Gods in Alabama (26 page)

“What does that mean?” said Rose. “You don’t know anything about him.”

“Tell her,” said Burr. “Tell both of us. Finish this.”

He nodded at me, and I realized there had never been a need to craft a lie for Rose Mae. The truth would do everything I had wanted the lie to do. I could stop Rose and send her home, away from Clarice, but only if I at last told the entire truth. I stood up and walked a few paces away from Burr, into the darkness. “Sit down, Rose, and don’t look at me.”

She hesitated, and then she sidled over and joined Burr on the dead grass, sitting with him next to the spill of light from the Blazer’s headlights. Burr was sitting up straight now, breathing normally.

I said, “The Jim Beverly you are looking for, Rose? He doesn’t exist. Your therapist is right. It isn’t men. It’s you. You pick bad men. You can’t even see a good one when he’s right in front of you and you’re beating the crap out of him. Jim Beverly wasn’t any good. He was a rapist, Rose.”

To Burr I said, “I think you figured out it wasn’t me. That’s why you wouldn’t say it for me. And you’re right, Jim Beverly never touched me. It happened, though, Burr. It did happen. But it wasn’t ever mine. I stole it from her. I stole it from Clarice, and I never knew how to give it back.” 

CHAPTER  14

SINCE CLARICE AND I could date only if we doubled with each other, Jim Beverly’s friend Rob Shay was coming along. I knew Rob was about as interested in me as he was in macramé. He was a baseball boy, tall and cleanly handsome with dark hair and an all-American jawline. He had his pick of cheerleaders, but he was Jim Beverly’s wingman. He swung by my lunch table one day after Jim Beverly had officially asked out Clarice and said, “Hey, Arlene, you and me Friday, with Jim and your sister, okay?”

“Cousin,” I said.

“Whatever. You in?”

I shrugged, and he took it for a yes. He made a gun out of his fingers and tipped me a wink as he shot me with it. “Great, see ya then.” He cruised on past to his regular table.

That was fine with me. I was, if possible, even less interested in Rob than he was in me. Even though I knew the score, I kept catching myself accidentally thinking of the evening as “our” date with Jim Beverly, mine and Clarice’s.

Getting ready on Friday afternoon, I had herds of jungle cats prowling through my stomach, and even Clarice seemed uncharacteristically jittery. We fussed our way through our pre-date preparations in a round-robin of nerve-racked primping. I started at my dresser drawer, wishing I needed a bra or at least owned a bra that made me look like I needed one, while Clarice chastised her hair. After I had dressed in a T-shirt and a pair of jeans that mercifully hid my skinny legs, I moved into the “yelling at my hair” slot, while Clarice shifted to rummaging through her makeup. Then we switched again, and she busied herself with hating all her clothes while I cursed my inability to understand eye shadow.

I foolishly got into Clarice’s makeup bag and test-drove some robin’s-egg blue. I ended up looking like a disco raccoon. Clarice had put on a short flippy skirt, pale pink with darker pink tulips growing up from the hem. She had on a short-sleeved sweater the same color as the tulips. The sweater clung to her curves. The skirt came down almost to her knees but was so light and full-cut that it swirled and floated as she walked, showing off her long legs. She put on a pair of flat strappy sandals, and I noticed her toenails were painted a pale pink, like the insides of seashells.

Even Clarice’s feet were pretty.

I took one look at her and felt my heart drop out of my chest and roll across the floor, collecting grit. She looked like Ken’s Dream Date Barbie. She took one look at me and said, “Oh, wow. Arlene, what were you trying to do with the, um . . .” She pointed at her eyes.

I shrugged and drooped pathetically in the chair. “I don’t want to go,” I said.

“Don’t be silly. We still have twenty minutes, and you know they’ll be late. Boys think girls can’t be ready on time.”

She grabbed her makeup bag and pulled me to my feet, dragging me down the hall to the bathroom. We passed Aunt Florence coming the other way. Florence stopped dead when she saw me, her eyes widening. Clarice held up a hand to stop her before she could speak. “She’s washing her face right now, Mama.”

In the bathroom, Clarice handed me some cold cream and said, “Take everything off and let’s start fresh.”

I did as she asked, scrubbing my face clean, soaking my T-shirt and dampening the front pieces of my hair in the process. Then I slumped in despair on the closed toilet. With my long damp hair stringing around my bare face, I looked about ten years old.

