Bastard out of Carolina (6 page)

L
ove, at least love for a man not already part of the family, was something I was a little unsure about. Aunt Alma said love had more to do with how pretty a body was than anyone would ever admit, and Glen was pretty enough, she swore, with his wide shoulders and long arms, his hair combed back and his collar buttoned up tight over his skinny neck.

Sometimes after Glen had been over to visit and gone, Mama would sit on the porch and smoke a cigarette, looking off into the distance. Sometimes I’d go slide quietly under her armpit and sit with her, saying nothing. I would wonder what she was thinking, but I didn’t ask. If I had, she’d have said something about the road or the trees or the stars. She’d have talked about work or something one of my cousins had done, or one of the uncles, or she’d have swatted my butt and sent me off to bed, then gone back to sitting there with her face so serious, smoking her Pall Mall cigarette right down to the filter.

“You and Reese like Glen, don’t you?” Mama would say now and then in a worried voice. I would nod every time. Of course we liked him, I’d tell her, and watch her face relax so her smile came back.

“I do too. He’s a good man.” She’d run her hands over her thighs slow, hug her knees up close to her breasts, and nod to herself more than me. “He’s a good man.”

The nights Mama worked at the diner, she’d leave us with Aunt Ruth or Aunt Alma. But sometimes, if she wasn’t working too late, she would make up a bed of blankets and pillows in the backseat of her Pontiac and take us with her. She’d feed us dinner in a booth near the kitchen and let us listen to the jukebox for a while before she put us to bed in the car, telling me sternly not to unlock the door for anyone but her. While we sat in that booth, I’d watch her at work. She was mesmerizing, young and sweet-faced and too pretty for anyone to be mean to her. The truckers teased her and played her favorite songs on the jukebox. The younger ones would try to get her to go out with them, but she’d joke them out of it. The older ones who knew her well would compliment her on us, her pretty girls. I watched it all, admiring the men with their muscular forearms and broad shoulders as they sipped the coffee my mama served them, absorbing the music as it played continuously, keeping Reese from spilling her milk or sliding down under the table, and smiling at Mama when she looked over to me.

“You’re Anney’s girl, an’t you?” one of them said to me. “Your little sister looks just like her, don’t she? You must look like your daddy.” I nodded carefully.

When Glen Waddell came, Mama would get him a beer and sit with him when she could. Sometimes, if she was busy, he would carry us out to her car when Reese got sleepy, holding us in his big strong arms with the same studied gentleness as when he touched Mama. I always wanted to wait till Mama could tuck us into our bed of blankets, but she seemed to like for Glen to carry us out with all the truckers watching. I’d see her look over as he went out with us, see her face soften and shine. Maybe that was love, that look. I couldn’t tell.

 

My mama dated Glen Waddell for two years. People said it took her time to trust men again after Lyle Parsons died. Mama would occasionally take Reese and me with her to pick Glen up from his new job at the RC Cola plant. Sometimes he would still be working, lifting flats of soda bottles to stock his truck for the next morning’s route. All those full cases had to be loaded and the empties pulled off and transferred to the conveyor belt for cleaning and shipment to the bottling plant. He would shift each case of twenty-four bottles above his head and onto the truck with a grunt, swinging from his hips with his whole weight, arms extended and mouth sucked in against his tongue with concentration. His collar was open, his pale blue short-sleeved uniform shirt was limp, and it stuck to his back in a dark stripe down his spine. Mama would still be in her waitress dress, smelling of salt and fried food, and just as sweaty and tired as he was, but Glen would smile at her like he knew she sweat sugar and cream. Mama would lean out the window of the car and call his name softly, and he would blush dark red and start moving a little faster, either to show off his strength or to get out of there sooner, we weren’t sure.

Glen was a small man but so muscular and strong that it was hard to see the delicacy in him, though he was strangely graceful in his rough work clothes and heavy boots. There were bottle fragments on the pavement, crushed shards ground into the tarmac, and all the men wore heavy work boots with thick rubber soles. Glen Waddell’s feet were so fine that his boots had to be bought in the boys’ department of the Sears, Roebuck, while his gloves could only be found in the tall men’s specialty stores. He would pivot on those boy-size feet, turning his narrow hips and grunting with his load, everything straining and forceful, while his hands cradled cases and flats as delicately as if they were soft-shelled eggs. His palms spread so wide he could easily span half a case’s width, keeping every bottle level no matter how high he had to throw the flat.

