Gods in Alabama (8 page)

I was sitting on the floor making a cat out of Play-Doh. I was pinching the cat’s head to give him ears when the phone rang. I could hear the background buzz of my mother padding to answer it. Then she said, “Oh, Florence, no.” A pause and then she said again, “Oh no. No, no, no.” She said more things, and then she hung up the phone and she was weeping. I was frightened, so I did not listen to her words, just kept pinching the cat’s ears while Mama’s voice washed around me, anguished and hysterical.

Daddy held her while she screamed and beat her legs on the floor.

I was pinching so hard the tiny strings of Play-Doh came off into my hands. The cat’s head got smaller and smaller until he had no head left.

Mama choked and cried on Daddy, wailing out a story about my cousin Wayne. Something about yellow jackets. Something about Wayne’s dog, Buddy. I couldn’t understand it. My cousin Wayne was dead, Mama said, and we had to go to Alabama right then, right then, because Florence needed her.

We never went. Because later that day, after my mother had been given her nervous pills and put to bed, my graceful daddy tripped while loading Mama’s suitcase into the car. When he fell, his thighbone snapped like a brittle bit of ice, and that’s how we found out he had cancer. It was in his stomach and his liver and had worked its way deep into his bones.

We stayed in Kansas while it wasted him and made him frightening and thin. Then it got into his brain until my daddy, who never yelled, yelled all the time in a raspy voice in a military hospital room that smelled like pee. Finally they sent him home with us to die, and he did die. It didn’t take as long as you might think.

Right before he died, my mother started taking his pain pills.

One for me, one for you, sharing them out. I remember a nurse came to give him injections, too. He was at that stage when they refilled his prescriptions without blinking, and no one worried that he was taking too many pills. Mama started squirreling them away. One for me, one for you, one for later. As he got worse, so did she. Two for me, three for you, four for later.

After he died, Mama spent all her time blankly sifting through bills and sympathy cards without ever opening a single envelope.

She went to a new doctor who gave her antidepressants. She took them on top of her hoard of pain pills and her nervous pills.

The army still paid us, but not enough, especially since with Daddy gone, we couldn’t live on post. We moved to a town apartment, and I could never remember which green door was ours, they were all so alike.

I couldn’t go to the school on post anymore. I got skinnier, and Mama rarely remembered to give me a bath. She was afraid to open the lid on the washer, so I sifted through laundry piles and dressed myself in the cleanest things I could find. I had no friends in the new school. The town kids were unused to seeing new faces every month. They weren’t like military brats who must master early the art of instant friendship.

At lunch I stared at my tray and chewed my ratty black hair and the ends of my fingers like a wild thing. I didn’t smell very good. The other kids seemed to think that if they touched me, they might catch dead-daddy-itis, and they would lose their daddies and smell bad and chew their fingers until they bled, too. I was probably the only second-grader at Samuel Gompers Elementary who obsessively read
Lord of the Flies
because I could really relate to the pigs.

Aunt Florence saved us. She came roaring up to Kansas in my uncle Bruster’s second-best pickup truck to claim us after being unable to get my mother on the phone. Our phone had been cut off because Mama couldn’t open envelopes. I could finally find our apartment when I walked home from school. It was the one with eviction notices on the front door.

I remember very clearly hanging limp in Aunt Florence’s mas-terful grip as she shook me like a floppy puppy and said, “Do you not see this child is dying on the vine? Look at this child! Your child is dying, do you not see this?” Aunt Florence dug her hands almost painfully into my shoulders, pressing my feet hard against the floor, grounding me.

My mother stared back, glazed and calm, not seeing. “All right, then,” said Florence. “We can fit your good dishes and the china cabinet in the back of the truck, and the rest of the furniture smells like it needs to be burned anyway. Filth. This place is all-over filth. Even the paint smells. You can kiss your deposit goodbye.”

She single-handedly packed up what she could salvage. She bathed me and bundled me into clothes she had washed. She bathed my mother and dressed her, too. While Florence marched in and out, filling up the back of the pickup with our things, my mother sat limp and uncaring in my daddy’s old armchair, and I watched big-eyed and wary from the floor at her feet. At last I fell asleep there on a clean towel my aunt had put down because she said she wouldn’t put an animal in my filthy bed.

