Sugar Run: A Novel

by Mesha Maren

  Out the bus window towering trees whipped by, waxy green leaves and wisps of gray moss, and over it all the bleached sky clarified into a seamless blue.

  “Chaunceloraine,” the driver called, but nothing looked familiar to Jodi and the bus was picking up speed now, passing out of the downtown, past faded beauty shops, blinking tattoo parlors, men on the corners wearing too-big T-shirts, and women in butt-hugging spandex shorts —freddie’s fried chicken . . . we buy gold . . . rooms $29.99 and up . . . checks cashed now—and there, at the back of a sun-glittered parking lot, the red tents and gilded chintz of a carnival fair.

  “Chaunceloraine,” the driver said again, and this time Jodi rose and climbed over the mustached man, who slept deeply, cheek resting on his shoulder.

  “Luggage?” the driver asked, and Jodi shook her head, stumbling down the steps and out into a face full of sunlight.

  The air was thick with the smells of fry oil, gasoline, and hot cement; the rush of tires; and bumping bass. Jodi let it all in, blinking up at a billboard that towered over the station roof, showing a row of blind-white teeth, pink cheeks, and soft, paternal eyes: a smile like mine might not be a world away. for happiness call 1-800-697-6453.

  Jodi turned quickly from the smug pink-and-white face but the image of it and those words, happiness . . . a world away, stayed with her as she walked across the hot parking lot. She’d never trusted anyone with perfect teeth but until this moment she’d never really thought it through completely. All Effie’s teeth had rotted out by the time she was thirty and it hadn’t been until years later that she was able to afford a set of ill-fitting dentures. Jodi herself had never been to a dentist until she arrived at Jaxton, where they had filled thirteen cavities and yanked out two molars. And Paula’s teeth too had been constantly hurting; for all the money she’d liked to throw around, all she had to do was open her mouth and anyone could have seen where she came from.

  The Rocklodge Motor Inn advertised air-conditioning but the nicotine-stained unit in Jodi’s room could muster only a slight lukewarm breeze. She propped open the windows, splashed cold water on her face, and added ice to her paper cup of bourbon. Unregulated, the hours already dripped like spit, and the cheap floral walls pulsed with indecision—you can do anything—no one’s watching, go out—don’t go out, you’ll fuck up—what’s your plan? Not since she was seventeen had she made any choice that sprang from her own free will entirely. At Jaxton she’d been preserved, safe from her own self. But now here it was, the weight of decision and consequence yoked about her neck again, making her lungs squeeze tight with each breath. She’d barely managed to order food at the Waffle House. The menu had overwhelmed her, and the waitress talked a string of jargon that made no sense.

  At a Salvation Army down the street from the Waffle House, she’d found a pair of scissors and clothes that fit. After an hour of stunned uncertainty she settled on jeans, a navy-blue T-shirt, and a pair of work boots. In the rust-flecked mirror back in her motel room she’d inspected her face, wrinkle lines deep from her nose down to her jaw, cheekbones sharp under pale skin. She pulled her long braid out and snipped off eighteen years of growth, then trimmed the hair that was left level with her chin.

  “What do you say?” she mouthed aloud.

  Younger, she thought, staring down at the snake of a braid, coiled there in the plastic sink. But there was no one to confirm it, no babble of a cellmate’s voice to let in or drown out.

  At Jaxton she’d had five cellies over the years and after the first she’d learned the distance necessary for survival. When a new one arrived she’d put her jail face on—a glassy, already-gone look that set the parameters straight. She’d known that all of them, every one, the cellies, the guards, the parishioners, the therapist, they’d all be gone before she would. Only a few girls, like Maritza, the little half Latina with scabbed arms and an overbite, had tried to break through. Her voice—just that morning—banged back and forth between their concrete walls. You’ll write me? she’d whined, reaching one hand toward Jodi. Yeah, yeah, Jodi’d said. No, you won’t, Maritza said. She’d refused to go to breakfast and refused her morning pills, was winding herself up tight, well on her way to a stay in the hole. You’ve got your own money now, Jodi had told her. I moved the last of my commissary funds over for you. Maritza had smashed her fist against the wall. I don’t want your money, she said. Kiss me. She leaned out from her mattress, face sweaty and red. Kiss me. You’ll never see me again. Tomorrow I’ll have somebody new in here, somebody that tries to cut me, somebody that fucks with my head.

