By Easter time, I could walk nearly to town and back from the Opry with only the most reasonable amount of aches and pains. I’d lost seventy pounds. Seventy God damn pounds!
I’d managed to save a chunk of money, but I still had a long way to go, so I decided to start making custom picnic tables in addition to birdhouses and dollhouses. I painted the tables whatever color folks wanted and sealed them tighter than Grandpa’s lips when asked about his moonshine.
The new dresses from Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton fast became what motivated me to walk by the snack shacks rather than walking in. I couldn’t bear to disappoint her.
I’d gone in to see Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton for measurements three times—our “checkups.” I never did ask her out. That seemed less possible than making it to the moon. Still, it was nice feeling so alive around her—and maybe that would be enough.
Then, on our third measuring, I looked into her mirror and saw something I hoped I wouldn’t: sagging skin. Seems I wasn’t losing weight so much as I was deflating.
My skin hung in wrinkled groupings, almost like pie dough that needed rolling out. I pinched the place where my body actually started and imagined slicing off the excess with a pair of scissors. Of course I couldn’t do that, given all the veins and nerves and whatnot, but I wanted to. Truly, I might have risked it, if only to avoid Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton seeing me like this.
She knocked on the door. “You ready, hon?”
“What’s that?”
“I said, you need an assistant. I don’t want to be measured by you. I don’t want my friend to see me looking all saggy and misshapen.”
Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton opened the door discreetly. She eyed me up and down. “Oh, that. That happens.”
“What am I going to do?” I cried, holding a bag of limp skin in my hand. “I don’t know which is worse, being big or—”
She took the tape measure from her teeth. “Skin is not going to kill you like that weight will. Besides, you can get that cut away.”
“You can?”
“It’s not cheap, but they do it in Dallas—where they do everything. Meanwhile—” she got back to measuring—“moisturize with aloe. You have a plant?”
“At this rate,” I said, pinching my sagging underarms, “I’ll need a farm.”
“I don’t have a farm, but I do have a nice plot of aloe out back. You go help yourself when we’re done here.” She rolled up the tape measure and paper-clipped it. “47-49-48, and I think some of the waist is your excess.” She tucked the tape measure in her seamstress pocket. “This week, on account of your halfway mark, I’m going to make you a pantsuit—break you from those dresses. If you don’t like it, you only have to wear it for two weeks.”
“I always wanted to wear pantsuits, but by my mid-thirties they got too hard on my form.”
“That’s what ladies think. They think that, if they are big, they should wear big—but the opposite is true. Besides, you have a sturdy form. Show it off.”
“Perhaps when I’m a little less sturdy.”
“It’s good to be sturdy.” She flashed her smile and told me to take my time getting dressed.
I buttoned my dress up, clicked off the light, and helped myself to some aloe in the back on my way back into the store. Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton was just turning the OPEN sign to CLOSED.
She asked, “You want to get lunch with me?”
“Where?”
“Here.”
Without waiting for my answer, Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton—the sun making her hair look even whiter—walked behind the counter and pulled out two chicken-salad sandwiches.
“I thought you might say yes,” she said when she handed one over.
We sat down in her sitting area. The fan made a low whirling noise. I was going to make a joke about how typically folks see you in your underwear after you’ve eaten together, but stopped myself.
She poured us both some strawberry water from the pitcher on her counter. The sunshine on the rug looked like a slanted window on the floor. For a minute, it seemed as if we were in a living painting—some kind of frozen moment. I knew I would remember her standing there in her loose, off-white dress pouring water from a pitcher filled with ice and strawberry slivers for a long time. Maybe forever.
“You ever go to movies?” I asked.
“I do,” she said.
“Maybe you’d like company?”
“It just so happens I would.”
“It’s seven miles to town from the Opry. How about I walk here, then I drive us in your car? That would give me quite an incentive to exercise.”
She handed me my strawberry water and sat down. “What would?”
“You would, Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton,” I said, blushing against my will.
“Well.” She smoothed out the embroidered napkin on the table between us.
I recovered. “I would like you to see me more often when I’m dressed.”
“And that is how I know you are a Southern lady, not pulled in by the politics of the time. Although—” she leaned in—“there are a few of the modern politics I agree with—at least in principle.”
I didn’t know then what she was alluding to, so I got nervous and ate a big bite of my sandwich before asking if she could give me the information for a Dallas skin doctor.
“I have someone I can ask.”
“You seem to know a person for everything.”