The next day Florence loaded us into the cab of the truck and drove us down to Alabama. I rode in between them, my feet dangling down on either side of the gearshift. It was late November, and the trees were leafless and frightening. A year ago, at Christmas, Aunt Florence and Mama had been lovely tall blond ladies, soft and rounded, almost identical. They’d had ninety-watt smiles that showed a lot of square teeth, and shiny eyes as big and round as quarters.

Now, on one side of me, my mother’s pretty plumpness had run to fat. She was squashy and amorphous. In the fading day-light, her face look blurred, as if it were made of pale wax that was melting and her whole face might slide off her skull and slither into her lap. On my other side, Aunt Florence had withered and hardened. She was a stick figure, and her skin was so dry, her arms and cheeks were chapped and ashy. Her mouth seemed permanently clamped into a lipless line. I could see the intricate bones of her wrists, and the unmovable grasp of her skeletal hands on the wheel. I sat ramrod straight between them, unable to lean one way or the other and rest.

We got to Possett just past dawn. I was bleary but awake, staring at the town as we drove through it on the main drag. We stopped at both of its traffic lights. Town was three blocks long.

At the end of town was the drugstore that had a diner in the back.

On the other side of the street, three small tin outbuildings, like gardening sheds, stood in a neat row. Someone had nailed a single long board across the top of all three of them, and in hand-stenciled letters it read POLICE DEPARTMENT, FIRE DEPT, JAIL.

“Police Department” was too long, and the “ent” crossed over into “Fire Dept’s” rightful territory. It occurred to me that the word “department” had hogged up so much room that the fire department had been forced to use an abbreviation. I wondered if they were angry with the police. I would have been.

We left town behind and headed down Route 19, a country road that led through soybean and cotton fields and pastures to my aunt’s house. My aunt’s neighborhood was converted farm-land. There were only about twenty houses, all small ranches on huge lots with room for a working garden or a henhouse. Some had pastureland attached, with a barn for a horse or goats.

Aunt Florence had devoted over an acre to a fenced-in vegetable and herb garden. She had a shed back there, with electric-ity and running water, and a concrete drive from the main road led to a parking pad beside the shed. The house itself was a white ranch they had dressed up in some very ugly and obvious vinyl siding. It had dark green shutters. We turned down a side road and took the gravel drive that led to the carport.

As we pulled in, I could see my cousin Clarice sitting on the steps that led down from the back door into the carport. She wore a white cotton nightdress with short puffed sleeves, and her knees were tucked up inside the gown. She had turtled her arms in as well, and had folded herself up inside so that she looked like a ball of white lawn with a head.

She stood up as Aunt Florence pulled up the emergency brake and turned off the truck’s engine. Her long golden legs appeared as if by magic, and her arms flailed around inside and then found the armholes and came shooting out. To my tired eyes, she looked like one of those pellets you drop in water, and when the casing dissolves, a sponge animal blooms, lovely and sudden.

Florence got out, but Mama wasn’t moving. She didn’t seem to be aware that we had arrived, just sat slack in the passenger seat, so I stayed by her. Aunt Flo went to rouse Uncle Bruster to unload, and he followed her out of the house in flannel pajamas, scrubbing at his eyes. He lifted me out of the truck with his great 
big bear’s arms. As he set me on the ground, he tousled my hair and said, “Hey there, girlie. Your aunt Flo says we get to keep you. I guess me and Clarice can quit little-girl shopping on weekends, huh?” And then he headed to the back of the truck to wrestle out Mama’s things. I supposed on one of their trips back and forth with the bags, they would unload Mama, like so much furniture.

Clarice walked over to where I stood by the side of the truck.

She looked pretty and whole and just like herself. She threw one arm around me and started gabbling at me, saying, “I’ve been up forever waiting. Hurry and come on in. I’m about to freeze.” She pulled me towards the house, chattering and friendly.

Clarice was the only thing that felt right. The air in the house was too still, and it was too quiet. The noises of Aunt Florence and Uncle Bruster, dragging our bags and boxes into the house, were staccato and abrupt. It was as if the house swallowed sounds before they could fade away. Sleep-deprived and a little frightened, I imagined the house wanted Wayne with all his boy noise and karate violence to stir it to life.

Unable to help myself, I went first to Wayne’s old room.

