by Jo Ann Beard
They ate terrible food, things mixed together that weren’t supposed to be. Mashed potatoes with corn, pieces of white bread with gravy poured on top, peas and carrots in the same bowl. Ralph would have a dish towel tucked into his collar and hold a fork and spoon in his enormous paws. He’d get something on the spoon, a great gob of potatoes, say, and then open his mouth as wide as it would go, like a bird in a nest getting fed a chewed worm. He had deep creases on either side of his mouth, and as he chewed, gravy would run down the gullies in rivulets, land on the dish towel, and stay there. It was an amazing and horrifying thing to watch. I had a sensitive stomach and sometimes, sitting across from him — eyes carefully averted, fastened on the Aunt Jemima potholder hanging on a hook or on a pan lid with a screw and a block of wood jimmied up for a handle — just hearing him eat could make me gag. I was in the habit of rising from the table and walking around the kitchen every few minutes, breathing through my nose, deeply, to keep from gagging. Then I’d sit back down, pick up two peas with my spoon, and put them in my mouth. This is what my grandma said to me once: “Eat your chicken, why don’t you? And don’t take the skin off, that’s what’s good.” They were trying to make me eat something with skin on it. At my own house, everyone knew enough not to say skin in relation to food.
My grandma, when she was cooking dinner, would send me down to the fruit cellar for jars of home-canned stuff. Then when I’d bring them up she’d open the jars and smell the contents thoughtfully; sometimes she’d have me take the jar outside to where Ralph was and have him smell it. He always said the same things: “There ain’t nothing wrong with that, tell her” or he’d bawl toward the house as I was walking back in, “Maw, that’ll be okay if you cook it longer!”
Once she served me red raspberries that she’d put up; poured them in a plastic bowl and put cream on them. As I started to dig in I noticed that there were some black things floating around. “Grandma, there’s bugs in this,” I said. She came over and looked into my bowl, head tipped back to see out of the bottoms of her glasses. “Them’re dead,” she told me. “Just push ’em to the side; the berries is okay.” And I did, and the berries were okay.
At night we watched one show on TV and then had to go to bed, when it was still a little bit light out. They’d go in their room and my grandma would come out with her nightgown on and her teeth out to tuck me in. I’d be lying stiff as a plank under the bedspread and here she’d come, without her regular clothes on, with her arms and feet exposed, her mouth folded in on itself. “G’night, honey-Jo,” she would lisp, pat me on the shoulder, and turn out the light. And there I’d be, while they snored up one side and down the other in the room across the hall. I’d tiptoe all over the bedroom, gazing for a while out the window, watching the sky turn black, the stars come out. I’d quietly open all the drawers of all the dressers in the room, take out things, examine them, put them back. I didn’t dare jump on the bed, although sometimes I said “Chicka-chicka China” to myself out of boredom. I tried counting sheep like on the cartoons, but I couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t for the life of me imagine what sheep looked like. I knew but I didn’t know, just as I couldn’t conjure up the faces of my long-lost parents and siblings. I was wide-awake, staring out at the vast Milky Way while the grown-ups snored on and on and the moon rose and sank.
The strange thing was, I always asked to go there. I don’t remember them ever inviting me, or my parents suggesting it. It was me. From far away the idea of their house was magical to me, all those nooks, all those crannies, all those things to play with — the button jars, the lowboy with a little drawer full of marbles, the flower arrangements, the rotating fan. So, every July I got dropped off on a Sunday and picked up the following Sunday. By Tuesday I’d be counting the hours, sitting on the backyard glider, staring at the black lawn jockey and the flagstone path that took you to the garden, the broken bird bath with a pool of rusty, skanky water in it. Their yard had as much stuff in it as their house did, only the yard stuff was filthy, full of dirt and rainwater.
The last time I went there my parents drove off on a Sunday afternoon as I stood on the gravel sidewalk and waved, already regretting my visit. My grandma fed us, dinner was the usual ordeal of gravy rivulets and tainted food, and then they turned Bonanza on. I lay on the living room floor, in the cleared-out space in the center; on either end of the couch were Grandma and Ralph. She was knitting an afghan and he was sharpening a stack of scissors.
