“I have a question for you,” Laurie said, as they were walking back up the lane. From time to time Eddie yelled a command. He was getting impatient.
Harmony was hoping the question wasn’t about Pepper; she didn’t feel up to any more questions about Pepper, not right then.
“How did you stand your mother?” Laurie asked. They were almost to the yard.
“I didn’t, I left,” Harmony reminded her.
“Do you think that’s why your brother makes obscene phone calls? To get back at her?” Laurie asked.
“Laurie, it’s probably because he can’t find a girlfriend,” Harmony said.
10.
Eddie insisted that his mother eat the first of the three perch he caught—he ate the other two. Then, as soon as supper was over, he fell asleep on the purple couch on the back porch, just as Harmony had, several hours earlier. As he slept he clutched a pocketknife that his grandfather had given him. It was a knife Sty had used for many years, and had sharpened many times—he used it to cut twine, or clean fish, or pare his toenails. The main blade of the pocketknife had worn thin, from many sharpenings. Eddie was very proud of the knife. Despite his grandmother’s frequent injunctions about cutting his finger off, he kept opening and closing the knife until he went to sleep.
Iggy, exhausted from a day of following Eddie around, slept at his feet; the turtle was in his shoebox beside the couch, but on the side near the screen, where his grandmother, with her poor eyesight, would be unlikely to find it and release it.
“Don’t let that child sleep on the porch,” Ethel said. “The night air’s bad for children—he’ll wake up with pneumonia and if he don’t get pneumonia a spider might bite him.”
“She’s cracked,” Sty said. “There’s no spiders on that porch.”
“You don’t know, you’re blind as a bat,” Ethel said.
“I’m blind as a bat?” Sty said, in surprise.
“Blind as a bat,” Ethel repeated. “If there was a tarantula spider crawling right on this table I doubt you’d even see it.”
“Mom, the night air’s the same air that’s out there in the daytime,” Harmony pointed out. Neddie and Pat had gone home while she was napping—now she missed them. Even though they bickered, she had gotten so used to having them around that not having them around made her feel strange. Anyway, arguing with her mother was a full-time job for three people; it was a good bit more than any one person could manage.
Laurie offered to do the dishes. She started clearing the table, but she made the mistake of yawning while she was carrying a couple of plates—Ethel, bad eyesight or not, saw the yawn.
“You’re sleepy, young lady, just leave them dishes, Harmony can clear the table,” Ethel said. “She hasn’t turned a hand in this kitchen in Lord knows how long.”
“Momma, that’s rude, Laurie just wanted to help,” Harmony said. “It’s only a few dishes.”
“Well, that girl’s sleepy, she might drop five or six plates,” Ethel said. “I can’t take the chance. Your father steals all my money, you know—he just takes my social security check right out of the mailbox and cashes it. I wouldn’t be able to replace this crockery if that girl broke it.”
“If I didn’t take your social security check out of the mailbox it’d sit there and never get cashed,” Sty said. “You haven’t been to the mailbox in years, and when you do go you won’t stick your hand in because you’re afraid of black widow spiders.”
“Black widow spiders make their home in mailboxes, everybody knows that,” Ethel said.
Laurie quietly cleared the table; Ethel didn’t notice.
“Ethel, that was excellent gravy,” Laurie said, referring to the cream gravy Ethel made with every meal. “I’m a little sleepy. If no one minds I’ll go to bed.”
“Don’t open your window no more than a crack, there might be bats flying around outside,” Ethel said. “Besides that, snakes climb walls.”
“Ethel, there’s a screen on the window,” Sty reminded her. “There’s screens on all our windows. Even if Laurie opened her window all the way to the top a bat couldn’t get in, much less a snake.”
“You don’t know everything, Sty,” Ethel said. “In fact, if you even still know anything, I don’t know what it is.”
Laurie kissed Harmony and then went up to bed.
“Is that girl adopted?” Ethel asked, once Laurie had gone.
