Bastard out of Carolina (11 page)

“Such fine little ladies,” the women would tell her, and Mama would pat her pocket and agree.

Mama knew how to make a meal of biscuits and gravy, flour-and-water biscuits with bacon-fat gravy to pour over them. By the time I started the fourth grade, we were eating biscuit dinners more often than not. Sometimes with the biscuits Mama would serve a bowl of tomato soup or cold pork and beans. We joked about liking it right out of the can, but it was cold because the power company had turned the house off—no money in the mail, no electricity. That was hunger wrapped around a starch belly.

One afternoon there was not even flour to make up the pretense of a meal. We sat at the kitchen table, Reese and I grumbling over our rumbling bellies. Mama laughed but kept her face turned away from us. “Making so much noise over so little. You’d think you girls hadn’t been fed in a week.”

She got out soda crackers and began to spread them with a layer of dark red ketchup spotted with salt and pepper. She poured us glasses of cold tea and told us stories about real hunger, hunger of days with no expectation that there would ever be biscuits again, how when she was a kid she’d wrestled her sisters for the last bacon rind.

“We used to pass the plates around the table, eight plates for eight kids, pretending there was food gonna come off the stove to fill those plates, talking about food we’d never seen, just heard about or imagined, making up stories about what we’d cook if we could. Earle liked the idea of parboiled puppies. Your aunt Ruth always talked about frogs’ tongues with dew-berries. Beau wanted fried rutabagas, and Nevil cried for steamed daffodils. But Raylene won the prize with her recipe for sugar-glazed turtle meat with poison greens and hot piss dressing. ”

After a while Reese and I started making up our own pretend meals. “Peanut butter and Jell-O. Mashed bug meat with pickles.” Mama made us laugh with her imitations of her brothers and sisters fighting over the most disgusting meals they could dream up. She filled our stomachs with soda crackers and ketchup, soda crackers and mayonnaise, and more big glasses of tea, all the time laughing and teasing and tickling our shoulders with her long nails as she walked back and forth. Reese finally went outside to chase the dogs from next door and yell insults at the boys who ran them. But I stayed back to watch Mama through the kitchen window, to see her fingers ridge up into fists and her chin stand out in anger. When Daddy Glen came back from fishing with my uncles, she was just like a big angry mama hen, feathers up and eyes yellow.

“Soda crackers and ketchup,” she hissed at him. “You so casual about finding another job, but I had to feed my girls that shit while you sat on your butt all afternoon, smoking and telling lies.” She shoved her hands under her arms and sucked her lips in tight so that her mouth looked flat and hard.

“Now, Anney ...” Daddy Glen reached out to touch her arm. She slapped his hand down and jumped back like a snake that’s caught a rat. I backed away from the window and ran around to the side of the house to watch from the open door to the driveway. I had never seen Mama like that. It was scary but wonderful too. She didn’t seem to be afraid of anything.

“Not my kids,” she told Daddy Glen, her voice carrying like a shout, though she was speaking in a hoarse whisper. “I was never gonna have my kids know what it was like. Never was gonna have them hungry or cold or scared. Never, you hear me? Never!”

She went in the bathroom and washed her face, her under-arms, and her neck. Mama was pulling her hose carefully up her legs when I ran in to stand beside her, too scared and excited not to stay close. She paused to hug me briefly. “Go call and have your uncle Earle come by here to pick you up when he gets off. You and Reese better stay at your aunt Alma’s place till I get back.” I ran out to the kitchen, where the phone was, but didn’t call. Instead I hung back in the doorway and watched her reflection in the mirror down the hall.

Mama put on a clean bra and one of the sleeveless red pullover sweaters she’d gotten from her friend Mab down at the diner—the one Mab joked was made to show just how high her tits could point. Daddy Glen came to the doorway and stood watching her with his throat working but no sound coming out. Mama outlined her mouth in bold red lipstick, combed back her dark blond hair, and hung her big old purse on one arm. She glanced up the hall and saw me leaning against the kitchen doorway.