We were watching my favorite show. The dad, Ben, had a buckskin, Hoss had a black horse, and Little Joe had a pinto pony. They had Hop Sing for a servant, in place of a mom. Back home my little brother would be humming to himself through the whole show, “Umbuddy-umbuddy-umbuddy-ummm Bonanza,” and everyone would be telling him to shut up. My mom would be smoking her cigarettes and drinking beer out of a bottle, my dad would have his socks off and be stretching his bare toes, drinking his beer out of a glass. My sister would be trying to do homework at the dining room table.
Here I was with Grandma and Ralph, staying up one hour later than I would the rest of the century-long week. Little Joe falls in love with a schoolteacher who comes past the Ponderosa in a buggy. He kisses her a long one, it stretches out forever in the silence of the living room. There isn’t a sound from behind me, on the couch. No one is moving while the kiss is going on. It’s horrible. I look around the room, at the pictures that cover every inch of wall space, my aunts and uncles and their families, framed sayings from the olden days, plaques with jokes about outhouses, a pair of flying ceramic ducks with orange beaks and feet, and on and on. Too much to look at. The pecking-hen salt and pepper shakers, the donkey with a dead plant coming out of his back, the stacks of old magazines under tables and on the seats of chairs. Underneath me are three scatter rugs, converging their corners in a lump under my back. Rag rugs, one of them made from bread wrappers. Hoss Cartwright saves the schoolteacher when her horse shies and now she’s in love with him. Little Joe tries to punch Hoss out. Behind me my grandmother’s knitting needles click together in a sad and empty way, Ralph’s breathing is audible over the scratch of scissor blades on stone. In the dim circle of light that I lay in, my head cushioned on an Arkansas Razorback pillow, I feel completely separate from them because of the simple fact that in seven days I will be rescued, removed from this terrible lonely place and put back in the noisy house I came from.
It occurs to me that Grandma and Ralph have nothing, they don’t even enjoy Bonanza all that much, they just turned it on because my mom told them to let me watch it. There can’t be anything for them to enjoy, with their long empty days, full of curled-up old ladies and dirty sheep. They don’t even drink pop.
I am crying on the floor, the tears go sideways and land coldly in my ears or on the velveteen pillow. I can’t bear, suddenly, the way the television sends out its sad blue light, making the edges of the room seem darker. A coffee can covered with contact paper holds red, white, and blue Fourth of July flowers, taken from a dead person. I wish suddenly that my grandma was dead, so she wouldn’t have to knit that afghan anymore. The rest of the year, while I’m gone back home and am playing with my friends, this is where my grandma is, her needles going, her teeth in the bathroom in a plastic bowl. My ears are swimming pools, and I feel trapped suddenly inside the small circle of light in the center of the room. I’m tiny Eva, watching Little Joe Cartwright through the bars of my crib, I’m a monkey, strapped into a space capsule and flung far out into the galaxy, weightless, hurtling along upside down through the Milky Way. Alone, alone, and alone. Against my will, I sob out loud. I turn over and weep into the Arkansas pillow, wrecking the velveteen. Suddenly my grandma’s hand is on my hair, the knitting needles have been set down.
There is telephone talk, and muffled comments from Grandma to Ralph, from Ralph to the person on the other end of the phone. My nose is pressed against the pillow and I’m still crying, or trying to. I suddenly want to hear what’s going on but I don’t have the nerve to sit up. My
clothes are gathered, the television is shut off, I am walked outside and put in the back seat of their great big yellow car. In the back window, there’s a dog with a bobbing head that I usually like to mess around with when I’m riding in the car. I don’t even bother to look at it; I just stare out the back window at the night sky.
After about a half hour of driving we pull over and sit at the side of the road. I’m no longer weightless, but unbearably heavy, and tired. My dad pulls up with a crunch of gravel, words are exchanged through open windows, quiet chuckles, I am placed in the front seat between my parents. We pull away, and as we head toward home, the galaxy recedes, the stars move back into position, and the sky stretches out overhead, black and familiar.
They’ve decided not to hassle me about this. “What happened, honey?” my mom asks once, gently.
“Bonanza made me sad,” I reply.
