Family Linen (9 page)

The country band at the Piggly Wiggly wore short-sleeved black shirts with glittering red cuffs and collars, and huge black cowboy hats. They were doing an old Kenny Rogers song, “Ruby, Don't Take Your Love to Town.” Lacy thought again of the things she planned to buy. Suddenly she remembered a disastrous dinner she had cooked sometime during the early years of her marriage. She had known, serving this dinner, that something was wrong with it, but she hadn't been able to figure out what it was. “Lacy,” Jack had said after a moment, “it's all
white
.” As indeed it was: fish with a cream sauce, rice, cauliflower, homemade rolls. Lacy used to tell this funny story to their friends. But now it seemed unbearably sad to her. It seemed like so many other things almost independent of herself and Jack, of their enormous good will, things that could not in any way have been foreseen or avoided. It's something that wouldn't occur to you, a white dinner. Thinking of Jack, Lacy saw herself again in the picture she had been looking at the night before, at her mother's: she and Jack, hand in hand, at a beach. In the picture, her mouth is a wide dark bow. Jack's eyes stare fearlessly into the future. That picture had been taken nearly fifteen years ago, at Wrightsville Beach, when they were in graduate school at Duke, before they married. When they were in love. And now Jack was in love with somebody else—Susan, another graduate student, ten years younger than he was. Doing it all over. But you
can't
do it all again, she wanted to scream at him. You can't have it twice, and you can't get it back— Although Jack himself looked exactly, she thought, the same: thin, bearded, the lopsided grin, the warm brown eyes. She couldn't imagine where those years had gone.

Lacy leaned against a battered blue camper to catch her breath as it all—flying pennants, whirling dancers, jostling crowd—blurred and swam, for a minute, before her eyes. She noticed that the guitarist was staring at her. He was a heavyset man of sixty or so, with a snake tattooed around his arm. “Ruby, for God's sake turn around!” he sang in a high nasal voice.

Suddenly Lacy realized that this Piggly Wiggly stood on the site of the old drive-in movie theater where she came with Louie Scuggs, the first boy who really loved her, and with Red McClanahan who touched her breasts and then never asked her out again. She hadn't liked Louie because he was too much like she was—too smart, too vulnerable, never quite “in.” Lacy was the spelling champion, for instance, instead of a majorette like Myrtle. Louie Scuggs brought olive-and-cream-cheese sandwiches to school. But Red McClanahan! He was the kind of boy Candy knew. Lacy couldn't believe it when he asked her out; she still couldn't believe it, twenty years later. Myrtle had told her that Red spent six of those years in prison, that now he sold linoleum and carpet for Sears.

Lacy remembered three things about the night Red touched her breasts:
Thunder Road
, starring Robert Mitchum, was playing at the drive-in; she wore a white sundress, with spaghetti straps, which she had made herself in the 4-H Club; and little Linda Milligan, her distant cousin, fell from the top rung of the jungle gym and landed on her face in the gravel right under the giant screen, splitting her chin wide open. Just as Red touched Lacy's nipples, Linda Milligan ran between the rows of parked cars screaming bloody murder, while Robert Mitchum drove wildly across the huge pearly screen behind her. Robert Mitchum's job was running moonshine through the woods. It was, Lacy remembered, a really good movie. Linda Milligan grew up, got married, moved to northern Florida. And even now Lacy could almost feel Red's hands on her breasts.

The guitarist with the tattoos kept looking at her. “Ruby, I know I'm not half the man I used to be,” he sang with the band, “But Ruby, I still need some company.” Lacy started to giggle; she couldn't help it. The band took a break, and a little wind whirled the trash at her feet. Lacy knew she should do her shopping. But the guitarist was moving forward. “Listen miss,” he said, “listen,” in her ear. Then suddenly he was right in her face, with his gray-black stubble, his flat light eyes. “Now you're Verner Hess's girl, aren't you?” he asked deferentially. “I ain't seen you since you was grown.”

“Yes—” Lacy's voice sounded strange to her in the sudden lack of music.

“Well, I don't know if you remember this or not, but I had a son, Donny Dodd? and he was sweet on you? and we, me and the missus, took you with us water skiing it must of been at least two times, over to Holston Lake. We had us a boat then, for the boys. We used to go over there every Sunday in those days. I'm Ernest Dodd,” he said.

