The Accidentals Page 20

  Miss Holcomb wasn’t at her desk. I didn’t know where to sit so I stood beside her desk at the front of the room, my shoes soaked through and my ponytail drooping. The other students filed in, laughing and chatting, talking about the football game on Friday, the fall dance. When they saw me standing there, up in front of the class, everybody stopped talking and stared. The girls began to snicker and whisper; the boys winked and looked me up and down. One of the boys began to whistle “The Star-Spangled Banner” and some girls broke out laughing. One pretty girl wiggled her little finger at me, sending the others into a fit of giggling. I couldn’t remember any of their names.

  About that time Miss Holcomb came through the door. She was sporting her blond flip, helmeted down with hairspray, and she had on a hot pink dress that matched the rouge spots on her cheeks. She was carrying an armload of files.

  She walked over to her desk and me beside it. “Grace,” she said briskly, “welcome back.” She glanced at the others. “Everybody, take your seats.” She then proceeded to tell me I needed to repeat my junior year. I had not been in any school for a very long time, there was no telling what I knew and didn’t know. When I’d left town so suddenly, my grades had been on the skids. I did not have The Basics; I was going to be Held Back. I was to go to the principal’s office for reassignment.

  Miss Holcomb had a booming voice, and by the time I left the room, you could have heard a pin drop. As I closed the door behind me, I heard a hum like a swarm of bees approaching, then a sudden burst of excited chatter, then Miss Holcomb: “Settle down! Get out your books.”

  After that I wore big sweaters and knee socks and scuffed-up saddle oxfords, threw away my eye shadow and hair ribbons, told June to take my best outfits. I grew my hair long and chewed on the ends. June was a good cook and I ate and ate.

  I felt like Methuselah next to my classmates, who were a year younger. I never went anywhere or did anything with them, not that anyone asked me to, except some fast boys who thought I might be easy. Sometimes June and I would go to the picture show, but mostly I stayed home and studied, the way I had when I lived with Frances. Now, though, as the weeks passed, I studied like my life depended on it. Frances had taught me more than I realized, and I became quickly bored with my lessons. I asked to be moved into the hardest classes, the ones everyone except the eggheads avoided: calculus and Latin III, each of which had attracted a grand total of four students including me. I made all As. I cleaned house, polishing the furniture so it shone, running the carpet sweeper on weeknights and mopping the kitchen every weekend. The house, Dad said, had never looked spiffier.

  When I wasn’t studying or eating or cleaning, I read. Every Saturday I headed the half mile to the Pearl River County Library, loaded up to my chin with take-back books. I spent hours selecting new ones for the week ahead, books about the flora and fauna of the Amazon jungle, books of poems, books about outer space and ancient Greece and tadpoles and famous murders. I came upon a book about playing jacks, the best strategies for casting and picking up. I’d rarely played jacks BC, but now found I was good at the game. Throw them down, pick them up: there was a rhythm to it, a neatness. My fingers became little lively animals, capable of almost any contortion. I graduated from onesies to double bounces, eggs in the basket, pigs in the pen. I got myself a second set of jacks, practicing with twenty instead of ten. After a while, June refused to play with me. Alone with my jacks, I decided to split my talents and become two players: Grace vs. Not Grace. An even match.

  My father would come into my room and watch as Grace and Not Grace sat on the floor bouncing the ball and picking up jacks, their hair tucked behind their ears. Like my sister, Dad seemed to have forgotten the past year and a half; it was as if there had been a time warp and the world had stopped spinning, as if he had never spit whore and slut at me. Now we were back in time, the past a cemetery with no markers. Now my father looked at me with kind eyes. He asked me if I needed anything, he gave me wads of bills, told me to go downtown and get myself some decent clothes and a haircut. Instead I pocketed the money, thinking if things got worse, I would need a stash.

  At night I lay in bed and thought about the boys, what we’d done, how we’d been together. How long ago it all seemed. Light-years. I promised myself I would look for them when I got out from under Dad’s thumb. I doubted they would still want me; I was a mess. But they were unfinished business; I wanted to know what had happened to them. I’d come to realize they’d been punished too, they’d lost each other just as I’d lost them.