Cousins
Here is a scene. Two sisters are fishing together in a flat-bottomed boat on an olive green lake. They sit slumped like men, facing in opposite directions, drinking coffee out of a metal-sided thermos, smoking intently. Without their lipstick they look strangely weary, and passive, like pale replicas of their real selves. They both have a touch of morning sickness but neither is admitting it. Instead, they watch their bobbers and argue about worms versus minnows.
My cousin and I are floating in separate, saline oceans. I’m the size of a cocktail shrimp and she’s the size of a man’s thumb. My mother is the one on the left, wearing baggy gabardine trousers and a man’s shirt. My cousin’s mother is wearing blue jeans, cuffed at the bottom, and a cotton blouse printed with wild cowboys roping steers. Their voices carry, as usual, but at this point we can’t hear them.
It is five A.M. A duck stands up, shakes out its feathers, and peers above the still grass at the edge of the water. The skin of the lake twitches suddenly and a fish springs loose into the air, drops back down with a flat splash. Ripples move across the surface like radio waves. The sun hoists itself up and gets busy, laying a sparkling rug across the water, burning the beads of dew off the reeds, baking the tops of our mothers’ heads. One puts on sunglasses and the other a plaid fishing cap with a wide brim.
In the cold dark underwater, a long fish with a tattered tail discovers something interesting. He circles once and then has his breakfast before becoming theirs. As he breaks from the water to the air he twists hard, sending out a cold spray, sparks of green light. My aunt reels him in, triumphant, and grins at her sister, big teeth in a friendly mouth.
“Why you dirty rotten so-and-so,” my mother says admiringly.
It is nine o’clock on Saturday night, the sky is black and glittering with pinholes, old trees are bent down over the highway. In the dark field behind, the corn gathers its strength, grows an inch in the silence, then stops to rest. Next to the highway, screened in vegetation, a deer with muscular ears and glamorous eyes stands waiting to spring out from the wings into the next moving spotlight. The asphalt sighs in anticipation.
The car is a late-model Firebird, black on black with a T-roof and a tape deck that pelts out anguish, Fleetwood Mac. My cousin looks just like me except she has coarse hair and the jawline of an angel. She’s driving and I’m shotgun, talking to her profile. The story I’m recounting to her is full of what I said back to people when they said things to me. She can sing and listen at the same time, so she does that, nodding and grimacing when necessary.
She interrupts me once. “What’s my hair doing?”
“Laying down. I’ll tell you if it tries anything.” Her hair is short but so dense it has a tendency to stay wherever the wind pushes it. When she wakes up in the morning her head is like a landscape, with cliffs and valleys, spectacular pinnacles.
“Okay, go ahead,” she says. I finish my story before my favorite song comes on so I can devote myself to it.
We sing along to a tune about a woman who rings like a bell through the night. Neither of us knows what that means, but we’re in favor of it. We want to ring like bells, we want our hair to act right, we want to go out with guys who wear boots with turned-up toes and worn-down heels. We’re out in the country, on my cousin’s turf. My car is stalled in the city somewhere on four low tires, a blue-and-rust Volkswagen with the door coat-hangered shut. Her car is this streamlined, dark-eyed Firebird with its back end hiked up like a skirt. We are hurtling through the night, as they say, on our way to a bar where the guys own speedboats, snowmobiles, whatever else is current. I sing full-throttle: You can take me to paradise, but then again you can be cold as ice; I’m over my head, but it sure feels nice. I turn the rearview mirror around, check to see what’s happening with the face.
Nothing good. But there you have it. It’s yours at least, and your hair isn’t liable to thrust itself upward into stray pointing fingers. It doesn’t sound like corn husks when you brush it.
My cousin, beautiful in the dashboard light, glances over at me. She has a first name but I’ve always called her Wendell. She pushes it up to eighty and the song ends, a less wonderful one comes on. We’re coming to the spot on the highway where the giant trees dangle their wrists over the ground. In the crotch of an elm, during daylight hours, a gnarled car is visible, wedged among the branches.
