Betty

by Tiffany McDaniel

  She began to read my poem aloud.

  Fuchsia.

  Magenta.

  Rosy pink.

  These are the colors she is allowed to be.

  One day she will be ripped apart.

  These are the secrets we share.

  From mothers to daughters,

  from sister to sister.

  A high-flying eagle is not a sign of God.

  It is why our mothers and sisters cry.

  Later, maybe we will be happy.

  But today we put out flowers for who we once were.

  We are the girls who have just now realized

  we’ve been praying wrong this entire time

  you’ve been inside us.

  After her gentle delivery of the last line, Mom laid the poem on her dresser and opened her jar of lotion. She rubbed it on her bare elbows.

  “My mother used to have figurines,” Mom said as she lifted her chin as high as it would go as she added another layer of lotion to her neck and collarbone. “All of the female figurines you could take apart because they were boxes or bowls. They all held somethin’. In their skirts, in their bodies, they all held somethin’. None of the male figurines held anything. They were solid. You couldn’t put anything in and you couldn’t take anything out. I suppose if you think about it long enough, you’ll see why this is like real life.”

  She placed the lid back onto the jar of lotion.

  “There was one figurine in particular,” she continued. “It was a woman lyin’ on her back. Her stomach caved-in so she could hold anything for you. She was a bowl made of milk glass. So white and so pretty, I thought I’d die starin’ at her.”

  I watched my mother as she slowly removed her earrings and placed them tenderly on the dresser top. She stared out the back windows and watched Dad plant the honeysuckle in the yard.

  “My momma would pick our honeysuckle blooms,” she said. “She put them in the bowl shaped like a woman. Some houses have peppermint candies in a dish or butter mints, but Momma always put honeysuckle blooms out like they were candy. In a way they were. We ain’t ever had honeysuckle at the house here, so you don’t know how to eat ’em, Betty.”

  She turned to me and used her hands to illustrate as she spoke.

  “First you pick a bloom,” she said. “You’ll see a little string hangin’ there where it used to be attached to the bush. We called it the honey string. You pull this string.” She gently pulled her hands through the air. “At the end is a tiny drop of nectar. I’d sit by the bowl of honeysuckle blooms after my momma picked ’em and I’d pull those honey strings out and lick the nectar.” Mom’s soft laugh became a sigh as she turned back toward the window. “Momma took all those little yella honey strings I pulled out and she tied ’em up in a necklace. She called me her sweet little girl and giggled as I spun for her, the necklace spinnin’ with me.”

  Mom dropped her hands to the Cherokee corn beads of the necklace Dad had made for her. She stared at the carving of the apple half.

  “After what Pappy did to me, Momma never called me her sweet little girl again. And she never picked any more flowers for me to eat. The woman bowl was always empty after that. I hated that emptiness so I threw her against the wall. Momma didn’t say nothin’ about what I’d done. She just told me to go to Pappy, who was waitin’ for me in the bed.”

  Mom laid her cheek on her shoulder. I thought she would speak no more, but she parted her lips to say, “Sometimes I think the universe is just a glow. The glow of a cigarette in the dark. All the stars, the planets, the galaxies, the infinite edges. It’s all in the small glowin’ tip of a cigarette in the hand of a man leanin’ back against a wall, watchin’ a girl walk by on her way home, knowin’ she’ll never get there.”

  26

  Her young ones also suck up blood: and where the slain are, there is she.

  —JOB 39:30

  The morning seemed immortal in its calm mist. At last the rain had stopped. The sun hadn’t been seen in Breathed since the week before, when we had buried Grandpappy Lark. That seemed a distant memory as I did my best to dodge rain puddles on my way to Papa Juniper’s Market. Inside the store, I grabbed a basket and started filling it with items from Mom’s list. After I’d finished, I went to the magazines.

  Picking up one with a smiling woman on the cover, I flipped through its pages.

  “Hey, buffalo hunter.” Ruthis’ voice came from behind me.

