Lay It on My Heart (16 page)

“No,” she says, squinting at me until her crusty eyelashes stick together. “We're kin. It's not for real, anyway. I mean it's for real but not really.”

“That doesn't make any sense.”

“That doesn't make any sense,” she says, mimicking me again. “Don't give me your dictionary talk.” She throws herself back against the seat. “You just can't help yourself,” she says in disgusted wonder.

“Tell her,” comes Cecil's voice. I raise myself up and turn toward him, and he looks down at the front of his pants, then back up at me and licks his lips. I duck behind the seat again. In my lap, my thumb is covered in hatch marks, and I dig out my pen and cross a group of four for a bundle.
Inhabit me, O Lord God
.

“You counting something?” Tracy says.

“No,” I say. I pray the prayer over and over again, and I keep praying as the sub pulls the lever and the bus doors swing closed, as he backs the bus out slowly and we creep down the school drive in the long line. It's like we're part of a segmented tapeworm, like we saw diagrams of when Mr. Catterson gave his missionary presentation. One of their friends, he said, had a worm like that in his stomach. The friend, a prisoner, got so hungry that he could feel the tapeworm coming up through his throat, poking around at the back of his mouth for food. The tapeworm was starving, too.

Behind us, Cecil says, “Rosemary Cooney, you know what you want.”

“Rosemary,” a few kids start in. “Rosemary.”

Inhabit me, O Lord God
, I pray.

“That's right,” Cecil says. There's a shuffling behind us.

“Rosemary, Rosemary.” Most of the back of the bus is chanting now. Everyone keeps it low, but we're crawling slowly down the highway and the sub doesn't even check the rearview.

I peek over my shoulder. The girl who was smoking when she got on the bus, a girl with enormous breasts and stiff, brassy hair, shifts over her seatmate in the back and does a crouched walk up the aisle to Cecil's seat, while Cecil's seatmate makes his way back to hers.

Still nothing from the sub. “He just lets this happen?” I say to Tracy.

“What did I tell you? He probably wishes Rosemary would come sit on
his
lap. You see those titties?”

It's true. The girl's chest, in her deeply scooped T-shirt, is so ample that it makes me think of Daze's word,
bosom
. My own breasts haven't stopped hurting, but I'm getting used to the way it feels, a fact that makes me gloomy. Even my bra has turned a dingy gray, as if depressed by its big job.

“What size are you now?” Tracy asks, catching me looking down. “C?”

“I don't know,” I say. When I check behind me again, Rosemary is sitting on Cecil's lap, her knees to the aisle. He fits the top of his head underneath her chin and ducks his face into the deep crevice of her bosom.

“I see you in activity,” says Tracy. “With that girl everyone hates. The one who used to be Melinda when she lived here before. I hear she gave Mister Cooper a pair of her panties. I hear she's a lesbian. A girl who likes girls.”

“Then why would she give her panties to Mister Cooper?”

“I hear she gave them to Missus Teaderman, then. You-all both have Missus Teaderman. I have her first period. You have to do speeches?”

“How-to speeches,” I say. I try to imagine Kelly-Lynn giving her panties to Mrs. Teaderman, and all I can think is that Mrs. Teaderman would wash them, maybe, and give them back, like Daze does with mine.

We're approaching the turnoff to East Winder, where the shoulder gets shaved down to only about a foot. The tire catches the edge of the asphalt, and for a second it feels like we're about to tip over. I look down again at my marked-up hand.
Inhabit me, O Lord God
.

“I feel it,” Rosemary is saying, behind us. She's squirming on Cecil's lap, his face still buried deeply in the front of her shirt.

We roll through town and out the other side by the time Rosemary untangles herself and makes her way back to her seat. Everyone in the back of the bus cheers.

“Cousin,” Cecil sings softly when the cheer dies down. “I got time for one more.”

I hold my breath. We pass the historic sign for Tate's Bridge, then we near the gas station where Tracy gets off, high above the river on the ridgeline.

“Tell your friend,” Cecil says, but Tracy ignores him. She stands up into the aisle, and light from the window panels travels across her pale face and neck, turning her skin yellow. The sub brings the bus to a stop.

