Sugarland

by Joni Rodgers

  Kit pulled the lid from the tin and discovered old letters and newspaper clippings. There were black-and-white snapshots with crimped edges, one picture of Mel as a two-year-old, wearing nothing but a pair of cowboy boots and a great big grin. Kit laughed out loud, partly because he looked exactly like Cooper, and also because she remembered Neeva telling her once, “I never took naked pictures of the babies. Isn’t there enough smut in this world?”

  Kit opened the closet door and felt for a light switch. Not feeling one, she passed her arm back and forth across the expanse of the walk-in, hoping to touch a string hanging down. Her hand came in contact with something that felt like ribbon. She tugged gently, then jumped back as the entire wall collapsed forward in a Fibber Magee of tumbling boxes, breaking glass, and a choking billow of dust. Blessedly, something snagged on the string that yanked a bare, dangling lightbulb to life.

  Kit found herself knee-deep in gaily wrapped and ribboned packages of all sizes. Christmas, Mother’s Day, Happy Birthday—the paper ranged from fairly recent angel foil to kitschy aquamarine flowers, dusty and brittled by age. Kit recognized her own poinsettia paper from last year on one bundle. She recognized her own carefully tucked corners, as distinctive as her own handwriting on several of the tags.

  Sliding her finger beneath one of the corners, she uncovered the word Vid-tek. The tape rewinder from three Christmases ago. Inside the angel paper was the large-number,

  extra-volume telephone they’d sent the following year. She tore open the end of another bundle and discovered an afghan just like the one Marnie had crocheted for her and Mel five years earlier.

  In a sad antithesis of Christmas morning, Kit opened the packages one by one. Robe. Slippers. Tea cozy. A pair of garden angels. Jenga. Isotoner driving gloves. Clap on, clap off—The Clapper! Not knowing what else to do, she piled the gifts into the Salvation Army box on the bed.

  After a while, Mel returned from the hospital with news that Marnie was doing fine, but Butch was terribly sick to his stomach. He now had Trudy and Blake in tow, and Kit’s heart sank even deeper.

  “Mel, I know this is a tough day for you,” Kit said, “but honey, I can’t take care of all these kids and do this thing, too. I can’t.

  “Well, I have to take Aunt Alice back to Corpus. And Pop is going to need some supper.” He looked at her helplessly. “What am I supposed to do?”

  “All right. Okay. This’ll be fine.” Kit tried to think of a way to make that true. “Okay, here it is: I’ll keep Mitzi and Trudy. You take Cooper, Blake, your dad, and Alice over to Corpus Christi. Take them all to a restaurant, feed them, and drop Alice off. Come back to New Rippy, drive through McDonald’s for Mitzi and Trudy, drop it off here, leaving Cooper and your dad, then take Blake back to his house. He’s plenty old enough to be by himself. We’ll keep Trudy here just in case he decides to set the place on fire or something.”

  “Okay,” Mel nodded numbly. “I got it.”

  “Wait!” Kit called as he headed down the hall.

  He turned back, thinking she was going to kiss him.

  “Bring trash bags,” she said.

  Sweetest, most coveted love,

  Please don’t let me hear your voice again. Every time you feed me, I know I’m slowly starving. It’s not ours to take, but I lie at night, tangled in a wanting of you that breathes deeper than my silent prayers. I used to watch you working, alive with desire for your hands, your mouth, your voice on the phone, your eyes like cigarette smoke over sky, like deep water. How did boundaries that were always so clear become so blurred?

