Choices Read online

  Best of all is when the Fawcetts come, usually once a week. There’s Freida and Ed (I don’t call them that) and three kids. Whoever waits on them always makes the same joke when the kids get noisy: “Who turned these faucets on?” The kids are loud, but then they’re kids. And they never throw their food. Earlbert mashes his peas and potatoes together. I did that once. Mom jumped up from the table and scraped my plate into the garbage. “That’s disgusting!” she said. “Your father did that.”

  I stared at her. Most of the time Mom works at Faye’s, takes care of us and the house as if Dad never happened. That part of her life is over, and there’s no looking back. It’s like changing classes at school. Bing! Bing! You march here, open this book, settle down, and then Bing! Bing! Bing! You have to go to another room and do something else. The math teacher could die after you leave her class, and they wouldn’t let you turn back. Math was over anyway. Time for science.

  It’s never like that at the Dixie. Things kind of float. Old Mr. Kelly is eating cereal most afternoons when I come in. He was doing that when Mom worked here. He sits at the counter spooning All-Bran and frowning at the newspaper.

  “Hi, son,” he says, as I put on my apron. “Tell Agnes I said for her and Faye to keep them women beautiful. The rest of the world is going downhill fast.”

  Things do change at the Dixie but slow enough so you know what’s happened. Like when Mrs. Lee died. She and her husband always came for chicken livers Friday night. Then she got sick, and he’d just stop by to tell us how she was. He couldn’t stay to eat, so sometimes Mrs. Elam sent dinner home with him. “It’s extra,” she’d say. “Keep your money. I can’t sell leftovers.”

  Then Mrs. Lee died. The Dixie closed a whole afternoon for her funeral. Now Mr. Lee comes alone. Not for chicken livers. He comes for spaghetti or pinto beans. And he has a little dog who sits in the booth with him. Mrs. Elam doesn’t mind. The way I see it, the Dixie takes care of people. Better than some doctors.

  Now if I can just convince Mom of that.

  Cutting the Pie (Morris)

  All my life I have heard how this is the Land of Opportunity. It don’t matter, they say, what your background is. You can be poor, you can be black. By God, you can even be a woman. Hard work fixes everything.

  Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying Americans aren’t better off than some folks. I’ve just got questions. The other day I heard a kid, nice kid, privileged, say, “Sure I know the Golden Rule. It means the Gold rules. Right?”

  Is that right? I want to talk about Equal Opportunity. I can’t cover everything, so I am going to leave out the big stuff, like race and sex and education. Like where your house is if you have a house. I’m going to talk about teeth.

  For starters, your teeth, like your bones and brain and all the rest, come from your parents. They come from your grandparents and on back down the family tree. If your mama didn’t have enough milk when she was little, that shows up in your teeth. Same with your daddy. What I’m saying is, if your folks were hard up, you get short-changed before you’re ever born.

  Then if you are one of a string of children and there is barely enough to go around, you don’t get the vitamins and such to grow good teeth. And to say you don’t go to the dentist twice a year is like saying you don’t go to the moon.

  There you are, 13 and ashamed to smile. Sixteen and putting a hand across your mouth when you laugh. The only time you’ve been to a dentist is when something had to be pulled. Your teeth are kind of shadowy or crooked, maybe some of them are gone, so you hang back meeting people. And they judge you for this, you who didn’t have a thing to do with it.

  So when you go out into the world and get your piece of Opportunity Pie, just be sure you cut it up real good. Not much flavor to it if you can’t chew.

  Pleasing (June)

  I don’t know when Bill quit talking.

  I am not perfect. I will not pretend to you I am. My figure is not the best, and I quit being young a while back. Housework is not one of my interests. Going to garage sales is. Others include baking cakes, playing the guitar, and listening to sixties music.

  “You are such a child, June,” Bill says when he decides to speak to me. Usually this is when he’s caught me singing. “Next thing I know, you’ll grow your hair long and try to go back to high school.”