  THERE IS ONE thing I haven’t told.

  Behind the school there was a place where a little creek ran. Moles had made their tunnels through the underbrush and their tunneling had left raised paths along the sides of the creek. It was just before Christmas break, the year I returned. One night I’d stayed late to practice Christmas carols with my Latin class. Mrs. McFadden, our teacher, made her students learn the carols in Latin, and on Christmas Eve we were to bundle up and stroll around town and sing all the verses of “Adeste Fideles” and “Silens Nox” and the rest of our repertoire to Opelika’s shut-ins. Mrs. McFadden was serious as death about it; we were to sing each carol solo to her until we had learned every last word by heart. We would be graded also on our decorum around the old sick people of our community. In addition to being prepared, we would be kind and encouraging, or we would fail.

  I was starting home, cutting across the football field, when a boy I’d seen once or twice came up behind me. He said he knew my sister. He asked me where I was headed, and I told him. He said he knew a shortcut if I didn’t mind a few weeds. I was loaded with books, and he offered to carry them. I thought maybe he liked me.

  When we got to the place where the little creek ran, it was just turning dark. There was a flock of little brown birds feeding in the brush. Goldfinches turned brown for the winter, more than likely. My mother would have known. The boy dropped my books, flushing the birds. He took me by the hair. He pulled me along, down to the creek, and pushed me to the ground. My head was half in the water; I could feel the currents passing through my hair. I froze, afraid he was going to drown me.

  Why are you doing this? I asked.

  What’s one more boy? he said.

  It lasted just a few seconds, just long enough for the finches to resettle. Then he said, If you tell, no one will believe you. Until now I haven’t.

  He took off, climbing up the creek bank, fighting his way through the underbrush. I lay there a good long time, listening hard, my head wet and cold as ice. After a while I heard an owl call out, then another answer. It was mating season. My coat was soaked and torn, my underwear gone, but I put myself back together as best I could and wrung out my hair. I hardscrabbled my way up the bank and gathered my books and papers from the brush. I pulled my wool cap out of my coat pocket and put it on.

  Some people make a mountain out of a molehill. After everything else that had happened, it seemed as small and insignificant as one of those little mole tunnels along the creek bank. I worried, of course, that I’d become pregnant again given my recent history, but when I didn’t, I thought I’d had a stroke of luck for a change. Later on, in the halls, I saw the boy on my way from English to calculus, but then one day I didn’t anymore. It was like it had never happened. It was like I dreamed the whole thing.

  THIS I DO remember: It was a clear night and I walked home under the stars. For a moment I thought I saw something go by, not a shooting star but an object steady and methodical, a machine of some sort, maybe one of those space capsules. After that first little Russian dog burned up in the cold outer dark, the skies were full of living creatures, always circling. I imagined a set of eyes looking down on me. An animal being, brooding over the world.

  Good luck, I said. Be brave.

  20

  June

  LISTEN, MAMA USED TO SAY: THERE IS A CRESCENDO IN every aria, a place where everything comes together. You can feel it building.

  Life, she said, is another
story. It heads down back alleys, takes sharp left turns. Then, one fine day it jumps the track and crashes.

  LEAP AHEAD.

  The day I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that my life has jumped track is July 21, 1969. Grace is long gone out into the world; I’m out of college over a year and launched into a promising career. On earth it’s 4:18 in the afternoon and I’m the unwilling passenger in a car that’s at least a hundred and ten degrees despite all the windows being rolled down as far as they’ll go. On the moon Neil Armstrong is preparing to walk out and say his little piece about one giant leap for mankind. Jim, my former friend and now brand-new husband, has just that minute turned on the radio. He’s driving us due south, from Memphis to New Orleans, and I’ve sweated through my clothes. No rain in a month and the farmland we’re passing through looks more like the moon than the moon itself in the pictures I’ll see later that night on TV.

