by Julia Watts
Dee grinned. “The relief you get from physical therapy isn’t usually comic relief.” To Chrys’s surprise, she pulled her soiled shirt off over her head and stripped down to her sports bra, revealing a tan, toned belly and more in the bosom department than her loose-fitting polo had implied.
“Uh, let me get you a T-shirt.” She ran to her room, took three deep breaths to calm herself, and grabbed a baby blue shirt because it would complement Dee’s eyes.
“Thanks,” Dee said when Chrys held the shirt out to her. “I’ll wash it and bring it back next week, okay?”
“Sure,” Chrys said, unable to meet Dee’s eyes to see if the baby blue complemented them or not. “I’ll let you two get to work. Let me know if there are any more marauding chickens on the loose.”
“Oh, I’ll let Mrs. Simcox chase them. That can be our physical therapy for the day,” Dee said, making Nanny smile.
In her room, Chrys paced, too full of nervous energy to sit down. She wandered over to the small bookcase in the corner, the only bookcase in the house. Chrys was the only voracious reader in her family. In the case were a small Bible, as opposed to the gigantic family Bible which sat on the coffee table in the living room, and a dictionary that probably dated from her mom’s high school years. There were a couple of Billy Graham books, a copy of Johnny Cash’s The Man in Black, and a dozen or so Westerns by Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour that had belonged to her grandfather. Snuggled next to Riders of the Purple Sage was a slim volume Chrys was pretty sure Nanny had never read: Original Seine: Sensuality and Subversion Among the Women Writers of the Left Bank. She shook her head at the academic-ese of the title. Why did so many academic writers feel the need to follow that pattern—a clever turn of phrase plus a colon plus a descriptive subtitle? When she’d first thought of the “original Seine” pun, she had been delighted by her cleverness. Looking at the book on the shelf, though, it seemed a much weaker title than, say, Riders of the Purple Sage.
She took her book off the shelf and sat down with it. The dedication read, “To Nanny, who taught me more than I ever learned in school.” But the text of the book itself was probably incomprehensible to Nanny with all its theories and jargon and long quotations from difficult modernist texts. Reading it now, Chrys saw with a mixture of amusement and horror her much younger self: a wide-eyed novice academic who thought she was destined for a life of the mind—discussing ideas and developing theories, making significant contributions to her field. This freshly fledged PhD could never have predicted the low-level academic workhorse she’d become, teaching section after section of English comp to glassy-eyed freshmen who texted in class and couldn’t sort out the correct usages of their and there to save their lives.
Squinting at her dense academic prose, Chrys questioned not only the reality of her current academic life but the dream of her imagined one. Was there really anything she could’ve said about Gertrude Stein or Djuna Barnes that hadn’t been said at least a dozen times before? And who read these scholarly publications anyway? A few students probably skimmed them to lift out quotes for papers they were writing (the academic equivalent of strip mining). Some fellow academics might have read them, mainly to compare the “scholarly contributions” to their own. The scholarship that had been so exciting when Chrys was in grad school now seemed like a poorly attended circle jerk. She put the book back on the shelf.
When Nanny hollered, “We’re done!” Chrys found herself stealing a glance at the mirror before going into the living room.
“I guess this is the part where I’m supposed to walk you out,” Chrys said.
Dee smiled. “Wouldn’t want me to get lost. Plus, you’ve got to protect me from the chickens.”
Once they were out on the porch, Dee said, “She really likes having you here, you know.”
Chrys couldn’t help but feel touched and a little shy from the compliment. “I’m glad to hear that. I like being with her, too. Always have.”
“There are some excellent paid caregivers,” Dee said, leaning against the porch railing and looking out at the chickens pecking in the yard. “But when you’re paid by the hour—and underpaid at that—you don’t always go the extra mile to make sure the patient is happy.” She turned around, and Chrys couldn’t help noticing how the sunlight streaked her hair with gold. “It’s not like having a granddaughter who’ll take you out for a milkshake.”
Chrys smiled. “The lady does love her milkshakes.”
“I know taking her for a milkshake every once in a while seems like no big deal, but what you’re doing is improving her quality of life.”
