The Cotton Queen

by Pamela Morsi

  It was a nice life, actually. I didn’t mind it at all. I had the new cable TV installed and thirty channels were suddenly available in my living room. I spent my day watching old reruns of Donna Reed and Perry Mason, Make Room for Daddy and Father Knows Best. It was so pleasant to just step back into those times. If I closed my eyes and just listened to the dialogue, I could almost put myself back there. Back when I was runner-up for Cotton Queen, Tom Hoffman’s steady girl, a happy, hopeful young woman, ready, eager for whatever the future might bring.

  At night, however, with all the house lights off, I sat in the shadows beyond the dining room window and stared out into the darkness. It was the same darkness that I’d hidden in at the Shady Bend Motor Lodges. What I was watching for, what I was fearful of, was no longer as clear cut and definable as it had been. But it was still there. It was very much still there.

  I might have lived out the rest of my life just like that, fantasy all day and fear all night. That was working perfectly until Laney called me in early June. After a few requisite inquiries about my health, she got right to her point.

  “Robert, the guy I’ve been dating for a while, he got his M.B.A. a few weeks ago,” she told me.

  “Oh, well, isn’t that nice,” I said. “When are you going to bring that young man home so I can meet him?”

  “I don’t know. One of these days,” she answered. “Anyway, with Houston’s economy booming, he got offered some really great jobs. And he’s accepted one with an energy finance company.”

  “Uh-huh,” I responded, already more or less bored with the personal details of some young man I didn’t even know.

  “It’s a great job,” Laney told me. “And they paid him a big hiring bonus. So he’s made a down payment on a house in West University.”

  “Really?” I said. “I suppose a home is a very good investment for a single man.”

  “Well, Robert’s not exactly a single man, Babs,” Laney said. “He and I have been together for over a year now.”

  There was something about the way she used the phrase “been together” that was disconcerting, but I ignored it.

  “It’s certainly nice then that he’ll be staying in town and living so near the campus,” I said.

  “I’ve moved in with him,” Laney stated.

  “What?”

  “I’ve moved in with him,” she repeated. “We’re living together. There’s no reason for me to pay expensive room and board at the dorm when I can live with him and still ride my bike to classes.”

  “Honey, you can’t do that,” I told her.

  “Of course I can.”

  “What must people think?”

  “They think whatever they think,” Laney answered. “I don’t really care.”

  We continued to argue for several minutes. I got angry and slammed down the phone. Then I called her back and we wrangled even more. I couldn’t budge her. I couldn’t make her listen to reason. I was furious. I was frustrated. And I was frightened. I was frightened for my daughter. I had never wanted her out there where men could hurt her, misuse her, take advantage of her. I had tried to keep her safe, but she seemed determined to run headlong into danger.

  After walking the floor with worry all night, I called Aunt Maxine for help. I decided that the only way to handle the situation was to have Aunt Maxine go down to Houston and shame Laney out of such a terrible decision. I thought that if they laid it on thick enough, they might even be able to get her to give up her last year at college and move home immediately. In my own mind I was convinced that the only thing that would be required was the sight of some member of her family. That would bring Laney to her senses and cause her to realize that she was being duped by this Robert person.

  Aunt Maxine hurried over as soon as I called her. She came in, rather out of breath and looking pale and tired.

  “Are you ill?” I asked her.

  “Not any more than usual,” she answered.

  “Well, you look terrible,” I told her.

  A ghost of a smile flittered across her face. “Trust me, Babs, I’m perfectly capable of returning the compliment.”

  I glanced down to see that I was still wearing my bathrobe. That it was frayed and worn and had a dribble of unidentified food stain down the front.

  “I’m sorry,” I apologized hurriedly. “I was just worried.”

  “I’m worried myself,” she said. “Renny’s wife is divorcing him.”

  “The new wife?”

  “She’s not all that new anymore,” Aunt Maxine said. “She’s keeping the house and the kids and virtually throwing my son out on the street.”

  “That’s terrible.”

  “Apparently that’s how it’s done,” she said. “I don’t know what to do. I called Pete to see if he could help. He said that Renny would never take anything from him. And he’s probably right about that. It just breaks my heart that those two boys can’t get along.”

  Aunt Maxine was so upset, so distracted that I just couldn’t tell her what Laney had done.

  After she left, I decided that if she couldn’t help me, maybe I could help her. I picked up the phone and called Renny’s home. His wife answered. I was extremely gracious and friendly, using all those social skills honed in community service. She gave me a number where I could reach Renny. I tried it on and off all day. Finally late that evening, I lit a lamp in the darkness and called again. He picked up on the second ring.

  “Renny, it’s Babs,” I said.

  “You heard, I guess.”

  “Yes, Aunt Maxine was here this morning.”

  “So now you know it all,” he said. “You know I’m a lousy husband, a bad father, I can’t hold a job, I can’t keep a wife.”

  “Your mother needs you, Renny, come home.”

  “I’ve heard all this before,” he said.

  “Yes, you have. And it’s more true now than ever.”

  “She has Pete.”

