by Joan Opyr
“You know what I mean. Or,” she added dryly, “maybe you don’t.”
“I sleep alone plenty. Why do you always make out like I’m the lesbian equivalent of Warren Beatty?”
“Envy.”
I waited for a moment, trying to gauge how far I should go. We had only recently begun to discuss the subject of Abby dating again. Her partner, Rosalyn, had been dead for five years. I considered the topic taboo and commented only if she brought it up first. Since the lights were out, I decided to be brave.
“You could do something about that, Abby. The world is full of women who would jump at the chance to have you as a bed-mate.”
“Right,” she said. “As evidenced by the fact that I’m in a hotel room with you and we’re sleeping in separate beds like Lucy and Ricky Ricardo.”
“Come on over. One half of my spacious queen-sized bed is at your disposal.”
“No thanks, Warren. I’d rather not end up on Dolores’s hit list. Do you mind if I close the curtains? I’ll never get to sleep with that full moon.”
“The moon’s always full in the South, didn’t you know? That’s why we’re all so crazy. Lunatics.”
“I was just thinking,” she said. “It does seem to get closer here than it does in Portland, and yet Oregon’s not that much farther north. Why were you thinking about your name?”
“I have no idea. Random association of thoughts in a tired mind.”
She yawned. “Too much beer and not enough dinner. Goodnight, Poppy.”
“Goodnight.”
Despite my exhaustion, or maybe because of it, I was awake for a long time after. When the sound of Abby’s breathing grew heavy and regular, I climbed out of bed and walked across to the window. I opened the curtains an inch or two, just enough to let a small shaft of moonlight shine across the room and onto the foot of my bed. I loved moonlight. As a child, I used to sneak out of my bed and meet Jack Leinweber in the cornfield behind our subdivision. We’d chase one another along the rows of stalks, or bend the stalks over to make huts and fortresses. The farmer must have hated us. We used his field to make elaborate crop structures.
I watched the shaft of moonlight until I fell asleep, sometime after midnight. I dreamed about field corn, and Abby, and my name.
“For heaven’s sake,” my mother said, “it’s not that bad. You’re lucky you weren’t blinded, or worse.”
“What could be worse?”
“A glass eye. An empty socket. Your eyelids sewn shut over a gaping hole.”
“Here now,” my grandmother interrupted, “there’s no need for that.” She sat at the dining room table shelling field peas. “Just tell Hunter to stop calling you Popeye. If you kick up enough fuss . . .”
“If I kick up any fuss, he’ll never stop. You know how he is.”
“It’s your own fault,” Nana said. “You’ll answer to any awful nickname. You ought to insist on your given name.”
“I hate Mary Frances.”
“Well, I don’t know why. Mary Frances is a pretty name.”
“I’m not pretty.”
“You’re not when you flop on a chair like that with your legs all splayed out. You want to sit up straight, stop hunching over, and cross your legs at the ankle. It’s high time you started acting like a lady.”
I remained where I was. Unless she got up to pinch me—and she’d been known to—I didn’t bother to correct myself.
“And while I’m thinking about it,” she went on, “I will pay you to take off those raggedy old cut-offs and put on something decent. People will think you don’t have any better.”
“No one cares about my shorts.”
“I care. They have a hole in them. I can see clear to Chattanooga. You make me wish I had a long stick with a pin on it—then you’d learn to sit right.” A line of peas rolled into the metal mixing bowl. “Your mistake was letting people call you anything other than the name you were born with. No one has ever called me anything but Myrtle.”
“Not true. Hunter calls you Dolly.”
“He calls every woman with big boobs Dolly,” my mother observed.
“It’s disgusting and sexist.” I sat up in the chair, not to correct my posture but to better make my point. “Why don’t you object to that?”
Nana dismissed this with the wave of a pea pod. “It’s just nicknaming,” she said. “Why should you mind? You were called Mary Frances until you went to school. You started letting people call you Frankie, and Fran, and I don’t know what all . . .”
“Frank,” I said.