  And what am I doing in this blazing hot car barreling down Highway 55 on Planet Earth? I’m peeing in an orange Tupperware bowl and worrying it’s going to overflow. The reason I’m peeing in the bowl is that I am pregnant—thank you very much, Jim and Uncle Sam—and the reason we’re following the Mississippi River south, a distance of 392 miles, is we’ve just gotten married at the courthouse in Memphis the day before. I wore an old flowered shift with a Peter Pan collar that made me look like I was singing in a choir of hippies. I needed a haircut. A woman who did the typing for the judge was the witness. Her lipstick had leaked into the corners of her mouth, giving her the appearance of a vampire who’d just had lunch. When Jim tried to give the judge a twenty-dollar bill for his trouble, the judge pushed it away, cocked his head in my direction, and muttered under his breath, “Christ’s sakes, boy, buy the little lady a decent meal.”

  We have company on this loathsome trip. In the back seat, sitting up on her haunches and panting out the window is a sad sack of a dog I found at one of the rest stops we frequented until Jim unearthed the Tupperware bowl in the trunk of the Ford, a remnant from his mother’s kitchen. The dog’s so covered in ticks she looks like a walking specimen of those speckled melanomas you see in pictures taped up in the doctor’s office. All skin and bone and exhausted tits, though there were no puppies in sight when I found her tangled up in the blackberry bush where I’d stopped to take a private puke on my way to the bathroom. (I must admit I didn’t for a moment consider mounting a search for the litter; honestly, it never occurred to me.) The poor thing looked like she was trying to decide which truck she should run herself under.

  The dog seems vaguely familiar, as if she’d belonged to someone I’d known when I was little, maybe a neighbor down the street. Even without the ticks, she would have looked peculiar, and especially so given her tit situation, which makes her underside resemble a row of sad little balloons the day after the party. The tits are one thing, the ears another. They’re the size and shape of beignets. They stand at attention, revealing their pink, oddly private interiors, which are also studded in ticks. A stripe, originally white, runs from the tip of the dog’s nose to the top of her head.

  “What’s this?” Jim says when I lug her, squirming and panting, back to the car. “We can’t take that thing with us. We’re going to New Orleans. Put it back.” His voice is uncertain, glazed. Over the miles, the enormity of our misdeed seems to have settled like a fine dust over his face. Behind the wheel he looks even smaller than ordinary, a bit slumped. I notice how slender his wrists are.

  I don’t answer, just glare at him and throw the dog into the back seat whereupon she turns herself around three times and lies down, puts a paw over her nose, and begins to snore.

  Jim glances in the rearview mirror. “What are you going to do with it? How are you going to sneak it into the motel?”

  I stare out the window. “It’s a she, not an it.”

  “Man, it’s uglier than shit. Why is it speckled?” He peers more closely into the mirror. “Is there mold on it?”

  “Watch the road. I’ll check her when I next have to puke, which I’m sure will be coming right up.” What I’m thinking is that it serves him right to get stuck with a tick-studded, half-dead mutt. Maybe along the way I can pick up some more sickly animals to torture him with. Look what I was getting stuck with.

  The dog lets out a monster fart.

  Jim makes a sound in his throat, which over the years I will come to recognize as an expression of disgust, and turns on the radio. I lift myself off the seat and get on the Tupperware bowl (I have given up on underwear by this point) and begin to pee, which is when the announcer comes on and we hear about the men getting ready to walk on the moon, which chokes up the announcer but does not thrill me in any way whatsoever. After the dogs they fried up there, I never liked the space race. Think of it. Getting strapped in that tiny capsule all alone and shot up into the endless night. I snap the top of the Tupperware bowl shut and put it on the floor, where it commences to slosh with the motion of the car.

  THE NIGHT I found out I was expecting this bundle of joy, a couple of nights before our trip, though it feels like a couple of centuries, we were at the drive-in movie. I wish I could say what was playing. All I remember is that it was about zombies. Zombies leering at pretty blond girls in white nightgowns, who of course screamed when they spotted them, zombies with cataract eyes jumping out from behind every bush, making the girls shriek and run for their lives, losing shreds of their blouses in the process so that the tops of their breasts bounced and shone in the moonlight. Of course, this was years before those pregnancy tests you can buy at every corner drugstore. Jim was friends with a nurse named Sally. Eighteen hours before, he’d delivered my pee to her sealed up in a jelly jar. He’d put it in a brown paper bag as if it were moonshine. He was supposed to call Nurse Sally that night to get the verdict. When he left to go to the concession stand to make the call at the pay phone, I told him to bring me back a bag of popcorn if I were not, knowing that if I were, I wouldn’t be able to eat a bite. I really and truly didn’t think I was, despite definite signs to the contrary. For Christ’s sake, here we were a couple of friends who’d never even looked at each other crooked. Jim did my taxes, for god’s sake—how boring is that?

