Trash (24 page)

“Want some?” It was one of the women from Atlanta. She held out a brown bag from which a bottle top protruded.

“It would make me sick.”

“Naw,” she grinned. “It’s just a Yoo-Hoo. I got a stash of them in a cooler. Got a bad stomach myself. Only thing it likes is chocolate soda and barbecue.”

“Barbecue,” I sighed. My mouth flooded with saliva. “I haven’t made barbecue in years.”

“You make beef ribs?” She sipped at her Yoo-Hoo and sat down beside me.

“I have, but if you got the time to do slow pit cooking, pork’s better.” My stomach suddenly growled loudly, a grating, angry noise in the night.

“Girl,” she laughed. “You still hungry?”

“Well, to tell you the truth, I couldn’t eat any of that stuff.” I was embarrassed.

My new friend giggled. “Neither did I. I had peanuts and Yoo-Hoo for dinner myself.” I laughed with her. “My name’s Marty. You come up to Atlanta sometime, and we’ll drive over to Marietta and get some of the best barbecue they make in the world.”

“The best barbecue in the world?”

“Bar none.” She handed me the bottle of Yoo-Hoo.

“Can’t be.” I sipped a little. It was sweet and almost warm.

“You don’t trust my judgment?” Someone opened the porch door, and I saw in the light that her face was relaxed, her blue eyes twinkling.

“I trust you. You didn’t eat any of those damn noodles, did you? You’re trustworthy, but you can’t have the best barbecue in the world up near Atlanta, ’cause the best barbecue in the world is just a couple of miles down the Perry Highway.”

“You say!”

“I do!”

We both laughed and she slid her hip over close to mine. I shivered, and she put her arm around me. We talked, and I told her my name. It turned out we knew some of the same people. She had even been involved with a woman I hadn’t seen since college. I was so tired I leaned my head on her shoulder. She rubbed my neck and told me a series of terribly dirty jokes until I started shaking more from giggling.

“Got to get you to bed.” She started to pull me up. I took hold of her belt, leaned over, and kissed her. She kissed me. We sat back down and just kissed for a while. Her mouth was soft and tasted of sweet, watery chocolate.

“Uh huh,” she said a few times. “Uh huh.”

“Uh huh,” I giggled back.

“Oh yes, think we gonna have to check out this barbecue.” Her hands were as soft as her mouth, and they slipped under the waistband of my jeans and hugged my belly. “You weren’t fixed on having tofu lasagna tomorrow, were you?”

“Gonna break my heart to miss it, I can tell you.” It was hard to talk with my lips pressed to hers. She licked my lips, the sides of my mouth, my cheek, my eyelids, and then put her lips up close to my ears.

“Oh, but think . . .” Her hands didn’t stop moving, and I had to push myself back from her to keep from wetting my pants. “Think about tomorrow afternoon when we come back from our little road trip hauling in all that barbecue, coleslaw, and hush puppies. We gonna make so many friends around here.” She paused. “They do make hush puppies at this place, don’t they?”

“Of course. If we get there early enough, we might even pick up some blackberry cobbler at this truck stop I know.” My stomach rumbled again loudly.

“I don’t think you been eating right,” Marty giggled. “Gonna have to feed you some healthy food, girl, some
healthy
food.”

 

Jay does karate, does it religiously, going to class four days a week and working out at the gym every other day. Her muscles are hard and long. She is so tall people are always making jokes about “the weather up there.” I call her
Shorty
or
Tall
to tease her, and
sugar hips
when I want to make her mad. Her hips are wide and full, though her legs are long and stringy.

“Lucky I got big feet,” she jokes sometimes, “or I’d fall over every time I stopped to stand still.”

Jay is always hungry, always. She keeps a bag of nuts in her backpack, dried fruit sealed in cellophane in a bowl on her dresser, snack packs of crackers and cheese in her locker at the gym. When we go out to the women’s bar, she drinks one beer in three hours but eats half a dozen packages of smoked almonds. Her last girlfriend was Italian and she used to serve Jay big batches of pasta with homemade sausage marinara.

