by Amy Conner
“Well,” he says, stiff as a length of stove wood, “y’all can see she’s home now. Sorry to have called you out for a false alarm.”
The asteroid-sized cop closes his notebook. “Happens more often than you think, Mr. Sizemore,” he says cheerfully. “We’ll be on our way now. Y’all have a happy Thanksgiving.”
That’s guaranteed not to happen in this house, but I say anyway, “And the same to you, officers. I’m sorry again about the mix-up.”
Du walks the cops to the front door, doing his best to look like he’s got this situation under control. There’s a low-voiced exchange outside on the porch I can’t quite hear, but from the cops’ guffaws I gather his good-ole-boy instincts are coming through in the clutch.
My mother crosses the room and folds me into her thin arms. Dropping Troy’s hay rope so I can hug her back, I’m aware of her ribs beneath my hands, frail as swallowtail butterfly wings under her woolen dress.
“I’m so sorry,” I whisper into her shoulder. “I shouldn’t have worried you.”
“Oh, Annie,” she sighs. “What have you gone and done now?”
My throat closes around any words I might have spoken when Du stalks back into the living room, his footsteps loud as the banging of my heart. I move away from my mother’s side, wondering if my marriage, the life I left behind yesterday, will survive this Thanksgiving Day.
“I’m gonna ask you one more time,” Du says, his voice cold and distant as the surface of the moon. “Where you been? And where the hail did that dog come from?” Troy’s tail is erect and quivering, his expression wary, but he holds his ground.
Taking courage from the dog, I walk across the acre of carpet toward my husband, and with every step I feel the rosebush voice howling inside me. I choose the easy question first.
“He’s a rescue,” I tell him, my voice shaking. “I, I found him in an elevator.”
Du snorts in disgust. “I mean it. Where. You. Been.” I peek at him. He folds his arms, eyes narrowed to coin slots. I look down at his fleece slippers, away from the mask of rage on Du’s normally amiable face.
Here I am again.
It’s time to grovel. I’m literally being called on the carpet, an all too familiar experience. For more times than I can count, Du’s spoken to me as though I were a disobedient child, but this is the first time in thirteen years of marriage he’s been so angry he doesn’t sound like he wants to forgive me. Like always, I can’t speak up because I don’t know what to say, how to justify the unjustifiable.
And then, with a jolt of self-awareness like a thrown breaker, I’m amazed to discover I’m mortally tired of this. I’m sick to my soul of the carpet and my usual place on it. I’ll be damned if I can stand living like this anymore, always wrong, always apologizing. For better or for worse, this is me.
I lift my chin, tilt my head back, and look my husband in the eye, defiant. “I was helping a friend.”
“Which friend?” Du demands. “Where were you all night, dressed like a damned slut?”
I’m not turning back from this. If I’m going to be damned, let me be damned for the truth—at least, the parts of the truth I can tell him.
“Starr Dukes is my oldest friend, my best friend since I was seven years old. She needed a ride to New Orleans, and I drove her.” With every word, I know I’m not wrong. Not this time, not about this. “Before you ask, I didn’t tell you because I knew you’d say I couldn’t do it since she’s Bobby Shapley’s pregnant girlfriend, the one everybody’s been talking about. Starr didn’t have another soul in the world to help her. It was the right thing to do, and I did it.”
In this room, among the carefully curated furniture and artwork, the outward and visible manifestations of Du’s success, my explanation falls like a dead bomb: nobody wants to pick it up because it might go off.
Du’s blank-faced, his eyes dull. He slumps, and his big, meaty shoulders collapse inward as though he’s taken a body blow from the heavyweight champion of the world. When he finally speaks, he says heavily, “You thoughtless bitch. Bobby’s pregnant girlfriend. You helped that little whore, and now I’m going to have to deal with the shit that’s gonna come down. Goddamn you, Annie. The Judge will see me tossed out of the firm and doing wills for niggers when he hears about this.” Blindly, Du turns and stumbles away from me, his hands in his hair. I can only watch him leaving the living room, crossing the foyer, taking the stairs to the second floor.
