Allowing for thirty minutes of unfelt hugs at the graveside of
the grandmother who raised them, Bethann will be on her way from
South Georgia to South Florida with Holly--nineteen, but an adolescent mess--and
already in her mind she is turning around and taking back her offer to re-raise her
sister.
Passing before the casket at the flower-banked altar of the
little rural church, Bethann slips her left arm around Holly and she
presses all two-hundred-plus pounds of damp flesh into Bethann and moans.
Bethann feels her own face flush, a raw surge of sorrow in her chest,
tears misting her brown eyes. But Holly's broad face remains pale and
plastic, her slit gold eyes dry. Bethann walks her sister toward the
open door and the assorted friends and kin bunched there, relaxes her
hold on Holly's waist, but still she hovers hot and close. Her hair
is sheet white--she was a cute fat kid but now she is ugly, greedy,
mean.
Bethann has had just enough college psychology to dabble with
the theory that Holly can't help how she is, what she is, that their
mother having hung herself in jail and their daddy having died an
alcoholic are at least partly to blame for her behavior, that Holly's
problem--make that plural--is a reflection of all that and
reversible. Allowances must be made. But deep down, Bethann knows the
sweet old lady with the stern deathface has made allowances--the last
person in the world who would tolerate the stealing and lying and
using. The last person who loved Holly. Except for Bethann.
"Let's go," Bethann says and starts walking toward her Jeep
Wrangler in the sideyard of the white concrete-block church. She
doesn't look behind and half-hopes that Holly isn't following, but a
sidelong look at the dry grass lawn reveals Holly's bulk in shadow.
Same stalking shadow from as far back as Bethann can remember, up
until she left home two years ago for college in Miami, Florida.
The late sun is beaming down, glancing off the parked cars and
steaming her body beneath the navy blazer. She can smell the sunned
cloth mingled with the cut grass and scorch of autumn. She shrugs the
blazer down over her shoulders and shucks one sleeve and then the
other from her long thin arms. Then slings it over her right
shoulder, still walking. Hearing behind her Holly's pointy-toed girly
shoes skimming the grass. Won't pick up her feet. Symptom one, of
many, of her general slouchiness. Or maybe her fear of leaving the
only place, the only people, she's ever known. Bethann would like to
look back, to see if those people are watching her go. Watching them
both go. But she doesn't.
When she gets to the red Wrangler, she opens the door with the
remote; she never can remember to test the luxury from a distance.
She gets in and tosses her blazer to the rear seat. Holly stands at
the other window. Her rattlesnake eyes fixed on Bethann through the
hot glass.
"It's open," Bethann says, arranging her tone, her face, her
feelings. She starts the truck and the air conditioner rips into the
packed heat and baking vinyl.
Holly opens the door and has to hike the hem of her green
straight skirt to step up. She laughs through her closed face and
hoists herself up and onto the seat. The big green jacket and dress
Bethann bought her to wear to the funeral looks wilted and sprung.
Her curled hair is a rats' nest.
Bethann takes the hand-drawn map from her pants pocket, unfolds
it and stares down at the web of roads that will take her to the
interstate. If she's lucky. She passes it to Holly. "You direct me,"
she says. Holly takes the paper in her left hand--not right, mind you-
-and fans her face. Her squiggly curls separate and wave. Bethann has
never thought about it before, but wonders whether Holly, who quit
school pregnant at fifteen, can even read. And suddenly the whole
project of re-raising Holly seems too much and too late. Impossible
and futile. Where to start? Can she even afford to feed Holly on her
puny salary from Electrolux? She tries to picture Holly working as
she had when she first went to Florida: peddling vacuum cleaners door
to door--without a car to haul the heavy, awkward demonstrator and
kit. She tries to picture Holly working for Bell South, or AT&T, but
her sister keeps popping up in a brown waitress uniform. McDonald's
or Shoney's. Holly, who won't even wash her own plate, as a waitress!
"Ought to be crossing the Florida line by six," says Bethann.
