Suzanne
On the first and third Friday mornings of every month, Suzanne Ledbetter and her daughter drive over to the credit union to deposit Jon’s paycheck along with her cash and checks from selling Avon and Tupperware. To avoid the crowds of men who work at the plant across the highway and come on their lunch breaks, they arrive a few minutes before nine. While Lauralee waits in the car or stands in the parking lot twirling her baton, Suzanne fills out deposit slips for checking, savings, retirement, vacation, Lauralee’s college and wedding, and one account that she records in her notebook as charity. It is an account she has had since she worked full-time selling life insurance and nobody, not even Jon, knows about it. It is her safety net. If things go south in a hurry, she will have options.
When Suzanne hands the slips and checks and cash to the teller, the woman marvels aloud, as she does every two weeks, at Suzanne’s neat handwriting and tidy piles. I believe you are the most organized woman I have ever seen, the woman says, and Suzanne replies, Well, aren’t you sweet, Mrs. Ordóñez, and she digs through her purse for a business card and a perfume sample. Because she prefers to sell products that make women feel pretty, she does not mention the new food storage system she has in the trunk of her car. Instead, she tucks a catalog under the woman’s windshield wiper on her way out.
It is late June and the sun is murderous. Suzanne’s heels sink into the black tar and gravel as she walks back to the car where Lauralee waits with the windows up and the engine running, her hair hanging in thin strands around her face. She has her mother’s red hair, just as Suzanne has her mother’s.
How much did we earn this week? Lauralee asks after Suzanne has slammed the door and pulled a tissue from her purse to dab her forehead and armpits.
Forty-five dollars. We’ll have to step up our game at this afternoon’s practice.
You can do it, Lauralee says. Her baton rolls off the seat and she leans over to pick it up, groaning as the seat belt cuts into her belly, kicking her mother’s seat as she stretches her arms toward the baton. You’re the best saleslady in Odessa.
That’s because nothing feels as good as earning your own money, Suzanne says. Her deliveries are in small white bags on the passenger seat, and she keeps the vents pointed directly at them. She pulls a small spiral notebook from her purse and makes a record of her account balances. She is five dollars short of her biweekly goal. Two weeks ago, she was short by ten. Suzanne pats her armpits one last time with the tissue and then puts on her sunglasses and freshens her lipstick. Time to channel Arlene, she thinks, setting aside her notebook and taking up the legal pad where she has written her to-do list: Take Lauralee to piano lessons, drop off casserole for Mary Rose, pick up Lauralee, hang needlepoint art in L’s bedroom, deliver gift bags to the ladies at the practice field, call Dr. Bauman, go to Credit union. Check.
They are running late, so she shifts the car into first gear and pulls out of the parking lot with her tires squealing and the transmission humming tightly. They are going nearly sixty miles an hour when they drive through the green light at Dixie and South Petroleum Street, but they catch the train anyway. Suzanne pulls to a quick stop and taps one fingernail against the steering wheel while they watch the Burlington Northern cars rattle past. When the train slows to a crawl and then stops completely, she chews her cuticle for a moment, then shifts into reverse and takes a different route. Never depend on a man to take care of you, Lauralee, she says. Not even one as good as your daddy.
I won’t. Her daughter is buckled up tight, a stack of piano books on the seat next to her. Her tap and ballet shoes are in the trunk, along with her swim bag and a large plastic tub filled with Tupperware.
I got lucky because your daddy is the best man in Odessa, Suzanne says, but many don’t. You are going to get everything you want in life—she tries to catch her daughter’s eye in the rearview mirror—but you can’t take your eye off the ball, not even for a minute. People who take their eye off the ball get hit in the face.
