“Yes ma’am.” I started shaking out a sheet to hang it on the line. I didn’t want Mama to see my face. I had no intention of calling Shannon Pearl.
Mama never asked why Shannon Pearl and I had quarreled. The only time she mentioned it was when she agreed with Aunt Raylene that it was probably better to stay out of kids’ arguments. I’d walked in on them talking together and knew immediately what they had been discussing, so I turned right around and went back out. Mama had gotten angry when Mrs. Pearl called to tell her that I’d never apologized for taking a swing at Shannon, though not because she thought I should have been made to apologize. Her anger was at my careless stupidity.
“Don’t you know you can put somebody’s eye out, hitting them in the face?”
“Yes, Mama.”
“No reason to be hitting people anyway.”
“No ma’am.”
“Well ...” She looked at me closely. I knew she was waiting for me to say something, but I just kept my eyes on the table. “I don’t know about the Pearls. They should have brought you home right away, ‘stead of making you sit in the car while they went all over everywhere.” She started rummaging through her purse for her cigarettes. “And I don’t know why she’s calling after all this time.”
“No ma’am.” I didn’t want to discuss Shannon Pearl. By now, I was sure, she was lonely for someone to talk to and had gotten her mama to call us.
Mama sighed tiredly. “Well, you just stay out of trouble. I don’t want to be explaining your behavior to other people all the time.”
“No ma’am.”
It was just before Thanksgiving that Shannon Pearl called our house and got me on the phone. “I’m not gonna apologize,” she said right away, as if no time at all had passed. Her voice sounded strange after not hearing it for so long.
“I don’t care what you do,” I told her. I held the phone with my shoulder and picked my cuticles.
“Stop that,” Mama said as she went by on her way to the kitchen.
“Yes ma’am,” I said automatically.
“What’s that?” Shannon sounded hopeful.
“I was talking to my mama. Why’d you call me?”
There was a sigh, and then Shannon cleared her throat a couple of times. “Well, I thought I should. No sense us fighting over something so silly, anyway. I bet you can’t even remember what it was about.”
“I remember,” I told her, and my voice sounded cold even to me. For a moment I was ashamed, then angry. Why should I care if I hurt her feelings? Who was she to me?
“My mama said I could call you,” Shannon whispered. “She said I could ask you over this Sunday. We’re gonna have a barbecue for some of Daddy’s people from Mississippi. They’re bringing us some Georgia peaches and some eggshell pecans.”
I bit at my thumbnail and said nothing.
“You could ask your mama if you could come.” Shannon’s voice sounded breathless and desperate, almost squeaky. “If you wanted to,” she added. I wondered what she had said in order to get her mama to agree I could come over. Out on the porch Reese had started shouting at Patsy Ruth.
“You don’t even know how to play this game!”
Why should I go to the Pearls’ house and watch her fat relatives eat themselves sick?
“Mama gave me a record player,” Shannon said suddenly. “I got a bunch of records for it.”
“Yeah?”
“Lots of ’em.” I heard her mother saying something in the background. “I got to go. Are you gonna come?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. I’ll think about it.” I hung up the phone and saw Mama was watching me from the kitchen. “Shannon wants me to come over to her house this Sunday. They’re having a barbecue.”
“You want to go?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
Mama nodded and handed me a towel. “Well, come help me. And you be sure and tell me if you’re going before Sunday. I an’t gonna want no surprises on Sunday morning. I might want to spend the whole day in bed, you never can tell.” She smiled, and I hugged her. I loved it when she looked like that. It made the whole house feel warm and safe.
“I might want to go on a trip myself.” Mama slapped my behind lightly. “But I an’t going nowhere till we get these dishes done, girl, and it’s your turn to dry.”
“Yes ma’am.”
I didn’t plan to go. I really didn’t. I certainly didn’t call Shannon back, and I didn’t say anything to Mama either. But Sunday afternoon I started walking toward Shannon’s house, carrying Reese’s tin bucket as if I was going hunting for late muscadines. Along the way I shook the wilting gray-green vines that would die off as soon as the first good freeze came. In the movies. people were alwavs swinging from vines like those, but every time Reese or I tried it, we wound up falling on our behinds. Maybe they had a different kind of vines in the forests where they made movies, but then they probably didn’t grow muscadines there.