"You got a pool?" Holly fans. One fat ankle crossed over a fat
knee. Skirt up to her crotch. Dingy white panties. Shoes sideslung on
the floor.
"No pool," says Bethann. Holly can't help it.
"Cable?"
"No cable."
"What you do for fun?" That same laugh behind the board face.
"Study for next day's test."
"God!" Holly stares out the window at the pinewoods, at a sudden
field of cut hay with mammoth bolts lined along a fenceline. The sky
is leached, losing its blue hue.
"You won't be bored," says Bethann. "You'll be too busy to get
bored."
"What I'm scared of," says Holly--muffled laugh. Her speech is
spit-thick, and Bethann can tell she is dipping Skoal. She hands her
a foam cup from the holder on the center console.
"Here," she says.
Holly spits. Brownish saliva like ropy coffee.
"All of it," says Bethann.
Holly laughs. "You kidding."
"No I'm not."
"Mama's been letting me dip, long as I don't smoke." She spits
the damp wad of tobacco with a plunk into the cup, perfuming the
truck with a chicory scent, then buzzes down the window and lets the
wind have it. Brown spittle flies, freckling the rear window on that
side.
"Let's get this straight," says Bethann. "I can hardly afford to
feed myself and stay in school, so I won't be spending money on
cigarettes or Skoal." Or drugs, she thinks but doesn't say.
"Maybe I oughta stayed with Dad." Holly looks back as if to see
her grandfather.
Bethann steers the truck south at the next fork in the road,
shifts gears. "Seems like I recall him telling you he was through."
"Hell, Bethann! Heywood's always saying stuff like that. I
wrecked his old Caprice and he like to had a heart attack. Next week,
he hauled off and handed me his truck keys."
Bethann drives. Trying to sum up and categorize Holly's
condition. What makes Holly Holly. If only Bethann can label her, she
can handle her. For instance, Holly behaves like a spoiled teenager--
but she's almost adult-age and has hardly been spoiled; Holly hangs
with dopeheads because nobody decent will have anything to do with
her--but decent people hung with her before she became one of the
dopeheads; Holly is the product of backwoods education and hick
thinking--but that's not it altogether either. Soon Bethann is back
to the excuse--reason--of Holly being an orphan, raised by two strict
old people set in their ways. But Bethann herself has been raised by
the same people, in the same place, under the same circumstances. And
it scares the hell out of her to think that according to psychology
she may yet turn out like Holly.
Another dirt road past neat farmplaces, then woods, and soon
they are passing a Hardee's, an Amoco, following the blue arrow I-75
signs west with the twilight.
"You ain't hungry?" Holly holds to her fat shaved calf and jacks
her foot higher up on her thigh--a fat acrobat.
"Not yet." Bethann stares ahead as if she hasn't seen the
Hardee's.
A sharp left and they are on the entrance ramp to the
interstate. No backing up now. She merges with on-coming traffic. The
Jeep wobbles as a semi roars past on their left.
Holly gives the driver the finger and snorts.
A long silver car with a gray-haired couple glides alongside.
Holly gives them the finger and snorts.
"Try waving instead," says Bethann.
"You wave your ownself," says Holly.
"I'm not about to argue with you."
"Yeah, you will. Just like Mama and Heywood."
"Was that before or after you wrote 15,000 dollars worth of bad
checks on them?"
"That again!" Holly places both feet on the floor and the
chuckle rises from behind her face. "I'll just get out up here if
that's how it's gone be."
"I'm sorry, Holly. Truly, I am."
"Truly, I am. You ought hear yourself since you went to
college."
To make up for lugging along Holly's past, Bethann pulls off at
about the fifth exit since they got on the interstate. Making certain
enough time has lapsed since Holly threatened to get out. She motors
up to the STOP sign, then left to a Chic Filet.
"They ain't open on Sundays," Holly says.
"Oh, I forgot."
Holly chuckles as if to say, See how smart I am. Then, "Right
yonder's a Kentucky Fried." She points farther west up the highway
where the sun is melting down behind a billboard with three faded
young women bare to the printline over their breasts: WE BARE ALL.
