Authors: Jill McCorkle
“Now how are they connected to the others like the Chinese and Japanese?” Carly had asked at least seven times, until Debby finally excused herself to leave. It was not easy to do but she did. She kept her date with Koi Clark instead of driving with her mother and sisters to the outlet malls at Myrtle Beach. But later, by the time they finished quizzing her about Koi and telling her what she had missed and how much easier it would have been on everyone if she had driven them because her car had the biggest trunk and how it was the last time they had a little happy group outing
before daddy died
, she was sorry she had kept the date. The price paid for that trip to the movies with a nice person she would likely never see again was too high.
There was a time when anything but white-bread mainstream was a joke in their house, even if now Wanda is desperate to become Miss Multicultural. When Debby did date a white-bread product, Troy Preston, star halfback and son of the town’s leading surgeon, they didn’t understand that, either —meaning, of course, that they didn’t understand what he saw in her.
Break the chain. Pull the plug —pull it, pull it
.
One person Debby did care about enough to call him her boyfriend happened to be black. She and Ronnie were the best fencers in the small junior college they attended. Actually they were the
only
fencers —part of a small intramural experiment —and not very good, either of them. They would meet in the gym several
afternoons a week to joust about, the only sounds being the squeak of their shoes on the blond polished wood and their rhythmic breathing as they circled each other in a kind of dance. One day, walking back to their dorms, they talked about how the thing they liked most of all in fencing was the mask, that it was like peering out a dark screen door. Their bodies were outside, moving in the world, while their souls remained hidden. It was a beautiful October day and the clarity of the colors and brisk chilly air made Debby almost giddy, more talkative than she had ever been. It prompted her to lean in close enough that their arms brushed and their hands naturally found each other, their fingers locked tight for that five-minute stroll as they continued discussing their sport. They liked to lunge forward, swords crossed as they pressed their weight against each other, struggling to make eye contact and hold it. There was a connection she hadn’t felt before and hasn’t in all the years since. They were all for one and one for all.
Ronnie once asked, midlunge, eyes safe behind his mask, if it bothered her that he was black. “No,” she said, “does it bother you I’m not?” He pressed in closer. Her wrist bent, giving, and he pinned her against the concrete wall, both their swords raised overhead, and pressed his mouth against hers through the masks. The mesh of their face guards was metallic and cold, a reminder of time and place and the coach just inside the glass office door.
“We’re a good fit,” he told her the one time she allowed him to
stay in her room through the night. Stretched side by side, their bodies matched up, hipbones and ankles, elbows and shoulders. Ronnie wasn’t tall but people often asked,
Does he play basketball? Can he do the moonwalk?
And once recently, Carly asked about his
size
. “You know,” she said and giggled, caressing her hair newly dyed a shade of red that does not exist in nature. Debby hoped that her silence left all kinds of questions for Carly to mull over, but in five minutes Carly was completely immersed in telling a story about someone she knew who had had her eyeliner tattooed on even though the procedure is illegal now. Though Debby would never tell Carly or anyone else, the truth was memories of Ronnie and what it was like to be with him had for years played in her mind like a backbeat, the bass rhythm of what she wanted in life, a kind of person, a kind of relationship, a kind of freedom and security system all rolled into one.
While her sisters go on and on about their latest interactions with their mother, telling whoever visits what they have done and “what mother said,” Debby wants to point out that they’re talking about a woman whose last truly alert moments were about two months ago when there was a naked clown living in her closet. He came out in the middle of the night and told her to take all of her clothes off, which is why Debby was finding her all tangled up and half naked each morning. Their mother said he should have been ashamed saying and doing all those things he did but she did have to chuckle over it all. He was a clown after all, even if
he did bear a striking resemblance to that awful fat woman who used to work with their dear darling daddy. By then she loved to tell all about when she first met their father, how he fell madly in love with her and was still consumed with his passion for her as he drew his last breath.
