Folly (15 page)

“So do I.”

“For the first time in my life,” Folly said. “I never won nothing.”

“I won Bingo once, but it wasn't anything like this,” Martha said.

It was Saturday night and though Folly had the night off, Mary Lou was working till closing. Folly wrote her a note and left it on her bed when she went out to her union meeting.

Dear M.L.

If you want to talk, we can stay up late tonight. If you're too tired, never mind.

Love, Ma

When she got home all the lights were out. She looked in on Mary Lou, who was curled up facing the wall. She looked small—sweet and childlike. Not a taut wire filled with venom. Folly was relieved she did not want to talk, though perhaps it would be easier to have this discussion if Mary Lou were filled with sleep. She remembered rocking her calm after nightmares.

As soon as Folly closed the door, Mary Lou breathed deeper and started to fall asleep. It seemed as if the day had stretched out a long time, and she was glad to know that her mother was in the next room.

17.

Mary Lou turned over the note her mother had left her and wrote on the back of it in bold capital letters: GOOD MORNING MA. WORKING TIL 5, THEN GOING TO LENORE'S FOR SUPPER. PROBABLY GO BY TO SEE DAISY ON THE WAY. CALL ME AT THE STORE IF I HAVE TO COME HOME AND STAY WITH THE BOYS OR ANYTHING.

LATER, MARY LOU

She walked softly around the trailer, getting dressed and fixing herself some breakfast. She felt full of nerve, leaving this note for her mother, while she would not have told her, face to face, that she was going to Lenore's. She dared her mother to say one word about Lenore. Too old, indeed. She felt every bit as old as Lenore. She had worked full time since school let out. She went to bed tired and sometimes woke up with a yearning to stretch out and close her eyes and dream through the morning, but she hadn't missed a day of work yet. She hadn't even been late.

The enjoyable thing about being up before anyone else was the quiet. That and the coolness of the morning, the way the air seemed light though you knew it would grow heavy with the humidity by nine or ten. Mary Lou felt in charge of the sleeping household. She pictured her brothers looking innocent with sleep, her mother, too; she felt responsible for them all. This was payday. She would be getting her largest check ever for a full week plus overtime. She had tried to calculate how much the take home would be, based on the deductions that had been taken out of her previous checks, but she had little idea if her calculations were correct. She planned to cash the check at the store and give Lenore money to buy them a six-pack to take to her place. She
wondered had her ma thought about the fact that Lenore was old enough to buy booze, when she'd said she was too old? She pondered again over how her ma had known to look for her at Lenore's that night Daisy had the stroke. Neither of them had brought it up afterwards. She wondered if her ma would call her at the store. She stuck the note under Folly's door, then put on her shoes and left for work.

Peters brought around the checks sealed in envelopes and stuck hers in the back pocket of her jeans while she was bagging with both hands in front of her. He reminded her of Roland butting up against her after that night she had gone to the drive-in with him. Roland had finally stopped asking her out; in fact, had even stopped speaking to her, which she didn't mind except she felt that he was often lurking somewhere, watching her, and she sensed with some fear that he might be out to get her sometime. She didn't have anything to base this on, really, just her hunch that he was a little crazy. In response to Peters she twitched her butt in irritation, a gesture which he probably took to be cute, but she didn't care—she knew what she meant by it. First chance she got she found an empty aisle and opened the envelope to check out the amount. $102.56. She had calculated $115. Everyone said she'd get the taxes back eventually, but if that was true, she didn't get the point of why they didn't just give her the money in the first place. Damn taxes. All through the rest of the day she allowed herself to day dream about where her $102.56 would go. Most of it to the grocery bill they had to pay off from the strike. She saw it next to a minus line, eating a big chunk out of the debt. Better to put it all in one place so you could see a dramatic difference like that. $313 minus $102.56 would leave . . . she tried to subtract in her head while she bagged . . . it took a long time to come up with $211. To wipe out a debt
—that
would be exciting. If you couldn't do that, maybe it would be better to spread it around more.

Just before quitting time she caught Peters in the manager's office and asked him to cash the check. “Don't spend it all in one place,” he said. She refrained from telling him to mind his own business but definitely decided she would turn the whole wad over to her mother and tell her to put it against the grocery bill. She folded the bills over and pushed them deep down in her front pocket. As she walked, she was aware of the presence of the lump they made on the front of her leg, and worried about being robbed in a way she rarely had before.

