The Lion is In

by Delia Ephron

  Her dad wasn’t much of a drinker. She understood that later. Nobody who loves liquor leaves anything in the bottle. From then on she finished his beer and soon began sneaking and drinking whole bottles herself.

  Alcohol, the perfect cure for insomnia. She was medicating her pain—the emptiness of abandonment, the guilt that it was somehow her fault, the sadness that she was too proud and angry to acknowledge.

  In high school she drank more. Party drinking, mostly. She had more fun buzzed. She was a champion at snapping bottle caps. She could snap a beer bottle cap clear across the street and into a garbage can, and often challenged guys, getting her beer paid for by winning. She branched out, trying sweet drinks with cool names like Singapore Sling. She was careful, limiting herself, because her father waited up. He never went to sleep until she was home. Anyway, it was easy to fool him, because he trusted her.

  When she got to college on a scholarship, the University of Maryland at College Park, and away from the watchful eye of her dad, she started getting drunk every night.

  Which is how Lana became the last person she wanted to be: her mother.

  28

  Rita and Marcel take daily walks to see the sunrise. One morning Rita braids wildflowers into a chain, something she learned to do when she was a child. That night, when she performs, both she and Marcel wear a crown of wildflowers.

  Clayton sheds his sweats and begins to dress up. He bundles all his collared shirts that he hasn’t worn in years and drops them at the laundry for a wash and iron. Light starch, he tells them. He digs out his old jeans, discovers that they still fit and that, if he wears them with his leather embossed belt with a large square silver buckle, he doesn’t look half-bad. He notices a purple rayon shirt in the window of the local men’s store and buys it. He makes them take it right off the mannequin. He doesn’t even try it on before buying because he’s embarrassed about his sudden interest in self-improvement. Late at night he pays a visit to the Pick ’n Save, where he locates a jar of hair gel for men. At checkout he feels the need to explain himself. “We’re getting popular,” he tells Tami. “I’ve got to look the part.”

  But he knows the real reason he’s dressing up is for Rita.

  He’s fascinated with her. When she crowned the lion with that wreath of flowers he couldn’t get over it. She’s graceful. So solemn. Purity itself, he concludes. He offered her a ride to the motel after closing but she refused. He offers it every night, and every night she refuses.

  “No, thank you,” she says. “I appreciate the offer but Tim will take me.”

  He thinks her manners are impeccable.

  The audience is growing. One night Clayton arrives to find a line at the door. It is standing room only, and all because of Rita. She enters the cage now as part of the show, and when she does, you can hear a pin drop. She lets Marcel sniff her with no bars between them.

  Rita observes that often when she approaches Marcel, he bats a paw at her. It makes her nervous. He does have powerful paws and sharp claws. But then she thinks maybe he’s telling her something, something he would like to do.

  The next afternoon before The Lion opens for business, she enters the cage with a box of paper towel rolls. She tears off a longish strip and holds it out, stretched tight between her hands. After several attempts Marcel karate-chops it with a bat of his paw. They rehearse this for days. The night she unveils the new trick, the audience goes wild. She gets a standing ovation.

  Rita raises her arms, acknowledging the appreciation. And then bows.

  29

  One afternoon the women borrow Tim’s car and drive to a nearby freshwater pond. “A prettier spot you won’t find,” Tim assures them.

  Rita drives while Tracee reads Tim’s directions aloud, appreciating his pointer about changing lanes early to prepare for left turns. And his thoroughness. It is impossible to get lost when a person tells you how many stoplights to count. They buy a picnic lunch from a diner they pass on the way, including a sweet tea (jumbo size) for Lana. She has become obsessed with this local drink that Clayton calls “liquid diabetes.”

  As they thread through the trees along a narrow path, Rita marvels at the strange North Carolina pines that have foliage top and bottom but are bare in their middles, providing a clear view to the parklike clearing and a smooth, glassy pond gleaming in the sun.

  “Isn’t this beautiful?”