Her sisters live
in soap opera time and forget from one day to the next exactly what has happened. They have friends who change partners as often as underwear, but as soon as the recessional march plays and they are out at the reception drinking champagne and eating little finger foods, that’s old news. They forget how they fucked first this one and then that one. Talked about this one, lied about that one. They forget because life is just so hard —so hard to get Justin in an Ivy and so hard to satisfy a husband while also satisfying yourself. So hard to find a good hair color person or a housekeeper or Russian tutor or pedicurist. They forget their dad was in love with Big-Butt Betty or that Uncle Ted and the sex-convention women flew too close to the sun, that Wanda once lived in a crack den and that Carly’s whole life has been dictated by her boobs and how the men she married have ordered her to wear them. Her sisters forget because it’s easier that way.
They will, however, never forget that Debby has dated people of different colors and they will never forget the time she wore white shoes after Labor Day. She was only twenty-five and had
fractured her toe, and those were the only shoes that could accommodate a great big bandage. Still, they were embarrassed and ashamed. They talked about it and talked about it, their mother saying how surely she had taught Debby better than that! It all gets regularly visited, too, the white shoes and Koi and Ronnie, though the years have led them to call him Rashad.
“Debby was international before international was cool,” Justin’s dad, Justin, says, standing tall in his shiny conservative shoes. They will remember those goddamned white shoes and her one real boyfriend (because he was black and not because he was nice) when all that’s left on earth are Tupperware products and the cockroaches.
Sometimes, when it’s
too late for a sisterly drive-by, Debby sits in that room with all the power of malicious force. She could withhold food and drink. She could accidentally trip and pull the oxygen plug.
She
could smoke long brown cigarettes and fill the room with carbon monoxide. But why? No one can give her an edited rerun, a return to the choices she didn’t make. No one can give her a second chance with Ronnie, the nerve to get in a car or on the bus and go when he invited her to come see him after he transferred to Furman. She told him her sister was getting married and she needed to be there to help (true); she told him her mother was having a memorial service on the anniversary of her father’s death (true); she told him she was sick,
and she was. Sick with fear and lack of courage and the price tag of her own freedom.
Pull it. Pull the plug
. And then another year passed with an invitation she didn’t have the nerve to accept and then too many years passed and thoughts of Ronnie were replaced with those of places that she might go. She has read so much about certain places that she feels she’s been there and can play through it like memory on demand. She is on a remote country road in Scotland, surrounded by heather and shaggy wild ponies. Enormous stone castles emerge from the distant mist. Or she is stretched out on the pink sand of Bermuda, the ocean lulling her into sleep, or she is at the wailing wall, fingertips brushing the rough surface where strips of paper —desires and pleas and blessings —are rolled and tucked and crammed and hidden, whole lives pressed into cracks and crevices, or she is stretched out on a dorm bed hours from home, thoughts of graduate school and published articles and trips to Europe and Egypt and Alaska put aside while she wraps her legs around the strong young body on top of her, the pulse of his neck against her cheek, and moves against him as if her life depends on it.
A woman on television
is crying hysterically because the baby she has pretended was hers is not. “I couldn’t have one,” she sobs. “I am so much older than I look.”
“But I don’t understand,” the bewildered husband says, and then there is a commercial where a happy family goes to Disney
World and meets Cinderella.
Pull it
. And then there is a man talking about his erectile dysfunction and what a drag it was but now he is all better (wife grinning in the background) and others can be back in the game, too (he throws a long football pass to a man eager for the information), “Just ask your doctor.” The woman on television is still hysterical and will be for days to come until given a sedative or slapped in the face. The actor who plays the hysterical woman has a real life elsewhere. And here —in Debby’s real life —she is taking care of her mother. A woman who loved purses and parties and raised her own children exactly as she had been raised. A vibrant force to rival any of those on the soaps, reduced by time —real time —to a pale, lifeless creature.
Sometimes, Debby wishes
for the end. She thinks of packing a bag and calling up one of her sisters to say that she is going on that cruise. Bring over that money they have been promising her all these years. Pick up some Depends on the way. Depends, Ensure, talcum powder and lotions so she doesn’t get bedsores, those new little Oral B things that fit on the fingertip so they can gently clean her slowly rotting gums. She thinks of going out for her walk and never coming back. She could reach her mile and a half marker at the elementary school and instead of turning and heading back down the street just keep going. She could get in her car and be on the interstate within minutes.
