Mockingbird

  “Do you think I’m like her?” I said.

  Daddy thought. “Some. And I think you’re like me, some. But mostly you’re like you, and you will cut your own swath in the world.” He took my hand and gave it a squeeze. “So don’t you blame your problems on me, you hear?”

  I sniffled and laughed.

  “Your momma even foxed me about her epitaph,” Daddy said. “Did you know that? We were talking, oh, maybe six months before she died. She was pretty sick. The night before we were supposed to go into the hospital for her checkup she says, ‘George, I have an announcement to make. I’ve been thinking about you tonight, George, and I have decided to inscribe my tombstone in your honor.’ And I said, ‘Is that right, old lady? And what are you going to write on it?’ And she looked me dead in the eye, very serious, and said, ‘She Had Great Stuff, But Struggled With Her Control.’”

  I have a confession to make.

  The day Rick Manzetti came over for the first time, Pierrot never climbed out of the chifforobe and whispered in my ear. I made that up.

  I know it seems like a lie, but I swear it isn’t. If I had written down what really happened, that I got to feeling worse and worse, and more and more scared, that I felt the Riders’ stares from across the room and chickened out and told Rick I couldn’t sell, you wouldn’t have understood. You would have thought I was just getting emotional. You wouldn’t have felt the animal terror in my heart. I had to make you understand, had to make you feel what it was really like. Because what I wrote back then, about the weight of Pierrot tugging on my dress, his mean little voice in my ear—that’s the truth. It didn’t happen, but it’s the truth, I swear it. I swear it.

  —Which is what Momma would say.

  Oh God, I don’t know, I don’t know. Am I turning into a liar, just like her? That’s what Greg said, he said I was like her. I let Sugar in, just as she would have.

  But I’m not her. I know I’m not. I know I’m not.

  Is it possible she was right all those years? That all the time I thought she was lying, she was telling the truth, but I just didn’t understand it? I didn’t want to hear it?

  Who was the liar? Who told the truth? Who is writing this, her or me?

  I thought when she died that I would be rid of her at last, but I’m not. It’s like Carlos said: alive she was a monster, but dead she’s inescapable.

  Oh God, Momma. Please let me go.

  EIGHT

  I was turning into my mother. I was living in her house now, I was the oldest woman in the family; it was me who had to look after Daddy, me who had the child on the way. And I, who had been so sure of myself and who I was—not Momma, mostly—felt myself begin to melt in the May heat, my edges running, my outlines less definite. I was not the daughter I had been, for my mother was gone. My job was gone too, and the safe future I had always meant to make with my actuary’s money. I had tried to find a lover in Bill first, then Greg; both had seen my mother instead of me. I had tried to give away Momma’s gods and her gods had forbidden it.

  Even my body was for the first time not wholly my own. There was another person growing in me, who would have a different face and story, and for the first time I found myself wondering what my mother had thought when it was me growing in her belly. Could I really have been as strange and different a being to her as the baby in my womb already was to me? Could she have worried so much about my future, wondered whether I would be left- or right-handed, fretted at the cost of college education, tried to decide whether it was best to breast or bottle feed?

  It wasn’t only my baby that grew within me all through that hot spring; I was carrying my mother too.

  We were nearing the end of May, and snake weather had come in earnest: air so humid you couldn’t strike a match in it; heat so intense you could see your shadow sweat. The skyscrapers downtown shimmered and smoked in the hazy air. When it rained, the air was blind with water for twenty minutes. Afterwards the streets smelled of oleanders and boiling tar.

  The Saturday after my disastrous date with Greg I went over to Candy’s apartment to help mail out wedding invitations. I was dreading the visit. My sister has a thing about not using air conditioning. Even Momma, though she left the house doors open, would at least run the a.c. in her Oldsmobile. Candy just drove with the windows down.

  Candy lived on the top floor of a shared house. She had no kitchen table because she had no kitchen (she shared the one downstairs). So we sat on the floor on either side of her coffee table to work. Candy wrote up the invitations; I addressed the envelopes. We each had a glass of iced tea with a wedge of lime. Candy, curse her, was sitting cross-legged in a halter top and a pair of panties. I was wearing a Men’s Size XL Astros T-shirt and a pair of awful navy-blue polyester maternity shorts that itched on my abdomen. “This is unbearable,” I said, interrupting my own story about my date with Greg. “I can’t come over here anymore. I feel like a boiled prawn.”