I hummed as I walked, snatches of Mama’s favorite hymns and mine, alternating between “Somebody Touched Me” and “Oh Sinner Man.” Reese always sang it as “Whoa Sinner Man,” which made Uncle Earle bark out his donkey’s-bray laugh. I missed Earle. We weren’t going to see him until spring. He’d been sent to the county farm for busting a man’s jaw and breaking a window down at the Cracker Blue Cafe. Aunt Alma said he’d gotten into more fights at the farm and a bunch of men had held him down and shaved off all his black hair. I tried to imagine him baldheaded.
“That’ll slow down his womanizing.” Aunt Alma had sounded almost pleased.
“What’s womanizing?” Reese hadn’t learned yet that asking questions when the aunts were talking just got you pushed outside. I’d tried to tell her that if she ever wanted to learn anything, she should just shut up and listen and try to figure it out later.
“What are you doing listening to other people’s business?” Mama had been really angry. “You get out of here, all of you.”
“See what you did.” I’d been righteously indignant. I wasn’t used to being put out with the little kids. “Now we’ll never know why they shaved his head.”
“Oh, I know that already.” Reese smirked and put her arm around Patsy Ruth. “Granny said he tried to cut some fellow’s dick off.”
I’d never come up to the Pearls’ house from the back before. I usually came down the road from the Sears Tire Center, but that Sunday I cut through the backyards of the big houses on Tyson Circle and through the parking lot of the Roberts Dairy Drive-In. There were magnolia and flowers all along the back of their property so no one could see that parking lot, and I had to wiggle past the mums that were planted close to their fence.
There were a lot of people there, and they all looked like Pearls. Short, puffy, overdressed men stood around holding massive glasses of tea and grinning at skinny, pale women with pink lipstick and flyaway hair. Little kids were running around over near the driveway, where some big boys were taking turns cranking an ice-cream maker. Two card tables had been set up in addition to the big redwood picnic table Mrs. Pearl was so proud of getting last year. It looked like people had already been eating, but the charcoal grill was still smoldering, and Shannon Pearl was standing beside it looking as miserable as any human being could.
I stood still and watched her. She was fiddling with a long-handled fork, looking over every now and then at the other children. Her face was flushed pink and sweaty, and she looked swollen in her orange-and-white organdy dress. I remembered Mama saying Mrs. Pearl just didn’t know how to dress her daughter.
“She shouldn’t put her in all that embroidery. As fat as that child is, it just makes her look bigger.”
I agreed. Shannon looked like a sausage stuffed in a too-small casing. She also looked like she had been crying. Past the tables, Mrs. Pearl was sitting with half a dozen wispy thin women, two of whom were holding babies.
“Precious. Precious,” I heard someone exclaim in a reedy voice.
“You fat old thing.” One of Shannon
’s cousins ran past her and stage-whispered loud in her ear. “You musta eat nothing but pork since you was born. Turned you into the hog you are.” He laughed and ran on. Shannon pulled off her glasses and started cleaning them on her skirt.
“Jesus shit,” I muttered to myself.
I had always suspected that I was the only friend Shannon Pearl had in the world. That was part of what made me feel so mean and evil around her, knowing that I didn’t really care enough about her to be her best friend. But hearing her cousin talk to her that way brought back the first time I’d met her, the way I’d loved her stubborn pride, the righteous rage she turned on her tormentors. She didn’t look righteous at that moment. She looked tired and hurt and ashamed. Her face made me feel sick and angry, and guilty about her all over again.
I kicked at the short wooden fence for a moment and then swung one leg up to climb over. All right, she was a little monster, but she was my friend, and the kind of monster I could understand. Twenty feet away from me, Shannon sniffed and reached for the can of lighter fluid by the grill. She hadn’t even seen me.
Afterward, people kept asking me what happened.
“Where were you,” Sheriff Cole said for the third or fourth time. “And what exactly did you see?” He never gave me a chance to tell him. Maybe because it was hard to hear over Mrs. Pearl’s screaming.
“Uh huh, and where were you?” He kept looking over his shoulder toward the grill and the sputtering fat fire.
I knew he hadn’t heard a word I said. But Mrs. Pearl had. She had heard me clear, and she flailed at the people holding her, trying to get her hands on me. She kept screaming “You!” over and over like I had done something, but all I had done was watch. I was sure of that. I had never gotten two steps past the fence.
