The Cotton Queen (5 page)

He said it lightly, friendly, jokingly. Still, I was suddenly very conscious of my bare feet and the thin nightgown beneath my chenille robe.

Burl crossed the room and began opening the cabinets. “What have you got to drink in this place?” he asked.

“I...uh...milk,” I answered. “And orange juice, I think.”

I moved to the fridge to check.

“I never took you for a teetotaler,” he said.

“I’m not. I mean, I don’t really drink, but it’s just because I was a teenager and now I’m a mother. Tom would sometimes have a beer on a hot summer day. But I don’t have anything here, now.”

Burl nodded, yet he was clearly annoyed.

“Would you like some orange juice?”

“No.”

His reply was sharp.

“Sorry,” he said almost immediately. “I just wanted us to have a little drink together, try to get to know each other a little better.”

“That would be nice,” I said. “Maybe after the baby is born we can have a little welcome home party or something. It would give Mary Jane a nice break and it would be fun for Laney, too.”

He chuckled. The sound was somehow unpleasant.

“The party I have in mind wouldn’t need my wife or your daughter.” He moved to stand right in front of me. “I’m thinking of a little private party for two.”

I stepped back.

“Burl, I don’t know what you’re thinking but...”

“I’m thinking about you,” he said, his voice velvet soft. “I’m lying in that room over there, and there’s just a wall between your bed and mine. It’s just a wall and I’m thinking I can almost hear you breathing.”

He was so close I could feel his words against my skin. I stepped away again, this time finding my back flat against the refrigerator. I knew what was going on now, I thought. He was making a pass. I could slap his face, but that would ruin any friendship we might have forever. So I pretended not to understand.

“These walls are thin, but I doubt you can hear me breathing.”

I tried to edge away from him. He grasped me around the waist.

“I need you, baby,” he growled out. “I’m aching, aching for you. And I know you’re over here, all empty and needing a man.”

“Let me go, Burl.”

“You don’t want me to,” he said. “You’ve been telling me every way except plain English. Shaking your butt at me night and day. I’m here now, baby, and I’m going to give it to you real good.”

“Let me go!” I insisted. “I’m telling you in plain English now, let me go.”

“You want to fight a little bit? Okay, that’s fun. I like a woman who’s a little sassy.”

I was annoyed. Burl was disgusting and obtuse. It was clear to me that our friendship was irrevocably spoiled. That disappointed and aggravated me. Unfortunately my sheltered, safe life made me unprepared for anything worse.

“Stop it!”

He grabbed my breast as he pressed me against the refrigerator. I slapped at his hands. He just laughed and ground his pelvis against mine.

“You love it, baby,” he said.

He tried to kiss me. I turned my head away.

I was struggling now. I was desperately trying to push him away. He grabbed my hands and held them both in one as he got the other inside my robe, pawing me. I was surprised at how strong he was, how easily he could control me. I began fighting back in earnest. Unable to move my arms, I clawed at him. I aimed a kick at his groin. He brought up his own knee to block my attack. Left with nothing else, his face was close to my own, I sunk my teeth into his cheek.

That made him mad. He cursed vividly and then hauled back and slapped me so hard I saw stars.

“Stupid bitch! This could have been fun for you, but I’m having you either way.”

He picked me up as if I were nothing more than a rag doll and slammed me facedown on the kitchen table. I was momentarily stunned as he pushed my nightgown up around my neck. But when he began jerking down my underpants, I grabbed for them. He held my wrists together at the small of my back. I kicked, I struggled, I fought. He parted my legs with his own. He controlled me easily and he laughed at my powerlessness.

“I’ll scream,” I threatened. “I’ll scream, Burl, and it’s like you said. These walls are thin. Mary Jane will hear me.”

“Yeah, and what’s Mary Jane going to do?” he asked me. “I’ll tell you what happens if you scream. If you scream your little girl comes running in here to see Mommy getting fucked on the kitchen table. She’ll remember it every day of her life. Go ahead, scream your head off, bitch.”

I didn’t. I thought of Laney. I bit down on my lip. I held my scream. I held my breath. I had only had sex with Tom. It had been sweet and tender, thrilling and satisfying. This was not that. This was mean and ugly and frightening. I laid my cheek against the yellow Formica and I stared across the table. Willing my mind to another place, I focused my attention on the salt and pepper shakers, two little ceramic kids, the smiling icons of a canned soup company. Two happy silent children who watched as he forced himself inside my body again and again and again, greedy, abusive, debasing, until he spilled his seed inside, making me filthy for all time.

L
ANEY

I
KNEW
THE
minute that Babs woke me up that something was wrong. Maybe it was the sight of her bruised cheek and swollen lip. Or maybe it was the urgency in her voice.

“Get dressed,” she said. “Get dressed as quick as you can.”