“It’s too much. I can’t take this shit anymore. I’m gonna pack me a bag, go somewheres else and think things over.” Du’s voice dwindles with his footsteps, and then I hear a door quietly shutting upstairs. My mother’s tired face is oblique, unreadable, but she says nothing.
I should go after him.
But I don’t.
My mother and I are outside down by the rose garden, letting Troy Smoot run around in the backyard. Off the hay rope, the dog’s hurling himself across the frosted brown grass like a manic Frisbee, peeing on the lawn furniture and chasing imaginary rabbits through the bushes.
The BMW turns out to be parked in the garage, the keys in the ignition. On the front seat I found my purse and parka, its pocket still stuffed with hundred-dollar bills. It’s something of a relief that now I don’t have to remember Starr as a thief but as an inconsiderate, lying, ex-best friend instead. I can imagine Du thought the worst after he discovered the car, after he’d found I wasn’t in the house. Actually, I can’t imagine what he thought and I’m not sure I want to try.
My mother’s bundled up in her old mink, sitting on the cement bench beside the denuded rosebushes and smoking a cigarette. She offers me one from her pack.
As I light it, she surprises me by asking, “Where’d you get the dress? It’s not your usual style.”
So grateful for being able to smoke again, without thinking I say, “Maison-Dit.”
She takes a ladylike drag on her Parliament. “Somehow I can’t see Dolly selling it to you. And I doubt the jacket came from there.” The dog sniffs inquisitively at one of the rosebushes, the Peace hybrid tea, scoping out his new surroundings. My mother smiles. “I like him,” she says.
“He’s a sweetheart of a dog,” I say absently, wondering how I’m going to explain that I stole Troy Smoot from that perverted cheapskate Jerome Treeby. “I guess he’s mine now.”
“Not the dog,” my mother says. “I meant the man who loaned that jacket to you—he must have been worried you’d be cold.” My mouth falls open at this. She stands up and smoothes my hair behind my ear. “It’s been the most dismal fall,” she says, “far too chilly for Thanksgiving.”
“I love you,” I say, my voice breaking. “I’m sorry I did this to you, to Du.”
“Mercy Anne,” she says, “Duane’s a grown man. He can take care of himself. And if you wanted to help Starr, I’m glad you did—although it would’ve been better to have told him what your plans were. He really was beside himself when he called me.”
“But I knew Du wouldn’t let me even have coffee with her. I couldn’t exactly tell him I was driving Starr to New Orleans to get money for a lawyer so she could take on the Shapleys. Besides, the whole damned thing was a terrible idea, a waste of time, not worth what I may have lost here today.” I bite my lip and look away. “She just . . . left me.”
My mother mashes her cigarette out on the cement bench and asks casually, “How did it go so wrong between you and Starr?”
So I tell her about Starr’s predicament, about her trouble with the Judge, her inexplicable decision to get back together with Bobby, how she stranded me in New Orleans. I give her an abbreviated version of how I got home, too, leaving out the truck stop part. Even now, the memories of Starr’s betrayal, of Ted’s face as I left him, tear through my heart like a dull knife cutting a ripe tomato.
“And so it was all for nothing,” I say when I’ve finished. I stub my cigarette out on the sole of my boot. “I should have known Starr would act like that. It was a, a . . . trashy thing to do, just
like what everyone used to say about her.” I gulp, remembering my husband’s reaction. “And Du’s so angry.”
My mother’s mouth tightens. “That’s ridiculous. I can only imagine what it’s been like for you,” she says. “Duane Sizemore has always meant to keep you on a pretty short leash. I could have told him that taking such a heavy-handed approach would end up, well, much the way it has.” She points at Troy Smoot, who’s digging in the rose bed, scattering the pine-straw mulch with furious energy. “Isn’t that the Treebys’ dog?”
“Yes,” I confess.
“Good for you. Someone should have taken that poor thing away from Jerome a long time ago. I almost stole him myself once.”
At this astounding information, I have to sit down on the cold cement bench next to her, remembering right away I really ought to go inside and put on some underwear. That’s why I don’t notice that the dog has unearthed a small pile of dusty EPT tests and has dropped them beside my boots like he’s sharing a kill. My mother and I seem to see them at the same time.
“What’s this?” she asks. She reaches down, picking up one of the wands.