Suzanne is a firm believer in sunlight and bleach, and not hiding behind little white lies. The sooner Lauralee has a complete picture of their situation, the better, so she tells her: Trash, that’s what people say when they talk about my family. Trash when they were tenant farmers in England, and crofters in Scotland, trash when they were sharecroppers, first in Kentucky, then in Alabama, and trash here in Texas, where the men became horse thieves and bison hunters, Klansmen and vigilantes, and the women became liars and confederates. And that, she says, is why there are only three of us at Thanksgiving dinner every year. That’s why nobody will be coming to town for the Bicentennial celebration. I wouldn’t have those people at my table if somebody held a gun to my head—which they might.
When her daughter is a little older, Suzanne will tell her that less than a hundred years ago, they were still living in dugouts, hiding out from debt collectors and Texas Rangers, waiting for the Comanche to come and fill them with arrows. Suzanne’s people were too stupid, or isolated, to know that the Red River War had been over for five years, and what was left of the Comanche people, mostly women and children and old men, were confined to Fort Sill. Until the day he died, Suzanne’s great-great granddaddy carried a tobacco pouch made from the scrotum of a Mescalero Apache he murdered on the Llano Estacado. Suzanne’s cousin, Alton Lee, still keeps it in an old cedar chest covered with cigarette burns and bumper stickers of the Stars and Bars.
I don’t feel like going to piano, Lauralee says. It’s boring.
Suzanne grits her teeth and chews the inside of her cheek. Little girl, you think you’ve got it bad? When I was your age, I saw a boy get eaten by an alligator. All they found of him was his little Dallas Cowboys T-shirt, and one sneaker.
Why did he get eaten? Lauralee has heard this story a dozen times and she knows what question to ask next.
Well, he wasn’t paying attention to where he was going. When people don’t look where they’re going, alligators get them. Anyhow, the boy’s mother—her name was Mrs. Goodrow and her family had been in East Texas since they were run out of Louisiana—she hung in there. She had eight other kids and no time to dwell on it, but his daddy wasn’t ever the same. Or at least that’s what your grandma Arlene told all of us kids. Your grandma could sell a glass of iced water to a polar bear. She could talk the sweet out of a sugar cube. And she was pretty as a field of bluebonnets, too. Five years running, she was the Harrison County rodeo queen.
I wish she was here, Lauralee says.
As do we all, honey. Stop hunching your shoulders like that, she calls as Lauralee walks away from the car, you’ll get a dowager’s hump. Piano lessons. Check.
Arlene and Larry Compton used to drag Suzanne and her brothers all over West Texas, chasing the boom. Stanton, Andrews, Ozona, Big Lake—they were always trying to save for a rainy day, but when the price of oil fell or Arlene had bounced enough checks to get the sheriff’s attention, the family would rush to pack the car. Suzanne and her brothers sat elbow to elbow in the back seat while her parents smoked and fussed and blamed each other. If they hurried, her daddy said, they might be able to watch the sun rise over the swamp. Her mother said, Goddamn it, Suzie. If you don’t stop kicking the back of my seat, I am going to wear you out.
Back in East Texas, they’d find some little tarpaper shack at the edge of the swamp, someplace with a landlord who didn’t recognize their name—Compton, as in the Compton boys are back in town, so don’t let your cats out of the house, lock your doors and hide the silver, tell your daughters to watch out—or if the landlord did know the name, he didn’t care. Nobody else wanted to live out there.
Her mama was as unpredictable as the stray dogs that sometimes slipped into the yard when Suzanne left the gate open. When Daddy sent her outside to close it, she walked into the darkened yard, swearing she’d remember to close the gate next time, hoping the things she saw moving in the night were only moon shadows cast against the bare dirt. Some mornings before he left the house to look for wo
rk, when the brothers were still sleeping or they hadn’t come home the night before, Suzanne’s daddy would give her a dime. Make yourself scarce, he’d tell her. Your mama needs to rest.
On those days, she walked into whatever town they were living near and spent her dime, and when the sun was threatening to go down, or she was hungry again, Suzanne went home and stood on the front porch with her hand on the doorknob and one ear pressed against the door, the wood splintered and rough against her cheek, tarpaper flapping gently on the wall next to the front door, while she tried to get a feel for what might be waiting on the other side.
