Sugarland

by Joni Rodgers

  He rustled and moaned a little, and when he settled back to sleep, he looked so much like Mel, Kit had to press her hand against her shirt again. He was broad-shouldered and beautiful, his legs were already soft with sandy hair, and there were strong indications he’d also inherited Mel’s booming baritone, expressive eyebrows, and amazing talent for whistling. Kit knew she couldn’t have found a better man for her boy to take after.

  Mel was a foreman now, over at the Industrial Aircraft maintenance hangar. Kit used to ask him questions about what that meant, but his answers were full of technical jargon and an airplane mechanic’s oblivious confidence. He didn’t know that not everyone understands how to fly, that this was an astounding physical secret to which he was privy and Kit was not. To Kit, it seemed like a majikal alchemy of sheet metal and zephyrs, but Mel simply saw a logical progression of paperwork, ball bearing, paycheck, food; the orderly origami whereby Bernoulli became a pound of ground beef.

  He spent five nights a week plus overtime, climbing up and down scaffolding, greasing landing gear, checking wing flaps, changing leading edges, and doing a host of other things Kit couldn’t even imagine, but which involved expensive tools, smelly lubricants, and a lot of sweat. The hard work used to do good things for his body, but the beer he drank when he got home was winning out, slowly but surely. Kit was just as happy to have him on third shift. They needed the money, and anymore, the evenings he was home were barely discernible from the evenings he wasn’t.

  Four years earlier—the autumn Cooper went off to kindergarten and Mitzi busied herself and Kit with a toddling reign of terror—Mel had brought home a ‘62 Ford Falcon from the junkyard and retreated with it into the garage. He became both master and slave to the beast, fattening it up with used auto parts, raising it on a pedestal of cinder blocks, laboring tirelessly on its behalf. Between the carcinomas of rust and abrasion, a patina of royal blue was still discernable; the junkyard Falcon was a time-battered twin to the hand-me-down, pride-and-joy Falcon Mel had inherited from his big brother when he was discharged from the marines.

  It had been Teddy’s first car, then Mel’s, and Mel had taken immaculate care of it. He’d driven it to Fort Worth, Lubbock, and Louisiana. He’d driven it to New Mexico, old Mexico, El Paso, and Dallas. He’d driven it up to Detroit, Sault Ste. Marie, and even Canada, and a decade later, with no particular destination, he was driving it still.

  When Mel finally ran out of gas somewhere south of Houston, he drove Teddy’s Falcon to and from a janitorial job at Imperial Sugar. And one day on his lunch break, he met Kit at the café where she waited tables to supplement her singing jobs. Early the next morning, he kissed her goodbye on her mother’s front porch, peeled out of the driveway to impress her, and smashed into a telephone pole across the street.

  “Couldn’t keep my eyes on the road,” he used to say with a mischievous grin and nostalgic nod toward her.

  That was the end of Mel’s first Falcon.

  But now, he had this one, and when he wasn’t in the garage working on it, he was dozing in his recliner, stirring himself periodically to scratch, swig his tepid beer, and click the remote a few times while Kit paced the kitchen with a lump in her throat.

  At first, she tried to talk to him. Then she tried to entice him with food, moody lighting, and Antonio Carlos Jobim music. She bleached her hair, bought a painful push-up bra. Lately, she’d even picked fights with him—anything to elicit some kind of spark—but that just made him trudge around the house with his hands in his pockets, which exacerbated the problem he had keeping his pants from sagging too low on his flabby rear end.

  Kit shuddered when she saw him like that. She felt like she was suddenly waking up in someone else’s life with someone else’s inconvenient galley kitchen and crummy car and saggyassed husband.

  There were moments of panic when she caught sight of Mel’s hirsute belly lolling between the bottom of his T-shirt and the top of his sweats. There were long periods of smoldering anger after every carefully planned and consistently failed seduction of him. But most of the time, there was a deep, underlying ache. She felt it when she saw her favorite old snapshot of him grinning like a rowdy kid in his Semper Fi T-shirt. She felt it when she came across a soft flannel shirt she used to nuzzle or a pair of worn jeans she used to tug at, and she tried not to think about the trim, young, homeless man who would inherit them from the Salvation Army. Mel’s rusty fishing gear and dusty bicycle, his half-finished projects, impotent power tools, and well-intentioned building materials lay lethargic in the garage; each symbol of his inertia became another particle of sand, drifting the shelf on which Kit and Mel lived.

