We Are Taking Only What We Need

by Stephanie Powell Watts

  Jonnie got out of the car, wiggle-walked for Don’s benefit on the concrete path to the restaurant. She turned to watch him.

  Don hadn’t moved but watched Jonnie play her game. Framed by the picnic tables on one side, the thick yellow grass, and on both sides, low-reaching poplar branches’ spring-green leaves highlighting Jonnie in the center, her chin just over her bare shoulder, her face expectant and bright.

  “I’m a lucky man,” Don yelled. But even as he said it, he realized that this was the first time he was telling Jonnie what he knew she wanted to hear.

  DON WAITED ON the back deck of Sylvia’s house. She was a busy woman, what with the kids, her crazy family, her equally crazy friends with their constant low-rent problems, but Don knew she liked to be home on Saturdays. He wouldn’t have to wait long. Don took a seat on the stairs leading up to the deck. Sylvia had her flower beds cleaned and neat, already prepared for summer growth. Sylvia might not keep a neat house, but her yard was another story altogether.

  Sylvia had pots of various sizes on the deck and on the built-in bench above it. Little pots, terra-cotta, plastic ones, pots all over the place that she’d bought at garage sales and thrift stores, all full of seedlings bursting out of the red-clay soil she’d scraped up from the yard. This tacky mess grown on a few dimes would in the summer become Sylvia’s lush garden with great masses of old-fashioned color in a jungle all over: bleeding heart, sweet peas, purple coneflower, even some showy annuals as long as she could grow them from seed. When they were very poor and not just ordinary poor, years ago, Sylvia would find birdseed and plant giant sunflowers around their trailer. Don loved their great brown faces, and though he never told her, thought Sylvia herself a magician for willing them into being. Don searched the pots for the Magic Marker shorthand only Sylvia understood. He liked her simple printing, a man’s way of writing, bold and unadorned.

  Last time he came, Sylvia wouldn’t speak to him at all. She peeled potatoes at the sink. Water steaming hot as she stroked a brush across the speckled potato bodies. The water sang into the silver sink, making Don content. Sylvia looked to have forgotten he was there and concentrated on the sweet-looking potatoes, not soft or mealy looking, but plump, just the size to fit nicely in a fist. Don arranged the junk in his pockets, gum, receipts, a cigarette stub he’d fished out of Sylvia’s garden.

  “You gonna wash them all day,” he said, not particularly hateful, but he could tell that he took Sylvia’s moment and ruined it. Before she had time to really think about it, Sylvia threw the knife into Don’s leg propped on the chair in front of him.

  “What the hell? Sylvia!” Don watched the blood rush through his white sock onto his fingers. It was a good shot, but not fatal, anyone could see that. Still, Sylvia wanted to feel something, rush to Don with genuine concern. But all she could manage to do was pull another knife out of the drawer and continue washing the potatoes.

  Sylvia rolled her car around the corner, parked, hesitated just a minute trying to pretend she didn’t see Don on the deck. She grabbed the canvas tote bag she was using for a purse and considered looking at herself in the rearview mirror to get some idea what Don was about to see. No reason, she thought. Might as well get it over with.

  “What are you doing here?” Sylvia opened the car’s back hatch, grabbed a grocery bag, motioned for Don to pick up the other one.

  “Nothing. Just come to talk to you.”

  “Well, you better talk quick, I’m getting ready to go to sleep.” Sylvia hoisted the bag to her hip, fiddled for her keys.

  “You’re not asleep now,” Don said.

  Don was always saying something stupid like that, Sylvia thought. Always trying to get her off her guard. If he said something dumb enough it was like a smack in the middle of the forehead, stunning you into silence, and he could keep on doing what he wanted. You don’t spend twenty-four years messing around with a man and not learn at least a few of his tricks.

  “Come on then. Put the meat in the freezer.”

