The Right Thing (19 page)

I've known this a long time, it seems. I shift uncomfortably in my seat, the unwelcome understanding coming home to roost like pigeons on a ridgepole at sunset: one at a time, each with a soft thud of inevitability. I'm cringing as I think about how we live together, thoughts I usually avoid. Of course Du never would have agreed to let me take this trip—he barely lets me go shopping on my own. It's Du who supervises the dinner menus, signs off on the gardening, consults Myrtistine on every damned little thing around the house, keeps me on his radar whenever we're at a function or even just out for drinks with another couple. No, I think, Du Sizemore doesn't trust me at all.

What's most disturbing about this knowledge is the fact that I already knew it.

More subdued now, I let Ted talk and drive, two things he really is good at. He keeps it all light and humorous, thank God, because I'm sorely distracted. After another sixty miles, we've crossed the state line and I find I'm hungry—no, ravenous—only to discover that Troy Smoot has surreptitiously nosed open Bette's bag of snickerdoodles and eaten them all, every crumb.

“It's okay,” I say. Another random eating episode averted. I know I ought to feel relieved, but instead, I'm ready to hunt through the jumble on the truck's floor for anything, even just a leftover pack of Wendy's saltines. I don't think I've ever been this hungry in my life.

“You sure?” Ted asks. “I can stop.”

“I've had plenty already today. I'll live.”

“Not if you don't start eating,” Ted says. “Seriously. You're one beautiful lady, but you're way too skinny. If you were a horse, I'd worm you. There's a truck stop at the Fernwood exit. I'm going to buy you a ham sandwich and then take you on to Jackson.”

And like that I hear Starr, in the passenger seat of the BMW.
You probably have no idea how men look at you—like they want to buy you a ham sandwich, then take you home.

Starr. All over again, I experience the gash in my utterly unfounded trust. I lose it then, bursting into loud messy sobs that seem to rip their way out of my chest. I can't stop them either because, like seeds, these tears were planted this morning in the rose garden when I gave up on the baby, they took root when Starr rubbed out the two little girls drawn in her breath on the car's window, and they've been waiting for their chance to explode into the light ever since I learned she'd abandoned me. I
trusted
her. She was my best friend once, a long time ago, but how could I have been so gullible? Tears are all I have left.

And it appears these upstart tears mean to have their way with me, and so they do, all the way to the off-ramp, all the way to the dark edge of the parking lot behind the Fernwood Travel Plaza, all the way—inevitably it seems—to Ted's arms again.

“Hey, baby,” he murmurs into my hair. “Hey, now. It's going to be okay.” He strokes my back, soothing me as he might a nervous horse or a worn-out child. I'm getting the front of his T-shirt wet, but I can't quit crying.

“You'll be home before you know it, sweetheart,” Ted says.

I sob. “That's the worst part of this—home.”

Ted tucks my head into the hollow between his neck and broad shoulder. “Well,” he says lightly, “isn't that the place where they have to take you in?”

“You have no idea. You have no idea how awful it is, how awful I am. All my life, I've tried to do the right thing, but the right thing always seems to turn into the wrong thing somehow.” The words pour from my mouth like a busted faucet in my rush to get it out. “If I can't get back in time tonight, everyone is going to be giving me that
look
again and I can't stand it, I can't take being a fuck-up of the highest order anymore. It's always been that way for me. Why is it so damned hard? Why am I always such a mess?”

Feeling emptied out, I come up for air at last, wiping my eyes, but Ted is warm, Ted smells wonderful. Ted feels too good for me to move back to my side of the front seat, so I rest my head on his shoulder and come closer.

He kisses the top of my head, his lips just barely brushing my hair, but I feel it. “You seem just fine to me, Annie,” he says. “For what it's worth, I think you did the right thing by a friend and she let you down. You can't be responsible for the whole world, honey.”

That's when I really cut loose crying. It's that word.
Responsible
.

Ted scoops me up like a load of caterwauling laundry, and I instinctively wind my arms around his neck. He opens the door, carrying me the short distance to the back seat of the truck and gently sets me down in the heap of horse blankets with Troy Smoot. Alarmed at this noisy interruption of his nap, the dog shakes himself and leaps into the front seat. I roll to my side and curl up in a miserable ball in the midst of the blankets, still warm from Troy, crying myself into hysterics. The rosebush voice, strangely on the same team as I am for once, is crying, too. Then the slick fabric of the horse blankets rustles as Ted climbs in the back, shuts the door, lies across the seat and takes me in his arms again. Ah, I breathe. That's better. Gradually the tears slow. I catch my breath while he holds me close.

“Hush, baby,” Ted says softly. “I've got you.” I'm quieting now, aware of his body pressed against my own. I wipe my eyes and look up at him.

