In a car, headed point-blank down an interstate, there is a sanity akin to recurring dreams: you feel as if every moment has been lived and will be lived exactly according to plan. Landscapes and peripheral realities blur and rush headlong backwards through the windows like the soft edges of sleep. And the road ahead and behind you becomes a straight line, framed in the perfect arc of a dashboard.
My sister sits hunkered against the side of the car and fiddles with the radio, careful not to touch my right leg. On a Sunday morning in the midlands of South Carolina all radio stations play either gospel music or black church services. Jane Anne chooses a church service and claps her hands, eyes closed, to the hiccupping rhythm of the preacher, both his voice and her percussion sounding disembodied in the smallness of the Volkswagen. “Take Jesus, oh Lord take Jesus,” the preacher says, “take Jesus for New Year’s.” Clap clap clap goes my sister, clap clap. “Jesus is my friend” clap “Jesus is your friend” clap “Friends, accept Jesus” clap clap. Deep in her bowels she is a fundamentalist, a lover of simple truths and literal facts; her resolution for the coming year is “to see things more clearly.” In this she is resolute, commenting often on points of interest as we careen northward through cotton fields and marshy bottomland and stark-colored advertisements.
I have no such resolution. While driving I develop an acute myopia and it is all I can do to concentrate on the pavement that blears and dashes like water underneath the car. Outside the world flashes by as if switched on and off in a two-dimensional slide show, one frame at a time, the whole universe condensed to a television screen.
“Look at that!” Jane Anne cries and points frantically somewhere outside. “Look, look!”
“What was it?”
“You didn’t even look,” she says. She claps her hands together with a violence that means she wishes one of them was mine. “Didn’t even goddamn look at what I saw. You probably had something more important on your mind, I’m sure, probably aren’t even interested in that cow I just saw with the human face.”
“You just saw a cow with a human face?”
“No,” she says, almost happily, “I didn’t see a thing,” and then she stares sullenly out her window.
Just last night my father and stepmother engaged in a domestic catfight over this kind of optical delusion. During a television football game, the Gator Bowl in Florida, they break out in an almost-brawl over forces beyond their control, forces five hundred miles to their south. Clemson, a South Carolina school, and Ohio State are playing and my father perversely roots for Ohio, a state that exists for him only during television football and basketball games. My stepmother was raised in the thick of Clemson patriotism, a twitch at the corner of one eye blossoming into a fullblown spasm, possibly hindering her vision, at every Clemson penalty and first down.
By the end of the game tension is extreme, my stepmother’s eye winks rapidly, my father’s mien settles like concrete as he stares at a commercial. Clemson is winning, my palms are sweating and slick, my stepmother is exultant, and my father steadily slips into a familiar attitude. Once, eight years ago, he almost hit me when I won a Monopoly game. His is a competitive madness that operates at a slow boil until all is lost, then his expression explodes into a kind of pseudo-apocalyptic blitz. So when a Clemson player intercepts a key Ohio State pass and Woody Hayes, ex-coach of Ohio State, smacks the Clemson player in the face, my father blitzes out, saying “Kill him, kill the bastard, Woody.” My stepmother blithers to her feet (they sit in identical easy chairs, separated by a coffee table), winks and gasps, arms akimbo and shivering, shouting now: “You might as well say ‘kill me,’ that’s what you mean!”
Blitz over, my father settles back into concreteness while my stepmother marches, footstep-echoes beating into the walls against one another, into their bedroom. An hour later everyone is sleeping heavily and even the television has sunk into a blank stupor. Today she poked her head in my bedroom doorway, flashing a smile birthed and bred in South Carolina and cultivated like white cotton, and told me goodbye before she left for church. She plays the organ for the Methodist Church of Fort Motte.