“Now if I could just improve my own, that would be terrific.” Chrys hadn’t meant her joke to be revealing, but she could tell it was by the look on Dee’s face.
“What do you mean?”
Now she’d done it. How to say something without saying too much? “Well, I guess you could say I’m in a transitional period in my life. I just got out of a long-term relationship…well, got kicked out of it, more accurately. And I don’t know…I don’t have what I want in life right now, but I don’t exactly know what I want either. Is that what you call a midlife crisis?”
Dee was holding her gaze intently. “It’s what I call my life crisis, or at least it’s pretty close. I’ve been divorced for a year now. That’s part of what brought me down here…the need for some distance. Well, that and my job in Cincinnati was taking up way too much of my time, and Anna was going through some stuff and really needed me. And then Papaw died, and here I am.”
“When all else fails, move to Kentucky, huh?”
Dee laughed. “The destination of last resort. Hey, I’ve been talking to your nanny about Papaw’s place—well, I guess it’s my place now—and she says she’d like to see it. So I was wondering, maybe after her Saturday beauty shop appointment, you might stop by. I could make us some lunch.”
Chrys felt herself looking everywhere but at Dee—at the chickens, the yard, the mountains in the distance—before saying, “I’d—I mean, we’d—like that.”
* * *
After she heard snores coming from Nanny’s room, she dialed Aaron. Somehow all the activities that took place after Nanny’s bedtime—from reading in bed to drinking beer with her brother to calling Aaron—felt tinged with a teenaged naughtiness.
“How’s the heartbreak, honeybun?” Aaron asked, as always.
“Still there, but I’m getting used to it. It’s like growing a new limb or something.”
“Yeah, but less useful. Having an extra arm would be the shit.”
“Yeah. I do need to tell you, though…I think I might have a crush.”
“Out in the boondocks? What do you have a crush on, a nanny goat?”
Chrys laughed. If a non-Southern urban person had made this joke, it would’ve pissed her off. But from the only black gay boy from Niota, Tennessee, it was funny. “It’s neither a farm animal nor a relative, but thank you for asking. It’s Nanny’s physical therapist.”
“You do like the healthcare providers, don’t you?”
Chrys winced. “No comparisons between Meredith and Dee, please. Dee’s totally different. Being a physical therapist, she’s much more—”
“Hands on?” Aaron interrupted.
“Well, I don’t know about that. Actually, I don’t even know if she’s gay. She’s divorced, which could say straight.”
“It could say gay just as easily. Be careful all the same, though. You put the moves on any local straight girls, and the peasants will be coming after you with torches and pitchforks.”
“Don’t worry. I managed to live here a lot of years without getting killed.”
“But by God, if she is a dyke, fuck her ASAP. It’s always a good idea to fuck a new person after a bad breakup. It washes the stink off.”
Chrys muffled her laughter in her pillow so as not to wake Nanny.
* * *
Dee’s family home was an old two-story farmhouse with gingerbread trim, much roomier than the tiny ho
use where Nanny had raised her three children.
As soon as Chrys put her car in park, Dee bounded down the porch steps. “I’m glad you could make it,” she said, opening the back door to get out Nanny’s walker. “And Mrs. Simcox, my papaw’s ramp is still in place, so getting up on the porch should be easy-breezy.”
“It’s a lovely house,” Chrys said.
“I always thought so.” Dee walked alongside Nanny. “Anna wants us to paint it purple, but I told her we have to wait till we’ve been here a year. Then if we decide we want to stay, we can paint it. There’s no way I’m painting a house purple and then repainting it white so I can put it on the market.”
“I don’t know how you could move back to Ohio after living in a spot as pretty as this,” Nanny said. She pronounced Ohio as O-high.
“Well, Ohio isn’t all factories and smokestacks,” Chrys said. “It has some pretty spots, too.”
Chrys knew that Nanny and many Appalachians of her generation viewed Ohio as a vast industrial wasteland because so many of their male relatives had moved to smoke-belching Cincinnati or Dayton for factory jobs after the mines closed in the fifties. Apparently Dee was familiar with this stereotype of the state, too.