Nana rolled her eyes. “Frank. You shouldn’t have been allowed to get away with that.” She cast a pointed look at my mother. “If they’re calling her Popeye at school, someone should call her teacher and tell her . . .”
“She’s in high school now,” my mother said calmly. “She has more than one teacher. She can sort out for herself what she wants to be called. If that’s Popeye, Frank, or Rosy Red Ringbaum, it’s not up to me to decide. I’ll abide by her wishes, but she’ll have to enforce them at school. As for Daddy, no one can make him do anything.”
“Poppy,” Nana said. “That’s like Popeye, only it’s nice. It’s a flower. Very feminine. What about that?”
“Good God,” I said.
“You know I hate it when you talk like that, Poppy. It’s common and trashy.”
“Poppy,” Nana said, hugging me. “It’s so good to see you. Have you lost weight?” She spun me around and examined me from all angles. “I believe you have. Look how skinny she is, Barbara. You’re too skinny. Is everything all right?”
“It’s the surgery. I lost weight before, and then I wasn’t hungry after, and, all in all, I’m down about fifteen pounds. I’ve got my appetite back now.”
“Good,” my mother said. I hugged her, too. She and my grandmother both seemed to have shrunk since I’d last seen them, though it had been only a couple of years. My mother was five foot five, and my grandmother an inch or so taller, and yet I towered over them like Shaquille O’Neal. “You’re not too skinny. You look fine, unlike me. I could do with six months on a desert island, living off the fat of the land, so to speak.” She patted her stomach.
“You always say that, Ma, but you look great.”
“I’m so glad to hear you say that because I’m starving. Where would you like to eat?”
I laughed. Then I said, “Don’t we need to go to the hospital first?”
She shook her head. “We’ve already been, first thing this morning. There’s no change. Dr. Adkins—that’s the doctor who’s treating him—wants us to come back at noon to talk about his options. I told her I wanted to wait until you could be there.”
“I’m ready whenever. So, how about Fat Daddy’s?”
“Well,” my mother hesitated. “I don’t really like Fat Daddy’s. Too greasy. Is there anywhere else?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t been in Raleigh for a while. What about Courtney’s, is that still open?”
“It is, but we just ate there day before yesterday.”
I turned to my grandmother. “Where would you like to go, Nana?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “You decide.”
“How about Gregory’s?”
“I prefer Big Ed’s in the City Market,” she said.
“Big Ed’s,” my mother agreed. “That’s good. Have you been to Big Ed’s?”
“No.”
“You’d like it. They have good food.”
By that point, I didn’t care if they served French fried toe-nail clippings. Five minutes in the bosom of my family, and I found myself playing the Great Magnifico, breakfast mind reader. It was an old pattern, and it drove me crazy. It also felt welcoming and familiar. I could fly to the moon or sail the seven seas, but when I finally got back home, I’d have to stand around in a parking lot guessing where it was Nana and my mother wanted me to say I wanted to eat.
We walked up Hillsborough Street to where my mother had parked her ancient Datsun. It
was a faded, rusty yellow and it burned oil, but she’d managed to get nearly three hundred thousand miles out of it.
“You could have used the valet parking,” I said. “All you had to do was give them my room number.”
“My car would have died of shock. Or the valet would have.” My mother unlocked the passenger side door, and I was faced with the age-old dilemma, Granny in the front or the back? Nana was a notorious backseat driver. She’d be better able to shout instructions from the co-pilot’s chair. Also, she was eighty years old. It would take her twenty minutes to climb over the front seat and into the back. On the other hand, there were the questions of knee-room and stitches.
“I’m torn,” I said. “Politeness tells me to let you have the front, but my hysterectomy says, ‘Be rude to your granny.’”
“I’ll get in the back,” Nana said. “You can ride up front with your mama.”
“Actually,” my mother said, “I was going to let Poppy drive.”
“Oh lord.” Nana’s hand fluttered up to her chest. “Then I am definitely riding in the back. With my eyes shut.”
Once again, I was a fifteen-year-old with a learner’s permit. My grandmother sat in the back seat and screeched and gasped at every opportunity, nearly causing more wrecks than she prevented.