“Ted?” I ask. “What are we doing?”

He sighs, shifting so that there's the barest space between us. “Getting to know each other better, I think,” Ted says, his voice thoughtful. “I've been doing most of the talking so far. Tell me something about you, Annie,” he says. “Tell me about something that's important to you.” His hand is on my hip, just resting there, but I feel the warm weight of every finger, the solid breadth of his palm, and for the first time that I can recall, for once I come to understand. This time, in this place, I already know what's important. I know what's important to
me
.

“Not yet,” I whisper. “Not yet.”

This time, the kiss isn't an accident. No, and this time I slide my hand to the front of his jeans, closing around the long, hard length of him. I press my lips to the surprised groan deep in his throat. Ted pulls me closer, his breath running rough.

“Are you sure, Annie?” he says, low-voiced and hoarse.

I am.

A
fter Starr left the first time, the new year of 1964 came like a cut-off notice from the electric company.

Within the first week after the Christmas holidays, my name found itself figuring prominently in Miss Bufkin's green ledger of problem students. I missed Starr so much I couldn't bring myself to play with Lisa Treeby or any of the other, more tractable children my grandmother tried to force upon me. I was such a consummate brat because they weren't Starr: “accidentally” sitting on Lisa's Kenmore playhouse, collapsing it beyond repair (she cried), taking Laddie's Christmas money in a game of poker with the Old Maid cards where I made up the rules and so couldn't lose (he cried), cutting the real human hair off of Julie's Madame Alexander doll (she smacked me). Among many other infractions, I was so bad that everybody's parents complained and that put a stop to that. My grandmother was livid, but for once she couldn't make everybody do her bidding and have me back over to play. No, I was anathema, and the word got around.

But the weeks passed and I eventually got used to the isolation, to having no best friend. In time, the intolerable pain of missing Starr faded but, feeling obscurely vengeful and wanting to make a point, I turned again to the forbidden company of the Bad Kids. No matter how often I was punished for my part in their exploits, I sneaked, lied, and hung out with them anyway. My mother despaired of me during the dark days of that long winter.

Like all seasons, though, the winter ended. Finally summer vacation rolled around, and true to winter's promise, life had become a slow-motion disaster epic from which I seemed to learn nothing. Even so, when Joel Donahoe tried to put my eye out that June, by then I was eight years old and should have known better. Buddy Bledsoe had been shipped off to Boy Scout camp again for the summer, and so Joel obligingly filled the miscreant vacuum to become the baddest of the Bad Kids in the neighborhood. That alone should have been proof no good could come of us playing circus together in our garage during a rare, unsupervised afternoon.

“Hold still, Annie,” Joel warned. He was balanced on one foot, my mother's sewing scissors in his hand cocked and poised to let fly. My back was pressed flat against the stucco wall, arms outstretched in a classic posture of a knife thrower's girl-target. Joel let fly, and the sharp point of the scissors struck my forehead just above my left eyebrow, then fell to the garage's cement floor with a clatter.

“Ow!” A warm trickle flowed into my eye. It didn't hurt yet, but I couldn't see for the blood. “Methyl Ivory,” I screamed, running for the back door and the pillowed fortress of her dark arms. “Joel Donahoe put my eye out!”

“I didn't do it.” Joel's yelp was already far away, past the ligustrum hedge separating our yard from Dr. Thigpen's house next door.

That summer, my mother was playing a lot of bridge. When she got home and saw the bloody Band-Aid over my left eye, she didn't wait to hear the whole story. Her face assumed that some one's-go nna-p ay-for-this expression indicating the end of that someone's life. Not even stopping to take off her hat, she marched out the wide front doors in search of Joel Donahoe, stomping down the steps, and across the St. Augustine in her spike-heeled pumps, white gloves fisted, her gray silk shantung skirts billowing gun smoke. From the homeland of Methyl Ivory's vast lap, I contemplated the death of Joel Donahoe with a self-righteousness reserved only for the young and naïve. Vengeance, I was sure, would soon be mine.

Five minutes later, my mother banged back through the front door, down the long center hall, and into the kitchen, a Fury in a pillbox hat. The hem of her skirt was covered in grass stains.

“The little hooligan got away,” she snapped. “Methyl Ivory! What were you doing all day? How could you let Annie play with that, that little . . .
weasel?
”

Methyl Ivory was imperturbable before my mother's wrath, but I felt her stiffen. Her voice composed, she said, “Annie s'posed to stay in the backyard, where's I can keep an eye on her, ma'am. I plenty busy cleaning this house, cooking dinner, doin' the laundery.”

