Mockingbird

by Sean Stewart

  Carlos turned right seemingly at random and we were rolling through a neighborhood of faded Southern Gothic mansions, some in lovely condition, with wide balconies and restored porch swings, others falling apart like blowzy Southern belles many years past their prime. We passed a smaller, Georgian affair that cowered under a tremendous live oak. “Momma once said that a lot of Southern history is explained by the fact that every good-sized live oak has a few limbs at just the right height to hang a man,” I told Carlos. You could have dangled a score of bad guys from this monster. “You said there were two things that kept you from marrying Candy. Her job was one. And the other?”

  Carlos nodded. “Sí. The truth is—perdón, Toni—I am not so crazy about my mother-in-law.”

  “You? You aren’t crazy about your mother-in-law?”

  He turned right again, heading back west through the residential streets. “What do you mean by that?”

  “But—Carlos! She’s dead! Candy’s mother is in the ground, comprende?”

  He nodded gloomily. “Sí. If she was alive, that would be one thing. But the dead…the dead are not reasonable, Toni. You see? Maybe if your sainted mother was alive, she would try hard to get along, you know? She would want to see her grand-babies. She would hold her tongue, as my mother does. But the dead? No. In my experience they are muy tercos. Very bossy.”

  “Your mother couldn’t hold her tongue with a spaghetti fork!”

  Carlos looked at me. “I am not here to talk about Mamá. I am telling you I am not so easy with marrying into this family. This is my point.”

  “You don’t know anything about my mother. Didn’t she always make you welcome in our house?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Whose family are you going to marry into then, Carlos? Some dour chica, get out of your bed every Wednesday for the five o’clock Mass—you think she’s going to want you, with your tattoos and your medicine bags and your death car?”

  Carlos frowned. “A family is not a game. It’s not for fun. It’s serious. My kids, I want them to grow up right.”

  “Listen, you will never find a better wife than Candy, someone who will put up with your craziness, who feels why it’s important to light the candles on the hood of your car, who can touch those bones and still be happy, can walk in the sunlight. Candy is perfect for you. If you are too blind to see that, you deserve whatever wife you settle for.”

  Carlos chewed on his mustache. “This is what my mother says.”

  “La Hag? I mean, Mrs. Gonzales thinks you should marry Candy?”

  “Mm. But a man can’t choose his wife to please his mother,” Carlos said. “I have been trying to think it through.” We were back to Montrose, by the old Carnegie Library. Carlos swung majestically into the center lane, cutting off a Honda whose driver put down his cell phone long enough to flip us the finger.

  “So the reason you haven’t said yes to Candy is that she had too much support from your mother.”

  “Maybe. Okay.”

  Momma used to say, “Wonders will never cease.” Just that once, she surely was not lying.

  Later that night Candy called to say that Carlos had accepted her proposal. The wedding was set for September 20th. Everything was right in her world.

  It nearly killed me.

  I had expected to be relieved for her, or glad, or just amused. Instead, the fragile calm I had been trying to hold around myself shattered. There would be no large check from Rick Manzetti; the Riders had seen to that. I was four and a half months pregnant, showing now, with no job and no father for my child. There would be no Daddy to protect the baby from me. It would absorb my every mistake.

  No. I couldn’t let that happen. I had struck out at the Bookstop, my date with Bill Jr. had been a disaster, but I could not allow myself to quit hunting. Rick Manzetti was back in New Orleans, but I called and left a message on his machine suggesting that I would be happy to tell him some of the Little Lost Girl stories as soon as he could come back to Houston. Then, to make sure I wasn’t missing any chances, I called up my old friend Greg, the one Momma had terrorized in the pharmacy as he tried to buy a pack of condoms.

  As a potential father, Greg had some liabilities. He was not reliable. He was not a man with a strong direction in life. He didn’t have a good steady job, nor did he seem to want one. But he was funny, and charming, and good-looking, and he had said more than once that he looked forward to having children.