“No thanks,” I said, swallowing my irritation. “I’m not supposed to be driving yet. That’s why Abby took the car this morning.”
Abby had actually taken the car on the grounds that she needed a getaway vehicle more than I did. Edna had expressed a restrained pleasure when Abby had called her that morning. It quickly faded when she said that she’d come with me. When Edna was feeling charitable, she referred to me as ‘that white girl.’ This morning, I was ‘that crazy white girl.’ She blamed me for Abby being a ‘bulldagger.’ Never mind that I had nothing directly to do with it. I was gay first, Abby and I were friends, ergo I led Abby astray. Edna was perfectly polite to me the times I’d been to her house, she could even have been described as cordial, but you could have cut the air with a knife.
“How is Abby?” my mother asked. “Is she still working at the same place?”
“Still working trauma at Emanuel. That hospital would fall apart without her.”
“It’s good of her to come home with you.”
“It’s good of you to let her use your rental car,” said Nana, fumbling with her seat belt. “I think she takes advantage.”
I looked at my mother. “I wish they made seatbelts for mouths,” I said.
Abby met Rosalyn Bodie in the English Department at N. C. State. Rosalyn was a returning student, about forty-five, in the final year of her Master’s program. Abby was in Rosalyn’s survey of American literature class. It was not love at first sight. Rosalyn was a terror, a brick shithouse of a woman, nearly as wide as she was tall, with a loud booming laugh and a reputation for flunking science and engineering students. Abby was pre-med, and she had a four-point she wanted to maintain. She had no problem with biology, physics, or chemistry, organic and inorganic, but she resented having to take any English classes at all.
“I understand what the white whale represents for Captain Ahab,” she said. “I read the book. Ask me any question, any factual question, and I will tell you the answer. I deserve an A. I have A-level knowledge. But Rosalyn Damn Bodie doesn’t like my essay about the white whale and Captain Ahab. She says that I’m missing the subtle point. She says that literature is not plug and chug, and she accuses me of using Cliff ’s Notes. How can you stand being an English major? It’s all so fucking subjective.”
When Rosalyn Bodie finished her Master’s degree, she went on to UNC-Chapel Hill for a Ph. D. That same year, Abby dropped out of pre-med and transferred to UNC’s nursing program. She said she was less interested in driving a Porsche and more interested in patient care. I knew she was more interested in Rosalyn. They moved in together, and Abby learned to tolerate Moby Dick, though her literary tastes still ran to murder mysteries and Looney Tunes. Rosalyn named their cats Starbuck and Queequeg. Abby named the dog Belvedere.
I finished my Bachelor’s and a Master’s at N. C. State, and then I spent several months working at a bookstore in Chapel Hill. I lived in Abby and Rosalyn’s spare bedroom and paid them a ridiculously low rent. Rosalyn got a teaching position at Case Western Reserve in Cleveland, Ohio. Abby moved with her and enrolled in the Master’s in Nursing program, and I went on for a Ph. D. at Ohio State University in Columbus. A year later, Rosalyn was diagnosed with colon cancer. Two years after that, she was dead.
Abby fell apart. She didn’t eat, and she didn’t sleep. She emptied their apartment and sent everything to Good Will. She gave Belvedere to a farmer and Starbuck and Queequeg to a friend in nursing school. She slept in a sleeping bag on the bare floor and stopped answering her phone.
I had a friend who’d left Ohio State to take a job at Hauser Designs in Portland, Oregon. When a technical writing position came open, he thought of me. He said I never did anything but complain about graduate school and the frauds and lame-shits who passed for intellectuals, so I might as well get out in the world and earn some actual money. Did I really want to spend the rest of my life teaching middle-class morons to appreciate sonnets?
I took the job, and I took Abby. I retrieved as much of her furniture as I could find at the Good Will and I loaded it, my own stuff, and her into a U-Haul. I got Belvedere back from the farmer. Starbuck and Queequeg stayed with the nurse friend. Abby and I lived together for three months. When I left in the morning, she was still asleep. When I came home in the evening, she went to bed. One day, I found supper waiting for me on the table at five-thirty. Abby told me she’d applied for and gotten a job. Though I asked her to stay, she and Belvedere moved out within the week. We had a fight about whether or not she was going to pay me back rent. I won.
