Lydia

by Tim Sandlin

  “In the ’30s, there was a decapitation. Decapitations fascinate me. Do you think the eyes keep working for a while afterward? I don’t see why not. Imagine what it must feel like to see your own body without a head.”

  And while the woman went into an hour drone on the subject of blood, guts, and gore, Shannon sat next to the window and stewed over the stupid amount of energy she’d wasted deciding what to wear when she met Lydia’s plane. Shannon’s grandmother was impossible to satisfy, so it was senseless for Shannon to work herself up over clothing. Lydia criticized. Maurey said it was an evil habit Lydia fell into years ago, and she didn’t mean to be mean. Shannon should take it as a lesson on what not to do when she grew up, which you would think would have happened by now, if it was going to.

  “We need bad examples even more than good ones,” Maurey said.

  “Yeah, but why do I have to be related to so many of them?”

  Shannon chose a white turtleneck, black Wranglers, Nike running shoes, and earrings Hank Elkrunner made in the prison jewelry shop from two #12 Royal Coachman dry flies. She changed in the airport restroom, ran out to the parking lot to find Lydia’s BMW, threw her bag into the trunk, then ran back into the airport in time to meet the next flight. Lydia wasn’t on it.

  Shannon settled in to read the pile of catalogs she’d brought from Greensboro, but visions of Tanner kept getting in the way. She came up with at least ten things she should have said, most of them having to do with the size of his penis. Then the shape. Then his ability to use it effectively for anything other than a whiz in the wind. Given two days to write several drafts of her phone call’s last line, she could have made him feel like such a loser.

  Lydia was on the next flight up from Denver. She had bought herself a first-class ticket, and she came off the plane wearing a flowing white broomstick skirt with a silver conch belt and matching bracelets, looking like honorable mention in the Isadora Duncan lookalike contest. Her hair was jet-black like vinyl seat covers. Shannon had been braced for the rejection of no hug after not seeing each other in two years, and she was shocked when Lydia grabbed her around the shoulders.

  “Let me give you some advice,” Lydia said. “Don’t ever go to prison.”

  “I’ll try not to.”

  “Prison makes a woman stronger, but it isn’t worth the trouble.” Lydia released the hug as the economy-class passengers parted and flowed around them like rocks in a river. “You look nice. Did Hank give you the earrings?”

  Lydia hadn’t said, You look nice, to Shannon since middle-school graduation. “He sent them to me for Christmas. Are you okay? You want some water?”

  “I’m perfect.” Lydia headed for the baggage carrel. “But we’ll have to do something about those shoes before the party.”

  They waited by the baggage carrel for Lydia’s four brand-new suitcases, then passed through the glass double doors into the Wyoming sunlight. Lydia almost kissed the asphalt, probably would have if Shannon hadn’t been standing there looking like she expected a slap. It was all Lydia could do to keep from sounding happy.

  “Are you still working in the little frame shop at the mall?” she asked.

  Shannon was having trouble with the bags. Lydia thought about offering help but was afraid it might set a precedent.

  “I don’t think so,” Shannon said.

  “Don’t think so?”

  “I broke up with the owner right before I left Greensboro. He doesn’t seem like the type who can work with an ex.”

  “You were sleeping with your boss?”

  Shannon set three bags on the pavement and dug for Lydia’s car key. There wasn’t much to say, beyond the obvious.

  Lydia said, “That is so asinine.”

  “I know that now.”

  “You should have known it earlier. When I was your age, girls had long since stopped sleeping with their boss.”

  Shannon said, “When you were my age, you were a grandmother.”

  Lydia reached for the key. “It’s nice to see you haven’t completely lost your spunk. I was afraid you’d gone meek on me.”

  3

  Lydia had been spunk personified on the plane. Nothing like spending a few thousand dollars on clothes to give a woman back her confidence. And she did relish flying first-class, up there ahead of the rabble. It may have cost an extra five hundred, but by God, her wine came with a cloth napkin. An executive with his cutting-edge ThinkPad tried to strike up a conversation, and she cut him dead. She was in control.