It never fails. When she gets to this point, her heart pumping
with anticipation, a loud sigh will come or her mother will cry out, her eyes fixed on the spot where Peppy slept for seventeen years. And Debby will race to find her, this old wasted stranger, eyes open but distant —pale blue and alarmed, like the time they had the car accident and she held Debby’s hand and stroked her hair while the emergency crew worked to unpin her from the passenger seat, the way she looked one brief moment the week after Debby’s father died when she said she wished she had loved him better, or the time last year when she saw Debby packing a bag and in a wild childish way begged her please not to leave. “You’re the one I have always known I could count on,” she whispered.
Pack a bag. Pull the plug. Take your turn
.
She is Sisyphus. All day long she pushes that rock, and when she is almost to the top, something happens to distract her, and it all rolls back to the very place the journey began. Someday she will make it to the top. Some perfect day she will stand, wind in her face, and watch the rock barrel down the other side, taking anything and anybody in its path. But until then she will travel this worn and familiar road, sure-footed and steady in real time, eyes vigilantly focused on the life before her. She is the cobbler of her own heart, and this will save her soul.
SURRENDER
The child had spent
the afternoon drawing pictures of her grandmother without clothes on, and now Rose was sick and tired of it. She hadn’t wanted to keep the child to begin with but what was she to do? Who could help that her son had impregnated and then married someone who was hysterical and self-centered —a horrible combination —with rings on all her fingers and her eyes drawn out like Cleopatra on the make, and who could help that her son on an average sunny Tuesday morning in October would do what he did every weekday morning, climb poles for the power company, checking and repairing lines, only to die suddenly with no warning whatsoever. For years Rose had feared he’d get electrocuted, and that was, in the darkest recesses
of her mind, the call that she had dreaded getting —a bolt of lightning, a surge of power —but instead it was his heart, an inner surge and sudden shock that left him slumped and tethered to a pole until a coworker who was sitting in the truck eating breakfast happened to glance up a second time to note that Drew’s position had not changed at all, that it was not a game. “Too late,” was what the EMT person said. “Nothing anyone could’ve done.”
The coworker, a friend of Drew’s since high school, where they had both excelled as athletes and class clowns, confided
—confessed
—that the long minutes he had sat there eating his Egg McMuffin he had been laughing at what Drew was famous for doing, a kind of lewd pole dance, pressing his pelvis against gummy creosote, his spiked boots kicked and swung outward, hard hat tipped seductively to one side, to entertain his buddies down below. All those minutes just hanging there.
It would be easier if it had come from the outside, if the world had betrayed him instead of his own body. He had inherited a family history of high blood pressure and heart disease that ran through her veins. Hank gave him long muscular legs and a face almost too sweet to be handsome, one that would have benefited from the creases and lines of age. She gave him poor vision and heart disease. She betrayed him every time she had ever fed him his favorite deep-fried foods and butter- and sugar-filled desserts, by never saying a word about his chain smoking and beer drinking, the growing pudge around his middle, grown considerably
pudgier since marrying a girl who never cooked anything but fast food in a microwave and whose idea of a vegetable was the flat thin pickle on a cheeseburger.
And now here Rose sat with what was left of her son, a five-year-old girl with spiky short hair, an awful haircut attempting to correct what the child had done to herself with a pair of manicuring scissors locked right there in Rose’s own bathroom just two days after Drew died. The child’s green eyes —slit like a cat’s —stayed fixed on Rose while the girl drew yet another picture of exposed breasts. The pictures were harsh and smudged where her plump sticky hands smeared the page and then the cream-colored carpet. She colored in the nipples this time with green crayon, all the while studying everything Rose did. Rose thought that something was wrong with the child even before Drew died and now she was sure of it, though Hank said that that was nonsense. “In fact,” Hank had said just last night, “I think she’s a lot like Drew.”