  “Tim’s idea,” Tracee reminds her. “He’s so reliable. Have you noticed?”

  “He’s a sweetheart,” says Rita.

  “Yes, a sweetheart,” says Tracee. “That’s what he is.” She kicks off her shoes and walks barefoot on the dense, mossy grass, enjoying the soft sponginess. She picks flowers for each of them, exotic spiky blossoms in purple and magenta, tucking one behind her ear, while Lana and Rita spread a ratty motel blanket under an enormous shade tree.

  Lana and Tracee can barely recall how drab Rita once was, because now she laughs easily and her intelligence, long suppressed—a quiet ability to assess a situation—is so apparent. The caution that informed her every move has given way to curiosity and spiritedness. She is still modest but not shy, small but no longer invisible. They admire and trust her. Because trusting someone besides each other is not familiar, they don’t know that they trust Rita, only that they like being around her. They feel safe. While they lounge on the blanket, eating tuna fish sandwiches, Lana and Tracee find themselves talking about the past, regaling Rita with stories.

  “My favorite sandwich when I was little was—”

  “Butter and sugar on white bread.” Lana finishes Tracee’s sentence. They high-five and burst out laughing. “High-fiving is so dumb. We high-fived our way through high school.”

  “Have you been best friends forever?”

  “Forever,” says Tracee.

  “She was always at my house. Her parents were useless,” says Lana.

  “They were never home.”

  “She’d come over in the morning for scrapple.”

  “Is that a game?” says Rita.

  “No, it’s food. It’s a loaf made of pig parts. You don’t want to know what parts.”

  “The head,” says Tracee.

  “Remember the couch,” Lana asks.

  Tracee groans.

  “What?” says Rita.

  “When Tracee’s dad wasn’t trucking and her mom riding with him, they were at the racetrack in Bowie losing their money. One day she answered the door—”

  “I was all alone.”

  “She opened the door and there were two guys—”

  “As big as barns, I swear.”

  “They walked right in and carried out the couch.”

  “It had splashy red flowers.”

  “How old were you?” says Rita.

  They ponder that, what they were wearing at the time, and that Lana’s dad felt so bad for Tracee he took them for ice cream—so it was most likely summer.

  “Probably twelve,” says Lana.

  “Oh, my,” says Rita.

  “They never replaced it,” says Tracee. “I had almost no place in the whole house to sit but my bed.”

  “At night we’d do homework. Well, I did. You weren’t too big on school.” Lana falls silent, thinking about how much she loved school and drank her college opportunities away. “My dad built miniature trains. It was his hobby after my mom split. We had little cabooses and engines everywhere. Locomotives galore. The Silver Streak, the Prairie Princess, the Sunset Limited. He took me to all the conventions where these train-obsessed guys get together.”

  Lana shoves her straw into her tea, bobbing what remains of the ice, remembering her dad, Tracee, and her all together at the kitchen table—her dad wearing his big magnifying lenses over his glasses, concentrating hard to screw tiny wheels on tiny axles, gluing in itty-bitty windows, fitting parts together with ant-size pincers. He would flip his lenses up every now and again to give Lana a smile or a wink. “How’s it going, baby?” If she or Tracee needed help, he slid h
is chair around. “What’s the problem?” Sometimes he was as clueless as they were, but usually they figured it out together.

  Tracee has the diamond necklace in her pants pocket. She stretches out and turns away from them, hoping they will nap so she can play with it a bit. Instead she finds herself thinking about the other day, when she was in the kitchen picking up a tray of clean glasses and caught sight of Tim out the window. It was nearing sunset on a hot night and he was washing his car. He was shirtless and as slick as a wet seal, tossing on pails of soapy water. Tracee had seen Tim shirtless before, when they’d shared a room, but never shirtless and slippery. She’d never seen him stretch and scrub half naked under a violet sky.