“Perk up,” said Clarice. “It’s all fixable. I swear, Arlene, I have never seen you fuss around so much before a date. Close your eyes and tilt your face up thisaway.” She turned my face from side to side, and I kept my eyes closed while she messed around putting things on with sponges and Q-tips and all her makeup brushes. “What’s with all the nerves and the eye shadow, anyway?” she asked. “Arlene? Do you kinda like Rob Shay?”

“No!” I said. “It would be dumb if I did like Rob Shay. Or any boy like that, a sports boy who’s all-popular and every other girl in school goes to mush when he walks past. You know he’s only taking me tonight because of your mama’s rule. No boy has ever asked me out except ones who have friends that want to date you.”

“Stop talking. I want to do your lips,” said Clarice. I felt the cool tip of a liner tracing the outline of my mouth, and then one of her brushes painting inside the lines. “You’re too hard on yourself. I think boys just don’t ask you out because you don’t flirt.

You have to talk to them like you think they’re the very best one.

They won’t ask you unless you practically send up a big firework that will explode right over their heads saying, ‘Yes, yes, I totally like you!’ Boys live every second scared to death a girl is going to say no when they ask her out.”

“No, boys live scared that
you’ll
say no when they ask you out,”

I said when the brush left my mouth.

But Clarice only said, “Turn sideways on the toilet, and I’ll French-braid your hair.”

After she braided it, she picked fronds out of the front and left them to wisp around my face. Then she dragged me back to our room and re-dressed me from the skin out. She pulled a long black knit skirt out of the back of my closet. It had been part of an outfit I wore to church the year before. It was tighter this year, and Clarice gave a nod of satisfaction. She handed me a cranberry-red tank top that Aunt Florence had told me suited my coloring, and made me put that on with my black flats. When I looked in the mirror, I was surprised to see I didn’t look ten years old anymore. I looked like a teenager.

The tight skirt showed off the dipped-in waist I had recently acquired, giving me the illusion of hips. The tank top would have been risky on a bustier girl, but on me it looked nice, showing off my pretty collarbones. Clarice had not done much to my eyes at all, just mascara and liner. But she’d put blush lower than I usually put it, and all of a sudden I had noticeable cheekbones. She’d also done my mouth darker than I ever would, a red as deep as the color of the tank top. I was surprised to see I had a pretty mouth, full and heart-shaped like my mother’s in pictures I had seen of her when she was younger. I had a girl mouth. A kissing mouth. I couldn’t help but smile at myself. Clarice hadn’t trans-formed me into some sort of teen school beauty queen, but I looked nice.

Clarice and I headed into the den where Aunt Florence and Uncle Bruster were watching TV. Mama was in her recliner at the back of the room, holding her hands up flat and stiff, about six inches apart. She was staring intently at the space between her hands.

Uncle Bruster smiled at us and said, “My girlies are looking real pretty.” He dug into his pockets and pulled out two quarters and two ten-dollar bills. This was a standard pre-date ritual. He handed us each a ten-dollar bill and said, “If something happens with your date, and he gets fresh or takes to drinking or runs off, you go someplace public and get yourself a Coke while you wait for me to come get you.”

“Yes, sir,” we said. Mama banged her hands together, hard and sudden, and Clarice and I both jumped. Florence and Bruster didn’t even blink. Mama opened her hands like a book and stared at her palms, then held them up again, six inches apart.

Uncle Bruster handed each of us a quarter and said, “If your date starts asking you to do things you don’t feel comfortable about, you give him this quarter. You tell him he can call me and ask me the question he’s asking you. If I say okay, then you’ll go along with it.”

“Yes, sir,” we said, and Mama banged her hands together again.

Clarice and I watched her studying her palms.

“There’s a fly in the room,” Aunt Florence explained impatiently. “You listen up to Daddy.”

Clarice looked around. “I don’t see any fly.”

“That’s because there’s not really a fly,” I said, and Clarice flushed faintly pink. Mama had her hands up six inches apart again. “Can we maybe wait in the living room, Aunt Florence?”

Aunt Florence cocked a suspicious eyebrow and said, “Yes, you may, but no scooting out the door like dogs coming to a whistle if those boys sit out there and honk at you. You will wait until the doorbell rings, and Bruster and I will come in the living room and meet them before you even think you’ll head off into the night with them.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Clarice as Mama banged her hands together in another emphatic clap.