Shannon had put her glasses back on. She had the lighter-fluid can in one hand and she took up that long-handled fork in the other. She poked the coals with the fork and sprayed them with the fluid. The can made a popping noise as she squeezed it. She was trying to get more of the coals burning, it seemed. Or maybe she just liked the way the flames leaped up. She sprayed and sprayed, pulled back and sprayed again.
Shannon shook her hand. I heard the lighter-fluid can sputter and suck air. I saw the flame run right up to it and go out. Then it came back with a boom. The can exploded, and fire ballooned out in a great rolling ball.
Shannon didn’t even scream. Her mouth was wide open, and she just breathed the flames in. Her glasses went opaque, her eyes vanished, and all around her skull her fine hair stood up in a crown of burning glory. Her dress whooshed and billowed into orange-yellow smoky flames. I saw the fork fall, the wooden handle on fire. I saw Mrs. Pearl come to her feet and start to run toward her daughter. I saw all the men drop their ice-tea glasses. I saw Shannon stagger and stumble from side to side, then fall in a heap. Her dress was gone. I saw the smoke turn black and oily. I saw Shannon Pearl disappear from this world.
They held the funeral at Bushy Creek Baptist. Mrs. Pearl insisted on laying an intricately embroidered baby blanket over the coffin. I gave it one glance and then kept my head down. Mrs. Pearl had put a cherub with pink cheeks and yellow hair on the spot that was probably covering Shannon’s blackened features. I kept my hand in Mama’s and my mouth shut tight. Reese had wanted to come, but Mama had refused to let her and sent her off to Raylene’s for the day. Mama wasn’t too happy that I wanted to go to the funeral either, but she agreed to bring me after I started crying. Daddy Glen had gotten angry at Mama for giving in to my “nonsense,” as he’d called it, and gone off fishing with Beau and Nevil. Over the last few months, he’d started drinking, matching them beer for beer at family gatherings and coming home to fall asleep on the couch.
“Boy can’t drink,” Beau joked, taking great amusement in Glen’s red-faced confusion after a few shots. “Just don’t have the constitution for it.”
“The belly,” Uncle Nevil corrected.
“Right, the belly.” They all laughed at that. Glen suddenly taking up drinking seemed to please them in some odd way.
“Damn fools,” Raylene had complained.
“It don’t matter,” Mama had told her. “Glen an’t gonna be a drinker no matter how hard he tries.” It was true. Where Beau and Nevil could drink for hours and only get noisy and mean, Daddy Glen would invariably fall asleep while they were still sipping away. He’d wake up with an aching head and a sour stomach when Beau and Nevil were starting to sip coffee to get ready for a day of work, both of them still half drunk from the night before but going on anyway. It all made me nervous, but like Mama I couldn’t see anything that could be done about it.
“Did you ever see her?” Mrs. Pearl said to the preacher they’d brought in from their family church in Mississippi. “She was just an angel of the Lord.”
The preacher nodded and laid his hands over Mrs. Pearl’s as she hugged close a great bunch of yellow mums. Beyond them, the choir director had one hand on Mr. Pearl’s elbow. Mr. Pearl was as gray as a dead man. I watched from under lowered lashes while the choir director pressed a paper cup into Mr. Pearl’s hand and whispered in his ear. Mr. Pearl nodded and sipped steadily. He kept looking over at his wife and the flowers she was gripping so tightly.
“She loved babies, you know. She was always a friend to the less fortunate. All her little friends are here today. And she could sing. Oh! You should have heard her sing.”
I remembered Shannon’s hoarse wavering voice humming in the backseat of her daddy’s car after she had told me a particularly horrible story. Was it possible Mrs. Pearl had never heard her daughter sing? I looked over to Mr. Pearl and saw his head dip again. If it had been me in that ball of flame, would they have come to my funeral?
Mrs. Pearl lifted her face from the flowers. Her watery eyes flickered back and forth across the pews. She doesn’t understand anything, I thought. Mrs. Pearl’s eyes moved over me sightlessly, her hands crushing the flowers pressed against her neck. She started to moan suddenly, like a bird caught in a blackberry bush, softly, tonelessly, while the preacher carefully pushed her down into the front pew. The choir director’s wife ran over and put her arm around Mrs. Pearl as the preacher desperately signaled the choir to start a hymn. Their voices rose smoothly, but Mrs. Pearl’s moan went on and on, rising into the close sweaty air, a song with no meter, no rhythm—but gospel, the purest gospel, a song of absolute hopeless grief.
