by Lee Smith
I keep up. I don’t need to go anywhere, that’s what I tell Lacy. It’s so bright out there it hurts my eyes. Sybill is such a loud person. And don’t I know how the hillside looks, and those flowers, and all that blue? I know, Lacy, but thanks I say. Thanks a million ha-ha.
But oh Lacy is pretty, she looks like Princess Di. It’s that haircut she’s got. Candy comes to cut my hair. And I was such a pretty girl myself and Elizabeth put a bowl on my head then and cut my bangs. Elizabeth is very sick, Nettie says. Listen. Pay attention. Elizabeth is very sick, that’s why her daughter Lacy is here who looks like Princess Di who has lost twenty-three pounds on her amazing diet, you can too, you can share the Royal Secret, how she lost four pounds in forty-eight hours and ten pounds in just one week right after the birth of the Prince. Mealtime is an exciting time on Princess Di’s diet. This diet would not work of course for Kenny Rogers who spends two thousand dollars a week on barbecued ribs he has them flown in to wherever he’s performing, for the whole crew, such a generous man. While Sue Ellen on the other hand keeps her blender on the set where she whips up seven types of grain, bananas, and raisins in hot water for a very healthy snack. Sue Ellen has a young lover now. You can’t blame her either, JR is so mean. Some men are just mean. It was awful for Pamela when JR dug up her first husband and accused her of bigamy right in front of Bobby. That was awful! And Pamela poor thing had that miscarriage. Some men are just so mean. Oh don’t I know how it looks out there, so bright, and all the flowers? Listen, honey, Nettie says. Listen here. I’ve been there, is what I tell Nettie. I’ll take care of it, okay? If I can find it and send it off.
Speaking of bright, honey, did you hear about the electric housewife who makes sparks fly wherever she goes? This forty-one-year-old mother of three was ironing a dress when it just up and burst into flames. Now she has to take three showers a day and wears a copper bracelet on her wrist and a long piece of wire tied to her ankle to ground her at all times. Some women are mean, too. Sybill is turning mean in her age like Elizabeth, Nettie says. Asking so many questions like that. And I say ha ha! Sybill was never a child at all, just a spooky little grownup like the ones who have that disease they’re born old and by the time they’re eight they’re ninety, all bent over with arthritis and God knows what. They have little old bodies and nappy white hair. I have it too but it’s pretty and soft, Candy puts Spun Sand rinse on it to keep it so nice that’s why I look so pretty. I don’t know how it got so white. But if Sybill was my baby I’d of drowned her, ha ha! Of course I would not, it’s a terrible death, what a way to go, just look at Natalie Wood. If she had enough sense to take off her jacket she’d be right here with us today. Clinus has a joke, What kind of wood won’t float? The answer is Natalie Wood. Ha ha. And of course it was the height of tragedy leaving Robert Wagner and those three children. Called RJ by his friends. Natalie and RJ had been married for years and years, don’t ask me how they met. You never can tell, when you meet somebody, whether that mysterious chemistry will occur. See here. It was love at first sight when I served him a fake hamburger, I was working in a Denver luncheonette when a man gave me this rubber burger for a joke and so I gave it to Johnny R a twenty-nine-year-old truckdriver who happened to be my next customer. He got mad at first but then he took me to the movies and five years later we are as happy as clams. The Wacky Way I Met My Mate by Louise Nettles, oh we’ve all had a little romance. In fact, those flowers. Nettie says listen, Fay. Don’t worry! I tell them. Ha ha! It’s nice in here and cool and dim. I like it cool like this with lots of atmosphere. It’s wacky and bright in Hollywood otherwise known as Tinseltown. I’ll take care of it! I say.
See here. If you’re in trouble get in touch with Reverend Al and the prayer family of Fresno, California. Check the appropriate box for better job, more finances, I am worried, my health is bad, people talk about me, happier marriage, I need more confidence, I am not understood, someone to care for me. You will receive a beautiful rugged leather cross and a special prayer handkerchief and he will meet your needs. Yes he will! If Clinus will get me a stamp. Nettie won’t. Sometimes Nettie is mean. JR was so mean to dig up Pamela’s first husband it was as Elizabeth would say in poor taste. Listen honey. Elizabeth is very sick. The way I met my mate was just so wacky. Put a check by my health is bad and get me a stamp honey and don’t worry I’ll take care of it.
