Backseat Saints

by Joshilyn Jackson

  “There are a lot of things you say you don’t do, Lena,” he answered. “You don’t lie, and you don’t fuck, and you don’t take your boyfriend home to meet your family. You say you love me, but you have a hundred ways to avoid the truth without ever lying.” He pointed at the laptop on the table. “Case in point. Today you tell your aunt that you’re broke, and tomorrow you return that and get your money back. And that’s what you call telling the truth.”

  “No, it’s what I call not lying. There is a difference, you know. I am not under any obligation to tell anyone everything. I just don’t lie, which is more than ninety percent of the freakin’ world can say, and anyway, why are we having this fight? Why did you this minute decide I need to take you to my uncle’s retirement party? That’s not what I thought you were going to ask me.”

  Burr said, “Maybe it’s not what I planned to ask you, either. But Lena, I watched you work your aunt over, and I found myself wondering—not for the first time—how often you work me, to keep me out of the middle of your life.”

  “First of all, Possett, Alabama, is not the middle of my life. It is not my home. It’s the fourth rack of hell. I don’t go there myself, let alone want to take you—”

  “Look at your phone bill,” Burr said.

  “And second of all,” I went on as if he had not spoken, “I don’t see the connection between not having sex with you and taking you to Alabama.”

  “It’s what women do when they fall in love with a man,” Burr said. “They have sex with him, or they take him home to meet their family. In point of fact, Lena, most women do both.”

  “But my family is insane,” I said in what I hoped was a reasonable tone. “Why would you want to meet them?”

  “Because they’re yours,” he said matter-of-factly, one hand reaching for the doorknob. “I thought you were mine.”

  I was instantly furious. It was too good a line, a movie line. People don’t get to say smashing things and then walk out in real life. Burr could say crap like that more often than most because of his low-slung basso profundo voice. He could say hyper-dramatic lines that, if I said them, would have whole crowds rolling on the floor, shrieking with laughter and telling me to get over myself. But Burr? He could say “Luke, I am your father,” and get away with it.

  But not with me.

  “Don’t you dare try to Rhett Butler your way out the door in the middle of a fight,” I said, getting up and coming around the coffee table after him.

  He let go of the doorknob and said, “You’ve never so much as mentioned my name to your folks, but you spend half your free time at my mama’s house. You won’t be my lover, but you can’t keep your hands off me until I’m clinically insane. I’m a twenty-nine-year-old man, Lena. Not some fifteen-year-old kid who says he loves you in the hopes of seeing his first tit.”

  I said, “It isn’t that I don’t love you. But I swear before God, you don’t want to make this trip. It would be like stepping into a soap opera, except no one is beautiful or rich or interesting. If we went down there, you have to know what it would be like. I mean, come on, Burr, what do you see when you look at us?”

  Burr said, “I always saw the best couple going. The question is, what do you see?”

  “Same thing,” I said. “But that is not what they are going to see down in Possett, Alabama. They’ll look at me and see that weird Arlene Fleet who was never any better than she should be, and when they look at you, they’ll see that nigger she’s fucking.”

  Burr smiled a little and said, “But I’m not fucking you.”

  “Well, we could maybe get you a T-shirt that says you aren’t, but they wouldn’t believe it, because why else would I be with you? It can’t be that you’re smart, or handsome, or interesting, or successful, because you can’t be any of those things when you’re in Possett, Alabama. You will be much too busy being black. When you’re with my family, being black is such a big job, it takes up your entire definition. You don’t get to be anything else.

  “If I show up home, wanting to bring my black boyfriend to my uncle Bruster’s good-ol’-boy retirement party, they’re going to take that as personal. Like I got a black boyfriend specifically to use as spit for their soup.

  “And maybe then you’ll get it in your thick man head that I picked you because you’re black and that’s a button I can push. I mean, a girl doesn’t go home for ten years, you have to guess she has some issues with her family. But that’s not why at all. I picked you because you’re you, and you’re perfect for me, and because I’m so in love with you.”

