of the cellophane.

  “I don’t know how you’re breathin’ in there,” I said, stepping closer.

  I thought she didn’t hear me, so I said it louder, but she still didn’t answer.

  “Well, Dad will be angry if I just leave ya like this,” I said.

  I untied the knot at her neck and took the cellophane off her head. The whole time, her eyes were fixed on the wall in front of her as if there was a thread between it and her.

  As I turned to leave, I heard her voice but couldn’t make out what she had said.

  “What’d you say, Mom?” I asked.

  “It was so beautiful in that yellow world.”

  I waited for her to say more, but she sat there as still as anyone I’d ever seen.

  Out in the hall, I held the cellophane to my eyes. Everything was colored yellow from the wood floor to Trustin’s charcoal drawings Dad had hung on the wall. The longer I stared through the color, I found these things dropping away until I stood in a field of tall yellow grass, gently bending from a breeze. It was as though it was a sweet and tender dream my mother had passed to me.

  “It’s so beautiful in this yellow world,” I said just before Mom’s scream pierced my ears.

  I ran back into her room. I saw the blood first. Then I saw her on the floor, a sharp kitchen knife off to her side.

  “Mom, what’d you do?”

  Her wrists were cut. She trembled, curling herself into a ball. For all the ways she wanted away from life, she was absolutely terrified of what that meant. What was death to a woman like her? Maybe at that moment, so close to it, she worried death would be her over and over again. Her coiling up into herself until she could taste her own breasts and choke on her own thighs.

  I slipped on the blood, falling forward into a puddle of it. I dropped the cellophane and grabbed her arms. Her hands seemed flimsy, like a ragdoll’s. I held her wrists against my chest. I could feel her warm blood soaking through my shirt as her eyes rolled back and her head fell off to the side.

  “What happened to the yellow?” she asked.

  I picked up the cellophane and laid it over her eyes so her world could be beautiful again.

  “I’ll be back,” I said as I got up. I thought she should know I wasn’t simply running away.

  Earlier, Dad had taken Trustin and Lint to the river to fish. I ran through brush in the woods, trampling twigs and pinecones. All I could think about was the color of my mother’s blood. It reminded me of the beets she’d sent me out that morning to pick. She had given me a large yellow bowl and told me to fill it up with the first of the spring crop. Before I got to the garden, she yelled for me to come back.

  “But I ain’t got the beets yet,” I told her.

  “Come back,” she said again.

  I returned, showing her the empty bowl, to which she slapped me across the face.

  “I told you to fill it up,” she said.

  “I was tryin’, Mom. You called me back.”

  With a flick of her hand, she sent me on my way again. Once more, she called for me.

  “Come back, Betty.”

  By the time I turned around, she was gone
. I filled the bowl with beets until they spilled over the edges.

  “Come back.” I darted through the woods.

  When I got to the river, I smelled smoke. I followed it upstream, where I found Dad. He was throwing fish meat into the flames of a small fire.

  “We offer part of the fish to the fire,” he was telling my brothers, who were faced in my direction and staring at me. “The fire will calm the anger of the dead animal’s spirit. If you do not calm the spirit, it will seek revenge and take a new shape from the spilled blood.”

  “Like her?” Trustin pointed at me.

  Dad turned and jumped at the sight of me.

  “Where you hurt at, Betty?” He felt his hands up and down my arms, frantically searching for the wound.

  “Not my blood,” I said, pointing back. “Mom’s.”

  Dad pushed past me as he yelled for us to throw dirt on the fire. We quickly scooped up handfuls, extinguishing the flames.

  “Hurry up,” I told my brothers. “We have to help Dad save our family.”

  The three of us ran as fast as we could.

  “W-w-wait for me,” Lint said. Trustin fell back to grab Lint’s hand and yank him faster. I left both of them behind to try to catch up to Dad.

  “Alka? I’m comin’.” He continued to holler her name through the woods as if she could hear him.

