by Janis Owens
Since the Browns still go to Welcome, Kenneth comes home with Grannie sometimes, and in her presence, he loses some of his babe-hound gloss and returns to his goofy old Kenneth-self, and the three of us have a big old time. We eat till we drop, then settle down on the couch and watch wrestling on TBS, though I don’t like it as much as I used to, I don’t know why. I guess I’m getting a little old for wrestling. It’s beginning to seem kind of fake and dumb to me, though Grannie, she still gets into it. I mean, to her, these people aren’t actors, no way, and when the good guy is getting double-teamed, she gets hot as a firecracker, wants to call Atlanta and tell the police. I guess the television gives it too much of an air of reality for her to handle. Usually she’s pretty real herself, but she takes wrestling and As the World Turns to heart, and me and Kenneth usually laugh our butts off every Sunday, watching her.
At six, they have to get dressed for the evening service at Welcome, which gives me time to work on my tapes, because Pastor Jim (all these charismatic preachers have regular-guy names like that: Pastor Bob or Pastor Jim) quit having an evening service on Sundays so people could spend some quality time with their families. Well, I really got a witness to that (charismatic term) and have Grannie’s little house all to myself for a couple of hours, since Missy’s still a good Baptist and Simon is actually living part-time up in Waycross, has rented an apartment up there, where he stays a good part of the week.
I miss him a lot. Sim is good to have around because he’s easy on the nerves and good company to boot, has never given me a hard time about moving out, never lays on any little guilt trips. Every once in a while he drops by the high school and takes me to lunch, and if I can swing it, I want to go and stay with him a few days during spring break, which is soon upon us, just next week. We’ll have a good old time up there, and if Sondra Cole goes up for a visit, maybe she’ll bring Rachel along, and in the light of the Georgia sun she’ll lose her disgust for me and something will develop.
I’m not getting my hopes up, though, because Rachel Cole still cannot stand me, even less than she used to, and it’s not even her fault, or not altogether. See, the Coles are right on the borderline of poor (not food-stamp poor, but Dollar Store poor) and their three lovely daughters are their primary assets. When Sim and Sondra hit it off in high school, their mother naturally saw visions of rich in-laws and free Sanger furniture, and when I fell in love with Rachel, it was to everyone’s satisfaction.
Everyone but Rachel, that is, who is about one hundred seventeen pounds of soft, green-eyed, ginger-haired rebellion, with plans to get out of the middle-class squeeze by her own wits and not my inheritance. A worthy ambition, I am sure, but I didn’t ask to fall in love, either, and almost died of it when we used to go to school together at Lincoln Park. Back then, she treated me with a semblance of decency, occasionally sending a polite word or two in my direction, even sitting next to me in the car if Sim and Sondra happened to be giving us a ride at the same time.
Then Simon and Sondra graduated last May, and they decided to forgo any hasty decisions about an early engagement and he moved to Waycross, and they never even talk about getting married anymore, though they still write and visit each other and he still calls her his girlfriend and all. But nothing legally guaranteed to keep the Coles in new couches, so the pressure was on Rachel to perform, and that’s when her patience ran out and she has come to the point where she rolls her eyes at everything I say. I mean, I could raise my hand in algebra and ask a perfectly honest, straightforward question about the square root of 42, and out of the corner of my eye, see her face just wither with contempt.
Sim long ago advised me to leave it alone, says she’s in love with some boy from Blountstown who plays basketball, but I still hang on to her, I don’t know why. Maybe because she’s not a threat anymore and the sight of her behind in a pair of frayed Guess jeans still makes my chest tighten in a very natural kind of way that I enjoy. I tell you what, it was comfort last year when I thought I was falling in love with Gabe, I’ll grant you that.
So I guess I owe her a little loyalty, and maybe if we meet up at Sim’s and her mother’s not there to exert any maternal influence, she’ll forget the jock and give me a little room. Maybe.