  Don wriggled the damp packages of chicken breasts, short ribs, and hamburger from the plastic bag and stacked them in the corner behind the ice pops. He would have liked a little more to do, keep his hands busy and moving, let Sylvia see him working. She always liked him in motion, doing a chore, sweating, proving he had a plan. His luck, he was in the middle of a break when she decided to check on him, either leaning on a hoe, resting his eyes, or in a just-took-off-my-shoe-to-remove-a-stone position, the exhibit A to her belief that he was of little use and couldn’t be trusted.

  Don eased into the tweedy den chair and felt into the dark sides for a remote control.

  Sylvia began folding the pile of towels in a mound at the end of the couch. She popped the cotton, smoothed each with the side of her hand. Don watched her pop and fold a few while the lint flew in the already stiff air around them. Don tried to latch onto one piece of lint and follow it to the ground, but the mote kept disappearing before his eyes.

  “If you’re just going to sit there, you could fold some. How long you staying anyway?” Sylvia threw a pile of towels to Don on the recliner. He tried to imitate Sylvia’s actions, but he was slow.

  “That’s not very polite,” Don said, pretending to be hurt. Sylvia laughed through her teeth, the sudden air sounding like a hiss in the room.

  “I just come to see how you are, that’s all.”

  “You see me every day, Don. You know how I am.”

  “I know.”

  “How’s that little girl you’ve shacked up with?”

  Don was surprised though he shouldn’t have been. Of course Sylvia would find out about Jonnie. There are no secrets in a small town, Don had learned that the hard way.

  “She’s all right. All right. A little girl.”

  Sylvia laughed and rubbed the smooth skin on her neck, her nervous habit. Don watched her unmanicured hands rest on her thighs, form baskets of dark, thick fingers, protectors for her knees. Don kneeled in front of Sylvia, put his head on the fleshy part of her thigh. He didn’t want Sylvia to see his face just then.

  “You ever going to let me come back here?” Don said into the soiled denim of Sylvia’s lap.

  “Why should I? I see you more now than I ever did,” Sylvia said, but what she wanted to say was underneath that meanness, a smooth thing like a river pebble, cool words that would make him come back and for good and finally be the man she could want.

  Don raised his head and looked up into Sylvia’s face.

  “You got a soda?”

  “You can look.”

  Don grunted his way up, his skinny legs like pipe cleaners in his blue jeans. Sylvia wondered what he might have looked like if he’d fattened up a little. She’d figured he would, though she never pushed it. Most men don’t stay rail thin, but spread in the middle, their faces broaden in a way she thought manly. Not Don. He was strong though, stronger than he looked. Sylvia thought his hair especially unruly today, spiky like the goldenrod bushes she liked, uncut, not careful shrubs, but radiant and irreverent. She knew that wildness was nothing to admire. Anything out of control was beautiful only to the distant looker, the woman passing by swiftly in the moving car.

  Don drank the orange soda his kids favored. He hated the too-sweet syrup, but it was something. He didn’t forget about Jonnie, a sweet girl. But anybody paying attention knew they weren’t a forever couple. That was easy math. Sylvia would always be in the picture, it was as simple as that.

  The kitchen was his favorite part of the house. Each instrument, pan, and object had a reason to be, a function you could name. There had been days when he let himself in the house just to look around and touch the hard things with purpose, the oversized spoons, turners, and graters, pots and chopping boards, all there, all seeming more necessary that he was.

  Sylvia was still folding the raggedy towels, creasing the stained washcloths, stacking them for the closet. The fact that she hadn’t moved made Don bold.

  “That hit the spot,” he sighed. />
  “Do you know anything you haven’t heard before?” Sylvia rolled her eyes at Don’s willing face.

  “Come down here.”

  “I’m not getting on no floor with you.”

  “It’s clean. Come on.”

  “I do the cleaning around here, and I know it ain’t. Forget it. I need to take a nap anyway.”

  “Do you still love me, baby?” Don hadn’t meant to say that. It wasn’t a trick or some line to get Sylvia’s attention, but an honest question, one he wanted to know the answer to.

