An Excerpt from "Little Town Lies"
(Page 2 of 2)
This new realization was the little flutter of breeze that brought the whole house of cards down. She’d done a slow-motion meltdown in the office, erasing files, pulling records, doing whatever she could to make her clients disappear into the system.
Texas was planning to abandon them sooner than they thought. Texas was getting real uneasy about folks supping at the public trough, yes ma’am, she surely was. But now these few, these precious few, were going to be real hard to find. Their checks would keep coming for years, probably, maybe unto death. Maybe after.
She’d been working there long enough to know she’d better leave before she got canned, so she handed in her resignation prior to somebody figuring out that her clients had all been “ghosted” off the rolls.
She’d gone home to find her roommate pounding away in her bedroom with her latest sex toy, a guy named Harry or Frankie or Seth or Jason or whatever. Whoever. She’d listened to the jungle drum of it, her roomie’s transparently fake cries, the guy’s gasping and yelling, and had decided there was no choice: she had to leave here and she had to do that right now, this instant.
She’d pulled down her suitcases and started packing, and then realized that she wasn’t just leaving this apartment, she was leaving this whole life, Houston, her job, everything.
As she packed, she’d sort of assumed that this would be the first of three or four days of moving, during which her friends would find out and try different ways to make her stay.
In fact, the packing was done in an hour and over the three days until her Friday departure, the only comments she’d gotten had been good-byes.
Her roommate could scarcely conceal her delight. She could ask Will-Mark-Todd to move in. Think of it, he could get drunk and slap her around right here at home instead of doing it out behind the bowling alley on Riverside and Old Spanish Trail.
Actually, when her last day arrived, the office gained an atmosphere of celebration. She faced a hard reality: people were relieved to be rid of her and her dark moods.
Sally had told herself, It’s okay, you will get through this, you will not break down and cry. She should be used to feeling unwanted. That had been the story of her childhood, after all.
She was always kind of baffled by the way people congregated, by all the friends they seemed to have, by the laughter and the delight with which they greeted each other. Before Sally spoke, she would compulsively clear her throat. And if she was in a crowd, she’d feel the need to first tap the shoulder of anybody she wanted to address.
Shyness, she thought, attributable to a lonely childhood and a lack of parental affection. Until she’d left home, heading for the University of Texas in Austin, she hadn’t realized that most children didn’t get up in the morning unsupervised, get dressed and make breakfast by themselves, without glimpsing an adult, then go off to school without so much as a wave good-bye. She’d learned from the way people talked about their pasts that her own family had qualified way high on the Dysfunctionality Scale.
Her parents had been like ghosts drifting in a ghost world of their own that only intersected with hers in the deep of the night, when long, drunken arguments, pitched low in the wee hours, would ebb and flow through her dreams like a poisonous smoke. But that had only been at first. Later, it was not as good.
When she came home after school, she’d let herself into a dark and empty house. After a makeshift supper scrounged from whatever she could find in the refrigerator, she’d do her homework to the droning accompaniment of the television, then get herself ready for bed. Sometimes her dad would look in on her when he came home, sometimes—precious memories—actually kiss her good night.
But an atomic bomb had gone off in the family when she was seven: the simple horror of it was that her mother had killed herself.
To this day, she remembered the moment she’d found her, the strange coolness of the room, the way her hand lay along the bed, soft late sunlight gleaming on the empty skin. She had touched her face, and it had felt like the cool rubber skin on a doll.
In her college psych courses, she’d learned that her mother had been “bipolar,” a nicer term than “manic-depressive.” But manic-depressive gave a more accurate picture of what life with Mother was all about. There were long, slow storms of weeping, and Sally couldn’t comfort her and Daddy stayed away, and the desperation came to seem like a sort of weather, with gray clouds forever.
Then there were the times when, all of a sudden, the sun would come out, and Mother would enter the living room dressed and ready and sing out cheerily, “Sally, let’s go!” Off they would go to see a movie, assuming there was an old musical at the Texan or a comedy at one of the multiplexes.
Afterward, they always stopped at Baskin-Robbins and had hot fudge sundaes and fed each other and fought over the cherries. Occasionally, while channel surfing late at night, Sally would come across one of the films they’d seen together and her heart would be struck as if by a blow.
