Authors: Jill McCorkle
Mo Rhodes was gone almost twenty hours before she called home. Misty and I were playing Chinese checkers and Dean was working on a model of a ’59 Thunderbird when the phone rang. The TV was on, “I Love Lucy,” the episode where Lucy has gotten a loving cup stuck on her head and has to get it off so it can be presented down at the Tropicana. “No!” Mr. Rhodes yelled when Misty ran toward the phone. “I’ll get it.” He had been sitting on the couch, staring at the same page of the newspaper for over an hour. It seemed the phone rang forever, Dean sitting there with the tube of cement glue and little spare tire lifted and frozen, Misty standing in the wildly patched-up cutoffs and green poor-boy shirt with the wide-toothed zipper that she always wore around home.
“Hello?” Mr. Rhodes voice was loud and deep as he stared at the speckled linoleum of the kitchen, flicked the cover of a book
of matches open and closed. “Yes, I’m here.” He glanced over at us, but it was like he could see through, as if we were made of glass or not even there. “You should have called sooner. You should have . . .” He stopped, again looking at us, his eyes dull. Then it seemed an eternity that he listened, tears rolling down his thin bony face and him not even bothering to wipe them away, not even turning his head so that we wouldn’t see. Dean dropped the tiny wheel, and it rolled off the card table and was lost in the thick shag carpet. I reached out and began feeling for it, but he just sat there, like Misty, staring at Mr. Rhodes, who now was holding the receiver so tightly that his knuckles were white.
“Chainsaw?” Lucy Ricardo asked to an explosion of laughter.
“You’re not thinking, Mo,” he whispered. “It’s not worth it. What about . . .” Again he listened, cleared his throat. “Look, you do what you want.” He sighed, pulled a cigarette from his shirt pocket and lit it. “But you bring the baby home. The baby stays with us.”
“Oh, great.” Dean jumped up from the table, his fold-up chair falling behind him, crashing against the bricks of the fireplace. “She’s really left us. She’s gone.” He was looking at Misty now, his face contorted as he tried not to cry, a smaller darker version of his father. “That son of a bitch.” His high boyish voice sounded so foolish uttering the big manly words, and yet he still gained our attention and respect. Ethel was on the telephone asking, “Do you think you can get a loving cup off of a woman’s head?”
“That’s just your oldest son voicing his opinion,” Mr. Rhodes said, his voice made stronger by Dean’s words, threatening. “Yes, she’s here. Kate is over here with her.” Misty sat staring at the mention of her name, a look of hope on her face, as Dean pushed the table up and over, hundreds of tiny black and silver parts disappearing into the carpet.
“You cannot have Buddy.” His voice was loud now, forceful and angry. “I don’t give a damn about you.” He paused and in that
second Misty was up and running to him, reaching for the phone, crying, begging, but he held her away with one hand against her chest. “But Buddy’s place is here. You’re not fit to have him. And hey”—he laughed loud and sarcastically—“how about asking the son of a bitch to give Betty a call. She still doesn’t believe it’s true, doesn’t believe you would do this to her.” He cradled the receiver under his neck and with his other hand pressed down to break the connection. Misty slapped his hand away and sat on the floor, face in her hands.
“It’s all your fault,” she screamed when he tried to lift her. “I hate you. You let her leave. You let her.” He knelt there, his hand suspended above her back as if he were afraid to touch. “It’s going to be all right, baby,” he said. “Maybe she’ll change her mind. Maybe she’ll decide to come home.”
“Will she?” She spat the question and then stopped cold as she crawled towards him.
“She’s bringing Buddy home. She’ll be here tonight,” Mr. Rhodes said. “She promised.”
“But will she stay?” She looked up at her father, and he looked away, over at the sink where Mo’s wildly colored apron hung.
“I don’t know,” he said.