“Did you call Earle?”

I nodded, uneasy at lying, but not wanting to upset her. It would be hours before Earle would be free to come get us, and I’d already decided not to wait for him.

Mama paused, shook her head, walked back to the bedroom, and reached under the bedframe to pull out the box where she stored her shiny black patent-leather high heels. When she stood up in those, she looked like a different person, older and harder, her mouth set in a grim little smile. Her blond hair looked even brighter, her eyes darker, her complexion paler. She was coldly beautiful. Daddy Glen was still standing in the hall, but Mama stepped around him as if there wasn’t really anyone there, as if cocking her hip and swinging to one side were just a normal part of walking down the hall. Daddy Glen swayed a bit as she passed but did not move to stop her. His hands hung along his pockets while he breathed through his mouth like he was going to be sick. Her heels clicking on the floor were almost as loud as the cracking of his knuckles where he stood. I followed closely behind Mama, afraid to look back at Daddy Glen, afraid my glance might break the spell that seemed to be holding him in the hallway. Mama said nothing, just gave me a hug and a kiss, and slid behind the wheel of her Pontiac.

When the car engine roared, the spell broke. Daddy Glen ran out and stood on the tarmac watching Mama drive away. His face was rigid. He didn’t even look in my direction, but my belly crawled up tight against my backbone. I felt as if the grass had turned to ammonia and was burning in my throat, as if Daddy Glen’s skin was radiating red heat and waves of steamy sweat. Around the narrow straps of his sleeveless T-shirt I watched the muscles in his shoulders roll and bunch. I knew he could easily break my arms as methodically as he was cracking his knuckles, wring my neck as hard as he was wringing his hands. I backed up carefully, then ran around the house, climbing the fence between our yard and the neighbor’s so I couldn’t be seen.

Reese was jumping rope with the MacCauley twins and didn’t want to go with me, but she cheered up when I told her we would walk to the highway and hitchhike instead of calling for a lift. Reese loved flagging down strangers on the highway and begging a ride the four miles over to where Aunt Alma lived. She had promised me she would never do it without me, but I worried that as soon as she was a little older she would be hitchhiking all over the county. So every time we hitched a ride, I made up a new horror story. The habit was so strong in me that nervous as I was, I automatically started another one, this time about the phantom driver who went around picking up girls and skinned them like young deer, eating the meat and tanning their hides to make coin purses and pocketbooks.

“He’ll never get us,” Reese laughed. “We just have to be careful never to take a ride with a man alone.” I thought about that for a moment.

“Well, it an’t so easy to know who the phantom is,” I told Reese. “Sometimes he catches a married couple first, hiding in the back of their car while they’re in the gas-station bathroom.

When they drive off, first he murders them and then he props them up so you’d think they were the only people in the car. That way he catches lots of people who would never get in a car with a man alone.”

Reese chewed her lower lip and stared up the highway. I could see she was thinking this new information over carefully. She examined the people in the truck that stopped for us, an elderly woman in a dark blue shirtwaist dress, and a younger man in khaki work clothes. Before climbing in back she slapped the side of the cab hard enough to see both of them jump in their seats. I bit my tongue to keep from laughing.

The old lady scolded us for catching a ride on the highway. “You could get killed or worse,” she told us through the back window. “Young girls on the roads are an invitation to the wicked. Anything could happen to you.” We both nodded solemnly and thanked her politely when we jumped off just down the road from Aunt Alma’s place.

 

It was past midnight when Mama came for us. Reese was asleep in Aunt Alma’s bed, but I was sitting up with Uncle Wade, nodding over the picture puzzle he worked at when he couldn’t sleep.

“Girl, your mama,” he said, giving me a little push. I jerked fully awake when Mama touched my shoulder. Her hands were heavy and smelled faintly of Jergens Lotion.