  Bill didn’t know me back then, but he’s seen pictures. And I’ve told him about singing with The Three Spirits. Me, my friend Amy, and my sort-of boyfriend Russell. We practiced on Saturdays at each other’s houses and sang wherever anyone would let us. Folk songs, mostly.

  Russell and I wrote songs, too. I try to remember the words to those sitting in the laundry room with my beat-up guitar. Even when Bill’s not home, I play down there. I’m afraid his clothes or books will hear me.

  Some nights I say to him, “Can’t we just talk?”

  “What’s the point?” Bill asks. “We’ve said it all before.”

  For some reason, last week that made me really mad. “Maybe we should split up then,” I told him.

  “Oh, sure,” he said. “I’d get slapped in jail for deserting a child.”

  “The kids are 15 and 17,” I reminded him. “And you wouldn’t desert them. We’d work out custody.” I couldn’t believe I was saying those words.

  “I’m not talking about Velma and Mark, you lump-head. I’m talking about you. You couldn’t make it three days without me.”

  “Oh, no? And why not? I pay the bills, drive a car, cook the meals, raise the kids. What would I lose when you left?”

  “A grown-up in the family,” he said. “Someone to tell you what to do.”

  “I don’t need anybody telling me what to do,” I said.

  “You don’t? Who was going to feed the kids ice cream for dinner last week?”

  “That was a celebration, Bill. I read about it in a magazine.”

  “If you read in a magazine to pour paint on their cereal, would you do that, too?” He glared at me.

  “It was to celebrate Velma passing math,” I told him. “A whole meal of her favorite food. No fussing about calories or vegetables . . .”

  “I swear you’re making that girl just like you.”

  “Is that the worst thing that could happen?” I asked him.

  He held the newspaper in front of his face. “Don’t expect me to dignify that with an answer.”

  That is the last thing Bill has said to me except “I need socks” or “Where’s my blue pants?” or “Take this to the bank right now.”

  My friend Yvonne says he probably has another woman, somebody young and skinny he met at work. Maybe so, but I do not see it. Bill wears his same old clothes and comes home at the regular time. As I told Yvonne, he’s about as fetching as a paper bag.

  She clapped her hands. “That’s the best thing I’ve heard from you in years,” she said. “Are you thinking about leaving?”

  No, I am not. Not now, anyway. I am going to get a job. Bill will throw fits, I know. He won’t yell. He’ll just bring his grudge to the table.

  He’ll look at Mark and say, “If your mother was home long enough, she’d fry chicken till it’s done.”

  Or he’ll turn to Velma. “If you don’t learn to cook, we’ll all starve now that your mother’s got this job.”

  Mark will just shrug his shoulders and go on eating. Velma will say, “Aw, Dad,” and steal a look at me.

  Even a year ago I wouldn’t have thought it was worth it, getting a job, I mean. But now I see Bill’s going to gripe no matter what I do. I might as well get out and learn something, earn some money. Maybe I could work at an antique store or a flea market. It would be like a garage sale every day! I don’t know.

  But I’ve got the newspaper here this morning, and I’m looking for jobs. Notice I don’t say Bill’s newspaper. Up until this minute, I’ve thought the newspaper was his. I’ve worried if the kids folded it wrong or got jam on it at the table. I’ve made sure the sections were in order. Just to try to please s
omeone who couldn’t be pleased.

  I’m not like that, you know. That’s the funny thing. I don’t ask a lot, and I’m easy satisfied. All these years I’ve failed at pleasing Bill. I might as well try to please myself.

  Trucking (Lige)

  People are all the time saying that a dog is a man’s best friend. I say a man’s best friend is his truck. If he don’t have a truck, well, I feel sorry for him.

  The thing about a truck is you can haul almost anything in it and you still sit higher than the cars on the road. No offense, but I like to look down on people, see what they’re eating, see if their hair’s parted straight. And a truck ain’t like a car. You don’t have to keep it clean, just keep it running. Plus, there’s always a little something you can work on. You can’t work on a dog.

  Sometimes I want to ride around in my truck, and sometimes I want to take it apart. It depends.