“No, Momma, she’s not adopted,” Harmony said. “Why do you ask so many rude questions?”
“What’s rude about the truth?” Ethel asked. “There’s something funny about that girl, I thought she might be adopted. What’s she doing kissing you?—you’re not her mother.”
“It was just a goodnight kiss,” Harmony said. Her urge to be somewhere else was getting stronger. Ever since she woke up from her nap she had been thinking how nice it would be to be in a motel room, alone, just to piddle, or watch TV. She wanted to be someplace where her mother wouldn’t always be there to ask rude questions, or make rude statements, or just look at her rudely and think suspicious thoughts.
“Momma, would you mind if I went to a motel? I feel like being alone,” she said.
Ethel looked shocked.
“Drive all this way after being gone for years and then not even spend the night?” her mother asked. “What kind of behavior is that?”
“Which motel?” she asked, before Harmony could even reply. “Have you got some man stashed away here that we don’t know about?”
“I don’t have a man anywhere, Mom,” Harmony said. “I’ve been under a lot of strain and think I’d sleep better if I could be alone.”
“Go in your room and shut the door, that’s alone enough,” Ethel said. “Why would anybody want to be alone when they could be with their own mother? That’s awful. Drive all this way to be with your mother and then go off to a motel to see some man?”
“Ethel, Harmony’s grown,” Sty said. “She’s middle-aged, and this is a free country. If a middle-aged woman wants to be alone that’s her business.”
“She’s my daughter, I don’t care how old she is,” Ethel said. “I didn’t want to be alone when I was middle-aged. Why should Harmony be any different from me?”
“Momma, I am different from you,” Harmony pointed out, feeling tired. Even when she was sixteen, arguing with her mother had made her feel tired.
“It’s middle-aged women who usually have some old boy stashed away,” Ethel said. “Look at Pat. It’s a disgrace, how she behaves. They’ve had to send her away to those old sex doctors I don’t know how many times. I thought it was a waste of money. If that’s her thing, whose business is it but hers?”
Sty looked exasperated. “That’s just what I said to you about Harmony,” he said. “If being alone in a motel is her thing, let her do it.”
He handed her the keys to his pickup.
“There’s a Best Western about six miles down the highway,” he said. “They have a nice clean coffee shop. I expect it’s the best Tarwater’s got to offer.”
Ethel picked up the sponge and began to sponge the smoky wall again.
“I doubt she knows how to drive a pickup,” she said. “If she don’t, too bad—my Buick is unavailable. You let the oil get dirty and now I’m afraid to drive it for fear it will burst into flames while I’m on the way to town.
“I got no friends left anyway, I don’t need to go to town,” she added, still sponging the wall. “What if there’s a nuclear attack while she’s off in the pickup—what’ll we do, Sty?”
“Ethel, the cold war’s over, there won’t be a nuclear attack,” Sty said. “Just watch CNN.”
“I don’t believe everything I hear on the radio,” Ethel said.
“CNN ain’t radio, it’s TV,” Sty reminded her. “I guess it don’t matter, you can’t see well enough to tell the difference.”
“If we could get all the way to Texas we might survive,” Ethel said, still working on the premise of a nuclear attack. “I don’t know that that fallout wo
uld fall all the way to Texas.”
“She’s cracked,” Sty said. “Go on, honey. Get a good night’s sleep. Me and Eddie will do the milking in the morning. Once we get the chores done we might fish a little more. Sleep late if you feel the need.”
“Why would she need to sleep late?” Ethel asked. “She hasn’t done anything but sleep since she got here. I thought she might want to talk to me, but so far we ain’t talked five minutes. I’ve got funny daughters, none of them care about talking to their mother.”
Sty stood up and walked Harmony to the door.
“Don’t stand around waiting for the last word to come out,” he said. “If you do that you’ll never leave. There’s no such thing as a last word, with your mother. I’ve been waiting over fifty years for the last word, and so far I’ve waited in vain.”
Harmony kissed her father, and made sure Eddie’s blanket was tucked close around him before she let herself out the screen door.