“Come on, Bone,” she whispered. “We’re going home.” She thanked Uncle Wade in a tired voice. Her hair was limp and her face scrubbed clean. She was still wearing that pullover sweater, but she’d added a loose white shirt and changed back to her waitress flats.

“Don’t talk,” she told me. “Just get Reese’s shoes and come on.” She lifted Reese without disturbing Aunt Alma and carried her out to the car. I followed her, holding on to her right side while Reese leaned into her left shoulder. At the car, she paused and looked up into the dark night sky. In the light from the house, her face was all hollows and angles, her eyes sunken and glittery.

“Damn!” she whispered softly, and leaned her forehead against the cool metal above the car door. “Damn, damn.”

“Mama,” Reese whimpered. I pressed my cheek against Mama’s side and kept still. There was a long cold moment while we waited, and then Mama pushed herself back up straight and opened the door.

“All right,” she said, as if she were wrapping up some long conversation with herself. “All right.”

I looked back to Aunt Alma’s house. Uncle Wade was standing in the kitchen looking out at us, his face stern and his mouth hard. Why was he angry? I wondered. What could have made him look so terribly angry?

 

“Cook you some eggs,” Mama said as she steered us into the kitchen and sat us at the table. There was flour in a can, a jar of jelly, butter in a dish, a bag of tomatoes, fatback in a sealed package, and a carton of fresh eggs all speckled brown. She put most of it away and then whipped the eggs up with sweet milk, laying slices of green tomato to fry around the sides of the pan before she poured the eggs in.

“My mama used to cook this late at night,” she announced, blinking in the too-bright light. Daddy Glen was sitting in the living room in front of the television set with the sound turned down low, not looking at us and not speaking. I watched Reese’s eyes flicker toward him and then back to Mama and over to me. Daddy Glen’s hands kept moving on his thighs, the fingers working into knots, tightening on his trousers and then shaking against the dark fabric like the legs of dying june bugs turned belly up in the night. Mama pulled a tray of biscuits out of the oven and grinned at us.

“You got to get the tomatoes almost done before you put the eggs in, ‘cause you don’t cook the eggs much at all. Want them soft. Want them to melt like butter between your teeth and your tongue.” She spooned me out a scoop of eggs and put two biscuits on the plate next to the soft browned tomatoes. Reese spread butter on her biscuits and poured a big dollop of jelly next to her eggs. My stomach was so tight I didn’t see how I could eat, but Mama sat right across from me and smiled so wide I knew I had to eat it all. I did, slowly, while Daddy Glen sat silent in the next room and Mama went on talking like he wasn’t there at all. My eyes kept sliding over to where his hands gripped his thighs. I curled mine under the table, rubbed my leg muscles.

The biscuits stuffed me but didn’t satisfy. Once I started eating I could not get full. Reese seemed to feel the same way. She ate until her eyes looked swollen shut from too much food. Then she lay her face down on the table as if she were going to nap right there. Mama smiled at her and reached over to tuck her lank blond hair behind her ears where it couldn’t fall in her eyes. She buttered all the biscuits that were left and wrapped them in a towel to keep for morning. All the time she went on talking about nothing in particular, about her mama and meals she had watched her aunts cook up late at night, about a noise the Pontiac had started to make, and how she really needed to clean out the trap on the washing machine.

I listened to Mama with my mouth open. It felt like there was a wind blowing from my neck down to my belly, hot and chill at the same time, dropping little sparks into my nervous system. Finally Mama put Reese and me to bed together, sitting up beside us as if she were going to spend all night there. I could hear the television set still playing softly in the front room, and I tried to stay awake, but the food was like a drug in my system. I slid off into the dark and a dream of great soft strangling clouds lying like fogbanks on a field of blackberries. I woke up to Reese’s swollen frightened face and the low angry sound of Daddy Glen’s voice down the hall. I linked my fingers with Reese’s and prayed for silence, closing my eyes so tight my ears buzzed.