Arthur went by the One Stop on his way home from work, he’d been drinking maybe a little. The air conditioner was busted in his car and his shirt stuck flat to his back like a creepy wet skin. Arthur had come to a low pass anyway. He’s done it all in his time, a jack of all trades you might say. Now he’s a house sitter. He got out of the car. Clinus was out there by the gas pumps fooling with something. Clinus never seems to get hot or cold either one. He wears khaki pants and a khaki shirt year round, Nettie buys them a dozen a time at the Army-Navy, that’s all he wears. His pants are too short. He never sweats or gets cold. If your brain stops, everything else does too, Arthur could use some of that.
“Howdy,” Clinus said. He squinted at Arthur, grinning. His dog Bert lay flat out in the dirt beside him.
“Howdy,” Arthur said.
Bert didn’t even move.
Clinus wore his cowboy hat with the feathers in front, he’s got a lot of hats. Clinus sat flat on his ass in the dirt with some kind of a thing in front of him, between his legs, and his tools, and his feet stuck out straight as poles on either side of the thing and the tools. Arthur got a big kick out of the way Clinus was just sitting out there.
“What you doing?” Arthur asked him, mainly to pass the time of day. Arthur doesn’t give a shit about much of anything now.
“Coffee grinder,” Clinus said. His fluffy gray clown hair poked out from under his cowboy hat. “Looky here.” Clinus held it up and that’s what it was all right, an old coffee grinder. Arthur figured he’d probably sell it for seventy-five dollars when he fixed it up. People are nuts for antiques. People will buy anything, too. “That’s nice, Clinus,” Arthur told him, and Clinus grinned his big grin, like he’d really done something this time, like he’d got the whole world by the tail. Maybe he had. “Nettie here?” Arthur asked, and Clinus put the coffee grinder back down on the ground where it landed with a soft little splat kicking up little puffs of dirt that hung in the air all around. He jerked his thumb toward the store.
It was real hot. Arthur could feel his blood pressure up in his ears when he climbed up the wooden steps and pushed on the screen door. He needs to get back in shape. He’s got high blood and a bad heart, a weak stomach, low back pain and hemorrhoids and a terminal case of despair. Ask anybody. Arthur has come to a sad pass recently, done in as he says by Inez Nation, a low woman with shameful behavior. He’s on Elavil and Dalmane, he drinks Mylanta like it was water. Arthur stopped in the door and looked around, wiping his face on his sleeve. He’s still a good-looking man and in his ravaged face you can see the boy he used to be, the handsomest boy in town. Now, his niece Theresa says he looks like Lawrence of Arabia.
“Nettie,” he said.
Nobody was in the store there, where they haven’t changed the signs or the merchandise in years, or if they have you can’t tell it. No way to run a store, thinks Arthur, who has had some experience. The old ceiling fan going like crazy, all it did was stir the dust. Arthur has told Nettie a million times, things could be done with this place. You ought to put in a motel. You’ve got a prime location here. Nothing doing, says Nettie. You can’t tell her a thing. Well if you all want to live out here like Negroes, it’s all right with me, Arthur says. He looked at the counter, Chapstick and Little Debbie oatmeal cakes, Nerds, and the gumball machine, Kleenex, Rubik’s Cubes, key chains, pickled eggs. And nobody home. So he went over to the drink box, an antique just like that coffee grinder, and opened it up and got him a Sprite, chugged about half and put him in a little sweetening to go with the rest. He could hear the TV going in the back. He knew that was Fay back there,
watching her stories. All Fay ever does anymore is push those little buttons to change the stations; the whole thing freaks Arthur out.
