Final Vinyl Days (4 page)

“Able, she said
able
.” The nurse held her hands up to her mouth and fled the room.

“Don't look back,” he said two days later as they were leaving the hospital with Sarah Wallace Rosen, nothing marked or murderous about her. “You'll turn to a pillar of salt.” They were in the parking lot, Sarah wrapped in a lightweight cotton blanket, the cloth shielding her face from the sun. “Wasn't that Sarah who turned to salt? Wasn't she Lot's wife?”

“I always thought they said
pillow
of salt,” Eve said. “I always pictured something entirely different from what they had in mind.” She swung around and stopped, stared at the doorway they had just left. “Still here,” she said, “I guess we're not worthy of those biblical names after all,” and Adam lifted the camera hung around his neck and focused: Eve pasted on a background of chain link, red brick, and shimmering black asphalt that stretched into parking lots and one-way streets, highways and runways, subdivisions and cocktail parties, fields, forests, temptations and promises.

My mother's last words to me were “No matter what happens, no matter how lousy your life becomes, stick to your marriage, stay there, and
make
it work.” I would like to have ignored her, but that was impossible, seeing as how she had eased out of a coma to deliver this message and there was a crowd of medical people standing around trying to hear her over the beeps and gurgles coming from her bed. My twin sister, Twyla, was right beside me, but of course she got
no
instructions whatsoever. All the dying demands were directed at me and
my
life with
my
husband, Doug Houston,
my
marriage of three years that I'd somehow bumbled my way into. Now
she was trying to ruin it for me; minutes left in her life, and she was going for broke.

“He's better than I ever hoped you'd find,” she rasped, her forehead bald of the sharp circumflex brows she'd been drawing on for years. Maybelline black-brow pencil nubs, years' worth, rolled around in her bathroom drawer along with my father's forgotten styptic pencils, lacquercoated bobby pins, and loose aspirins. I couldn't even remember my father's face as I focused on hers, pinched and waiting.

“You were so right to marry him. Now promise,” she hissed, her lips so thin and pale when stripped of the Revlon Rich Girl Red that she had worn since creation. Always, even at breakfast, it was already applied, marking her cup and cereal spoon with a greasy red film. Maybe she slept in it.

Promise
. This is what happens when you are the responsible one. You are handed out huge demands while your recently divorced, let's-have-a-party kind of sibling gets a little pat on the hand to stop her violent sobbing. Twyla and I are fraternal (or sororal as our mother always said) and really look nothing alike. People used to say, “How can you be twins?” comparing her wee petite body to my size-thirteen hips, her thick dark hair to my do-nothing frizz. When people said how pretty Twyla (the
prettier of the two, they whispered) was, they then had to give me a runner-up-Miss-Congeniality-like superlative (Tina is so smart, so capable, so solid and dependable—great childbirthing hips).

“Promise it, Tina,” my dying mother said and somehow in all of her weakness managed to leave me feeling so burdened
I
could have died. “Swear to God that you'll stay with Doug for all eternity, that you'll do everything to keep him. Let me die knowing that one woman in our family made her marriage work even if it killed her.”

Everybody was waiting for an answer. What was she sentencing me to? Never had she pushed me in the right direction. Never had she given me good advice. She was the one who wanted to iron my hair straight (like Twyla's) back in junior high school and scorched it, leaving it to smell so bad that Ronnie Stewart, who sat behind me in civics class, complained to the teacher. She was the one who suggested I wear a Sunday school outfit, complete with white patent-leather sandals, and sing “The Lord's Prayer” in the high school talent show—
Elvis got his start with the gospel
—while girls like Stacy Price and Yolanda Wallace wore tight bodysuits and did cartwheels and splits. Twyla (who had kept her talent a secret) came out in one of our father's suits. He had only been dead a month at the time of the show, and somehow that suit
had survived the day our mother ripped through his closet and drawers and cut up all of his things with her electric hedge trimmer.

The last time that I'd seen that suit, my father and mother were going to a dance at the Jaycee Hut down on the river. It was just a week before he died, and my mother had been acting strange. She was always talking about the laundry, asking my father's opinion about the laundry, how often did he think she did the
laundry
, did he ever stop and wonder what interesting things you might chance to
find
in the
laundry
. She painted her fingernails bright red, and when she stood by the front door straightening his tie, it looked for a minute like she might just keep pulling it tighter and tighter until his eyes bulged and popped, but then he kissed her on the forehead and gently pushed her away. It was one of those moments you look back on and wonder.

