My mind then played a strange trick on me—the kind that happens when you look at something and you say to yourself, “No, I don’t know that.” And then when you look away, another part of your mind says, “Oh, but yes.” I looked back at what I did not think I knew.
In the corner near the hall, at a big table with a lot of men sitting around him, was Sam. He was leaning back in his chair, his neck as though it had no strength in it, his head seemingly loose. His eyes were half-closed. He was drunker than the men I’d gotten away from in the back hall. That Sam was not anyone I knew.
I looked at Gill. He was looking around the room. Looking for me. Ella was playing the piano. People were beginning to move around, now that all the acts were over.
“Come on, sweet pea.” Gill came up to me and took me by the elbow. “You and me need to head on home.”
It took us a good ten minutes just to walk to the door, because even though I could tell Gill was just putting on a fake good mood, he was stopping to collect pre-midnight kisses from anybody worth kissing. I kept glancing back at Sam. He had his arm against the shoulder of some man and it looked as if they were arguing. By midnight he probably wouldn’t even know me. By then I’d probably even be wishing I wasn’t there.
We drove home in silence—me and Gill. The Land Rover’s heater didn’t help much with the night air. It was cold. The fields were so dark that we couldn’t see the ground as we rode past. When we pulled up in front of my grandparents’ house, Gill opened the jeep door and walked me to the front steps. My grandparents had given me a key and I put it in the lock. I turned sideways to face Gill and I said, in almost a whisper: “You’re going back for him, aren’t you?”
Gill smiled at me. “Of course.”
21.
The Joys of Stretch
That whole winter and early spring was like looking in the mirror in the funhouse at the state fair. All the lines of what was familiar were stretched and pulled, twisted into what I barely recognized and didn’t want to. I lay on the Man-from-Shiloh’s bed one Saturday morning and watched B.J. and Ron load all their things from my parents’ house into a truck. B.J. came to say goodbye to me.
I stood on the front porch steps until she and Ron got in the truck. Then I went inside and didn’t watch them as they drove off. She could wave until her arms fell off. She could look back to where I’d been standing and see only air.
Sometimes I spent the afternoon with Sam, but it was as if he was somewhere other than beside me. Each day he started with a tablespoon of salty, red-hot pepper sauce. It not only helped him wake up, it was the only way he could taste anything. He would drink gallons of coffee, sometimes with me sitting beside him chattering on about school and anything I could think of. He frequently called out, “Come in,” when no one was at the door. He talked to the refrigerator as if it were someone alive expecting terrific manners. He seemed really lonely. I knew he had to be. I was. Sometimes he clutched at his chest as though in pain. And no matter how Gill tried to hide liquor from him, he always had some from somewhere. He bought morning-glory seeds at the Mercantile and ground them up and drank them, hulls and all, with a glass of wine. They caused him to see pictures, and he would leave us while sitting in his bedroom just as certainly as if he had joined the foreign legion. In his mind, I guess he had.
When he shaved he took pills so his hands would stop shaking. Gill begged him to stop drinking. Sam said he would as soon as he could stop smoking.
It was the strangest thing in the world, how I could be so lonely I felt that I might die. And nobody knew it. Or at least if they ever did they wouldn’t know why or how much. And if I told them why it’d seem crazy and small, compared to all the awful things that could happen in the world. I probably couldn’t put a name on my loneliness anyway. I couldn’t make it sound alive or real or as big as it was.
On Valentine’s Day a light snow fell but melted before supper. Sometimes sheets of ice kept people off the sidewalks. By the beginning of March, the whole town smelled of old, scorched wool and damp socks.
I called up a tried-and-true method for at least getting the blood to move. I shoplifted a switchblade right in front of Mr. Weiss’s eyes. And if he saw me, he looked away, either impressed by my gall or embarrassed to do anything because of the sorry state of my family and who I was. Later I learned, with relief, that he had driven to Little Rock for glasses, so I guess he just couldn’t see me or else didn’t believe his eyes. Because it was a big beautiful black-handled switchblade like some people had cut each other with a few years before in an argument at the pool hall. On the sign outside the pool hall, the Weisses had painted, “The Lucky Lion.” But because of the bad fight that had been there, and others that still happened near there, its nickname was “The Bloody Bucket.”