“People undress in front of me,” she said. “It makes for personal conversation.”
I nodded and took this to mean that she was personal with me only because she got personal with all her clients. Going to the movies was just two widows passing the time. That revelation of not being special to her weighed heavy on me. I’d hoped maybe she fancied me, but I suppose she needed to seem like she fancied everyone in order for them to feel comfortable stripping down and revealing all their bad sides.
“You OK?” she asked me, laying her hand—as cool as lettuce—on top of mine.
“I’m just tired today.”
“Poor thing,” she said before pulling up the napkin from near my hand and dabbing her mouth, as if she were headed for the napkin and not my hand the whole time.
× × ×
Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton and I saw Psycho and The Magnificent Seven—and then we did something that changed my life forever. We drove three hours in her spirited Volkswagen fastback to Austin where we decided to go crazy and see The Trials of Oscar Wilde since the movie had been banned from Sugar Land.
The gorgeous old theater got as crowded as a Good Humor truck in the desert. It smelled like popcorn and Old Spice and strange new scents I’d never smelled before. The red velvet seats squeaked when we sat down, but they were comfortable enough. My armrest had a bit of residue on the edge from the person before me, someone who clearly enjoyed toffee. I wiped my hand as casually as possible on the back of the seat in front of me while Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton figured out where to hang her purse where it wouldn’t touch the floor. We looked to be the oldest folks in there and had the tamest fashion of anyone, even the men—especially the men. It was like traveling to the future.
Just as we settled in, the screen went dark, and the slim lights lining the side walls dimmed. It felt as if I was falling asleep in a dreamworld with Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton right there beside me. The music crackled on and the film started.
Everyone stayed calm during the film until reference was made to Oscar Wilde’s “gross indecency” for having an affair with a young man named Lord Alfred Douglas, Lord Queensberry’s son. At that point, a man in the theater whistled and yelled, “Three cheers for indecency,” leading a legion of other whistlers and clappers.
I slinked down in my seat, readying myself for a wave of opposition from the rest of the crowd, but none came. Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton, smiling in the glare of the movie lights, quietly threaded her arm through mine.
“You liking this?” she asked, leaning in.
Not sure whether she was talking about her arm or the movie, and not wanting her to move her arm, I just nodded.
“That young man was twenty years younger than Oscar Wilde!” she whispered. “That sort of thing happens all the time with older men and young ladies—but that’s not really the issue at hand, now is it?”
A young man in front of us turned slightly to let us know that Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton’s commentary was not increasing his enjoyment of the film. She nodded curtly, but kept quiet.
The movie went on, with a few rowdy folks in the audience yelling back to the screen when derogatory bits were said against Mr. Oscar Wilde, making me wonder if they hadn’t snuck in a little something stronger with their pop. The theater buzzed electric that night, with a kind of tension and release. A man near the front with dark peg-leg pants and a bright red turtleneck, who looked like he fell asleep each night with a book on his chest, smoked and hollered that Oscar Wilde should have been sainted.
“Amen!” someone responded from the back.
Maybe it was being inside that bubble of a theater or maybe it was a gathering of all the lessons of my life to date, but either way I blurted out, “You know, I kissed a girl once—when I was also a girl.”
Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton’s face broke out with the smile of a gossip who’d just hit gold. She gasped and pulled me to her. “What?”
Two people in front of us turned around, looking more agitated than worms in a bait cup.
Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton barely cared. “Tell me!”
“I’ll tell you afterwards,” I said and pointed that she turn her attentions back to the screen.
“Afterwards?” She took her arm away. “You, Nana Dara, have a cruel streak.”
As soon as the credits started Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton whispered, “Let’s get moving. We have a long drive back—just enough time to hear the secret details of your youth.” She grabbed our empty cups and scooted in front of a few people who were reading all the credits. I’d never seen her be so impolite.
I squeezed down the theater row after her, grateful I’d lost as much weight as I had but also painfully aware of the amount I had to go, as I felt my buttocks grazing head after head like I was going over bumps made of hair.
× × ×
Thankfully she’d parked close to the entrance of the theater because Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton practically sprinted and, despite my elevated exercise, I would not have been able to keep up much longer.
Red-faced and feeling for my pulse on the right side of my neck to be sure I wasn’t going to have an attack, I said, “You are walking so fast that I almost took these secrets to my grave!”
“You would have been good on the stage,” she said.
I walked around to the passenger side and unlocked her door. “And I’m driving back. We almost died a dozen times on the way over.”
