Between, Georgia

by Joshilyn Jackson

  “Why do you say that?” I asked. His hands were back on me, and I was bending with him, into him, my eyes drifting closed.

  Jonno lifted me, sliding into me from behind.

  “Because you always do,” he said. He seemed to have a thousand hands, and he smelled so familiar. The little red Crabtree who lived in my blood had woken and was running wild under everything the Fretts had tried to raise me to be. Jonno had infinite appeal to that muffled beastie. I braced my arms against the bathroom counter and said, “Stop talking.”

  He stopped talking, and it was good, for a while. He had always been good at this part, the seduction, knowing exactly what my body wanted. But once we were well into it, I found my eyes opening again. When I looked into the mirror, his eyes were open, looking at us, too, and against the background of my pale blue shower curtain, the angle of our bodies seemed staged. He saw me watching and moved one big hand up from my hip to my face, tilting my head back until the line of my neck was a curve that echoed the curve of my hip. Our reflection was a moving photograph, perfectly composed.

  We worked our way through our lexicon of positions, moving from the bathroom to the bedroom floor to the bed. He was getting the job done—he always got the job done—but I knew that if someone walked in on us at any point, he would look beautiful. He moved with me in a way that was externally lovely, almost poised. It was the kind of sex you want to film; my orgasm was inevitable, and his arrived precisely ten seconds after mine while he made a Hollywood-approved facial expression.

  He rolled off me and sprawled on his back, completely at ease, while I lay beside him wondering what the hell was wrong with me. Last night I’d fallen off the wagon after almost two months of Jonno-less propriety, and I couldn’t seem to get back on that wagon this morning. Then I looked at the clock and panicked. I leaped up and ran all over the room, trying to get myself cleaned up and reasonably presentable in fifteen minutes. Jonno watched me scramble into underpants and thrash around in my closet. I pulled on a brown and gold knit dress that was long enough to wear without hose.

  “X. Machina has a late gig tonight. We don’t start playing till midnight,” Jonno said. “Mind if I stay here and sleep a little longer?”

  “Fine,” I said, rolling my hair into a wad at the back of my head and securing it with a clip.

  “We’re playing the Rox Box. You want to come?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, right,” he said, grinning. “I forgot. You’ll be with your mama in Between.”

  “Shut up, Jonno,” I said. I’d had on brown sandals the night before, and normally they would be in slot three of my shoe rack.

  Last night he’d played reverse Prince Charming and taken them off me, pausing theatrically to kiss my ankles and my arches, then flinging them away. I traced my memory of their trajectory and found them under my dresser. I stuffed my feet into them. The clip was already slipping in my slick red hair, and I looked wild-eyed and pale beneath my freckles. I didn’t have time for makeup or contacts. I got my glasses out of my bedside table drawer and shoved them on, cursing my Crabtree genes. Every Frett but Mama had 20/20 vision. “I’m not going to Between.”

  “Yuh-huh,” said Jonno. “If you don’t go, come hear us play. I’ll take you for eggs after.”

  I paused at the bedroom door and said, “I don’t want you to take me for eggs. I don’t want you to take me for anything. Be gone when I get home, lock up behind you, and the next time I want to see you is Friday at four P.M. sharp, in court. This was really the last time.”

  “Yuh-huh,” he said. I turned to go, and he added, “Hey, want to drive to court together on Friday? I could pick you up, take you for eggs after.”

  By way of an answer, I slammed the bedroom door hard, and I could hear his laughter following me all the way out of the apartment.

  CHAPTER 3

  I COASTED THROUGH my first two jobs, interpreting back-to-back anthropology lectures on the UGA campus. Student Services often called my agency and booked me as an interpreter when a deaf student enrolled in an anthro class, since I knew the professors and was familiar with the terminology.

  Channeling a lecture wasn’t like interpreting a conversation; communication moved in only one direction. And since I’d heard this particular lecture three times before, I don’t think my clients realized how distracted I was.

