Hick - Andrea Portes [71]
“All right, well . . . I reckon I’ll just leave it with you.”
He turns back to the bacon and eggs, making a plate. He sets two plates down on the table, between two sets of forks and knives made with intricate designs like the rugs. He pours orange juice into crystal glasses you see in commercials for wine, with rolling vineyards in the background and grapes on the table. The chairs for the table are matching with dark wood, lions carved in the back and velvet pillows where you’re supposed to sit.
There’s a sadness to this room, a loneliness, as if the only people ever here are the people on the pages of those books.
I look around the room and jump back slight as I catch my reflection in the window. I forgot the part about my hair being black and choppy and being turned into a boy. it’s an ugly look, like I went from Cinderella to the wicked stepmother overnight. But there’s something to it, some preemptive strike against what it is I’m supposed to look like and who it is I’m supposed to be. There’s something to it that makes me feel a little more brave and a little less ashamed.
I still wonder if you pinched me if I’d wake up back in Jackson and all this was just some daydream by the side of the pool, with Glenda still inside moving up and down on Lloyd. How can it be that you believe a life that blinks on and off from a lit-up tube more than you believe a life that passes smack-bang in front of you? How can it be that you’ll believe a man can walk up on the moon before you’ll believe that Glenda flew up in a bubble and Eddie didn’t make it off the floor?
These things are distant, you think. These things are distant and don’t happen.
But somewhere in America, between the freeways and the Food-4-Less, between the filling stations and the 5 o-’clock news, behind the blue blinking light coming off the TV, there is a space, an empty space, between us, around us, inside us, that inevitable, desperate, begs to be filled up. And nothing, not shame, not God, not a new microwave, not a wide-screen TV or that new diet with grapefruits, can ever, ever fill it.
Underneath all that white noise there’s a lack.
Beau finishes his eggs and leans back in his chair, cleaning his glasses.
“Where you figuring on going?”
“I don’t know. Thought I’d go to Vegas.”
“I reckon I won’t take you there.”
“How come?”
“That’s no place for a girl your age, that’s for damn sure.”
“Where’s my .45?”
“That was yours, eh? Well, I’m afraid it belongs to the boys in blue now.”
I look at Karl, keeping watch on the porch, his head on top of his paws, resigned but not skipping a beat.
“I reckon it’s best you get home.”
“Wull, what if I don’t wanna?”
“I reckon you do.”
I scan the rows upon rows of books, lining the walls, with names like Bartleby and Metamorphosis and The Age of Innocence. I scan the bindings and gold trim, each one different than the next, each one carrying some sort of timeless secret giving you the keys to the kingdom if you can just suss it out.
Beau catches me lost in the bindings.
“Where you from anyway?”
“Palmyra.”
He stops half out the door.
“Excuse me?”
“Palmyra, Nebraska.”
“Huh.”
“it’s not so bad. We got a good football team.”
“Yeah, okay. Listen. Two hours, then we’re leaving. There’s a bus stop in Salt Lake, that’ll take you to Omaha.”
“You’re not dropping me off in Utah.”
“Excuse me?”
“Listen, Mister, you can drop me off in Dallas, you can drop me off in Spain, you can even drop me off in Sparks . . . but there is no damn way you are dropping me off in Utah. If you do I’ll die and it’ll be all your fault.”
“Listen—”
“If you do I’ll go straight to Vegas and become a crack whore and die in a shoot-out and you’ll see it on TV and it’ll haunt you till the day you die.”
“Jesus.”
“I mean it.”
“Two hours. Lord have mercy.”
The screen door bangs into the frame behind him as he stalks off down the path into the woods, Karl in tow. I watch him from behind and suppress the urge to follow.
That lady with the hoop skirt is still staring at me from the painting. she’s made of