  Riding around is for when I’m restless or when something’s got me by the throat. Each gear I go through, I can feel something let go. When I see valleys down through the curves of Big Black Mountain, I start to breathe easier. A world that’s got that in it can’t be all bad.

  Other times I’m not restless, I just need to think. That’s when I raise the hood. So much in this life can’t be fixed, that’s why God gave us engines. I check the oil and water, change the carburetor filter (I use a piece of stocking and a rubber band). There’s always belts to replace and hoses to tighten. A truck needs you. Now a dog needs you, too, but a dog looks at you. He needs you bad. That gets to a person after a while.

  Sometimes I just start my truck up and listen. You can tell a lot by the way it sounds, like you can tell by a dog’s whine if he’s sick or only lonesome. Would you keep a dog you didn’t know? People do that with engines all the time. I don’t understand it. Then when something needs fixing, they hand their life to a guy in a zip-up suit. Not me. No buddy. If the thing’s about to throw a rod, I want to know it. Besides, working on the truck is good for my mental health. While I got my head under the hood, whatever was on my mind just works itself out. When I’m done, we both run steady.

  No sir, you can’t ask for a better friend than a truck. It’s hard working, faithful. Don’t get fleas unless you let your dog sleep in it. Don’t cause stray trucks to hang around. And if you do park it next to a bunch of trucks down at the store, it won’t crawl in your closet and give you pups.

  Crying (Lena)

  I still remember the day I decided to quit crying. We hadn’t been married more than three years, and I had cried a lot. Oh, I’d go for weeks, months maybe, without a tear. I’d clean house only when Jimmy was asleep or gone because it made him nervous. I’d figure a way to keep us on our budget without letting him know. I’d fix meals he liked and then just eat yogurt. I was scared to death of fat. Should have been scared of something else.

  Anyway, we’d go along even as a tabletop until something would upset the whole thing. It might be an overload at work for me or Jimmy going for weeks without looking for a job. All at once, I would blow up, and Jimmy would stare like he’d never seen me before. Then I would bust out crying, and he’d say, “There, there. It’s just one of your moods.” He’d act all manly so I could curl into his arms and soak his T-shirt. Pretty soon we’d both feel better. It was clear I was weak and he was strong and we were balanced again like the tabletop.

  Which I only scrubbed when he was gone or asleep.

  But there came a day when we’d worked our way through the whole routine right to where I was supposed to cry and something happened. All of a sudden I was a little girl again, and we were my mother and daddy. We looked different, and we said different things, but it all came out the same. Just like 5 + 5 = 10, but so does 6 + 4 and 7 + 3.

  I remembered how Mother would sweep and dust and shop and carry and cook and fold and scrub and never complain that it never ended, that we never noticed, much less said “Thanks.” And then one day some little thing would happen—maybe Billy would drop his sock in the toilet and call her to get it out before he flushed—and she would absolutely blow up. “Why do you do me this way?” she’d say. “I can’t go on.”

  When Daddy got there, they’d shut themselves in the kitchen, and we would hear her crying. It was like a tune above the low hum of his voice. Then he’d come out and take us in the living room while she went upstairs. “It’s all right,” he would tell us. “Your mother’s just overtired. Be quiet for a while and stay out of her way.” And that was it.

  When I was little, I was so grateful to Daddy for making everything normal again, for being the calm one who never yelled at us. But that day, standing in my own living-room-bedroom-dining-room-study, watching it all as a grown-up, I saw what a trick it was. Daddy was saying that something was wrong with Mother, not with us who treated her like a servant. It was her problem. All we had to do was wait for her to get over it. Nothing had to change. Next day she would say she was sorry. Mother was weak and Daddy was strong and all was right with the world. How come I saw it that day when I had never seen it before? I do not know.

  “This is one big trainload of shit,” I said to Jimmy, right when he expected me to crawl into his arms. “Ride it out if you want to, but I’m getting off.”

  After a long time and a lot of fights, Jimmy did, too. It’s not been easy. We’ve missed our old way of acting even though it hurt.

  Of course, we still fight, but it’s more interesting now. Sometimes it even brings us together.

