by Julia Watts
“Well, you’d better rest up then. Or have a second cup of coffee.”
“I think I’ll do both.”
Once Nanny was settled back in her recliner, cup in hand, Chrys took a few minutes to make herself presentable. She changed into a fresh T-shirt and a pair of cargo shorts, washed her face, brushed her teeth, and pulled her hair back into a ponytail. She didn’t bother with jewelry or makeup because it was just her and Nanny. Who was she trying to impress? The chickens? The chickens! She hadn’t fed them or the pig yet. The demands of rural life were going to take some getting used to. “I’ve got to go take care of the critters,” she told Nanny.
“They’s some stale cornbread on the back of the stove. If you crumble it up with some buttermilk, Porkchop likes it real good.”
Chrys had heard the expression “madder than a wet hen” before, but right now “madder than a hungry hen” was more fitting. The chickens were apparently unaccustomed to breakfasting at a late hour, and they squawked and flapped their wings irritably as Chrys opened their bag of feed. A little black banty rushed at her and pecked at her tennis shoes in an apparent attempt to get her to move faster. “Jesus, haven’t you girls heard of brunch before?” Chrys scattered the cracked corn on the ground. The chickens jockeyed for position, nudging each other out of the way to peck at the kernels. She let them have at it, picked up her bucket of cornbread-buttermilk slurry, and proceeded to the pen of the porcine prisoner.
As soon as Porkchop spotted her—or, more likely, spotted the bucket—he started squealing and oinking up a storm. His curly little tail quivered in anticipation.
“Hungry, buddy?” Chrys said, then reminded herself not to fraternize with the doomed inmate. She poured the slop in his trough, and he fell to immediately, snorting, slurping and smacking. Chrys knew the little bit of farmwork she’d just done was a tiny fraction of what Nanny did growing up, tending a big garden, caring for pigs and chickens and cows—feeding things so they would feed you. She thought of her students, whose idea of food preparation was microwaving a Hot Pocket. It was good that everybody didn’t have to work as hard as Nanny did growing up, but there was something to be said for knowing how to do things the hard way.
When Chrys came back in the house, Nanny was on the phone. “Here she comes,” she said. “She can tell you.” Nanny covered the mouthpiece with her hand. “It’s the physical therapist. And she’s a girl,” she said, like she was announcing the birth of a baby. “She needs directions.”
Chrys took the phone from Nanny.
“Hi, this is Dee, the girl physical therapist.” It was a warm, good-humored voice. “I think I’ve gotten myself lost. I’m at the end of the holler outside a trailer that has a bunch of hound dogs in pens in the backyard.” As if on cue, hounds bayed in the background.
“You’ve gone too far.”
“That’s not the first time somebody’s said that to me.”
Chrys laughed. “Well, in this case, it’s an easy problem to fix. Just get yourself turned around, and then take the first driveway on the left.”
Dee the Girl Physical Therapist was a few inches taller than Chrys. She had the natural tan of an outdoorsy type and wavy hair the color of toasted wheat which she wore in a braid down her back. Her green polo shirt bore a crest reading Mountainview Physical Therapy. “Thanks for the directions,” she told Chrys. “I really should get a GPS, but I hate that little voice bossing me around.”
“It’s always such a smarmy little voice, too,” Chrys said. The GPS in Meredith’s Lexus always gave directions in clipped, BBC-perfect English. “I’m Chrys, by the way. Come on in and meet Nanny.”
“That’s not my name, you know,” Nanny called from her chair.
“Dee, this is my grandmother, Mrs. Dottie Simcox. Nanny, is that an acceptable introduction?”
“That was much better. Just ’cause I’m your nanny don’t make me Nanny to everybody.” She looked in Dee’s direction and smiled. “Nice to meet you, honey.”
Dee moved closer to Nanny and shook her hand. “Nice to meet you, too. We’re going to see if we can get you up and moving around some today.”
Dee’s use of the hospital “we” notwithstanding, Chrys was feeling like the third wheel in this equation, so she excused herself to her room. She stretched out on the chenille bedspread and opened the collection of short stories she was reading, her concentration broken occasionally by Dee’s voice or Nanny’s grunts or groans.