  I didn’t have to turn around to see she was with her friends. I could smell their perfumes mixing.

  Ruthis jerked the magazine out of my hands to see the cover.

  “Now isn’t this sad,” she said to the other girls, who giggled. “Betty thinks a magazine will tell her how to be pretty. Don’t waste your money.” She shoved the magazine against my chest. “There’s nothin’ that can help you. You’ll always be ugly.”

  “Ruthis?” Her mother’s high-pitched voice rang out. She was standing at the end of the aisle.

  Ruthis answered her mother on command. The other girls fell in line behind her.

  “I told you.” Her mother scolded her as they left the aisle. “I don’t want you hangin’ ’round that Carpenter girl. She’ll make your face break out.”

  I tore a page out of the magazine and quickly folded it down inside my pocket. Before I left the store, I remembered to add a can of tuna to my basket for the cat at the house. She’d started hanging around our back porch. She was fluffy with a gray body and white beard that matched her four white paws. I first saw her sitting in a tree in the backyard. She looked like a bird, so I named her Birdie. She arrived pregnant. Dad said she would have her kittens any day. I had blankets on my bedroom floor for when the time came.

  In a hurry to get home to her, I quickly paid for the items in the basket.

  At the house, I set the bag of groceries on the kitchen counter. Mom was at the sink washing squash to be boiled. A pot of boiling water was already on the stove. The large sunflower leaves Mom had lined the inside of the pot with hung out over the rim. After she washed the squash, she cut them into large chunks she then dropped into the boiling water. She folded the sunflower leaves over the top of the water like a lid for the squash to steam beneath.

  Working around Mom, I opened the can of tuna and carried it upstairs to my room, where Birdie was asleep on my bed. She woke up to eat once I petted her. Remembering the magazine page, I took it out of my pocket. It was an advertisement of a blue-eyed woman selling grape juice. I cut the woman’s eyes out.

  Careful not to crease them, I crawled in under my bed. There on the floor was my magazine girl. I had been creating her over the past several weeks by choosing specific facial features from women in advertisements. I took the red lips from the model in the cigarette ad and the chin from the young mother endorsing her favorite brand of breakfast syrup. I decided I wanted the dark blonde eyebrows of the woman who was the face for corn dogs, while I selected the dainty nose and cheeks of the model selling the “world’s best ice cream.” I had pieced these facial features together with the creamy porcelain skin of the woman who was selling tomato soup.

  “Hello,” I said to the girl as I lay on my belly.

  I created the girl beneath my bed because I didn’t want Flossie to see her and laugh at me.

  “Oh, silly Betty,” I knew she would say. “You can’t pray your way to pretty. Not a girl like you.”

  I ran my fingers down the magazine girl’s long flowing blonde hair, which I’d cut from the model in the ad for boxed cake mix.

  “I got your eyes today,” I said to the girl. “Now, you’ll be able to see.”

  I used tape to stick the blue eyes to the floor. The girl was now complete. I turned over and laid with the back of my head on top of her face, as if she was rising into me and I was falling back into her. I felt the floo
r until my fingers met the cool glass of a jar. Sliding it toward me, I rested it on my belly. There were air holes in the lid.

  “So you can breathe,” I told the praying mantis inside the jar. She tapped her hands against the glass.

  Dad would say a praying mantis was the first prayer of the first human ever to live. Because the insect was prayer itself, there was power there.

  With both my hands on the glass, I begged this power to make me as beautiful as I believed I wasn’t.

  “Make me look like the girl,” I said. “Give me her blue eyes. Her blonde hair. Her peaches-and-cream skin.”

  I prayed with the mantis until I felt it was enough. With the jar, I slid out from under the bed and went to see myself in the mirror with the hope I would have turned into the magazine girl. I found I still looked like me.

  “It didn’t work,” I told the mantis, who seemed to say, Of course not, Betty.

