Authors: Lisa Howorth
William hopped off his stool to get his face three inches from the TV screen. “Some people already got frozen to death. I hope it’s coming here.”
“Get your dumb lice-infested head out of the way so I can see,” Eliza barked.
“His problem is taken care of, Eliza,” said Mary Byrd. “Stop being so rude. William?”
Eliza sneered, simultaneously sucking in a piece of cereal from her upper lip.
“No mushrooms, no whitish sauce, and no green things in it, ’specially English peas. And no throw-uppy cheese on mine,” he paused. “
Please
. I wish we could get some killer snow. But no.
We
get black streets and hot rain.”
Mary Byrd had to smile. “It’s Parmesan, William. Or Romano. It’s just a very ripe kind of cheese. It’s aged. Same kind we get on pizza,” she lied.
“That’s what I mean. I don’t like stuff that’s
very ripe
or
old
.
Barf
is very ripe. And on pizza you can peel the whole flap of cheese off, like skin.”
“Maybe I could just melt down some Cheese Cousin and pour it over your pasta,” Mary Byrd said. Cheese Cousin was what they called Velveeta.
“Please!” complained Eliza. “Some people are trying to eat here.”
“Some people are dorks and are getting big, Frosted Mini-Wheat butts,” William said.
“Mom! Do something about him!”
“That’s enough. Knock it off,” Mary Byrd ordered. “Enough cereal
and
fighting. Go do your homework.” William began backing out of the kitchen in his moonwalk approximation, singing “Woolly Bully,” a performance calculated to detonate his sister, who had lots of gold, fuzzy body hair and had just begun shaving her legs. Eliza jumped up to chase him, yelling, “Yeah, you better
run, For-ray-est, run
, you little retard!” After hearing one door slam, shouts, and another slam, Mary Byrd picked up the phone and dialed her husband’s office. “Don’t say retard,”
she said to herself while she waited for Charles to pick up.
“Hey. Evagreen left a note that you called.”
Charles’s voice was pleasant and businesslike. “Yeah, I wanted to be sure you remembered that Wiggsby is coming by tonight with those prints.”
Mary Byrd sighed, “Oh,
god
. I completely forgot.”
“And I’ll be late. I’m still in Memphis with Carl, from the Callahan. He’s got to go back to D.C. in the morning and he wants to take back some of June Law’s and Minnie’s new stuff for a show he’s putting together on women photographers in the Delta. But don’t tell Wiggs that. We’re just finishing up.”
“Chaz, do we
have
to?” Mary Byrd complained. “He’s so exhausting. It’s a school night.”
“You’ll be fine. The children will be fine. Get Mann over for drinks to help you, and I’ll be home in an hour and a half and we’ll go out to the Pink Palace,” Charles said. “That way, we can just dump him back at the hotel after.”
“He’s always rude to Mann. And he creeps the children out.” Once he had reached over Eliza’s shoulder as she ate spaghetti, forked a wad, and, raising his arm high, somehow neatly dropped it into his open mouth. The children were used to their parents’ friends’ eccentricities and didn’t mind them much as long as they stayed out of their personal spaces.
“It’ll be okay. I’ve got to get those prints of the casino photographs from him, and we’ve got to get him to agree to a late spring or summer show. It’ll be fine. Get out the cream cheese and pepper jelly,” he said, trying to lighten up.
“Ha ha. So he can eat it off his big German knife again?” They both laughed, but just a little.
“And what’s with Evagreen?” Charles asked. “She seemed . . .
weird
, when I called.”
“I don’t know. She left early.”
“Well, I’ll see y’all later.”
“At some point I’ve got to tell you about the call I got today from a detective in Richmond.”
“Jesus. Will that never be over?”
“I
know
,” Mary Byrd moaned. “Now some woman is writing an article, or something, I don’t know, and so now the police have got to reopen the case, and I’ve got to—”
“Try not to worry about it. We can talk later. If I don’t go now I’ll never get home. Just tell Wiggs I got tied up with our accountant. See y’all in a little while.”
