The Animators(52)
Something feels different, tonight. The sketch of Stroke Sharon—it has something that I want. I want to be able to feel this way all the time. To be able to laugh about the things that have happened to me, baggage and all, light and dark. To own it handily enough so that it could be funny and horrifying at once. Maybe this is the idea I’ve been looking for. Maybe this is something close.
When we quiet, I say to Mel, “My mom called me. She wants us to come to Kentucky to visit.”
Mel’s eyes go wide. Behind her there’s a third sketch. It is another me, prestroke, full in the face and chest. But this sketch is unfinished, empty space filling the eye sockets. It is a half me, a ghost me come straight from her hand, staring us down as Mel says, “Oh, we have to go. Of course. We have to.”
—
When we get the go-ahead from the docs a few weeks later, the weather is beginning to cool. We pack up the car and give Jesco the house keys. He flaps his hand at us. “Y’all are headed back to the big city, I reckon.”
“Kentucky this time.”
“Huh.” He peers close at me. “Well. Y’all be safe. Don’t get et up by a wildcat.”
“Can’t make any promises,” Mel tells him. We pile in. We head north.
FAULKNER
I was born in Faulkner, Kentucky.
My parents grew up there, and their parents, and their parents. With each successive generation, the family tunnel vision thickened until living outside the perimeters of the triangle formed by the Bert T. Combs Mountain Parkway to the south, Interstate 75 to the west, and I-64 to the north was unthinkable. I have always assumed that my leaving is the reason my family doesn’t like me, but it could be the other way around. It’s a circular problem, a snake with its tail in its mouth.
My very first job was at the Faulkner County Library, an annex to the WPA building that served as the town’s elementary school. It inhabited the basement, books dampened by the underground, carpeting the scratchy green found on outdoor patios. Mrs. Horsemuller, the county librarian and an epileptic, recruited me to keep an eye on the place whenever she had a seizure at her desk. She trusted me to pick her up (she weighed maybe ninety pounds) and carry her to the cot in the back office. Her husband owned Horsemuller Hardware down on Main and would stick his head in at lunch, whispering, “Was the little missus feeling sleepy?”
I’d reshelve the few books checked out but spent most of my shift paging through old yearbooks. I liked yearbooks from the smaller, outer-county schools best, back before consolidation: M. C. Mattox in Hollins, Purvis Manual in Shortridge, and Faulkner itself, the edge of tobacco country, where shipments piled with steaming coal still sped through on the five A.M. CSX train.
Faulkner was always more interesting to me in the past tense. Dad was class of ’75, Mom ’76, a time when girls in our part of the country were just beginning to stop ratting their hair. There were, in fact, precious few changes between the 1976 Eagle and the 2001 Pride of the Tribe: the White Dot became a Dairy Queen, wide-bottomed coupes were replaced with RAV4s. But the open, unfettered expressions of kids in portraits remained, as did the zeal for FFA and FCA (there were as many cows and Christians in 1976 as in 2001). The same twenty surnames are ubiquitous. Everyone is kin to everyone else, tributaries joining in marriage and forking off into nieces and nephews and cousins and step-cousins. The prom queen Mom’s year was Denise Falwell, mother of my chief high school tormentor, Karly Ingram, who ended up leaving our senior prom because her boyfriend, Travis Cotter, got hammered and unsheathed the pimp cane he’d bought to match his tuxedo, revealing it to be a sword, which he swung around the gym to the strains of AC/DC until the police took him away.
I was from the town, like everyone else, but I could never shake the suspicion that I was merely a spectator. I haunted the yearbooks of the past yet failed to show up for my own senior portrait. Not pictured: Sharon Kay Kisses.
I was the only student from Faulkner to go to college out-of-state in ten years. When I got the Ballister scholarship, a frantically excited Mrs. Horsemuller called the newspaper and got me a front-page article.
Upon seeing the article, my father didn’t say anything, but reached out and grabbed my head, something between an embrace and a noogie. This, coming from the man who typically responded to anything I said with a creased brow and some irritated head-shaking, who once, when my parents refused to send me to a gifted-and-talented program at Duke on the argument that it was too far away, turned and hissed, “You think you’re too good to work this summer?” The article was clipped and thumbtacked to the bulletin board in his garage, where it was found when he died. The ladies at the laundromat where my mother worked had it laminated, and it was affixed to our fridge at home, where I was gratified to see how much it bugged Shauna. Though Mom did mutter, releasing me from a rare hug, “They did not get your best side, hon.”
It seemed Mrs. Horsemuller was the happiest of all that I was leaving. When she heard the news, she hugged me hard, her skinny little limbs hot beneath the fabric of her sweater; then she dabbed at her eyes with the edge of a Kleenex, smiling.
Before I left for the last time, she grabbed my face with sudden ferocity. “Don’t you come back here,” she said. “Don’t you dare.”
When I said nothing, she shook my face for emphasis. “This place,” she said, “is a bucket of sand crabs. One tries to climb out, the others’ll reach up and pull him back down. Climb out of here. Don’t you dare come back.”