I was sitting there in the high school auditorium in my white shoes, missing my father and wondering how Twyla'd saved that suit, given my mother's thorough nature, but then I was distracted by the red spotlight on Twyla. Her hair all slicked back like a man's, she began to lip-synch “Take a Walk on the Wild Side.” Her friend, Pete Ray, who had a terrible reputation and had had it ever since he brought some glossy magazine photos to school
in the sixth grade, was operating her little phonograph and cheering her on from back stage. He was so greasy-looking, if you threw him up against a wall he'd just ooze on down and leave a trail like a slug. You'd think my mother would have said something about
him
, but the only description ever doled out to Pete Ray was
son of a podiatrist
.

Of course Twyla didn't win; the teachers never would have allowed such a thing. First prize was reserved for Yolanda Wallace, who could pull both feet up and behind her head and then roll around on her back like a little beach ball. She did this to that song, “Afternoon Delight,” a song that will always remind me of my father's death. Maybe Twyla didn't win, but she did
bring the house down
. For weeks afterward, that's what people said: that Twyla, what a card, she brought the house down, what a hoot. She came back to bow three times, and then when everything died down, Mrs. Rupert, the Latin teacher and my sponsor, put on the record of “The Lord's Prayer.” Somebody at the back of the auditorium yelled out for a separation of church and state, but I kept singing. It felt like my white patent-leather sandals were glowing. Why had I ever listened to my mother? I wished the big ceiling light overhead would fall and crush me as dead as my father.

“You were just, just . . . ,” my mother had me by the
shoulders, tears in her eyes. “You were an inspiration.” She blinked with the words. “Just a sweet inspiration. And you!” She turned to where Twyla was standing with our father's jacket tossed over one shoulder, a little moustache penciled on over her upper lip, “You just brought the house down, honey. Why didn't you tell us what you were up to, little clown? Isn't she the clown though, Tina?” My mother, her Rich Girl Red lips stretching into a forced smile, leaned her head right next to Twyla. “Where did you find the suit, honey?” she asked.

It was after that that I decided the best thing I could do for myself was to always do the opposite of what my mother said. That's how I ended up going to college instead of getting in on the ground floor of Aunt Rochelle's
clothing business
like Twyla. This business was Aunt Rochelle and six of her cronies sitting around all day crocheting string bikinis. Some of the bikinis had little beads and things crocheted into patterns. Twyla's job was to carry them around from store to store and get orders. Both of the clothing stores in town had ordered. The big seller was the one with flowers on the breasts. Aunt Rochelle was expecting these suits to go national any day, and that's all she and my mother talked about; they talked about how sad it was I had gotten that degree in art history
and had nothing to really show for it while
the business
was expanding into cover-ups and lingerie.

And, that's how I ended up with Doug Houston, who on first meeting, my mother said was
a little plain and dull and ordinary
; nothing like Twyla's fiancé, Ronald, a lawyer who wore a lot of jewelry, some of it looking like it weighed more than he did. While this conversation was going on, Twyla was standing there in the kitchen laughing. She was modeling her wedding dress, a low-cut sequined number with a train longer than my mother's house. Her wedding bra was crocheted out of the finest weight thread and had little seed pearls up the straps. Aunt Rochelle had made it herself.

My mother leaned forward and rubbed at a coffee ring on the kitchen table. “I want somebody good enough for you, baby,” she said. “I want somebody like Ronald who can do nice things for you, take you places. I mean, you are not equipped to care for yourself in any way.”

“Well, it's not because Aunt Rochelle and I haven't asked her.” Twyla climbed onto the center of the table and turned to catch a glimpse of her whole self in the big picture window.

“What if you married that man?” My mother leaned to the side to see around Twyla's dress. There were flecks of midnight-blue mascara (the color she thought I should
wear) on her Cover Girl–laden face. “I mean he's studying to be a construction worker, honey.”

“I have a good salary as a teacher,” I told her, “and Doug is going to be an engineer.”

