by Bev Marshall
June’s eyes were misty. “I know you do,” she whispered. “And I care about you. I’d do anything for you, Layla Jay.”
I knew that what I had to tell her would maybe end our friendship, or worse, maybe hurt her terribly, and I didn’t want either of those things to happen, but I had to take the chance. I couldn’t go on pretending I was a lesbian like her.
Chapter 24
JUNE SAT WITH HER HANDS HIDDEN BENEATH HER THIGHS, AND when I saw the frightened expression in her widened eyes, I nearly lost my nerve. But something in my life had to be resolved, and this situation with June was the only one I had any control over. I pushed my butt back in the chair and took a deep breath.
“That day you took the photograph. After I left, I went to the library, and I found a book a doctor wrote about girls ... and boys, too ... who like each other. I mean girls liking girls, boys liking boys.”
June looked down at her orange-polished toes sticking out of her sandals. “Don’t, Layla Jay, don’t say any more.”
“I have to. I need you to understand.You have a condition, June. It’s probably not curable, but you’re not alone. There might be lots of lesbians in Zebulon who feel like you do. That’s what I read you are. A lesbian.”
“I know that,” June snapped. “You think you’re the only one who can look things up in the library? I’ve known for months. Way back when I first started going out with boys, I knew something was wrong with me. I didn’t feel the same as all the other girls. I tried to pretend I liked boys to kiss me, I wanted to like it, but what I felt was ...” She shivered. “Those guys were just gross to me. I couldn’t stand them touching me.” Her voice softened and pulling her hands out from beneath her, she pressed her palms together. “I know for sure that I could never feel the same about a guy as I do you. I guess I’ve always loved you.You’re soft and beautiful and exciting. I can’t help the way I feel, Layla Jay.” Her eyes filled with tears. “I can’t help that I love you. That day you let me take the picture, I thought maybe, maybe you loved me, too. I thought you liked what we did.” She was trying hard not to cry.
I felt as awful as I had on the night I said those terrible things to Mama. Mama couldn’t help being the way she was, and neither could June. “I do love you, June,” I said. “But not in that way. I want to have boyfriends, get married, have babies someday. Don’t you ever want those things?”
“Of course I do. But I probably won’t ever have them. I wish I could. I wish I were like you and most girls, but Layla Jay, I can’t be something I’m not.”
“June, are you sure? Couldn’t you try harder to like a boy? Maybe you just went out with the wrong ones.” I thought of Roland. “I know for certain that all some boys care about is getting what they want.They scare me, too. That’s why I like Jehu. He’s not like them.” I hadn’t meant to tell her about Jehu, but now the cat was out of the gunny sack. I had twisted the knife I’d stuck in her heart, but I went on, hoping she would understand that I only wanted to help her.“Jehu is sweet and gentle and he wouldn’t ever try to make me do something I didn’t want to. Maybe if you met someone like him.”
June sniffed. Her voice was filled with dull disappointment.“I knew you were still stuck on him, no matter what you said.”
“Yeah, but now I need to get unstuck on him.” Then I spilled out everything that had happened between us. I ended saying, “So now his parents won’t let him date me.” I tried to smile.“I guess we’re both longing for something we can’t have.”
“Could I have a hug?” June said. “Just a hug.”
I stood up and when she reached around me and pulled me close, I could feel her heart beating against me.The hug felt good, and just for a moment, I wished I did love June in the way she loved me. Quickly, I pulled away from her and looked toward the kitchen. “How about something to eat? I’m starved. Mama hasn’t been to the grocery store in a week.”
In the kitchen over sandwiches of leftover pot roast, June watched as I ate. She’d only nibbled the crust of her bread, and I was worried sick about how she felt about us now. June took a sip of Coke and then looked over at me. “Layla Jay?”
“Yeah?”
“You know, in a way, I feel better now that we’ve talked about this. I guess I knew all along that you didn’t feel the same about me as I do about you. I just wanted it so bad that I had to keep trying.” She pushed her saucer away. “You won’t tell anyone, will you?”
