Leaving Eden

by Anne Leclaire

  After a while I wanted to give up on the driving, but Martha Lee told me to try it one more time, and maybe it was because I was relaxed from laughing so hard and didn’t have room for nerves, but this time it was perfect. I cranked the shift from first straight through second to third without jerking at all, easing up on the clutch like I’d always known how. The rest was easy. I didn’t even swerve all over the road like you might think I would. Martha Lee said I had a natural aptitude for steering. She promised she’d get me a book of driving rules and said we could practice again the next week. Then she took me out for pizza and ice cream.

  “Don’t tell your daddy about the driving,” she said when she dropped me off. “We’ll just surprise him.” Which was fine with me. There would be less chance that he’d say I couldn’t do it. If he even remembered I was alive.

  I was fixing dinner when I realized I hadn’t had the empty-hole-feeling in my belly for hours. For a fact I’d have to say it was the best day I’d spent since Mama passed on.

  Tallie’s Book

  Peppermint tea will soothe a sour stomach.

  Even if people act like they’re mad, underneath they can be really feeling sad.

  Like most things in life, driving isn’t hard once you get the knack of it. Getting the knack is the hard part.

  nine

  For the next three days I rode over to the creek straight from the Kurl, and it had nothing to do with the record high temperatures we were experiencing or my need to get cooled down. Truth was, I didn’t want cooling down. I wanted to feel the heat in my belly again, the way I had when Spy was looking at me. For sure, I knew I should be staying away from Baldy and this shameful temptation to display myself, but you couldn’t have kept me away if you tied me to a kitchen chair and double locked the door. Some mighty force inside was pulling me, like in science class when we watched the little black filings swoop across the lab table to the horseshoe magnet. “Magnetic attraction,” Mr. Brown told the class. He said it was an irresistible force of nature. That’s how I felt. Like I had this urgent force building inside me, and the lodestone drawing it was Spy.

  Just thinking about the possibility of him being there made my thighs feel heavy and my belly get warm, but he never came. Not once. Wiley was there the second day I went there, but Will was nowhere to be seen. He acted like such a goof that I finally asked him what the hell was the matter, was he having the curse, which was one of the things the girls in school call being in your moon. He turned red and said what was the matter with me, I was the one acting like she was on the rag, which is one of the gross things the boys call your moon. Goody said sometimes men could be crude-crude-crude, and Wiley was proving her right.

  When Spy didn’t appear on the third day, it occurred to me that he might have gone to Virginia Beach and that was why he hadn’t come back to the creek. Va Beach was what the popular kids all called it, like it was their private oh-so-cool name. Their special code. But if one of the regular kids said it, they’d look at them like there was snot running down their chin. Going to Va Beach was a summer tradition for kids going off to college in the fall. They’d rent a house for a weekend and would party-party-party, then they’d spend the rest of the summer bragging about how wasted they got. I wouldn’t go if they asked me, and not only because Elizabeth Talmadge would have wrangled herself an invitation even if she hadn’t graduated yet, and I’d have to spend the weekend listening to her make fun of my clothes. During lunch period, she always made a big deal about how there was a clothing sale at the church thrift shop in town and maybe I should check it out. She did that even before Mama took sick.

  The Queen of the World was the one who started calling me Bullwinkle, after that stupid cartoon with the moose, because my real name is Natasha like one of the characters on the show. I told her I was named for Natalie Wood, and she said, Oh, really, how droll, which is the phony way she talked sometimes. Mama said Elizabeth teased me because she was jealous, which is the kind of thing mamas have to say to their kids. “Right, Mama,” I said. “Elizabeth Talmadge, who is the most popular of all the popular girls, who lives the perfect life in a perfect house and wears perfect clothes, Elizabeth Talmadge who is Queen of the Universe, who is probably Queen of the Whole Solar System, yeah, Elizabeth Talmadge has plenty of cause to be jealous of Tallie Brock. She probably cries herself to sleep every night, she’s so envious of me.”

