PD looked up at us and smiled. “I drew you a sun,” she said, holding out a piece of binder paper with a yellow smiling sun on it.
Miss Debbie sucked in a breath. “She’s so good she can even draw in the car.”
“Though that car is pretty smooth,” Bo said, putting his hands on PD’s little shoulders.
Miss Debbie sighed. “Now is not time for car talk, Bo.”
“Nor is it time for Hell talk,” I said.
“What the heck is the matter with you!” Miss Debbie pulled out a cigarette from her bra but didn’t light it. “You are killing yourself!”
Bo asked PD if she wanted to go look at the fountain in the middle of the hospital yard and PD, always one to be fascinated with the workings of water, nodded her head up and down. She waved to me as they left.
Miss Debbie watched them go, holding her smoking-arm elbow with her free hand like a fashion model. I looked over at her, and I understood that she was stuck in a place that would never support her being what she could be—some style-minded woman in a big city somewhere, with places to go. Her life would always be too small.
“Your truck is totaled,” she said. “They had to saw it open because you were too heavy to just come out the window.”
“What?”
“They cut the doors off and drug you out, Nana Dara.”
“Where’s Eddie?” I redirected.
“What? How the heck should I know?”
“Did you call her?”
“I sent a carrier pigeon,” she huffed.
My nurse—a short thing with a ponytail left over from high school some decades earlier—came in and asked if I wanted anything to eat.
“Jujyfruits,” I said, just to gouge at Miss Debbie a bit.
“Nana Dara!” she squawked.
The nurse didn’t look up. “We have catfish.”
“That’ll do,” I said, ignoring thoughts about how it must have looked with them dragging my fat body from that cut-open truck. Lord.
Miss Debbie rifled through the one cabinet in the room like the nurse wasn’t there. The nurse watched her, waiting for Miss Debbie to notice and stop, but she never did, so she turned back to me. “Catfish. OK. You get well.” She squeezed my leg through the white blanket and sheet. It felt comforting to be touched. It’d been so long.
“Can we smoke in here?” Miss Debbie asked me.
“Only if you don’t mind your face being blown off by loose hospital oxygen.”
She set her giant vinyl bag down on the guest chair by my bed. The chair looked like tweed, which made me wonder how they could possibly keep it clean in a place that specialized in bodily fluids. She pulled out a pack of menthols to hold.
“What are you going to do now?” Miss Debbie asked, as if I had just attempted to climb a hill and rolled back down.
“Save money for a new truck.”
“I imagine that’s a start.”
“I could go back to making birdhouses. I make the best birdhouses.”
She softened. “I remember.”
“I could sell them down at the market.”
“That’s a lot of birdhouses.”
“You here to cheer me up?”
Miss Debbie scratched her forehead. Her nails were bright blue with New Year’s stars painted on them. It always amazed me how she never damaged herself with those talons.
I looked around the white sanitized room, wondering how I’d let it go this far. I truly could die, and that frightened me so much I almost left a gift on my clean hospital sheets.
“I’m going to start walking to get this weight off,” I said, something inside me clicking on. “I’m going to wrap myself in plastic and start walking. I need to make some serious changes. My life will never be like this again.”
Miss Debbie let out a sigh and nodded. “Good. But start with short walks, like once around the Opry. You are big, Nana Dara, so start small. And you can’t seriously wrap yourself in plastic.”
“Extreme is needed.”
She held onto her menthol pack. “I’m so worried about you. You—you are my second mama, you know.” She smiled and cried a little, not caring that her tears were destroying her carefully laid makeup plans. “I’m just so worried.”
“You’re going to be more worried in a moment.”
Miss Debbie paused, then lit a cigarette from the pack she’d been squeezing. “How’s that?”
“Stand up near the door there,” I said.
She moved over to the door and crossed her arms, making sure the cigarette was out of the way of her vinyl bag.
“You ready?” I asked.
Her hand shook as she took a deep drag on her cigarette. “Yes.”
“I’m saying this because I want us to be family—real family. I want you to know me for who I am so maybe someday we can talk. Love is important, you know, and so when we leave it out of conversation, it leaves a hole.”
“Are you feeling dizzy?”
“Miss Debbie, I’m a non-practicing lesbian. Always have been.”
Miss Debbie wiped her eyes and yanked open the door. She hollered out the door: “Come quick, she’s having a stroke or her mind’s being overtaken! She must have hit her head—hard!”
“Miss Debbie, calm down.” I tried to sit up but was too afraid of jostling the monitors on me. “I am not having a stroke, and I am not crazy. I have always been a lesbian—though I did love your daddy.”
“I cannot hear any more of this.” She let the white door close behind her and looked toward Heaven. “God is sending me more tests than Job.” Miss Debbie glared at me and dropped her sunglasses down from her auburn hair. She stubbed her cigarette out in the plastic vomit tray sitting on the cabinet. “You need to get some sleep and get your shit together, Nana Dara. Get your shit together. Praise be his name.”