“Okay.”

Normally I got at least a couple of “time to wake up” announcements before I went in and sat at the table, leisurely coming to life over cornflakes and juice. Never was I rousted out of bed to put clothes on immediately. Probably out of sheer novelty I obeyed without question.

“What happened to your face?” I asked.

She reached up and touched it, almost surprised, as if she hadn’t noticed.

“I fell,” she said and then added slowly, “I was carrying some boxes and I fell.” It was weird the way she said it, as if she’d just thought of it. But I didn’t comment. She’d walked out of the room and I had more immediate concerns to distract me.

Babs had laid out my clothes at the foot of my bed, a madras plaid button-down shirt and dungarees. Why was I wearing dungarees? I always wore dresses to my kindergarten class. All the girls did. What kind of day was it going to be in dungarees? I went out to ask my mother.

The question disappeared from my lips. The whole house was in chaos. Everything we owned was stacked up, packed up or stashed in brown paper sacks.

“What’s going on?”

“We’re moving.”

“Huh?”

“We’re moving out,” Babs said. “I don’t like this place anymore.”

“Are we going back to Uncle Warren and Aunt Maxine’s?”

“No.”

“Am I going to school today?”

“No.”

“What about breakfast?”

“I’ll get you something later,” she said. “Now you have to help me carry all of this stuff out and get it into the car.”

“Why don’t we get someone to help us.”

“We don’t need anyone to help us.” Her words were stern, almost angry.

“Okay, Mama,” I responded meekly.

Her voice softened, too. “Get your shoes and socks on while I pack up the things in your room.”

There was no place to sit, every chair was covered with stuff. I sank down to the floor and did as I was told. I could hear her packing in my room. It was not the careful, thoughtful sorting of our things that she’d done at Uncle Warren and Aunt Maxine’s. She was just throwing things into grocery sacks as fast as she could. She had my entire room emptied by the time I’d tied my Keds.

“There’s not going to be room to take everything,” she said to me. “We’ll load up as much as we can in the car and the rest we’ll just leave.”

That didn’t concern me very much. I assumed that the stuff we’d be leaving would be her stuff. Towels or dishes or things like that, things that weren’t that important. When I saw some of my toys were in the throwaway pile, I didn’t go along uncomplaining.

“This is mine, Mom,” I pointed out, as I dragged my big plastic shape sorter out of the discards.

“It’s a baby toy,” Babs told me. “You don’t play with baby toys. You’re a big girl now.”

She was right. Somehow it didn’t make any difference.

“I like all my toys,” I said. “Why should I leave them here? We brought them from California. We kept them at Aunt Maxine’s.”

“There’s no room for them in the car,” she answered.

“We should borrow Uncle Warren’s trailer,” I told her.

“You don’t need them. We’re only taking what we need,” she said. “We’re leaving them here. And that’s final.”

“But Mama...”

“Don’t argue.”

Her tone was firm, harsher than necessary. So I kept further complaints to myself, but I wasn’t happy about it. I continued to sulk even as Babs readied the last of the boxes near the kitchen door.

“Now I want you to be very quiet,” she said.

“Quiet? Why?”

“We don’t want to wake Mary Jane,” she said. “She’s probably still asleep and we don’t want to wake her.”

That seemed a little strange. I thought adults were always up early in the morning. But I figured it had something to do with having a baby and going to the hospital.

Babs opened the door slowly and propped it with the trash can. She glanced at me and put a finger to her lips as a reminder. We began carrying boxes out to the car.

After the novelty of the first load, it wasn’t all that much fun. It was hard and boring and my mother insisted that we do it all as if we were walking on tiptoes. I couldn’t carry very much. Babs had to do most of the work. It took a half-dozen trips at least. We filled the trunk up first and then the backseat. She crammed the last of it into the floorboard of the front seat passenger side.

“Go shut the door,” she told me. “The rest we’re going to leave. Hurry! And be quiet!”

Those two commands seemed contradictory to me, but I tried. I made one quiet walk through the home that I was just beginning to feel was my own. I grieved for the things we were leaving behind. The floor lamp that we’d had in the house in California. The rocking horse that had been in my room since babyhood. All my summer clothes, including my swimsuit with the yellow daisies on it. I felt sad and a little lost as I wandered among my now discarded possessions.

Suddenly my mom was there.

“Laney, what are you doing? Come on, get in the car now!” she growled at me through clenched teeth.

I hurried to obey.

I raced through the house and into the kitchen. Babs was right behind me. She moved the trash can to shut the door. I glanced inside it and saw my SoupKids, salt and pepper shakers. Aunt Maxine and I had collected twenty-five can labels to get them. When we mailed them in, I’d licked the envelope. I wasn’t leaving them behind.

“Don’t touch those!” Babs actually yelled.