* * *
If Dr. Bauman can be believed, Suzanne is unlikely to ever carry another pregnancy to term. Her womb is chock-full of fibroid tumors, he says, and the miscarriages are hard on her body, hard on her spirit, hard on her family. They might as well go in and take everything out. Call it a day, he says, if you aren’t going to be using them anyway—them being Suzanne’s ovaries. She will hardly notice the difference, he says, except she won’t have her monthly cycle anymore. And won’t that be a treat.
When Suzanne knocks on Mary Rose’s door, she is holding a King Ranch casserole in the hand she doesn’t chew on. She admires the new baby, remarking on his size and weight and length, and Mary Rose hands him over without hesitation. When Suzanne mentions her conversation with the doctor, Mary Rose says, I’m sorry to hear that, but she is looking past Suzanne, her eyes scanning the front yard and the street. They haven’t spoken since Corrine Shepard practically accused Suzanne of being a bigot—a crazy notion that she got, or so Suzanne has heard, from D. A. Pierce.
Oh, please, she tells Mary Rose, I’m fine. There are people starving in Cambodia. Her gaze takes in Mary Rose’s thin frame, the shadows beneath her eyes. You look like you’re starving, too.
Mary Rose stares at the casserole dish she has found herself holding, and the baby, who is gripped like a bag of groceries in the crook of her other arm. All right, she says flatly, thank you.
I taped a little Tupperware catalog to the bottom of the dish.
Mary Rose runs a finger along the bottom of the glassware. Oh, I see.
I gave one to my friend who works at the credit union, too. Suzanne looks at a jagged cuticle and quickly tucks it behind her back. Do you know Mrs. Ordóñez?
We use Cattleman’s Bank, Mary Rose says.
Well, she is just the sweetest lady. Suzanne glances at her watch. If you throw together a little green salad, y’all will have yourselves a complete meal.
Casserole, Check.
Suzanne has the best of intentions, but she can’t stop wondering aloud how some people get to be so stupid. In the midst of any calamity, she almost always says the wrong thing. A year earlier, when a tornado wiped out a trailer park in West Odessa, killing three people and injuring a dozen more, she wondered aloud why anyone would choose to live in such cheaply made structures. The ones that survived, she told Rita Nunally, ought to be prosecuted for putting their families’ lives at risk. But those homemade casseroles that mean somebody won’t have to fix supper that night? Those, she can do. When the recipe calls for a can of cream of mushroom soup, she sautés fresh button mushrooms and stirs in a can of milk with a tablespoon of flour. And while her casseroles aren’t exactly quiche lorraine, every one of them is a complete meal—meat, vegetable, and a pasta or grain.
Her chocolate-chip cookies are made with real butter, not margarine, and she never skimps on the brown sugar. Everything fresh, nothing canned. That’s her motto. No pinto beans and corn bread for Lauralee, she likes to tell her neighbors, no babies before she’s finished college. Her daughter will never eat stewed dandelion greens, alligator, rattlesnake, or collards. She will never eat catfish or carp or anything else with a mud vein that has to be removed, and there will always be a dessert course after supper, however simple it might be. Every night before dinner, she lights two small candles and sets them in the middle of the dining room table, then stands back to take in the scene. They’re pretty, she tells Jon and Lauralee. They make every night feel special, even Wednesday. And in this light no one can see the bright red knot where a pimple is trying to sprout on her chin, the chipped tooth from a fall she took when she was fifteen, the cuticles she can’t stop chewing.
When I was a little girl, she tells Lauralee, I would have given my eyeteeth to live in a house with carpet, and a bathtub that’s big enough to lie down in, and a piano that my mother had bought by licking and posting four hundred and fifty-six thousand S & H green stamps. Your daddy and I are the first in our families to own a home in five generations, but someday, your house will be even better. You’re going to graduate from college and buy one that is even bigger than this, with a second story and plenty of windows, so you can look out and watch the whole wide world passing by.