  Then came the steps and the walk across the tarmac. She held up like a champ through all that. She was home. The county should have sent a brass band. Then she saw Shannon, and Lydia’s illusory bubble burst. In one breath, she became the ex-con limping back to the cave after doing her time. In her breasts, from which Lydia thought all emotions spring, she knew she was a cliché. It was Shannon’s earrings that did it. Hank had made them. She didn’t want to think about Hank, not today. Hank brought on the ache of loss—lost people, lost years. The entire last ten years had been a write-off. She was free and home, and he wasn’t. She felt like Dorothy, waking up in her own bed in her own room in Kansas, surrounded by Auntie Em and Uncle Henry, only to discover Toto had been hit by a truck.

  And Shannon—Shannon looked like cold soup. Girls should wash their face after they cry. Hard times should improve your posture, not wreck it. Lydia had been set to establish her authority, but one look at Shannon and she took the girl in her arms.

  Lydia said, “You look nice.” She would never have said that if it were true.

  At the house, twenty or thirty locals milled around the yard, their attention split between meat and beer. They didn’t rush the car and welcome her back into the bosom of the community. A couple old codgers who looked vaguely familiar cut their eyes her way, but they were checking out the antique BMW more than her. Except for Pud and his cousin Rowdy, she didn’t see anyone whose name she knew. Pud grinned and waved, making signs like he would come over and hug her, but he was stuck at the barbecue pit. Lydia waved back and waited for Shannon to carry her bags into the house.

  Later, after Shannon finished the obligatory fussing with the bags and pointing out where things were, as if Lydia were the guest instead of the owner of the house, Lydia sat in her room and wept. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d cried. Not in all the years on the run, not during the arrest or the trial or the nights in prison. She didn’t cry when her father died. Maybe a pet death way back in childhood. The week after she stopped smoking there’d been a tire commercial that made her dewy-eyed, but Lydia blamed that on nicotine withdrawal. And the night Nixon was elected the second time, she almost cried but got drunk instead. But now, when it was over, she was bawling like a baby. That was the shits of it all—it was over. Lydia looked into her future and saw one long playing out the string. She would be going through the motions from here on out. She’d lost her turn.

  After a while—a short while, considering it was her first cry in forty-five years—Lydia dug in her purse for her emergency panties and blotted the tears off her cheeks. She stood and walked to the mirror and looked at herself, thinking what every middle-aged person thinks when they look in the mirror—Where did it all go?

  She sneaked from her bedroom to the bathroom, but Shannon was locked in and wouldn’t come out, so Lydia had to wash her face in the kitchen sink. She was thorough. Scrubbed clean, she doubled back to the bedroom and reapplied her makeup, careful not to overdo it like an old lady. Then she went back to the mirror. Now, she didn’t think, Where did it all go? Now, she thought, Take no prisoners, bitch. Let’s mingle.

  ***

  I showed up carrying a dozen daffodils wrapped in brown paper. Lydia was the first to spot me.

  “Sam.”

  The tanning-booth tan threw me off. The last time I’d seen Lydia, six months ago in Dublin Prison, her skin had been rice white,
the same rice white it’d been—with the exception of her fugitive year on the reservation—since my birth.

  “Mom?”

  “The flowers are sweet.” Lydia swept the daffodils from my hand.

  “They’re not for—”

  “Your hair is turning gray, Sam. I want you to run straight to Kmart and buy Grecian Formula.”

  “Is that what you did?”

  She sniffed the flowers. “Daffodils are my favorites, next to orchids. Shannon.”

  Shannon came over from the dessert table, where she’d been talking to a white Rastafarian. I hadn’t seen my daughter in almost as long as I hadn’t seen my mother. Shannon looked grown up. I realized with some shock that if I were single and we weren’t related, Shannon was probably too old for me to date.

  Lydia said, “Shannon, be a dear and find these poor flowers some water.”

  Shannon smiled at me as she took the flowers. “Hi, Daddy.” The hug was hampered by the daffodils, but it was still what I lived for.

  “How you been?” I asked.

  “Terrific.”

  “You’re not bulimic, are you?”