Miss Debbie tried to make a grand exit, but when she yanked the door, it wouldn’t pull open fast enough, and her vinyl bag dropped from her shoulder. She fell a little to one side, stumbling on her clunky heels. “Well, hell!” she yelled just as she got the door open and crashed into the hallway. “If you need me, I will be at church—praying. You know the way.”
Her sunglasses fell, and she kicked them out of the way, so as not to be distracted as she stomped out on her righteous path.
BEING AVAILABLE
Bo drove me home from the hospital. We hardly said two words the whole trip. I knew that he knew what I’d confessed to Miss Debbie, and I knew that he didn’t want to discuss it. I could just see Miss Debbie railing against me in that loud whisper she had, periodically covering PD’s little ears to keep her safe from the topic. The topic being me.
Out of respect to Bo, I didn’t ask him any questions. I didn’t get him in the middle. I just sat there, letting the remnants of a terrible Connie Francis song trail through my brain like a punishment.
Two days later Eddie, raced up to the Opry. She raised her hand to her forehead to cover her eyes against the bright sun and peered in the front screen door. “Nana Dara? Nana Dara!”
“I’m alive! I’m just on the couch. Come on in.”
My stepdaughter pushed open the door. I watched a moment of realization pass through her as she saw how big I’d gotten—my size no doubt highlighted by my yellow T-shirt and matching sweat pants. It must’ve looked like I was merging with my mustard-colored couch, as if it was just a puddle of me.
Eddie’s hair was a little longer now and could maybe be a bob if she didn’t keep it so far back behind her ears. It made me wonder if she did that in case there were times when she had to wear a bob to feminize herself. It’s tough living so consciously all the time.
“Come on in.”
She took a few steps in and looked around as if she expected to be attacked by a giant pan of fudge.
“Don’t worry. I’m working on my weight—I’m turning it around.” I took in a breath. “And I want to tell you something I should have told you all those years ago on the night you didn’t go to your prom.
”
“Which prom that I didn’t go to?”
“The first one.”
“All right.”
“Ah . . . well . . .”
While I stammered, Eddie sat down on the rickety chair with her legs spread and her hands locked in the middle, like she was watching football. When she looked up at me, she broke out in a big smile. “Why don’t you let me guess what you are going to tell me?”
I lit a cigarette. “Sure.”
“You’re a lover of Sappho.”
“What now?” I asked.
She clarified, “You’re a lesbian.”
I nearly dropped my cigarette. “How did you know?”
“Other than the shoes you wear? Miss Debbie.”
“That girl leaks more than a wooden bucket of termites.”
“She called and read me the act—said it was my doing, that I had ‘poisoned the waters of our family well.’”
“Lord.” I leaned back.
Eddie smiled. “She goes crazy sometimes, Nana Dara, usually after Bible study or her third gin and tonic—or both.”
“Eddie,” I said, staying on track, “all of your pain is my fault. I should have been there for you. I should have been a role model for you. It’s my fault you suffered.”
“What?”
“I had chances—like prom night—to tell you about me so you wouldn’t feel so alone.”
She sighed. “That is even crazier than your rampages about aliens.”
“Well, they are breedin’ with us—”
“Oh, here we go! Between you and Miss Debbie, I’m looking like the sanest one out there—me, a woman with a bow tie collection.”
Eddie had a new ease to her, I noticed. She even smiled without hiding her teeth and just made a joke about her ties, something we never even addressed before, much less joked about. I hoped there was someone out there thinking about her right now.
“Seriously now, I should have told you earlier. I should have said something. Instead I made you hide and be someone you weren’t, and then you did dangerous things and got pregnant and had to give up your baby—”
She looked down at her trimmed, plain fingernails. “You really taking all that on, Nana Dara?”
“Yes. Yes, I am.”
Eddie took the cigarette from my smiley-face ashtray and sat back down. “I did what I did. I didn’t love the man who got me pregnant, but he was fun—and when my friends and their boyfriends went out, I had someone to take along. Then he enlisted. I slept with him because I wanted to, not because of anything you did or anyone I wasn’t yet able to be.”
I nodded, unconvinced but trying to look the opposite.
Eddie stared down through her knees at my stained and worn carpet. Her face grew dark. “But I will tell you this—the pregnancy sealed it for me. Made it all clear what I could and could not do. I love PD, you know I do, but I hated it, Nana Dara. I hated being pregnant. I didn’t really want the body I’d been given, and there I was, with it in its highest female form. And the doctor visits. Do you know what they do to check on the baby? Oh, I could barely handle it. And I was alone.”
“Honey, I’m so sorry.”
“I finally told Miss Debbie in the second trimester. I told her because I didn’t know if I could keep on going. I didn’t know if I could do labor. I needed some reason to keep on.”
I tried to catch her eye, but she kept her head down.
“Once I told her I wanted to give her the baby, she drove me to every doctor’s appointment and bought me all my clothes and didn’t say a word when I cut all my hair off, she said I was in ‘the crazy point’ of pregnant. She’d read it in a book.”
I smiled. “If you got Miss Debbie to read, you know it’s serious.”
