What was I thinking? The restaurant was a fishbowl full of floor-to-ceiling windows. Just beyond the parking lot Highway 18 looked like a runway, a straight shot, launching me anywhere, or so I thought, until my eyes settled on the across-the-street hamburger joint and throngs of my classmates in bunches spilling out of cars like adolescent clowns, making me forget that I was in the middle of my life, in the eye of it, and forcing me to see myself from the outside. I didn’t like the view. Besides, I was a Jehovah’s Witness. A Jehovah’s Witness for God’s sake. I wouldn’t and couldn’t go to a birthday party or smoke a cigarette. I knocked on people’s doors on weekends, on weekdays after school, or when I wasn’t working. I was supposed to introduce myself as a Jehovah’s Witness within thirty seconds of meeting someone—not a rule, but a protection. You’d be amazed at the people you could clear out of your path, stop in their friendly, lecherous, or people-interested tracks with those words.
“I bet you eat here every night, don’t you?”
“I used to. You get sick of it quicker than you think. They won’t let me in the house if I have a chicken box.”
Shelby laughed. “Sounds like ya’ll have fun.”
I hadn’t thought about what we did as fun. After my shift I’d wait to eat with my brothers and mother. They’d pick me up from work, my little brother quiet and sometimes half-asleep, and the four of us would sit in front of the television, my brother’s head stuck into the brown and orange chicken bucket searching for thighs, all of our faces greasy and content flickering from the light of the television. I never thought about it as fun.
Matt and Tim paused from behind the counter, listening. We couldn’t see them, but their fool-laughing broke through to the dining room every few minutes. They were talking about us.
“Customer,” Matt yelled.
“You take this one, Matt,” I yelled.
“What,” he flung open the door into the dining room, pretending to be annoyed so we wouldn’t suspect that all he’d wanted was some reason to join us.
“Nothing,” I said, waving him off. “Nothing. I forgot.”
“Ya’ll don’t have many customers, do you? I guess that’s good for you, right?” Shelby was giving me permission to get up. I was surprised that I cared, like I was on a date that despite all indications was going well.
“I’ll be back,” I said, the closest I could come to asking her to stay. I didn’t want to say that I wished we had so many people that I could take the orders, pour the fountain drinks, make change so fast that I could do it in my sleep. I wanted so many people in the store that nobody stood out and every face was a blur through the door.
A youngish couple waited in their low-riding car, not talking, waiting, like they expected me to come rolling out on skates. A toddler with thin brown hair to her narrow shoulders, pressed her cheek pressed like a cool comfort on the back window.
“SHOULD WE GET THE HOLLY SPECIAL?” the man said to the girl, jiggling her on his arm, his fat moustache an inch from her forehead. The child said nothing, picked at the dirty knees on her tights.
“Get what you want,” the woman answered, resting her back on the large plate-glass window. The man looked at me and winked like we both hated the woman he was with together.
“The Holly’s going to be fifteen, twenty minutes,” Matt yelled to the couple hoping to discourage them so he wouldn’t have to cook.
“We can wait,” the man said, setting the little girl down.
“They haven’t found those boys in Miller’s Creek,” the woman said to me. “They said it on the radio, just right now.”
Everybody speculated about what could have happened. We’d all seen in the newspaper and on television the sweet department-store picture of the little boys dressed like tiny hunters in matching-plaid shirts, overlapping each other like pups.
“I know for a fact a cult got them,” the man said.
“You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” the woman said.
The man leaned onto the counter. “In Love Valley, they do things like that. You don’t know what some people can do. I used to live down there, I know.”
The woman sucked her lip in disgust. “What does a cult want with little boys?” she laughed.
“You name it.”
The little girl had inched herself away from her parents almost to the booth where Shelby sat. Shelby must have looked to her like a wonder, too.
“Tabitha, get over here, leave people alone,” the woman yelped.
“Aren’t you a sweet doll baby?” Shelby leaned down to her, laughed in the direction of the couple to make sure they knew she meant no harm.