  “Yes, and she loves Pete,” I said. “But she loves you, too. And she wants you back.”

  “I can’t come back there,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  He hesitated.

  “I’m scared,” he said, finally. “I’m just flat-footed scared of the place. It holds a lot of bad memories for me.”

  “Sometimes we have to do the thing that scares us,” I told him. “Sometimes that’s the only way. Come back. It doesn’t have to be permanent. Stay in McKinney until you get on your feet, until you figure out which way to go from here.”

  “Is that what you’re doing?” he said. “I heard you don’t step a foot out your front door anymore. Are you trying to figure out which way to go from there?”

  The conversation continued on for some time, but we never got much beyond that.

  After I hung up, my own words kept replaying in my head. I knew that I was right about Renny. He needed to come home and face what frightened him here. He was never going to be a whole person again until he did.

  I flipped on the light as I went in to use the toilet. I caught sight of myself in the mirror and was startled. I stopped to stare in near disbelief. Looking back at me was a wild, haggard old woman. Her lifeless hair was graying at the temples and hung like a mop down past her shoulders. Her face was pudgy, lined and splotched, her teeth were yellow. Her clothes were ragged, worn and dirty. She looked like one of those homeless women they showed on the TV news. Except she had my eyes.

  “My God!” the startled whisper escaped my lips.

  No wonder my daughter was throwing away her life. She had a mother who was throwing away hers.

  I stood there for a moment, thinking about the enormity of the hilltop I needed to scale. Trying not to be daunted by the task ahead of me. I remembered the words I’d told Renny. He needed to face the thing that frightened him. I apparently needed to do the same. With a trembling hand, I rifled through the top drawer of the vanity until I found a pair of scissors. I took a deep breath and started cutting my hair.

  The fir
st steps were only tiny. I went into the hairdresser’s to get some style for my sheared locks. I bought a new outfit, casual but clearly fashionable in vivid red to give me courage and picked up some fresh makeup. I called Ritters Garage and they sent a couple of men to try to get the car started, tuned up and in shape for a drive. I packed my overnight bag and set it by the back door. Long days and house-darkened nights followed while I succumbed to fear once more.

  Then one morning dawned with a brilliantly lit blue-and-pink sky on the eastern horizon. I knew I should go. I walked past the suitcase a half-dozen times before I finally picked it up and carried it outside to the car. I was trembling as I started the engine. I kept telling myself how foolish and silly I was behaving. But no rational arguments could override the genuine terror that gripped me as I set out that Saturday morning on an all-day drive.

  I’d planned my route carefully. It was very circuitous. I would head north to catch Highway 69 to Greenville. From there I’d go south through Tyler and Lufkin. For any other person, the trip would have been straightforward. Due south through Dallas and Huntsville, arriving in Houston in about five hours. My way meant an additional two hours, minimum, but I didn’t mind. I was determined to see my daughter, but I was willing to do a great deal to avoid driving through Dallas again.

  Even bypassing it, I was still afraid. But as always, I couldn’t say of what. I tried to rationalize it, intellectualize it. What’s the worst that could happen? I’d ask myself. I could be involved in a deadly accident. I could get a flat and be stuck by the side of the road until a stranger/serial killer stopped to abduct me. Either of those outcomes would involve pain, suffering, terror. But they’d be over soon enough. My heart would surely give out early if I were injured. And a killer would dispatch me within days when he realized how useless I’d be at fighting him.

  If that was what I was afraid of, why was I so afraid?

  As I drove I recognized my own answer. That wasn’t what scared me. At every small-town stop sign, every station selling gasoline, every car that passed me, I glanced at the faces. I was looking for Burl. After all these years, I knew he was still out here and I feared that he still stalked me.

  I arrived in Houston in late afternoon. I found my exit easily enough and drove into the part of town near Rice known as West University. It had a sweet, small-town feel with cute little cottages and bungalows, many under renovation. I had expected Houston to be big, urban, frightening, like the Streets of San Francisco. But the residential area seemed not so different from McKinney after all.

  I got lost a couple of times before finding the address. Even then I might have missed it if I hadn’t seen Laney’s little red car. I pulled my aging Buick to the curb and turned off the ignition. I hadn’t realized how tightly I’d been holding my body until I relaxed it. I was exhausted already and my mission was just beginning.

  I mentally toyed with the idea of driving away, finding a nice hotel and getting a good night’s sleep before facing my daughter. But the thought of getting out on the road again was almost as daunting as carrying forward. With a determination born of maternal love and absolute necessity, I got out of my car and headed to the front door of the slightly shabby 1920s home that had a childlike quality about it. Perfect, I thought, for a couple who weren’t really a couple, only playing house.

  There was a piece of tape over the doorbell with a note in Laney’s handwriting that read Broken, Please Knock, so I did. I waited for what seemed like a long time and then knocked again.

  “Coming!” I heard an annoyed voice call from inside.