  Mama told me that sarcasm wasn’t becoming, and then she said there wasn’t a soul alive who lived a perfect life or was perfect, least of all a girl who tried to humiliate others.

  Anyway, when Spy didn’t show up at the creek, I was feeling that irresistible attraction so strong that before I could stop myself, I phoned his house just so I could hear his voice. The first time I called, his mama answered. She sounded so whispery, I could barely hear her. The second time, I swear she said, “Sarah, is that you?” I remembered what Rula had said about Sarah’s funeral and I hung up while she was still asking who’s there and was it Sarah. I tried one last time, at night, when I thought for sure Spy’d answer, but this time I got Mr. Reynolds and he threatened to call the police if whoever it was didn’t stop harassing them. I knew you could get these things to attach to your phone that’d show who was calling and that would be all I needed, so I stopped.

  Finally I decided the best thing to get Spy interested was to wait until I had the nine by twelve Glamour Pic of me transformed into a star. I’d find a way for Spy to see that picture if I had to mail it to him. Everything depended on the photo. Both getting to Hollywood and getting Spy.

  Just because I was preoccupied with Spy didn’t mean I’d given up my idea of going to L.A. I figured it out at night when I couldn’t sleep. When Spy was at UVA working toward becoming a lawyer, I’d be developing my career. We’d come back to Eden to be married. Ours would be the biggest, most important wedding Amherst County had ever seen.

  My mama and daddy never had a wedding, which was another thing Goody used to rant on about. I must have heard a thousand times how she’d been cheated of seeing Mama dressed in white and going down the aisle. They had this argument so many times, I could recite it by heart.

  “That’s why we eloped, Mama,” my mama told her. “Luddy and I couldn’t face the prospect of the circus you were hell-bent on providing.”

  “What’s wrong with wanting to see your only daughter married in style?” Goody said. “Just tell me, what’s the sin in that?”

  “Don’t pull that ‘only daughter’ crap on me,” Mama said right back. “It’s not my fault you didn’t have more kids.”

  “Perhaps I should have,” Goody said, straightening her wrinkled neck. “Then I might have had a daughter with a bone or two of gratitude in her body, a daughter who appreciated all the sacrifices her mama made instead of throwing it away on some bit of mill-hand trash.”

  Mama got the dangerous look she wore whenever Goody was mean about Daddy. “If you’re so all-fired hot to have a wedding in the family,” she said, going for the place that would hurt Goody most, “then you should tell your precious Grayson to get married.”

  “You leave Grayson out of this,” Goody said.

  My Uncle Grayson lived in Atlanta, where he was an accountant for some big company. He lived with another man, his housemate, according to Goody, who told people Grayson was waiting to find the right woman, a woman good enough for him, not the first piece of trash to swing her skirt across his path. Goody said that, but it was common knowledge Uncle Grayson wouldn’t ever be getting married. At least not in any wedding that Goody’d want to be within a million miles of.

  Mama loved him, though. “You ever need anything, sugar, you call your Uncle Grayson,” she said when she was real sick. She told me lots of things I should do when she was gone, like finish school and follow my dream and not let anyone get in my way or tell me I couldn’t have the life I wanted. I couldn’t bear to listen at first, and at the end, with the morphine and all, what she said didn’t make sense. She’d say t
hings like, “Listen to the bark of trees,” and, “Bite the vein of life,” and other stuff that sounded crazy. Sometimes she’d look straight at me and smile and call me Sasha. At first I thought she was having trouble with my name, but then she’d say it again. Clear as can be. Sasha. “It’s me, Mama,” I’d say. “Tallie.” “I know, dear,” she’d say, and call me Sasha again.

  The shame of life is we’re only given one chance at everything as it passes by. If I could do it over again, I’d take back every mean-hearted thing I ever said to Mama. And I’d concentrate on everything she said and I’d write it all down careful, word for word. Then I wouldn’t have to try to recall it all from memory. And I wouldn’t have to be always listening to the women at the Kurl and conversations in the girls’ room at school for things to be putting in my rule book, things a girl needed to know to become a woman. I’d get it straight from Mama.