“ORDER.” MATT YELLED like I wouldn’t notice the big bucket of chicken in the window. That, probably more than anything, made me give them their big bucket free.
“You sure?” the man said, like he expected a trick.
I tried not to look weary. Goodness knows I did, but a body gets tired of offering the remedy nobody wants.
“You see that, Carol,” the man glared at the woman, like he’d won a contest, beating her at a game she thought she had down cold. The woman rolled her eyes, already halfway out the door.
“Give the nice girl a kiss,” the man instructed the child; dangling her from her waist, her face raised to my height, so if I leaned across I could reach her round cheek over the counter.
The little girl’s expression didn’t change as she rested her hands on my face and jammed her tiny tongue in my mouth.
“Good girl,” the man hoisted her up to his chest. “Now, say thank you.”
I tried to find Shelby then, anybody who could tell me what I knew for sure, but Shelby’d turned away.
“Thank you,” the child whispered into the air between me and the door.
SHELBY CLEANED THE TABLE with the flat of her hand, wiped her face with a moist towelette. She looked like she was leaving.
“I hate it here,” and as soon as I said it, the bold truth of it scared me.
“You can get another job,” Shelby said, but she knew I didn’t mean the job. Shelby sucked from her straw and cast her eyes down to the top of her cup.
“I had a job in a barbeque place in Elkin. My brother got it for me. I wasn’t but fourteen but the owner, we called him Big Nasty, would let me work for cash. He was crazy. He wanted us to rinse out the paper cups people didn’t take with them,” Shelby raised her eyebrows in disbelief. “I was a kid, but I knew that wasn’t sanitary, you know?” I nodded, waiting for Shelby to tell the rest of the story.
“What did you do?”
“I did what he said. I would have rinsed out soda cans, if he asked. He was the one with the cash.”
I laughed but didn’t see anything funny. “I’ll get you some more,” I reached for her soda.
“Yeah, I’ll take one for the road.”
Shelby followed me to the counter while I jangled the crushed ice into the cup, the soda foaming over the top.
“You’ve got pretty eyes,” Shelby said. “You do,” she insisted like I’d disagreed. “There are all kinds of pretty outside of Wilkes County,” she said.
I knew my face was too thin and pointed. I’d been called Hatchet enough times to know I had a nose too big. It would be years before I believed in pretty. “I’m a Jehovah’s Witness,” I blurted.
Shelby nodded like I’d revealed something obvious.
“I thought ya’ll couldn’t wear pants,” she said.
“No, that’s Holiness people. We’re the ones that come to your door.”
“Yeah, I know,” she jabbed in the straw, dragged, found nothing but air between the chips of ice, the desperate sucking sounds making me so sad I thought I might cry.
“I thought there was more in there than that,” I said as I reached for her cup.
“Get used to it,” Shelby said, and this time we both laughed for real.
Shelby took the newly filled soda, bowed the straw up and down in the cup, the motion sounding like she was tuning a v
iolin.
“You’re a Jehovah’s Witness. That’s a good thing to be, right?” she said, her face looking sincere.
* * *
The last time I remember hearing Shelby’s name was a shock. I’d been waiting for my ride on the deck of our big two-story rental house, an old house, but solid with plenty of rooms. The owner liked my mother. Actually, he didn’t really know her. Better said, he felt sorry for her. She was a pretty, young woman trying to have a decent life with her kids and no man. He thought the least he could do was to let her have the old place for cheap. And it was a good place. We had a large wooden deck, and though I knew it impossible, I saw it dressed up in lights and teak furniture, mounds of food and colorful, umbrellaed drinks circulating in the hands and on the plates of our guests. We had an upstairs with large bedrooms and a strange little room with a sloped ceiling. Who cared that summer’s wall of heat kept us sequestered on the ground floor, sweaty piles of bodies positioned in front of two ancient electric fans? Move-in day we hesitated in each room, peered around corners tentatively like we were expecting a jack-in-the-box to pop out of every closet and around each wall or we were in a good dream that, if we were quiet enough, didn’t have to end. Before the road came through, this must have been a place for middle-class people. The only drawback was that only ten feet of yard and a narrow porch separated us from the busy highway. And even in the dead of night, we could hear the whir of cars rushing to the outskirts of town, to what passed as suburbs. What a pity that now no one would ever buy all this space and good light.