  An instant later I was standing face-to-face with a young man. He was sweaty and his clothes paint splattered. He was handsome, I suppose. His dark brown hair was a little long for my taste and although his features were regular enough, I didn’t find them particularly pleasing. Perhaps I was predisposed to dislike him. Whatever the reason, I detested him on sight.

  “Yeah?” he said, by way of greeting. And then added, “If you’re collecting for some charity, we’re not interested.”

  “I’d like to speak to Alana Hoffman,” I said, as haughtily as I could manage.

  For a moment I thought he might refuse and try to chase me from the porch. Of course, he did no such thing. Instead he turned back into the room and yelled out her name.

  “There’s some woman at the door,” he explained when she’d hollered back.

  “Just a sec,” I heard Laney say.

  I waited.

  Robert walked away from the door, but left it ajar. Inside I could see a bland, boring living room with lots of drab walls, books and black plastic. It was completely a man’s room. I was pleased and relieved to see nothing of Laney in it. I wouldn’t be asking her to give up so much.

  The door opened wider and there she was, my Laney. She hadn’t come home at Christmas. It had been over a year since I’d seen her pretty face. It was smeared with yellow paint. Her hair, that she’d allowed to grow back in its natural brown color, was now twisted into an untidy ponytail at the crown of her head.

  “Yes, ma’am?” she said, before recognition dawned on her. When it did, an instant later, her jaw dropped open in complete shock. “Mama?”

  Her use of that word was almost equally as startling to me.

  “Babs,” she corrected herself. “What are you doing here?”

  “I came to see you,” I said. “I came to meet your young man.”

  She glanced out at the car at the curb.

  “You drove yourself here?”

  “Yes.”

  “I...I don’t know what to say,” she sputtered. “You should have called us, let us know you were coming.”

  “Mothers don’t have to call first,” I told her. “Mothers have full immunity just to pop in. So I am.”

  Laney just stood there, staring at me, apparently dumbfounded.

  “Invite me inside, darling,” I said. “You don’t leave your mother standing on the porch.”

  “Yes, of course,” she said, opening the door more widely. “We’re painting the kitchen this weekend. Everything is a mess.”

  “Um, I see.”

  “Come on in, I’ll introduce you to Robert.”

  Something in her tone suggested that she’d prefer being devoured by wolves.

  LANEY

  IT WASN’T AS BAD as I would have imagined. But I’m not sure I would have imagined it at all. In the almost four years that I’d lived in Houston, my mother had not stepped a foot out of McKinney. Now suddenly, without warning, she’d come to stay the weekend.

  Robert was not amused.

  “What’s she doing here?” he asked me in a whispered question behind her back.

  I shrugged like I didn’t know. But I knew.

  There was nothing in life that could have stirred my mother to leave her beloved McKinney. Nothing except life and death. And it was my independence that she was determined to try to kill. She’d finally realized that I was having a life of my own, pursuing my own goals and just being happy with neither her input nor her consent.

  I brought her into our kitchen.

  After three years of dorm living, I’d thought it the ultimate of luxury. Now, seeing through my mother’s eyes, it was a tiny postage-stamp kind of a room with ancient appliances and cracked Formica countertops.

  “We’re going with yellow,” I said, stating the obvious. “It seems very sunny.”

  “It’s very fumy,” she said, wrinkling her nose in distaste.

  I nodded. “Yes, but I much prefer paint. There is something slightly unhealthy about just wallpapering over dirty walls.”

  It was a deliberate dig considering the literal forest of colorful print that she and I had glued up over the years. Unfortunately Babs appeared oblivious to it.

  “Is there somewhere we can talk?” she asked me.

  “Not right now,” I told her. “We’ve got to get this done. It takes forever for anything to dry in this humidity.”

  It was probably one of the ten leas
t hospitable comments I’d ever made in my life. Amazingly my mother failed to take offense.

  I tempered my nastiness with a more warmhearted suggestion. “Why don’t you have a seat in the living room. I’m sure you need a rest after such a long drive. I’ll bring you a nice glass of ice water.”

  “No, thank you,” she said. Instead she picked up the roller that Robert laid down and began to paint the kitchen.

  Robert was taken aback. His own mother was such a princess, she never put her hand to any type of manual labor. He was just becoming accustomed to my handiness. Clearly he found it disconcerting to have a woman of an older generation being equally comfortable at doing a “man’s job.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” he told her, almost taking offense at her willingness to help.

  “I don’t mind,” Babs said. “I’m here to talk to my daughter and my daughter is in here. Why don’t you take a little break? Go out for a smoke or something.”

  “I don’t smoke,” he said.

  “Well, why don’t you pretend that you do,” she suggested with a very bright smile.

  Robert shot me a helpless glance. I could almost have laughed. He always seemed so in control. He was the center of attention in every room he ever entered. But with Babs, he was out of his depth. With her, I knew he could never protect me.

  “I’ll...I’ll be out in the backyard,” he said.

  Babs dipped the roller and continued her job.

  I did mine as well, picking up the narrow brush, I carefully edged a thin border around the baseboards, the tile, the ceiling, allowing my mother the freedom of broad strokes that covered a lot of space in a short time.