  Sighing, I stared at my reflection. My skin had been darkened by the summer sun to a rich color not unlike our garden after a rain. I always thought it was a beautiful color, the garden after a rain. And yet, I wanted to be the bright-eyed child, too pale to live on barren land. At least that’s what everyone but Dad seemed to be telling me I should want. To seek another face, one that would be pallid in the moonlight. But as I stared longer at my reflection, I asked myself what was so terribly wrong with the way I looked. After all, my ancestors had bundled magic on a thousand walks through Christ and millennias, denying the faintest suggestion that they were not beautiful enough. The black of my hair had been part of ancient ceremonies. My eyes were steeped in tradition, buoyed by the divinity of nature. Dad always said we came from great warriors. Did I not have this greatness in me? The power of a woman so ancient, but still young in her time. I imagined her as she was then. Her spirit fierce. Her bravery undeniable. How could I not be as powerful? Why could I not consider myself beautiful when I thought of her as the most beautiful one of all?

  I left the mirror, cradling the jar against my chest.

  “I’ll set you free now,” I told the mantis as I twisted the lid off the jar. She seemed happy to be released as she walked out my open window and hopped onto the roof.

  I lay beside Birdie and ran her whiskers between my fingers.

  “If you pull a cat’s whiskers out, she’ll either talk or go blind,” Dad would say.

  “I wonder what you would talk about,” I asked her as I ran my fingers through her fur until I fell asleep.

  It was still light outside when I woke. Birdie was no longer on my bed, nor was she in my room. I went out into the hall, following the sound of Dad’s rocking chair into his and Mom’s room. I found Mom in the chair barefoot and sitting on her left leg, using her right to rock her. She was still wearing her apron. She had pinned a yellow squash blossom to the apron’s strap like a badge.

  “It’s ruined,” she said, gesturing to the bed where Birdie lay. She had given birth on top of the quilt and was cleaning her kittens as they fed.

  “Oh, look how cute you are,” I said to the kittens.

  “Have to wash the quilt before the stain sets,” Mom said as she stood.

  She walked to the bed, sliding her hands up the quilt to Birdie, who was purring.

  “What are you doing?” I asked Mom as she lifted Birdie up. The kittens had no choice but to separate from their mother’s nipples. “Where are you taking her?” I watched Mom carry Birdie across the room.

  “Time to spread your wings, little Birdie.” She tossed her out an open window.

  If you would have asked me if there is a halt to the world after a woman throws a cat out of a window, I would have said of course there is a halt. At the very least, there should be a second in which to stop everything, but that second did not exist and I could stop nothing.

  “Birdie?” I ran to the window. The first thing I saw was our wheelbarrow. There was also a pile of rocks on the ground for borders in the garden. What at first looked to be another gray rock, was Birdie’s body. She was lying on her side. Blood streamed out of her ears and into the white fur on her chest.

  It was either on the metal lip of the wheelbarrow or on the edge of one of the rocks that Birdie had hit her head, her skull cracking on impact in a force that jerked her neck back far enough to snap her spine. Her legs were still weak from having given birth. She hadn’t been able to get her feet turned around in time. Flossie would have said it was the curse that had lined all those circumstances up so perfectly.

  Out of all the windows, it was that one, I imagined her saying. And out of all the days for the wheelbarrow to be there, it was that day. Of course it’s the curse.

  I almost said it myself before Mom pushed me out of the way so she could see out the window, too. When her eyes settled on Birdie’s body, she slowly closed the window, the blowing ends of the cotton curtains abruptly going still. She wrung her hands and turned back to the kittens.

  “I hate you.” I pounded my fists on her stomach. “You killed Birdie.”

  Mom smacked me away and started walking around the room as though she was suddenly lost and unsure of her surroundings. With a confused look on her face, she paced the bedside, before turning to the kittens.

  “Momma is gonna be so angry I got blood on the sheets,” she said. “A girl who’s got a mess in her bed is a girl who’s got a mess in her head.” There was a bounce in her voice as she stripped the pillows of their cases in quick, jerky movements. “Get rid of the mess. Clean your bed. That’s what Momma always said.”