Linda was going to drive up any minute, and I wanted to be ready. It wasn’t enough to sit in the kitchen and listen for the crunch of gravel of her car in the driveway. I wanted to be on the deck eager and ready the second she came. I hoped she was alone. Her older girl was fine, sweet, a chubby kid with good home training and a lot of well-rehearsed answers. But the twins I avoided. They watched me like baby dictators or old men in a candy store, like I might run out with a jawbreaker. They didn’t get that from Linda. She approached the whole wide world like she was opening a jewel box, nothing closed and remote, and any little bauble she desired, she could pinch her fingers into the velvet and wear it to bed, if she wanted. I tried to explain her to my grandmother. “Linda Cashion is happy all the time. For real,” I told my grandmother. “She let her four-year-old kick the back of her car seat over and over. While she was driving,” I insisted. “Know what she did then? She laughed and sang to him, ‘I feel a little foot in my back’ like ‘Pop Goes the Weasel.’ What does it all mean?” I pleaded. I wanted my grandmother to tell me Linda’s secret to life, unravel the threads of it, so I could see it in its pure form, memorize it, have it, too. “It means she ain’t no black woman with real problems,” my grandmother said.
LINDA PICKED HER LIGHT BROWN CURLS straight up at every light to make sure that the thinnest part of her Afro looked like a halo in the fading light. Linda is white. White as they come. But she preferred the soul-sister do or maybe better described as the Annie Redux Early Middle Age style. I imagined how it happens. One day you need milk from the grocery store or eggs, some staple or final ingredient, the thing you can’t do without, and there you are: sweat pants, hair in some configuration, your face ashen and nude. But one day the thought, just an itch at first, but the thought emerges, who will see? If the answer is nobody, then it has begun. You blend into the stand of tomatoes, mounds of cantaloupes, row of green beans in a chaotic heap. And so what if the public sees, none of them look one bit better, and you stumble onto a truth you are startled that you couldn’t have figured out before: all that time, those years of fussing and primping in the mirror only to discover that there is no penalty for matronly. Part of Linda’s charm was that she reveled in the just-as-you-are.
“Sarah-Donna is doing so well. I want her to start coming to the meetings. Making the Truth her own,” Linda said. “She is missing so much,” Linda sighed into the mirror. “At least she’s getting to meet you. She needs a good friend, a Proverbs 18:24.”
I had my first weekday off from work in a long time, and I had a date with two hours of after-school rerun television. My favorite was What’s Happening. Here’s the premise: a single, black, kind, smart, hugely fat mother who works as a maid has a teenage son and daughter who stay home alone for several hours after they get home from school. The show focuses on the unstructured time the kids have with each other and with friends while Mom is working. Every episode without fail the mother grabs her bone-skinny son in a thick embrace, squeezing him from love or pride or consolation, causing the young man to exclaim, “Mama, I can’t breathe.” Hilarious. I anticipated the line but never saw it coming. What’s Happening was as good as it sounds.
Still I wanted to impress Linda. She was married to a Cashion, a member of one of the well-to-do families in town. It was always a coup to get a local believer into our congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses, but a rich, respected local was even better. Linda left a comfortable family to be with us; nice people who carol at Christmas for fun; decorous people who hid their dirt under years of silence and repression like God intended. When these folks got together, I bet money that no one showed up at the end of the party, like my Uncle Alvin, loose from a few bottles of whatever he could find, sloshing from family member to family member, eighty-proof breath in our faces, “Do you love me? I need to know. Do you?” If someone like her could turn her back on a smooth, happy life to run around door-to-door, what was my excuse? So when Linda called, I put on my least-wrinkled circle skirt, wrestled my hair back in a severe bun, what I like to call my hair’s missionary position, and gathered my Bible, tracts, and the Paradise book.