Jane Anne points out advertisements for the South of the Border tourist complex still an hour and a half in the future, CONFEDERATE FOOD YANKEE STYLE, BEST IN THIS NECK OF THE WOODS one sign reads. So frequent are these advertisements that they serve as punctuation along the sameness of the interstate and I begin to despise them because I feel my utter dependence on their familiarity. I come South twice a year, once at Christmas, once in the summer, each time more of an amnesiac experience than the visit before. I am fearful that after another few visits I may go home and never be able to leave, my present and future eradicated by the vicious tenacity of the past. But, truly, I am hypnotized home by the staid reality of what I remember—a somnambulatory reality so familiar and so unchanging that it appears to be the only true god in my life.
“I’d be a fool to stick around,” Jane Tressel sings from the radio. My sister has found an AM station. Lips taut and round, she sings along with her mouth forming the words as if molded around an ice-cream cone. The way she sings turns the words into nonsensical baby-noise, but this is also a special function of AM radio, this ablution of meaning into a catchy anonymity. Jane Anne carefully reads several beauty magazines, pining over the structured perfection of the models, always running out to buy new beauty products although she is as frugal with her money as a squirrel in autumn. A stranger, she sits so close to her door that no place in the car could be equally far from me and she eyes the side of my face with the wariness of a stray dog. She could be a nervous hitchhiker, except that she controls the radio. This trip is the first time we have been together alone in eight years. She is a stranger, stranger still because for thirteen years we slept in the same bedroom and now she resembles a kewpie doll rather than a younger sister.
With her left hand, when it is not spiraling around the radio tuner, Jane Anne tosses boiled peanuts between her lips. They look like a pile of swelled ticks, gray-skinned and blood-bloated, in the palm of her hand, and she is soberly emptying a paper sack full of them. I have noticed that she eats in a dazed trance, similar to the manner in which she sings to the radio, as if eating were a habitual duty. She was always a dutiful child, and now she weighs one hundred and seventy-five pounds, has a prematurely stooped back, and the corners of her mouth pucker down in a perpetual expression of bad humor. An unhappy kewpie doll.
Fifteen years ago she was a beautiful, dutiful child. Fifteen years ago I would bring her red and purple ribbons, watch her thread them through her hair. It looked like miniature maypoles, and when she tossed a braid I wanted to grab one and swing out. Today she wears a mud-colored scarf tied tightly at the nape of her neck.
“Why don’t you ever talk seriously to me?” she asks and I grip the wheel, staring hard at the car in front of me, abruptly aware of the scores of vehicles swarming the interstate ahead and behind me. Each one is a possible fatal accident.
“What do you want to talk about?” I say warily, my thighs beginning to feel cramped in the immobile space-time of the traveling Volkswagen interior. In the event of an accident, all is lost in a Volkswagen.
“What do you want to talk about?” Jane Anne mimics in a voice that, remarkably, is more like my own than my own sounds to me. She is full of surprises, this sister of mine whom I do not know. “I’ll tell you one damn thing,” she says, really angry this time, her tongue flailing against a stray peanut, “you may be smart, but I have all the common sense in this family.” Snorting, she clings to the side of her door.
This is true. She does have the common sense in our family, a fact uttered and re-uttered by my paternal grandmother who likens me to my Uncle George Wilkins. My Uncle George was so smart, she says, that he was almost an idiot. He died with a moonshine-ruined liver and a cancer that ate from his breast right through to his back, and Grandmother said it would have gone on through the bed and into the hospital linoleum if his heart hadn’t stopped first.
He was a geologist and forever poking rocks with his cane, head bent forward, arm flicking, cane flicking, eyes pouncing toward the ground to examine and file away every square inch of land that his feet passed over. Once he broke his nose against a haybaler, never saw it, saw only the gray-black pieces of sedimentary rock that flipped over and under the tip of his cane. But he was a smart one, my Uncle George, and twice a year scientists from Washington came down to sober him up and fetch him back to a laboratory where he performed penetrating geological studies. They wanted him to fly up there, but he always said he did his traveling on the ground. Now he’s his own specimen, buried under six feet of sand and sedimentary rock in Calhoun County, South Carolina, and he’s not going anywhere.
