by Julia Watts
“So ... Sheila, Tracee, I was just about to make some coffee. Would you like some?” As grating as these drop-in visits were, Lily was determined not to alienate any of the McGillys through her lack of hospitality. After all, her success in the courtroom depended largely on the McGillys’ continued good will.
“No thanks,” Sheila chirped. “Me and Tracee just decided to have a night away from the boys — let them stay home with the kids for a change.”
“There’s this new aerobics class they’re starting over at the middle school,” Tracee added. “We thought we’d stop by to see if you wanted to come with us.”
The idea of aerobics— let alone the idea of aerobics performed alongside Sheila and Tracee —filled Lily with the kind of anxiety she hadn’t experienced since junior-high PE class. It wasn’t that she was adverse to exercise. Back in Atlanta, she and Charlotte had taken long walks every evening, talking about the day’s happenings and pushing Mimi in her stroller.
But walking was a natural exercise—it was something human beings were inclined to do anyway. There was nothing in Lily’s genetic makeup, however, that gave her the inclination to contort her body in rhythm to outdated top-forty music. “Gosh, guys, I’d really love to, but as you can see, we have company.”
“Oh, you go ahead.” Ben smiled with devious benevolence. “Ken and I can hold down the fort here.”
She looked at her ersatz husband with pure spite. She knew what that twinkle in his eyes was all about. He and Ken would be making out on the couch like a couple of teenagers, while she was forced to skip around a middle-school gym like a moron. “Well, I don’t know, hon. Mimi still needs to be put to bed.”
“Don’t you worry about a thing.” Ken smiled. “Daddy Ben and Uncle Ken will take care of her.”
“Come on, Lil-leee,” Sheila playfully whined, “it’ll be fun.”
Now she was in the position of looking like a total bitch if she declined. “Just a second... let me go get changed.”
In her room, she threw on a baggy long-sleeve T-shirt and some cutoff sweatpants, all the while imagining elaborate ways to murder Ben and Ken. A mere five minutes ago, she had been having such a pleasant evening.
“I tell you what, Lily,” Tracee said, after they had piled into her Lexus. “Five years ago, if Sheila and me was gonna have a girls’ night out, we woulda been heading to the bars instead of to aerobics class.”
Sheila giggled. “We’re getting old, I guess.”
“Yep,” Tracee agreed, “we ain’t nothin’ but old married ladies. How ’bout you, Lily? You feel like an old married lady yet?”
“I don’t know. I hadn’t really given it much thought.”
“Oh, you wait till Benny Jack knocks you up a couple times, then you’ll feel like an old married lady—trust me.” Tracee laughed.
Lily hoped her tight-lipped smile didn’t reveal how uncomfortable she really was. She had spent very little time around straight women over the course of her adult life; it was little wonder she was so clueless about how to act like one.
The aerobics class was, if possible, even worse than Lily had imagined. The middle-school gym was populated by a herd of slim, tanned bleached-blond women who looked like so many Sheilas and Tracees. Lily wondered if somewhere in Faulkner County a factory churned out these seemingly identical women just as the Confederate Sock Mill churned out identical socks. The one distinctive-looking woman in the class was middle-aged and heavy, her broad hips stuffed into a pair of gray sweatpants.
Lily was just admiring the big woman’s chutzpah far attending an aerobics class full of Sheilas and Tracees when the real Sheila elbowed her, nodded toward the big woman, and whispered, “Somebody’s got a long way to go.”
The aerobics instructor was distinctive from all the Sheilas and Tracees only in that her hair was brunet. Her taut and toned body was apparent in her electric-blue leotard and hot-pink tights, and a zealous smile of the type worn by born-again Christians was plastered across her carefully made-up face. “O-kay, lay-deez!” she chirped, clapping her well-manicured hands. “We’re gonna start in tonight with a weigh-in. And then, after you’ve been coming to this class for six weeks, we’ll weigh in again, and you’ll really see some improvement.”
She led the way to the locker room, where the “ladies” were invited to come in one at a time to stand on the scales. Several of the Sheilas and Tracees giggled when the heavy woman took her turn, and one voice stage-whispered the word, “Tilt!” If there was a way in which this class was dissimilar to junior-high PE, Lily failed to see it.