  Frances was the only one that Jodi had ever really let in. But Frances was different because Frances hadn’t wanted anything except to bully Jodi into loving herself a little more. Forty-three years old and serving a sentence for the heroin her daughter kept stored in her basement. Sure, yeah, you’ve heard of turning a blind eye, she said. Well, I’d carved my eyes all the way out. When the cops showed up the daughter was nowhere around but the dope and the cash were right there. It ain’t like I’m stupid, I knew what she was doing but I guess I never imagined . . . Forty-three and they’re going to reform me!

  Frances had filled out the empty corners of Jodi’s days with her easy laughter and bright eyes and it was not until it had already started that Jodi had realized that they were dating. It was six years ago now that Frances was released but Jodi could still feel the way her heart had perked up and her body relaxed whenever she was in the room.

  Wind rippled the motel room curtains, carrying with it shrieks from the carnival rides and the pitch and dip of a midway barker. Jodi brought over her bourbon and stretched across the bed. The air smelled of dust, cigarettes, and lemon-oil cleaning spray and through the open window she could hear strains of the merry-go-round jingle. The music that always reminded her of first sex, Jack Ambler in the parking lot of the West Virginia State Fair, and the hot vinyl of the pickup seat and the sun setting all glass gold across the railroad tracks.

  Outside, a car pulled up and a shuffle of feet walked past. Through the half-closed curtains Jodi watched a blonde woman in a blue bathing suit cross the parking lot and ease herself into the swimming pool. Her head disappeared under the water and Jodi turned from the window, searching for the TV remote. On the mattress beside her lay the contents of her plastic sack, an unabridged version of Les Misérables and a brand-new copy of Real Property Law and Practice, both gifts from Sonya, the frizzy-haired court-appointed therapist.

  Every week Jodi had sat for an hour in that little box of an office, staring at Sonya’s bottle-thick glasses and oh-so-earnest face. Jodi told her it was all bullshit, those phrases Sonya taught her: “lack of familial models of self-control,” “imprinted patterns of retribution,” and “generational intersections of love and violence.” Sonya had just smiled patiently, though, and when Jodi told her she’d read the abridged prison-library copy of Les Mis, she’d brought her this huge full-volume hardback. Jodi hated it at first, the weight of those fifteen hundred pages killing all the pride she’d built up around conquering the shorter version, and she’d hated that smile that Sonya had gotten on her lips. Jodi could see her already, at some cocktail party with colleagues, sloshing her glass of white wine and telling them all about her brilliant hillbilly client. Sonya stank of privilege and Jodi knew without asking that her life had been just one long stretch of soft, buttered bread.

  For a while Jodi only used the unabridged Les Mis to keep her feet still while she did sit-ups. Eventually she got caught up in the huge story, though, the little corners of comedy and god arguments. And then, when Sonya found out that Jodi was going to be released, she’d remembered Jodi’s talk of Effie’s mountain land, the tangle of bank loans and heirs, and she’d given her Real Property Law and Practice. The legal language ran all together, overstuffed and thick, but there was hope in the phrases of abators and freehold estates, and anyway, the idea of Effie’s land was more than just a need for a place to call home; it was connected to a time nested inside
this time, like a grain of sand deep inside the coil of a snail shell. Even when she’d been there, on the farm with Effie alive, Jodi had been bending in her mind toward the memories of before, the time when her parents had lived there too. Maybe, she thought, she’d been like that since birth, filled up with a backward yearning.

