Trash: Stories

  “This is it,” Mama had told me on the phone that weekend last spring. “I’m not going back into chemo again.”

  She had been serious, but Jo and I steamrolled her back into treatment. There were a few bad weeks when we wondered if what we were doing was right, but Mama had come through strong. I convinced myself we had done the right thing. Still, when afterward Mama was so weak and slow to recover, guilt had pushed me to take a leave from my job and go stay at the old tract house near the Frito Lay plant.

  “We’ll get some real time together,” Mama said when I arrived.

  “You need rest,” I told her. “We’ll rest.” But that was not what Mama had in mind. The first morning she got me up to drink watery coffee and plan what we would do. There was one stop at the new doctor’s office, but after that, she swore, we would have fun.

  For three days, Mama dragged me around. We walked through the big malls in the acrid air-conditioning in the mornings and spent the afternoons over at the jai alai fronton watching the athletes with their long lobster-claw devices on their arms thrusting the tiny white balls high up into the air and catching them as easily as if those claws were catcher’s mitts. I watched close but could not figure out how the game was meant to be played. Mama just bet on her favorites—boys with tight silk shirts and flashing white smiles.

  “They all know who I am,” Mama told me. I nodded as if I believed her, but then a beautiful young man came up and paused by Mama’s seat to squeeze her wrist.

  “Rafael,” Mama said immediately. “This is my oldest daughter.”

  “Cannot be,” Rafael said. He never lifted his eyes to me, just leaned in to whisper into Mama’s ear. I was watching her neck as his lips hovered at her hairline. I almost missed the bill she pressed into his palm.

  “You give him money?” I said after he had wandered back down the steeply pitched stairs.

  “Nothing much.” Mama looked briefly embarrassed. She wiped her neck and turned her head away from me. “I’ve known him since he started here. He’s the whole support of his family.”

  I looked down at the young men. They were like racehorses tossing their heads about, their thick hair cut short or tied back in clubs at their napes. Once the game started they were suddenly running and leaping, bouncing off the net walls and barely avoiding the fast-moving balls. All around me gray-headed women with solid bodies shrieked and jumped in excitement. They called out vaguely Spanish-sounding names, and crowed when their champions made a score. Now and again one of the young men would wave a hand in acknowledgment.

  I turned to watch Mama. Her eyes were on the boys. Her face was bright with pleasure. What did I know? Where else could she spend twenty dollars and look that happy?

  When later, Rafael jumped and scored, I nudged Mama’s side. “He’s the best,” I said. She blushed like a girl.

  Mama was not supposed to drive, so I steered her old Lincoln town car around Orlando.

  “You are terrible,” Mama said to me every time we pulled into another parking space. It was an act. She played as if I were dragging her out, but every time I suggested we go back to the house, she pouted.

  “I can nap anytime. When you’ve gone, I’ll do nothing but rest. Let me do what I want while I can.”

  It was part of being sick. She wasn’t sleeping, even though she was tired all the time. She’d lie on the couch awake at night with the television playing low. Every time I woke in the night I could hear it, and her, stirring restlessly out in the front room.

  It was awkward sleeping in Jack’s house. The last time I had lain in that bed, I had been twenty-two and back only for a week before taking a job in Louisville. Every day of that week burned in my memory. Mama had been sick then too, recovering from a hysterectomy her doctor swore would end all her troubles. Jo was in her own place over in Kissimmee, an apartment she got as soon as she graduated from high school. Only Arlene’s stuff had remained in the stuffy bedroom; she herself was never there. At dawn, I would watch her stumble in to shower and change for school. She spent her nights baby-sitting for one of Mama’s friends from the Winn Dixie. A change-of-life baby had turned out to be triplets, and Arlene spent her nights rocking one or the other while the woman curled up in her bed and wept as if she were dying.

  “They are in shock over there,” Mama had told me. “Don’t know whether to shit or go blind.”

  “Blind,” Arlene said. The woman, Arlene told us, was drunk more often than sober. Still, her troubles were the making of Arlene, who not only got paid good money, she no longer had to spend her nights dodging Jack’s curses or sudden drunken slaps.