“Oh sure,” Lacy said, when in fact she didn't remember any of it, not Donny Dodd's face, or this father of his, or the missus, nothing at all of those Sundays spent water skiing on Holston Lake. No, wait—there's “Ramblin' Rose,” sung by Nat King Cole, coming from the small black transistor radio on the green blanket. Transistor radios were new then. Lacy saw again the wide shining lake, the circle of hills, and a boy coming up at the end of a ski rope, suddenly and totally out of the water. But she couldn't see this boy's face: all she remembered was “Rambling Rose,” and the way your nose feels when you get it too full of water.
Oh, Jack
, she thought, suddenly furious.
Oh, Jack darling
. Because he had left her, and left her open to all of this.

“That was fun, that water skiing,” Lacy said to Mr. Dodd, edging past him toward the store. “Please tell your wife hello.”

“Died,” he said. “Cancer. She was all eat up with it.”

“I'm sorry.” Lacy shook his hand, squeezing the snake. “Take it easy,” she said, and, “I think you all are real good,” meaning the band.

She found what she needed and went to stand in the checkout line behind a man and his wife and three little sobbing girls.
Sweet on you
, she thought.
The Dodd boy was sweet on you
. The clock over the automatic door said 7:05. Back in North Carolina, her lover would be having a martini, probably, or running. He runs five miles a day. Visiting hours would have started at the hospital. Candy would be there already, smiling softly, in her crinkled white uniform. Arthur might be there too, scowling in a corner, permanently ill at ease. Sybill would have her mouth pursed, legs crossed at the ankle. Out front, Mr. Dodd's band was starting up again. After Lacy paid, she went to stand by Kate at the line of video games. Kate was playing “Nuclear Holocaust.”

“This is the last American family,” Kate said. “See, the thing you have to do is get Timmy past these dorks.
Whoops
,” she said.

“Come on now.”

“
Mom,
” Kate said, but then the screen went dark.

The air had cooled off, and the violet arc lights were glowing softly all over the Piggly Wiggly parking lot. Mr. Dodd's band played “Orange Blossom Special,” with a skinny rat-faced boy hunched over the fiddle. A big woman with a long black ponytail ran forward from the crowd and started dancing all by herself on the pavement. Lacy felt old and tired; she knew she could never keep up with her running lover.

“Weird music,” Kate said. As they waited to turn into the main road, Kate asked what would happen if she got pregnant.

“Well,” Lacy said, “that would probably be really unfortunate, because it would be so bad for your health, as well as for the baby's, so I guess we'd all have to sit down together, that is, with the boy, and his parents, and your father, and we'd just have to decide what would be the best thing to do under the circumstances, and then—”

But Kate flipped the radio dial, not listening. Finally, Lacy stopped talking. She always tends to answer their questions too fully, to give them more information than they need to know.

“I
could
, you know,” Kate said after a while.

“Could what?”

“Get pregnant now. Couldn't I?”

So that's it
.

“Sure you could,” Lacy said. She waited for a break in the line of cars.

The early evening air smelled new, green, and full of possibility. The haze was gone. Beyond the bustling parking lot, the mountains rose; high above them, the sky was clear and luminous. Lacy couldn't understand what she remembered and what she didn't—why, for instance, the theme song from
Thunder Road
kept running through her mind. Robert Mitchum's face, dark and strong, was as big as a house on that shining screen—that screen which used to be
right there
behind the Piggly Wiggly where the pony rides were. Red McClanahan had coarse brown hair and yellow-green eyes. When he kissed her, he kept them wide open.
Life before Jack
. Lacy rolled the window down, over Kate's protests. She found herself smiling, on the road back to Mother's house.

Lacy is just so pretty, every day she brings me these flowers. They are blue. We put them in my vase, my swirling vase from Clinus who brings me things too. Lacy is not my baby. Clinus is not my baby either, or Lacy who says these grow up on the hill, Fay, out behind Mother's house. They grow on the hill by the split rail fence which runs up to the barn, won't you come out Fay to see them? The whole hillside is blue. Here, we will put them in a vase, but won't you come out in the car? It's such a pretty day, Lacy says, it's so dark in here. Can you see them, Fay, how blue they are, in your vase? Can you see in here? Nettie says leave her be, Lacy. She's okay. I say I'm okay, you're okay too and Lacy laughs. I laugh too, ha ha!