People talked about Glen’s temper and his hands. He didn’t drink, didn’t mess around, didn’t even talk dirty, but the air around him seemed to hum with vibration and his hands were enormous. They hung like baseball mitts at the end of his short, tight-muscled arms. On his slender, small-boned frame, they were startling, incongruous, constantly in motion, and the only evidence of just how strong he was. When he reached for Reese and me, he would cup his palms around the back of our heads and drop down to look into our faces, his warm, damp fingers tangling gently in our hair. He was infinitely careful with us, gentle and slow with those hands, but he was always reaching for Mama with sudden, wide sweeps of his arms. When he hugged her, he would lay his hands on her back so that he covered it from neck to waist, pulling her as tight to him as he could.

Mama was always taking Glen’s hands between hers, her fingers making his seem even bigger, harder, and longer. “He’s a gentle man,” she told her sisters. “You should see how tender he gets, the way he picks Reese up when she falls asleep in the back of the car, like she was so delicate, so fine—like that glass that chimes when you click it against your teeth.” My aunts would nod, but not with much conviction.

But I could tell that Mama had begun to love Glen. I saw how she blushed when he looked at her or touched her, even in passing. A flush would appear on her neck, and her cheeks would brighten until her whole face glowed pink and hot. Glen Waddell turned Mama from a harried, worried mother into a giggling, hopeful girl.

One afternoon Glen dropped the last case onto the truck and turned to look at Mama, Reese, and me waiting in Mama’s old Pontiac. The sun caught his sweat, shiny beads and rivulets, so that he seemed to glitter in the light. He wiped his face, but the sweat kept coming down in tracks, and he looked as if he were weeping. He walked toward us slowly, dropped by the door in a crouch, and reached through the window to take Mama into a tight embrace.

“Oh Anney,” he whispered. “Anney, Anney.” His voice was a husky tremolo. “You know. You know, I love you so. I can’t wait no more, Anney. I can’t. I love you with all my heart, girl. ”

His arms stretched over the seat and pulled Reese and me forward, pressing us into Mama’s neck and back. “And your girls, Anney. Oh, God! I love them. Our girls, Anney. Our girls.” He sobbed then, pulling us in tighter so that Reese’s bird bones crunched into my shoulder and the haze of his sweat drifted all around us. His face slid past Mama’s hair, pressed into mine, his mouth and teeth touched my cheek. “Call me Daddy,” he whispered. “Call me Daddy ‘cause I love your mama, ’cause I love you. I’m gonna treat you right. You’ll see. You’re mine, all of you, mine.”

His shoulders shook, his body reaching through the window seemed to rock the whole car. “Oh, Anney.” He shuddered. “Don’t say no. Please, Anney, don’t do that to me!”

“Glen,” Mama breathed. “Oh, Glen. I don’t know.” She trembled and slowly stretched her own arms up and around his shoulders. “Oh, God. All right, I’ll think about it. All right, honey. All right.”

Glen jumped back. He slammed his hands down on the car top, once, twice, three times. The echoes were like shots. Mama was crying quietly, her shoulders heaving back against Reese and me.

“Goddam,” he screamed. “Goddam, Anney!” He spun in a circle, whooping. “I knew you’d say yes. Oh, what I’m gonna do, Anney! I promise you. You an’t never even imagined!” He spread his arms wide and whooped again. His face looked like someone was shining a hot pink light on it. He pulled the door open and reached for Mama, his hands still shaking as they wrapped around her back. He drew her in so close that she came off her feet, and then he swung her around in the air, laughing and shouting. Reese put her hands on my shoulders and held on. I could feel the vibration as she shook gently to the echo of Glen’s shouts. We both smiled and held on to each other while Glen danced Mama around the parking lot in the shelter of his arms.

 

“You just don’t like the Waddells,” Mama told Granny. She was standing on Aunt Alma’s porch, wearing a blue-and-white polka-dot blouse Glen had bought her. It showed off the color of her eyes, he’d said. From the look on her face anyone could see that she was making an effort to be patient with Granny.