  Passion was a low priority in their lives now. After a hard night at the hangar, Mel had little energy for coupling or quarreling. But, Kit guiltily reminded herself, he always came home after those hard nights. He was a good man with no real vices, and as far as he knew or wanted to know, Kit was a good wife with no real complaints.

  As cruel as this moment was for Kalene, the quick, choking shock of an unexpected whitecap was kinder, in Kit’s mind, than the slow groan of irreversible undertow. She wondered if Wayne had named the other woman when he was pressed about the car, wondered how it might feel to hear something like that from Mel, how Mel might feel hearing it from her. He probably wouldn’t mind, as long as she kept feeding him regularly. There was probably nothing she could do to make him hate her, though Kit thought she might prefer that. Hate being at least an off-brand of passion instead of the cancerous nullifier of love apathy is.

  Back in the living room, Kit gathered toys and newspapers from the floor and pitched them under the couch bed. Then she straightened the comforter to hang down and hide the mess and arranged ruffled pillows neatly on top.

  Headlights beamed across the living room wall as Kiki pulled the station wagon up to the garage. Kit dashed out the front door to help carry the kids inside, and Kiki kept it together admirably until they were tucked upstairs, snug in the Ninja Turtle sleeping bags, with Raphael, Donatello, and The Shredder duking it out over their heads.

  “Would you like some popcorn, Kiki?” Kit offered gently, but her little sister only sobbed.

  “Oh, Kit, my life is in ruins!”

  “Here, sweetie, have a Diet Coke,” Kit struggled.

  “I have learned the true meaning of despair.”

  “Oh, Kiki, honey. What about a Rice Krispies treat?”

  “That bastard. That 1-lousy bastard.”

  “Oh, Kiki. I’m so sorry.” Kit was crying now, too.

  “And you won’t believe who he’s trying to blame it on!”

  Kit’s heart froze in her chest. “Who?”

  “George Walker Bush!”

  “What?” Without meaning to, Kit blurted a strangled gasp of laughter.

  “That bastard says if George Walker Bush hadn’t become governor of Texas, causing Ray Bob Sawyer to have too many beers at the G. W. gubernatorial election celebration, he wouldn’t have driven Ray Bob and Darinda home and consequently met Darinda’s sister, Cylene, whose husband had been down to Galveston that very morning and got a big ol’ redfish, which she had frozen in her chest freezer out in the garage on account of she wanted to get it mounted for him for his fortieth birthday, and then when they brought the thing over, she just happened to be wearing spandex pants and an off-the-shoulder blouse and lolling her cleavage from here to Del Rio and gave Wayne a note that said ‘call me tonight’ and—that b-bastard!— he calllllllled herrrrr...”

  “That bastard,” Kit said through gritted teeth. “He is such a bastard.”

  “He’s been with her every Wednesday afternoon all these months and three times while I was at Mom’s last week, and I’m such an idiot I never knew. And!” Kalene pulled away from Kit indignantly, “Mel knew all about it! The bastard told him!”

  “Mel? The bastard told Mel?”

  “Men are such bastards.”

  “He told Mel,” Kit echoed. “I didn’t realize they were that cl
ose.”

  “What am I gonna do, Kit? What’ll I tell the kids?”

  “I don’t know, Kiki. I don’t know. What a mess.” She put her arms around her baby sister, and they both started crying softly again. “Oh, Kiki, I’m so sorry. I’m so so sorry.”

  “Oh, don’t be sorry for me, Kit. It’s my own dang fault. Wayne just keeps getting worse and worse, and I just keep letting him. He’s always had a temper on him, and his moods, you know—he’s always been like that. But the last three years, ever since Chloe was born, it’s like he’s a different person. And he always comes back around saying how he’s sorry and he didn’t mean it and he loves me and I know I’m stupid, but—I love him, Kit. It’s getting harder and harder to remember why, but I still love him.”