One afternoon when her father was away on a business trip, Momma had come into Sally’s bedroom and said, “Promise me that if anything happens to me, you’ll go next door to the Trumans.”
The Trumans were a strange little couple who had built their house themselves. It was a fifties-style box with a flat roof, and they were kind of box-shaped themselves. The house leaned a little to one side. Years later, Sally drove by and noticed it looked sort of okay since the new owners had put on a traditional peaked roof.
That evening, her mother was unusually quiet. When Sally went into her bedroom and called her, then touched her hand, she remained eerily still. Then that other touch, the one that still lived in her fingers and always would, of her cool, lifeless cheek.
She promptly went next door, just as she had been instructed to do. After going over to check on her mother’s condition, Mr. Truman got hold of her father, who rushed home. The funeral was held a few days later. Sally could not remember crying. Her father had been polite, shaking hands with family members. And there had been those low voices again, murmuring the incantations of loss that seemed to her a special, secret adult language, a language that meant only one thing: the little girl will now be completely alone. Momma had taken so many sleeping pills that she’d died. To this day, Sally refused to take them, even when the ghosts of the past sobbed in her memories and sleep would not come.
Uncle Ed was her mother’s brother. She had begun visiting him in Maryvale during the summers, because her father didn’t know what to do with her once school was out. Ed was a lifelong bachelor, but nevertheless he was happy to entertain his little niece for a couple of months every year.
That had been happiness—looked forward to from the moment she had to leave in the fall to the moment she came back after school was out. Then, by the grace of God and the calendar, she would return to her wonderful little room that looked out on the old elm with its squirrels and its mockingbird who would trill on moonlit nights with a sweet demon’s fervor.
Maryvale, named by its founder for his long-lost wife. Sort of English-sounding for a Texas place. But so lovely: the Vale of Mary. Orange Indian Blanket swarmed the roadsides, and bluebonnets marched the long valley itself, and on stormy nights, the hills around conversed in their ancient, rumbling tongue.
Her father remarried two years after Mom died, and if her suicide had been an atomic bomb, this was like opening a flamethrower on the broken little soul that still survived, because her stepmother just plain hated her.
During the courtship, it had been “Oh, Sally, love, come sit over here with me.” She’d smelled of Arpege and Camels, and her nails were blood red.
Before the coming of her stepmother, Sally had never doubted she was loved, because children have a hard time doing that, but afterward, she knew what it was to be despised. She’d never been cared for, but her poor momma had certainly loved her—and her dad, too, in his dry and distant way.
Once the new woman entered her world, though, Sally made a horrifying discovery: this was someone who could not be pleased. Suddenly Sally wasn’t athletic enough, didn’t clean her room well enough, read the wrong kinds of books. Babies poured out of her stepmother like an avalanche, and Sally soon found herself caring for howling twins and a curly little boy who understood by the time he was three that this house contained a real-live Cinderella to kick around.
As Sally reached her teens, it became clear that everything would be perfect if she would simply vanish.
She tried to oblige by running away from home. Time and again, she took off from the house, from school, from wherever she happened to be, heading for vaguely imagined nirvanas like the streets of New Orleans or New York or San Francisco, dreaming of passage to India, of the byways of Paris … but always ending up in the backseat of a cop car on her way home.
When at last she got her letter of admission to UT, she took off for real and with their full and complete approval.
“Be good,” was how they put it. Sentimental to the end.
She never returned home again, not even for Christmas. She tried not to hear the relief in her father’s voice when she told him she’d be visiting Uncle Ed for the holidays instead.
The Maryvale exit came up suddenly, and she had to brake hard to avoid passing it by. She made it though, tires squealing as she turned. Once off the highway, she slowed the car, rolled down the window, and sucked in the country air, rich with summer heat.
That scent, the dry grass of high summer, the faint tang of sweating East Texas pine, filled her with a burst of emotion so powerful and so unexpected that she sobbed. She almost had to stop the car. But there was no way she would do that. She went on down the road, toward the one place in the world that had always treated her well.
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