  The other day Jimmy said, “I’ve swept the whole house and taken out the cat litter, and you haven’t dusted in a month.”

  “But I’ve done all the laundry,” I said.

  “Who took the baby to the doctor last week?” Jimmy asked.

  I looked him right in the eye. “Who balanced the checkbook?”

  “Okay.” I could tell he was getting into it. “Who paid for the car repair?”

  “So? Who took the car to the garage in the first place? Who dropped it off and walked to work in the rain?” I tried my best to look pitiful. Jimmy smiled.

  “We did,” he said, and I had to laugh.

  I guess we can’t keep score anymore. We’re on the same team.

  Baptizing (Herschel)

  You been baptized? I been baptized three times. My sins have been scrubbed on a board. They’ve been bleached and hung out to dry. Jesus saves, but He didn’t save on me. I’m not sorry. I reckon I needed it.

  Here’s how it happened.

  I grew up on a little farm out at A-Jay, and we went to Beefhide Baptist Mission. I was a big cut-up, not really mean but not ready to say No to trouble. When I was 14, I found my papaw’s liquor jug in the barn and drank till I like to lost my eyesight. That was on a Friday night, and come Sunday I still felt like somebody was mashing on my eyes with a hot spoon.

  Well, Mommy dragged me to church, and I thought, “If I don’t puke, I’ll repent,” so I did. In two weeks I was baptized in Red Fox River.

  Now I’m not saying that that baptism didn’t help me. It did, and I don’t take it lightly. Lord only knows what would have happened to me if I hadn’t had that little coat of grace.

  The way I see it is I got cleansed there at Red Fox, but the Holy Ghost wouldn’t have much to do with me. Partly because my heart wasn’t right, partly because I smelled so bad. So I shook off the holy waters like some sorry dog and went right back to rolling in the dirt.

  By the time I was 16, I had left the county and was hauling moonshine for an outfit over at Grundy. Now, they was smart. Gave me a big old Cadillac with a little bitty Jeep engine and put the liquor jugs right under the hood. My only fear was what if the car broke down. So they gave me enough cash for bus fare and said if the car give out I should hightail it to the nearest town and take the bus back to Virginia. That never happened, and I drove for them four years. Right down Big Black and into Cardin. Pulled in at a car dealer, blew the horn at the service garage. Up came the door, in went the load, and that was that.

&nbs
p; I might still be doing it if I hadn’t met Lorna Stanfill, who was working in a drugstore in Big Stone. I’d stop there coming back from Cardin and get chili dogs and Teaberry gum. After I’d done this a few times, Lorna and I got to talking. Now, she was older than me. Most everybody was in those days. She was pretty in the face and real—well, filled out. And she had this way of popping gum when she talked and lifting up ashtrays to wipe the counter while I ate, and, I don’t know, I just loved her.

  The thing is, Lorna was saved. Real saved. She lived with her daddy and his wife in a double-wide trailer in the middle of a sunflower field. And she had a three-year-old girl named Prayer.

  O Lord. What could I do about that?

  Lorna always wore this necklace with a little gold cross topped by a diamond clip. The stone squinted when the cross moved in the V of her collarbone. The cross was framed by the V-neck of her uniform, too. That V made me think of another V just inside it. Oh, I tried to think about the cross, but it was so little and Lorna’s breasts were so big.

  I started carrying a red leather New Testament in my shirt pocket. She never noticed. Once I flipped it open and pretended to read during lunch.

  “That’s a good book?” Lorna asked.

  “Best there is,” I said, holding it up.

  “I like the Old Testament better,” she said, popping her gum. “Jesus don’t scare you.”

  “Scares me plenty,” I told her before I could stop myself.

  “Why?”

  It seemed I was too far in to turn back. She refilled my coffee.

  “Well, look at it this way. After all them prophets, God sends us this baby with angels singing and everything to make us pay attention. People try to murder him, but he grows up. Goes around healing people and preaching love. Does not hurt a soul. He says we will kill him, and we do. You don’t call that scary?”