“I’ll tell you another damn thing,” Jane Anne says and warms up to one of our childhood wrangles, the kind where neither of us is aware of the reason but both of us will stake our lives on a resolution in our favor. It is our father’s blood that swells up at these times, bubbles of madness that break at the mouth. “I’ll miss your sweet, sweet eyes,” Willie Neal croaks from the radio, “I told you when I left, I couldn’t live with your lies.”
“I’m sick and tired of you making me feel stupid. You act like I’m still eleven years old, like I’m still your devoted and moronic pawn. I’m nineteen, damn you, I’ve read Sartre and Camus.” She utilizes her French education in all arguments, since I have studied only Latin and vaguely remember it anyway—French is her code language through which she can curse me to my ignorant face. “I’ve seen Chicago and New York, I’ve seen Paris and you don’t even have a passport.”
“A passport isn’t exactly a rite of passage, Jane Anne.”
“Not,” she says, “if you don’t even have one.” Furious now, she sputters like a cat and is just seconds away from a serious assault. Sometimes when we were younger we’d forget what we were angry about in the middle of a wrangle, and so kept on with it anyway, only louder and with more passion.
“Not,” she says, “if you travel with your heart incognito like a goddamn ghost. You’ve been just a barrel of laughs for two weeks.”
“Didn’t come down here,” I say, grim as a soldier, “in order to entertain my family.” There is a white Pontiac endangering my rear bumper.
“Then why, in God’s name, did you come at all?” Jane Anne kicks the peanut sack; the Pontiac veers to the left and passes safely, though in a glance I can tell that the man inside it is a lunatic.
“I know one thing and don’t you forget it: I am as educated as you are, I am as competently conversive as you are.”
This, too, is true. In fact, Jane Anne can shift facilely between Sunday dinner chatter at my grandmother’s and mournful sympathetico at my aunt’s where my first cousin, Jonathan, is dying of cancer. Both situations strike me dumb.
At my grandmother’s Christmas dinner, I deaf-mute my way through the awkward vacuum during which butt-pinching uncles watch football games and bouffant-headed aunts question me as to how many boyfriends I have and my grandmother pounces at odd moments to bark in my ear, “Can’t go to school forever!” Normally I wink and grin like a demon, offer condolences for my slovenly personality, giggle madly while my butt is tweaked, and create countless football players who appear and disappear as boyfriends according to my whim. Once I created a rather bookish law student who was poorly received and he disappeared during the course of dessert, an hour later reappearing as a dashing quarterback who was a well-received pre-med. This time, however, I sleepwalk, staring maniacally at each relative until they leave me alone.
“Time to eat!” Grandmother cries, pertly, her presence in its element and as relentless as a Mack truck. Fourteen grown men and women rise as one and throng into the kitchen where dishes of food, festive-colored and bubbling, are lined in perfect rows to be picked over, placed on china plates and retired to the dining room, there to be consumed in dutiful silence. But first comes the continuum in which fourteen grown men and women hang back, hem-haw, pluck at their sleeves or pick their noses, succumb to the cowardliness of not being first in line though for five hours their appetites have been titillated to the peak of a savage desire. For a few seconds we stand like tame vultures and just peer, ravenous, at the untouched food. I believe I will faint from hunger, until I finally find myself at the table, slapping mashed potatoes onto crisply cool china.
“Jane Anne,” Grandmother says in her grand commandeering tone, a tone reminiscent of both grade-school teachers and Methodist preachers, “would you please say grace.” Jane Anne positively glistens with glee, jubilant while all eyes pin me against the profaned table, potatoes puffed and accusing on my plate.
“For these Thy gifts, Oh Lord let us be thankful,” Jane Anne croons, in a strangerly fashion. The surge is on now, compliments and condiments fly across the table, and I sleepwalk through dinner, an attendant to disapproval.
FREE IN-ROOM MOVIES: TWENTY HONEYMOON SUITES I read on a huge sign. In twenty minutes we will pass through the middle of South of the Border, almost into North Carolina. The peanuts have risen once more into Jane Anne’s lap, and she nimbly eats them. “It’s my last night in town, I’d be a fool to stick around,” the radio says. I do not know the performer although his song is appealing in its drowsy insistence. At South of the Border Jane Anne will meet a boyfriend from her school and I will continue north to my school alone. Both of us are hyper-aware of the advertisements, as if they are motes of sand trickling time away. She wants to get out of my presence as badly as I do hers; we are both morbidly afraid of each other, FREE—ADVICE, AIR, WATER. EVERYTHING ELSE REASONABLE.