  “I’m getting out of here, and I’m never coming back,” she told me the first morning of that week. By the end of the week, she had done it, though the apartment was half a mile up the highway, and even smaller than Jo’s. I saw it only once, a place devoid of furniture or grace, but built like a fortress.

  “Mine,” Arlene had said, a world of rage compressed into the word.

  Lying on the old narrow Hollywood bed again, I remembered the look on Arlene’s face. It was identical to the expression I had seen on Jo when I was packing my boxes to drive to Louisville.

  “We’ll never see your ass again,” Jo had said. Her mouth pulled down in a mock frown, then crooked up into a grin.

  “Not in this lifetime.”

  All these years later I could look back and it was exactly as if I were watching a movie of it, a scene that closed in on Jo’s black eyes and the bitter pleasure she took in saying “your ass.” I know my mouth had twisted to match hers. We had thought ourselves free, finally away and gone. But none of it had come out the way we had thought it would. I hadn’t lasted two years in Louisville, and Arlene had never gotten more than three miles from the Frito Lay plant. Twenty years after we had left so fierce and proud, we were all right back where we had started, yoked to each other and the same old drama.

  “Take me shopping,” Mama begged me every afternoon, as if no time at all had passed. I had looked at her neck and seen how gray and sweaty the skin had gone and known in that moment that the chemo had not worked out as we hoped.

  “Tomorrow,” I had promised Mama, and talked her into lying down early. Then gone back to curl up in bed and pretend to read so that I could be left alone. Every night for the two weeks I stayed there I would listen to Jack’s hacking through the bedroom wall. Every time he coughed, my back pulled tight. I tried to shut him out, listening past him for Mama lying on the couch in the living room. She talked to herself once she thought we were asleep. It sounded as if she were retelling stories. Little snatches would drift down the hall. “Oh James, God that James . . .” Her voice went soft. I listened to unintelligible whispers till she said, “When Arlene was born . . .” Then she faded out again. In the background, Jack’s snoring grated low and steady. I curled my fists under the sheets until I fell asleep.

  When she took me shopping, Mama bought me things she said I needed. She made me go to Jordan Marsh to buy Estée Lauder skin potions. “It’s time,” she said. Her tone implied it was the last possible day I could put off buying moisturizer. I submitted. It was easier to let her tell me what to buy than to argue, and kind of fun to let her boss around the salesladies. I even found myself telling an insistent young woman that, no, we would not try the Clinique, we were there for Estée Lauder. Afterward, we went upstairs to do what we both enjoyed the most—rummage through the sale bins.

  “I need new underwear,” Mama said. “Briefs. Let’s find me some briefs. No bikinis, can’t wear those anymore. They irritate my scar.” She gestured to her belly, not specifying if she meant the old zipper from her navel to pubis, or the more recent horizontal patches to either side. I sorted the more garish patterns out of the way, turning up a few baby-blue briefs in size seven.

  “Five now,” Mama muttered. “Find me some fives, and none of those all-cotton ones. I want the nylon. Nylon hugs me right, and I hate the way cotton looks after a while. Dirty, you know?”

&
nbsp; Sevens and eights and sixes. I kept digging.

  “Excuse me.” The two women at Mama’s sleeve looked familiar.

  “Mam,” the first one said, pushing into the bin. “Excuse me.” She reached around Mama’s elbow to snag a pair of blue-green briefs. “Excuse me,” she said again.

  The accent was even more familiar than her flat grayish features and tight blond cap of hair. Her drawl was more pronounced than Mama’s, more honeyed than the usual Orlando matrons. It was a Carolina accent, and a Carolina polite hesitation, too. The other woman reached for a pair of yellow cotton panties, size seven. Mama moved aside.

  “So I told him what he was going to have to do,” the first woman said to her friend, continuing what was obviously an ongoing conversation. “No standing between me and the Lord, I told him. We’ve all got a role in God’s plan. You know?”

  Her friend nodded. Mama looked to the side, her eyes drifting over the woman’s figure, the pale white hands sorting underwear, the dull gold jewelry and the loose shirtwaist dress. That old glint appeared in Mama’s eyes and a little electrical shock went up my neck. I moved around the corner of the bin to get between them, but Mama had already turned to the woman.