Sensing things were not going my way, I commenced a noisy demonstration of sniveling victimhood. Methyl Ivory gave me a discreet push, and I slid off her lap into disgrace, my bare feet coming to rest on the cool linoleum. A tear plopped wetly on my big toe.

“That's it,” my mother announced in disgust. She yanked off her gloves. Rummaging in her purse, she fished out her cigarettes and fired one up with a snap of her lighter. “If it's not one thing, Mercy Anne Banks, it's another,” she said, expelling smoke in a furious stream. “Before you lose an eye or end up in the back of a police car, I'm sending you to stay with Aunt Too-Tai in the country. You've
got
to learn to be more responsible.”

“But I don't want to go to Aunt Too-Tai's,” I squalled. “It's boring. And she, she . . . doesn't have air-conditioning!” Rattling window units had been installed late last summer when my father had finally saved enough money to get the house—a big old Greek Revival relic—air-conditioned. This summer, we would no longer be too embarrassed about the box-fans on the floor to invite people over for cocktails. The air-conditioning seemed like an excellent reason not to be banished.

“Too bad, missy,” my mother announced, looking grim. She stabbed her cigarette out in the sink. “I'll go write her a letter right this minute.” Aunt Too-Tai lived so far out in the country, she didn't have a telephone either.

My summer vacation was going to be ruined.

Awaiting Aunt Too-Tai's reply, my mother made sure that I was practically chained to the rusted swing set in the backyard for the duration. Joel and the other Bad Kids leaned over the fence, daring me to climb out and join them on expeditions of thievery and random vandalism.

“We're going down to the creek,” Joel taunted. The creek was an enormously attractive drainage ditch across Fortification Street, past the old garage above the railroad tracks. It was full of interesting household debris and deformed frogs: just this past spring we'd found half a dozen wriggling tadpoles with two heads. “Too bad you can't come.” Joel sniggered. Then he lobbed a brown paper bag over the fence. “Here's something to play with, crybaby.” I glared at him from my perch on the top of the slide.

“Joel Donahoe, I hate you,” I shouted.

After the Bad Kids left, though, I slid down the scalding metal chute and ambled over to investigate the bag. It was full of dog shit, probably the product of King, Dr. Thigpen next door's German shepherd. I dropped it in the grass in my rush to report this latest infamy to Methyl Ivory. She was in the living room, watching
As the World Turns
on the black-and-white TV while she ironed my daddy's shirts.

“Methyl Ivory, Joel Donahoe threw dog shit in our backyard,” I complained. “Can't I go beat him up?” I held up my fists like Cassius Clay. “I'll teach him not to be so mean.”

“Don't you say shit.” Methyl Ivory tested the iron with a finger-flick of water from the tall, condensation-beaded glass on the ironing board beside her. The iron hissed.

“You said it,” I pointed out.

“Talk like that why you going to the country. You best stay inside till you mama get home from the bridge party.” I was speechless at her indifference. How could she not understand that this salvo couldn't be ignored? If I was going to be gone for weeks this summer, who was going to defend our home and our honor? I had a vision of stinking brown bags in heaps all over the backyard. “Go on now, read one of your books,” Methyl Ivory advised me.

“But Joel Donahoe—”

“That boy gone end up in the 'formatory 'stead of the work farm, he keep at it.” Serenely sure of her predictions as ever, she added, “You gone have a good time with your old auntie this summer 'fore you come home and go to third grade. All kinds of chirren'd love it out there. Didn't I hear your mama say Miss Too-Tai got a horse for you to ride?”

I folded my arms and sniffed, refusing to be mollified. It wasn't a horse; it was a mule, and Aunt Too-Tai's mule, Bob, was even more ancient than she was. Besides, the whole barn area had been off-limits to me whenever the family had made the pilgrimage to Chunky to visit: my mother wanted me to keep my company clothes clean, and Daddy worried about hookworms.

At any rate, the lingering hope of appealing to my father for relief was utterly extinguished that evening when he went outside to light the barbeque and stepped on the paper bag.

 

Late in the day the next Saturday afternoon, I was spying from behind Dr. Thigpen's oak tree as a dusty black Chevrolet rolled into the driveway. My great-aunt Theodosia Imogene sat in the front seat. Long before my time, my grandmother Isabelle had nicknamed her Tootie. When their mother told her to stop it, she called her little sister Too-Tai instead. Great-Grandmother Gooch had wisely let that particular dog sleep in peace, probably knowing from experience with the awful Isabelle that things could only get worse.

Aunt Too-Tai got out of the passenger side in her bib overalls and men's work shoes. She adjusted the wide-brimmed straw hat on her head and walked up the steps to the front door. Her farm man, George, stayed with the car.