Linda and I got to her Bible study’s white wooden frame house. The porch was hardly big enough for both of us to stand at a comfortable distance. I rested my arm on the porch railing, and bits of peeling paint adhered to my blouse. I resisted the impulse to peel some of it off. I didn’t want Linda to think I was too wrapped up in my appearance.
“Come in,” a woman’s voice rang out at us. “Door’s open.”
The woman stood with her back to us, her hands in sudsy dishwater.
“Hey, Linda. Ya’ll have a seat,” she called over her back, “I’m just going to dry my hands.”
I liked the cozy rooms, the kitchen and living room open to each other, every inch of space covered and decorated. I’ve always liked the feel of houses that seem collated together, the decorator’s spirits undaunted by the lack of money, each couch, figurine, side table dragged in and married to other found items. The woman motioned for us sit. She was twenty-five, if she was a day, but from a distance she could pass for my age. Sarah-Donna sat herself on the longest couch, which faced the oversized love seat where Linda and I sat. Sarah-Donna was plain and gangly, her long legs crossing and uncrossing, like she was nervous and couldn’t figure out what to do with herself. Linda told me that Sarah-Donna reminded her of a woman who walked right past her and into her house in California, made herself a peanut butter sandwich, and walked out without a word.
“Mama’s coming back soon. I told her ya’ll would be here,” Sarah-Donna said. “She won’t mind ya’ll coming. She just don’t want to hear none of it herself.” Sarah-Donna smiled.
“We’ll be as quick as we can,” Linda said, ignoring the Jew reference, but I could see her storing away the phrase for a future lesson.
I was glad to hear we wouldn’t stay. I hated the idea of the mother coming in, her jaw dropping, her muttering to herself, or worse, passing right by us without a word.
“Before we start, can I ask you something?” Sarah-Donna said.
“Of course,” Linda closed her book and put it between us on the sofa, letting Sarah-Donna see she wasn’t a bit worried about getting on with the lesson.
“Did you hear about Shelby?” Sarah-Donna began. “So sad. Well, I didn’t hear it, but plenty of other people did. Sad.”
For months I’d wanted someone to say Shelby’s name out loud, to hear
the sound of it, hear about her, to feel the relief from the necessity, the load of having her on my mind. Linda didn’t like gossip and looked a little scared that she was about to open a snake-charmer’s basket. If there existed a way to shift the conversation, she’d find it. Stick to the positive, talk about our future plans, about Bible study, about working more in the field service, about maybe becoming a missionary in some backward country without television, Jordache, or Top 40. She would never have wanted to talk to us about Shelby, but Sarah-Donna was determined.
“Ya’ll did hear, right?” Sarah-Donna pressed.
“No. What happened to her? Is she all right?” Linda said.
“She’s got The AIDS.”
“Oh dear,” Linda said.
AIDS talk was everywhere. For all I know, AIDS was the first disease that the public saw doctors wrestle with, refine their assessments. It’s no wonder that we imagined the worst. Now, no matter what anyone said, we knew that anybody could get The AIDS any time. Sex? Needles? A yodel or drawn-out stare? Yes, yes, and needs more research.
“They announced it yesterday on WKBC. They said everybody had to stay away from her. The danger, you know it? You never think something like that is going to happen around here,” Sarah-Donna shook her head, but I could tell she was excited.
It was a good story. The town prostitute, the worst sinner, gets the worst disease we know.
“The Bible says all about that, right? Eye for an eye, right? I mean you have to pay for your sins,” Sarah-Donna said.
“They will receive recompense in their own flesh,” Linda said as she held her Bible like a shield.
Shelby’s body fooled her, but that could happen to anybody. Before you know it, you are led to places you can’t begin to understand. I’ve felt it. There have been days when I thought if only I’d had someone to touch me, make the ache I couldn’t name stop, tell me the pain I held in my lockbox of a heart was useful, a necessary thing to finally usher me into a kind of paradise I could get to from here. Of course, that was wrong. The trick you learn, after years, sometimes, is that pain is just pain.
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