I’d never been as afraid as I was during the months after Rosalyn died. I thought I’d lost Abby, but as far as I could tell, she was nearly herself again. Or at least a reasonable facsimile.
Chapter Nine
I sat back down in front of the typewriter, yawning. The afternoon sun was streaming through the window blinds, casting slatted rays over the dining room table. I guessed that it was about four—my view of the mantle clock was obscured by an enormous jar full of plastic flowers. I switched on the typewriter. My grandmother appeared in the kitchen doorway as if by magic.
“What are you up to?” she asked.
“Just typing my essay.”
“Oedipus still?” she said, pursing her lips.
“The very same.”
“Don’t be sassy with me. You’re not too old to whip.”
I laughed and rolled a sheet of onionskin into the typewriter. As a tool of art, the Olivetti was a sacred object. It belonged to my grandmother, who was an occasional poet. From birth to death, every significant life event was invariably marked by four verses of doggerel. She wrote poems for birthdays and weddings, retirements and funerals. She wrote a poem to celebrate each presidential inauguration and dutifully mailed it to the White House. The letters on White House stationary that she received in reply were framed and hung on a wall in our hallway.
For a time, I was on typewriter probation, having been caught using the Olivetti in the commission of a crime. I’d slipped an extra couplet into my grandmother’s birthday poem for one of her childhood friends, Rosarita Callahan. The poem began, “No one is sweet-ah than dear Rosarita.” My addition was, “Rosarita was born in Durham, nine months after egg met sper-um.” I thought it was funny. Nana did not.
She stood in the doorway, watching me. I yawned again. “I’m fixing to make me a grilled cheese,” she said, her face softening a little. “Do you want one?”
“No, thanks.”
“You have to eat something. You didn’t eat breakfast or lunch.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“If you sleep all day, you lose your appetite,” my mother said. She sat cross-legged on the sofa, watching te
levision with one eye and reading a book with the other. “She’s on the vampire diet. Up all night, in her coffin by dawn.”
“I’m on the drunk diet,” I replied. “I’m going to put a stake in his heart. Where is he, anyway?”
“He went to get a haircut and then to the hardware store,” Nana said. “He said he might stop by the shop to do something.”
My mother shot me a disgusted look. The only thing Hunter ever did at the shop on the weekend was drink. Bloom’s Chevrolet seemed to employ only alcoholic mechanics. I hoped Susan was right about old man Bloom’s sons; I hoped they were putting a stop to the garage parties.
“How long has he been gone?” I asked my mother. She held up two fingers. Two hours. That might or might not be all right. Hunter’s barber didn’t take appointments; he was first come, first serve. Including the wait, the hair cut could take anywhere from forty-five minutes to an hour. Depending on what he needed at the hardware store, and whether or not he had to go to more than one, two hours was within the realm of possibility.
“Did he say what time he’d be back, Nana?”
“In time for the AA meeting.”
“AA meeting, my ass,” my mother said. “I’ve heard that one before. Listen; let’s disable this damned Wurlitzer while we’ve got the chance. I can’t take any more of his midnight serenades.”
“It wasn’t midnight,” I pointed out, “it was two a.m.”
“Why didn’t you hit him in the head with a brick?”
“If you want him dead, you’ll have to kill him yourself.”
“Who was that he was calling last night?”
“Lucky Eddie.”
“Eddie?” my grandmother called out from the kitchen. “I don’t want to see that phone bill. He’s called from one end of the country to the other this month.”
“It’s always after midnight,” I said, “so at least the rates are low.”
“Eddie,” my mother smiled. “Really?”
“Really. You shouldn’t have told him about Eddie’s new car.”
“I don’t know why not,” she said. “Your father owes me nearly five thousand dollars in back child support. If I had that money, maybe I could have a new car, too.”