  My last appointment was at a local restaurant, interpreting a job interview. I was still off-center as I pulled my ragtop Mustang into the parking lot behind Bibi’s Real Ice Cream. I sat for a moment, turning the air-conditioner vent to blast my overheated face. I opened the file. My client, a deaf man named James Leeds, had applied for a part-time job there. According to my sheet, the manager, Amber DeClue, had asked for me specifically, so I was betting I had interpreted for James Leeds before. The name wasn’t ringing any bells, but I would probably remember him when I saw his face.

  I was a good twenty minutes early, so I pulled the rearview mirror to face me and put contacts in and powdered my nose, put on lipstick and mascara. I took my hair down and brushed it out, but even in my narrow rearview, I could see it still had an obvious rumpled-by-sex look. I shoved it back into the clip and checked my cell phone for messages or missed calls. Nothing. I’d turned off my phone while I was working, but Bernese had made everything sound so dire, I’d almost expected to find a message from Mama. I knew what her doll heads meant to her.

  The first dolls my mother ever made were explorers, sent as emissaries to find her own mother’s past. My Frett grandmother died before I was born, but by all accounts, Jane Frett had been one hell of a woman. After Mama was born, she taught herself to drive so Mama could attend a school for the deaf. It meant almost three hours of driving a day, but Jane would neither allow her child to board and lose her connection with her family, nor let her remain uneducated. It was a phenomenal decision to make in the forties.

  But Jane Frett’s life seemed to have begun with her marriage.

  If Mama or her sisters asked about her childhood, her family, their shared heritage, Jane feigned a deafness of her own. Bernese the pragmatist shrugged and let it go, and Genny was too diffident to press, but Mama wanted some connection to her past.

  Her genes had given her clever hands and deafness, a bone-deep understanding of shape and color and form paired with vision that she had known from childhood would not last through middle age. All this had to have come from Jane. Mama grew up knowing her father’s family—solid, warmhearted folk of German descent—but there was neither artistry nor Usher’s syndrome in that family tree.

  Jane Frett was half Seminole, but she was the most assimilated Native American to ever draw breath, a devout Baptist whose only language was English. Her heritage was the proverbial smelly elephant in the drawing room; it was there, but it seemed like bad manners to mention it. All my mama knew of Indians was what she read in her Little House books. While the adults of the town never spoke of Indianness to the Frett sisters or their well-respected father, they surely must have been talking at home.

  Genny and Bernese were teased at school, called Injuns, whooped at, the usual casual cruelty of children sniffing out differences.

  Bernese, built low and solid and fearless, squelched her share of teasing early on by tackling the loudest bully and hitting him in the face until his nose was bleeding and he was weeping for mercy. Mama didn’t meet a lot of prejudice at her deaf day school, but she lived it vicariously through Genny. Genny, nervous from birth, was a natural school goat. She could always be counted on to dissolve into entertaining tears or, even better, rip out little chunks of her hair.

  Prowling through her mother’s drawers and closets, Mama found no birth certificate, no family Bible, nothing that would open a path into her mother’s past. But when Mama was eleven, she discovered that the bottom of her mother’s jewelry box lifted out. Beneath it she found a photograph of a man, a decidedly Native American man, sitting with a white woman and a little girl.

  The girl had
Jane Frett’s face, and she was holding a white girl’s china doll in fancy dress. The doll’s neck was wound with loops and loops of Seminole beadwork.

  Mama made her first doll the very next day. She formed the head out of salt dough and dried it overnight. Genny, already her willing craftsman, hand-sewed a limbless body that wasn’t much more than a stuffed cone of red silk. My mother tried to make the doll’s head look like the one in the picture, but she didn’t have the skills. So she practiced. She read every book on dolls and doll making in her school’s library, then begged Jane Frett to buy her more. She moved into working with clay and got better, then started making molds and casting porcelain slip. She made the same doll over and over again as a way of asking her mother a question that was never answered. Decades after she’d successfully reproduced the doll from the picture and had gone on to other faces and forms, years after her mother’s death, all the way up until her world went dark and she was no longer physically able, Mama had been asking.