I laid my sandwich down. “No, I’d never.” I held up my pinkie to cross fingers like in the old days. June smiled as our fingers touched. Then remembering the looks from the girls at the pool, I said, “I think Lyn and some of her friends already suspect though.”
“Yeah, they saw me staring at them when we changed into our nightgowns at a sleepover. None of them are very modest, not like you.”
“They’re all bitches. I wouldn’t worry about what they think.”
“I don’t, but I care what you think.You’re my only friend, and I need you so much.”
I smiled.“And you’re all I’ve got, June. I guess we’re stuck with each other no matter what comes.” I picked up my sandwich again. “You never know. Maybe this is just a phase you’re going through. You may have the complex about your father or something mental like that and you’ll work it out someday. Or maybe you’ll meet the right man and you’ll feel the same about him as you do me.”
June shook her head from side to side. “I doubt it. But if it happens, you’ll be the first to know,” she said. “You can be the maid of honor at my wedding if I ever have one.”
“And you’ll be mine.”
THE NEXT DAY JUNE’S MOTHER cooked up a trip to Tupelo for June and her to visit her aunt Martha. I suspected that she wanted to keep June away from Zebulon in case Mama was bound over for trial, but she did leave her sister’s phone number with us. Mr. Albright said not to worry, that he could subpoena her if necessary. Mama was sure he wouldn’t need to, and her confidence was beginning to scare me more each day. The bounce in her walk and the smile on her face, caused I supposed by her falling in love with Mervin, wasn’t the proper demeanor I thought a woman who’d killed her husband should have, and Mr. Albright agreed, warning her to stay out of Skinnys and the liquor store.
Mervin was of the same mind as Mr. Albright and he persuaded Mama to stay home a lot of nights when she would have ignored Mr. Albright’s admonitions. I hadn’t wanted to like Mervin. After Wallace, I didn’t feel I could trust any man Mama brought home. Although Mervin was sweet and kind, I reminded myself that, when I’d first met Wallace, I had liked him, too, and that miscalculation had been an error I couldn’t afford to make again. I didn’t understand why Mama didn’t feel the same as me, but I suppose that you don’t have a choice about falling in love. And Mama was definitely in love. She sang in the bathtub, she hurried home from work, never complaining about tired feet anymore or cranky customers or the heat that was beating down mercilessly on sticky asphalt streets.The world was just one big old play-ground to her and she was the kid swinging the highest, believing she’d never fall.
Mama must have been right about Mervin’s being more like my daddy. He certainly was the exact opposite of Wallace. He was quiet, shy, soft-spoken, and although he went to church occasionally, he never judged Mama, who still slept late every Sunday. Papaw and Miss Louise liked him, too, and I did trust Papaw’s judgment. He hadn’t been taken in by Wallace like everyone else, so when he called Mervin a regular guy with a good head on his shoulders, I took notice. “The first man Frieda ever went out with that’s not full of bullshit,” Papaw said.The proverbial fly in the ointment for Mama was that Mervin lived on a farm out in Amite County, and there are always lots of big green horseflies swarming around cow shit. Mervin had invited her out to his place several times, but Mama wouldn’t go.“Let’s stay here,” she’d say.“I don’t feel like a long drive.” Or she’d invent some excuse to stay hom
e, like she was expecting a call from Mr. Albright. Finally, one morning after Mama left for work, Mervin called me and asked if I’d like to come out and see his workshop where he molded the statues and yard ornaments he sold out of his shed. I figured he didn’t really care about my opinion of his property, that he was hoping I’d have a good time and beg Mama to take me out there again. It was just a ploy, but I was bored with June gone. I agreed to go.
Mervin had warned me to wear old clothes, so I put on a pair of cutoffs with strings hanging down my thighs, pulled on a yellowed gym blouse, and slipped on my tennis shoes, tying my hair up in a ponytail. I needn’t have bothered with my hair. I’d expected Mervin to pick me up in his work truck, but when I ran out to the drive, he was sitting in the ancient Cadillac with the top down. I had never ridden in a convertible, and wasn’t expecting the force of wind that blasted across the car as we picked up speed on Carterdale Road. I closed my eyes and my earlier vision of myself in Audrey Hepburn sunglasses with a scarf flowing behind me returned, and I laid my head back against the soft leather seat and pretended we were driving through the Pyrenees instead of rural Mississippi.