As she stepped into the locker room for her turn on the scales, she even breathed in the odors of junior-high PE — the stale, sour smell of pubescent sweat. “O-kay, hon,” the aerobics instructor, whom Lily had begun to think of as Spandex Dominatrix, said, “now, how tall are you?”
“About five-three.”
Spandex Dominatrix wrote the information down on her clipboard. “Step on the scales, please.”
Just as she would have when she was thirteen, Lily dumbly obeyed.
“Uh-huh,” Spandex chided as she looked at the scale. “You’re a full eight pounds over your ideal body weight. But don’t worry. Stay in this class, and you’ll be shedding that flab in no time!”
Lily walked out of the locker room, disgusted not because she was supposedly a few pounds over her ideal body weight, but because she had let Spandex Dominatrix actually make her feel bad about herself for a few seconds. Sheila and Tracee, she noticed, had stripped down to butt-floss leotards for their weigh-ins, and she saw the fat woman looking at their firm buttocks with a mixture of envy and loathing.
What was this psychosis American women had about weight? Even Lily, a supposedly enlightened feminist, fell prey to it sometimes. When she had suffered an insecure moment, when she had expressed to Charlotte the need to flatten her tummy or firm up her butt, Charlotte had always pulled her close and whispered, “Now, who wants to ride in a car that doesn’t have any upholstery?”
The women lined up in rows for their exercises. “O-kay, lay-deez,” Spandex Dominatrix chirped, like Richard Simmons with just a touch more estrogen, “we’re gonna start out with a warmup. But first, does anybody have any questions before we start burning off those calories?”
Lily felt her hand go up in the air.
“Uh-huh?” Spandex acknowledged her.
“Uh ... yeah.” Lily searched for the right words. “I was just wondering, why does this class have to be about how skinny we can get? Can’t we just exercise to improve our health and feel good instead of trying to live up to some impossible commercial ideal of beauty?”
Although Spandex was still wearing her smile, she was looking at Lily as though she had been speaking to her in Latvian. Finally, Sheila nodded toward Lily and said to the aerobics instructor, “She ain’t from around here.”
“Oh,” Spandex Dominatrix said, seeming to find Sheila’s comment a satisfactory explanation. “O-kay, let’s get started then.”
The soundtrack for their stretching was, as Lily had suspected, moldy top forty. They moved from the warmup into a more strenuous step routine. Lily looked around to all the Sheilas and Tracees, who were clapping and yelling “Whoo-hoo!” and enjoying themselves enormously. Great, Lily thought ... stepping with the Stepford Wives. She took some comfort in watching the fat woman, who at least looked appropriately miserable. It wasn’t the exercise that was exhausting Lily; it was the fact that she was supposed to be perky while she was doing it.
In the car after the ordeal was over, Sheila said, “I can’t believe what you said in class. I thought I was gonna die!”
“It’s just cause you’re a newlywed,” Sheila said. “In a few years, you’ll know how important it is to keep them pounds off ... to keep Benny Jack’s eye from wandering.”
“Well,” Lily said, feeling ridiculous even as she said it, “I like to think that Ben wants me for me, and not for my waist size.”
Sheila and Tracee burst ou
t laughing.
“Yeah,” Tracee hooted, “you’d like to think that, wouldn’t you?”
Lily entered the house to find Ben and Ken cuddling on the couch. “It’s getting late,” she barked. “Y’all can’t be together at all hours of the night. People will talk.”
“Damn,” Ben said, “what’s wrong with you? PMS or something?”
“Ben,” Lily sighed, “how would you like it if you were forced to go out and play a game of tackle football with a bunch of straight boys who farted a lot and talked incessantly about pussy?”
“Uh ... well, it sounds like my idea of hell,” Ben said.
“Exactly. And I have just been to that same circle of hell for the opposite sex, with Sheila and Tracee as my guides.” She nodded toward Ken. She really did like him, and didn’t want to come off as a total psychopath. “I’m sorry I was rude, Ken. I enjoyed visiting with you tonight ... before I got sucked into the vortex of doom. And now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to check on Mimi, take a shower, and have a nervous collapse.”