  Lana moves to the water’s edge, reading a book Rita has brought her from the library, Lit by Mary Karr, all about being an addict. Rita, who could not astonish Lana any more than she already has, given her relationship with Marcel, goes skinny-dipping. Lana looks up to see her pass by, her naked ample bottom white and dimpled. She walks into the water without even dipping a toe first, swims out a fair distance, and rolls over. She floats on her back, the sun on her face. Blissful.

  A splash. Rita splashes upright, rubbing her eyes to see.

  “Mary Karr gets religion,” Lana calls from the shore.

  “What?” says Rita.

  Tracee struggles to focus, having lost herself entirely in Tim perched on his car roof soaping the sign, WILSON’S DRIVING SCHOOL. She sees Lana raging back and forth. “Catholicism, how sick is that? The Bible, church, the works.”

  Rita, treading water, squints, locates the book bobbing not too far off, swims over, and pushes it to land.

  “That’s what saved her,” says Lana. “That is so fucked.”

  “Could you get me that blanket?” Rita wades ashore with the now useless stack of soggy pages. “Would you mind, Tracee?” she adds, because Tracee is lying on it.

  “Religion!” Lana is scathing.

  “I had no idea.” Rita takes the blanket from Tracee and wraps herself up like a squaw. “The librarian recommended it.”

  “She should be shot. I’m not giving it up to God.”

  “Giving what up?”

  “Who the fuck knows.” Lana drops back down on the ground and sits there glowering at the beautiful day. Rita notices how tired she looks. Beat up. She wears herself out.

  “Marcel could help,” says Rita.

  Lana erupts. “Marcel?”

  Rita decides maybe now is not the time.

  Lana smacks the water with her feet. “I’ll pay for it. Tell the library. Do you think my head is too big?”

  “Is this about the book? I’m getting confused. I don’t mean to.” Rita sits down next to her.

  “No. I’ve just always wondered about my head in relation to my body.” This is something Lana would have asked her mother, but her mother wasn’t there to ask.

  “Your head is a perfect size. You are perfectly proportioned.” Rita slips an arm out of the blanket and around Lana, pulling her close. Lana sighs. Her head conks onto Rita’s shoulder as if she has been waiting her whole life for the opportunity.

  30

  One night at closing time Clayton approaches Rita and hands her a book. “I heard you like this,” he says.

  “Sudoku? Oh, thank you, I do.”

  “I don’t know what level you are at, so it’s got all three levels.”

  The next night when Rita comes out of the ladies’ room, Clayton is there, stopping her in her tracks. He’s wearing cologne, a scent so sweet she nearly sneezes.

  She moves sideways. So does he.

  He backs her against the wall. “I want you,” he says.

  “Excuse me?” says Rita.

  She ducks under his arm and slips away. He follows.

  “I can’t stop thinking about you.”

  “Please try.”

  “I can’t. You’re”—he almost loses his nerve but decides to tell the truth—“erotic.”

  Rita is surprised. No one has ever said that to her before. But still… “No, thank you.” She hurries away.

  At the library Rita continues to educate herself on lion behavior. She reads that lions like to hang over the branches of a tree. At first she imagines Marcel standing on his hind legs with his front paws drooping over a low branch, as if he’s a person chatting over a backyard fence. But then she sees pictures of lions in Africa, stretched out on the thick limbs of thorn trees, lounging like the cats they are.

  She wants Marcel to have a tree.

  There are none around The Lion. The closest, a cluster of scraggly firs a mile away, have twiggy branches that would break under Marcel’s weight. Besides, she would never risk walking Marcel any farther than she does.

  One morning when she and Tim are making a grocery run, they pass a lot where two men with a buzz saw are about to demolish an oak tree. “Pull over,” she says to Tim. “Stop here, please.”

  Rita knows that the tree has been struck by lightning. She has seen its effects before. The tree is a skeleton, all foliage gone. The bark is sheared off one side of the trunk, although the hardwood beneath is still intact. The men have already cut off the burned upper branches, which lie scattered where they fell, but what remains is substantial: a strong trunk and several low, mighty limbs. “More a sculpture than a tree,” she says as she and Tim look it over. A sculpture—the men are impressed by the idea, but they are already impressed with Rita, because they have seen her show.