Of course. Let the unraveling of my lies continue. Why ever not?
“Oh, Annie.” Shaking her head, my mother’s voice is sorrowful. “Why have you buried”—she gestures at the pregnancy tests on the ground with an air of despair—“all this? Why didn’t you tell me? I’d assumed that you and Duane had decided you didn’t want children after all.”
Too tired to cry, I shake my head and look away, hopelessly sliding the rough length of Troy’s hay rope through my fingers. “I buried them so no one, especially not you, would know I was still trying to have a baby,” I say with a short laugh, arid as the dirt of the rose bed. “I gave that up for good yesterday morning. After nearly thirteen years, I’ve finally had enough. I’m a failure at getting pregnant,just like I’m a failure at everything else.”
“Darling,” my mother says. “You’re not a failure, not really.”
“No?” I drop the EPT test on the ground. “Look, you don’t have to be kind to me. I know it’s true. All those goody two-shoes over at the Ladies’ League act like I’m the last person on earth they want on that stupid committee, and I can’t really blame them because I’m positive rocking those babies just gives them gas. Oh, and at the firm? The other partners’ wives always stop talking when I come in the room and give me these looks, like I just ripped open a big bag of ripe garbage and dumped it on the carpet. And . . . and it seems like Du’s done with me, so I guess it’s sort of a blessing, me not being pregnant. A baby would only make this situation even more complicated.”
I still can’t believe it: after thirteen years of a maybe-not-so-bad marriage, Du’s gone and perhaps not ever coming back. He left without knowing the worst of it. The hell of it is, he left because of Starr. Coiling the hay rope and putting it in the jean jacket’s pocket, I consider the EPT tests piled like grimy finger bones on the dead grass. There’re fifteen of them so far, and Troy’s still digging.
“I swear to God,” I mutter hopelessly. “It’s always been like there was some big-ass, super-important rule book that got passed around, only I was out of town the day everybody else read it.” I put my face in my hands, rubbing my eyes, gritty from lack of sleep. “And don’t try to tell me I haven’t been this crashing disappointment to you all my life. I already know.” My joints protesting, I get up off the cement bench, wrapping Ted’s jacket closer around me. It smells like him. The heady scents of night and leather and the faintest trace of cologne bring me almost, unaccountably, to tears.
My mother takes my hand. “Come on,” she says. “Come with me to the house. I’m sure that dog needs to eat, even if you won’t. I’m so cold I feel like a freezer-burned catfish.”
“Okay,” I say. She’s right: her hand is like ice in mine. “I’ll make coffee, and we can have some pumpkin pie, at least. Oh, and I should call Aunt Too-Tai to tell her Thanksgiving’s off.”
“Besides, there’re some things I need to tell you.”
Curious now, I whistle to the dog. We really should go back inside before we all catch pneumonia. The three of us walk across the lawn to the flagstone terrace together, silent, my mother and I thinking our own thoughts. Reaching the back steps, I open the screen door to go into the kitchen.
“I didn’t love your father, you know,” my mother says, looking back over her shoulder at the rose garden, shivering. “Not at first.”
CHAPTER 16
“Oh, Annie,” my mother begins, “your father was the bright, golden dream of a near-destitute girl growing up in Lannette, Georgia. That was me.” With a sigh, she then falls silent.
We’re sitting at the kitchen table, cups of steaming coffee in front of us. After all the coffee I’ve had in the last twenty-four hours, my cup is supremely unenticing, but I take a sip anyway. My eyes are burning with fatigue, but I need to hear this.
“You’ve never talked about your childhood very much,” I say. “I always wondered.”
She nods. “It’s not hard to understand why. God knows, I’ve never wanted to call attention to my upbringing. You see, my parents worked in the West Point Pepperell towel mills—lint-heads, they were called. My father, a Black Irish immigrant from County Mayo, could only find work in the bleachery, and my mother was a folder on the third shift. We were tenants in the mill houses then, cheap little four-squares with no insulation but only the bare clapboard siding between us and the weather. The winter wind whistled into those cramped and drafty rooms like a southbound freight, so my father used to stuff old newspapers into the leaking window frames, but the wind found its way inside anyhow. In the wild ravine behind those houses, the mill creek ran gray and greasy with foam curds of soap and factory chemicals. My father’s hands were scarred a permanent fish-belly white from the bleach, and my mother coughed all night long, a racking cough so labored that it woke me up in the dark. In those houses, the walls were thin as glass, and you could see the ground through the holes in the floors.”