  In the morning, Kit made pancakes. Oscar and Coo, delighted to wake up and find themselves in the same room, came downstairs in their rumpled pj’s, bonding in the tree fort’s ritual handshake: high five, side five, palm slap, back slap, pinky link, thumb link, Bullwinkle, “yes!”

  Kit had intended to let Kiki sleep, since they’d only just gone to bed a couple hours earlier, but Kiki showed up at the table with red-rimmed eyes and wan smiles for the kids, giving no indication that she’d learned the true meaning of despair and that her pleasant life in the double-wide surrounded by mature trees and five prime acres in Montgomery County—a life that until last night appeared so shady and clean—was suddenly falling apart on her.

  Kit truly never wanted for that to happen. She wanted her and Mel to play cribbage at Kiki and Wayne’s every Saturday night and take all the kids on picnics and to baseball games at the Astrodome and on excursions to Splash Town. She wanted the two of them to take the kids to Taco Cabana for lunch, talking and laughing, something of their own childhood coming back to them as they watched their children playing by the fountain. She wanted to sit close to her little sister and let her know how much she loved her, how much she liked belonging with her. She wanted them to share the secrets of their souls and have those secrets be about loving the men to whom they were happily married and about how they had discovered the “Seven Secrets of Renewed Intimacy,” as detailed in this month’s Redbook.

  “How’s your stomach?” she asked her baby sister.

  “Better.”

  “Do you want some soda crackers or something?”

  “No. That never works for me.”

  “I don’t have any 7-Up. How about chamomile tea?”

  “You’re so lucky you never had morning sickness,” Kiki lamented. “It’s horrible. Like a hangover without the good time.”

  Kit made Kiki sit down while she poured thick syrup over the kids’ pancakes and used the sides of their forks to cut bite-sized squares.

  “That’s okay,” Oscar said when she came to Chloe’s plate. “I’ll help her.”

  “Well, thank you, sir.” Kit rumpled his hair. “You’re quite a gentleman.”

  “Mama, Cooper’s opening his mouth with chewed-up food in it,” Mitzi tattled.

  “You’re dead, Dog Mouth.” Cooper pinched her leg beneath the table, and she screamed.

  “You two knock it off,” Kit warned, “or there’s gonna be some black marks on your star charts.”

  “Big deal,” Cooper said. “I hate that thing, anyway. I’ll never fill it up.”

  “Yes, you will, Cooper.” Kit kissed the top of his head. “I know you can.”

  She was confident, having carefully engineered the chart to ready him for success, not set him up for failure, just as Dr. Brazelton advised in the “Lifestyles” section of the Houston Chronicle.

  “See? Just three more stars, and you get to rent a video game.”

  “Hey, Coo,” Oscar elbowed him. “Now available at a Blockbuster near you: ‘Bubble Man.’ My friend Chase showed me a bunch of the secrets on it.”

  “Oh, man!” Cooper groaned.

  “I could help you get your stars,” Oscar suggested, pushing his glasses up on his freckled nose. “Then we could play it this afternoon.”

  “Mom?” Cooper was suddenly hopeful.

  “That’s a great idea,” Kit said. “All that’s left is pick up sticks and pine cones, pull ten weeds in each flower bed, and bring recycling bins up from curb.”

  Oscar and Cooper exchanged glances, plugged their thumbs into their ears and fanned their fingers upward in another Bullwinkle salute.

  “Yes!”

  They chugged the last of their milk and headed upstairs to get dressed.

  “Your children are so civilized,” Kit wondered at her little sister. “How did you do that?”

  “Oscar is a quirk of nature,” Kiki reassured her. “Chloe more than makes up for him.” She stroked her stomach and added, “Lord knows what this one’s gonna be like.”

  “Mama,” Chloe begged, “will you and Aunt Kitty come play Barbies?”

  “Play Pandora with us, Mama,” Mitzi cried. “Or Persephone!”

  “Or Gilligan’s Island!” Chloe suggested.

  But Kiki had to head for the bathroom again. Kit hushed and urged the little girls toward the living room.

  “Today,” Ricki Lake was announcing, “Guess What, Mom! I’m a Girl in Love—With Another Girl!”

  “Let’s watch ‘Care Bears’ instead,” Kit said, digging through the sofa cushions for the remote.