  She offers to buy it. “It’s for Marcel,” she tells them.

  “No charge,” says one.

  “Where do you want it?” says the other.

  They dig it up, load it onto their pickup, cart it to The Lion, and replant it next to the parking lot.

  Clayton, arriving that night, isn’t thrilled to find a fairly petrified oak tree on the property, but he keeps quiet about it because he wants Rita.

  The next morning, when Rita and Marcel leave The Lion for their dawn walk, they turn right instead of left. Rita leads him to the oak tree, hoping he will climb it. The low limbs aren’t that high and she can still keep Marcel leashed. How nice it would be for him to loll on a branch.

  Marcel doesn’t react at all to the tree. She might as well be introducing him to a mailbox.

  They stand there awhile. Eventually he moves close and rubs his side against it. Back and forth. Rita hears a low hum like an air conditioner on the fritz. It seems to her that Marcel is purring.

  From then on, every so often, for a change of pace, they visit the tree in the morning for a rub before heading to the rise.

  31

  One afternoon at the café in Fairville, when Rita, Lana, and Tracee are sharing a slice of buttermilk pie, Rita tells them about a crime that happened right in the next state. In Selmer, Tennessee.

  “One night when the minister was lying in bed asleep, his wife took a rifle and shot him in the back. Bang.” She pops a bit of crust in her mouth.

  “He must have been a meanie,” says Tracee.

  By way of an answer Rita recites, “‘Law, says the priest with a priestly look, / Expounding to an unpriestly people, / Law is the words in my priestly book, / Law is my pulpit and my steeple.’”

  “Hey, lion lady,” a dad with a brood of six yells from the back. “Come say hello.” He lifts a toddler for a better view.

  “I’ll be right back,” says Rita.

  They watch her shyly greet people on her way to the man’s table, autographing a few napkins simply “Rita,” shaking hands with all the children. They can’t hear her because she always speaks quietly, but they know she is giving all the credit to Marcel.

  “That poetry,” Tracee whispers to Lana, “what’s it mean?”

  “What you said. The priest is a meanie. Well, more a tyrant.” Lana pours a pile of salt onto her plate, presses her finger in, licks it, and considers the implications.

  Rita slides back into the booth. “It could have been the potato salad.”

  “What?” says Trace
e.

  “What set her off. Making it for the umpteenth time.”

  “Who?”

  “The wife. Potato salad after church every Sunday. Let’s see, fifty-two weeks a year. Let’s say she was married thirty years—”

  “How old was she?”

  “I don’t know. Let’s say twenty years, then. Fifty-two times twenty… What’s that? I can’t do math. Harry would know,” she says grimly.

  “Couldn’t she make coleslaw instead?” says Tracee.

  “Is Harry a minister?” asks Lana at the same time.

  “Yes,” says Rita.

  “And he’s your husband?”

  Rita fidgets, folding down the corners of the napkin.

  “Did he beat you? Is that why you left?”

  Rita still makes no reply.

  “Did you shoot him?” says Tracee.

  “My goodness, no. I would never shoot anyone. Too messy.” Rita picks up the bill and studies it. Lana continues to eat salt. It’s making her tongue raw but she can’t stop herself. Rita slaps the bill down. “I’ll tell you what I think. Why she snapped. Suppose you’re the wife of a minister and you’re unhappy? Who can you tell? ‘Don’t you dare tell anyone your problems because it will reflect on me.’ I bet you anything he said that. I bet the town was so small that if she turned around she bumped into herself. It’s surprising she even knew what she felt if she could never say it. Everything bottled up. All the pretending. That her husband was loving, that he was kind. Everyone projecting goodness onto you, but it isn’t you at all, it’s some idea of you. The minister’s wife. The expectations. The isolation. The loneliness. Feeling invisible. I don’t think about her at all.”