  My room is still and hot tonight, and as always, I’m alone. I’m thirsty. I brush the back of my hand across my mouth and imagine the nape of your neck, the curve of your spine. I push my dry tongue against the roof of my mouth and feel the color of your nipple—pale brown as it comes erect at the slightest small tease. I love that you never push my head down. You let me go my own way, finding forgotten nerve endings at the back of your calf and thigh. When I say something that makes you laugh, I feel the sound against my soft pallet, a vibration, like someone calling my name under water. You’re lazy, letting me tease around the ridge to the tiny eye, lifting your hips like a bowl of honey-milk. But sometimes, I’m so thirsty. I want too much. I go too fast, too hard. My lips begin to feel bruised and swollen, a slight tinge of blood where I tried to protect you from my teeth. If you kiss me now, you’ll taste it. So kiss me now. Please, kiss me, stroking and saying, easing, entering in. I’ll cross my ankles and confine your stroke just there. Whisper something, anything, private things, until I feel myself resolving—nipples, fingers, the soles of my feet, the internal expansion that pulls my head back, opens my mouth, forces the air from my lungs. This is the moment I’m most afraid. I’m alone unless you’re willing to reveal something. Confide secrets, extract promises, speak profanities. I used to pray to be forgiven, to forget how you revived my dry hopes, my dismembered senses, but now, I beg for one more opportunity to trespass and be trespassed against. Oh, Lord, let him touch me. Christ, let him kiss me. Jesus, let him lie over me like a cross against the back of the crucified. Oh, God, let him fuck me, let him fuck me, let him—

  “I’m back,” Mel opened the back door, startling Kit and letting in the sound and smell of a summer thunderstorm as he tromped into Neeva’s clean kitchen a little after three in the morning. Kit hastily folded the floral notepaper and shivered it back into the envelope.

  “Kit?” His wet sneakers squeaked across the linoleum.

  “In here!” she sang. She tried to vault over the Salvation Army box to cram the letter inside Roget’s Thesaurus or chuck it into the now empty bra drawer, but Mel was coming down the hall, so she snatched the Danish Butter Cookie tin on top of the armoire and stuffed the missive inside, clanking the lid down tight against all that stroking and saying and blasphemous, ankle-crossing bliss.

  “Well, it’s a boy,” Mel announced from the doorway.

  “Lord help us,” Kit said, leaning casually on the dresser. “This world really needed another Butchy Prizer.” Mel laughed, and she asked, “Is everybody all right?”

  “Yeah. Marnie’s pretty wiped out, but Butch slept for a couple hours while she was in the labor room. And the baby! Ah, Kit, the baby’s just beautiful.” He stroked his hand across Kit’s stomach. “The whole time, I couldn’t stop thinking about—”

  “I’m glad everybody’s okay,” Kit broke away and busied herself back at the boxes, intently resorting the contents. “And I got a lot of work done. Took four huge bags of trash out of the kitchen and six or seven out of here.”

  “Come across anything interesting?” Mel asked, shaking out Butch’s raincoat.

  Kit motioned toward the trash box, and he knelt beside it with a soft, slow whistle. He used a yardstick to stir the contents, dislodging a 1967 New Rippy High Armadillos seat cushion, two miniature sombreros, a set of Myrtle Beach salt-and-pepper shakers, and about twelve years’ worth of those little plastic squares that hold bread bags shut, all clipped onto a length of clothesline rope.

  “Hmm,” he said.

  “Mel, I’m afraid your mother was a few flakes short of a piecrust.”

  “Yeah.” He sat down on the edge of the bed and then lay back with a long, deep sigh.

  “Are you okay?” Kit sat close beside him and stroked his forehead.

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you miss her?”

  “I missed her forty-four years ago,” he shrugged. “Or she missed me.”

  Kit thought this was the saddest thing that could be said in epitaph for a mother, and the stinging in her eyes was as close as anyone came to crying that day. Crying for Neeva, anyway. She lay down and put her arms around Mel, drawing her leg protectively across him, wishing she could have made at least one good mommy in his life. The tension in his body seemed to melt a little when she laid her hand over his heart.

  “Thanks for doing this, Kit,” he said. “This and everything else.”

  “Don�
�t say that.”

  “No, it’s true. You do everything that makes our life work. You always have. And I never tell you, so you think I don’t know it. But I see it, Kit. I know. I appreciate it. And I’m gonna show you how much. Just you wait and see.”

  “You don’t have to show me anything, Mel.” She tried to get up, but he held her there.

  “I’ve got something for you,” he tantalized against her neck. “And I think you’re gonna like it.”

  “Mel, not here.”

  “Not that,” he grinned, “but it’s almost as good.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a surprise. And you don’t get to see it until you come home from the hospital with the baby.”