  “I know what you mean.” Mama’s tone was pleasant, her face open and friendly. The woman turned to her, a momentary look of confusion on her face.

  “You do?”

  “Oh yes, there is no fighting what is meant. When God puts his hand on you, well . . .” Mama shrugged as if there were no need to say more.

  The woman hesitated, and then nodded, “Yes. God has a plan for us all.”

  “Yes.” Mama nodded. “Yes.” She reached over and put both hands on the woman’s clasped palms. “Bless you.” Mama beamed. This time the woman did frown. She didn’t know whether Mama was making fun of her, but she knew something was wrong. Her friend looked nervous.

  “Just let me ask you something.” Mama pulled the woman’s hands toward her own midriff, drawing the woman slightly off balance and making her reach across the pile of underpants.

  “Have you had cancer yet?” The words were spoken in the softest matron’s drawl but they cut the air like a razor.

  “Oh!” the woman said.

  Mama smiled. Her smile relaxed, full of enjoyment. “It an’t good news. But it is definite. You know something after, how everything can change in an instant.”

  The woman’s eyes were fixed and dilated. “Oh! God is a rock,” she whispered.

  “Yes.” Mama’s smile was too wide. “And Demerol.” She paused while the woman’s mouth worked as if she were going to protest, but could not. “And sleep,” Mama added that as it had just occurred to her. She nodded again. “Yes. God is Demerol and sleep and not vomiting when that’s all you’ve done for days. Oh, yes. God is more than I think you have yet imagined. It’s not like we get to choose what comes, after all.”

  “Mama,” I said. “Please, Mama.”

  Mama leaned over so that her face was close to the woman’s chin and spoke in a tightly parsed whisper.

  “God is your daughter holding your hand when you can’t stand the smell of your own body. God is your husband not yelling, your insurance check coming when they said it would.” She leaned so close to the woman’s face, it looked as if she were about to kiss her, still holding on to both the woman’s hands. “God is any minute pain is not eating you up alive, any breath that doesn’t come out in a wheeze.”

  The woman’s eyes were wide, still unblinking; the determined mouth clamped shut.

  “I know God.” Mama assumed her old soft drawl. “I know God and the devil and everything in between. Oh yes. Yes.” The last word was fierce, not angry but final.

  When she let go, I watched the woman fall back against her friend. The two of them turned to walk fast and straight away from us, leaving their selections on the table. I felt almost sorry for them. Then Mama sighed and settled back. With an easy motion, she snatched up a set of blue nylon briefs, size five. She turned her face to me with a wide happy smile.

  “God! I do love shopping.”

  “Wasn’t she from Louisville, that woman had the sports car? The one with those boots I liked so much?” Jo and I were folding sheets. We had cleared about a month of laundry off the bed, shifting sheets and towels up onto shelves, and stacking the T-shirts, socks, and underwear in baskets. Jo’s rules for housekeeping were simple; she did the least she could. All underpants, T-shirts, and socks in her house were white. Nothing was sorted by anything but size—when it was sorted at all. If I wanted to sleep, I had to get it all off the bed.

  “No,” I said. “Met her after I moved to Brooklyn.”

  “Sure had a lot of attitude. And Lord God! Those boots. What happened to her, anyway?”

  “Got a job in Chicago working for a news show.”

  “Oh, so not the one, huh?” Jo made a rude gesture with her right hand. “You talked like she had your heart in her hands.”

  “For a while.” I shook out a sheet and began to refold it more neatly. “But when I moved in with her, things changed. Turned out she had Jack’s temper and Arlene’s talent for seeing what she wanted to see.”

  “That’s a shock.” There was a sardonic drawl in Jo’s tone. “Didn’t think there was another like Arlene in the world.”

  “There’s a world of Arlenes,” I said. “World of Jacks, too, and a lifetime of scary women just waiting for me to drag them here so you can talk them out of their boots.”

  “Well, those were damn fine boots.”

  Jaybird came in then, dragging his feet across the doorsill to knock loose the sand. Jo waved him over. “You remember the red boots I bought in Atlanta that time?”