  Burr said, “I love you, too, Lena. But I’m done being played.”

  I said, “What does that mean? You’re giving me an ultimatum? ‘Fuck me or lose me’? Because that sucks, Burr.”

  “Don’t misunderstand me,” he said, his voice rising. “Don’t make this about me trying to get over on you. I’ve never pressured you that way. And yeah, obviously I want to have sex with you, but that’s not what I’m saying here. I’m asking you to introduce me to your family. That’s all. I’m asking for a commitment, Lena. We’ve been together two years now.”

  “On and off,” I said.

  “Mostly on.”

  He reached for the doorknob again, and I said, “Don’t you dare walk out on me in the middle of a fight.” I was so angry, I was practically screaming. “I mean it, don’t you do it.” He paused for a second, but then he flipped the dead bolt.

  The door seemed to catch in the frame, so he gave it an angry shove. It swung open, knocking back a girl who was standing on the other side. She was so close she must have had her ear pressed up against the wood, and the force of Burr’s exit spilled her all the way backwards onto her bottom.

  “What the—” said Burr, and he stepped over the threshold towards her, already reaching down to help her up. She went scuttling backwards like a panicked crab. He stopped moving, and she bounced back to her feet, scrabbling frantically in her huge macramé purse. She was dressed like one of my students, in tight jeans and a peasant blouse, but I didn’t recognize her. Her hand came out of her purse and up, holding a tiny spray can aimed at Burr’s face.

  “I heard you yelling,” she said to me. She was breathing hard, but once on her feet, she seemed more exhilarated than frightened, taking a theatrical Charlie’s Angels pose with the spray can.

  “Whoa,” Burr said. He put his hands up. “Calm down.”

  She didn’t take her eyes off him, but she was talking to me. “You go for the soft parts,” she said. “And then we run while he’s down.”

  I realized I had put my hands up, too, instinctively. I dropped them and walked over beside Burr. “Are you all right?” I said to her. “It was an accident. We didn’t know you were there. What on earth were you doing?”

  “Lena, is this one of your students?” said Burr. He angled himself, trying to stay between me and the Mace, which was easy since she had it pointed aggressively at his face. She had her legs apart in a fighter’s stance, and both her arms were fully extended, aiming the can like a gun.

  “I don’t think she’s after me, Burr,” I said, and because I was so angry, I couldn’t help but be amused, watching this tiny girl hold him at bay. “Her problem’s with you, looks like.”

  “I was just leaving,” said Burr.

  “Bet your ass you are,” the girl said.

  “He was only trying to help you up,” I said to her, but she ignored me and kept the can trained on Burr.

  Burr dropped his hands slowly and walked past her, and she turned in a circle, keeping him covered.

  “We’re not done with this conversation,” I called after him.

  “I am,” he said and went on down the stairs.

  I started after him, but the girl turned sideways and then stepped to block me. She whipped her head back and forth, trying to keep an eye on both of us.

  “Excuse me,” I said, but she ignored me. Burr turned the corner, and the moment he was out of sight, she faced me and dropped her arms
, grinning triumphantly. “They’re almost all sonsabitches.”

  At second glance, she was too old to be one of my students. I put her at about thirty. She was my size or maybe even a little shorter. I doubted she could claim five-one in bare feet. Her thick dark hair was cut in an aggressive bob, shorter in the back and angling down into two razor-sharp points on either side of her fiercely pretty face.

  “We were only arguing,” I said. “Excuse me, I need to catch him.” I started after Burr, but she moved into my path, blocking me again. She still clutched the spray can.

  She said, “If I had a dime for every time I said those words!”

  “Put the Mace away,” I said.

  “Oh, right.” She dropped it into her bag. “What timing, huh? I heard you yelling in there, and I was about to bust this door down and come in after you.”