  “Why do you want to start all that mess?” Sylvia yelled, flecks of angry spit that landed on Don’s cheek. The meanness of it startled him, almost made him cry.

  “I don’t know,” he said as he reached up to her, coaxed her shoulders forward, guided her to the floor. She rested her head on his shoulder, though that’s not what she was set on doing at all. She looked twisted and uncomfortable leaning into him like that, and Don worried over the contortions Sylvia had to do to be close. Don smoothed her hair, wanting Sylvia to be soothed, if just for a minute, like she was finally okay, finally awake from a bad dream. He loved the way Sylvia could open herself up for him, as easily and quickly as a child, her ire and disappointment forgiven or at least held in abeyance as her body slackened and fear rippled through and then escaped her face like an ousted demon.

  “Did you comb your hair today?” he said.

  “Did you?” she whispered.

  The bed was heaped with clothes, clean and dirty, some free weights Sylvia always planned to use with her exercise tape, and her large rolling suitcase.

  “You going somewhere?” Don asked, a flutter of nerves wiggling its way into his stomach.

  “Where am I gonna go?” Sylvia snapped. “Lana wanted it.”

  Don ignored her tone, tried not to let Sylvia see his exhale of relief. “Lana’s always wanting something.”

  “Don, let her alone, she don’t need to be in this.”

  Don took off his shirt, then his jeans. “She ain’t welcome as far as I’m concerned.”

  Sylvia stood in front of the bed waiting for directions. Nothing about Sylvia was shy, but her relationship with Don, this marriage that wasn’t a marriage confused her, took her to uncharted land where she didn’t understand the customs.

  “You want to dance?” he whispered.

  Sylvia grinned. She looked so young when she grinned, and Don felt a surge of warmth for her, for the fun young girl who drank beer as well as he ever did, let the foam dribble on her chin, if she wanted. The girl who from the day he saw her naked liked for him to take in her whole long body, her legs thick and strong as tree trunks, the pooch of her belly, her big heavy breasts, nipples dark as plums. She convinced him that she was the way a woman should look, and anything else was a compromise. At first he was afraid to tell her how good she was and lived in terror that she would realize the whole truth and walk away. A young man won’t believe that holding back the truth won’t keep a woman close.

  Sylvia’s face was glad, unmired by worry, the only time she was truly a beautiful woman. Her grandmother’s freckles weren’t pinched into a seagull shape on her cheeks, her mother’s disappointed mouth was finally twisted into happiness.

  “Here, look at my face, but follow my feet,” Don pulled her into his body.

  In his embrace, Sylvia knew Don was following a script he’d learned from another woman. Sylvia knew that men need direction from the woman they choose. It makes them feel cared for and safe. She leaned into Don’s naked chest and tried to pretend that was all there was to it. She was the most stable part of Don’s world. Always had been. He would stray, but didn’t he always come back? Didn’t he end up wanting her? But feeling his body move from the care he’d taken from that child hurt her more than she’d anticipated. Sylvia remembered when Jonnie was born, a fat, bald-headed baby with the mystery father. Sylvia had held her not as a baby, but when she was a bigger child, a toddler, Sylvia was sure she’d hefted that girl in the crook of her own arm.

  Don’s leg caressed her thigh and shifted her weight to the other foot, moved her, however awkwardly into a tiny square in the space between her disheveled bed and the wall. She wasn’t going to cry, although she thought about it. But as quickly as it came, she felt the old hardness build, the dike that kept Don away from the best part of herself.

  Don realized he’d made a mistake though he wasn’t quite sure what it was. He felt the stiffness return to Sylvia, the closed-off place he hated in her that would one day brick up against him.

  “Come on baby,” he said. “We don’t have to mess around with that. I just want to be here with you.”