  So there I sat, watching the zombies wreak havoc and pinning my entire life’s dreams and plans on a bag of stale popcorn. (I would have prayed, but after my kissing friend Hil died sitting at a stoplight minding her own business, I realized that everything is Luck with a capital L, pure and simple. My mother chose the wrong chiropractor, the one who didn’t wash his hands.) My current situation is nothing but Bad Luck, which all began with Jim, who, after much changing of majors and other forms of foot dragging, graduated from college against all of his best efforts and, before he could say rice paddy, found himself reclassified I-A. Then the worst luck possible. His birthday, September 14, was put into the draft lottery with all the other birthdays, and, lo and behold, it wasn’t the hundredth or the fiftieth or the twentieth to be drawn but the first. Numero uno. With that kind of luck, I figured he’d get shot in basic training.

  I advocated for Canada or self-mutilation—maybe cutting off his trigger finger—but his dad’s a retired lieutenant colonel, who already found Jim deficient in everything from fly-fishing to football. This military dad was small like Jim, except with bulging biceps and a prominent chin he thrust at you when he talked, giving him the look of a twitchy cock at a cockfight. He’d wanted a manly boy. What he got was a skinny little guy in glasses who sneezed at the slightest change in temperature. Now here was Jim’s big moment; knowing he was doomed to be called up any day, he could step up to the plate and finally score points with the old man where it really mattered: jungle combat. What did he have to lose? So Jim hastened himself down to the army recruitment office and enlisted. He took his physical, and, sans heart condition, scoliosis, schizophrenia, asthma, or flat feet, was deemed fit as a fiddle, if you didn’t count the fact he couldn’t see six inches in front of his face without his glasses.

  I
used to be fond of Jim. We met when I joined the staff of the college newspaper at Southwestern in the foreign city of Memphis in the foreign state of Tennessee, having left home for the first time just a few weeks before. The newspaper office was housed in a ramshackle two-story house from the dark ages. When we were introduced, I immediately noticed the wastebasket that sat front and center on Jim’s desk, into which the toilet in the bathroom upstairs dripped from a wet spot in the ceiling above his head. When he left the newsroom for the night, he would take the wastebasket outside and empty it, as if that were part of his job. Being a worrier about diseases like cholera, I found such equanimity impressive and over time discovered myself going to Jim when I needed calming down, which was about every other day. I told him things I’d never told a living soul. What my mother had gone and done about the baby she couldn’t imagine, how afterward she’d bled to death one Sunday afternoon in November while our father had taken my sister Grace and me to see the giraffes dance, how Grace had insisted on those extra two hours at the zoo. How Grace had gotten herself pregnant too, how she’d been one of those girls who went away, only to return home still holding her grudge against me for spilling the beans to Dad, how after she went to college up in Chicago she never really came back. How I missed her like a lost limb. The only thing I didn’t tell him was that Grace’s little child was six feet under because nobody in my family saw fit to take her. It would be years before I’d tell him that shameful story.

  Why I chose Jim to tell my secrets to I don’t know. Over the years I’d honed the art of making other people talk, laughing and joking and sympathizing with them, putting them at ease. Once I got out into the world, I quickly became known throughout the newsroom as the reporter who could pry open any can of worms, ask the really tough questions and get some answers. This is a June story, the managing editor would say, and off I’d go to the penitentiary or the police station or the home of the accused, notepad in hand. But my own story, it was like those giraffes: wild and unwieldy. Who in his right mind would believe it? Jim would, as it turned out. He’d listened to it more times than one, not saying much, just shaking his head and patting my hand and talking about the future: how smart I was, how talented, how I’d just begun to live. My sister would come around and forgive me for ratting her out; she just needed to grow up and get some perspective. I almost believed him.