They have returned from piano lessons, Check, and Suzanne is hanging a needlepoint above Lauralee’s white wicker headboard. It is the only completed project from Suzanne’s brief foray into crafting the previous spring after a miscarriage, this one so early she isn’t certain if it was another pregnancy that didn’t take or just a particularly painful and heavy period. She has set the needlepoint in a brass frame, and thin green vines and white roses form a loose chain around the words Tidy house, Tidy life, Tidy heart. Clenching a leftover nail between her canines, she stands on Lauralee’s twin bed, lightly tapping the frame, first at one corner, then at another, then at the first again, until it hangs perfectly straight. She steps back to the center of the bed and examines her artwork, then leans forward and pushes gently on the upper right corner. Perfect.
Lauralee sits on the carpet with her legs crossed and her shoulders hunched, listening to Gordon Lightfoot on her little pink record player. Since his album came out a few weeks ago, that damned record has been spinning 24/7, Lauralee moving herself to tears every time she hears the song about the ship that went down in Lake Superior.
See how this little needlepoint is hanging just perfectly, Suzanne says and reaches to touch her daughter’s fine hair. Honey, why don’t you turn that off for a little while? It’s maudlin.
Maybe she and Jon can drive to Dallas to get a second opinion from a specialist. Maybe they can adopt, or the next time one of her brothers or cousins calls and asks if Suzanne and Jon can take care of their children for a little while, just until they sort themselves out, maybe Suzanne will say yes, but only if they’re willing to leave them for good. If she decides to have the procedure done, she isn’t going to tell anybody until it’s over and done with. She will check herself into the hospital, have the surgery and be back in her own kitchen before Lauralee gets home, before the plant whistle blows and Jon comes home from the plant.
Suzanne heads to the kitchen table for her legal pad and the gift bags she brought in from the car earlier that day. When she looks out the kitchen window and spies D. A. Pierce riding her bicycle in circles in front of her house, she drops everything and rushes outside, calling, You there, Debra Ann Pierce, you come here. I want to talk to you. The child lets out a high-pitched squeak and takes off pedaling down the street, sturdy legs moving like two piston pumps. She swerves madly to dodge a truck that has run the stop sign at the corner, and keeps right on pedaling.
* * *
To avoid being run over by a young man with his eye on the ball, they walk along the edge of the practice field. When Lauralee dawdles, Suzanne reminds her to pay attention. You stop paying attention and next thing you know, somebody’s come and towed the family car away, or you come from church one day and find all the furniture sitting on the lawn, sinking into the swamp.
She carries a plastic food container in one hand and six Avon bags in the other. Three more gift bags are hidden in the heavy purse that hangs from one shoulder. It’s hot as the devil’s armpit out there, but Suzanne’s red hair is tucked neatly behind her ears. Her bright orange pedal pushers are freshly ironed, and her blouse is white as a magnolia blossom. Even out here on a hot and dusty football field, she
wants her neighbors to say, Suzanne Ledbetter looks like she just stepped off an airplane.
Lauralee walks a few feet behind her mother with her head down and the baton cradled in the crook of her elbow. She has legs like a jackrabbit and her face is covered with so many freckles it looks like a red pen exploded on it, and although Suzanne curled the girl’s hair again before they left the house this afternoon, it has already fallen. In the center of her forehead, a single, valiant curl hangs on for dear life. Stand up straight, Suzanne says, and Lauralee throws her head back, high-stepping her way across the field and clutching her baton like it’s Judith’s sword.
On the football field, the team is doing its first set of burpees. When they get to fifty, Coach Allen tells them to do it again. Sweat rolls down the boys’ foreheads, and the edges of their pads and jerseys are dark with water. One boy falls to the ground and lies there. When somebody squirts cold water in his face, the spectators laugh. Shit, back when they played ball, Coach threw a bucket of ice water in their faces. They once watched a boy get heat stroke out there, and he didn’t go to the locker room. He played through it.
Valentine Page 14