“It’s a different kind of pretty, though,” Dee said after Nanny had made it onto the porch. “I’d miss the mountains if I went back.”
“I never could stand flat land,” Nanny said. “There ain’t no privacy and there ain’t no place to hide.”
Chrys laughed. “What have you got to hide from, Nanny?”
“You never know,” Nanny responded cryptically.
“Here’s the living room,” Dee said once they were inside. “Decorated in thrift store chic, as you can see.”
The couch was a vintage piece that had been reupholstered in purple. On the wall above it were shadowboxes displaying old thimbles, squares of quilts, and buttons. In the corner was a matching purple armchair with a tabby cat snoozing on it. A wooden sign with the word Imagine hung on the wall above.
“I like it,” Chrys said.
“Me too,” Nanny said. “It’s different.”
Dee laughed. “Well, I struck a compromise with Anna. We couldn’t have a purple house, but we could have purple living room furniture. Want to look around the rest of the floor?”
Chrys almost gasped when they entered the next room. The walls were lined with bookcases full of leather-bound classics, paperback mysteries and contemporary novels. One corner of the room was occupied by a treadmill and a rack of weights. In the other corner was a squashy armchair occupied by a little girl with wheat-colored hair and red-framed glasses immersed in a copy of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Chrys felt a tug in her heart, remembering the solitary joys of a bookish childhood.
“Anna, could you step away from Hogwarts long enough to say hello to Mrs. Simcox and Ms. Chrys?”
Anna looked up, startled. “Oh…hello.”
“Hidy, honey. That’s a big old book you’re reading,” Nanny said.
“It’s the fifth in the series,” Anna said. Her feet were bare, and her tan legs were dotted with mosquito bites. Summertime legs. “They get longer and longer.”
“You know, I must be the last person in the English-speaking world not to have read those.” Chrys had been working on her dissertation when the Harry Potter craze first took off. She had been too buried in her scholarship to have time for popular fiction.
“Well, you’ve got to borrow one!” Anna said, as if she were dealing with a medical emergency. She sprang out of her chair and dashed for a nearby bookshelf. “Here’s Sorcerer’s Stone. When you finish it, I’ll loan you Chamber of Secrets. The first two are super-fast reads.”
“Thank you.” Chrys probably wouldn’t have been so generous with her books when she was a kid, but then, she hadn’t owned many of them. “I’ll take very good care of it.”
“Nanny and Papaw used this room as a dining room,” Dee said. “But I can only remember eating in it at Thanksgiving and Christmas. I guess we’ve always been eating-in-the-kitchen people.”
“Our family, too,” Chrys said. She thought of the dining room at Meredith’s and how formal and fake it had felt sitting there, as though they were playing at being lord and lady of a manor.
Dee’s kitchen was sunny, with red-and-white gingham curtains on the windows. The table and chairs were a vintage dinette set. “Oh, I remember these,” Nanny said as Dee helped her to her seat. “You like old things, don’t you?”
“I guess I do,” Dee said.
“You reckon that’s why you like me?” Nanny said, and they all laughed.
“I walked right into that one, didn’t I, Mrs. Simcox?” Dee went to the fridge. “I made chicken salad for lunch, so you can have it on a sandwich or on some salad greens.”
They ate chicken salad and drank lemonade, and Anna talked to Nanny about her love of craft projects. As soon as the dishes were cleared, Anna put a big plastic tub of beads and feathers on the table, and she and Nanny got to work stringing necklaces.
“If you’re okay with Anna for a few minutes, I might take Chrys on a little walk around the property,” Dee said.
Nanny grinned. “You go on. Me and Anna’s fine here. We got necklaces to make.”
When they were out of the room, Chrys said, “That looked like Nanny and me thirty years ago.”
Dee smiled. “They both look happy. Anna can’t really remember her grandma, so it’s good for her to have a surrogate.”
“It’s good for Nanny, too,” Chrys said as they walked down the front steps. “She has a great granddaughter, but Peyton’s still a little squirmy when it comes to craft projects. She’d rather chase the chickens.”