  She smiled. It was like seeing the ads I had collected come to life. Her blonde hair glistening in the sunlight. Her pale skin, almost too colorless to exist.

  “Shhh.” She slowly laid her finger against her lips as she looked toward the doorway. “Pappy will be home soon. He’ll be wantin’ what he always wants.”

  She dropped the pillowcases and bent over the crying kittens on the bed. She started raking in the edges of the quilt until they were up around the kittens. She lifted the quilt like it was a bag that the crying kittens were inside of.

  I shouted for Dad even though I knew he was in town on a job building new shelves at the library.

  “Don’t call Pappy in. Jesus Crimson.” Mom looked terrified, as if she truly did expect Grandpappy Lark to appear in the doorway with all ten of his claws. “Don’t you know what he’ll do?”

  She knocked me to the floor. The kittens’ cries rang louder in my ears.

  “Let them go, Mom.” I got up and tried to peel her hands off the quilt. “They can’t breathe.”

  She grabbed my hand and pinned it between hers and the quilt.

  “Do you want to know what it was like?” she asked.

  She started to spin us in a circle, the bag swinging out from our joined hands. I screamed, but she only spun us faster. When she finally stopped, the room was a blur. She tightened her grip on my hand until I had no choice. What she did, I did. Together, but against my will, we lifted the bag up behind us.

  “Mom, stop. Please don’t. No, no, no—”

  She forced me to pitch the bag forward with her, our arms moving as one through the air, slamming the kittens against the floor. I winced at the sound their bodies made.

  “Dad, help me.” I wished he could hear me.

  Only one kitten was faintly crying. The others had gone silent. Mom kept hold of my hand, but I tried to get enough weight on my side to pull it out from under hers.

  “You’re killin’ ’em, Mom. Please stop.”

  “Please stop,” she repeated. “That’s exactly what I said. And do you know what Pappy did? I’ll tell you what he did. He kept hurtin’ me.”

  Despite fighting back, I was powerless to stop her from making me slam the kittens into the floor with her again. The tiny cry that had survived from the first impact was now snuffed. We both stared at the blood seeping t
hrough the fabric. Because Mom’s hand had started to sweat, I was able to pull free. I tried to get the kittens, but Mom grabbed me by the hair and threw me down to the floor.

  “You’re a monster,” I said.

  “Monster? That’s what I had called him.” She swung the bag into the floor, over and over again. “I screamed and cried and called him a monster, a demon, the devil himself. But he didn’t quit. He just kept hurtin’ me and hurtin’ me and hurtin’ me.”

  The bodies of the kittens were so pulverized, it started to sound like she was slamming a bag of water against the floor. I held my hands over my ears. Only when she was out of breath did she drop the quilt.

  She swayed from side to side as if she was about to fall over as she said, “That’s what it felt like. Havin’ Pappy on me. I was as innocent as newborn kittens trapped in a bag.”

  “They were just kittens,” I said. “How could you hurt them like that?” I struggled to speak through my sobs. “They were just babies.”

  She roughly grabbed my face.

  “Don’t you dare cry over them,” she said, “when I had no one to cry over me.”

  She walked out of the room. I crawled across the floor to the quilt. When I pulled its edges back, all I saw was blood. I had to keep wiping the tears out of my eyes so I would be able to see the slightest movement from one of the kittens’ tiny feet or tails. I still had hope they would be okay.

  “That blood is settin’ in so we best hurry.” Mom had returned with a broom and metal dustpan.

  She shoved the dustpan toward me.

  “Put it under ’em so I can sweep ’em up on it,” she said.

  “No.” I pushed the pan back.

  She laid her hand in the blood, then slapped it across my cheek.

  “If you don’t do what I say,” she said, “I’ll put the rest of that blood on your hands. When your daddy comes home, he’ll know exactly what you’ve done.”