She tossed me her keys. “I like it when you drive anyway, hon. Gives me a chance to put my feet up.”
A black couple with hair as puffy as Q-tips walked by holding hands. They were so unlike Huddie and the black folks I had grown up around that I had to smile. Made me wonder what the 1960s had in store.
I slid in, moving the seat back a hair, and we were ready to go. “Don’t ask me about my past until I’m out of this parking lot,” I said. “You know how I feel about parking lots—they are death traps to be sure. I need to focus.”
“I will try to be patient,” she said, wrapping a red-and-blue silk scarf around her hair so she could roll the window down.
I drove out onto the road headed back to Sugar Land. Unable to hold it in a moment longer, she said, “OK. Now spill it.”
“I wasn’t really a girl—I mean, I was nearly twenty.”
“Loretta Lynn was celebrating her seven-year anniversary by then.”
We turned onto the freeway, chugging down the on-ramp before I took my spot in the slow lane.
“You were twenty. And she was . . .”
I cracked my window to stop Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton’s window from whistling. My neck felt numb from an anxiety that was multilayered. First, I was nervous speaking about my wanderings of years ago, fearing Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton might find it too much to handle in the end. Second, I worried that talking about my time with Rhodie might change it somehow, or might even be a betrayal of her. Third, it was plain difficult for me to talk on that level of personal. It was frightening, like when you first try walking in heels in public—something I did only once when I was sixteen for my cousin June-June’s wedding. The results were tragic, let me tell you.
I took in a breath and started. “She was twenty also, and heading to college.”
“And her name?”
“Her name was Rhodie.”
“And where did you meet?” She waited, then sighed. “As God as my witness, you are the world’s worst storyteller.”
“We met at the egg store where I was working.”
It got silent.
“I’m not asking any more questions. I will simply sit silent in this car until you start telling me the wheres and what-fors of this tale.” Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton opened her glove compartment with a loud cracking sound and brought out a box of figs to snack on in the silence.
“I’m sorry,” I said after a few minutes. “I don’t know how to talk like this.”
“You just tell me what she looked like and how you became friends and then how things progressed as they did.”
“Does this upset you?” I asked, my throat clenching up so hard it hurt.
Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton sighed and closed her fig box. She set it on the floor at her feet and turned to me, with one leg tucked under her.
“My husband died nearly a decade ago,” she said, “bless his heart. We had a strong marriage. A good one, although we had never been blessed with children, as you know, on account of an injury he got hunting. Everything worked but didn’t work at the same time.” She paused, then got back to it: “About fifteen years in, I met a woman at the VFW. We both did dress work and got together on a project to upgrade the church robes. She did this beautiful embroidery work. On every one of those gowns she’d stitched the Lamb of God. They were so gentle, those little lambs.
“Over that year working together, we got close, and she confessed to me that her husband shopped around a bit. Might have even had another child a county or two over. Anyway, her name was Barbara, but everyone called her Taffy—I don’t remember why. Taffy had three kids that she loved. For her, she’d said, that would do.
“Her husband started staying away more so more and more, and I went over there helping her with the kids, since I couldn’t have any of my own. Well, one night we were sitting on the porch, drinking some redneck lemonade, when I leaned over and kissed her. I have no idea why, but I did it.”
I nearly swerved off the road. “What’d she do?”
“She kissed me a little, but then she pulled away and told me it was time to go check on the baby. He had croup.”
“And?”
“And we never talked about it again. We finished up the project, and she told me she was getting too busy with raising the kids while her husband was away nearly every weekend. After a few more months, she started going to Saturday night services and I just never saw her again. Somehow, I just never saw her again.”
I had no idea what to say.
Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton grabbed her fig box again and popped one in her mouth. “Now that’s how you tell a story. Get to it, Nana Dara.”
So I did. I told her everything—right down to the time Rhodie drew hearts on my arm with berry juice, and it stained so I couldn’t wash it off for three days and had to wear long sleeves. I told her about our one weekend together, when her family drove to New Mexico, and about the thunder and lightning storm that happened then and how it felt so natural. I told her about her mother finding us and slapping me on the side of the head, and the deep fear and shame that slap burned into me. I told her about my cousin Earl and that other officer who had defiled those four women in jail. I told her about the pastor who set me apart from everyone in the entryway after Sunday service, and about my crazy, selfish decision to break Rhodie’s heart. I told her that Rhodie died before I could apologize.