Which Holly makes a big show of reading. The fact that she can read
does not, under the circumstances, hearten Bethann.
Inside the brilliant yellow and white restaurant with its
plastic aura, Holly orders the chicken dinner, extra crispy, with a
side of corn on the cob. Same yellow as the walls and Holly's hair
under the white lights. The green suit changes her skin to green.
Like a lizard, she picks up the color of her surroundings. Same as
she picks up the behavior of her friends. She's like a mirror
reflecting what passes before her.
She eats fast and much, stirring the silky brown gravy in the
well of her mashed potatoes while informing Bethann on the history of
"the Colonel." She makes him sound like a great statesman. She scoots
barefoot from the booth and skates to the counter for a refill of
Coke. As she sidles into the booth again, the lapels of her green
jacket fall open and Bethann can see the circle imprint of a Skoal
can in her bra.
"Better take that cup with you," she says and gets up and dumps
her snack box in the garbage can. Then heads for the restroom.
When she gets back, Holly isn't in the booth, and suddenly
Bethann panics. The blanching lights overhead make her feel so
disoriented she cannot sort the door on the left from the wall of
windows. That kind of feeling. Then she sees the huge green suit
through the plate glass: Holly just standing there, sipping Coke
through a straw without letup.
It is almost dark and the strip mall lights outshine the bruised
afterlight of sundown. Still that smelter of asphalt and exhaust
fumes. Bethann gets into the truck and feels lesson one is starting
over when Holly stands there waiting for her to unlock the unlocked
door.
###
Just past the Florida line, the rain of lovebugs changes into
real rain, but still the milky bursts of bugs stick to the windshield
like paste. The rain stops and starts, and Bethann, switching the
wipers from intermittent to slow, finally turns them off but keeps
her right hand on the lever to tap it into action as the rain
accumulates on the windshield. The sky ahead is racked with navy
clouds; overhead it is boggy-mud gray but moving. Ten miles farther
and the rain becomes steady and the headlights in the northbound
lanes bounce and glister on the wet gravel and Holly slurps at the
watered Coke on bottom of her cup. The wipers slap and grind, and the
confusion of sounds makes Bethann think that Holly is crying. But
when she looks over, Holly's face is sealed neon green in the dash
lights. Her pouty lips wrapped around the straw, cup with picture of
the Colonel in both hands.
"I thought you were crying," Bethann says.
Holly lets go of the straw, says, "How come?"
"Just sounded like it."
"I mean, how come would I be crying?"
"I guess because our mother just died."
"Grandmother. Besides, you know I don't cry."
"You could," says Bethann. "I mean, it's okay to cry. Sometimes
I wish you would cry."
"How come?" She buzzes the window down and pitches the cup out
into the rain, letting in the bitter smell of steamed oil and
dampened dust. The cup tumbles to the emergency exit, and rolls to
the ditch. A lit billboard with an undershot nimbus--Mickey Mouse,
like Jesus, in white.
"You got any crackers or gum?" Holly opens the glove
compartment.
"I'll help you lose weight if you want to." Lack of self-esteem
is a term so overused and misused it's been used up, but it applies
here. It has to be Bethann's weight."
"Yeah. Like I ain't tried."
"All you have to do is eat healthy and slow."
No answer. She lifts the map and the auto manual and pulls out a
red Bic lighter. "You smoke?"
"No."
"Pot. I bet you do pot. All them college kids smoke pot."
"I don't."
"But you got your faults and don't say you ain't, how come you
wearing them men's shoes."
Bethann can feel her small feminine feet lost inside the hard
lace-up shoes. "Now that you've brought it up, I'd appreciate it if
you'd quit telling my friends I'm a lesbian."
"I didn't say that."
"Yes you did. Amy told me she called and you said, `I bet you
didn't know Bethann's a lesbian.' For the record, I am not a lesbian,
but if I was, it wouldn't be anybody's business."
"Just my point." That insane laugh behind the face, a smug look.