“She told me all about the stages and made me write down what I was eating every day. It was Miss Debbie in the room with me when I found out it was a girl. We had some wine later that night to celebrate, and I asked her if I could name the baby. At that point, I could have told her I wanted everything she owned—and her husband—and she would have given it to me.”
“You could probably still have him, I imagine.”
Eddie met my eyes. “Nana Dara, we both know I’d never want him.”
“Me neither.”
She smiled—beamed really—and took another drag off my cigarette.
I said, “Can I ask you something?”
She nodded.
“I don’t quite get how you don’t want to have a woman’s body—I mean, what does that mean?”
“It took me so many nights, many of them more than a little dark, for me to come to understand that. And by understand, I am not saying that I understand but, rather, that I just accept. It’s like what you learn in Eastern religions, like Buddhism.”
“What now?”
“Buddhism.” She smiled. “I learned about it when I was in California. It’s just like a different religion, only they don’t like to call it a religion—they call it a philosophy.”
“All right,” I said, wary.
“Buddhism teaches a lot about self-acceptance, or at least that was the focus when I was studying it, seeing that I needed a lot of self-acceptance. I learned to stop asking ‘why’ and start accepting the fact that I have these strange yearnings, which put me somewhere between the two genders, and having something is enough—you don’t always need to know why.”
I didn’t say anything, my mind playing a tug of war between how I’d been raised and how I truly felt.
She went on: “There’s a saying I repeated to myself fifty times a day, every day, for three months: ‘What you are is what you have been. What you’ll be is what you’ll do now.’ Buddha said it.”
“Buddha?”
“He’s like Jesus—actually a lot like Jesus, only not Jesus.”
I smiled. No one in Sugar Land that I know sits around talking about an alternative to Jesus.
“Nana Dara, the way I’ve come to love myself, as I am in every moment, is the way I want you to love yourself. Start by giving away all those notions that who I am is your fault. Maybe even thank yourself for who I am.”
It hit me then—the same way it hit me all those years ago in the prison when I defended the man who’d been assaulted with the broom by saying that maybe he wasn’t a homosexual: I had just apologized to Eddie for being the way she was, which means that I thought her being this way was wrong—but I didn’t, did I?
“I’m just sorry you felt so bad for so long.”
“I know.” She smiled like someone who didn’t mind waiting five hours on a lake for one measly bite. “Thank you, Nana Dara.”
I took in a breath and recollected, hitting the maximum of new information I could process in one day. I pulled us back to our original topic, letting Eddie know she had to ease off or my head would pop. “OK, so then you had PD . . .”
She nodded, telling me she got it. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Was that hard for you, given what we just talked about?”
“I came to think of it like this, Nana Dara: It’s what needed to happen, for a million reasons. A million.”
“That’s a big number.”
“Yes.” Her dark eyes dulled to a faraway place. “Yes it is.”
“Oh honey.”
“And now there’s PD.”
I said, “Yes, yes there is,” all the while wondering if she gave up California and their crazy philosophies that seem to suit her so she could be near PD.
“Well,” she said, clearly also at her limit for the day, “it’s time for me to head out.”
I pushed myself up with arms that were getting stronger every day. “You think you might want to have a visit again some time this week?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Good,” I said.
“Are you fine with Miss Debbie—with the way her mind goes?”
“I just hope it passes.”
“Most storms do,” she said.
“Even on Jupiter.”
; Eddie tucked her shirt in and headed for the door. She turned back to me. “So, you have a girlfriend?”
“What? No, no.”
She laughed. “Why not?”
“I’m an old woman!”
“So?”
“So, that’s nasty.”
She stepped outside. “That so?”
“No,” I said, taking a minute in our safe space to consider the words I’d just used. “No, it isn’t nasty. It’s just not available.”
“Well,” Eddie said, looking feisty and proud, “I’ve found that it’s more available than folks think.”
A NEW DRESS
Eddie and I visited quite a bit, with her keeping me occupied while Miss Debbie held her distance. Then, two months later, Miss Debbie started calling me up, her acting like no time had passed and nothing had changed. She called me every day at noon, telling me she was just making sure I was still breathing, asking if I needed anything.
If I needed wood for my birdhouses, she’d send over Bo, but most times she’d come over herself to help me out—and usually she’d bring my little peanut, PD.
The phone rang again at noon, right on time.
“Hello, Miss Debbie,” I said.
“You want me to come by to get you out for your errands?”
“No, I’m trying to walk.”
“You miss that truck, huh?”
“You bet I do. But the weather’s nice, so it’s not so bad. And it forces me to move around.”
“Glad you are walking because you know that weight is going to kill you.”
“How’s your gin?”
“Gin don’t kill.” She paused to yell at PD to be careful with her juice cup. “People on gin, however . . .” She recollected herself. “How’d the birdhouses do this weekend? Eddie said you emptied her trunk.”
“Sold left and right at the Saturday market. Baptists love birds, it seems.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“I’m going to start making dollhouses, too. There’s a demand for them.”
Then Miss Debbie finally breached the subject. She started in easy: “Nana Dara, you had a crazy spell in the hospital. Do you remember?”
“I do.”
Her voice hushed on the phone. “Do you take it back?”
Sugar Land Page 24