  She said the word “you” as if it had a W on the end. It was pure Alabama. I forgot about going after Burr and stared at her, taking in her pointy face and the huge violet-blue eyes gazing out from between the sharp wings of her hair.

  “Rose?” I said, but it simply couldn’t be. The last time I’d seen Rose Mae Lolley, she’d had waist-length hair and had moved with the slow grace of an underwater ballerina on opium. The Rose Mae I knew and loathed years ago, back in Alabama, would never go leaping around wielding Mace in a Yankee stairwell. And she certainly wouldn’t lower herself to speak to me.

  But she was nodding and saying, “Can you believe it? I look different, huh? You don’t. Not much, anyway. I mean, older, sure. But I knew in a glance I’d found Arlene Fleet. May I come in?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. I thought for one absurd moment that she had to be here on a mission from Aunt Flo, a tactical maneuver in the perpetual war to bring me home. Before I could stop myself, I found myself asking, “Who sent you? Was it Florence?”

  Rose looked puzzled and said, “Florence? Oh! Mrs. Lukey? Clarice’s mom? Lord, no, I haven’t seen her in a dog’s age. How is she doing?”

  I boggled at her. “This isn’t some sort of old-home week, Rose. I haven’t seen you in ten years. I didn’t even know if you were alive or dead, and quite frankly, I didn’t much care. And now you are standing out in my stairwell, apparently eavesdropping on me and my boyfriend? It’s none of your business how my family is. If Aunt Florence didn’t send you as some form of torture, then how the hell did you even find me? What are you doing here? What do you want from me?”

  She briefly looked nonplussed, but then she plastered a smile on her face and said, “Okay, Arlene. I guess you never were one for social graces. That’s fine. It’s kind of a long story, but if you want the short, standing-in-a-stairwell version, I can do that. I got in a fight with my therapist, and now I’m on a spiritual journey. Congratulations, you’re my next stop.”

  I looked at her skeptically. “Is this about the retirement party?”

  “No, I don’t even know what that means. Surprisingly, everything in the world isn’t all about you, Arlene. This is about me. I told you, I am trying to follow a path I’ve devised for my own spiritual development—”

  I held up my hand to stop her talking and said, “If this is some sort of twelve-step thing, making amends or whatever, fine. I forgive you. Now I need to go catch Burr.”

  “Forgive me for what?” said Rose. We did a little three-step dance in the hallway as I tried to get around her, and she bounced back and forth from foot to foot, hair swinging, to stop me. “Wait, Arlene, one minute. I’m sorry I sounded snippy. I really do need your help. I’m only doing what you’re trying to do. Going after the one that got away.”

  I stopped trying to get around her and eyed her warily. You can take the girl out of Alabama, but how do you stop Alabama from following you over a thousand miles to lay siege to your doorstep? I felt the beginnings of an old anger stirring; God was not supposed to let this happen. It was an unspoken part of the deal. I took a step back towards my open apartment door. “Whatever this is, it can’t have anything to do with me,” I said.

  “But it does, indirectly. See, my therapist said I get crappy men because I go looking for them, not because men are mostly crappy.” I took another step back, and she started talking faster, trying to make me hear her out. “She thinks I choose assholes because that’s what I think I deserve, blah blah, masochism, blah blah, low self-esteem. You know how shrinks talk.”

  “No,” I said pointedly. “I don’t.”

  Rose looked skeptical. “With your mother? Come on. Anyway, she’s wrong. I’ve been thinking through my romantic history, looking for a guy I picked who wasn’t an asshole. If I can find just one, then my shrink is wrong and it isn’t me, it’s the men. And there is one, I know it. I remember. But I need you to help me find him.”

  “Find him?” I said. While she was talking, I continued to edge backwards. Rose followed me, step for step but with a longer stride, so she was now much too close to me. I could smell fruit gum on her breath, and her eyes held the fervid light of a convert.

  “Yes. I have to find Jim Beverly,” she said.