In the living room, Clarice and I perched on the orange sofa.

We could hear the muted burble of the TV, punctuated by my mother’s sporadic applause, coming from the den.

“I hope he doesn’t honk,” whispered Clarice. “I hope he thinks to come up to the door, or Mama might march out there and get him by the ear and give him her ‘never underestimate the power of good manners’ speech.” Clarice shivered her shoulders in a horror that was only half mocking. Florence might actually do it.

Luckily, either Rob or Jim Beverly had been raised right, or they had heard locker-room tales about Clarice’s strict parents.

They came up to the door to collect us. Clarice and I stayed sitting on the sofa in the living room while Bruster and Florence went to let them in. We listened to introductions going all around.

When the boys came through the doorway, I saw immediately that Jim Beverly had misread the situation. He was smiling and chatting easily with Bruster. Usually the girl’s father is a safe bet, but he’d missed seeing the actual danger. Florence watched him with cowboy eyes, cool and level, a deadly shot from fifty paces.

“Where are you taking our girls this evening?” Bruster in-quired.

Jim Beverly outlined our plans, telling him we would see a movie at the Dupe in Fruiton and then head to Mr. Gatti’s for Cokes and slices with some other kids from school. Jim Beverly was using lots of eye contact and pushing his eyebrows up sincerely, but the real interview was going on in the living room doorway.

“I know that name, Shay,” Aunt Florence said to Rob. “Where do you boys get your preaching?”

“Jim and me, our folks all go to Mount Olive,” said Rob, and I saw Florence relax a notch. Mount Olive was a Southern Baptist church in Fruiton.

“You’re Caroline Shay’s boy?” Aunt Florence said.

“No, Caroline is my aunt. You’re thinking of my cousin Ronny,” said Rob. “I’m Darcy and Pam Shay’s oldest.”

Florence gave a curt nod. “I know Pam Shay. You have yourself a good mama.”

“Thank you, ma’am. I know,” said Rob. Clarice and I ex-changed glances. Mount Olive and the “ma’am” meant our dates had just been approved.

“You have them home by eleven sharp,” Bruster was saying to Jim.

“Daddy,” said Clarice, protesting. “Eleven-thirty?”

I saw Bruster and Florence’s eyes meet, and she tipped him an almost imperceptible nod. “I tell you what,” said Bruster. “You leave the pizza place by eleven. It’s what, about a twenty-minute drive? But you act like Cinderella. When the clock is bonging eleven, you girlies better be climbing in the carriage.”

“Thanks, Daddy,” said Clarice. She hopped up, and I followed as if on a string attached to her. “But you know Cinderella got to stay out till midnight.”

“Cinderella was a sophomore,” said Bruster.

The movie was some underwater special-effects thing with a sea monster and bikini-clad skin-diving scientists getting eaten all over the place. It was what Clarice’s borderline-slutty friend Janey called a clutch film. Things kept popping up from the shadowy depths. I had managed to slip into the row of seats before Rob could, and we were sitting in a line with Clarice on the end next to Jim Beverly, and then me in between the two boys. I clutched nothing but my own hands in my lap, happy to be sitting next to Jim.

When the bikini-eating went on hold while some plot points and conversations happened, Jim Beverly shifted in his chair and whispered to Clarice, “I’m gonna go get me a Coke. You want a Coke? Or Milk Duds or something?”

Clarice said no, but Rob overheard him and said, “Get me a popcorn, bro.” He passed a bill to Jim, who took it and said,

“Arlene?”

I shook my head, but then I whispered, “I’ll come with you. I need to go to the ladies’.”

I let him go past me and then stood up and followed him out of our row and up the aisle. I liked it, the two of us heading to the concession stand, as if he were my date. He nudged my arm and said, “Girl, I better not get you a Coke, if you already need to hit the loo twenty minutes into the movie.”

We slipped out the double doors. The Dupe had only two theaters, and the doors led directly out onto the lighted lobby. I flipped my long braid over my shoulder and smiled up at him the way Clarice would have. I tried to emulate the teasing tone I had heard her use so often to fuss at boys. She could complain about something they’d done as if she secretly thought it was adorable or naughty or both. “I would have gone before, but you boys were late coming for us. I didn’t want to miss the previews.”

Jim Beverly grinned back at me and said, “Blame Rob for that.