  By that November, Mama wasn’t eating enough to keep a bee alive. She stopped listening to TV because the noise hurt her. She didn’t even want music, music that’d been like blood in her veins—country and Elvis and all the oldies. She asked us to turn it off. She wanted peace, she said. She needed quiet. During the day, she lay drowning in the folds of her blue robe, her lips chapped and cracked. Sometimes she’d ask for little pieces of ice that she’d hold in her mouth till they melted. In the night, I’d hear her moaning. “I’m here, darlin’,” Daddy’d say. “Right here.” He’d taken to sleeping on the floor beside her mechanical bed.

  “She’d be better off in the hospital,” the doctor told Daddy one day.

  “She wants to stay right here,” Daddy told him. “In her home.”

  “Can’t you make her go?” the doctor asked. “Can’t you make her see the sense in being there where we can regulate things?”

  Daddy kind of smiled. “Not a person alive can make Dinah Mae do something when she’s got her mind set.”

  Then the doctor said something about “lungs to bone to brain,” and I ran out of the house before I could hear any more. It made me worse than sad to see Mama like that, but I didn’t cry. I was afraid if I started I’d never stop, and I think that was when the hard black thing first took root in my chest, a thing that hurt, like a rib was broken or missing.

  It made my heart about break to look at Mama’s feet. Her perfect, size-five feet, feet that had danced the boogie and enraptured my daddy, had turned ugly, swelling nearly double and fatter than Effie Webb’s and hers spilled over the tops of her shoes. When she was on morphine, Mama kept telling us her feet were cold but when we covered them with a blanket, she got fussy and told us to get rid of it. “Take off my shoes,” she said and, no matter how many times we told her she wasn’t wearing any, she kept after us to take them off. “Okay, Cookie,” Martha Lee’d finally say, “we’ll take them off,” and that would calm Mama down.

  It made me jealous sometimes, the way Martha Lee did everything for Mama, but I was glad, too, relieved that I didn’t have to do things like change the diapers she had to wear or clean up the snot that ran out of her nose when she was out cold from the morphine, stuff that I couldn’t do no matter how much I loved Mama. But Martha Lee didn’t mind a bit. “Come on, Cookie,” she’d say in this straight voice that wasn’t the phony kind people sometimes used, like they were talking to a retard instead of a sick person. Her voice was soft and made the back of my throat ache just to listen to it. “Let’s get you cleaned up and in a new outfit and then I’ll put some lotion on your back.” Then she’d bring in a basin and cloth and wash Mama all over and put on a clean gown, one of those ugly things that tie in back like they make you wear in hospitals. She’d brush Mama’s hair and tie it back with a ribbon, and put a little blush on her cheeks, and while she was at it, she put some on Duane’s Clinton-mask cheeks, too. That always made Mama smile. Martha Lee’d tell Mama she looked as pretty as a carnival doll. “You, too,” Mama’d say back. There was not a cold chance in hell anyone would ever be mistaking Martha Lee for a carnival doll, but watching her with Mama I could understand why sick folk might believe she was an angel.

  Anyway, with Glamour Day a key part of my plan to get Spy to love me, I was so het up, I couldn’t sleep the night before the team of trained professionals was finally set to arrive. I’d close my eyes and picture the blonde in the poster, then I’d put myself in her place, the pink boa draped around my neck. Then I’d open my eyes and check the bedside clock to see how much longer I had to wait. It felt like morning would never arrive. Daddy rolled in after one. Last call at CC’s, I thought, and stared up at the ceiling, at the stars Mama’d stuck there. She’d put them there when I was ten. A whole constellation that glowed faintly in the dark, with moons and planets complete with little rings. I didn’t see them at first and when I finally noticed them, she said they’d been there for a week. “Why didn’t I see them?” I asked her. “You weren’t expecting them,” she said. “Sugar,” she said, “you got to keep your eyes open for the unexpected. Especially when it’s been right in front of you all the time.”