  Each of the delicate porcelain heads she had cast when she was sighted had a name, even the animals. The heads that had never been made into completed dolls, more than a hundred of them, had been packed away, the molds wrapped in cotton and paired with her best cast, then sealed into individual boxes. Each box was labeled with the doll’s name in English and Braille, and even now, over twenty years after her vision had narrowed to a pinhole and then winked shut, she could run her hands across the label and describe the porcelain face that went with the name.

  Mama’s dolls were a tangible link to her work, her heritage, her mother, and her sight—to all her deepest losses—and she always wanted me to come home and be with her when Bernese sold one of them. But I had no trouble guessing why she hadn’t asked me this time. Mama wanted my divorce to go through probably more than I did. She knew that when it came to getting shut of Jonno, I was easily derailed. If she called me home to Between, I might waffle there until I had good and missed my court date.

  I needed to talk to her. Phone conversations with my mother were usually unsatisfying for both of us, but I had to try. I couldn’t be distracted and risk misrepresenting James Leeds to his poten-tial boss: I could cost him the job. I unclipped my cell phone from my purse and dialed 711. It rang twice, and then I connected to the relay service. I punched my way through the automated response menu, choosing voice service and inputting Mama’s number.

  A female voice came on the line and said, “This is CA 75857, dialing your number now.”

  “Thanks.”

  After about a minute the CA said, “Your call has been answered with ‘Hello.’ ”

  I said, “It’s Nonny. Bernese called me. Is everything okay at home? Go ahead.” I could hear the soft click of the keys as the CA typed my message out for Mama to read on her Braille display.

  There was a long pause, too long, and then the CA said, “All fine here. Go ahead.” Which meant absolutely nothing. I had no idea if Mama was being so short because she was irritated with Bernese for calling me, with me for calling her, or because she was simply typing the truth in the most expedient language possible.

  “Did you choose a head? Go ahead,” I said.

  “Not yet. Go ahead.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t. You don’t have to give up any of them at all if you don’t want to. Go ahead.”

  “Choosing is hard, but I like to think of my dolls in museums.

  Smile.” The CA paused and then said, “I can’t read this. Looks like she typed J-N-N-O. J-N-N-O sleep your house? Still set for Friday? Go ahead.”

  So Bernese hadn’t waited a minute to tell Genny and Mama that Jonno had been at my apartment early this morning. Too early. I said, “All fine here. Still set. I only called to see if I should come home and help you. Just for today. Go ahead.”

  The CA said, “Do not come before Saturday. Go ahead.”

  “Because you don’t need help choosing? Or you do but you don’t want me to miss the hearing? Go ahead.”

  The CA’s voice was flat as she read, “How many times would you like to ask me? Smile. All fine here. Signing off or go ahead.”

  I needed to see my mother’s hands. I would know exactly how

  “fine” she was by how her fingers moved, wiggling cheerfully as she touched her thumb to her chest, or twitching in a quick dismissive flicker.

  “Signing off,” I said.

  The CA said, “The connection has been closed at the other end.” I thanked her and ended the call. It was the best I could do.

  Mama at least knew I was available. I flipped the phone back open but paused before I hit the power button. I usually kept the phone off when I was working.

  I had a reputation in Athens for being a meticulous interpreter.

  When I was at a job, I tried to stop thinking and become a con-duit, a bridge that let conversation flow between deaf and hearing cultures. If I wasn’t focused, getting it exactly right could be tricky, especially since not all deaf people use ASL. Some rely on finger spelling or signed English or their own invented system of home signs or combinations of all these things. To complicate matters, ASL is not at all structured like English. In fact, a hearing person given a flat word-for-word interpretation would probably think the deaf speaker was uneducated. Literal translations are about as user-friendly as those instruction manuals that come with some Japanese electronics, because ASL isn’t a way to speak English.