Lily stood in the shower, the sound of the running water drowning out her sobs. There were only two things she wanted — Charlotte, and her old life back—and both of them were as impossible to retrieve as the water that went down the drain.
She knew one thing for sure. If she didn’t find some lesbian friends soon, didn’t find a safe place where she could hang out and be herself, she was going to lose her mind. She was not psychologically fit for this kind of intense, twenty-four-hour undercover work.
CHAPTER 12
“No oozing around the site of the injury?” Dr. Jack’s voice asked over the phone.
“No.” Feeling her throat constrict around the mouthful of yogurt she’d been trying to swallow, Lily wondered if there was a more unpleasant word in the English language than oozing.
“Any pus?” Dr. Jack asked, answering Lily’s unspoken question.
“No.” Giving up on eating any yogurt herself, she instead spooned it into Mimi’s gaping mouth. “Okay, then, why don’t you just bring him into the office in ten days, and we’ll get those stitches out. If he has any problems before then, be sure and call me.”
Lily knew that Dr. Jack was winding down their phone conversation, but she didn’t want to let her go until she had asked her about another matter. “Dr. Jack?”
“Uh-huh.”
“There was something else I wanted to talk to you about.”
“Uh-huh?” She sounded puzzled.
“I, uh ... I don’t think I mentioned this to you the other day, but I write and illustrate — that is, draw the pictures —” She mentally kicked herself for explaining what illustrate meant. The Dr. in Dr. Jack’s name meant she probably understood the meaning of three-syllable words. “Children’s books.”
“Is that a fact?” Dr. Jack sounded mildly interested, but still puzzled.
“Yeah. I was thinking about what you said about going on farm calls with your dad when you were a little girl, and I thought that a story about a little girl who did that might make a good picture book.”
“Ha!” Dr. Jack laughed. “I don’t think anybody’s ever thought of me as literary material before.” She was silent for a moment. “Seriously, though, I like the idea. Daddy died last year. A book like that might be a good way to remember him.”
“We could even dedicate it to him if you wanted,” Lily said.
“Hmm.”
Lily waited for her to add something, but she never did. Finally she jumped in. “The thing is, I’m kind of a city girl, and I’d really need to spend some time around farm animals in order to draw them well. So I was wondering if maybe I could go on a few farm calls with you. I’d stay out of your way, of course —”
Dr. Jack laughed — a deep, low chuckle. “I don’t know. A city girl has to get up pretty early in the mornin’ to go on a farm call.”
“I can handle that. I’m kind of a morning person anyway.” That last part was a big lie, but she didn’t want Dr. Jack to stereotype her as a night-owl urbanite.
“Well, you just keep your drawing things packed then, Mrs. McGilly, ’cause I’ll be calling you one mornin’ without any notice.”
Lily hung up the phone and realized that the conversation had made her so nervous that she had been spooning yogurt into Mimi’s mouth faster than she could eat it.
Dr. Jack hadn’t been kidding about the early part. On Saturday morning, when the clock read four seventeen, the phone rang. “Hello?” Lily croaked.
“Hey. I thought you said you were a mornin’ person,” Dr. Jack laughed. “Just got a call about a sow in trouble. You wanna come?”
“Sure, I guess so.”
“You live on that road out by the Free Will Baptist, don’tcha?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’ll come by and get you then. I’m on my way.”
Lily threw on yesterday’s clothes and splashed some water on her face. She bumped into Ben on her way out of the bathroom.
“Was it that bull dyke veterinarian on the phone?” he asked, rubbing his heavy-lidded eyes.
“Now, now, dear, that’s not a very politically correct way to refer to her.”
“Nobody who calls at four o’clock on a Saturday morning gets the PC treatment,” Ben muttered.
“I shouldn’t be gone long,” Lily said. “I don’t think Mimi will wake up before I get back, but if she does, you can look after her, right?”
“Hey, what are self-proclaimed fathers for?”