  I could tell right away it was one of Daddy’s noisy nights. Sometimes when he came home from CC’s, he wasn’t too bad, but that night I followed his progress through the kitchen, falling over every chair, then into the bathroom. I prayed he wasn’t too drunk to aim true, because I was so g.d. sick of wiping his pee drops off the floor, I could puke. I’m not the maid, I wanted to tell him. Finally I heard him fall into bed and pretty soon he was snoring. My daddy was the champion snorer. If they had medals for it, he’d have gotten the gold. “Your Daddy’s not a bad man,” Raylene told me once. “He just needs someone to take him in hand.”

  He woke up before I did. When I walked into the kitchen, he had the coffee made and was frying up some eggs, although you had to marvel that he could walk straight, never mind handle a fry pan. “Early bird gets the breakfast,” he said, and poured me a mug, then—surprise-surprise-surprise—he gave me the eggs he’d been cooking for himself. He was happy as a pig in shit, whistling like crazy while he fried up more eggs for himself. I’d eaten half my breakfast when I really tuned in, and that was when it hit me. He was whistling that old blues song, “I’m a Man,” the one Mama knew meant he was working himself up to apologize for some harm done.

  I shoved the eggs around the plate, my appetite flown straight out the window. It’s nothing, I told myself. He’s probably only feeling bad for staying out half the night and drinking up the bill money while the Cash Store cuts off our credit and I go around in midget’s clothes. It’s nothing. But in my belly, it didn’t feel like nothing. When he sat down to eat, he stopped whistling, but guilt lay on his face, plain as white on rice. On the pretense of getting more coffee, I took a look out the window to check on the truck, see if it was smashed up, but it was the same as usual, just the one fender bashed in. It’s nothing, I told myself again, searching for reassurance. Then I remembered Rula Wade and how her daddy’d married a woman half his age. I knew women hung around CC’s. I looked across the table and stared at him, trying to picture him with anyone but Mama. The closed place deep inside my chest got a little tighter. He’d finished his eggs and was taking up the tune again.

  When he left for the mill, he mussed up my hair, like I was five. He was still whistling when he went out the door. To erase the notes from my head, I cranked up the radio. They were playing an Elvis tune. “Blue Hawaii.” Which of course made me think of my mama. Mama never was convinced Elvis had actually died. His name was misspelled on the tombstone at Grace-land, she said, and that was a sign intended to show it wasn’t really him buried there. Lord, but she pure adored Elvis. I remembered the time by the creek when she’d told Martha Lee that Elvis could put his boots under her bed any night. He and Sam Shepard, even if Sam wasn’t handsome in the traditional way. Mama said Sam Shepard looked like he could carry on a conversation without having to circle around to repeat himself. I thought this revealed Mama’s imagination. Then I wondered how you could have feelings of desire for more than one
person. I thought that would get complicated.

  After I finished with the dishes, I took a shower. Even though they wouldn’t show in the picture, I shaved my legs and coated them with lotion. From time to time, in spite of the radio blasting from the kitchen, Daddy’s old blues tune took up residence in my head, making me edgy, but then the excitement about the Glamour Day pushed it aside.

  I hadn’t said one word to Daddy about the picture. I wanted to surprise him. I could imagine how proud he’d be when he saw me transformed . I was thinking, too, that when he saw I could be pretty, like Mama, maybe he’d want to pay more attention to me.

  When I was finally ready, I was so excited, I could have run the whole way to the Kurl. Last thing before I left, I went to the kitchen, switched off the radio, and reached up for Mama’s silver syrup pitcher. Before I even lifted the lid, I knew the money was gone, and then I understood why Daddy’d been whistling and looking so guilty. I didn’t waste one minute attempting to deny the hard proof that lay right before my eyes. Of all the bad times in my life, all the disappointments and losses, this about matched the day they buried Mama. But, just like then, I didn’t cry.

  It took a while to get settled. I had to sit down and close my eyes and rock. Back and forth, back and forth, holding tight to the dark place, holding tight till I could get steady.

  Tallie’s Book

  Not one person alive lives a perfect life.

  Keep your eyes open for the unexpected.

  Never count on anything.

  ten