  I asked Greg if he wanted to see a movie with me and he said yes.

  Now I had to figure out how to push our date past the point of just being friends. Any relationship will go on just as it always has unless you work to change it, or one of the parties goes away and comes back a different person. Well, I had changed, hadn’t I? Before Momma died, I had never been mounted by a Rider. I had never been pregnant. I had never been unemployed. Hard to call these improvements, of course.

  Once again I wished I was Candy. For the first time I regretted spending all that time catching baseballs instead of men. Humiliating, but there it was: I was more comfortable in a mask and chest protector than in a short skirt and nylons. I was the catcher on the girl’s softball team, which went to the city finals and lost out to the Bellaire Bullets. Catcher is a good position to play if you’re bowlegged but smart.

  I don’t think girls everywhere know how to play ball quite like we do in Texas. I’m not saying they don’t have good teams, but I think sports is closer to religion here than most places. Thanks to Daddy I knew how to call a game. I knew why 2 and 1 with two men out was a running count and I had a good arm for the throw to second base. I knew how to turn my wrists over when swinging to lift a ball over the infield and how to inside-out a pitch on the outer half of the plate and drive it to the opposite field. I could lay down a bunt if the situation called for it. I was a singles hitter, like most girls, but I was good enough to hit third for our team, because nobody was better at advancing a runner.

  Was there such a thing as a dating slump? And if there was, I wondered if there were lessons to be learned from baseball. The worst hitting slump I ever went through was in my junior year in high school. The longer I went without a few decent at-bats, the worse my swing got. I started pressing. After we lost the last game of the regular season, I was 2 for my last 17.

  “You’re thinking too much,” Daddy told me after the game. I remember him looking patiently across the steering wheel at me, his round chin stubbled with greying whiskers. “It’s your head that gets you in trouble, Toni. The body remembers.”

  I didn’t say anything, but I stopped taking batting practice. I left the kitchen if there was a ballgame on the radio. I even skipped one team meeting, pretending I had a doctor’s appointment. When the playoffs started, I knew the other pitcher was going to want to go strike one, and I resolved to swing at the first pitch even if I had to golf it on the third hop. It came straight over the center of the plate and I drilled it off the pitcher’s knee and into left field. For the rest of the playoffs I never touched a bat until I was standing in the on-deck circle. I led all hitters, going 10 for 21 with three walks, three sacrifices, and 9 RBI.

  I was remembering that playoff run as I was trying to decide what to wear on my date with Greg. I considered the silk shantung jacket, but it hadn’t been lucky for me with Bill Jr. Besides, it was fitted, and I was scared that if I tried it on, my little tummy would make it look funny and I would know I had passed the Pregnant Lady line and could no longer be sexy.

  I wandered into the kitchen and looked at the reflection staring at me from the window above the kitchen sink. The reflection was half hidden behind the leaves of a peppermint plant. Those Beauchamp women, always half hidden in the foliage. Then something a little bit magical happened. A slow, lazy smile crept over the reflection. I wasn’t smiling, but the reflection was. She leaned forward and looked at me. Her bangs fell across her eyes. I pushed mine aside to see her face better. It was my face. And now I could feel that my mouth had curved into ju
st her lazy smile.

  She laughed, a low, husky laugh. “Hey, sweet child,” said a voice which was not quite my voice. It was deep as the South, lazy as a bayou. I picked up that voice like an instrument left lying for me to find, an instrument I knew but had forgotten. “Hey Sugar,” I said, smiling back.

  Maybe I was crazy then; maybe it was all the worry that had left me weak, that made me call Sugar to myself. I walked over to the chifforobe, my feet bare and alive to the kiss of the cool tile. I reached into Sugar’s cubby and searched among the sweet and scented things there and took the ones whose touch most pleased me: a silk scarf the color of mangoes; a brooch for my dark hair; a tiny crystal thimble of perfume. Then I went upstairs to change. I did not let the goddess all the way in; not wholly. I left her laughing at me from my kitchen window. But the body remembers, I whispered to myself as I climbed the stairs and dressed myself and touched the scent to my wrists. In the Galleria I had been Sugar, that sweet one who desired. If I could just stop thinking, my body would remember.