Clarice came with me, one arm still draped over my shoulder.

Wayne’s room had been stripped. I remembered it with cowboy wallpaper and bunk beds, with Erector-set debris and Lego and action figures strewn all over the floor and desk, Buddy flopped like an extra-large yellow throw pillow on the bottom bed.

Since I had last seen the room, someone had gone after the walls with a razor, scraping the cowboys away and then painting them a stark, institutional white. Wayne’s scuffed bunk beds and toy chest had been replaced by an ancient brass double bed and a mirrorless dresser. My dead aunt Niner’s padded rocker was squatting by the closet where Wayne’s desk had been. Bruster had brought in a load of Mama’s things, and two Hefty bags filled with her clothes sat side by side on the new oatmeal-colored carpet. The room smelled so strongly of lemon Pledge and Lysol that it made my eyes water.

“Where’s Buddy?” I said, and Clarice looked at me with round eyes, alarmed. She put a finger over her lips and shook her head at me. Then she pulled me away, out and down the hall. She led me by the hand to the cheery, noisy colors of her bedroom. Apple green warred with gold and hot pink. Aunt Florence had put the new oatmeal carpet all through the house, but except for that, Clarice’s room was just as I remembered it.

Clarice had always had a thing for daisies; her room was coated with them. Her dust ruffle was covered in yellow and white daisies, and she had added a few daisy-shaped throw cushions.

She even had daisy decals all over the ceramic base of her apple-green lamp.

Clarice saw me looking and snatched up the lamp. “Sniff it,”

she said, scratching at one of the decals and then thrusting the lamp at my face. “It’s s’posed to smell like real daisies, but it smells like fake ones to me.” I sniffed dutifully at the lamp, wondering what fake daisies smelled like. Burned sugar, mostly. I saw my suitcase sitting on top of one of the twin beds and fell gratefully beside it, breathing in deep to catch the candy-sweet alive-ness that was in Clarice’s air.

Clarice had always been too grown up and glowing to be real to me, so pretty and assured and tall. At Christmases past I had been the tagalong, smaller and younger and sometimes unno-ticed, trailing in the boiling wake Clarice and Wayne left behind them as they galloped about the house. But now this same Clarice flopped down beside me and said, “I always wanted a sister,” even though it meant she had to give up having her own room. We fell asleep listening to Uncle Bruster cuss out my mama’s china cabinet as he wrestled it down the hall.

The next day my aunt drove us into Fruiton to register me at Mosely Elementary. Florence bullied the school principal into skipping me ahead and putting me in Clarice’s third-grade class.

The principal voiced some concerns about my age and size, but Aunt Florence talked over him, winning by sheer volume, while my mother drooped uncaring in his office and I picked the ends of my fingers off.

“The child is reading books I don’t understand, and you’re worried about her ‘social adjustment’?” said Aunt Florence. “Arlene here might know what that means, with all her fancy reading, but I don’t know any social adjustment. All I know is she’s smart as a whip, and in the third-grade classroom my girl will be there to look out for her.”

The principal was right in theory. I was incapable of social adjustment to a third-grade classroom. But I would have been just as incapable in the second, where I belonged.

In the third-grade room, it didn’t matter. Clarice calmly adjusted everyone else to fit me. It soon became apparent that if anyone wanted Clarice to come to their sleepover or birthday party, or to play on their kick-ball team—and they all did—then they had to invite me, too.

I’d been in school about two weeks when Mama had one of her fits in the middle of the night. She was banging the wall so loudly that she woke up everyone in the house. Clarice and I sat up, and Clarice said, “That’s in Wayne’s room.”

I said, “Mama,” and leaped up and went running down the hall, with Clarice a beat behind me.

The banging stopped as I reached the doorway. I looked in and saw Aunt Flo sitting on Mama. Mama must have been banging Wayne’s wall with her face, because bright blood was jetting out of her nose. Florence had Mama’s shoulders pinned with her knees. Mama was flopping like a trout under her. Florence was grimly silent, riding her, and the only noise from Mama were little grunting puffs that made the blood streaming from her nostrils bubble and pop. Uncle Bruster loomed up behind us, and Florence saw us all there. She snapped, “Call an ambulance, Bruster, and you girls better get. Back to bed. Now.”