Dee didn’t seem like someone who would spend her days winding through the hills and hollers. Her look and her grammar seemed like what Chrys’s dad would half-jokingly call “citified.” Chrys told herself to concentrate on her book. Since the breakup, her concentration had suffered terribly. She especially hated how this lack of focus affected her reading, which for as long as she could remember had been as important to her as eating and sleeping.
When Dee called that they were finished, Chrys found Nanny sitting in her recliner with a bottle of water.
“I believe I wore her out today,” Dee said, smiling. “But remember what I said, Mrs. Simcox. The more you stretch, the easier it’ll get.”
“Don’t let this girl’s pretty face fool you,” Nanny said, nodding in Dee’s direction. “She’s tough as a cob.”
“Well, you’re no marshmallow yourself, Mrs. Simcox.” Dee turned to Chrys. “I told your nanny I might want to take a quick look around the house to see if I could make a few suggestions about things that might make her daily activities a little easier.”
“That would be great,” Chrys said. “The bathroom seems to be especially problematic.”
“Well, let’s have a look.” Dee followed Chrys to the bathroom and surveyed it. “Well, right now I’d say the only thing you could do to make it worse would be to throw some banana peels on the floor.”
“It is pretty bad, isn’t it?” Chrys said, feeling strangely embarrassed. “I’ve just been staying here since yesterday, and helping her into the tub this morning was—”
“Terrible for both of you, I’m sure. She needs a shower stall with a seat and some railing other than that flimsy towel rack to help her get on and off the toilet. Medicare should pay for it if her doctor and I recommend it. And you don’t need to be lifting a full-grown woman in and out of the tub, or pretty soon you’ll need physical therapy yourself.”
When they came out of the bathroom, Nanny said, “Now Chrystal, you walk her out when she’s ready to go, all right?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
When they were out on the porch Dee said, “Every single house I go to around here, the old people worry about not being able to walk me out. It’s like they’re afraid I won’t be able to find my way back to my car.”
“My parents always insisted on walking people out, too,” Chrys said. “It’s an Appalachian thing. Politeness is big here. Except when it’s not.”
Dee laughed. “I know what you mean.”
Chrys’s curiosity was getting the best of her. “I’m going to ask you a very Appalachian question if you don’t mind.”
“Shoot.” Dee made full eye contact, and Chrys noticed that her eyes were very blue.
“You’re not from around here, are you?”
Dee flashed a wide, easy grin. “Your nanny asked the same thing, except she said ‘ain’t.’ The answer is I am but I’m not. I was born here, but my dad got a job in Cincinnati when I was three, and we moved there. My brother can remember living here, but I can’t. But we always came here and stayed at my grandparents’ for Christmas, and then we’d drive down for the Fourth of July and stay two weeks. My brother always hated it. He got bored and missed playing ball with his friends, but I always liked how much room there was to wander off by myself and imagine things.”
Chrys nodded. “That was my favorite part about growing up in the country. There was a lot of stuff I didn’t like, but I did like that.” Another thing Chrys had noticed about her students—something she thought negatively impacted their writing ability—was
that they had had no time devoted to “wandering and wondering” as children. All their free time had been spent in front of bleeping screens or in hyper-supervised organized activities. “I don’t think kids do that much anymore.”
“I know,” Dee said. She leaned back against the side of her car, her hands in her pockets in an almost James Dean-ish pose. “When the fates conspired for me to move back here, I thought at least my daughter could have that.”
“The fates conspired?”
Dee laughed. “That did sound a little dramatic, didn’t it? What happened was, when my papaw died last year, he left his house and farmland to whichever of his grandkids wanted to live in it. Well, all the grandkids had grown up to live pretty urban lives, and nobody wanted it. I didn’t even want it at first. But the deal was, if none of us wanted it, the place would be sold. And I couldn’t stand the thought of that, especially because I knew what would happen if it got sold to the highest bidder…the house would be torn down, the trees cleared for lumber, the mountain blasted for coal. I couldn’t live with that happening.”
“And so you decided to move here?”