“Girl,” Cecil says to me, and just like that, I stand up, too. “Next time,” he promises as I follow Tracy off the bus with a small group of kids. We wait there in the dirt while the bus rolls away and the rest of the kids disappear into the tiny gas-station store. I'm almost a whole head taller than Tracy, and I never realized it before.

“You following me?” she says.

“No.”

“What, you need something from the store?”

I nod. I don't know what else to do.

“Well, come on, then,” she says, and I head inside after her. A bell over the door tinkles. The light overhead is dim and the air smells old. The other kids from the bus are all bent over a cooler of pop, lifting cans out of the ice.

“What do you want, chips?” Tracy says.

“I forgot money,” I say. I make a show of going through my purse as if there might be money in it.

Tracy plucks two bags of potato chips from clips on a rotating stand. “Momma,” she calls to the woman behind the counter. The woman has orange hair like Tracy's, only it's fading to gray and tied back in a red bandanna. Behind her, floor to ceiling, are cigarette packs stacked neat as cells between narrow plastic barriers.

The woman behind the counter lifts her hand, but she's keeping her eye on the kids at the cooler.

“I don't have any money,” I say, wondering if Tracy missed it the first time.

“Two bags.” Tracy holds up two fingers toward her mother. “You get that?”

The woman raises her hand again and nods. She's scooting change across the counter with the fingertips of her other hand. Several of the kids grab their sodas and leave, and when Tracy and I start to follow them, the woman calls out, “What's your name, girl?”

“Me?” I say.

“I know Tracy's name.”

“Charmaine Peake.”

Tracy's mother tucks a red curl into her bandanna. Her eyes are small, bright blue chips of glass set deep into a squint. “Daddy knew some Peakes.”

I wait for her to say something more, but she goes back to counting change. Tracy pushes open the door.

“Thank you for the chips,” I say.

“Tracileen, wipe off that handprint you just made,” says her mother, and Tracy swipes at the glass with her sleeve.

Outside, she heads across the dirt yard of the gas station to a cinder-block house in back of it that I never noticed before. “You coming or what?” she says to me without looking back, and I follow her. It seems like the right thing to do after the chips.

You can hear a dog barking inside, throwing himself against the door as Tracy tries to shoulder it open. “Sometimes this sticks,” she says. She takes a step back and rams it hard, bursting into a dark, damp room lit watery blue from the television set. A brown-and-white-speckled dog growls at my knees. “Careful,” she says. “He only likes Momma.”

The place is a mess. Dishes on the table, beer cans on the floor, ashtrays on either side of the velour sofa, and another two on the coffee table in front of it, all of them spiky with cigarette butts. The dog is still growling at me. I reach my hand down to let him sniff, and he snaps at my fingers.

“Corky, stop.”

“I have to get home before my mom does,” I say.

“What's stopping you?” Tracy says. “Corky, shut up.” She holds the dog away from me with her foot. He's really snarling now, baring long yellow teeth.

“Thanks,” I say, holding up the bag of chips. I back away from Corky onto the stoop and am relieved when the screen door closes.

I don't know exactly how long it will take me to get home, walking from up here on the ridge. The days are getting a little shorter. Already the sun's falling behind the palisades, turning the gorge gray under a bright swath of sky. Then I remember the flyer, and I'm crossing back over the yard, knocking on the frame of the screen door. Tracy appears with a cigarette in her mouth. “This is for you,” I say through the screen, and when she cracks the door, I thrust a flyer into her hand, then turn and walk away fast, before Corky breaks free.

 

That night, over the dinette, Phoebe informs me of what I already know: the shirt I'm wearing, like every other shirt I own, is too tight to keep wearing much longer. She pulls it away from my chest, trying to stretch the fabric, and I wince when she lets go and it stretches back against my nipples.

“Does that hurt?”

“Not really.”

“I don't know what ‘not really' means,” she says. “How many days since your period?”

“Since it started or ended?”

“Started.”

I think back. “Twenty,” I say. “Twenty-one.”

“You have to keep track, Charmaine. But it might not make much difference. I've never been regular.” Phoebe brings her hands to either side of her face and draws her cheeks down with her fingertips, dragging her lower eyelids open to reveal the red rims underneath. I look away.