There’s a car in the drive: not the low hum of the Mercedes, but a jerk of a stop and a quick blast of a horn—Missy, surely. She has this huge attitude these days about having to chauffeur me around so much, and really lays on the horn, so I’d better get moving. Grannie always offers to take me home, but she really can’t see worth a hoot at night, would probably drive us into a tree—
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
SPRING BREAK; WAYCROSS
I got my report card in the mail today. Failed Latin flat but pulled a C in algebra, which is a miracle that I’ll have to share with the other mystics at Living Water Assembly on Sunday. Aunt Candace said if I could make a C average I could go stay with Simon, and when she said it she had heard from Missy that I was flunking both algebra and Latin and was pretty smug about it. Then the C I named and claimed came through and she’d like to back out, but since I aced history, my average is a solid 2.0, so she finally gave in and called Simon and he said sure, great, that we’d have a big time and he’d keep an eye on me and all.
Good old Sim, you can always count on him. He’s busy as a bee these days, working as a line supervisor up there, though mostly he’s just soaking up the business and gaining the respect of the other employees and what have you. Everybody knows he’s off to FSU in August, then he’ll be back and in charge, though nobody seems to mind or be unduly resentful. Like I say, my brother is easy on the nerves. He just does his own thing and rolls along with the tide and somehow manages to be liked by every man, woman, and dog he meets. But naturally, naturally, no charm involved.
Grannie says he gets it from Daddy, that he’s just like him, which isn’t exactly the case, for he’s not ambitious like Daddy, he doesn’t have to be. It’s all his for the taking, which, I think, bores him a little. I mean, he’s this sixth-generation Baptist with all this carefully bred missionary fervor to do good and right and change the world, but when he looks around, there is just no outlet for his ambitions. I mean, no matter how hard he works or how much money he makes, still in all, there’s only so much satisfaction you can get from a well-built couch. And I think Sim is beginning to realize this.
Maybe he considers me an object of Christian charity. He sure has been nice about me staying with him, even called Sanger and made arrangements for Mr. Sam to come by and pick me up, take me up on his weekly payroll run. We took the same route we took last year when I was interviewing him for the oral-history project, even stopped at Jimbo’s in Homersville for barbecue, making for a leisurely, nostalgic little drive through the rural twilight. For the first time in a long time, I actually began to enjoy myself, actually began to make a few jokes, told Mr. Sam that the reason all the white folk at Jimbo’s looked at us with such wide eyes was that they assumed from his car (a big old black Lincoln) and dress and companion that he was a crack dealer who dealt in virgin white boys on the side.
It’s the kind of humor that Mr. Sam finds a little less hilarious than other father figures I’ve known, but anyway, he laughed, and most of the way to Georgia talked about Daddy, as if I were still interviewing him for a project. I didn’t mind, because Sam has a musical kind of—I don’t know what you’d call it—gheechie, maybe—voice that’s hard to understand when you’re in a roomful of people, but really does justice to a story when you’re rolling through the wire grass at twilight, the narrow county highway mist-covered and silent, broken up by tiny crossroad towns, each with its own churches and trailers and barbecue, just like home.
When we pulled into the Sanger parking lot, Sim was waiting there by his truck, leaning against the tailgate with his arms crossed on his chest, and after not seeing him in for so long, I had forgotten how much he favors Daddy and could have cried or something from the shock. It wasn’t his face, really, or even his
dark coloring, but his precise way of moving and dressing, which is exactly like Daddy and always will be as long as Mama buys his clothes.
He came over and thanked Sam for bringing me, was kind enough to overlook my watery eyes with no mention that that is exactly the reaction one would expect from a son of Gabe Catts. He just helped me get my stuff, didn’t mention anything but supper and how I’d have to sleep on the sofa sleeper and it was a Sanger, so not to expect too much. He said this to lighten things up because it’s a family joke, how sorry Sanger furniture is. Not the wood stuff they make at home, but the upholstered couches and chairs they make in Georgia. Trailer furniture, Mama calls it, and used to cry when Daddy made her buy it for the house, which used to just infuriate Daddy.