“Glen loves me, loves my girls. Don’t matter if his family is stuck-up and full of themselves. Glen’s not like that.”

“You don’t know what that boy is like, Anney. You just don’t know.”

“I know he loves me.” Mama spoke with conviction, certain that Glen Waddell loved her more than his soul and everything else would come from that. “I know enough,” she told Granny.

“That boy’s got something wrong with him.” Granny turned to Aunt Alma for support. “He’s always looking at me out the sides of his eyes like some old junkyard dog waiting to steal a bone. And you know Anney’s the bone he wants.”

“You just don’t think anybody’s good enough for Anney,” Alma teased. “You want her to go on paying you to keep her girls every day till she’s dried up and can’t imagine marrying again. ”

It was a continuation of a fight that had been dragging on all week. Now it was Sunday, and Glen was coming over to take everyone out to the lake for a picnic. Granny was refusing to come along even though Mama had packed chicken hash and Jell-O with her in mind.

“Let it go, Anney, and help me with this camera.” Aunt Alma had a new Brownie and was determined to document every family occasion she could. “You can’t win a fight with Mama no way. Just leave her alone and let her come to her senses in her own good time.”

When Glen arrived, it was the camera that coaxed Granny out of the house and onto the porch with the rest of us. But then it was Glen who didn’t want his picture taken. “I an’t no movie star,” he told Alma, and kept putting his hand up in front of his face when she pointed her camera at him.

“It’s that new haircut,” Earle joked. “Glen don’t want people to know his ears stick out that far. I’m with you, Glen. We’re too ugly for photographs. Let the women and kids line up for ’em and leave us alone. ”

Uncle Earle liked Glen Waddell well enough, but like Granny he didn’t think much of the Waddell family. He’d even said so to Glen’s face, but the boy had just grinned at him, and that didn’t seem right. Even if he didn’t get on with his people, Earle believed that Glen shouldn’t let anybody bad-mouth them. If they had traded a few punches over it, bled on each other a little and made up after, the whole thing would have felt better to Earle all around. But Glen was a quiet sort who never fought in friendly style. He either gave you that slow grin or went all out and tried to kill you. The latter earned him a little respect, Earle admitted. The cops had had to be called on Glen once at the foundry before he left to take the job at the RC Cola plant. Glen was a grown man, a working man, and he loved Anney Boatwright. Everybody knew that, even Granny.

“Now, Earle, don’t you be making no trouble. Granny pushed her hair back behind her ears and smoothed down the wrinkles on her green print blouse. ”I want Alma to get pictures of everybody. I want a book of family pictures for my cedar chest.”

Earle laughed and sneaked around to poke Alma while she was focusing on Granny and Mama, then chased Reese and me out into the yard, catching Reese and throwing her up in the air so high she flapped her arms like she was going to fly. I dodged them and cut through the bushes, ignoring the brambles that caught in the skirt of the new dress Mama had made me wear. From the other side of Earle’s truck, I stood and looked back at them, Granny up on the porch with her hesitant uncertain smile, and Mama down on the steps in her new blouse with Glen in that short brush haircut, while Alma posed on the walkway focusing up at them. Everybody looked nervous but determined, Mama stiff in Glen’s awkward embrace and Glen almost stumbling off the steps as he tried to turn his face away from the camera. It made my neck go tight just to look at them.

Only Earle and Reese were relaxed, Reese shrieking and giggling, still up in Earle’s arms, her legs outstretched as he spun the two of them around and around on the wet grass in the bright sunlight. “Bone, Bone,” Reese screamed. “Oh, Bone, help me! Help me!”

“I’m gonna fly you to the stars, little girl,” Uncle Earle teased through clenched teeth, making Reese scream all the louder. The words were barely our of his mouth when he slipped in the grass, coming down hard on his butt. His legs flew straight out in front of him, and Reese landed safely on his lap, her scream turning to a giggle as Earle started to curse.

“Goddam, I’ve ruined these britches now.” “Serve you right if you did,” Granny yelled at him. “You could have killed that child. Reese, you get your little dimple ass up here with your mama.”

“You come on too, Bone,” Mama called to me. “You and Reese come on up here for Alma to get a picture of the four of us together.”

“Yeah, come on, girls.” Glen held on to Mama with both hands around her waist.