  “Like the baby isn’t surprise enough?”

  Mel laughed and kissed her, and he tasted like summer rain.

  “God, I love you,” he said. “You’re my whole life.”

  His words lay on her chest like an anvil. Kit thought if she stayed one second longer, she was going to start bawling.

  “I love you, too,” she mumbled, and headed for the bathroom.

  It was a long, hot drive home.

  “How much longer?” Cooper kept asking until Mel finally barked at him that if he asked that question one more time, somebody’s father was gonna pull this car over to the side of the road, and then he’d see just how much longer it was. Nobody really knew what all that meant, but Mel’s tone of voice could be pretty intimidating, so they drove on in silence.

  “Do you want me to drive for a while?” Kit asked when the stars began to appear and Mitzi and Cooper were both asleep in the backseat.

  “No, that’s okay,” Mel said. “You must be wiped out.”

  “Kind of,” she shrugged, “but I could take a turn.”

  “Is there something wrong with the way I’m driving, Kit? Am I annoying you in some way with my driving habits?”

  “No, I just thought—”

  “Then let me drive, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay?”

  “Okay, already!”

  “Good.”

  “Fine.”

  Mel rubbed his eyes and squeezed the bridge of his nose, and Kit bit her lip to keep from telling him he was right smack on the bumper of the truck in front of them. And way too close to the center line.

  “I sure wish we could afford to stop at a motel,” he said.

  Kit bristled on her side of the seat but didn’t say anything.

  “But I guess Kiki’s happiness is worth more than anything else in the world,” he continued. “And we are responsible for all her needs.”

  “Mel, do we have to—”

  “After all, it’s not like she’s a grown woman or anything.”

  “I told you, I will replace the savings account.”

  “Yeah, I heard. Are you gonna hold up a liquor store to do that or just sell one of your mink coats?”

  “As soon as I can start working again, I will, Mel. I was thinking I might wait until the baby’s born, but what the hey! I’m sure a lot of people are anxious to hire a pregnant housewife who dropped out of college on account of she was working two waitress jobs in order to send her husband to vocational school.”

  “Oh, forgive me, Kit! I actually forgot for five seconds how I selfishly robbed you of your education just so I could provide silly little extravagances like shelter and food for our family. I forgot that I forced you to be a waitress with no education when what the hey! You could have been a waitress with an Art History degree!”

  “You’re right, Mel. An Art History degree is worthless. I’m much better off with nothing. I mean, this way, both the food service and housekeeping industries are wide open to me. Why, I bet there’s a million career opportunities ready to jump on up and bite me, so you know, any day now, I’ll be out there shakin’ that moneymaker, all right?”

  “Geez,” Mel mumbled guiltily. “Forget I said anything.”

  Kit was impossibly caught between seething wrath and the compulsive urge to beg his forgiveness. She knew they couldn’t afford it, but she couldn’t turn her back on Kiki. Not now. She knew she should have never left for Orlando. She should have been there for Kiki all along when this weirdness with Wayne was going on. A thousand tiny details—bruises explained away a little too easily, glib stories about trips and mousetraps and scatter-minded accidents, long periods of silence, the violence of Chloe’s Ken doll whenever Barbie wasn’t quick enough jumping into the Dream Car. And then there was that night. The rain. The broken glass. As soon as she learned what he was capable of, Kit castigated herself, she should have forced Kiki to admit what was going on and get out of the house for good. When Kiki finally did blurt it all out over the phone from the Red Cross tornado shelter, Kit wanted to kill the bastard herself. She wanted to be part of the wind that ripped his stupid head off and pounded him into the ground.

  After they rushed back from Orlando to get her, Kit took Kiki shopping, purposely avoiding the discount stores where she always bought clothes for herself and Mel and their own kids. Kiki and Oscar and Chloe were accustomed to better. Kit combed the newspaper and apartment guidebooks, paging past the low income complexes and insisting to their mother that Kiki needed the security of a gated community. At the furniture store, she emptied the last of their savings account with the fervor of someone purchasing an indulgence from the pope, but the images still haunted, and the knowledge still nagged. She couldn’t get around the fact that someday, somehow, Kiki was going to find out what happened, and Kit would lose something that had been precious to her all her life. Lately, she found herself separating from Kiki in preparation for that day, unable to bear hearing her voice on the telephone, making excuses to avoid the Taco Cabana, not wanting to think about the ten-minute drive to the apartment complex, even though she missed her sister painfully and knew her sister painfully missed her.