“Those who do can,” Twyla said and adjusted her dress so that her breasts were pushed way up like Olivia Hussey's in
Romeo and Juliet
. “And those who can't, teach. That's what Ronald says.” She stepped down onto the chair and then to the floor, her train sweeping the cowboy boot salt-and-pepper shakers that my mother had bought on her honeymoon in Nashville to the floor.

Ronald was such a prize. He slicked his hair straight back for what he called a Wall Street look. He drove a Grand Prix that my mother said made her feel
regal
when he drove the three of them to the Country Caboose where he said he
wanted
to order headcheese but got the brie crêpe instead. Twyla said that Ronald said that appearances are just about everything, and it seemed our mother agreed. Twyla breathed on her diamond, rubbed it on a dish towel, and bent over the catalog of bridesmaids' dresses on the kitchen counter. Her breasts were about to escape altogether.

“Engineer, huh,” my mother said. “So, no wonder those little hands of his are always so clean. Just stand back and tell others what to do, huh? That explains all
those big words of his.” (He had once used the word
exacerbate
only to have my mother say that she'd just as soon he go ahead and say what he really meant, filthy or not.) Now she walked over and pulled up on Twyla's dress so that her breasts settled back down where they were supposed to be. “Your father was such a man.”

“He was a fireman.”

“That's right. A fireman,” she said. “Which means, when you think about it, that he didn't work a day in his life. When has there been a big roaring fire in these parts?” She stopped and stared into her little laundry room. I knew she was doing inventory on all the different detergent samples she'd received in the mail. She loved samples and always had: soap, shampoo, toothpaste, but somehow she couldn't bring herself to use them; she liked to possess them, save them, count them. “When has there been a big fire anywhere in this state?” She stepped forward to rearrange a little tiny box of Tide. “He faked many fires, I know that.”

“Ronald is a P.I. attorney,” Twyla interrupted and continued talking right through our mother's telling something we had heard thousands of times, about how the fireman wives had discovered a big bonfire area out behind the firehouse where the men would go to get all sooty as a camouflage if they wanted to stay out late.
“When we first met at Singles Night I thought Ronald was a P.I., you know like Magnum, P.I.” If Twyla had had any sense at all she would have been dangerous.

“No, sir,” my mother continued, dabbing the perspiration from her hairline; her eyebrows were smudged against her shiny forehead, and sparkly blue eyeshadow creased in her lids. “I never could get the soot out of most of his belongings, Shout, Clorox, I've tried them all.”

I wanted to say, speaking of fires, why in the hell is it always so hot in your house? But I held my tongue. It was so hot I thought I'd die. By then I had come to think of her as something that would grow and thrive under such conditions, like the spores of some kind of mold or fungus. Way back, I felt she was growing something bad, so I was not at all surprised when it turned out she had liver cancer.

“Those stains were symbolic,” she said. “Oh, he might put out a little car fire out on the interstate,” she said. “But he spent most of his time inspecting and demonstrating.” She turned and laughed so loud that Twyla jumped. “Get it?” she asked. “That's what got him killed, all of that inspecting and demonstrating. He fancied
himself
a teacher.”

“Well, those who can do,” Twyla said. She had her eye on the bag of Hershey Kisses on top of the refrigerator, probably trying to figure out if she'd have time to run a
few miles or do a couple hundred jumping jacks if she ate one. Thank goodness she had never gotten the hang of making herself vomit because she might have been very good at it.

“Answer her,” Twyla ordered me, in a whisper. My dying mother was waiting, her eyes drooping and then widening with determination to stay awake; even in death she was the most stubborn person I'd ever met. Why was she doing this to me? What horrible thing could she possibly know about Doug that had made her want to approve of the union. I nodded slightly and then harder when she reached out to grip my wrist. I focused on Twyla, all dressed up for this visit. In the privacy of our own home, Doug and I called her
the little hooker
. She wore low-cut, lacy things, miniskirts, and spiked heels. Twyla was so thin it hurt to look at her. “What's the difference between a counterfeit bill and a girl who's anorexic?” Ronald asked us all one night in my mother's kitchen. He and Twyla were already having problems. Doug barely glanced up from the paper, politely gesturing that he really had to keep reading.