Valentine(33)
She has already disappeared into her house by the time I realize she left Debra Ann Pierce in my front yard. I stand there and watch the girls, who occasionally look over at me, grimace, and then ignore me completely. When the baby wakes up, I shepherd everyone into the house and lock the door. While the girls play in Aimee’s room, I try to nurse him. My right breast is burning up, and a hard knot next to the nipple suggests an infected milk duct. When the baby latches on, the pain travels the entire length of my torso.
By the time we are ready to leave for the Ladies Guild, it is nearly ninety degrees out and Aimee is mad that I sent her new friend home. She sits in the front seat kicking the glove box and fiddling with the air-conditioning vent while the baby fusses on the seat between us.
Did you have fun with Debra Ann? I ask.
It was okay, she says kicking, kicking, kicking.
Stop it, Aimee. Do y’all have a lot in common?
I guess so, she says. She has a bunch of friends, but I think most of them are imaginary.
This will be my second meeting with the Ladies Guild. When we moved to town, I decided we should maybe give up our Baptist radio and find a real church. It might be good for us to be part of something, and Aimee has started to talk about getting saved. But today’s meeting is a horror. The swamp cooler runs constantly, to no avail, and the heat only exacerbates the burning in my breast. When I arrive, some of the ladies are talking about having their husbands take boxes of old summer clothes out to the families living on the outskirts of town, in makeshift oil camps that have appeared overnight, it seems.
Those camps are just awful, Mrs. Robert Perry tells us. Trash everywhere and most of them don’t even have running water—she pauses and lowers her voice—and full of Mexicans.
A murmur of assent goes through the room. It’s terrible how they do, somebody says, and someone else reminds us that it’s not all of them, just some, and I sit there with my mouth hanging open. As if I have never heard this kind of talk in my life, as if I didn’t grow up hearing it from my daddy at the dinner table, from all my aunts and uncles at the Thanksgiving table, from my own husband. But now I think about Gloria and her family and it rankles, like an open sore that I can’t stop picking at.
Aimee and the baby are down the hall in the church nursery. This is a church, I told myself when the teenaged girl squealed and plucked the baby from my arms. They will be safe here. I close my eyes and press my hand to my forehead. Maybe I’m running a little fever. My right side, from beneath my armpit to my rib cage, feels like someone took a blowtorch to it.
Mary Rose, are you all right? B. D. Hendrix’s wife, Barbie, is standing next to my chair. She lays a hand on my shoulder. Someone says I’m probably worn out and then someone else mentions the awful business with the Ramírez girl, and there is another murmur of assent. It’s a real shame. How on earth is Mr. Strickland’s mama sleeping at night? She must be worried sick about her boy and all because of a misunderstanding.
This was no misunderstanding, I say. It was a rape, and I am sick and tired of y’all pretending otherwise. I pause and let my eyes wander around the fellowship hall. It is hot as perdition in here. Several ladies who have been fanning themselves with their copies of the charter now sit perfectly still on the edge of their folding chairs, as if they are awaiting a revelation, and I take this as a sign that I ought to continue speaking. In a few short hours, I will recognize this for the terrible error it is, but not now.
Because you can call a sandstorm a little breeze all day long, I tell them, and you can call a drought a dry spell, but at the end of the day, your house is still a mess and your tomato plants are dead and—my voice tightens up and, to my horror, my eyes begin to fill. I am not going to cry in front of these good ladies. I can still stop talking and everything might be okay, eventually, more or less.
I saw her, I tell them. What he did to her.
Excuse me, Mary Rose—the voice comes from over by the swamp cooler—I know what you think you saw, but last time I checked we still live in America, where a man is innocent until proven guilty.
A murmur wanders around the room, gentle bullshit passed from one good woman to another. While they are right about Strickland’s constitutional rights, it seems to me they have already convicted a teenage girl. If y’all will excuse me, please, I say, and make a break for the ladies’ room.
Eventually they send the treasurer, Mrs. L. D. Cowden, to check on me. Mrs. Cowden is a senior member who claims her grandmother planted the town’s first row of pecan trees back in 1881—the same year the five Chinese railroad workers died in an explosion out near Penwell. A windstorm snapped all twenty-five of the first saplings in half. The story is a bald-faced lie. Everybody knows it was Mrs. Shepard’s granny Viola Tillman who planted those trees, but nobody likes to admit it. Corrine was asked to resign her membership six years earlier, Suzanne told me, after a little scuffle with Barbie Hendrix. It all might have been forgiven, or at least lived with, given Corrine’s deep roots in the community, but then she stopped getting her hair done on Thursday afternoons. I’m done with all this, she told the good women of the guild. From now on, I’ll jack it up my own damn self, all the way to Jesus.
Mrs. Cowden finds me in the ladies’ room next to the fellowship hall, hunched over the sink and trying not to cry. She leans quietly against the bathroom door while I splash lukewarm water on my face and mutter to myself. What bullsh— What bull. Can’t even believe this.