“How do we know she’s even got a driver’s license?” she heard her mother say, while she was still on the step.
The seat of the pickup was just about worn through—Harmony could feel the springs, when she sat on it. The highway was visible, about two miles away. She could see the lights of big trucks purring along it. There was a glow to the south, where Tulsa was.
Harmony took it slow, going over the dirt road—she wasn’t used to pickups. She knew if she had a wreck her mother would complain forever, mainly to her father, since it was her father who gave her the keys.
She had only been on the highway about two miles when she came to the Tarwater exit. The town was just a sprinkle of lights, a mile off the interstate. She had been looking forward to being in the motel alone, but she had a sudden urge to see her brother; it was odd that they had seen so little of one another, over the years, because they had always been close. When Harmony was in high school she thought Billy was the best-looking man in Oklahoma, if not the world. He quarterbacked the high school football team and took them to the state championships twice, winning both times. There was even a commemorative cannon on the courthouse lawn, with the dates of the victories printed on the barrel.
In high school, Billy had all the girls in love with him. He dated the most beautiful girl in the school, Tammy Dawson; it was assumed they would marry, but to everyone’s surprise Tammy married a lawyer and moved to Dallas.
It was about then that Billy began to let success slip through his fingers. He was a sophomore at the University of Tulsa, and had been on the dean’s list four straight semesters, when he got arrested with some friends of his for stealing oil field equipment. Since it was a first offense, Billy didn’t have to go to jail, but definitely the slipping began about that time. He came back home and tried to farm with his father, but that effort didn’t last long; Sty had his own way of doing things, and that was that. Pretty soon Billy left and went to New Mexico, where he got in some trouble that everyone had always been sort of vague about. Neddie thought there might be a child born out of wedlock, out in New Mexico, but that was just her guess. Billy never said anything to anyone about a child. Then he got caught coming out of Mexico with some kind of ore in his trunk; some people thought the ore was gold and some people thought it was uranium, but in either case it was a little bit illegal. Billy had to go to jail for six months as a result. When he got out of jail he didn’t do much of anything for a few years, except gamble on sports and play dominoes with the brothers who owned the Conoco station in Tarwater. Billy was the best domino player in the state; he had always been exceptional at anything he did; but it was still a limited life. Of course the very fact that Billy had even been in Mexico caused Ethel to fret for years; she had worried while he was in prison, but even that worry paled beside the worries she had about all the diseases Billy probably was infected with as a result of being south of the border.
Harmony had been south of the border quite a few times herself; she had even had a boyfriend named Enrique, from somewhere south of the border; of all her boyfriends, many of whom had been pretty hard to shake, Enrique ranked as probably the most obsessed. Specifically he had been obsessed with her clitoris, why she could never figure out. Most men, once they reached the state of being obsessed, fixed on her breasts but Enrique got obsessed with her clitoris and stayed obsessed with it until she finally managed to shake him, which was quite a few months after the obsession began. Never again had her clitoris come in for quite so much attention as it got while Enrique was obsessed with it.
Of course the fact that Enrique had been obsessed with her clitoris was way off the track from wondering what had caused success to slip away from Billy; it was just a memory that came back to her once in a while when she was low—at least with Enrique around she had always known she was wanted.
One reason she drove so slowly as she entered Tarwater was because her mother’s last-minute intuition had been right on the nose: she didn’t have a driver’s license. Somehow, the last time her license came up for renewal, she had never got around to sending it in. It was one of those times when her bank account had eight dollars in it, exactly the amount that it cost to renew her driver’s license. She didn’t think it made sense to spend her last eight dollars on a driver’s license when she didn’t have a car anyway.
So, as she approached the center of Tarwater, she drove especially slowly. The two policemen in Tarwater—there had always been two—didn’t have that much to do. They sat in their cars and waited, most of the night, and they loved to pounce on speeders. Also, she had the feeling that her father’s pickup was not too well equipped for night driving. Only one headlight seemed to be working; either that or her vision was weird.