“You are too hard on yourself,” she said. “You were a young woman—a scared young woman.”
“I’ve recently come around to giving myself that forgiveness, mostly—to practicing what Eddie calls self-acceptance.”
I put on my signal and changed lanes to pass a truck loaded down with hay, some of it flying off and hitting my windshield.
“Hmmm,” she said, waiting to see if I had any more to say.
I took in a deep breath, preparing to tell her about the head cook. This was something only a few people knew about, and something that had never been thoroughly discussed. Both Beauregard and the Warden acted like the matter had been shut when the head cook got sent off after that night with me and him and my piece of mug. In their polite avoidance of it, I allowed that night to somehow make me dirty—like they were kind enough to overlook my dirtiness because they loved me. Messed up but true. It’s just how my mind works sometimes.
I started in, my hands wet on the wheel: “Then there was the head cook.”
“At Central Unit?”
“What we called Imperial State Prison Farm or Sugar Land for short, but yes. Shortly after I’d locked myself away—and you can see how obvious that is—he attacked me. He attacked me a few times really.”
“What!”
“He nearly took my honor in the most dishonorable way.”
Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton twisted herself in her seat so she fully faced me. “Oh my dear, I am so sorry. What happened? If you want to tell.”
I cleared my throat. “He came at me with his member out—and this was after he’d showed me himself a few times before, only now he wanted to really use what he had made into a weapon. So I cut him.”
She gasped. “You cut him—there?”
“I aimed there, but I caught his hand instead.”
“Ha! Well, don’t mess with you!”
“This relates to Rhodie. He’d gotten ahold of some letters she wrote to me and made them out to be nasty. Before that moment—and even some times after—this part of me agreed. I’d said it by the way I acted back then, all sheepish and distant, that it was OK to not care about me. That I was getting the distance I deserved for being . . . for being a pervert.” My body filled with my own strength, the power of telling my story. “But that night when I cut him, I started to find this strength—meager though it was then. And over the years, that strength grew and grew. So, in the end, his attacks were really blessings.”
Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton reached over and ran her hand along the side of my head, like you do with a child. “Aw, hon.”
“It was a long road after that to where I am now, but I found myself a good friend in Beauregard and a soul mate in my friend Huddie and a great man in the Warden, and then I got me some fabulous kids by proxy.”
“Yes, you did.”
I drove along for a minute, maybe going too slow for the freeway, feeling my emotions lining up and my life making sense. I saw how this kind of talking could give type of reality to feelings—make them tangible.
Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton waited, not saying anything. The lights on the sides of the road zipped by over my windshield.
“So that’s it, really.” I breathed out. “That’s my story.”
“I love your story. You are one strong woman, Nana Dara.” She shifted in her seat again. “Now, about your friend Rhodie, you ever consider doing that again?”
I swerved just a little. “You mean . . . the Oscar Wilde way?”
She smiled with those flawless teeth. “Yes, ma’am, the Oscar Wilde way.”
“Oh, not often.”
“What does ‘not often’ look like to you?”
I laughed. “Maybe twenty or thirty times a year.”
“Ha! Well, you ever think about The Oscar Wilde way lately?”
“I’m practically an old woman!”
She sucked her teeth. “Women in my family live until their nineties. That’s twenty-five years of life left.”
“My family doesn’t live as long.”
“Your family didn’t turn a new side to a life of exercise and strong food.”
I thought of Daddy when I set him up at that hospital for folks after their minds had gone, with his belly so big it hung several inches over his belt buckle. “True.”
“You need to answer my question then, young lady.”
I didn’t know what to say. Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton was about the prettiest woman in the town, but I didn’t want to lose her as a friend.
“You first,” I said, keeping an eye on the road since her headlights were about as helpful as cataracts. “You think of it lately?”
“Coward.”
What they teach you in sales, Bo—the used-car salesman—once told me, is never to be the one to say the last word. Ask a question and leave it hanging. The one who answers first loses the deal. With the prowess of a used-car salesman, Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton waited, watching me.
“OK,” I finally said, “yes, yes I have considered kissing a woman lately.”
She smiled, popped another fig in her mouth, and rolled up her window. I rolled mine up to stop the whistle again.
“Me too,” she said, a proud edge to her voice.
I almost couldn’t take any more. I didn’t want to know if it was me—I mean, I did want to know, of course—but I was one breath from exploding, and what if it wasn’t me? So instead I just turned on the radio and told her to change the topic until I could have a proper amount of bourbon.