  “You’re hot?” Candy said, surprised. I glared at her. My skin was slippery with sweat under my arms and between my legs and behind my knees. “I’ve got a fan, Toni. Just a minute.”

  “Did you know my blood volume is going to go up by thirty percent over the next four months?”

  “You mentioned that a few times. Is that why you’re hot?”

  “No, I’m hot because it’s incredibly hot in here. The blood thing is why I’m even hotter.” The fan was new and lightweight, a twenty-dollar Target special. Candy set it on the floor behind me, turned it on, and watched all the wedding invites blow gaily off her coffee table. Careful repositioning followed.

  She sat back down before her stack of blank invitations. “Tía Gomez next, right?” Sweat glistened on her forehead, and among the nearly invisible hairs on her upper lip, and between her breasts. The skin showing between her halter top and her panties was as brown as her tanned arms. “So Greg really said it was like screwing Momma, hey? Ouch.” Candy looked at me. “You put on Sugar, didn’t you?”

  “How did you know that?”

  “Sugar was Momma’s idea of sex. Here’s the card for Tía Gomez.” I stuck it in its envelope, sealed and stamped it. Candy wiped her sweaty hands off on her halter top so she wouldn’t get blotches on her next note. “I bet that’s your idea of sex, too.”

  “What?”

  “Sugar.” I didn’t answer. “That isn’t sex. That was Momma.”

  I thought of the silks in Sugar’s cubby back at the house, and the tiny crystal bottle of perfume.

  “That’s the great Texas lie.” Candy put down her pen and stood up. Her attic room was small, with a sloping ceiling. She walked to the window at the front and looked out over the crepe myrtle which had not yet begun to bloom. I wondered if anyone passing could see her, standing there in her underwear. Then I wondered if she would care. “The great Texas lie says we trick men, we cheat and lie and trap them. We lure them into marriage. Pink toenails and a ribbon in your hair, like tying a trout fly. That’s Sugar’s style,” Candy said. “I never believed that.”

  “I guess we don’t either of us like to lie, do we?”

  Candy said, “If you want good sex, start with Mr. Copper. Don’t look so astonished, Toni. Your trouble is you think about money too much. You only think of Mr. Copper’s power one way. But he’s about seeing things exactly as they are. There’s no make-believe when you see through Mr. Copper’s eyes—Hang on. I want to show you something.” She walked to the dresser beside her bed and pulled open the bottom drawer.

  The ice in my iced tea clinked and wobbled as I held the cold glass against my cheek. The fan passed back and forth across my sweaty body.

  “Every time you go to the grocery store you see rack after rack of women’s magazines trying to sell you the secret of ‘How to Get a Man,’” Candy said. “‘What Men Really Want in Bed. How to Turn Him On.’ All of them full of ads for moisturizer and pantyhose and deodorant and crap. Like Daddy says, when a man is trying to sell you something, be careful.” Candy came back and d
ropped a stack of porn magazines on the table. HOT LEZZIE LICKS! screamed the top magazine. Two naked blondes knelt together to French kiss with their boobs touching. The taller one was looking at the camera. Want to help us cum? read the caption.

  “Candy!”

  “Hustler isn’t trying to sell anything,” Candy said. “Not to you and me, anyway. Hustler, Velvet, Club International—they measure their success by how often their readers jack off per issue.” She flipped open the magazine. “‘If you want to know What Really Turns Him On, here it is, straight from the horse’s—’”

  “Candy!”

  “‘—mouth.’” She grinned and reached over my shoulder, flipping past the table of contents. I had a confused impression of buff-colored skin, blond hair, pouting mouths, large breasts, many kinds of underwear, women holding their vaginas open. Mouths, lots of mouths: red lipsticked ones, smiling ones, tongues stuck out toward cocks, mouths slack with passion, bitten lips, kissing, one mouth dripping with saliva. Little hot needles of embarrassment prickled across my face and my eyes slid off the pages. I couldn’t make myself look, and when I did look, I couldn’t take much in. The pictures were gone too fast, I looked away before I had time to understand them.