On the fifteen-mile drive out to Amite County where Mervin lived, he told me that he’d inherited the place from his parents, who had died less than a year apart five years earlier. His older brother, Jake, lived in Knoxville, Tennessee, and his younger brother, Mike, had joined the army, so he lived alone in the redbrick two-story house surrounded by several outbuildings. A two-car garage was attached by a breezeway to the left of the house, and beyond it there was a metal-roofed workshop with a sign hanging over the closed double doors that bore the block letters spelling out the name of his business, WRITTEN IN STONE. As we pulled into the crushed-oyster-shell drive that wound to the left toward a display of cement figures beside the shed, I saw a red-roofed barn, a small cow lot similar to Papaw’s, and behind that an open field of verdant green pastureland. Farther back tall pines, oaks, chestnuts, and maples rimmed the perimeters of the field.When I breathed in the countrified air—a mix of cow manure, chicken feathers, chemicals, and wild butter-cups and bluebells that dotted the lawn—I felt right at home again and realized how much I missed roaming across Papaw’s land. I guessed I was a country girl at heart and always would be. Living in town might be more exciting, but walking down steaming sidewalks inhaling the acrid odors that spewed out of exhaust pipes couldn’t compare to the natural scents of land and beast that God had given us. If Mervin’s plan was for me to extol the virtues of country living to Mama, he had succeeded. “It’s glorious. If I lived here, I’d never want to leave,” I said to him.
Mervin pulled onto the grass beside a cement angel. “Maybe someday you will,” he said. Then shutting off the engine, he shrugged, “Of course, your mama would disagree with you. I can’t even talk her into driving past this place.”
“I know,” I said. “She hated living on Papaw and Grandma’s place, couldn’t wait to get into town.That’s the main reason she married Wallace,” I said as we got out of the Cadillac and walked over the brittle grass to the row of statues. I wished I hadn’t mentioned Wallace; it seemed like farting in church.
Mervin didn’t react to my talking about Mama’s dead husband though. He swept his arms across the array of figures. “So what do you think?”
“Wow” was all I could think to say. Covering nearly a half acre of land were cement tables, benches, fountains, and numerous statues arranged by type and subject. Most of them were unpainted gray cement, but there were colorful ones, too. In the first row I walked past were the religious figures: angels, the Virgin Mary, St. Francis in a monk’s robe, and Jesus Himself with a lamb beside Him. There was a grouping of animals: a rooster, deer with and without antlers, a standing pig with a piglet curled beside her, a turtle on a rock, swans, ducks, and even an alligator. I liked the people best: cherubs playing musical instruments, a girl dressed in a peasant costume with a basket on her arm, a shapely woman with a water pitcher on her shoulder, a jockey, a colored boy with a fishing pole, and enough dwarfs for two Snow Whites to live among. I was enchanted.
“Did you make them all?” I asked.
“No, only some of them. Others I order and have shipped to me. I do make a few figures though and all of the fountains, tables, chairs, and benches. I get more calls for fountains than you would imagine.” He steered me toward one with a cross on its top. “This one is going in the church on Eighth Street tomorrow.”
“And you deliver it in your truck?” I asked, running my hand around the scalloped tiered bowls.
“Yeah, it comes apart.To me, that’s the hardest part of my job, delivery and setup.” Mervin grinned. “Want to see my workshop?”
“Sure,” I said, following him past a mound of gravel toward the shed.