"Well, you make your life other people's business by using them.
Bringing your dope buddies home and propping them up in front of Mama
and Daddy's big-screen TV. Playing it all night and wrecking the
house. Stealing Mama's jewelry and her dying of cancer."
"Now you blaming me for Mama dying." She scoots low, knees on
the dash. Arms crossed over her great jutted breasts.
Bethann swings the Jeep out and around a U-Haul truck, motors
ahead. Sucks in her breath and lowers her voice. "It's not your
fault; it's nobody's fault. Let's drop it."
"Quit bossing me then."
"I'm not, I'm trying to talk to you."
"Then shut up." Holly gazes at her warped face in the rain-
streamed window glass.
The rain has stopped and Bethann switches off the wipers, and
the truck is quiet as she passes the car ahead. Out of the slant of
her eye, she sees Holly straighten up and poke something into her
jacket pocket.
"All you had to do was ask. I would have given you the lighter."
And then in a shower of light at an exit, she spies the red Bic
on top of the map and manual. What has Holly taken? What was in the
glovebox? Nothing of value. Nothing important. But it's the
principle...
The rain starts again, silver slashes in the semi-dark. Bethann
has to lean forward and strain to see ahead. Light traffic and oily
pools that spatter like glass with each tire to hit them, then mend
like magic. Checkbook. A spare checkbook was in the glovebox. She
cuts her eyes at Holly, now doping her bottom lip with Skoal. When
she looks at the highway again she is staring underneath the back
bumper of a semi, so close that she can see the greasy axles, the
cave of shafts and crossframing. She brakes, the Jeep shimmies into
the left lane and curves toward the median, then halts facing north
and straddled a ditch of black water between slopes of weeds and
grass. A backlog of cursing and rattling and thunking joins in the
middle to meet Holly's overheated voice. "You trying to get us
killed?"
Bethann just sits with both arms on the steering wheel,
headlights glaring on the black water and wet grass and the
southbound traffic slowing to look. Rain tapping on the truck roof,
persistent and oddly peaceful.
"You don't care about anybody," Bethann shouts, not looking
because she can't bear to. "You didn't care about Mama and you don't
care about me." Then she looks, really looks. "You don't even care
about you. I don't know if you can care. So tell me, how the hell can
I drive with you robbing me and smarting off?"
"I'm out of here." Holly opens the door and gets out in the rain
and picks up her girly new pointy-toed shoes, slams the door and
starts walking up the median, Georgia bound. The truck smells hot,
like burning rubber.
Bethann watches through the wavering of tears and rain. Watches
till the broad green outfit and sheet white hair are out of sight.
And she is momentarily glad to no longer see her, hear her. She
starts to turn the Jeep onto the interstate, headed in the other
direction, but has to wait for a gap in traffic. Meantime, she wheels
the Jeep back into the exact middle of the median, astraddle the
water again, and starts juddering along. Soon, she sees Holly walking
ahead--head down and bare white feet high-stepping with purpose. Then
as if for Bethann's benefit, Holly steps to the edge of the
interstate and sticks out her right thumb. Moving her lips to say
"fuck you"--which Bethann has forbidden--when the cars slow but pass
her by.
Bethann pulls alongside, buzzes the window down, and yells
through the rain and the slisking of car tires, the trucks' roaring,
"Holly, come on. Get in here."
Holly keeps standing there, alone, pitiful, wet. Thumb out.
Bethann gets out of the truck. "Come on, get in the truck. Right
now, get in the truck." Her voice coming hoarse and thick and lost in
the burn of diesel and oil and asphalt.
One glance back from Holly and she steps out into the middle of
the glistening highway and stands and even begins to hop from right
to left foot, side to side and back, then both feet spread like some
kind of ritual dance, cars slowing and swerving, and Bethann standing
on the edge of the emergency lane, yelling, yelling, but Holly only
repeats the steps, like hopscotch, yes hopscotch. And then in the
lights of the final semi, Bethann sees the tears shine in those
rattlesnake eyes.