I was so startled I dropped the salt one on top of the pepper, chipping the little hat.

“Oh, Mama, it broke,” I whined.

“Leave it, it’s trash,” my mom said, her voice adamant.

Just then we heard noise outside. It wasn’t a scary noise or an unusual noise, simply the sound of someone moving around outside. Babs paled visibly, her eyes wide in fear.

“Babs? What’s going on?” I heard Mary Jane’s voice from the yard.

My mother immediately stepped out onto the back porch.

“I’m sorry, we didn’t mean to wake you.”

“Wake me? What are you talking about, I’ve been up for hours.”

I was alone for only one short moment in the duplex kitchen. I glanced down into the trash again at my salt and pepper shakers. They were mine. Mine! Babs had no right to throw them away like they were hers. I jerked them out of the trash and stuffed each into a front jeans pocket only an instant before my mother stepped back into the kitchen and grabbed me by the arm.

“We’ve got to go,” she said. The directive seemed as much for her as me.

“I don’t understand,” Mary Jane said as my mom hurried me across the lawn. “What do you mean you’re leaving?”

“Something’s come up,” Babs told her. “We’ve got to go.”

“Something came up? Between last night and this morning?” Mary Jane didn’t seem to believe it. “What about Laney’s school? Should I still pick her up this afternoon?”

“She won’t be going back to that school.”

That statement stopped me in my tracks.

“I’m not going back to my school?”

Babs didn’t answer, she hurried me even more forcefully. When she got the car door open, she actually picked me up and sat me inside.

“Where will you be?” Mary Jane continued. “How will I contact you?”

There was an instant of speechless hesitation on my mother’s part and then she responded decisively.

“We’re going back to California,” she said.

“What?” The incredulous response was spoken by Mary Jane and me both.

“Some of Tom’s friends have found me a great job,” she continued. “But I’ve got to hurry out there. I’ll call you when I get an address.”

“It’s all so sudden, too sudden,” Mary Jane said. “You were going to help me get to the hospital.”

The last sounded almost accusing.

“If Burl can’t get here to pick you up, maybe you should call a cab,” Babs said.

“A cab?”

“Look, I’ve got to go,” my mom told her. “I should have been out on the road at dawn.”

“Okay, okay.” Mary Jane’s voice was quiet, almost forlorn.

My mom stopped then, next to the car and gave Mary Jane a little hug. “Don’t worry,” she said. “You’ll be fine, everything will be fine. I’ve got to get on the road immediately. I’ll call you, I promise.”

A minute later Babs was behind the steering wheel, backing out of the driveway. As soon as we were turned forward in the street, she hit the gas, a little too hard and we squealed away from the duplex and Mary Jane.

“We’re going back to California?” I asked.

“No,” my mother replied.

I was stunned to think that Babs had lied to Mary Jane. But I didn’t question her about that, my curiosity about my future was a much stronger concern.

“Where are we going?”

She glanced over at me, clearly annoyed. “I don’t know that yet,” she said. “We’re just leaving.”

I didn’t think that could be true. She rushed so forcefully ahead, driving faster than usual and barely pausing at stop signs. We raced through parts of town that were completely unfamiliar. The wind that blew inside my window all new and never seen. The truth of her statement became clear when she pulled into an empty church parking lot. She turned off the ignition and laid her head down on the steering wheel.

“What are we doing?”

“Shhhh!” she answered. “I’m trying to think.”

I kept quiet, but her thinking took a very long time. Finally I got my schoolbag out and began to sort through my things. I found some chalk and got out of the car and drew a hopscotch on the concrete. I was really good at hopping. I could even make the circle turnaround on one foot without losing my balance. Nobody at my kindergarten was that good and some of the girls in first grade couldn’t do it. I entertained myself with the game. That was okay for a while, but eventually, I got tired of playing all by myself. I wished I was at my school. It was probably recess by now. All the kids would be having fun. I couldn’t believe that I would never go back there. That couldn’t really happen, I assured myself. Then I remembered our house in California, my sidewalk, my neighbors. One day it was there and the next it was all gone forever. Yesterday I had friends and went to school. And today I was stuck in an empty parking lot. I didn’t like being alone, but I didn’t get back into the car.

Babs was crying now. It wasn’t the little tears of a skinned knee or a broken toy. She was wailing as if my dad had died all over again. I didn’t know what to do. So I didn’t do anything. I sat down next to the car, leaned my back against the wheel and waited for it to pass. I pulled my salt and pepper shakers out of my pockets. I felt a little bit guilty about having them. I’d never really disobeyed so completely. But still, I was so glad I’d saved them. They were smiling up at me. The one with the broken hat and the one that was fine, they both were smiling, happy to be with me. They were my friends, I decided. My always cheerful, always available friends. From now on, whenever they were with me, I was never alone.