  “Daddy!”

  “I can feel your bones.”

  Lydia said, “Stand up straight.” Shannon stood straighter and decided her family was the most boorish bunch in America. There wasn’t one thing they were incapable of saying.

  Lydia went on. “Bulimic, my eye. Wouldn’t hurt you a bit to lose ten pounds.”

  Maurey and Gilia walked up. Maurey’s newly permed hair was piled up under a cowboy hat, and she wore a long-sleeved white shirt with a yoke. Gilia had Esther propped on one hip. “I think Shannon’s weight is perfect,” Gilia said. She passed Esther to me and took the daffodils from Shannon. “Thanks so much, Sam,” she said. “You’re a prince.”

  Maurey said, “If anything, five more pounds would make her look healthier.”

  Even at her strongest, Shannon could barely deal with a family gang-up. Right now, she’d been up since 4 a.m. Carolina time, flown on three airplanes, and been told her pussy stank. “Would you tactless wonders stop discussing my weight?”

  “How’s your sex life, then?” Maurey asked. “Still having that dry problem?”

  Shannon fled for the house.

  Lydia, meanwhile, had been eyeing the daffodils. She’d known they weren’t meant for her, but she was the guest of honor here. It was her Goddamn party.

  “I think those are for me,” she said to Gilia.

  I did the only thing I could to keep the peace. I offered up my child. “Mom. Lydia. Meet your granddaughter Esther.”

  Lydia peered at Esther, who broke into a beatific smile.

  “Wherever did you come up with that name?”

  I said, “You like it?”

  “It’s Jewish.”

  Gilia almost bristled. “So.”

  “Only pretentious twits pretend to belong to ethnic groups they don’t belong to. On the reservation, you couldn’t turn over a rock without finding a pasty white girl calling herself Running Dove or Dances in Sunshine.”

  Lydia bent down for a closer look at Esther. I had been training Esther for this moment for three nights—hours after supper and during bath time. It was the moment I’d been planning since Esther’s birth.

  Esther said, “Yo, Grandma.”

  Lydia smiled. “She is charming. I can see the Callahan eyelash line.”

  Maurey made a sucking-air sound. “My God, you said something nice.”

  “I can say nice things if they’re true.”

  “Prison softened you, Lydia.”

  “It did not. And don’t for a second think I don’t remember who finked to the Secret Service in the first place.”

  “I’d do it again in a heartbeat,” Maurey said.

  ***

  Lydia’s first arrest was only for threatening the president’s dog. She wrote Ronald Reagan a letter saying if he didn’t appoint a woman attorney general, she would assassinate Rex. The Secret Service called the local sheriff, who threw Lydia into the county jail for the weekend. Monday, they offered to release her on her own recognizance, but Lydia refused to leave, because the men’s cell had color TV and the women’s was black-and-white.

  I bought the women a color TV—without Lydia’s knowledge—she went home, and everyone but Lydia thought the incident had run its course. Unfortunately, Reagan, always the idiot, appointed a male attorney general. Lydia soaked a Ken-L Ration chew toy in Raid for two days, then sprinkled it with d-CON. She wrapped the poison chew toy in a Hershey’s candy-bar wrapper with the ends stapled shut, bought a dog birthday card from the Hallmark store in Jackson, wrote a nice note explaining how this is a gift for Rex from the grateful American people, and FedExed the package to the White House.

  Her mistake was she told Hank Elkrunner, who told Maurey Pierce, who telephoned the Secret Service. Even then, Lydia almost came away clean. Federal Express lost the package. Lydia took this as ineptitude, while I saw it as proof of God’s existence. Whichever, the miracle lasted three months before the package was found holding up the short leg of a dispatcher’s desk in Hannibal, Missouri. FedEx called to say the dispatcher was fired, Lydia’s money would be returned, and the package would be delivered by three p.m.

  Lydia and Hank disappeared by noon.