  There must be some gifts, I figured, that I could choose to accept.

  Later on, sometime after midnight, Greg pulled himself alongside my sweaty body and propped his head up on his elbow. I could just see his smile in the faint blue light of the digital clock beside his bed. I stretched like a cat and purred, the last phantom of Sugar like a lazy ghost in my limbs. “My God, Greg. What on earth were you doing down there?”

  He grinned. “The alphabet. Did you like it?”

  I closed my eyes and surreptitiously squeezed my thighs together. “Oh my. How far did you get?”

  “I think I was on M when you rolled me over.”

  Greg had filled out a lot since high school. Back then he had been whip-thin, all bangs and elbows. But over the years he had found his father’s blocky shoulders and wide back and hams somewhere—in the bottom of a few bottles of beer, probably, where most Texas men seemed to locate their figures. Even his fingers were big and thick. But quick still, and light. He reached his hand toward my belly. “May I?”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  His fingers settled on the bottom of my belly, light as doves. He ran his hand along the small undercurve of my abdomen. “It’s hard!”

  “You expected Jell-O? I’m not getting fat, you know. That’s pure muscle, being pushed and stretched by this watermelon growing inside me.” His hand stopped. “Do you find it ugly?”

  “I can barely find it at all. When will you really start to show?”

  “Soon, I think. I don’t know. I’ve never done this before.” I covered his hand with mine. Now that the sex was over I felt shy about touching him. It was definitely awkward to be there, naked, without Sugar inside me.

  “Do you ever get freaked out, Toni? I mean, to have this creature growing inside you? I think that would be so strange, to have a whole other animal living in me, and then fwaroom! bursting out like those things in Alien.”

  “Shut up, Greg. Yuck.”

  “Do you remember Mr. Boggs in twelfth grade Biology? I still remember him talking about how the fetus was made from undifferentiated cells, just like cancer cells. I thought it was so weird that a baby was like a tumor, only the baby was better organized.” He stopped. “Uh-oh. Forgot about your mom. Sorry, kid.”

  (It is two months before my mother’s death. Her mastectomy was too late. Now the cancer is in the left lobe of her brain, and in her spine and her ribs and the bones of her legs. She is in so much pain that tears of fury are standing in her eyes. “Get me some more of that goddam codeine, Toni.”

  The whole day has gone like this. “I can’t let you have it yet.”

  “Don’t tell me what the fuck to do, I’m your mother you little witch.” Momma has been drinking to help with the pain. Not that she has to be drunk to talk to me like this. “Oh God I wish I were dead and buried.”

  “Then let’s make it easy on all of us,” I say. “Here’s the codeine, Momma. Here is the whole bottle. You really want it? Take it. Take every last one. I’ll get you a glass of bourbon to wash it down, how about that? How about that?” I’m so mad, the bottle of pills in my hand is shaking hard enough to rattle.

  Momma stares at me, and crumples, and starts to cry, rocking back and forth in her bed. “I want Candy here. I don’t want you. Go away, go away. You just want me to die.”

  But it was me, not Candy, who nursed her through the last two months.)

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Greg took his hand off my stomach. “Okay.”

  I moved his hand up and put it on my left breast. I didn’t feel sexy anymore, I felt cold and frightened. But I refused to waste the chance Sugar had made for me. “Oh, Christ, that felt good,” I said. “We should have done this before, Greg. I don’t know why we never did this before.”

  “You were never like this before. You’ve changed.”

  I tried to smile. “In a good way, I hope.”

  “Zat remains to be uncovered by ze analysis,” he said Freudianly, sitting up in bed. I pulled the sheet up over my breasts. “Don’t get me wrong,” Greg said. “The sex was good. Really good. I’ve slept with sexier women who weren’t nearly so good in bed.”