Dee grinned. “Well, as I’m sure you recall, I’m pretty good at that myself.”
Out in the yard, they fell into an easy pace, walking side by side.
“This is the garden,” Dee said as they approached a plowed field filled with neat rows of tomato plants, beans tied to poles, cucumbers and peppers. “This is about half of what Papaw put out, but this is just my practice garden. If we’re still here next year, I’ll do better.”
“It looks good to me,” Chrys said. “I remember when I was little I used to run through the garden rows, and when I saw a ripe tomato, I’d pull it off and eat it right then and there. The juice would be warm from the sun.”
Dee ran over to a tomato plant, squatted, and plucked a ripe red fruit. She presented it to Chrys. “Knock yourself out.”
Chrys paused for a second before accepting it, feeling a bit too much like Adam being offered the apple. But then, probably like Adam, she thought oh, what the hell, and bit into the warm red flesh. Juice ran down her chin. She laughed, and so did Dee.
“As good as you remember?” Dee asked.
“Absolutely. Here.” She held out the tomato to Dee who leaned forward, lips parted, and took a big bite.
“Yum.”
“I know, right?” Chrys imagined Dee leaning toward her not for a mouthful of tomato but for a kiss. Stop, she told herself. It’s too soon, you’re still too hurt, and this is nothing more than the middle-aged version of an unrequited schoolgirl crush. But even as she tried to reason with herself, she couldn’t help noticing how red the tomato juice had made Dee’s lips.
As they walked on, Dee said, “You know, I’m really glad I met you. I needed a friend here.”
“Me too,” said Chrys.
“And I wanted to say…if you ever need to talk, I mean, about your breakup and that kind of thing, feel free. I know when Anna’s dad and I divorced, sometimes I just needed to vent.”
“Thanks.” Chrys knew she should say something else, but nothing else would come out.
“Of course, if you don’t want to talk, that’s cool, too. If I crossed a line—”
“You didn’t at all,” Chrys said. “But if we’re going to be friends, I need to tell you that my breakup—my relationship—was with a woman. Is that okay?” She winced at her ineptit
ude. “I mean, I know it’s okay…I’ve been okay with it for a long time. More than okay. But I mean, my being gay isn’t a problem for you, is it?” There. The most awkward coming-out speech ever.
Dee’s demeanor hadn’t changed at all. “Of course it’s not a problem. People like what they like. I’ve never understood why it’s a problem for anybody.”
“Me neither, but growing up here, it was a problem for plenty of people.” On one level, Dee’s response was reassuring: people like what they like, and it’s not a moral issue. On another level, it was discouraging. It was the response of a straight girl…a nice, open-minded straight girl, but straight nonetheless. She thought of Dee’s sensual smile as she held out the ripe tomato, then of the explosion of juice as she took a bite. As a feminist, Chrys had numerous problems with the story of Adam and Eve, but she had to admit it got one thing right: forbidden fruit was tempting.
Chapter Ten
“Hello?” Chrys was still in her pajamas, a cup of coffee in the hand that wasn’t holding the phone.
“Chrystal, honey, I’ve got a splitter of a migraine, and I ain’t gonna be able to take Nanny to church this morning.” Her mom’s voice sounded strained.
“That’s okay. Just get some rest and feel better.”
“I thought you’d pitch a fit.”
“Because you have a migraine?” Really, did her mother think of her as that insensitive?
“No, on account of you having to take Nanny to church.”
Chrys clearly needed more caffeine. Her brain wasn’t firing on all cylinders. “I didn’t say I’d take Nanny to church. I just said it was okay that you didn’t.”
“Listen, hon,” Mom said. “Your nanny ain’t never missed a Sunday of church unless she’s been in the hospital, and even then she didn’t think it was much of an excuse. Your daddy and brother’s off fishing, and Amber’s taking Peyton to that Methodist church over in Morgan. That just leaves you to take Nanny.”
Chrys remembered all too well the hard pews of the Piney Creek Free Will Baptist Church and the even harder line taken by the preacher on the subject of sin. “Mom, this is the one thing I’m afraid I can’t do.”