She takes a sip of her own coffee, watching me over the rim of her cup as if to see how I’m taking this.
Thanks to my Grandmother Banks’s relentless, corrosive disdain for my mother, I always knew she came from nothing much, but this is a revelation. I mean, I never knew it was that bad. After a quiet moment, my mother goes on.
“It was a hard life. Many times, Annie, we didn’t have much to eat, but my parents made sure that I had oranges, milk, and meat while they’d make do with bacon drippings on stale bread. Mother lined their own shoes with cardboard when the soles wore out, but every fall she always saw to it that I had a new pair of sturdy oxfords for school. I was a lonely, studious high school senior when my parents died within six months of each other. My father went in a machinery accident at the mill, and my mother from the emphysema—brown lung, the mill workers called it—that she’d gotten from breathing in all that lint, year after year.”
“How old were you?” I ask.
She looks away. “Eighteen, just two months shy of graduating. Far away in North Carolina, all of my mother’s people had turned their backs on her when she’d married a bog-trot Irishman, and my father’s kinfolk were only mysterious names in the family Bible, so when I had to quit the mill house after they died, I rented a miserable little room in town with the hundred dollars Mother had managed to leave me.
“But you should know that although I was an only child, I wasn’t left completely alone in the world. The women at the Reform Methodist church in the next valley got together and held pancake suppers, paper drives, and bake sales to raise money for me. Those good women. They must have known that after my mother passed I would have died, too, if I could. I only knew I wanted out of Lannette. The memories of my parents were too strong there.”
This explains so much—the thundering silence about my maternal grandparents, their utter absence from my life. I’ve always known they died young, but not how miserably they died, how alone my mother h
ad been. Having to rely upon the kindness of strangers must have galled like acid.
“But I thought you and Daddy met at Tulane, where you were both in school,” I begin. “How . . .”
My mother looks out the window and compresses her lips. “I’m getting there. My scholarship from Newcomb College came through three days after we buried my mother. I worked in the mill myself all that summer, but in the fall, when I set my cardboard suitcase on the gleaming wooden floor of my new dorm room in New Orleans, I couldn’t believe it. I’d never lived anywhere as fine as that small, unassuming space. There was a clean, bare mattress on the iron bed frame waiting for the hand-pieced quilt my mother had sewn from her old dresses, a sunny window overlooking the college’s front lawn. I had my very own desk, too.
“I’d be sharing the closet, though. My roommate’s wardrobe was already hanging there, and my clothes, so proudly made by the churchwomen, were shabby things compared to her beautiful frocks, walking dresses, and suits on scented, padded hangers. She had hats and pumps, court shoes and handbags, and the most darling matched set of luggage—caramel-colored leather covered with luxury liner stickers. Her bed was made up with lovely pink sheets and a matching comforter, and I was just touching the silk bathrobe thrown across the end of it when my roommate walked in the door with a friend, both of them dressed all in white. They were laughing and windblown, while I was wrinkled and worn out after the fourteen-hour bus ride from Lannette.
“ ‘You must be Colleen,’ the tall, blond one said, holding out her hand for me to shake. ‘I’m Tess. Do you play tennis?’ Of course I didn’t—the solitary court in Lannette was at the country club, and only the executives and their wives played there. I was so embarrassed before those two graceful girls in their tennis dresses, embarrassed that I’d been caught out touching something that wasn’t mine.
“But as the semester wore on, Tess became my best friend. We were roommates for three years, and from her I learned how to make my poor clothes look their best and was thrilled to have her barely worn castoffs since we were almost exactly the same size. I bought a secondhand copy of Emily Post and copied Tess’s table manners, trading my hick Lannette accent for her cultured one. And though I was pitifully shy at first, I learned soon enough how to talk to boys because they all flocked to her like bees to a branch of pear blossom. She had the knack of making everything seem so, so . . . easy. Tess was the best thing that had ever happened to me, until I met your father.”