I took my knife and after school I stood behind the garage, with Toulouse in his cage on the ground beside me, and practiced knife-throwing into the side of the dried-out hen house. Just for the heck of it, I drew a picture of a boy with an apple on his head. I aimed for the apple but didn’t flinch when I hit him between the eyes. Toulouse happily urged me on. Between the two of us we called that penciled, apple-wearing bugger every name in the universe.
Pictures of what I had thought would be—Sam and me married, living together, having fun every damn minute of the day, he and me as the family I so much wanted and now still couldn’t have—flew by in my head like moths beating at whatever light I had accidentally left on in my mind. Because most of everything I had once known and counted on I pushed into a rotten darkness and refused to look at. I didn’t want to remember B.J. whispering, touching my chin, calling me Flea. I didn’t want to think about Sam reaching over and stirring sugar into my afternoon coffee in a café he owned, smiling and telling me a joke.
One night Miss Pankhurst—her married name really never caught on—came to my grandparents’ house, nervous and crying. It was raining hard, one of those rains that if we had lived farther north would have been a spring blizzard. She shook her raincoat outside the sun porch and slipped off her galoshes. Miss Pankhurst was the only person I knew who would never forget rubber boots even in the middle of a personal crisis.
“I’ve never been so miserable!” She blew her nose. “He’s left me.” She set her boots in front of the heater.
I was told to go into my room and read.
“Foster? Why?” My grandfather made Miss Pankhurst a cup of hot tea heavily laced with the Inside Medicine.
The sun porch began to smell like rubber boots burning.
“What’d he do to you?” My grandmother wiped off Miss Pankhurst’s galoshes and set them farther away from the heater’s vent.
I listened from the hall and moved Toulouse’s cage outside the bathroom door.
“He’s just downright miserable with me.” Miss Pankhurst broke down and after a minute blew her nose into my grandfather’s handkerchief.
My grandmother gently prodded her and then she finally leaned over and pinched Miss Pankhurst’s chin in her hand and forced her to look up. “All right, Colleen, just what is it? Cut out this sobbing and tell us.”
Miss Pankhurst sucked in her breath. “He think’s I’m too rich for him.” Her voice quivered. “We all know I married beneath me—but I don’t care! It doesn’t mean a hill of beans to me that I’m married to a bus driver!” She sobbed again, then breathed and went on. “Daddy’s dead. So who else alive should care—except me! But it’s driving him crazy. All he can think about is that he’s living in my house, and he’s eating my food, taking baths in my tubs, and he’s sleeping in my bed.” She threw up her hands. “Oh, I know I tell him all the time that it’s not true. He gets a little check for helping out in the library, and of course he drives the bus route to Memphis. But frankly, Emily, just between you and me, he doesn’t make enough to count.” She put her face in her hands and cried. “Oh, what am I going to do? I can’t help myself. I love him.”
“Damn the male ego!” My grandmother slapped the a
rm of the chair Miss Pankhurst was sitting in and pshawed very loudly.
My grandfather cleared his throat. “Nobody likes to feel he’s being kept.”
“But what am I going to do?” Miss Pankhurst raised her head and looked at both my grandparents. Crying had made her cheeks swell, and her hair was wet from the rain and her permanent wave was loose and wild. She wiped her mouth. “I know it’s silly and stupid. I’m forty-nine years old; I didn’t think I’d ever get married. I sound like somebody in a soap opera. But I didn’t think anything like this could happen to me! I didn’t think I’d let it—something as messy as this, I mean. But I can’t stop it. It’s just as true as they say in those stupid movies!” She made her voice unreal and grating: “I don’t think I can live without him.” Then her voice grew steady and she firmly said: “I’m not sure I want to go on living without him.”
She put her head down and silently cried a moment, then laughed and reached for my grandmother’s hand. “Oh, Emily, love makes us all act so common. I can forgive everybody everything now. I’m just as base as any woman who walked down the street and thought about nothing else.”