“Bourbon?”
“Yes,” I said. “In one hour we are going to Maria’s Roundabout.”
“No—” she smiled—“what’s say we go to the Opry instead.”
I gulped and nodded.
× × ×
I hadn’t been expecting company, much less Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton, so my bathroom was a little ripe. “Let me run to the bathroom,” I said, hoping to clean up a bit.
The cats came up to say hello or, rather, to make sure they approved. I introduced her to them: Pillowcase, Licorice, and Mr. Honky Tonk. “There’s more cats—and some pugs somewhere around here—so watch your step,” I warned. “Meanwhile, help yourself to a libation—there’s some ice in the icebox.”
I left her with the brood and headed to the bathroom. Kneeling down to clean my toilet with the door shut behind me was about as feasible as squeezing a parrot through a keyhole, so I stood up and did the best I could to stab at the brown ring around the inside.
“Oh hell,” I said, deciding instead to bite off a piece of soap and spit it in there in the hopes of covering up everything with some bubbles and scent.
The trouble with biting soap is that you can’t really rinse it out without stimulating more soap. Great, I thought, now I’m foaming at the mouth.
I stepped a hard foot into my white metal trashcan to compress all the tissues in there, folded the hand towel in three parts, and pulled the bath curtain—all wild circles in blue and green—as tight as I could against the wall. That looked better.
When I walked out of the bathroom, Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton held out a glass of bourbon on ice for me. She had one for herself, too.
“I found these nice glasses in your cabinet, along with a shocking number of tuna cans.”
“Low in calories,” I explained, adding, “I view my need to eat that much tuna as an atonement of sorts.”
“I can see how you would, bless your heart.”
The pugs shuffled in, chasing each other, their legs like tree branches tapping across the floor. One of them ran into the wall where it narrowed before the hallway.
“Not the smartest beasts,” I said.
She smiled and sat down on the couch, leaving room for me.
I was so nervous that I guzzled my bourbon and suggested we go out for a cigarette.
“What else should we do after The Trials of Oscar Wilde but be modern?”
Once we were outside on the back deck, with me in my easy chair and her on the red vinyl chair I’d pulled out for her from the kitchen, she lit her cigarette off mine, looking at me over the burning embers, with me not sure what the hell was going on. We put our glasses on the white plastic bucket that served as my side table. I followed the line of old Christmas lights that wound around the edges of the porch. The crickets gossiped.
“Those blue eyes,” Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton said, drawing in a deep lungful.
“I didn’t know you smoked.”
“Honey, we all smoke.”
I smiled and hoped I wasn’t sweating too much.
“I’ve always had a lot of respect for women who don’t wear lipstick,” she said, looking at the pale orange smudge on her cigarette filter. “Though I prefer the way I look with it on.”
Then I did something I hadn’t planned out. I leaned in and said, “Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton, may I kiss you?”
She pulled in a short breath and said, “I could never resist good manners.”
And it was that easy. After thirty-five years, it was that God damn easy.
She held her cigarette out to the side. I bent in and I kissed her.
She set the pace, kissing me slowly. The way we kissed was a form of asking each other if it was OK to get a little more intense. I moved my hand up to the back of her head, gently, and she leaned into me. We kissed like there was nothing else anywhere, like we were floating together in space.
Just as the emotions started getting a little overwhelming, Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton pulled back. “Whew.” She took a drag. “I vowed if the chance ever came up again, I’d do it. I am so glad I did.”
“Well I guess you have completed your dare,” I said, feeling like I was just a challenge she’d given herself.
She smiled. “Oh, you are sensitive, bless your heart.” Then she leaned in and kissed me again, putting her free hand on the side of my face. Her mouth was soft and confident. I liked the taste of bourbon and cigarettes, and the smell of her tea rose perfume.
“This is as good as a perfect lemon meringue pie.”
“Well, good,” she said. “Now kiss me again because I can never get enough pie.”
× × ×
We spent the next half hour kissing before she said it was time she got home. She was flushed and I could tell she was trying to pace this out.
“I hoped you were the kind I could kiss,” I said.
She smiled. “I figured you might be.”
I blushed. “Lemme drive you home.”
“Then you’ll have to walk back.”
“I like walking.”
She kissed my cheek, and we walked out to her car. And during the entire ride to town, the beautiful Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton’s hand burned a mark on my thigh the same way holy water marks the possessed—deep, hot, and permanent.