  Once we made it to the house, he took the steps on the staircase three at a time.

  He found Mom unconscious on the floor of their bedroom. Dad slid in the blood and fell on his front side, crawling the rest of the way to her. My brothers stopped just behind me. Lint started shaking and crying, so Trustin pulled him back out into the hallway.

  “It’s okay, Lint,” I could hear Trustin saying. “Why don’t you show me what new rocks you have in your pockets?”

  I watched Dad lay his hands over Mom’s cuts. The blood oozed out between his fingers.

  “Stop squeezin’ her skin like that, Dad,” I told him. “You’re squeezin’ more blood out.”

  That was what I thought. That his hands were squeezing her like she was a sponge.

  “Call Doc Lad, Betty,” he said.

  Instead of going to the phone, I dragged Mom’s stool across the floor to the back right corner of the room, where a large spiderweb stretched.

  “What you doin’, Betty?” Dad asked. “Call Doc.”

  “I’m gettin’ the spider’s web. Remember?” I climbed the stool and reached toward the corner, but I was several feet away from it. “You said you can use webbing to stop a wound from bleedin’.”

  “Dammit, Betty. Call Doc Lad. Now.” He yanked the bedsheet off and wrapped it around Mom’s wrists.

  I jumped off the stool and darted past my brothers in the hall. I could hear Lint whimpering as I ran downstairs. I grabbed the pad of paper off the table by the phone. I searched through the names and numbers written in my mother’s cursive. When I found Doc Lad’s name, I put my finger in the rotary dial, counting the excruciating seconds for the dial to spin all the way around.

  “My mom’s cut herself,” I said as soon as Doc Lad said hello. “There’s red everywhere. Dad’s got the sheet off the bed around her wrists, so she’s gonna be awful angry when she’s able again. Angry at him for ruinin’ the good bedsheet.”

  “That Landon Carpenter’s voice I hear in the background?” Doc Lad asked.

  “Yeah, that’s my dad,” I said. “He’s yellin’ that you best bring somethin’ to save her ’cause he don’t think he can.”

  “This all happenin’ on Shady Lane?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  While waiting for Doc Lad, Dad told me and my brothers to go outside.

  “You shouldn’t be seein’ this,” he said.

  Lint didn’t stop running until he was out of the house and in the yard, where he moved his hands against the grass blades. Trustin spent the entire time drawing swirls with his finger on his arms as if he was making symbols with which to ward off evil spirits, or at the very least, keep the moment from settling into his soul.

  I ran out into the drive, where I waved with both arms even though Doc Lad was not yet in sight. It wasn’t long before I did see the front of a car. I jumped and waved bigger. He was driving so fast, rocks spit out from the back tires as he took the turn into our drive.

  “She’s upstairs, she’s upstairs.” I continued shouting as Doc Lad got out of the car with his black bag. He ran toward the house. I ran in step with him. “She’s upstairs, she’s upstairs,” I kept saying.

  I stopped at the foot of the porch steps as if it was a threshold I could not cross, while Doc Lad disappeared into the house.

  “Be careful, there’s a knife m-m-monster in there,” Lint said after him.

  My brothers closed in on either side of me as the three of us stared at the house, waiting.

  “I wonder what they’re doin’ up there?” I asked at the very moment we heard footsteps booming down the stairs.

  The screen door flew open and Dad came out of the house, carrying Mom. Doc Lad got ahead of them in order to open the rear door on his car. I stared at Mom as they passed. Her eyes were closed and her legs swung lifelessly.

  “Where you goin’?” Trustin asked them.

  At first, it appeared they were all leaving. Doc Lad got in the driver’s seat while Dad carefully laid Mom on the backseat. But after Dad closed the door, he backed from the car.

  “Doc Lad didn’t give us no s-s-suckers,” Lint said. “He always g-g-gives us suckers. Is he mad at us because of the b-b-blood?”