  Sylvia swiped the clothes from the bed, leaned to the footboard, and untangled the complicated sheets. She should divorce this man. The same reasons she told him again and again to leave and don’t come back were the reasons she should make it legal, go ahead and sign the papers. But not today. No one had noticed her today. Not the girl at the Bi-Lo supermarket, who didn’t pause as she looked around her to the next customer, not the teenage boys, all baseball caps and oversized shirts loud-talking outside of Lana’s hair salon, not the old man at the gas station on the other side of the pump, watching the numbers roll on the display like he was hoping against all hope that seven would not follow six, just this once, and none of the passing people in the mountain town, not another soul, besides this man, had thought to remember that Sylvia Ross was even alive.

  “ARE YOU STAYING, DON?”

  Don reached his fingers to the clasp of her bra, popped it open like a combination lock. “How long you need me, baby?”

  Acknowledgments

  Some of the stories in this collection were previously published, some in slightly different form, in the following journals and anthologies: “Family Museum of the Ancient Postcards” in New Letters and New Stories from the South, 2009; “If You Hit Randolph County, You’ve Gone Too Far” in Tampa Review; “We Are Taking Only What We Need” in Oxford American; “Unassigned Territory” in Oxford American, New Stories from the South, 2007, and Pushcart XXXII: Best of the Small Presses, 2008 edition; “Highway 18” in Tartts Four: Incisive Fiction from Emerging Writers; “Welcome to the City of Dreams” (as “Talk to Me While I’m Listening”) in New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing.

  I owe great debts of gratitude to many but especially to Rod Santos and Lynne McMahon, mentors in writing and life. Many thanks go to the Creative Writing Program at the University of Missouri-Columbia and Marly Swick and Trudy Lewis. My professors at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Sandra Govan, Stan Patten, and Nanci Kincaid, gave me hope and inspiration when I needed it most. Marc Smirnoff and Carol Ann Fitzgerald at the Oxford American offered their invaluable support and careful attention to my work. I am so grateful. I cannot thank Jan Fergus enough for her vision, insight, and love. I am blessed to count her as my friend.

  Great thanks to my dear ones: my baby brothers, Joel, Marc, Brent, and Mitchell, and to my sisters, Keya and Kellie.

  To the Watts family: Gary, Luke, Jim and Charlie, but especially to the good-looking, good-cooking women: Mary Watts, beloved Grammy; Mary S., Savannah, Molly and the cool aunts Bernadette, Terry, and Gale. I am proud to call you family.

  Many thanks to my friends who provided support and inspiration: Tina Wilson, Betsy Fifer, Joanie Mackowski, Seth Moglen, Beth Dolan, and Monica Najar. And to the beautiful amazing women who have made the good times great and bad times bearable: Kristin Handler, Vera Fennell, Julia Maserjian, Holona Ochs, and Angela Scott.

  To Alex Doty, I still can’t believe you are gone. Thank you. You made this book and my life richer.

  To my parents, Brenda Wray and Billy Powell. I told you I had a book in me, Daddy.

  To my dear grandmother Ruby P. Dula: I will never stop missing you.

  About the Author

  STEPHANIE POWELL WATTS is an associate professor of English at Lehigh University and is the a
uthor of No One Is Coming to Save Us. She has won numerous awards, including a Whiting Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, and the Southern Women’s Writers Award for Emerging Writer of the Year, and has been a PEN/Hemingway finalist. In 2017, No One Is Coming to Save Us was chosen by Sarah Jessica Parker as inaugural pick for the American Library Association’s Book Club Central.

  Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

  Also by Stephanie Powell Watts

  No One Is Coming to Save Us

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  WE ARE TAKING ONLY WHAT WE NEED. Copyright © 2011 by Stephanie Powell Watts. Introduction © 2017 by Stephanie Powell Watts. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  Cover design by Sara Wood

  Cover artwork © Amy Sherald, Saint Woman, 2015, private collection, Hunts Point, WA, image courtesy of the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago

  Originally published as We Are Taking Only What We Need in the United States in 2011 by BkMk Press, University of Missouri-Kansas City.

  FIRST EDITION

  Digital Edition FEBRUARY 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-274986-4