But hell, at least it’s cool, and he went back there too. This is, you might say, the living room. Full of big heavy dark furniture with fringes on it, Nettie’s last husband’s first wife bought it before she died. Plus Fay of course has got her stuff around in there too, the whole coffee table full of Stars and Midnights and National Enquirers. Which she was looking through real careful, paging through like a person who knows what they’re doing. Wrong. Fay keeps the lights real low and the window air conditioner was going like crazy. The TV was too. Only she wasn’t watching it, just paging through all careful and real slow. Somebody had brought her some flowers. You’d have to cry, going into that room, if you didn’t have to laugh. And Fay getting real heavy now, like a big white slug that never sees day. It freaks Arthur out. Although he ought to be used to it, he’s been there enough.
But one of Arthur’s problems is, he never gets used to a thing.
“Nettie,” he yelled.
Fay didn’t even look up.
“Come on back.” Nettie’s voice came from the kitchen, over the sound of Fay’s TV.
“And how are you today, Fay?” Arthur asked but she was just turning the pages real slow, and mumbling. Hadn’t said a whole sentence since about 1975. As far as what else she does, her functions, you can’t afford to think too much about that. She sleeps right there on the couch. Nettie and Clinus sleep in the back. Plus whoever Nettie has taken in this week. Nettie hires boys and then she raises them. Been doing it all her life.
It’s a damn loony bin out there at the One Stop.
Arthur went on back.
Nettie’s last husband owned the store, and then he got married to his first wife, the dead one, and added another room right behind the store, and then a kitchen on back of that, and then when he married Nettie and inherited Fay, you might say, he put two more rooms on behind the kitchen. So it’s a shotgun all the way, straight back. Then when Clinus’s real mother died he went out there too and built that stuff on the side. Where the antique business is, only it’s mostly a junk business if you ask Arthur. But it pulls them in. Any Saturday, half the county is out there, seeing what Clinus has got. Shows you what there is to do in Booker Creek on a Saturday, too.
“How are you?” Nettie said.
She looked at Arthur once, sharp, he knew she knew he was drinking. Nettie doesn’t miss a trick. And she has had some drinks with Arthur in her time. Years back, growing up, Arthur was out at the One Stop more than he was at home, for a fact. Or else he was on the sofa over the florist shop, in town, when she was married to Millard Cline. Nettie damn near raised him, or tried to. Nobody finished the job. “The thing about you is, Arthur, you are infantile,” Inez Nation once said. She said this before she ran off with all of Arthur’s money and the driver education teacher from the high school, plunging Arthur into despair. “At least I’m not an extravagant slut,” he should have said. But you never think of what you ought to say until the time is past. Arthur’s got his whole head full of them, the right lines from his whole life, which he never said.
Nettie was canning beans. She’s a little old woman now, looks like an Indian, wrinkled from working in the garden year after year and pumping gas. Wears a man’s shirt and jeans and running shoes. Nettie looks like hell. But she’s had some husbands in her time. Nettie was smiling at him. Arthur sat down on a high round stool.
“Well, how’s it going?” he asked her, and she said, “Fine, honey.” Nettie would say this if the house was on fire. Arthur sat there awhile watching her boil the jars and then put the beans in them and turn them upside down on a clean kitchen towel by the sink. You can’t find a woman who’ll care to do a thing like that today. They’re all into women’s lib. Even Alta, who he loved with all his heart, got to where she would rather go to Taco Bell than cook when she was working. Nettie was whistling a tune through her teeth. Arthur got another shot and after a while he started feeling better, and then the phone rang.
He thought how good it was drinking in the summertime. After a while all the light and heat gets up in your head to where things look good again and you get this kind of whispering in your ears. Makes you feel like you’re in on something. Winter is different, nothing you own runs right. You get cold, you get mad, you go ahead and get drunk. You can stay drunk most of the winter if the weather is bad enough. But in the summertime if you do it right you can pace yourself and drink all day and stay right all day long.
Nettie was talking straight into the phone. Then she got the dishrag and started wiping her hands off while she talked, holding the phone to her ear with her shoulder. She was wiping her hands off like she meant business. Arthur thought, uh-oh. But he couldn’t hear much due to this nice pleasurable buzz in his ears, and Fay had the TV going, it was a game show. Then she changed the channel to “General Hospital.” Arthur was thinking, It’s not such a bad life, Fay’s. You don’t have to hear anything but what you want to. You don’t have to see anybody but stars. They say Fay used to be different, but Arthur doesn’t know. He can remember, himself, when she talked. But he can’t remember a thing she said.