  According to Dr. Jane Poplin, Kit’s obstetrician, the only way to determine for sure who the baby’s father was would be through amniocentesis and DNA testing, and for that, she’d need blood samples from the two possible ... here Dr. Poplin had used the word “subjects.” Kit had been tearing her mind apart, ransacking for some way to obtain the samples without facing the “subjects” or having to explain the whole thing to Kiki. As much as the idea of sneaking into the hospital and slashing Wayne’s throat appealed to her, she figured she might have a problem getting a sitter while she went to prison for fifty years. And the idea of Ander’s expression when confronted with the possibility of yet another child—Ag! sadaesten dröeker!

  The baby grew inside her, day by day, and the burden of guilt expanded with it. Kit spent her days waiting for punishment to descend, knowing that whatever was coming, it wasn’t bad enough. There wasn’t a shower hot enough or a communion wafer dry enough to absolve her. Mel wasn’t the kind of man who would beat her, so she did her best to beat herself.

  He pulled into the driveway a little after midnight. Each bundling a child into their arms, they carried Mitzi and Coo up to their beds and tucked them in come-as-you-are—jean shorts, dirty feet, and all.

  Kit came down to the kitchen and measured grounds into Mr. Coffee. As she headed back up the stairs, she heard Mel out in the garage, clanking his tools on the cement floor, whirring his electric drill.

  The garage was now off-limits to everyone else in the family, including Kit. She caught fleeting glimpses of the Falcon as Mel came and went through the kitchen door; it was now swathed in an enormous blue drop cloth, a divine sculpture awaiting its grand unveiling by the Michelangelo of mechanics.

  Kit carried the suitcases upstairs and stretched out on the bed. Reaching into her bag, she brought out the Danish Butter Cookie tin and spread the antique-smelling contents on the comforter. The letters were still sealed in their pale blue envelopes, neatly addressed beneath brittle virgin stamps, and they all began the same way.

  Sweetest, most coveted love...

  Sometimes the handwriting became
too erratic to read, and Kit had to strain to decipher those lines that were scored through by the deeply creased folds.

  ... when I get there that day because I told you I would forbid nothing. The tacit invitation, the permission, I bow away from you, presenting like a mare. (Oh, I know! And I am sorry for the image, but I long to lead you back from your civilized mind to an ancient, bestial self) This isn’t something I can give you. You must be strong enough to take it. Don’t be afraid. My cry isn’t so much pain as intensity. I deliver myself to your gentleness, I believe in your willingness to go slowly, just a centimeter more each time I breathe out, until I’m pliant and wet and open and you’re able to pull back and slide forward as freely as when you faced me.

  It was like staring into a solar eclipse. Kit couldn’t resist. Her eyes felt large and dry, her chest constricted, scarred, as she carefully slid the John Wayne letter opener across the top of another envelope and pressed the notepaper open on the bed.

  ... while my fingers find the -precise circular motion that brings on my little nova. I do my best to hold back, but now? Please, now. The dissolving is such that all my being is wracked and weakened and taken under. Whose name will you cry out at the last moment? Mine? Your wife’s? Jesus Christ? I don’t care as long as I’m the one to hear it. Flood and overflow me. Or let me lay back to receive your warm white milk across my nipples and mouth. Oh, I want that, please. I’m so thirsty. I’ll share the salt taste with you in a kiss, drawing you on top of me, inside me, to comfort you, to let you sheath your sword. You’ve just slain Grendel’s mother, my love. You are mortally wounded, though you laugh every time I tell you that

  How could a harpy like Neeva have written any such thing? Who was her sweet, coveted love, and why did the letters lay there unsent for all the years that had gone by since you could send a letter for just five cents postage? And how could Otto have been oblivious to something that so profoundly affected her? And who the heck was Grendel?