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He looks up from his hands wrapped around his mug, his gray eyes assessing me, but not in an unkind way. “Yep. I reek-on I am.”
“Great. Well, I’m on a search. I’m looking for information about my mother; she’s done passed.” I notice that my voice has gone very Southern, very down-home. If I were to say “reckon” right now, I’d probably say it just like he had. I am a chameleon, blending in with the background. I try to pull all my vowels back in line, but I’ll be damned if they don't just stay long. “She left me a letter,” I continue, very much in the manner of a Southern belle. “Well, she left me this letter telling me a little about her younger years, and she said she grew up around Sorento.”
“Well, I’ve lived here my whole life and know about everybody around.”
The curly-haired waitress has stopped beside me, asking what I’ll have, and I tell her I’ll have a short stack of pancakes and a cup of coffee. I’m not really much of a coffee drinker—I’m a water girl—but with this guy sitting here watching me and so lovingly holding his own mug, I figure I’ll give it a try. Maybe it will put us in some club together.
“Sorry to hear your mama passed,” he says.
“Thank you. It’s fine. I’m not upset anymore.” I’m relieved to hear that I sound more like myself, definitely not a Southern belle, and the tension in my shoulders drops a degree. “I mean, I’m okay.” Because of course I’m still upset she died, but I’m more upset because the life she lived was so difficult, and I’d like to understand why. I’m trying to piece together the pieces of her life to understand her, and maybe understand me a little better, too. I’ve done a lot of thinking since the morning that Warren walked out and most of that thinking has led me to believe that I am just like she was. If he had stayed, I would have been her in fifteen years. Running off to be with him was a bad choice, like I was ashamed and not wanting anybody to know. When I meet the man I should be with, I’ll want to introduce him to everybody. I’ll want everybody to know what a great man I snagged. I didn’t feel that way about Warren. I knew it wasn’t right, what we were doing.
“That’s good,” he says, taking a drag on his coffee, and I watch as it slides down his throat. “What’d you say your mama’s name was?”
“Her name was Alice. Alice Carlisle.” I watch him as his brows draw together, and I turn to bring out the two pictures I brought with me, one from her prom and another with her sitting on a motorcycle, just laughing her head off. I show him the pictures, and his brows relax then re-crease. “Holy damn.” He looks around the room and calls out, “Marty! Hey, Marty! Come over here.” The man he is calling to is strolling through the throng of patrons, stopping to visit here and moving on there. This is his congregation, I realize. He is squat and square shouldered. He was probably a wrestler in high school, but all his meat has congealed in his stomach, where he wears his pants low, curving up at the sides of his belly, covered by a long, oversized, button-up shirt.
He makes his way to us, and Curly Hair brings my plate and coffee and sets it on the counter in front of me. “Val. You remember this girl?” the man asks her. He shoves the picture of Mom on the motorcycle up into her hands.
“Sure. That’s Alice Carlisle. Didn’t she die in a car accident when we were sophomores?” Then her brow crinkles. “No, she didn’t die. She ran away or was kidnapped. ’Member?”
“Yeah. I ’member. This here is her little girl,” he says, nudging me, like he’s proud to be introducing me.
“Oh, well, Holy Hell,” she says.
Marty has arrived, and soon there is a whole pod of people standing and gaping at me, and I realize that maybe this wasn’t the best decision I ever made. Heat rises up my face, and suddenly the stocking hat on my head is the one thing that is too much. I am melting. I whip it off, letting all that red hair, so like my mother’s fall down around my face and shoulders. That causes a ruckus, because if they hadn’t seen it before, they certainly see it now. I look just like my mother, except for my lips, because if the picture of the prom date includes my father, his smile is my smile.
“Oh my God” is the general consensus, and I have to say, I agree. They want to know . . . they want to know what happened to her, where did she go, how did she die . . .
“A wasting disease,” I say, because really what bigger waste is there than dying because of alcohol and drugs and their hold on you. They want to know where we lived—“Charleston, down past Effingham,” I say—and they nod, familiar with Effingham at least. They want to know why she ran away, or was she kidnapped, and to be fair, I don’t have an answer for that, so I just shrug.
They aren’t the only ones with questions. I want to know what was she like when she was young.
“She was a wild thing for sure,” Val says. “She was always the one on top of the pyramid, ya know what I mean?”
I shake my head a little, and Val looks around the group like maybe I’m dense for not getting it.
“You remember when she jumped off the top of Ripson Bridge?” one man chimes in. “Damn that was impressive.”
“She jumped off a bridge and it was impressive?” I ask, bewildered, because to me that just sounds like an early attempt at ending it all.
“Yes. She sewed that rubber costume. ’Member?” And there is a chorus of chuckles and “Oh yeah, I ’member.”
“Rubber costume?” I ask.
“Well damn, girl, back in those days we had something called home economics in school,” Val says. I don’t bother to say that I took home economics in junior high, so I know what that is. “And we had to create a pattern to sew that would be useful.” She puts air quotes around the word useful. “Well Alice was not a very traditional girl, and while the rest of us were sewing aprons or stitching quilts, she brought in this roll of rubber and proceeded to cut out some sort of bat costume.” There are chuckles. “I think there might be video of that somewheres.”
Feeling like we are settling in for a story, I finally draw my plate toward me and start cutting triangles from the pancakes, which are on par with Leslie’s, and placing them into my mouth.
“Sure,” another voice says. “I got that video, took it on my old Super 8. Sure it’s up in the attic somewheres. You’d like to see that. It was a show.”
When my mother had sewn all the pieces of her bat costume, which was really more flying squirrel than bat, the end result was rubberized fabric between her legs and arms zippered together to make a flap; unzipped the pieces just dangled. When her teacher, Mrs. Forester gave her an F on the project because it wasn’t useful, as well as it being ugly as sin, my mother had gone through the school telling everybody that she was going to fly off the Ripson Bridge on Saturday and wouldn’t nobody want to miss it. Well, damn near the whole school showed up, and my mother did just what she said she was going to do—she jumped right off the frames at the top of Ripson Bridge just as a police car rolled up to see the commotion.
“She didn’t jump,” the man next to me says, “She damn flew off of that bridge.” The laughing and reminiscing felt so good that before I knew it, I had swabbed the last of my pancake into the last of my syrup, savoring that last bite.
Damned if my mother wasn’t Icarus, flying too close to the sun.