Neither of them looked up as I put all of the Chinese checker marbles in their right color and then closed the box. Lucy still had not gotten the trophy off her head and was sitting there crying, Ethel by her side. Neither Misty nor her father looked up as I tiptoed past and out the side door into the carport, where Dean was throwing a rubber ball up against the brick wall. He held his throw while I started to walk past and then right when I got in front of him, threw it hard into my side. I stopped and stared at him, his teeth bared like a bony-faced camel as he stepped up to me. “Why don’t you get the hell out of here?” he said, his breath like soured milk, but when I took a step forward, he threw his arm out and caught me under the neck. “You are the ugliest girl I know,” he said, and pressed in closer, pinning me to the wall
of the carport where his superball had left perfect little circles of dirt. I stared down, at the grease stains on the concrete, at the bright yard beyond the shade of the carport, seeing clover patches and a huge bumblebee, the sway of the oaks lining our driveway, taking in the smell of cut grass and the sound of a distant mower droning like the window units and the traffic of the interstate. “Why are you always hanging around here? Huh?” He pressed in closer, his soured mouth open on my neck, on the right side, as I pushed against him, surprised by the strength in that thin chest and wiry arms.
“Let go,” I said, feeling my voice finally surfacing. “Let go.” I was on the verge of screaming when he looked up, his eyes tracing a line from my left cheek to my neck and back again; he let go and stepped away. I walked as fast as I could, and when I hit the bright sunlight, he began throwing the ball again, the dull thud rhythmically finding its way into my steps as I crossed the street to my own house. The shade of the porch was a relief, but I didn’t feel that I could really breathe until I got inside, the hardwood of our foyer cool against my feet, gardenia blossoms floating in a silver bowl on the table by the door, my face and neck flushed a deep splotchy red when I looked at myself there in the hall tree. I waited until my legs felt sturdy again before going to the kitchen, where my mother was washing mint leaves for the iced tea and putting up tomatoes while Mrs. Poole sat at our kitchen table talking about the upcoming Country Day Fair hosted by the Junior League. I knew she was
really
there in hopes of learning a little bit of news.
“Well?” Mrs. Poole asked, her lipstick marking all but one of the cigarette butts in the crystal ashtray. I opened the refrigerator and looked in, feeling the cool air on my face and legs. “Is she with that highway patrolman who is
supposed
to be a friend of theirs?”
“I don’t know.” I stood with the water pitcher in my hand, still unable to believe that Mo Rhodes had left, unable to believe
what Dean had just done to me. Mo’s face was in my mind, her laugh; but more than that, I couldn’t help but try and imagine what the scene looked like at her end of the phone. Was she with Gene Files? Was she sitting in some strange hotel on a strange bedspread in some familiar outfit that smelled like her house, the honeysuckle sachets that she kept in her bedroom drawers? Was she wearing the gauzy embroidered blouse she had worn to the fireworks, or had she slipped off with her brightly striped terry cloth caftan that she wore every morning while drinking coffee and listening to the radio? Had she packed her clothes and hidden them somewhere, behind a bush, in the laundry hamper under the quilts and fried chicken? My mind raced as I stared into the refrigerator, the cool air feeling so good to my face where Dean had pressed his sticky mouth and pulled in on my skin like he meant to hurt me.
“Honey, close the door now,” Mama said, and she looked older to me, wearing a starched white apron like you might see on a maid in a swanky restaurant. Overnight she seemed so much older, while Mrs. Theresa Poole was ancient-looking, ringed in her own cigarette smoke.
“What kind of woman leaves her family?” Mrs. Poole asked, and looked at my mother.
“She’s coming back.” I blurted the words without thinking, leaving out all the parts I knew to be true, that she was coming to bring Buddy home, that she had in fact left her family for her best friend’s husband, a man with great big hairy arms and a gun strapped to his waist.
I spent most of the afternoon in the upstairs hallway, sitting on the little window seat there in the dormer and watching Misty’s house, waiting for Mo to get home. I watched the approach of a summer storm, the brisk wind, and then suddenly the sky was black, and tree limbs thrashed about. I saw Misty standing barefooted
in their carport, lightning in the distance, dark clouds growing and swirling as she leaned against one of the wrought-iron posts. Her hair was blowing wildly, orange against the dark sky, while her dad stood leaning from the door and motioning her to come in. “Mother!” she screamed. “Mother!” Mrs. Poole was coming from her car, umbrella opened to the beginning drops of rain, and she also turned to watch Misty. “Mother!” I heard her scream over and over. We were all waiting, behind our doors or from windows above, watching and waiting.