So I just laughed, then gathered my stuff and thanked Mr. Sam, and Sim took me out to eat at this sporty little restaurant by the courthouse where all the young professionals eat. It’s called Gallahan’s or O’Brien’s or O’Grady’s and is all decorated like an Irish tavern, with neon Bud signs and Heineken lights over the bar. To tell you the truth, I felt just a little bit wicked sitting there at happy hour with a roomful of people who kept going back and forth to the bar, especially after God had come through with that C in algebra and all.
Sim, though, he was pretty cool about it. He must eat there all the time, because the waitresses all knew his name, and a lot of people dropped by the table while we were eating, a few of them said we looked alike. When our bill came I almost fainted because we’d ordered so much: fried cheese sticks and steaks and two desserts because I couldn’t make up my mind, and drinks which included beer for Simon. I mean, he just ordered it very casually, this glass of Bud, like he drank it every day of his life, and Grannie would drop dead if she knew.
I was talking to this man who’d stopped by the table who is somehow connected to Sanger when Simon ordered it or I would have leaned across the table and whispered: Simon? Does Grannie know you drink? Then I would have been as embarrassed as crud for being such a child, so I’m glad I didn’t.
But I don’t know. It still seems kind of weird to me. Maybe it’s another habit he picked up from Gabe, who is a drunk. Or used to be. He never drinks anymore but he talks about being an alcoholic like it was some great achievement. Some red badge of courage. You’d think he’d have the pride to be ashamed, but no, he’ll tell the world. Now that I think of it, that probably is where Sim picked it up and I wish he wouldn’t. Daddy never did. We never did. As far as I know, it’s a sin, though Pastor Jim once said Jesus drank real wine. But he never drank beer sitting in a bar with a bunch of other drunks telling him all these complimentary things because they know he’s got the bucks and will be a big man around town one day and are all sucking up to him.
Anyway, after we finished eating, he brought me here to his apartment in this huge, six-hundred unit complex on the outskirts of town that is built in kind of a Mexican theme, I guess you’d say, with buff-colored walls and arched doorways and an orange-tiled roof. I was kind of surprised when I walked in, for it’s really kind of luxurious for a nineteen-year-old, the living room all color-coordinated and neat, with peach-tinted walls and plush carpet and these big pen-and-ink drawings over the couch. Except that the furniture is that Sanger junk, it’s pretty impressive, and kind of a shame that I’m messing up the perfection of the place by sleeping on the couch, but there’s only one bedroom and that’s Sim’s.
I thought we might go out last night, catch a movie or something, but Sim was tired from work and had a softball game early the next morning, so we just turned in, got up early this morning for the game that was held at a softball diamond behind his church. It’s a big Baptist one on the highway that isn’t small like Welcome, but glass-sided and modern (though the original sanctuary, that does look like Welcome, is right next door, now a Sunday-school wing annex). After his beer drinking the night before, I kind of expected Sim to lie low with the church crowd, though he seemed equally at home there as he was at the bar, the same kind of smiles, some of the same people coming by our seats and telling us the same pleasant things.
Simon didn’t seem to see anything hypocritical about it, though I sure did, and on the way home I asked him why he drank beer and he said because he liked it. Then I asked him if Mama knew and he said no, and I asked him why he didn’t tell her and he said because she’d tell him not to, and that was the end of that. I didn’t say anything else, but I couldn’t help but think how flipped out Grannie would be, and how unraveled and unprincipled our family had become in the last couple of years, and all because Daddy had an inherited susceptibility to cancer of the hepatic system (his grandmother died of the same thing).
It really made you wonder.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
STILL SATURDAY; SIX IN THE AFTERNOON
I’m going on a date. An actual bona fide date in about three hours with the sister of a friend of Simon’s. Her name is Keri, but that’s all I know about her so far except that she has blond hair like her sister Kendra (who I met at O’Grady’s last night). If she favors her sister I’ll be doing all right. She wasn’t real pretty in the face but had herself all fixed up with makeup and had her blond hair braided. That’s about all I remember about her, that white-yellow hair that stayed blond all the way to the roots, and Sim says her sister’s is the same.