Still, the town looked awfully peaceful, maybe because it was such a relief to get beyond the sound of her mother’s voice. There was not a single car moving on the streets of Tarwater when Harmony drove up to the jail. Tarwater had no buildings more than two stories high—it was essentially a one-story town. Across the stretch of prairie to the south she could clearly see the sign for the Best Western. Just being able to see it was kind of reassuring; if the other headlight went out on the pickup she could probably just walk to the motel, it wasn’t that far.
Only a single police car was parked in front of the jail when she pulled up, but there were six teenagers sitting there, on the curb. At first she thought it might be a youth gang that had been let out of jail. There were three girls and three boys. When she stepped out of the car they all said “Aunt Harmony” at once, it was a big surprise. Then it dawned on her that the youth gang was composed of her nephews and nieces—Neddie had a girl and two boys, Pat a boy and two girls.
“We knew you’d come to see Uncle Billy, we just wanted to meet you, you’re the most famous person who ever lived in Tarwater,” a skinny boy said. Harmony knew he was Neddie’s just from his skinniness.
“Aren’t you Dickie?” she asked. “And you’re Don and you’re Donna. And you’re Dave and you’re Deenie and you’re Debbie.”
For some reason her sisters had given all their children names that began with D. Harmony thought she had done well to get their names right. Once the introductions were over, nobody had much of an inkling of what to say next. Harmony certainly didn’t, although she was touched that they had all wanted to meet her so badly that they had parked themselves on a curb in Tarwater, in the middle of the night. It certainly showed that they cared about their auntie.
Another fact that kind of soaked in was that none of her nieces and nephews were all that young; she was not seeing the little kids she remembered from Polaroids. They all seemed to fall in an age group between seventeen and maybe twenty-five. She had stayed away too long—much too long—to get to see them as kids. It seemed only a short while ago that she had been getting pictures of their earliest birthday parties, or snaps of the boys in their Little League uniforms—pictures from childhood. But already the childhood of the children in those pictures was gone; they just weren’t children anymore.
&nbs
p; “You’re all grown up,” she said. “Can I give you all hugs?”
Before she knew it they were all hugging her; it was as if they had been waiting for the hugs for years and years—all their lives, really. She was thinking, as she hugged them, that none of them looked too happy—not in an overall sense; not happy as Eddie was happy. They seemed older than their years, as if life in Tarwater had aged them too quickly. It was a little confusing; it was supposed to be city kids that grew up too quickly; but her nieces and nephews seemed to have grown old as they grew up. All but two already had children, and several had had more than one marriage.
“Aunt Harmony, you’re still beautiful,” Debbie said.
“We’re sorry about Pepper,” Don said. “We only got to meet her once.”
“Maybe if she had lived in Tarwater she wouldn’t have got AIDS,” Deenie suggested; Harmony knew she was just trying to be comforting, but the way it came out wasn’t comforting. The very thought of Pepper living in Tarwater was confusing. She might have already had babies and an ex-husband and have been abandoned; she might never have known Laurie or the nice bakeries of New York. If she could have lived, Pepper would have had good things ahead of her. Harmony was having a hard time imagining what good things the nice young people in the street had ahead of them, other than more children, more divorces, more husbands and wives who weren’t much different from the husbands and wives they had got the divorces from.
“Aunt Harmony, did we make you sad?” Deenie asked. Probably she felt Don had done the wrong thing, in mentioning Pepper.
“Honey, it’s just a sadness I have,” Harmony said. “You didn’t cause it. Have you been in to see Uncle Billy?”
“He doesn’t want to see us,” Dickie said.
“He thinks we’re all fuckups,” Debbie said. “He told Peewee not to let us in the jail.”
“We all want to meet Eddie, real bad,” Donna said. “We saw him all over the place on TV.”
“He’s so cute,” Deenie said. “We’re going to go out to Grandpa’s in the morning and take him to breakfast.”