Dee broke eye contact for a moment and looked a little sheepish. “We decided to try it for a year. Anna was having some trouble with other kids in school, and I was still kind of recovering from getting divorced. I struck a deal with her that if she’d be willing to make the move, she could be homeschooled for the year. It just felt like time to try something different, you know?”
“So how do you like it?”
“Well, I love how beautiful it is,” she said, waving in a gesture that took in the trees, the grass, and the surrounding mountains. “But I guess my answer would still have to be I don’t know yet. We’ve not even been here for two months, and Anna won’t start homeschooling till late August. How about you? You don’t seem like someone who’s spent her whole life in a holler.”
Chrys struggled with how much to say. Dee seemed cool and sophisticated, but you could never really tell about people. “Well, I’m an English professor at a little college in Knoxville. I don’t work in the summer, and Nanny was between caregivers, so I thought I’d help out for a little while.” There. Nothing about her sexual orientation, the breakup, or her emotional crisis. Not the whole truth, but not a lie either. “I guess I felt like trying something different, too.”
Chapter Eight
During the summer, Friday was always cookout night at Chrys’s parents’ house. When Chrys pulled into the driveway with Nanny in the Oldsmobile, Daddy was manning the grill, periodically setting down his spatula and trading it for a can of PBR. Chrys’s mom and Dustin’s wife Amber were carrying bowls of potato salad and Jell-O out to the big picnic table, and Peyton, dressed in a tiara and a pink bikini, was standing in the middle of a pack of Chihuahuas and Chihoundhounds and waving a plastic magic wand as if enchanting them to do her bidding.
Dustin opened the car door on the passenger side to help Nanny get out. “Sissy, I can’t remember the last cookout you came to.”
“I came to one a few years ago.” Shit, how long had it been?
“You brung that lady doctor friend of yours,” Nanny said. “I thought she was kindly stuck up.”
Chrys and Dustin shared a smile. “Yeah, she was,” Chrys said.
Meredith’s trip to the cookout had been awkward. Chrys had felt like she was seeing the whole thing through Meredith’s eyes: the cheap beer and Jell-O salads, the over-loud talk about hunting and NASCAR among the men, the rambling conversations about children and illness among the women, the Chihuahuas and hounds and their progeny and the landmines they left in the yard, one of which Meredith stepped in, soiling a two-hundred-dollar pair of running shoes.
The whole experience had been agonizing. Chrys wanted her family to approve of Meredith, but she had also wanted Meredith to approve of her family. All anyone had been able to manage was a kind of strained cordiality, and Meredith had commented later that it was symbolic that at “those kind of cookouts,” the men claimed all the glory for the grilled entrees, while the women were relegated to the side dishes.
While Dustin got Nanny settled in a lawn chair, Chrys accepted a hug from Amber. “I’m sorry I ain’t been up to see you yet,” Amber said. “They had me scheduled a full shift every day this week, and by the time I got home and got supper fixed, I was just kilt.” Amber was nearly twenty years younger than Dustin and pretty in an obvious, Hooters-girl kind of way: long strawberry-blond hair, big blue eyes, and a wardrobe to show off her youthful feminine attributes. Tonight’s ensemble was an almost nonexistent peach-colored halter top and a pair of denim shorts that had been cut off so severely that there was hardly anything left of them.
“That’s okay,” Chrys said. “I’ve been busy getting settled in with Nanny.” She didn’t dislike Amber, but they certainly weren’t close enough to necessitate Amber’s apology for not coming to visit sooner. Except for a few jokes at Dustin’s expense and some chitchat about Peyton, the two of them had little to say to each other, though that fact didn’t stop Amber from talking.
“Hey, Chrystal!” Daddy hollered from his station at the grill. “Throw me that pack of weenies there on the table.”
Chrys grabbed the hot dogs. It took some getting used to being called by her real name instead of the shortened form she’d used for decades. “Here you go, Daddy.”
“They’s drinks over in the cooler if you want one,” he said, tearing open the hot dog package with his dentures. “Leaded or unleaded, whichever you want.”