  Miranda had her bathing suit halfway on when the phone rang. Her stomach clenched and she turned to the blinking machine with the note taped to the side: Rocklodge Motor Inn—Front Desk Dial “0.” All Other Calls Yer Expense. She moved her eyes from the phone to the wall and the brightly colored clothing strewn across the unmade bed. The phone stopped. Miranda eyed it once more and then walked toward the bathroom, the blue one-piece swimsuit bunched around her hips, her tits naked in the musty light. She took a bottle off the shelf above the toilet, palmed it open, and set three capsules on the back of her tongue. She was breaking her “no more than one a day” rule but today would just have to be an exception. She’d already moved down from the Dexedrine-Vyvanse combo to just Adderall and that felt something like a victory.

  The phone stayed silent, another small victory, and Miranda turned her attention back to her swimsuit, enjoying the feel of the material as it cupped her ass. Too tight, her mother would have said. Her body had been softer ever since the boys were born. It filled everything differently now but she liked it better that way. Her skin gave off a warm ripeness that seemed more fully hers than the taut teenage body that came before.

  She’d loved being pregnant. The things that were normally out of balance had aligned themselves during those nine months, her mood swings steadied, and her great cosmic yearnings were traded in for simple, sweet-tooth cravings. She’d cared for herself in a way that she never had before. She’d taken vitamins and planned meals and slept deeply, waking to examine her own body with a gushing eagerness, as if she were the new thing being created.

  But after Kaleb was born and grew big enough to be away from her for more than a few minutes, it had all returned: the trembling anxiety, the certainty of one day dripping into the next, and her life telescoping into a gray mist. It was only in pregnancy that things got simple again and she was nothing more than a collection of sensations. Cold now, warm later; hungry, then full; horny, sated. The pills, if she balanced them out right, did something similar but not the same.

  There were places where her skin remembered, places where, by holding and growing her sons, her body had become dearer. The softness of her stomach and thighs and breasts. But now Lee had taken the boys away. Kaleb, Donnie, and Ross were gone, so far outside of her body that weeks passed when she didn’t even see them at all.

  She grabbed a towel from the bathroom and stepped outside into the slap of sunlight. Walking the long way around to the pool, she avoided the plate-glass windows of the front office and the cleaning lady’s cart. She had told Alfredia that once she got a little cash she would pay extra for the days she owed but Alfredia did not own the place.

  As she pushed open the gate the amphetamine jangled in her veins and Miranda slowed, warming to it. The pool was clear and rippleless, shadowed momentarily by a passing cloud that intensified the blue water. She set her towel on a plastic chair and, turning, caught sight of a man on the second floor, staring down at her through the window. She noticed again the smooth line of the bathing suit where it cupped her ass but this time she saw it from the outside, through his eyes, and something in her sparked. She moved toward the pool, aware of every muscle. The water was a little too warm but it softened the dry parking-lot heat. She dove under, stretched her arms wide, and imagined herself from above, a blonde sparkling thing.

  She’d always seen herself like this. As if on camera. Under other eyes she moved more smoothly, fully in existence. She’d tried to explain it once, when her mother caught her watching her own face in the rearview mirror. Vanity, her mother had called it, but Miranda thought it was not so much vanity as a way to understand being a girl in the world.

  She stayed underwater as long as her lungs would last, then burst up and dipped again, enjoying the strength of her arms slicing and pulling. She’d been on the YWCA swim team in high school but dropped out junior year, too eager to join her future. A future that had now gone on past, it seemed. Still, swimming felt a little like a prayer, or better than a prayer, more like that universal sound the Buddhists made. Everything dropped away, the boys and Lee, the unpaid room, the Adderall. The water was continuous, expansive. Her muscles moved instinctually and when her lungs burned she glided up, took in air, then dove down again.

  She felt the man there. Even before his shadow spread across the surface of the pool, she slowed. He knelt at the edge and she surfaced. The camera angled, zooming to catch the drops of water along the tops of her tits.

  “You’re a good swimmer,” the man said.

  She would sleep with him eventually. The conclusion was entirely forgone. The interesting thing would be to see how they got from the pool to the room. What set of words would string the distance this time.

  “What are you, like captain of the swim team?”

  The man was named Daniel, a bricklayer from someplace up north of Atlanta. He’d come down with a crew, he told Miranda, to build a new shopping mall, but now the contractor said he could get Mexicans to do it for half the price and so they were out on their asses while they waited to see if the contract was binding.