When she found Lenore, she peeled a dollar off the roll and asked her to buy the beer with it. After that she felt lighter. She fantasized
herself rich, pulling out rolls of bills, handing them freely, casually, without care for their dimensions, over to cashiers. Supply unlimited. No need to count the change. This fantasy turned her walk into a swagger.

Lenore drove her into the parking lot of the hospital and said, “I can go by the diner for coffee while you're visiting.”

“No, that's okay. Come on in and see Daisy with me. I won't stay a minute.”

The two of them stood at the side of the bed and looked down over the bed rail at Daisy. Each time Mary Lou came, she noticed how the bed looked too big for her, especially with the rails up; it looked as if she were being eaten up by the bed. Her flesh was shrinking away. Mary Lou reached over and took her hand and Daisy's eyes opened for a minute, but they were fogged over. They looked at her but didn't seem to see her. “So you're here,” she said with a sigh in a far away voice.

Mary Lou felt creepy and took her hand away. Daisy must think she was someone else. She studied Daisy's face but couldn't find her, instead saw an old lady—wrinkled, wizened, dying. For a second it occurred to her she might have come into the wrong room, but Daisy's name was on the plastic bracelet on her wrist. The wrist was thin, purple spots speckling the skin. She wanted Daisy to see her with her friend and she wanted to know what Daisy would think of Lenore if she knew her. Probably she would like her . . . unless she thought she was out to put something over on Mary Lou.

Mary Lou was aware of how close she and Lenore stood to each other and of liking the feeling that came from that. She went back to concentrating on Daisy, thinking loudly to herself.
Look here, Daisy, look at me right here standing with my friend by me. I'm working all the time now. I've got a hundred and two dollars in my pocket, actually a hundred and one now. I'm turning it over to Ma later tonight. First I'm going to my friend's apartment for supper. I can think of a lot of things to buy but Ma got behind with the strike. Anyway, one more week and I get another check, same size, if I can get in some overtime. Daisy: you'd be proud of me. You look so small. I remember the year I grew to be as tall as you. Skeeter is almost as tall as me now. Tiny is still tiny. I dropped Ma's groceries all over the floor at the store yesterday. She and Martha have got a secret. Do you know it? Do you? I don't understand what's going on. They are like kids. I always thought
I wanted to be the ma, but I don't. I want my ma to be the ma. She don't even tell me who not to hang out with anymore.

Daisy opened her eyes again and this time focused more clearly on Mary Lou. She worked her lips as if the words of a question were loose in her mouth. Mary Lou almost said, “Frumbled, I'm frumbled,” but changed her mind. “I'm okay,” she said, instead. “Are you okay?” She took Daisy's hand back in hers. The silence of Daisy's stare made it seem as if she moved from so close she could see inside Mary Lou to far, far away. Then her eyes hazed over again. What do you see behind those eyes, Mary Lou wanted to ask.

Always when she came now, she had trouble figuring out how to get away. Was Daisy finished with the visit or waiting for them to say something more? Was she tired? Was she comforted by the fact that they were standing there, or did she feel stared at and yearn for the privacy of being left alone? She wished Lenore would make a move but knew she wouldn't; she knew it was up to her.

“You ever had a bed like this, with rails?” she asked Lenore.

“Nope. My ma used to put a chair up next to mine when I was a little kid and I sleepwalked.”

“Seems like to me I had a bed with a railing once, but I can't rightly remember what happened to it.”

“I had my appendix out,” Lenore said. “That's when I had one.”

“In the hospital?”

“Yup, right here in this same hospital.”

“Did it hurt?”

“After, when I laughed or coughed or something like that.”

“Come on, let's go,” Mary Lou said. She didn't speak to Daisy the way she usually did when they were alone. She spoke to herself again.
I'm going, Daisy. I'm going off to my friend's room. We're gonna make dinner. I think she might be a lesbian, you know, a homosexual. She sure is nice, though. I get nervous when I think about this.
She squeezed Daisy's hand. “Bye,” she said out loud.

As they walked down the hall, she realized how stiff she had held her body. She let her legs stride loosely and reaching in her pocket deep, she fondled her money.