So much for getting his attention. Actually, she was relieved not to have to go into it again. It could keep. They’d be too busy to talk about it tonight, and maybe same thing tomorrow, and she’d be putting the whole unhappy conversation off, and Charles would have forgotten it, and all of a sudden she’d be leaving to go up there and Charles would be furious, claiming, “Nobody ever tells me anything around here.” She knew the drill. Her avoidances and his busy priorities kept their communication level very low, sometimes a good thing, sometimes not. It worked for Mary Byrd to have Charles be too busy to discuss lots of things; they could be easily put off or “forgotten” altogether. In this way it was actually the negative spaces—the inaction and noncommunication—that helped keep their marriage together. In spite of the fact that she and Charles had failed to become much of a comfort to one another, their union was long and without major trauma, both of them understanding that a marriage was what two people make it, like a business. You had to make it your own and try not to let it be prescribed. Pretty much their unspoken thing was,
whatever worked
. By both accounts they would say that they had a happy marriage. If there was even such a thing as
happiness
at all, Mary Byrd often wondered.
Contentedness
seemed like maybe the best a couple could do. At any rate, Charles and Mary Byrd both abhorred the small-town inevitability of private life stupidly made public, and so they carefully avoided the trashy and tragic messes that others stumbled—leapt—into, not seeming to mind that their foibles showed for all to see like dingy, holey underwear on a clothesline.
There were always temptations, and failures. Women loved Charles’s sexy preppiness and reserve. He had very thick brown hair that his mother, Liddie, referred to as “hair-colored” hair shot with silver and hinting of no ethnicity, neither the swarthy nor the fair, not curly and not straight, with a perfectly situated cowlick at his hairline that came from generations of good WASP breeding and created an alluring, natural wave that matched his eye-colored eyes. He was tall and slender, but not so tall and slender that people described him as skinny, and he looked mannish rather than manly; he had a youthfulness that Mary Byrd, as she counted her liver spots and crow’s feet, found annoying. Charles didn’t encourage women particularly but they were often attracted to his chilly aloofness, which seemed to challenge certain women or pique their interest by raising questions rather than answering any. She didn’t think much about him and other women, maybe because she didn’t, or couldn’t, care enough. Or she was too busy. She’d heard other women with children or jobs or both talk about not having
quality time
with
their husbands, but it wasn’t that—she had plenty of quality in her life with Charles, she thought. He approached everything in their marriage with the surgical precision he’d inherited from his dad, Big William. He made things work: sex, money, arguments; it was all sort of like lighting the grill, making coffee, or cutting a mat for a photograph. And he didn’t hold grudges, and god knows she’d given him plenty to grudge.
Mary Byrd did love Charles. What was not to love? Handsome, intelligent, cultured in a charming Old South way, a good father, and a pretty straight shooter, as far as she knew, and she thought after all the years she really did know him. He was an incorrigible do-gooder, a Dudley Do-Right with an edge. No hobbledehoy, he liked his minor vices and carousing as much as Mary Byrd liked hers, but somehow he never got confused about issues of
honor
or
morality
, like she did. For Charles, things were black and white, while Mary Byrd floundered constantly in a confused gray fog. They both saw life as being too short, but Charles thought the challenge was to leave a strong, clear footprint; Mary Byrd was drawn to kicking up dirt, but wanted to get it all smoothed over and cleaned up again. And not get any on her, as they said. But she had never even thought about being married to anybody but Charles, that was for sure. Well, maybe Jack Hanna, or the dad on
The Waltons
. Or Christopher Walken, but that might be too scary. And why discard a perfectly good husband just because he wasn’t paying attention?