While the rain beat against the windows and the rubber boots baked and Toulouse and I hid at the end of the hall, Miss Pankhurst squeezed my grandmother’s hands and cried.
I lay on the Man-from-Shiloh’s bed, looking up at the ceiling, listening to the sounds of nothing outside—cicadas and crickets, frogs and peepers asleep with winter. I thought about marriages and people and men and women getting along. Nothing about it seemed simple. Even being unmarried but intended, like me and Sam, wasn’t easy. It could get out-of-whack and in trouble—like now. Living was, after all, mostly a lonely business.
That next week Foster Collins moved into my parents’ old house. My grandfather gave it to him at half the usual rent. Foster said that while he was living there, he was going to think up something to do with his life. Something big. He checked out a lot of books on business at the library.
The late March sun was warm, and daffodils moved around in the breeze, nodding their two-toned yellow heads like bowing Chinese, reminding me of my own too-polite self. On Saturday, since the dancing school had closed down after B.J. moved, I was at my usual black, angry wits’ end. I polished my switchblade, took Toulouse out of his cage, stroked his head and neck—which he loved—and with Toulouse’s feet curving over a towel I threw over my shoulder to protect my skin from his sharp toes, I headed for the Mill Pond.
I sugar-footed it across a plank in the shallow part behind Miss Pankhurst’s sad, almost empty house and walked into the woods on one side of the pasture. “Strange, strange,” Toulouse squawked, looking up at the trees that must have jogged some primeval memory of where he or his ancestors had once been. He clung to my shoulder like something stapled. “Lordy!” he screamed when I threw my switchblade into a tree trunk. Then “Ah,” when I wiggled it loose and stepped back to throw again.
I looked up and walked to the edge of the open field to look for the cow I’d had that misunderstanding with so many months ago, or the snake I was armed against now. I didn’t see either, but I saw Joel Weiss standing on the railroad track looking across the field at me. He must have been messing around at the Bloody Bucket and was walking the track home, which was a shortcut to Main Street since it paralleled the highway. He slid down the track’s bank and walked toward me.
When he got close, Toulouse screamed out: “Up yours!”
Joel busted out laughing and inspected Toulouse, who’d never been out of my grandmother’s bathroom for long. Not many people even knew about him.
“That’s the greatest bird I’ve ever seen.” Joel reached to pat Toulouse’s head. Toulouse spit out insults while lowering his head and neck to be scratched. Joel couldn’t stop laughing.
“Ah,” Toulouse kept saying. Then louder: “Lordy!” It was his signal that he missed the switchblade, I thought. But Joel had taken one out of his pocket and was holding it, which Toulouse had seen before I did.
“Wanna play Stretch?” Joel pressed the button on the knife handle that sent the blade out with a little pop that made Toulouse’s feathers shake.
We stood face to face and, since I was a girl and his guest in a sense, I threw first. My knife blade stuck up and trembled in the black mud like a shocked cat’s tail. Joel moved his foot to where the blade was, and I took my knife out of the mud. Then he threw his knife and I stretched my foot to where it landed. Pretty soon, he’d stretched me out until I couldn’t stand up anymore.
We played over and over, hours it seemed. Toulouse held on like someone struggling on a reeling bus. He flapped his wings for balance and cussed the whole time. I loved the way the knife blade would thunk into the mud and then go softly “fuuut” when I pulled it out to throw again.
And then, strangely, it seemed that kissing got on both our minds. I say this because I saw a crazy, dewy look in Joel’s eye; and he kept staring at my lips. I know it was on my mind. It seemed like something I was supposed to do because I hadn’t done it yet, unless you counted those creeps at the Silver Moon. But Joel had probably kissed a lot, if the way he strutted was any sign of his previous experience.
On our seventh game of Stretch, we lined up, face to face, closer than usual. And as I leaned forward, trying to watch my knife blade as though carefully aiming it, Joel grabbed both my shoulders, accidentally knocked Toulouse off, and kissed me quickly and squarely, like the soft smack of a midget boxing glove.
“Mercy!” Toulouse screamed, his tail feathers trailing in the mud of our game. Then he yelled, “Shit.” He looked like a drunk majorette; he was lifting his feet so high to keep his toes out of the mud. He flapped his wings a lot.