I turned and pushed my face into Mama’s dress. All my hardheaded anger was gone. As if she understood completely, Mama’s hand stroked my neck and down my back while she crooned under her breath her own song—muted, toneless, the same hum I’d been hearing all my life.
14
Shannon’s death haunted me. Suddenly I didn’t feel so grown-up anymore. I tried to make up with Reese, but she had decided that Patsy Ruth was the only person she trusted in the world, and had her sleeping over all the time. The two of them whispered together, giggling and pointing at me and then running off. Even Mama was mad at me. Exhausted with the effort of trying to come up with something new to wear five days out of every week, I’d worn jeans to school one day and been sent home with a stern note.
“Your clothes are clean. You got nothing to be ashamed of,” Mama had snapped. Any other time she might have been sympathetic about the girls at school laughing at me for wearing the same few A-line skirts and shirtwaist dresses over and over, but there was no money for new clothes, and no one to loan us any. Uncle Earle was still at the county farm, Aunt Alma had been laid off from her part-time job at the laundry, and Aunt Ruth was so sick Travis was paying a nurse to help Deedee care for her. Everyone was worried and irritable.
The back of my throat was tight all the time. Out in the utility room that hook no longer sang to me. The thought of its sharp pointy edges made me want to touch it again, but I could not bring myself to climb up and take it down. Even the river out at Raylene’s made me scared and sad, the rolling dirty water reminding me of the rainy mud at Shannon’s funeral. I
kept thinking of how she had been standing there with her head down, all her life still open and unknown, what might have happened, who she might have become. I did not think of the fire but of the dull thudding sound of her life shutting off, everything stopping.
Everything in my life was just as uncertain. I too could be standing somewhere and find myself running into the wall of my own death. I began to tremble whenever Daddy Glen turned his dark blue eyes to me, a deep hidden shaking I prayed he couldn’t see. No, I whispered in the night. No, I will not die. No. I clamped my teeth. No.
I took to watching myself in mirrors to see what other people saw, to puzzle out just what showed them who I really was. What did Daddy Glen see? Aunt Raylene? Uncle Earle? My hair had started to lighten, taking on red highlights instead of blue, but my eyes had stayed black as night. I looked at my cheekbones in the bathroom mirror. Not like Reese’s smooth, soft face, my cheeks were high and strong. Maybe ugly. Probably ugly. I turned my head. My teeth were white and hard, sharp and gleaming. I was strong all over. Turned sunshine into muscle, Mama swore. She was proud of how sturdy I was, what I could lift and how fast I could run, but I was suddenly self-conscious and awkward. I had shot up in the last year, so much so that my bones seemed to ache all the time.
“Growing pains,” Aunt Raylene told me. “Keep this up and you gonna be tall, girl.”
I didn’t want to be tall. I wanted to be beautiful. When I was alone, I would look down at my obstinate body, long legs, no hips, and only the slightest swell where Deedee and Temple had big round breasts. I had nothing to be proud of, and I hated Aunt Raylene’s jokes that we were all peasant stock, descendants of women who used to deliver babies in the fields and stagger up to work just after. Gawky, strong, ugly—why couldn’t I be pretty? I wanted to be more like the girls in storybooks, princesses with pale skin and tender hearts. I hated my short fingers, wide face, bony knees, hated being nothing like the pretty girls with their delicate features and slender, trembling frames. I was stubborn-faced, unremarkable, straight up and down, and as dark as walnut bark. This body, like my aunts’ bodies, was born to be worked to death, used up, and thrown away. I had read these things in books and passed right over it. The ones who died like that, worked to death or carried off by senseless accidents, they were almost never the heroines. Aunt Alma had given me a big paperback edition of Gone with the Wind, with tinted pictures from the movie, and told me I’d love it. I had at first, but one evening I looked up from Vivien Leigh’s pink cheeks to see Mama coming in from work with her hair darkened from sweat and her uniform stained. A sharp flash went through me. Emma Slattery, I thought. That’s who I’d be, that’s who we were. Not Scarlett with her baking-powder cheeks. I was part of the trash down in the mud-stained cabins, fighting with the darkies and stealing ungratefully from our betters, stupid, coarse, born to shame and death. I shook with fear and indignation.