  She went back to the kitchen and cleaned up the sticky breakfast remains and had just finished mopping beneath the bay window when Kiki came back.

  “Gilligan’s Island,” Kit said. “Is that from The Odyssey or The Iliad?”

  “Oh, Kitty, did it ever occur to you that some Barbies think that stuff is just plain boring?” She dropped a chamomile tea bag into a cup of hot water. “Some Barbies just want to go to the mall without all that pressure on ‘em.”

  “I won’t tell Mama you said that,” Kit smiled.

  “It would only hurt her.”

  They sat for a while, blowing and sipping at the rims of their teacups.

  “Care Bears, prepare to stare!” the TV falsettoed as the bears beamed hearts, flowers, and an unstoppable rainbow of righteousness that annihilated everything contrary to their agenda of goodness. They reminded Kit of the Christian Coalition.

  “Hey!” Kiki suddenly slapped one palm on the tabletop and snapped her fingers. “You know what we should do?”

  Kit didn’t know.

  “We should get back into the business.”

  There’s nothing sweatier than gold lamé in the relentless heat of a southeast Texas summer.

  That’s what Kit remembered most.

  The stretchy, sweaty, double knit fabric backing the sequins and beadwork that snapped and sparkled in the sun. The trickling down the small of her back. The prickly inner seam of her half-slip and the tight band of knee-high nylons.

  As she and Kiki got older, the high ruffled Loretta Lynn collars dropped to Bobbi Gentry’s scooped necklines, and the poofy chiffon sleeves shrank to spaghetti straps, making it slightly more tolerable, but from the first gig they performed as The Sugar Babes when they were six and seven years old, Kit silently swore she’d never put gold lamé on any kid of hers.

  But Kiki was always a good little trooper, as their mother was always eager to point out. She never complained one bit that the Elk’s Lodge was too smoky or the old folk’s home smelled like vomit or that all the other kids were going on carnival rides and popping balloons for a prize-every-time-you-tryl while they sat beneath the grandstand, waiting to open for Ernest Tubb or Grampa Jones or Tammy Wynette or whomever the wherever-they-were County Fair board had been able to book on its tight budget.

  Kiki spent the time practicing her facial expressions in the makeup kit mirror, making small talk with the main act. Mesmerized by their rhinestones and enormous hair, she listened with rapt attention to their tour bus war stories about sold-out crowds and backstage drunks and the glory days of the Grand Ol’ Opry. She responded precociously to their questions and compliments while Kit retreated into a c
orner with paper and crayons, quietly illustrating the world in which she planned to live someday. A world with a dog, a daddy, and quiet trees. A world that had nothing to do with standing up straight and working the mike and smiling even if you twisted your ankle in your high-heeled shoe.

  “ ... but right now, we’re going to bring up the little bitty girls with the great big voices, all the way from Sugar Land, Texas...”

  Her heart always turned over when she heard the PA echoing their introduction. She squirmed and straightened her sweaty dress while Kiki applied one of her practiced expressions, the one where her teeth looked whiter than sugar, and her eyes glittered like snow cones.

  “Let’s give a big El Paso welcome to Kitty and Kiki—The Sugar Babes!”

  And they would step out, waving, snapping, and sparkling as the backup band kicked into a Patsy Cline number. The crowd reacted with a polite smattering of applause until Kit belted her first line and blew the grandstand back a good three feet on its foundation.

  “Now baby if you’re missin’ me-ee... the way that I been missin’ you...”

  “Write me a line,” Kiki would take it, strident, innocent, and free, “sayin’ honey you’ll be mine...”

  Harmony!

  “Write me in care of the blues!”

  And then the cheering would be there, everyone in the audience astounded that so much sound could bubble up from two tiny dewdrops on a wide and dusty platform at the wide and dusty fairgrounds of a wide and dusty state. They giggled and mugged during the steel guitar solo, reprised the chorus, and ended with their heads back, gold lamé gowns flashing in the sun, mikes held straight up over their bright lipstick mouths.

  “Oh, honey, write me—”

  “Give that postman a letter, honey!”

  “In ca-ya-ya-yare—”

  “First class all the way!”

  “In care of the bloo-oo-ooooooooooooos!”