  “Go ahead and stare, Toni. It’s not like you’re sneaking a peek in a drugstore. No one’s going to ‘catch’ you.” Candy turned another page and held it open. Tammy & Sue: a blonde with a ponytail and a brunette with short hair. The blonde had on a letterman’s jacket. The brunette was the smaller girl, a winsome knockout wearing a tweed skirt and glasses. The other girls think Tammy and Sue are boring bookworms. They go off to a frat party, not realizing that our girls have been waiting for a chance to bone up on each other!!!

  In the first picture the women were kissing, mouth to mouth. The blonde’s jacket was open, her white shirt unbuttoned, her bra peeking out. The brunette’s eyes were closed behind her glasses. In the next picture, the brunette’s tweed skirt was gone. She was upright on her knees on a bed. The blonde had pulled her panties down. They stretched taut across the gap between her legs, a few inches below the curly hair of her pussy. The blonde had the practiced smile of a professional model. The brunette was a better actress. She seemed vulnerable, her smile half-timid, amazed, hardly daring to feel so much delight. She seemed so happy.

  In the third picture the brunette was crouching before the blonde, who now wore only white mid-thigh stockings and a bra she had peeled down so it lay like a hank of white cloth under her enormous breasts. The brunette was sticking her tongue out an inch from her friend’s pubic hair. She was still wearing her glasses.

  After this it was positions.

  The photographer knew his business. Though the blonde had the more outrageous body, it was the smaller-breasted brunette who had by far the more expressive face. He always caught her looks for the camera: her naughty glee, fingering her friend, or her blind, naive ecstasy, pulling the blonde’s ponytail tightly between the lips of her vulva.

  The brunette never took off her glasses. Her friend never rolled down her stockings. It was impossible to tell which one was Tammy and which was Sue.

  “Forget what it says in Cosmo. First lesson: guys like to see women fucking each other.”

  “Good Lord, these aren’t boobs, they’re volleyballs.”

  Candy said, “Does it turn you on, Toni?”

  “Isn’t it about five thousand to get your boobs done? I guess she wanted her money’s worth.”

  Candy gently reached out and turned my face so I had to look at her. “Toni. Does it turn you on?”

  I stared blindly at the photographs. One part of me was greedy to take them in, but I couldn’t. Embarrassment blinded me. More than embarrassment. Shame. My eyes saw the pictures but my brain slid away from them. “Leave me alone.”

  Candy turned the page. A redhead in a nightie lolled on a frilly little-girl’s bed with her legs spread. Clown and balloon wallpaper. Stuffed animals all around. Nineteen pretending to be fourteen, I guessed.

  “How about her?”

  “Candy!”

  “Lesson two: they all like young bodies. A lot of them also like the idea of fucking really young girls.”

  She flipped forward to the next pictorial. “Lesson three: they like the idea of fucking you in the ass.” In this set of pictures a guy in a NASCAR jumpsuit was fucking a woman in mechanic’s overalls. They screwed on, in, and around a cherry-red racing car. You could never see actual penetration, but in several pictures they were clearly supposed to be having anal sex, her sitting in his lap with her back to him, spreading the lips of her vulva with her fingers, obviously in part to show that wasn’t where his cock was. His hands grabbed tight on her huge breasts.

  “I think you don’t know what turns you on,” Candy said. “You can’t tell. You can’t even think about it.”

  “Screw off! Does it turn you on?”

  “Yeah. Some of it.” She tapped the anal sex picture. “This one. I like her face. He doesn’t do it for me. I could skip these,” she said, pointing to another couple of pictures. She sat down beside me and paged back through the magazine. She passed the young woman pretending to be a schoolgirl. “That’s not what it’s like when you’re a teenager. I don’t like what it’s selling.” Back to Tammy and Sue. “These two, and that one,” she said, pointing to an early picture, the brunette’s hand stealing slowly into the blonde’s crotch while the blonde licked at her nipple. “I could be turned on by almost any of them, if I decided to be.”

  “Are you mad at me, Candy?”

  “Why should I be?”

  “Something in your voice. You just…you don’t seem like yourself.”