  “Where are you from?” he asked.

  Miranda climbed out of the pool, squinting up at him. Midtwenties with bright eyes and a sun-worn face. Small frame and a blond beard.

  “Here and there,” she said.

  “Where’s here and there?”

  “Well.” She smiled and tied her towel around her waist. “Here, I guess, I mean.”

  “Here, like this town here?”

  “Yeah, Chaunceloraine.”

  He cocked his head.

  She glanced over at the motel. “Baby-daddy problems,” she said.

  Daniel wanted to take her to the carnival down the street but she would need another few pills and less sunlight before she’d be ready for anything quite like that.

  She traded the towel for a pink sundress that she pulled on over her still-wet suit, and they walked to the gas station for cigarettes, Seven Crown, and premixed margarita in a bag.

  It turned out that the words that brought bodies together were never quite as interesting as one might think. Daniel wanted to take her to his room but she knew her own would smell better. He mumbled something about it having been a while since he’d seen a girl as pretty as Miranda and then they were in it: the sweat-smell of his neck and the singularity of his pounding need.

  He finished quickly and as soon as he had rolled away Miranda wanted to touch herself, to stay there inside her body. There were times lately when masturbating constituted the high point of her days but she had to be by herself. The images that stirred her seemed not so much perverse as simply a little embarrassing. Alone in a room with the shades drawn and her eyes closed, she touched herself and imagined she was the voyeur. She was the not-so-attractive middle-aged man fucking a girl who looked like her own younger self.

  The margarita was too sweet but she drank it anyhow, adding a little Seven Crown every now and then. Daniel sat beside her on the bed, fully dressed, flipping channels and trying not to act like he was eager to leave. Still, it was nice to have someone in the bed with her. Her boys had stayed there that first month and now, whenever she was alone, she could never quite stop hearing their voices in the room. She bummed a cigarette and tried to find the words to ask Daniel about money. Not money for the sex per se, just like how friends can loan money without it having to mean anything. She’d never crossed that line, though, never asked for cash in hand. Maybe he could just pay for her room. She really needed cash, though, needed gas and drink money, but before the words could surface, the benzos she’d swallowed kicked in and she let herself drift.

  Lately it was always water dreams. But the water was dark and co
ld. Her boys were on the other side of the river, Kaleb in the middle, holding tight to Donnie and Ross. She swam toward them, confident in her strength, smiling, but no matter how quickly she moved, there was something rushing faster under her, a current that would reach them before she could.

  She woke to the sound of a key and pulled the sheet up to cover herself. A face appeared in the doorway. A tower of frizzy hair in that gash of sharp light. Alfredia.

  “Honey, this is it. You gotta get your shit and be out of here tomorrow. I can’t hold him off no more. He’s talking small claims court now.” She raised her eyebrows, showing thick swaths of green makeup. “And if I don’t get better at this eviction shit, I ain’t gonna have no job.”

  Miranda blinked.

  “You owe me for the six days I done covered.”

  Miranda’s mind reached out for something to say and the sheet slipped from her fist.

  “Put some clothes on and bring whatever it is you been taking up to the office, pay me with that.”

  “Alfredia,” Miranda called, unsticking her tongue from the roof of her mouth as the woman turned away. “You’ll read my tarot for me?”

  “Not again, sugar,” Alfredia said, squinting back into the room. “Your future don’t change in one day.”

  As the sun melted down toward the horizon Jodi left the motel room and followed the carnival song to the fairgrounds. When her stomach had started grumbling she’d realized that without thinking about it she’d been waiting for the chow bell. She ordered a corn dog and nibbled it as she walked down the aisles of dart and ball games, past a leering Mickey Mouse, garlands of fake roses, and mammoth teddy bears. Give it a shot here, ma’am—take a swing—whoa, didja see that? As easy as tossing a lima bean. The barkers leaned against the brightly colored girders with a greasy ease, stubs of cigarettes pressed between their lips, letting their practiced tone carry the pitch far out into the alley, crowded and sawdust thick.