Dr. Jack came to fetch Lily in a faded red Chevy pickup. It was impossible to imagine her driving anything else. “Hop on in, Mrs. McGilly,” she said, grinning. Dr. Jack, clearly a morning person, looked alert and cheerful despite the fact that it wasn’t even five a.m.
“Please call me Lily.” Pretty please, she thought. “Lily McGilly!” Dr. Jack laughed.
“Trust me. You’re not the first person to find my married name amusing.”
“I guess not. Well, some folks call me Jack, and some folks call me Doc. You take your pick —just as long as you don’t call me by my given name.”
“Which is?”
“Jacqueline. My momma got it outta some book she was reading. It never did suit me. Her giving me that name was just like her putting me in frilly dresses all the time. Pretty things just don’t suit me. I was always the plain, practical type. Not like Momma.”
“Is your mother still alive?”
“As far as I know. ’Course, the last time I heard anything was probably four years ago. She was still living down in Florida then. That’s where she went when she left Daddy and me. She left Daddy for another man when I was seven years old, but she didn’t stay with him either. She couldn’t be satisfied with nothin’ . . . she was the restless type. I think that’s one of the things that got on her nerves about Daddy and me: We were both content to stay in the same place and do the same thing. Not a restless bone in our bodies.”
“Hmm,” Lily said. “I think a lot of women in your mother’s generation were probably dissatisfied, always thinking they’d be happier with some other man, when the source of their unhappiness was really a lot deeper than that.”
“Huh,” Jack said. “You think a lot.”
Lily blushed. She hadn’t meant to get all theoretical, but she had just the same. All those years of living with a college professor, maybe. “I guess I do. Maybe it’s because I’m a writer. Of course, I don’t tend to philosophize like that in my books, since my usual audience is made up of seven-year-olds.”
Jack grinned. “You know, when you asked me if you could come along on some farm calls, I kinda wondered if you’d be a nuisance, since I’m so used to being by myself. But having some company for a change is nice.”
“We’ve not even gotten to the farm yet. I’ve still got plenty of time to be a nuisance.” It occurred to her that she had absolutely no idea what to expect when they arrived. “Say, when you called you said there was a sow in trouble. What did you mean by that? It sounded like she’d
been caught writing bad checks or something.”
Jack laughed. “No, a pig’s too smart to get caught writing bad checks. This sow’s in labor, but she can’t get one of the piglets pushed out. It happens sometimes — a baby’ll get turned the wrong way in the birth canal. And the mother panics cause she doesn’t know what’s going on. It’s really just a matter of getting the piglet turned around the right way. It’s not hard if you know what you’re doing.”
Jack pulled the truck into a long gravel driveway at the end of which was a small, white frame house. The house was dwarfed by the huge, unpainted barn that sat behind it.
A craggy-faced man in a John Deere cap and overalls began talking to Jack before she could even get out of the truck. “She’s in the barn over yonder. I done got you some soap and hot water.”
“Thanks, Ed. Let’s go take a look at her.”
Jack was apparently in an all-business mood, since she didn’t bother introducing Lily to the farmer. Figuring that manners took the backseat in a medical crisis, Lily grabbed her sketch pad and pencils and tagged along behind Jack and Ed, feeling faintly ridiculous.
The sweet hay smell of the barn was soured by sounds of fear and pain. In a corner pen, the enormous sow paced and squealed. Her eyes were wild, terrified. Two newborn piglets lay a few feet away from her, tiny and pink, rooting blindly in the straw.
This was the first birth Lily had attended since Mimi’s, and while the mother pig didn’t have as colorful a vocabulary as Charlotte, the similarities between the two occasions were striking. Lily knew the party line was that giving birth was a beautiful thing, and she agreed with that sentiment up to a point. But the miracle of birth also had a dark, scary side. One only needed to look at the panicking sow and her frail piglets to remember that all living creatures are born helpless, out of their mother’s fear and pain.
Lily kept her distance and watched the vet do her work.
Jack began by scrubbing her hands in the basin of hot water Ed had provided. She nodded toward the sow. “Now, Ed, this un’s named Minnie, right?”