  Candy said, “You don’t know me very well, Toni. You think you do, but you don’t.”

  The two college girls kissed sweetly and fucked on the page in front of me. I looked back at my sister, sitting beside me in her panties and halter top. “Have you…?”

  “Had sex with girls? Yeah. More than once. Mostly it’s been good, if you’re interested. One time, not so good.” Candy drank a sip of her tea. “Ever wonder if maybe you were a repressed lesbian?”

  “Candy!”

  “You’re saying that a lot today.”

  “You’re being outrageous!”

  “Well, the way your dates have gone, you’re thirty and still single, turned down marriage to What’s-his-name—”

  “Steve.”

  “Whatever. Maybe you just don’t like guys in the sack, but haven’t let yourself think about alternatives.”

  “Candace Jane!”

  She laughed at me. “Just an idle thought. You want an ice cube for your face? You look like you’re about to catch fire.”

  “Not everybody thinks about sex all the time, you know.”

  “Not even me.” Candy put her glass of iced tea down on top of Tammy and Sue. “I decided to lose my virginity at fourteen. May thirtieth, 1984. School had been out three days. I put on my pink halter-top and a pair of tight shorts and I went and sat on the curb by our house until someone stopped.”

  “Jesus, Candy. Why?”

  “Lots of cars slowed down,” Candy said. “Finally this one guy drove by in a green Duster. His hair was receding and he had put it in a ponytail in back to compensate. He was real nervous and kind of skinny. I thought he was about thirty. He asked if I wanted a ride.” Candy looked at me. “Well, you were always fighting with Momma, Toni. I didn’t have the guts for that. You were always the straight A student and you called the shots on the baseball team. I wasn’t like that.” She picked up her iced tea, leaving a ring of condensation that wrinkled Tammy and Sue’s beautiful young bodies. “Everything had to be out in the open with you. I wasn’t like that. I liked secrets. I liked sex. I liked it because it was fun. I liked it because it was dirty and nobody would talk about it. I liked it because I knew Momma was wrong about it. It was somewhere she couldn’t follow me.”

  “Jesus, Candy. You got into a strange man’s car?”

  “I
wasn’t being naive, Toni. I didn’t think it would be glamorous. I wasn’t that stupid. I thought I was pretty worldly about it. He took me back to his apartment, which was a hole. He was so nervous I finally had to ask him if he wanted to do it. When he took off his underwear and I saw his cock, I just couldn’t stop giggling.” She laughed and I laughed against my will at the merriment in her eyes. “When we did it he kept asking if I was a virgin and I kept telling him I wasn’t and it was okay. I was really tight and really dry and it hurt a lot. He took me home right afterwards. I don’t know what he was expecting, but he got chafed something fierce.” She snickered.

  “What if you’d gotten pregnant?”

  “Momma had me on the pill. She was wrong about sex but she wasn’t stupid.”

  “God.” I looked at my baby sister, her sad-funny smile and her scent of burnt cinnamon.

  “Okay, looking back I admit it was pretty stupid.”

  “Unbelievably stupid.”

  “But that night I was incredibly happy. I was even happy because it hurt. It was supposed to hurt. That made it real. Like getting your ears pierced. You wouldn’t feel grown-up if it didn’t hurt. It was my passport, you see? It was my ticket to a new world, and you and Momma couldn’t get in.”

  Candy drank again. “I liked boys better than girls in high school. To be around, I mean. Boys were more like you. They said what they thought and they didn’t think too much. Lots of times they were creeps and cowards. They weren’t complicated. Of course I got everything wrong.” She flipped casually past Tammy and Sue. “That first guy’s name was Randy, by the way. True story.”

  I laughed again. “I fucked a couple of more men early on,” she continued. “But it was the boys I really wanted, those beautiful dirty high school boys with their fingers greasy from French fries. I wanted…oh, I don’t know. Their mouths that tasted of stolen cigarettes. Their skinny muscly bodies and the hard-ons they totally had no control over. They wanted me and I really liked that. They wanted me. I liked the way they would pretend to touch my tit by accident when we were kissing, the way a boy’s dick would buck up in his jeans when I pulled his hand onto my tit and squeezed it there. It was something nobody would talk about. It was something true.”