  Trustin wrapped his arm around Lint as we watched Doc Lad drive away with our mother.

  Once the car was out of sight, Dad turned to face the three of us. All we could do was stare at Mom’s blood on him.

  “Is she dead?” Trustin asked.

  “No.” Dad quickly stepped over to us, pulling us each into him. “She’s not dead. All you have to remember about this day is that your mom was picklin’ beets. The juice got all over her wrists. That’s what the red is, kiddos. Just beet juice. She’s gonna be fine.”

  Later that evening, me and my brothers would talk about the way our father’s voice had cracked on the word “fine.”

  Dad didn’t go to bed that night. He started cleaning the house instead. Husbands always do that. They think as long as the house is clean and the work done, their wives will be happy as if all the joy of life centers on a washed floor. In the days following, Dad finished several furniture pieces that had been works-in-progress and arranged them in the house until the rooms looked like a country sampler. He built a small dressing table for Mom all while he told us we were not to excite our mother when she returned. If the dishes were dirty, we were to wash them. If there was mud on the floor, we were to mop it up straightaway. We were to be silent children who stayed out of our mother’s hair, as if that would be enough.

  “When’s Mommy c-c-comin’ back?” Lint asked.

  Dad never had an answer so he relied on saying, “Soon, son. Soon.”

  While Mom was away, Fraya dropped out of school. Dad was so disappointed, he painted the top step of the front porch black.

  “Because a step has died here,” he told Fraya.

  “Steps don’t die, Dad,” she said.

  “It died, Fraya, because you stopped walkin’ up it to a better life.”

  “They’re just porch steps, Dad. They get us in and out of the house is all.”

  “You know when folks have called me stupid,” he said, “don’t you know I’ve felt it? All because I’m a full-grown man with a third-grade education. It’s a bitter place at the bottom of the steps, Fraya, and I should know. I’ve spent my whole life down here, only able to stare up to the top. You know what’s there at the top?”

  “What’s there?” Fraya asked.
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  “It’s a good look at the world,” he said. “You’re able to see all of it. From there, you get to decide which part of this great big world God made just for you. But by droppin’ out of school, Fraya, you’ll never climb to a better life at the top of the stairs. You were gonna be the first person in our family to be able to say you were educated. You didn’t have to leave school. This isn’t what your mom would want for you. You can still go back. I can paint the step white again. Resurrect it. Steps don’t have to die forever.”

  “It’s important I take on more responsibilities here around the house,” Fraya said. “Mom is in need of help, don’t you think, Dad?” She looked over at the black step. “I reckon that step ain’t never been alive for me in the first place anyhow.”

  Fraya fell effortlessly into the role laid vacant in Mom’s absence. She wore Mom’s aprons and would pass through the house with a cloth in her hand as if she was a newly minted soldier in the war against dust. Dad did most of the cooking, but there was something about Fraya in the kitchen that made it seem as though she had done all the work. The way she ladled the hot soup in our bowls. The way she delivered the bread, warm from the oven, to the table. Through it all, she tended to Lint as if she had more mothering instinct inside her than she would ever need.

  “I think you don’t want Mom to come back at all,” Flossie said to Fraya one day as the three of us stood in the kitchen. “I think you just wanna be everyone’s mother.”

  Fraya took off Mom’s apron and picked up the knife Mom had used to slice her wrists. She stepped outside through the screen door. I started to follow her but Flossie grabbed my arm.

  “Are you crazy?” Flossie said. “She’s gonna kill us with that knife. Our blood is probably gonna be her sacrifice to some god in exchange for a golden apron.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” I replied. “It’s Fraya. She ain’t gonna hurt us.”

  I ran out the door to catch up to her. Flossie hesitated, but soon joined. When we got to A Faraway Place, Fraya was already sitting cross-legged on the stage.

  “What took you two so long?” she asked.

  “Flossie thinks you’re gonna stab us,” I told Fraya as I sat beside her.