Up ahead, the cornfields are dark and rustling. The deer shifts nervously behind the curtain of weeds, waiting for its cue. The car in the tree’s crotch is a warning to fast drivers, careening kids. Hidden beneath the driver’s seat, way up in the branches, is a silver pocketwatch with a broken face. It had been someone’s great-grandfather’s, handed down and handed down, until it reached the boy who drove his car into the side of a tree. Below the drifting branches, the ground is black and loamy, moving with bugs. In the silence, stalks of corn stretch their thin, thready feet and gather in the moisture. The pocket-watch is stopped at precisely 11:47, as was the boy. Fleetwood Mac rolls around the bend and the deer springs full-blown out of the brocade trees. In the white pool of headlights, in front of a swerving audience, it does a short, stark, modern dance, and exits to the right. We recover and slow it down, shaking.
“He could have wrecked my whole front end,” Wendell says. This is the farm-kid mentality. Her idea of a gorgeous deer is one that hangs upside down on the wall of the shed, a rib cage, a pair of antlers, a gamy hunk of dinner. She feels the same way about cows and pigs.
We’re in the sticks. Way out here things are measured in shitloads, and every third guy you meet is named Junior. I’ve decided I don’t even like this bar we’re going to, that howling three-man band and the bathroom with no stalls, just stools. Now I’m slumped and surly, an old pose for me. That deer had legs like canes, feet like Dixie cups.
Wendell pats my knee, grinning. “Settle down,” she says. “It didn’t hit us. We’re safe.” She likes excitement as long as her car doesn’t get hurt. I light a cigarette, begin dirtying up her ashtray, and mess with the tape until our favorite song comes on again. We’re back up to eighty on the narrow highway, daring the ignorant to take a step onto the asphalt. This is Illinois, a land of lumbering raccoons, snake-tailed possums, and flatout running bunnies, all trying to cross the road. The interior of the car smells like leather and evergreen trees, the moon peers through the roof, and Wendell drives with one finger.
“Hey, how’s my hair?” she asks suddenly. Her eyes are clear brown, her cheekbones are high and delicate, brushed with pink, her lips aren’t too big or too little. She’s wearing my shirt. A clump of hair has pushed itself forward in the excitement. It looks like a small, startled hand rising from the back of her head.
I make an okay sign, thumb and forefinger. The music is deafening.
Back in the cluster of trees, the deer moves into position again and the willows run their fingers along the ground. The corn whispers encouragement to itself. In the bar up ahead waitresses slam sloe-gin fizzes down on wet tables and men point pool cues at each other in the early stages of drunkenness. The singer in the three-man band whispers test into the
microphone and rolls his eyes at the feedback. The sound guy jumps up from a table full of ladies and heads over to turn knobs.
We crunch over the parking lot gravel and wait for our song to finish. I’m over my head, but it sure feels nice. The bar is low and windowless, with patched siding and a kicked-in door; the lot is full of muscle cars and pickups. A man and a woman burst through the door and stand negotiating who will drive. He’s got the keys but she looks fiercer. In the blinking neon our faces are malarial and buttery. As the song winds down, the drama in front of us ends. He throws the keys at her as hard as he can but she jumps nimbly out of the way and picks them up with a handful of gravel, begins pelting his back as he weaves into the darkness.
Wendell turns to me with a grin, a question on her lips. Before she can ask I reach over and press her excited hair back down.
Their house has a face on it, two windows with the shades half down, a brown slot of a door, and a glaring mouthful of railing with a few pickets missing. Pink geraniums grow like earrings on either side of the porch. It’s August and the grass is golden and spiky against our ankles, the geraniums smell like dust. A row of hollyhocks stands out by the road, the flowers are upside-down ladies, red, maroon, and dried-up brown. An exploded raccoon is abuzz over on the far side of the highway and crows are dropping down from time to time to sort among the pieces. On either side of the house, fields fall away, rolling and baking in the heat.
The sisters are sitting on the stoop shelling peas, talking overtop of each other. My mother says mayonnaise goes bad in two hours in the hot sun and my aunt says bullshit. They’ve just driven out to the fields and left the lunches for the hired men. They argue energetically about this, until the rooster walks up and my aunt carries her bowl in the house to finish the discussion through the screen door. She and the rooster hate each other.