  The last syllable had not cleared her lips before I was leaping wildly into my apartment. I slammed the door in her face and then shot the bolt and put the chain on. I couldn’t breathe. I had not heard his name spoken aloud in ten years.

  Outside, Rose Mae Lolley gave my door three sharp raps. “Arlene?” she called.

  I bolted across the room to the boom box that was sitting by the sofa. I dug around in the box of jumbled CDs next to it, looking for something, anything, loud. I came up with the Clash. I had not noticed until I tried to get the CD out of the jewel box and load it into the player how violently my hands were shaking. All of me was shaking. My teeth were banging together as if I were freezing.

  “Arlene? This is ridiculous. I need maybe five minutes of your time,” Rose Mae Lolley called, kicking my door once for emphasis. At last I got the CD tray to slide home. I pumped the volume up to about six.

  Rose gave the door a good pounding I could hear over “London Calling,” so I upped the dial to eight, neighbors be damned. Then I sat on the floor with my arms at my sides, pressing my palms down against the cool hardwood while the first song played out. I wanted to go and look through the peephole, but I was afraid I would see her giant lavender eyeball peering in at me.

  I cast about for something to distract myself. I had a stack of freshman world literature papers I needed to grade, but I wasn’t in any shape to face the grammar. I also had three books I was reading in tandem, research for my dissertation, but my heart was pounding and I doubted I could concentrate. I felt like going to bed, or maybe crawling under it and never coming back out.

  I noticed Burr had left his book behind, facedown on the arm of the sofa. The old cushion had a sinkhole in it where Burr had been. I wedged myself into his warmth and read, forcing myself to concentrate on the words, and not on whatever Alabama drama might be playing itself out in my hallway, or Aunt Florence’s demands, or the fact that my boyfriend had just walked out on me, maybe for good this time.

  It might have been easier if Burr had left a better book. He liked courtroom dramas, and he was the fastest reader I had ever seen. He ate text like pudding, no chewing, but he still managed to digest it. And these lawyer thrillers, he devoured two or three a weekend. In real life he was a tax attorney who wouldn’t touch criminal law, but he loved the books. They ran the gamut from literature to penny dreadfuls. Burr didn’t care about the quality. He ate them in bulk. If it had a lawyer protagonist, plot twists, and someone with big tits in jeopardy, he was all for it.

  This was one of the bad ones. The prologue alone had a body count of seven. The bad guy had killed five of them. Because he was bad, his reaction was to laugh gleefully and dance in the mayhem. The young DA, backed into a corner and in the wrong place at the wrong time, whacked two people. Self-defense, of course. Because he was good, his reaction was to vomit and think deep thoughts along the lines of “Oh the humanity.” Complet
e crap.

  I’ve personally committed only one murder, but the truth is, it’s not that simple. You can’t tell whether you’re the good guy or the bad guy based on whether you laugh or throw up. The truth is, I did both.

  I read for as long as I could stand it before I reached down beside me and hit the pause button on the boom box. My ears rang in the sudden silence. I did not hear anything from the hallway. I threw Burr’s book across the room. It smacked into the front door and bounced off to the floor. No reaction. Rose Mae Lolley was gone, for the moment.

  I was still shaking. I wanted to pray, but I was too angry with God to concentrate. Ten years, ten years I had been faithful, and now God was breaking the deal.

  Before I left Possett, I had promised God I would stop fucking every boy who crossed my path. (Although when actively involved in prayer I used the word “fornicating,” as if this would spare God’s delicate ears.) Now I was losing Burr over it. The truth was, I had worried that I was losing him for months, but still I had stayed faithful.

  I had promised God I would never tell another lie, and I hadn’t. Even when lying would make everything easy with Aunt Florence and my family, I had never let a word of untruth cross my lips.

  Lastly, I had promised that if He would get me out safe, I would never go back to Possett, Alabama. Not for anything. I wouldn’t even look back, lest I turn to salt.

  And now God had allowed Possett, Alabama, to show up on my doorstep.

  As far as I was concerned, all bets were off.