“Another thing,” she says, wrapping up her side of the dialectic before handing the floor to me, “you have been nothing but rude and ill-mannered this whole vacation, to me, to Daddy, even to Aunt Louise. You lack discrimination, that’s what you lack.”
“Jonathan… how is he?” Jane Anne whispers to my aunt. I perch on the lips of a couch, finger wringing finger, my tongue thick as a marble tombstone.
“Dying,” my aunt chokes, “dy—ing.”
“How long?” Jane Anne looks absolutely engrossed, a dutiful child.
“Days, weeks, God knows when he’ll be free from the pain.” Solemnly Jane Anne acknowledges the mercy of God with a slow, dazed nodding of her chin. She is gathering momentum for the predictable eventuality wherein my aunt will begin to sob and she can console with a firm and warm arm across the heaving back. But—surprise—my aunt visibly marshals her circumference and pulls herself together with a prolonged sigh. My palms are clammy with the dead and the living.
“Sarah Louise is home,” my aunt says, giddy with recovered strength, but poised along some precipice of mental breakdown. Sarah Louise is also my first cousin. “She’s in the back bedroom getting dressed.” Sarah Louise is in the back bedroom getting dressed, Jonathan is in the front bedroom, blinds drawn, dying. For a while we sit in an uncomfortably loud silence until Sarah Louise comes into the living room. Like her mother, Sarah Louise has reddish-brown hair and a pointed face that articulates itself at the breach of the nose. She looks like a rumpled domesticated animal, exhaustion whitening her cheeks in random places like frostbite. She is looking directly into my eyes.
“He wants to see you, Bo.”
“Me?”
“He’s asking for you.”
Jane Anne shivers and recoils, I recoil, a creeping nausea deep inside my throat; I wish to hell I was somewhere, anywhere, somebody someplace else. When I was two, Jonathan christened me into the family by nicknaming me Bo, a name used only by blood relatives and, to them, a name coincidental with my very existence. Only recently has Jane Anne begun to call me Jennifer, her statement of self-determination. Nomenclature is her forte.
I remember Jonathan in two ways: first, the way he looked at eleven, knobby-kneed and skinny as a fence post, my best friend and comrade. Like rabid dogs we chased the cows on his father’s farm until they ran idiotically into their pond water and grouped together up to their buttocks in sludge and cattails. The days I spent with him were always warm and cloudless and kinetic with revelry. We played doctor inside the very room where he now lies dying; he was the first man I ever studied. Once my father found us together and beat me with a leather belt until welts crisscrossed my bare legs and back like textile woof. Afterwards, since we lived in different towns, he grew out of revelry and into proms and long-legged cheerleaders. I saw him last two years ago, a young man so handsome he could send pangs of romance down the back of Ayn Rand herself. Blond hair feathered and long around his neck, the face of a beautiful woman made a little rough at the edges, an unaware body oozing casual strength and grace, the man was unbearably pretty. I believe the mythic Christ, aided by centuries of imagination, could never approach the fullness of reality in Jonathan’s splendor.
I stand and rub my hands together and they slide against their own moisture. In times of stress I enter into a semicomatose state like an instinct-driven opossum. Automatically my brain begins to decline a Latin noun, a ae ae am a, ae arum is as is. The room is shadowed and unlit, a thickly-queer smell of medicine and urine and sweet Jesus the smell of life itself condensed into a pungent and rancid death-room, without light and without hope. I feel an acute hatred for myself, sweat trickling—an endless beading health—under my armpits: da ta ta ta, a ae am a, this is the way the world ends. Across the room the bed seems to rest against the far wall but surely to God he is not in it, there is no indentation under the quilt, there is only a skull resting on the pillow, a yellow hairless sunken skull.