  The ethical question discussed at family gatherings from North Carolina to Wyoming was: did Maurey do the right thing? Which led to the splinter question: would Lydia have been nailed anyway? The Reagans get a signed threat from GroVont, Wyoming, followed by an anonymous poison chew toy, also from GroVont, Wyoming. How much brains does it take? Lydia contends that without Maurey’s warning, the White House person in charge of gifts would have thrown the sticky chew toy in the trash. Shannon and Pud side with Maurey. As usual, I straddle the fence. I admit Lydia did an awful thing and deserved to be caught and punished. But she’s my mom, for Chrissake. Nobody wants to see their mom in prison.

  ***

  Over by the barbecue pit, a lively discussion broke out on how you tell if a hog is cooked. Words like trichinosis were being bandied about. And New Age pansy. I drifted from the potluck table—cheese pesto and red Jell-O with suspended cling peaches—to a table of open wine bottles. As I poured myself a glass of zinfandel, a woman standing next to me said, “Zinfandel doesn’t go with pig.”

  She was early thirties, dressed in a bureaucratic sweater-skirt combination with open-toed, sensible shoes.

  “Are you one of Lydia’s authors?” I asked.

  “What makes you think I might be?” Her hair was that unnatural copper-tubing color favored by Yankee women.

  I said, “You’re not.”

  “A second ago, you thought I was.”

  “An Oothoon Press author would have used fuck in the answer.”

  The woman studied her fingernails on the edge of her plastic cup. The nails were painted the color of liver.

  “Fuck off, fuck no, or fuck you,” I said. “Lydia’s authors say fuck whenever they can. It’s a sign of empowerment.”

  “You must think you’re pretty empowered.”

  “Oh no. I never say fuck except when I’m quoting others. Lydia taught me the confident man doesn’t have to curse.”

  “But the confident woman does?”

  “That’s how life works.”

  She sipped her own wine, which was close to the same shade as her fingernails. “You must be her son.”

  I held out his hand. “Sam Callahan.”

  “Brandy Epstein. I’m Lydia’s parole officer.”

  “Oh.”

  “I hope you don’t mind me joining the party. I came out to introduce myself and saw all these people here. The whole town must have come together to welcome your mother home.”

  “More like the whole state.”

  “She must
be a revered personage.”

  I couldn’t detect sarcasm, but you never know with women. “Would you like to meet her?”

  “That’s what I’m here for.”

  ***

  Brandy insisted we first check out the dessert table, which proved to be an excuse for her to snag a big piece of chocolate cake with chocolate icing. She ate as we made the rounds of the other tables, drink stations, and horseshoe pits and finally found Lydia in the side-yard parking lot, standing next to a mid-’60s GMC truck with two Indian teenagers. Lydia cradled a rifle in her hands; it appeared we’d walked in on negotiations.

  “Sam,” Lydia said. “Meet Terry and Little Jim. They’re Hank’s cousins, twice removed.” Terry kept his eyes on the rifle, but Little Jim glared at me as if I were the icon of white impunity.

  To put Little Jim at ease, I said, “Custer had it coming.”

  Lydia almost smiled. “Social faux pas. Little Jim’s a Crow.”

  The significance of that slipped right over my head, but Brandy caught it. “The Crow were on Custer’s side.”

  I said, “Oh.”

  Lydia rotated the rifle bolt and checked the lever action. “You don’t see many of these,” she said. “Remington center-fire pump action. Thirty-thirty. This should keep the peasants at bay.”

  Brandy said, “Firearms are off-limits to felons.”

  Lydia’s face flared. “What the hell is it to you?”

  I said, “Lydia, this is Brandy Epstein. She’s your parole officer.”

  Lydia kind of shifted her weight back on her heels. She looked from Brandy to the rifle, then, casually as passing the salt, she tried to hand the rifle to Terry. Only he wouldn’t take it. Terry was in no position to touch a rifle in front of a parole officer. The rifle hung there between them for a moment until Little Jim threw it into the truck.

  He muttered, “White women.”

  Lydia said, “I hope you’re not one of those live-and-die-by-the-book bureaucrats.”

  Brandy cupped her cake from the top and took a bite off the bottom. She seemed intent on either avoiding the icing or saving it for last. “I’m afraid I am.”