Now it was night, and the rain had slowed to a steady drizzle, the roads still steaming. I wanted to call Misty but was afraid of Dean answering the phone; I still could not shake the odd feeling that came to me when I thought of his damp sour mouth on my face, his wiry body pressed against me, so close I could smell the detergent in his cotton T-shirt. She finally called me, but after two minutes her dad told her to get off; he was afraid Mo might try to call him again. “I saw you sitting in your window,” she said hurriedly, and laughed. “Man, oh man, did I put Mrs. Poole in a jerk.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to spy like that.” I waited but she made no response. “Misty?”
“I don’t care,” she said hurriedly. “What do I care?”
It had been over an hour since a car had turned onto our street, so I finally gave up and went to my room. I stood in the doorway with my eyes closed and felt my way slowly, step by step over to the window where I could feel dampness and a fine whistle of air around the old panes of glass. My mother took great pride in the distortion of some of our windows; it meant they were the originals with all their impurities, the waves and tiny pinhead bubbles signs of imperfection. “Of course this is nothing like what I showed you in Boston,” she had said numerous times.
Besides visiting cemeteries, we had spent a lot of time walking Beacon Hill, up Chestnut Street to see the amethyst window panes, the “treasured accident” of too much manganese in the glass shipped from London. It puzzled me, the differences made in the perfect and the imperfect, how a flawed coin or piece of glass becomes more valuable. I felt the window with my fingertips, still intrigued by my dad’s explanation of how glass is a liquid and how over the years it runs, slowly, a movement hidden from sight or touch. It was possible that the glass in my window had been running, oozing that slow race, since the 1920s. There were windows downstairs that had been sliding downwards since the Wilkinses were in this house. Thinking of them, as I stood before the window that overlooked their resting place, made me shudder, so I turned and felt my way to the bed. My eyes were still closed as I settled under the sheet and spread. Even in the summer, I had to have the spread; the sheet did not weigh enough to make me feel protected.
I fell asleep fighting the impulse to imagine Mo in the burly arms of Gene Files, to think of Dean as he pinned me against the wall of their carport. I did not want to know what I looked like at that moment; I did not want to see my own look of horror and fear, my impurity. And yet those are the photos that win prizes, those moments of torture and pain, those moments when human faces, like Mr. Rhodes’, split to reveal the deepest, darkest fears.
I didn’t want to think of my own impurities; I didn’t want to think of Mo Rhodes kissing that man, with all that hardware swinging from his belt. I concentrated on the street noise as a means of escape; with my eyes closed I tried to measure the distance of the coming and going of the cars on the interstate. I kept expecting to hear a car door slam, and that would be my cue to wake and run to the window. The cars were coming and going, rounding the turn there at the city limits, under the overpass bridge, where a billboard boasted the cheapest cigarettes in a
hundred-mile radius, past the Texaco station and the new riding stables, the Stuckey’s restaurant which Mrs. Poole said was way overpriced for the service. I imagined myself in a car driving it all, around and around, every square inch until I felt I could have done it blindfolded.
I woke to the rhythmic creak of our front porch swing, and when I opened my eyes it was gray out the window. A slight breeze lifted the white curtains like a tired ghost. I ran into the hall and down the stairs, certain it was Misty there. The boards of the porch were cool and damp beneath my bare feet, and before I even turned to answer her hushed whisper of my name, I glanced across the street at her house. All the lights were on inside, illuminating her dad, who stood, bare chested and in his pajama pants, in front of the picture window, with a cigarette in one hand and a coffee cup in the other. Dean was in the carport, the yellow light framing his body as he sat there waving a golf club back and forth.
I knew before even looking over at our swing that something was not right. Misty was in her yellow seersucker pajamas, barefooted, her hair pulled straight back and held down with a pink barrette. She was holding Oliver on her lap and stroking his back rhythmically, as he arched and stretched against her hand.
“Misty?” I asked, and stepped toward her. “What are you doing?” A car I didn’t recognize pulled up and stopped in front of their house, and after a few minutes a man and a woman got out.
“My mother is dead,” she whispered, and my whole body went cold like ice water rushing over me. “And Buddy.” I just stood and watched her, unable to move, every creak and pull of the swing chains causing my chest to tighten and ache. “They wrecked.” Her whisper was a monotone like you might use to tell a ghost story or a joke, leading up to a “boo” or a punchline,
but instead her words just stopped and lingered there. I hadn’t noticed Dean coming over, and I jumped with the sudden sound of his voice.