“Bo,” he says, a muffled, anonymous sound, drugged, removed, a physical impossibility save in nightmare. Dipping strangely, the lines of the room combat with a nausea, and I realize my mouth is whimpering and salivating. This nausea moves around the throat like unconscious prayer. The sting is for the da ta ta ta, arum is as is.
“Bo,” he whispers, “I wanted to tell you…”
“Tell me.”
“It’s not so bad.”
“Tell me quick.”
He coughs without coughing, resting. Two more minutes and I will go mad and this thought is comforting. Someone is whimpering somewhere.
“Are you still my friend?”
(“Fucking Jesus!” Jonathan yells and punches the air with his fist. The cowshed blows up in slow motion, splinters of wood fall like dust on his hair and shoulders. Large pieces of board fly over the fence, landing with dull thuds in the pasture. Down below, huddled up and frightened, Bo studies the delicate white hairs on the back of his right leg.)
“I wanted to tell you goodbye,” he says.
(The others said, “Don’t tiddle in the pond,” but they pay no attention. They are full, with the warm brown water pressing against them, and they pay no attention. Across the water, stabbed by erect cattails, the cows stand knee-deep and black near the pond’s edge, tails slapping onto their backs, heads browsing onto the surface then easing back up to stare at pine trees. Bo and Jonathan know that they think of great things, standing there in the water, staring. They tiddle freely and silently into the pond.)
“It’s not so bad,” he says.
I pretend I haven’t heard.
“It leaves.”
“Jonathan…”
“Goodbye,” he says. “I loved you, yes,” and then he starts to doze.
“Goodbye.”
I return to the living room and begin to cry. My aunt and Sarah Louise begin to cry. Jane Anne stares at me with narrow eyes, her mouth puckered in distaste, then she pats and coos and comforts Sarah Louise. Uncontrollably I want to punch her in the nose, kiss her on the mouth, dash outside to the car, and get the hell out of South Carolina. A past is dying out from under my feet and I notice for the first time the blinking red lights on my aunt’s Christmas tree. One two three, one two three they waltz, immobile, on the outskirts of the fir needles. I picture my sister wrapped in red lights, clapping her hands—one two three. When we get into the Volkswagen, she says: “You should have controlled yourself, you shouldn’t have cried in front of them. We were guests in their house.”
Ramona Stewart sings: “The sun’s falling from the sky and night ain’t far behind.” Jane Anne waits for my defensive remarks, contemplating her retort through a wriggling at the lips, the worrying to death of a boiled peanut at the tip of her tongue. “Sun’s falling,” Ramona goes on, “night ain’t far behind.”
“Listen, Jane Anne,” I say, glancing briefly in her direction, then staring straight ahead, a cheap power play although my hands and eyes are truly busy. She is filing away the information, noting the brevity and attributing it to arrogance.
“Can’t we part as friends, can’t we please just forget our old roles and part as friends? Please?”
Up ahead a huge sombrero sits atop a five-story tower. We have arrived at our connection, South of the Border. My sister sits in complete silence, one of her half-dutiful trances, and I pull off at the exit and enter the parking lot of a coffee house that is partly Mexican, partly southern, and mostly middle-American slough. Jane Anne’s friend slumps manfully against the wheel of a red Datsun hatchback with Wisconsin plates and, suddenly businesslike, Jane Anne is out of the car, suitcase in hand, pocketbook slung in a noose around her neck.
“Goodbye,” she says and is gone. I watch while she situates herself in the Datsun, then I pull out of the parking lot, drive up the entrance ramp to the interstate, alone inside the throbbing, hurtling Volkswagen, then insert myself into the welter of anonymous northbound vehicles.
I can go home again, again and again, each episode like a snowflake that sticks to your eyelashes. They melt and mingle with your tears. Take a memory, any memory, and it becomes an inviolable god, a sanity exactly according to plan. But those soft edges—those peripheral realities that blur, those landscapes that shift and rush past—those are the crucibles of emotion, and they flow headlong backwards beneath your feet. I come South only twice a year, once at Christmas, once in the summer. Each time is a possible fatal accident.