“Go sit on the toilet and take your shirt off.” She drops her hands, and the skin on her face reshapes itself slowly.

“What? Why?”

“You heard me. I'll be in in a second.” Phoebe stands and starts running water in a pan. I fold the dinette against the wall, stalling. She puts the pan on the burner and turns it on.

“What's that for?”

“Go take your shirt off,” she says. “Bra too.”

“Nothing hurts,” I say. “I don't need you to do anything.”

“Charmaine, I don't have the energy for a fight.”

I step into the bathroom and pull the accordion door shut behind me.

“Leave that,” Phoebe says, but I keep it shut. I sit down on the lid of the tiny toilet and peel my shirt off. It's the nipples, sore against everything, but it's also the rest of my breasts: they're heavy, and there's a tightness, like whatever's inside is growing too fast for my skin. When I release my bra, it's only a small relief.

I listen to the water starting to boil. After a time, Phoebe switches off the burner. Then she is there, collapsing the accordion door with her foot, a dishtowel in one hand and the pot of hot water in the other.

I cover my breasts with my hands.

“Don't be melodramatic,” Phoebe says. She settles the pot into the sink and dips the dishcloth in it. “Take away your hands.”

I won't. She stirs the dishtowel into the hot water, then picks it out gingerly. She wrings it out over the pot, sucking in little gasps of air, it's so hot on her fingers. Steam rises.

“Take away your hands,” she says again, crouching in front of me. “This will help.”

“But nothing hurts,” I say, keeping my hands where they are. “I don't feel anything.”

“At your stage of development, calcium builds up in your breasts if you don't use compresses.”

“Calcium?”

“Calcium, caffeine,” she says. “All kinds of things.” She pulls my left hand away and then she is touching me, probing the underside of my breast with her fingers. “Hard as a rock. We need to break up some of that mass.”

“Stop,” I say. “Please. The mass is okay.” I don't even know what she's talking about—a mass.

She covers my left breast with the dishtowel. It's so hot that tears come to my eyes.

“I can do it,” I say, blowing out air through my teeth. “Let me do it myself.” But then she begins to knead my breast with her fingers, through the towel, and I want her to stop. I want her to stop. I long again for tessering, like in the book, disappearing into another time and space. Titus has been approaching the bathroom with curiosity, and now he sits carefully outside the narrow doorway, watching.

While she does this, Phoebe stares into the mirrored medicine cabinet over the sink. “I'm getting old, Charmaine.” She takes away the cloth and again probes my naked left breast, which has turned a deep pink from the heat. I press my teeth together. I don't want to look at her this close up while she's doing such a thing. “If you didn't know how old I was,” she says, “what would you guess? Thirty?”

“I can do the other one,” I say, clapping my left hand over my left breast, wishing I had an extra hand to reach for my shirt. “Thank you. Thank you for showing me.”

“Stop it,” she says. She pries my right hand away from my right breast. The bathroom is just big enough for our bodies. She is breathing in my exhales, and I am breathing in hers. Even the words of my prayer don't have room to surface in here, though I close my eyes and rummage around for them, desperately, in my head.

She holds the hot, wet towel to my right breast and pushes my hand away from the left one. Now she is squeezing both at the same time, harder and harder. “I think I could pass for thirty, still,” she says. And then something weird happens, because I can still feel her hands and I can still hear her, but it's as though there's a bunch of parts of me, like there are parts of the body of Christ, and all the parts of me are climbing up my neck and into my head, like water's rising and we have to move to higher ground. We're all crowded up there together, watching what's happening right underneath our chin. Now I can pray again, but I am careful not to move my lips.

“When you see your father tomorrow, I don't want you to be alarmed,” she says, and it's as if the words come at me from far, far below.

I make a small sound in the back of my throat.

“It's been an interesting couple of weeks. He looks a little different from the last time you saw him. He's a little puffy from the new medication. In funny places, like his neck. And he doesn't have quite the same . . .” She takes her right hand off my breast and flaps it around her mouth as if encouraging the right word to come forth. “I don't know, Charmaine. He's just not quite the same. They've got him on something very strong. I just want you to be prepared.”