She was glad Charles had been married before to a beautiful, rich Delta girl whose daddy had the biggest John Deere dealership in the state, and one of the first catfish farms. Way younger, way prettier, and way dumber than Mary Byrd, she’d feigned pregnancy to get Charles to marry her, and then left him almost immediately to “have a career” with Wachovia in Charlotte, to Charles’s great relief. Charles’s sense of duty would never have allowed him to dump her. Of course, “having a career” meant that she quickly married a Wachovia CEO and probably was still up there, growing a fat ass and being a lacrosse mom and gloating over having transcended her humble Delta roots. At any rate, that first marriage had made Charles a better candidate for the second, of course. He’d quit thinking with his dick, if a man ever actually could quit doing that, and gotten a taste of how much marriage could suck, and was primed for a mate like Mary Byrd: attractive enough, nice enough, understood that there was a dark side to everyone, and had no ambition really, other than getting by and only occasionally pushing the fool button or the envelope to keep from dying of boredom.
But too much contentment made Mary Byrd discontent; too much comfort made her uncomfortable. She wasn’t much used to happiness and security. Before her children, there’d been a medical student she liked because he did little but study, fish, and shoot ducks. His profile was low, he knew few people in town. Tall and skinny, serious-looking and unlike most of the silly, fat-assed boys out on the campus, he was a farm boy who had grown up working his father’s fields in an air-conditioned combine, high up above the lush soybeans and cotton, beating off to Warrant’s “Cherry Pie” when he grew bored. He was safe. He was clean, he understood disease; and their worlds did not intersect. At his little rental house as often as not she’d simply sleep a deep sleep while he studied. Sometimes he would read to her from one of his medical books—his only books. Once it was about the chemical analysis of sexual passion. “Chemistry, that’s all it is,” he said. “Dopamine, norepinephrine, and phenylethylamine—natural amphetamines. Then the endorphins, morphine-like substances, kick in and people settle down for the long haul. Think about that, M’Byrd. Love is nothing more than a dope trip.” Mary Byrd found the idea of it all being science oddly affirming. It was like taking acid back in the day: part of the thrill of it had been knowing that you would eventually come down—you couldn’t sustain that intensity forever—and get back to normal. She’d cut the boy loose when he’d started to badger her for butt sex. It was natural, she supposed—maybe a med student
needed
to explore all the options, or orifices. Lucy, who was single and still on the market, said that ass was the new pussy, due to too much easily available porn. Mary Byrd was also generally against hanging with younger guys:
memento mori
fucking. Who wanted to see her loosening, dry skin pressed against the taut, peachy flesh of a twenty-five-year-old? And really, she decided, it took
adults
to commit adultery, and he wasn’t quite one.
There was the professor with a pygmy-haint wife. Whenever he saw Mary Byrd he would stare hungrily at her bony parts—her clavicles and wrists and knees, her sternum exposed by an unbuttoned shirt. After a drunken party, they had stepped behind a pool house and he had cupped her elbows, lightly brushing his palms across them, around and around. Then he’d gripped her hipbones, and kissed her. Did that even count as adultery: a mercy hump against a shed? After that they’d avoided each other for months. And anyway she knew that an affair with a married guy would suck; it would be like stealing a great piece of jewelry that would excite you and make you happy until you realized that you weren’t going to be able to wear it anywhere in public.
Then there had been the semi-famous filmmaker who had passed through town scouting locations for a Civil War movie. She didn’t know why she’d bothered—boring. The whole time the Chubby Checker “Limbo” song had played in her head, all Zildjians and tom-toms and Chubby’s hoarse, high encouragement: “
How looow can you go
?” She hadn’t really minded the indifference, it was just
difference
she had seemed to want, and maybe, she recognized, the guilt. Later, he had sent her a picture he had taken of her that he wanted to publish in a photo-essay for
Harper’s
. He’d gotten her about half-right. In the shot she was framed by the sharply limned leaves and deep shade of a magnolia tree. She herself was in full sunlight, her eyes averted and her face unfocused; it might have been any thirtysomething woman with a guilty, tentative look. She looked more intelligent and interesting than she was. A critic described the photograph as “sparkling” and “brilliant.”
Maybe the tree had been that, but she, anyway,
looked neither.