“Here,” Joel said, grabbing Toulouse and holding him while I wiped Toulouse’s feet with the towel. All the while Toulouse kept cussing, which thankfully broke the ice after Joel’s and my kiss. I had heard that conversation after sex was the hardest part. And after our kiss it sure seemed true, except that Toulouse saved us.
The tin roof of the Bloody Bucket glinted in the sun on the other side of the railroad track, and Toulouse seemed to be attracted by it. Then he simply flapped himself out and became exhausted and settled down on the towel of my shoulder like a warm lump.
Joel offered to walk me home, but I said I had some errands to run, which was an outright lie. I wanted to hang around Sam’s house. I watched Joel walk toward Main Street, and then I walked back to the shallow end of the Mill Pond, tiptoed over the plank, and walked behind Miss Pankhurst’s house toward Sam’s.
What was pushing me to snoop around to see if Sam was home was a gnawing feeling left over from the kiss. Maybe he’d seen me. Maybe he would think I’d gotten interested in boys my own age. He might think I’d deserted him, had given up, and would not wait. I felt, deep down, that if I could just find out what it was about me that had made him change and leave me, I could fix it.
Toulouse and I passed by Miss Pankhurst’s back porch and her azalea bed, which was unkempt but blooming. Purple flowers hung in place or else lay strewn on the ground like old cherry tomatoes. The dogwoods were in bloom, and their white petals lit up the whole neighborhood and the pasture where the cows grazed, making the field look like a white-dappled quilt.
I knew that Miss Pankhurst was at the library. She and Foster still saw each other, and one night I heard her come to the door of my parents’ house and beg Foster to let her do his laundry. But Foster wouldn’t give her anything to wash. He said he wouldn’t live with her until he could settle himself into some business that could support a wife.
The garage door at Sam’s house was open and the Land Rover was parked in the drive. There was some luggage and stuff in the side yard. I saw Gill coming out of the house, carrying things.
“You going somewhere?” I asked, my voice low and sudden. I stood at the end of the drive near an azalea bush.
I had startled him. Gill stopped to look at me. “Hey.” He smiled. By then I was standing c
lose to him, helping him load things into the backseat of the Land Rover. He laughed and talked to Toulouse and me.
“So where you going?” I asked again, since he hadn’t answered the first time.
He closed the car door. “A little drive on down through Texas. Sam’s got some business there.”
I knew what he meant. He was taking Sam to Lissaro’s. I knew he’d tried to get Sam well without taking him before now.
“Come on in,” Gill said. “We’re having lunch before we leave. There’s enough for you.”
Toulouse dozed on my shoulder and made sounds like an old person sucking his teeth.
I followed Gill into the kitchen and helped him ladle soup into bowls and set the table. I heard boots clumping in the hall, and then Sam’s voice: “I told you I don’t want any lunch. Let’s just go.” I recognized his voice in spite of the fact that it had grown hoarse, as though he kept a constant cold. His breathing could be heard all the way into the kitchen. He seemed to always be short of breath, especially when he was mad.
Sam stood in the doorway, and his mouth slid shakily into a half-grin. “Well, girl. I didn’t know you were here. How’re you?” he said, his voice low, hoarse and whispery.
Toulouse screamed and hopped on my shoulder. Sam sat down at the table beside me.
Gill washed his hands at the sink, then glanced back at Toulouse. “I sure wish I had a bird like that,” he said.
I looked at Sam, saying nothing, only smiling a little. He looked so unhappy that I wanted to reach out and touch him. His face was wide and puffy, as if he were obese, and his eyes looked at me with the vacant stare of a mounted deer-head. His skin was broken out in patches of red, and because I’d heard my grandfather talk about the conditions he’d had to treat on old Mr. Best, I knew it meant that Sam was starving. He was drinking his calories and letting his skin thin out in places like tissue paper. Nothing about him looked lovable. The lines in his face were dug like trenches around his mouth; his hair seemed more gray and dry. His hands trembled a little. He moved them off the table and hid them in his lap. I just simply had not been good enough. It was all my fault.
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