Nettie hung up the phone. Then she turned around to Arthur, and it seemed like she turned real slow in that hot kitchen. He knew it was bad news. Nettie opened her mouth and it took her a year. Out the window he could see the old Chevrolet, puke green, which Clinus had been working on for two years, and his red pickup, and a big old white refrigerator. The grass was real green.
“Arthur!” Nettie said. “That was Myrtle, calling from the hospital, and she says Elizabeth has had another stroke, a real bad one, and they’re going to try to get her on a pacemaker. But she don’t stand much of a chance. I guess we’d better get on over there.”
Now this hit Arthur hard. He wasn’t expecting it. He fully expected his mother to get well and get her one of those machines that glide you up and down the staircase and that’d be the end of it. In fact he could just see her, gliding up and down the staircase like a queen, all dressed up.
Nettie’s face looked like it was carved in wood. “Get yourself together now, Arthur,” she said. While she went out the kitchen door, going around to tell Clinus and Roy Looney, the boy who works for her, what was up, Arthur thought about that. If he was to get himself together he’d have to go all over the Tri-State area to do it. Not to mention Florida. He poured himself a little drink. Nettie came back in and said, “Come on, now,” and Arthur followed her back into the store where she got some Pringles and took them in and left them with Fay in case Fay got hungry while she was gone. Fay wasn’t paying her any mind, reading those magazines. Arthur and Nettie walked out in the sun in front of the One Stop where Roy was pumping gas for some hippies in a van. Clinus’s billboard said GET WELL SOON. Clinus sat in the dirt fiddling with his coffee grinder, Bert beside him. “I’ll drive,” Nettie said, looking at Arthur. Nettie is real little. Arthur put his keys back in his pocket and went around the side of the One Stop and they got in the pickup and took off in a cloud of dust like a western movie.
Nettie drove and Arthur looked at things. When you’re driving, you miss a lot. Going in toward town they passed the fancy entrance to Argonne Hills, the new subdivision where Myrtle and Don live. Myrtle and Don remind Arthur of that Rickie Scaggs song you hear on the radio now, about the people who sit around in their hot tub and talk about the things they’ve got. Although they haven’t got a hot tub, yet. Although they have been damn nice to Arthur, Don in particular. Sometimes he’s so nice, you wonder what he’s getting out of it, being that way. Don was always nice. In high school he was the kind of guy that wore a white short-sleeved shirt and got Best All-Around. What do you expect, though, an orphan raised by a preacher and a deaf woman? Don’s okay. So they passed by Argonne Hills, full of those rich young marrieds that moved down here with Burlington, and young doctors and
lawyers. This is one thing Arthur never could understand about Mother. Where she got those ideas. Why she thought she was better than everybody else in town, when you’ve got the Harrisons who send their sons to Yale, been doing it for a couple of generations. Or the Bentons who have owned Long Valley for two hundred years, not to mention all these young marrieds in Argonne Hills. It never made sense. Their grandfather did well in the lumber business, of course, years back, but then he lost his shirt. And Miss Elizabeth ended up without a thing but the clothes on her back and that house. Even if she never would admit it.
Nettie turned onto Main Street and there it was on the hill at the end of town, Arthur used to have to trim the damn boxwoods and clip the grass between all those goddamn stones in the walk.
Nettie drove by the new post office and here came two girls walking along in jeans and those stretch halters they’re all wearing this summer, laughing, eating ice-cream cones. You could see their nipples jiggle up and down. Arthur got hard, then. He has followed his cock all his life, and see where it’s got him to. He gets hard riding in a beat-up pickup truck with his seventy-year-old aunt while his own mother’s dying in the hospital and he’s looking out the window at the tits on high-school girls. It’s shameful. He has followed his cock too far, he’s a psychological misfit and as Alta once said, a scumbag. Alta actually said that, “Arthur, you are a scumbag.” God knows he was, too, in that case, but he wished she hadn’t said it. Later, he tried to make amends. Arthur can hear her right now saying it. He was losing that nice little buzz.