“I need carbohydrates,” Jay insists, eating slices of potato bread smeared with sweet butter. I cook grits for her, with melted butter and cheese, fry slabs of cured ham I get from a butcher who swears it has no nitrates. She won’t eat eggs, won’t eat shrimp or oysters, but she loves catfish pan-fried in a batter of cornmeal and finely chopped onions. Coffee makes her irritable. Chocolate makes her horny. When my period is coming and I get that flushed heat feeling in my insides, I bake her Toll House cookies, serve them with a cup of coffee and a blush. She looks at me over the rim of the cup, sips slowly, and eats her cookies with one hand hooked in her jeans by her thumb. A muscle jumps in her cheek, and her eyes are full of tiny lights.

“You hungry, honey?” she purrs. She stretches like a big cat, puts her bare foot up, and uses her toes to lift my blouse. “You want something sweet?” Her toes are cold. I shiver and keep my gaze on her eyes. She leans forward and cups her hands around my face. “What you hungry for, girl, huh? You tell me. You tell mama exactly what you want.”

 

Her name was Victoria, and she lived alone. She cut her hair into a soft cloud of curls and wore white blouses with buttoned-down collars. I saw her all the time at the bookstore, climbing out of her baby-blue VW with a big leather book bag and a cane in her left hand. There were pictures up on the wall at the back of the store. Every one of them showed her sitting on or standing by a horse, the reins loose in her hand and her eyes focused far off. The riding hat hid her curls. The jacket pushed her breasts down but emphasized her hips. She had a ribbon pinned to the coat. A little card beneath the pictures identified her as the steeplechase champion of the southern division. In one picture she was jumping. Her hat was gone, her hair blown back, and the horse’s legs stretched high above the ground. Her teeth shone white and perfect, and she looked as fierce as a bobcat going for prey. Looking at the pictures made me hurt. She came in once while I was standing in front of them and gave me a quick, wry grin.

“You ride?” Her cane made a hollow thumping sound on the floor. I didn’t look at it.

“For fun, once or twice with a girlfriend.” Her eyes were enormous and as black as her hair. Her face looked thinner than it had in the pictures, her neck longer. She grimaced and leaned on the cane. Under her tan she looked pale. She shrugged.

“I miss it myself.” She said it in a matter-of-fact tone, but her eyes glittered. I looked up at the pictures again.

“I’ll bet.” I blushed, and looked back at her uncomfortably.

“Odds are I’ll ride again.” Her jeans bulged around the knee brace. “But not jump, and I did love jumping. Always felt like I was at war with the ground, allied with the sky, trying to stay up in the air.” She grinned wide, and a faint white scar showed at the corner of her mouth.

“Where you from?” I could feel the heat in my face but ignored it.

“Virginia.” Her eyes focused on my jacket, the backpack hanging from my arm, and down to where I had my left hip pushed out, my weight on my right foot. “Haven’t been there for a while, though.” She looked away, looked tired and sad. What I wanted in that moment I will never be able to explain—to feed her or make love to her or just lighten the shadows under her eyes—all that, all that and more.

“You ever eat any Red Velvet Cake?” I licked my lips and shifted my weight so that I wasn’t leaning to the side. I looked into her eyes.

“Red Velvet Cake?” Her eyes were friendly, soft, and black as the deepest part of the night.

“It’s a dessert my sister and I used to bake, unhealthy as sin and twice as delicious. Made up with chocolate, buttermilk, vinegar, and baking soda, and a little bottle of that poisonous red dye number two. Tastes like nothing you’ve ever had.”

“You got to put the dye in it?”

“Uh huh.” I nodded. “Wouldn’t be right without it.”

“Must look deadly.”

“But tastes good. It’s about time I baked one. You come to dinner at my place, tell me about riding, and I’ll cook you up one.”

She shifted, leaned back, and half-sat on a table full of magazines. She looked me up and down again, her grin coming and going with her glance.

“What else would you cook?”

“Fried okra maybe, fried crisp, breaded with cornmeal. Those big beefsteak tomatoes are at their peak right now. Could just serve them in slices with pepper, but I’ve seen some green ones, too, and those I could fry in flour with the okra. Have to have white corn, of course, this time of the year. Pinto beans would be too heavy, but snap beans would be nice. A little milk gravy to go with it all. You like fried chicken?”

“Where you from?”

“South Carolina, a long time ago.”

“Your mama teach you to cook?”

“My mama and my aunts.” I put my thumbs in my belt and tried to look sure of myself. Would she like biscuits or cornbread, pork or beef or chicken?