I keep up. I don't need to go anywhere, that's what I tell Lacy. It's so bright out there it hurts my eyes. Sybill is such a loud person. And don't I know how the hillside looks, and those flowers, and all that blue? I know, Lacy, but thanks I say. Thanks a million ha-ha.

But oh Lacy is pretty, she looks like Princess Di. It's that haircut she's got. Candy comes to cut my hair. And I was such a pretty girl myself and Elizabeth put a bowl on my head then and cut my bangs. Elizabeth is very sick, Nettie says. Listen. Pay attention. Elizabeth is very sick, that's why her daughter Lacy is here who looks like Princess Di who has lost twenty-three pounds on her amazing diet, you can too, you can share the Royal Secret, how she lost four pounds in forty-eight hours and ten pounds in just one week right after the birth of the Prince. Mealtime is an exciting time on Princess Di's diet. This diet would not work of course for Kenny Rogers who spends two thousand dollars a week on barbecued ribs he has them flown in to wherever he's performing, for the whole crew, such a generous man. While Sue Ellen on the other hand keeps her blender on the set where she whips up seven types of grain, bananas, and raisins in hot water for a very healthy snack. Sue Ellen has a young lover now. You can't blame her either, JR is so mean. Some men are just mean. It was awful for Pamela when JR dug up her first husband and accused her of bigamy right in front of Bobby. That was awful! And Pamela poor thing had that miscarriage. Some men are just so mean. Oh don't I know how it looks out there, so bright, and all the flowers? Listen, honey, Nettie says. Listen here. I've been there, is what I tell Nettie. I'll take care of it, okay? If I can find it and send it off.

Speaking of bright, honey, did you hear about the electric housewife who makes sparks fly wherever she goes? This forty-one-year-old mother of three was ironing a dress when it just up and burst into flames. Now she has to take three showers a day and wears a copper bracelet on her wrist and a long piece of wire tied to her ankle to ground her at all times. Some women are mean, too. Sybill is turning mean in her age like Elizabeth, Nettie says. Asking so many questions like that. And I say ha ha! Sybill was never a child at all, just a spooky little grownup like the ones who have that disease they're born old and by the time they're eight they're ninety, all bent over with arthritis and God knows what. They have little old bodies and nappy white hair. I have it too but it's pretty and soft, Candy puts Spun Sand rinse on it to keep it so nice that's why I look so pretty. I don't know how it got so white. But if Sybill was my baby I'd of drowned her, ha ha! Of course I would not, it's a terrible death, what a way to go, just look at Natalie Wood. If she had enough sense to take off her jacket she'd be right here with us today. Clinus has a joke, What kind of wood won't float? The answer is Natalie Wood. Ha ha. And of course it was the height of tragedy leaving Robert Wagner and those three children. Called RJ by his friends. Natalie and RJ had been married for years and years, don't ask me how they met. You never can tell, when you meet somebody, whether that mysterious chemistry will occur. See here. It was love at first sight when I served him a fake hamburger, I was working in a Denver luncheonette when a man gave me this rubber burger for a joke and so I gave it to Johnny R a twenty-nine-year-old truckdriver who happened to be my next customer. He got mad at first but then he took me to the movies and five years later we are as happy as clams. The Wacky Way I Met My Mate by Louise Nettles, oh we've all had a little romance. In fact, those flowers. Nettie says listen, Fay. Don't worry! I tell them. Ha ha! It's nice in here and cool and dim. I like it cool like this with lots of atmosphere. It's wacky and bright in Hollywood otherwise known as Tinseltown. I'll take care of it! I say.

See here. If you're in trouble get in touch with Reverend Al and the prayer family of Fresno, California. Check the appropriate box for better job, more finances, I am worried, my health is bad, people talk about me, happier marriage, I need more confidence, I am not understood, someone to care for me. You will receive a beautiful rugged leather cross and a special prayer handkerchief and he will meet your needs. Yes he will! If Clinus will get me a stamp. Nettie won't. Sometimes Nettie is mean. JR was so mean to dig up Pamela's first husband it was as Elizabeth would say in poor taste. Listen honey. Elizabeth is very sick. The way I met my mate was just so wacky. Put a check by my health is bad and get me a stamp honey and don't worry I'll take care of it.