  It’s a separate language with its own structure and idiom, a whole-body language that relies as much on physical nuance as it does on signs. Interpreting ASL comes very naturally to me, because it is my native language as surely as English is. It’s the language I learned first, signing with my mother months before I said an intelligible word to anyone else.

  Instead of turning off the phone, I set the ringer to vibrate and clipped it back on my purse. Knowing Mama could reach me might let me forget about what was going on at home long enough to do my job well. I sat in the car for a moment longer, breathing in the comforting, familiar smell of my Mustang’s ancient leather seats. When I felt centered, I turned off the car and got out, walking around to the front door of the ice-cream parlor.

  Bibi’s was decorated in cutesy retro kitsch, with a few red leatherette booths and a lot of small round tables surrounded by wire chairs with heart-shaped backs and puffy red seats. Two boys in candy-striped jerseys and caps were working behind the counter, and they had a good-size lunch crowd waiting in line. A blackboard menu by the ice-cream case listed a small selection of soups and sandwiches. The place was full of UGA students; it seemed like a bad time of day to schedule an interview. I was standing inside the door wondering if I should knock on the EMPLOYEES ONLY door at the back or go ask one of the boys where I could find Amber DeClue when I felt a light touch on my arm.

  The girl standing beside me looked like another college kid, a skinny, doe-eyed thing with golden-brown hair that fell in random waves past her shoulders. She was so daisy-fresh and dewy she was practically dripping. She had long tanned legs, as thin and awkward as a fawn’s, and she tipped her weight from one to the other, swaying as she sized me up.

  I said, “Ms. DeClue?” as she was saying, “Are you Nonny?” She flushed and added, “I mean, Mrs. Overmilk?”

  “Frett,” I said.

  “What?” She took a tottery step backwards.

  “My last name is Frett.”

  She tucked her hair behind one ear and said earnestly, “But I specifically asked—I mean, I requested Nonny Overmilk.”

  “That’s my married name,” I said. “I go by Frett now.”

  “Oh! So you got divorced?” Her big eyes widened.

  “Where is . . .” I glanced down at my sheet. “James Leeds?”

  “Oh, not here yet. Maybe we should go sit and wait a little?”

  “So you’re conducting the interview?” I asked. She seemed too young and too uncertain to be given the responsibility, but she nodded and then turned around and began threading her way through all the tables,
working her way across the room. I followed her. She was wearing a short, sleeveless linen dress, expensive-looking. It wasn’t something I would wear to scoop ice cream. Her arms were so thin that her elbows looked bigger around than her biceps. We sat in an oversize booth in the back. A yellow leather backpack sat as a placeholder on the table.

  She stopped in front of the table, and I slid into one side of the booth. She didn’t sit, but moved so she was standing in front of my bench, blocking me in. I had to look up at her when she spoke. “Nonny. That’s an interesting name. What’s that short for?

  Wynona?”

  I shook my head. “It’s not short for anything.”

  “Oh. So that’s, like, your whole name? Nonny?” She picked up one foot nervously and then set it down again in exactly the same place.

  “Yes.” I glanced at the time display on my phone. It was just past three o’clock. “Shouldn’t you sit down? So you can see when Mr. Leeds arrives?”

  “Oh. Sure.” She sidestepped and then slid into the booth across from me.

  Her habit of prefacing everything with a breathless “oh” was starting to wear on my nerves, which caused me to feel irritated with myself. Athens was a college town, so I worked with a lot of college kids, and I usually liked it. Nothing that was bothering me today had anything to do with Amber DeClue, and I knew I shouldn’t take it out on her.

  She was looking at me with moist brown eyes, nervous and diffident. I shifted in my seat. Her expression was expectant, almost encouraging, as if she had sallied forth with the whole “Is it short for Wynona?” bit and was waiting for me to do my part to main-tain polite conversation. I looked away, watching the boys behind the counter scoop out double-dip cones and grab wrapped sandwiches from a cooler behind the counter.

  After a couple of minutes, Amber said, “So that seems like a pretty neat job, translating for deaf people.”