  “They hurt your feet.” Jay took a quick nibble on Jo’s earlobe and gave me a welcome grin.

  “Just about crippled me. But you sure liked the way they looked when I crossed my legs at the bar that weekend.”

  “You look good any way, woman,” Jay said. “You come in covered in dog shit and grass seed, I’ll still want to suck on your neck. You sit back in shiny red high-heeled boots and I’ll do just about anything you want.”

  “You will, huh?” She snagged one of his belt loops and tugged it possessively.

  “You know I will.”

  “Uh huh.”

  They kissed like I was not in the room, so I pretended I was not, folding sheets while the kiss turned to giggles and then pinches and another kiss. Jo and Jaybird have been together almost nine years. I liked Jay more than any other guy Jo ever brought around. He was older than the type she used to chase. Jo wouldn’t say, but Mama swore Pammy’s daddy was a kid barely out of junior high. “Your sister likes them young,” she complained. “Too young.”

  Jay was a vet. He had an ugly scar under his chin and a gruff voice. Mostly, he didn’t talk. He worked at the garage, making do with hand gestures and a stern open face. Only with Jo did he let himself relax. He didn’t drink except for twice a year—each time he asked Jo to marry him, and every time she said no. Then Jay went and got seriously drunk. Jo didn’t let anyone say a word against him, but she also refused to admit he was little Beth’s daddy, though they were as alike as two puppies from the same litter.

  “To hell with boots,” Jo joked at me over Jay’s shoulder. “Old Jaybird’s all I really need.” She gave him another kiss and a fast tug on his dark blond hair. He wiggled against her happily. I hugged the worn cotton sheet in my arms. I’d hate it if Jo ran Jay off, but maybe she wouldn’t. Sometimes Jo was as tender with Jay as if she intended to keep him around forever.

  Arlene lived at Castle Estates, an apartment complex off Highway 50 on the way out to the airport. It looked to me like Kentucky Ridge where she was two years ago, and Dunbarton Gardens five years before that. Squat identical two-story structures, dotted with upstairs decks and imitation wood beams set in fields of parking spaces and low unrecognizable blue-green hedges. Castle Estates was known for its big corner turrets and ersatz iron gate decorated with mock silve
r horseheads. It gleamed like malachite in the Florida sunshine.

  When I visited last spring, I went over for a day and joked that if I wanted to take a walk, I’d have to leave a trail of breadcrumbs to find my way back. Arlene didn’t think it was funny.

  “What are you talking about? No one walks anywhere in central Florida. You want to drown in your own sweat?”

  In Arlene’s apartments, the air conditioner was always set on high and all the windows sealed. The few times I stayed with her, I’d huddle in her spare room, tucked under her old Bewitched sleeping bag, my fingers clutching the fabric under Elizabeth Montgomery’s pink-and-cream chin. Out in the front room the television droned nondenominational rock and roll on the VH-1 music channel. Beneath the backbeat, I heard the steady thunk of the mechanical ratchets on the stair-stepper. Since she turned thirty, Arlene spends her insomniac nights climbing endlessly to music she hated when it was first released.

  The night before we moved Mama into MacArthur, the thunking refrain went on too long. I made myself lie still as long as I could, but eventually I sneaked out to check on Arlene. The lights were dimmed way down and the television set provided most of the illumination. The stair-stepper was set up close to the TV, and my mouth went dry when I saw my little sister. She was braced between the side rails, arms extended rigidly and head hanging down between her arms. I watched her legs as they trembled and lifted steadily, up and up and up. A shiver went through me. I tried to think of something to say, some way to get her off those steps.

  Arlene’s head lifted, and I saw her face. Cheeks flushed red; eyes squeezed shut. Her open mouth gasped at the cold filtered air. She was crying, but inaudibly, her features rigid with strain and tightened to a grotesque mask. She looked like some animal in a trap, tearing herself and going on—up and up and up. I watched her mouth working, curses visible on the dry cracked lips. With a low grunt, she picked up her speed and dropped her head again. I stepped back into the darkened doorway. I did not want to have to speak, did not want to have to excuse seeing her like that. It was bad enough to have seen. But I have never understood my little sister more than I did in that moment—never before realized how much alike we really were.