The smell of gasoline rose up inside the shed to greet us, and he turned on the big fan just inside the door. As the cooling breeze blew across the workshop, Mervin explained the process he used to create his work. He kicked a bag of cement that he said weighed nearly a hundred pounds.“I mix half a bag of this in a five-gallon container filled with pea gravel. Start with the gravel and cover it in a couple of inches of water, then I pour in the cement and mix that. Lastly I pour in the same amount of sand as the gravel, and add more water until I get the proper mix, not too thick, but not too watery.” Mervin showed me the big mixer that towered over the bags of cement before we moved on over to the molds into which he poured the cement mixture.The molds, made of rubber, fiberglass, and metal, were of varying shapes and sizes, and nudging one with his foot, Mervin said, “I pack this with a trowel, then shake the mold to get out all the air bubbles. If you don’t get all the bubbles out, you’ll ruin your work and have to start all over.Then I just walk away, leave it to dry overnight.”
“Why doesn’t it stick to the rubber?” I asked, thinking of how hard it was to get a cake out of a tube pan without leaving chunks in the bottom. “Do you flour and butter it like a cake pan?”
Mervin laughed. “No, but it’s the same principle. I coat the mold, using gas and oil as a release agent, to prevent sticking.When I take out the product, I shake it in the mold. I used to bump it on the ground but that cracks whatever is inside it. Learned that the hard way. Eventually, the mold will rot when the rubber gets hard and deteriorates, but I take care of my molds, recoating them after each use to keep them in good shape as long as I can. Some of these are like old friends, I’ve had them for so long.”
“Could I try one sometime?” I asked. “Maybe a squirrel or something else small?”
Mervin was thrilled I had asked. His face lit up in the dark interior of the shed. “Be my apprentice, you mean? Sure, I’ve always wanted a helper.You could do all of the painting just as well as I can I’ll bet.”
“What do you paint them with?”
“Silicone acrylic paint. First black and then your color over that.” He grinned. “When do you want to start?”
“How about now?” I asked, thinking how wonderful it would be to take my mind off Mama and apply it to something that might turn out to be beautiful. “How many can you make each day?”
“Sometimes as many as ten or fifteen.” Mervin grabbed the handles of the wheelbarrow.“Let’s get started,” he said, as he bumped the wheels across the grass to the pile of gravel.
We made a dwarf and a bench, and as we worked, Mervin told me how he’d been an apprentice himself to an old man who lived on the other side of Zebulon. “I didn’t know this was what I’d want to do for the rest of my life, but when a customer bought my first cement table, and I saw how happy the lady was with it after I set it beneath a chestnut tree in her yard, I was hooked. I meet a lot of really nice people, and giving them something beautiful that will last for years is what I love about the job.”
Mervin dragged the two molds out into the yard where they’d receive the benefit of the sun.“Makes ’em dry faster,” he said,“and it’s n
ot supposed to rain, so tomorrow you could come back and see the finished product.”
“I wish I could,” I said. “But with all the goings-on, who knows what tomorrow will bring?” I scratched my arms. “This powder itches like crazy.”
Mervin led me to the faucet, but the powder didn’t wash completely off. He then produced a bottle of Jergens Lotion and rubbed it up and down my arms to remove the last of the powder. His touch was light and gentle; it wasn’t a bit like when Wallace would put his hands on me. And this surprised me. Mervin was the first man to touch me, except for Papaw, after that last day with Wallace, and yet I wasn’t afraid for even a second. Somehow I knew I could trust him. It seemed like I had known Mervin for a long time, like he had always been a part of our family. It even crossed my mind that maybe this is the way my daddy’s hands would feel. Hadn’t Mama said their long fingers were alike? For sure he wasn’t like all of the other men Mama had brought home.
I think Mervin sensed the good feeling inside me because, when he looked up at me from where he squatted beside my feet, his eyes were gleaming with what may have been love for his new apprentice.
Chapter 25
THE NEXT MORNING I WAS BACK AT LOOSE ENDS, WANDERING through the empty house with nothing to do. I thought about calling Mervin to ask if I could return to his farm and see how my dwarf had turned out, but I replaced the receiver before I dialed. I didn’t want to ruin the memory of the wonderful day by going back too soon. Memories are like stews and gumbos and chicken pie. After they sit awhile without partaking of them, the next time you have them, they’re even better than the first time. I figured my next visit to Mervin’s would be just like that if I could make myself wait for a few days.