  “I hear a ‘but’ coming.”

  He laughed. “But…yeah. Tonight…it was fun, but it wasn’t really you, was it, Toni? It was you and something else. Your voice—I never heard you talk that way before. Slow and lazy. Never seen you walk that way. But your mother did, sometimes.”

  “Momma?”

  “Not that I didn’t like your mother. But I sure never wanted to sleep with her.”

  “I can understand that.”

  “Used to scare the hell out of me, to be honest,” Greg said.

  “Me too,” I said.

  Momma. Momma in me like a cancer, in my bones and brain and lungs.

  All in all, you couldn’t call my evening with Greg a success. The sex had been fun while Sugar was in me, but embarrassing afterwards. Worse, the idea of marrying a man who saw so much of Momma in me gave me the shivers. Besides, what kind of father would Greg make? Up at all hours, joining amateur blues bands or practicing stage magic or heading down to Austin to audition for a bit part in an independent movie. No job, no income, no set course in life.

  No. Once I had been rejected, it was easy to see I had never really wanted him.

  With Bill Jr. and Greg out of the running, that left only the dark horse, Rick Manzetti. Though even he was more interested in Momma than he was in me. He returned my phone message and said he would try to make it to Houston early in June to collect some of the Little Lost Girl stories.

  The night after my date with Greg I was sitting in the garden with Daddy and we were talking. It was dark and warm under the canopy of live-oak. I hadn’t yet laid in the summer’s supply of Deep Woods Off to repel the mosquitoes, so I had rummaged through Momma’s drawers upstairs until I found half a bottle of Skin-So-Soft to wipe down with. The first grapefruits of the year had come in from the Rio Grande valley and I had squeezed us a couple of glasses of juice.

  “Daddy, why did you love Momma?” I asked.

  He was quiet a spell, and I let him be. “Just loved her, I reckon. And she needed me. It’s a great pull, to be needed.” He took a sip of juice. “I don’t guess there’s a man on earth could live with your Momma if he didn’t love her pretty good.” Daddy smiled. “Then we had you and Candy. I sure wasn’t going to leave my girls.”

  I had some of my grapefruit juice. Fresh-squeezed it is so much sweeter than you would imagine if you only ever had the canned stuff.

  “Your momma used to say, ‘Men! You can’t live with ’em, and you can’t kill ’em.’”

  “Remember her apron?” I said. “The Way To A Man’s Heart Is Through His Chest.”

  “I believe she was about the smartest person I ever knew,” Daddy said. “Not school-smart, not like you. But she had a way of looking at things that was different from anybody else. You could walk down a street a hundred times wit
h a hundred different people and see the same road; but when you went with Elena, she’d make you see it new.”

  “I hate that,” I said. “I don’t like it when things change. I don’t think Momma ever saw a thing for what it was. I mean, which song is really the mockingbird’s own? It isn’t enough to keep pretending. There has to be something solid and real and true and forever. Momma couldn’t hold herself together two hours running. If she was happy, she saw one thing. If she was sad, she saw another. One day she was a good mom to us; the next day she was a failure. Was I a bad kid, a good kid, ornery or cranky or dutiful or what? Every time I looked back it seemed like the landscape behind me flipped around.”

  “You were a good kid,” Daddy said. “A good, ornery kid.”

  “She was just so sad, Daddy.” Unexpectedly I found myself starting to cry. “She was so sad all the time. I used to hate her so much for getting sad like that. I used to think there was something I could do, if only I wasn’t so stupid or stubborn or willful. If I could just be good enough, she’d be happy and then she wouldn’t—”

  “Baby,” Daddy said, “it wasn’t your job to take care of us.”

  “But I never had a chance, did I? It was Angela, it was the Little Lost Girl up in Canada, and there was nothing I could have done.”

  “A team falls apart when everyone is trying to do the next man’s job. You have to trust the people around you, Toni.”

  “What if you can’t?” I wiped my eyes with my shirtsleeve. Daddy didn’t answer.