“I’m kind of a vegetarian.” She sighed when she said it. Her eyes looked sad.

“Eat fish?” I was thinking quickly. She nodded. I smiled wide.

“Ever eat any crawfish pan-fried in salt and Louisiana hot sauce?”

“You got to boil them first.” Her face was shining, and she was bouncing her cane on the hardwood floor.

“Oh yeah, ’course, with the right spices.”

“Sweet Bleeding Jesus.” Her face was flushed. She licked her lips. “I haven’t eaten anything like that in, oh, so long.”

“Oh.” My thighs felt hot, rubbing on the seams of my jeans. She was beautiful, Victoria in her black cloud of curls. “Oh, girl,” I whispered. I leaned toward her. I put my hand on her wrist above the cane, squeezed.

“Let me feed you,” I told her. “Girl . . . girl, you should just let me feed you what you really need.”

 

I’ve been dreaming lately that I throw a dinner party, inviting all the women in my life. They come in with their own dishes. Marty brings barbecue carried all the way from Marietta. Jay drags in a whole side of beef and gets a bunch of swaggering whiskey-sipping butch types to help her dig a hole in the backyard. They show off for each other, breaking up stones to line the fire pit. Lee watches them from the porch, giggling at me and punching down a great mound of dough for the oatmeal wheat bread she’d promised to bake. Women whose names I can’t remember bring in bowls of pasta salad, smoked salmon, and Jell-O with tangerine slices. Everybody is feeding each other, exclaiming over recipes and gravies, introducing themselves and telling stories about great meals they’ve eaten. My mama is in the kitchen salting a vat of greens. Two of my aunts are arguing over whether to make little baking-powder biscuits or big buttermilk hogsheads. Another steps around them to slide an iron skillet full of cornbread in the oven. Pinto beans with onions are bubbling on the stove. Children run through sucking fatback rinds. My uncles are on the porch telling stories and knocking glass bottles together when they laugh.

I walk back and forth from the porch to the kitchen, being hugged and kissed and stroked by everyone I pass. For the first time in my life I am not hungry but everybody insists I have a little taste. I burp like a baby on her mama’s shoulder. My stomach is full, relaxed, happy, and the taste of pan gravy is in my mouth. I can’t stop grinning. The dream goes on and on, and through it all I hug myself and smile.

 

 

 

 

“You don’t get home often enough.”

 

It is August and high summer has fattened all the trees on Old Henderson Road, dried the road to powder and gray loose loam, coating the myrtle and dogwood trees with a flat white alkali stain. Temple sits on her porch while her oldest girl rinses her hairpins in a tub of bleach and spring water. Off in the yard, the dogs raise a dust cloud. I wipe sweat off my mouth and drink tea like I never left home.

 

Temple slides her palms on the worn porch step, flat and smooth under her hands, back and forth. We watch a long green trailer turn the corner, shear the leaves on the myrtle, just miss the leaning porch, the poplar, the young dogwood.

 

“That would have done it,” Temple laughs softly, open-mouthed and happy. “I could have put in the new plumbing this year ’stead of next. Anything that big’s got to be insured.”

 

I nod, scratch chigger bites on my ankles, unable to relax to pissing in the weeds, hoping that trailer comes back and pays for more than the plumbing. She married late, Cousin Temple did, married late and well—a steady boy, one of those Roberts from Asheville, a lean, freckled, still boy, as steady as she was and as quiet, a good son who loved his mother and never ran around like the other boys all the other cousins married early.

 

Temple rolls a little hair between two fingers and turns her red-tan face up into the sun slanting past the porch beams. This house, yard, dirt road, myrtle trees, kudzu holding the screens on the windows—none of it would stand up to a northern winter, a Yankee tax assessor, or an estate sale. But it puts Temple outside them, a property owner, something none of the rest of the family can imagine becoming. Temple has been an outsider all her life, though living on her own since her mama left her with her own mother when Temple was barely seven—a quiet red-faced seven as she is now a quiet red-faced woman whose hair shows gray where it lies close to her skull.

 

“You were a bean when you were a girl,” Temple tells me, “a string bean, and your sister was a butter bean. Your mama was a stretch of stringy pork, and together you didn’t make a decent Sunday dinner.”