From her second beer on, Mary Lou was intent on how to let Lenore know she wanted to be seduced. She couldn't stand this low level tension, wanted to be closer to the edge, to know if it would be repugnant to her or what, if Lenore were to approach her. She had wandered around the room while Lenore was putting the supper on, checked the
bookcase and found the lesbian book missing. This had seemed to forebode a life of frustration, given that she had finally felt she would find a way to ask to borrow it. She'd circled the room three times in her attempt to be subtle while scanning all three shelves of the bookcase and still had not found it. Finally, she'd settled into watching Lenore in the kitchen while the blank space in her mind which had counted on the book began filling in with ideas which had led to her swigging the beer faster than she should have or would have under less provoking circumstances. She wanted to know—did women together start out kissing like friends, then slide into something else, or what? She stopped short of letting herself feel anything sexual, but she liked watching Lenore; she thought her body was neat. She wanted to sit up close to it, but Lenore set the places for them to eat on the counter across from each other.

After supper they sat on the floor, Lenore with her back against the bookcase, Mary Lou leaning against the chair. Lenore was telling her about how her mother was on the wagon, she hoped for good. She tried to listen closely, but her mind was too busy imagining her responses to the seduction. And the consequences. Not that Lenore had made any moves. Would she be absolutely horrified if Lenore actually did? Would she walk away afterwards, changed forever? What would anybody and everybody (especially her mother) think if they knew?

She downed some more beer. Lenore was quiet now. She looked relaxed, sat with one knee pulled up to her chest, her chin resting on it. Her eyes followed Mary Lou as she stretched herself out on the floor.

“You okay?” Lenore asked.

“Yeah, just tired,” Mary Lou lied. She was actually quite dizzy.

“Here we are acting like a couple of old ladies, wore out on a Friday night.”

“Yup. It's a hard life.” Mary Lou closed her eyes, thinking this might serve as a welcoming gesture to Lenore, but it only served to make her head spin more. She let her hand flop out to her side, close enough to Lenore that she could touch it if she wanted to. Silence. Mary Lou was tense and confused. If she let herself go loose, she feared she'd be unsure of where she was, as if she'd just done a series of underwater somersaults and lost track of her sense of horizontal and vertical.

“Daisy's sure in a bad way, isn't she?” Lenore said slowly.

“I don't want to think about it.” Tears came to Mary Lou's eyes so suddenly, so out of range of her volition.

“I'm sorry,” Lenore said, “but you can cry all you want here, no one will care.”

About the last thing in the world Mary Lou wanted was to lay there and bawl her eyes out. She had drunk too much beer, deliberately, but not to be sad, to be brave and reckless and free. But her hotshot veneer dissolved as if it had no substance at all, and she couldn't stop herself. She remembered the hollow feeling of that moment when she suddenly hadn't recognized Daisy, had thought she was holding a stranger's hand, that she'd gone to the wrong bed, or Daisy had been switched, even died and been replaced by some other old woman. She kept her eyes closed, but the tears flowed from them anyway. As she wiped her cheeks with the backs of her hands, she bumped into Lenore who was by her side with the Kleenex box. She sat up and held a tissue to her face like a compress: Lenore put out her arms and encircled her, and held her still. She felt Lenore's strength calming her and some distant part of her was observing this was not what she had wanted, she had wanted a seduction. But another closer part said, not so,
this was
what she had wanted.

Mary Lou was back at her place against the chair, Lenore having quietly also resumed her posture in front of the bookcase. They sat without speaking and this warmed up Mary Lou's heart. She was grateful for Lenore not wanting to know everything that was going on in her. Lenore took their beer glasses and went to the kitchen.

“I don't think I better have any more,” Mary Lou said.

“I know. I'm making tea. Or would you rather have coffee?”

“Tea.”

“I thought so.”

Mary Lou thought of her mother bringing her tea in bed once when she had been sick with a high fever and had stayed home from school. She remembered her mother's cool hand on her hot forehead. The contrast, the coolness of that hand, had made her feel exposed, as she did now. She decided she'd ask Lenore outright if she was a lesbian as soon as she brought the tea. She might as well do it while she already felt exposed.

She could tell by the smell that Lenore had made coffee for herself. She sipped at the tea and cleared her throat. “Um.” She couldn't get the words to come out of her mouth. Her face ached. She blew on the hot tea and made the steam rise on her nose and cheeks. “There's something I wanted to ask you.”

Lenore looked attentive, raised her eyebrows in wait. “Shoot.”

“I think my mother's a lesbian.”

“You do?” Lenore said with great surprise.