He (Sim, that is) had to run down to Sanger for a few hours for a meeting, but he’s due back soon and I’ll have to get him to help me figure out what to wear. I don’t look as good in clothes as he does and I bet Keri is getting the lowdown on me from her sister and don’t want to be an unpleasant shock. My hair won’t spike anymore, it’s too long. I should have gone down and had Miss Cassie cut it yesterday before we left. When it just lies flat like this, I look like somebody named Ricky Earl.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
MONDAY NIGHT, LATE; WAYCROSS
Well, I’ve been here in Georgia two days now, and I’ve seen my brother drink beer and I’ve kissed a girl without a shirt on, and if Mama or Grannie or Aunt Candace knew, they’d yank me back to Florida so fast that the only thing they’d find left of me here are my footprints in the orange clay.
It all started last night when Simon came home from Sanger and told me to forget my hair, it looked fine. Then he showered and dressed and called Kendra, and off we went across town to pick them up at this house that’s inside this brand-new gated subdivision that looks like it was just this year hacked out of the surrounding orange hills. Sim says their father is in some sort of equipment rental business and must pull down the bucks because their house is not only a mansion itself, but is in a whole neighborhood of mansions, the yards all landscaped within an inch of their lives with crepe myrtle and dogwood and mondo grass, all band-box new, right out of a South Florida nursery. Even the live oaks are pruned down to, like, the Essence of Live Oak: a broad, stumpy trunk and a few long horizontal limbs and a touch of Spanish moss here and there for atmosphere, but that was about it.
Simon didn’t prepare me for this kind of wealth, and I felt kind of weenie standing there on their stoop waiting for them to answer the doorbell because at home being rich is my ace in the hole. It can’t get me the girl I want, who is Rachel Cole, who hates me, but it could get me one of several others if I tried. I felt even weenier when I saw Keri, who not only has real blond hair but also a better face than her sister and a more pleasing shape. But she didn’t seem at all shocked or disappointed by my appearance—in fact, both she and her mother (who is also blond, with a south Georgia accent so thick that she sounds like a female Deputy Dog) welcomed me inside as if I was the return of lost but beloved kin.
I didn’t quite know what to make of it, was kind of struck speechless, though fortunately Sim was there to do the talking. All I had to do was stand there with my hands in my pockets and look around at their house, which is two-storied and huge, a gigantic blown-up version of Aunt Candace’s modest little tract house. Even the living room is decorated with the same kinds of stuff: identical
hunter-green carpet and silk houseplants and gilt-framed art prints, all clean and sparkling, evidence of a generous bank account and a full-time maid, and I must say, I was just as impressed as I could be.
After we talked awhile, Simon said it was time to go, that he was hungry, and all the way to the restaurant he and Kendra kept up the conversation, so all I had to do was sit there in the backseat next to Keri and look attentive. This wasn’t hard because she held up well under close inspection, her light hair really kind of amazing, but unfortunately, chopped off just below her ears, so there wasn’t much of it to see. She was dressed with a kind of MTV theme in mind, with big silver earrings and a lot of spandex and T-shirt stuff—layers of it that made her look a lot older than fifteen, which she just turned, making her a year older than me.
Overall, I felt like I was dating someone’s mother, I don’t know why, maybe because her and Kendra kept talking so fast, laughing a lot, dropping profanity sometimes, not like they were doing it to impress anyone, but like they were used to it. I didn’t much care for it, but other than that, they were so friendly, so smiling and sweet, that I began to relax a little, was even talking by the time dessert came around, making a few jokes of my own.
After we ate, Sim wanted to go to a movie, but Kendra said no, that it was almost ten and that late, the place would be full of niggers, which I found kind of shocking, the way she said it so casually. I mean, a lot of the old people call black people niggers without even realizing it, even the old folk at Welcome (at least till Gabe blew in from the North; now they’re probably daresome to say the word colored without glancing over their shoulder to make sure he isn’t within striking distance). But Kendra didn’t say it like the old folk did, she said it with scorn, making me wonder if Sim ever told her about Daddy and the Klan and Mr. Sam being his partner and all.