I'd seen George before, of course, but I'd never heard him say anything. He was the oddest man, taller than my daddy, with long, skinny flamingo legs that seemed like they should bend backward at the knee. Unlike a flamingo, though, George was black, a black that was almost blue. His hair was a curling, steel-wool silver, but most fascinating of all was the white-veined scar twisting his full upper lip, winding in a mysterious serpentine to his left nostril. I'd imagined he'd caught it in one of the savage-looking machines piled up in my aunt's barnyard. Sidling closer to the car in shameless voyeurism, I stared at the scar while George pretended I wasn't gawking at him. Daddy lugged my little cardboard suitcase and box of books down the steps. George unfolded like a stepladder from the front seat and arranged my worldly goods in the cavernous trunk while my parents and Aunt Too-Tai discussed the terms of my exile.

“Make her wear shoes,” Daddy stated. “The hog pen is awfully close to the house.”

“And keep an eye on her,” my mother broke in. Her eyes met mine with a fearsome promise. “You've
got
to be more responsible, Annie.”

But I was already planning on making a run for it. I eyed the Chevrolet. I could steal the car. I already knew how to drive, although after I'd run the Buick into the garage last summer I hadn't been able to practice since. I was certain I could join the French Foreign Legion once I got to Africa, but ten minutes later I was fuming in the back of the Chevrolet while George drove and Aunt Too-Tai smoked all the way to Chunky, some forty miles of two-lane road from home.

 

After my dreadful behavior since Starr left, responsibility was a big theme that summer. Undaunted, though, on my first day of vacation I'd conducted a scientific inquiry: I put dead houseflies in the freezer ice cube trays and filled them with water so I'd have my own personal Ice Age specimens, timing the experiment with my late grandfather's gold pocket watch. When my daddy came home and went to make old-fashioneds, he discovered the watch atop a container of ice cream. Dr. Thigpen discovered the flies when he finished his old-fashioned and rattled the ice cubes to signal my dad for another round.

The summer was young, so over the course of the next week I'd gone on to set a fire in the barbeque pit with sticks from the backyard, using my mother's silver sandwich scissors to make s'mores with pilfered marshmallows; dye the Poseys' white poodle pink in a tin-tub bath infused with scarlet crepe paper; steal the entire block's mail from the boxes to play postman and, after it began to rain, leave every scrap of it—wedding invitations, bills, letters from the government, etc.—under the ligustrums. When in desperation my mother enrolled me in an unsuspecting playgroup in another, far-off neighborhood so as to keep me out of trouble, I told all the little girls it wasn't true, babies being born under piles of cabbage leaves in a gestational truck garden. Now everybody's command of the facts of life was clinically accurate thanks to my father's commitment never to lie to his child.

And concluding with the incident involving the off-limits scissors in the garage, this was all accomplished in seven days, a span of time nothing short of biblical considering the damage I'd done. Since these were the days before time-outs, I'd received seven spankings followed by seven lectures on responsibility. I should think before I acted. I should respect my parents' wish to live a peaceful life on Fairmont Street. Did I want to grow up to be a lady, or was I going to jail? Methyl Ivory's being inconvenienced wasn't mentioned at all, but she let me know about it just the same.

“Why you want to cut up, child? Don't you know I got the heart-flops?”

Summer in the country was the price of irresponsibility. I should have been reflecting on my behavior that long afternoon in the back of the Chevrolet, but the combination of Aunt Too-Tai's Pall Malls, the road, and strenuous unrepen-tance put me to sleep.

 

George must have carried me inside the house when we arrived because I woke early the next morning on a pallet beside Aunt Too-Tai's bed. I yawned and scratched, feeling grumpy as a damp cat, unwilling to get up and explore my new surroundings. The ceiling fan creaked overhead, pushing a tepid wash of air to ruffling the lace curtains, fluttering the hem of my aunt's nightdress hanging from a hook on the bedroom door. She was already risen and gone, as evidenced by her voice coming from through the open window from outside.

“Hand me that crescent wrench.” A clanging racket commenced. “Dammit, hold her steady.” Some large piece of machinery struggled to life with a series of barking coughs. I wandered to the window and stuck my head out into the day through the moon vine overtaking the side of the house. Aunt Too-Tai and George were beside a coffin-like, wheeled contraption containing a mess of gears, belts, and toothed cogs. The dew-covered tractor hitched to this mystery chugged blue exhaust into the brilliant eastern sky. The engine's growl covered my aunt's voice, but she was deep in a conversation with George. His hands were planted on his thin hips, George's scarred face dubious. He shook his head, and his mouth moved. My aunt leaned in to hear his reply, putting her hand on his shoulder. So George
could
talk, I thought, if he wanted to.