Amber was helping herself to a wine cooler, a beverage Chrys hadn’t even known was still manufactured, though as long as there were guys who wanted to get teenaged girls drunk, she supposed the wine cooler would have a reason to exist. Chrys rifled through the cooler’s sweating cans of Pepsi, Mountain Dew and Pabst Blue Ribbon. The women in the family generally didn’t drink beer at social gatherings, but she didn’t drink sugared soft drinks, and she’d be damned if she was going to stoop to sucking down a wine cooler just because she lacked a Y chromosome. PBR it was.
When Chrys took her beer into the kitchen, the first thing her mom said was, “Don’t you want a plastic cup for that?”
“The can’s fine.”
Mom drew her lips together. “I don’t care what you do. I was just thinking about Nanny. She don’t say nothing about the boys drinking because she says men is fools anyway, but she might say something to you. She don’t care for drinking.”
“Then she shouldn’t do it,” Chrys said. “I, for one, am rather fond of it. Now is there anything else that needs to be carried out to the table?”
Once they were all seated at the picnic table, its yellow-checked plastic covering nearly obscured by containers of ketchup and mustard and pickles and chow-chow, Daddy passed a plate of meat and said, “Now these here is deer burgers.” Sniffing the venison, the dogs circled the table in case either generosity or gravity might send some food their way.
“Tell Aunt Sissy what you call ’em, Peyton,” Dustin said.
Peyton grinned, flashing a mouthful of baby teeth. “Bambi burgers!”
Chrys smiled squeamishly. It was a tough call whether to eat a hot dog made from God knows what or a burger made from a wide-eyed woodland creature. She finally decided to pass on meat entirely and made do with potato salad and fruit cocktail-studded green Jell-O, a meal she could’ve eaten just as easily had she been toothless.
“I remember one time we was eating deer meat, and Chester broke a tooth on a piece of buckshot,” Nanny said, swatting at a fly hovering over her potato salad.
“That ain’t as funny as the one about him deer hunting early in the morning,” Daddy said, around a mouthful of Bambi burger. “He fell asleep waiting on a deer to show up, and when he woke up a deer had peed on his foot.”
Everybody laughed even though they’d heard the story before. It was one of the things families did.
* * *
After Nanny had retired for the evening, Chrys sprawled on
her bed and called Aaron.
“Hey, honeybun. How are things at Green Acres?”
“Rustic. Tonight there was a cookout. We ate deerburgers and played cornhole.”
“You played what?”
Chrys laughed. “Cornhole. It’s a game.”
“I’ll make sure I tell that to the guys at the bar this evening.”
“You’re filthy, but I miss you.”
“I miss you, too, honeybun. How’s the heartbreak?”
Chrys’s heart didn’t feel broken so much as painfully hollowed out, as though somebody had gone after it with a melon baller. “I don’t know. It’s weird how you can build your life around somebody, and then they’re just gone, you know? But not dead gone. Just gone away from you.” She sighed. “But being here helps, I guess. At least I’m making myself useful. It’s better than—what is that?”
Something was scratching at the window. She pulled back the curtain, fearing a wild animal or a maniac.
But the maniac in question was her brother, his idiotically grinning face framed by the window. “Aaron, my brother’s at the, uh, window. I’ll call you back, okay?”
She opened the window. “You scared the shit out of me!”
Dustin was holding three PBR tallboys suspended from the plastic rings that bound them. “Me and Amber wanted to see if you wanted to drink the last of the beer with us. I figured if I knocked on the door I’d wake Nanny.”
“So you decided to make me pee myself instead?”
Dustin grinned. “It wouldn’t be the first time. Remember when I stuck your hand in a bowl of warm water while you was sleeping and made you wet the bed?”
“I was twelve! You probably scarred me for life.”
Dustin shrugged. “Yeah, so you gonna come out here and drink a beer with us or not?”
When Chrys stepped out on the porch, Amber was laughing. “You made her pee the bed?” she said.
“Yeah,” Dustin said, pulling a can from its plastic ring and handing it to Amber. “But it ain’t like she was always the victim. One time she put the deer-pee scent Daddy uses for hunting in my cologne bottle.”