Are You Sitting Down? (35 page)

Five years after high school we were much more m
a
ture, Travis and I. We’d both been through college, Travis in
Me
m
phis
and me with two years at the community college in
Ruby Dregs
.
I still couldn’t escape a dead end retail job after that, pushing my way up the corporate ladder of being a sal
a
ried manager still working nights and weekends, still living at home with
my
parents.
My days of dreaming
about
musician scouts were long over.
I felt
a lot
like this God forsaken town on a road map—easy to skip over, easy to forget.
That all changed the night I met Travis.

Hello Dolly
was playing that summer, a production being put on by the Stage Door Players.
I’d played the piano for some of their musicals in the past, but not that year.
It was the first time I’d seen Travis since he graduated.
When our eyes met, we instantly knew the one thing about each other—the only thing—that mattered.
I wanted so badly for him to come and speak to me during the intermission, but I’m glad he didn’t.
I was a nervous wreck, smoking half a pack of cigarettes during that fifteen minute break.
It was a bad habit I’d later give up
just
for him.

Somehow, I worked up enough nerve to wait for him in the back of the theater after the show.
Not knowing what to say, I pretended to know him from high school and asked what year he graduated.
Only I wasn’t pretending.
I did know him, and somehow I just knew to reach out to him that night.
It was my one chance to finally connect with someone like me.
Travis
was glad I
spoke up
.
We went for coffee after the show, ner
v
ously sitting across from one another like we were on a blind date.
We spent almost every weekend together for the next
few
months.
I took off from work early on Fridays if I had the weekend off and drove down to
Memphis
to stay with him.
Six months later I was living with him.

I don’t think I would have cared if neither of us ever went back to
Ruby Dregs
, but Travis’s family was
what
kept drawing
us
back.
My family was
what
kept
me away.
It’s funny how that was the one thing that was opposite between us
—besides out last names—
growing up in the same town and having so much in co
m
mon, but hating and loving home for completely different reasons.

So, I went with him and faked my excitement about the trip back to hell.
I slept in his twin bed upstairs in his mother’s house, but I still felt like a guest.
I
racked my brain over
the thoughts in
Lorraine
’s head and wished I could read her mind.
I watched his siblings be just as distant to him as the preps were back in school.
And Travis was blind to it all.

I couldn’t make up stories and tell him my parents were g
o
ing to be out of town because it was almost impossible to get to
Lorraine
’s house without driving by
my old
house.
So, Travis made me go see them when we were in town.
I didn’t always make him go with me, because I knew the thought of him b
e
ing my boyfriend made my Mom uncomfortable.
It was easier to cut the visit short when it was just me, but sometimes I let Travis go
if he offered
.
I wanted Mom to see how happy I was now that I had someone, but even that happiness was hard to muster up in the misery of their presence.

My mom was usually always in a night gown, which she had probably been wearing for days.
Stray rollers were in her matted hair and she wore no make-up.
The spacey look in her eyes
was a sign
her mind was absent.
She spoke in a scratchy cigarette voice, another reason I quit smoking.
When she was angry, she blamed a God who never listened
to her
anyway.

My dad was a bumbling whale whose eyebrows were constantly raised in question causing his eyes to bug out.
Scotch tape and
super
glue held his foggy glasses together b
e
cause he was too cheap to buy new ones.
His clothes were as pale and faded a
s his skin.
He spoke in an effeminate
voice like a female impersonator would.
I swore I inherited my hom
o
sexuality from him, if such a thing could happen.

“You’re too hard on your parents,” Travis would say.

“You never lived with them,” I bit back.

“How hard could it have been?
Did they ever hit you?”

“No.”

“Did they mistreat you?”

“Not really.”

“Then I just don’t understand.”

“I don’t expect you to understand because you grew up in a very different household.
You had two loving parents and four brothers and sisters,” I said.

“You’re parents seem very nice,” Travis said.

“Things aren’t always what they seem.”

“But you just said they weren’t bad.”

This was the one thing we usually disagreed upon, and one of the few things we ever argued about.
I wasn’t shutting m
y
self off to him, but the only way for me to end the argument was to just be quiet and stop talking about them.
My parents weren’t bad people.
They were just easy to blame for my miserable lonely existence from which Travis had saved me.
I just couldn’t bring myself to say that out loud to him without sounding like a sap.

The ten years we spent together were like playing catch up with life.
I experienced more joy and happiness during that time then I ever did growing up.
I was like a kid all over again, out shopping with Travis in the malls or going to bars and re
s
taurants.
Every day there was something new in the city which
our
hometown could not offer.

And living with the first love of your life, waking up to him every day, being the center of his attention and he being the center of mine was better than any big time
Las Vegas
dream of stardom.
It just didn’t last long enough.
The cancer got in the way.
It slapped us both in the face and made us slow down.
It made us number our days and cherish all the mem
o
ries we created together, because we both knew there wouldn’t be any more.

All the trips to the hospital, the hours spent crouched over the toilet in the middle of the night during the chemo, the Fra
n
kenstein monster in the mirror, and the soiled bed sheets were not the days Travis would choose to remember.

They didn’t exist.

I might as well have been a ten year old because all the days I spent in
Ruby Dregs
before meeting Travis and all the days I spent at the end of life battling cancer didn’t exist.
We both erased them from our heads, and so all that was left was the time we had together.

It was all that mattered.

Travis

I was sitting across from Martin at the dinner table when there was a knock at the door.
With a mouthful of food, he swallowed hard with a painful expression as if the guest at the door
was someone he knew
,
someone
unwanted.
Mom was a
c
customed to guests stopping by during the holiday months.
They were usually members of her church or a friendly neighbor.
The stack of store bought fruit cakes in her pantry was a testimony to the number of guests she had already had this season.

Mom hated fruit cake.
I don’t think I had ever tasted it.
As a traditional joke, she would unwrap one and slice it, then set it out on a decorative plate amongst the rest of the food just to see if anyone ate it.
I think Robbie or
Daniel
ate a slice
last
year, having mistaken it for brownies or banana bread.
They spit it into a napkin and never touched it again after that.

Fruit cakes were not the only neighborly gift that Mom ended up with duplicates of.
For years, Mom had collected those doll-like angel tree toppers with satin or velvet gowns draped over a plastic or cardboard cone.
One of us kids usually gave her one each year for Christmas, and she enjoyed displaying them throughout the house year after year on the hall table and the mantel.
As the collection grew, she decided to leave them out all year and just move them into her sewing room until Christmas came around again.

After hosting a luncheon at the house for some church ladies one summer, Mom’s fondness for the angel dolls quickly spread.
The fruit cake count went down, and the doll collection mounted.
Although Mom never frowned at any gift
given
to her, she was not always proud of the angels
other
acquainta
n
ces gave to her.
Mom preferred the pricier angels with curly hair and
real
porcelain hands and face.
What she got most of the time from the people who didn’t know her quite well was a cheap knock-off you could find on the bargain aisle of any do
l
lar store.
These gifts
quickly became known as the ugly angel collection.

Mom accepted these unsightly angels with a pleased look in her eyes and a smile on her face, but knew the angel would end up on display in her sewing room during the hol
i
days.
O
n
ly the more extravagant angels were brought out of the sewing room to be put on display through the main part of the house from
after
Thanksgiving to New Years.
After the hol
i
days, the ugly angel collection was packed away in the attic and the se
w
ing room became the hibernation place for the ones she
preferred to
look at
. But, year after year Mom dragged all the ugly angels back out again.

“What if someone who gave me one of them in the past stops by?”
s
he’d say if you asked her why she put the
unattra
c
tive ones
back out
at all
.

Leave it to Mom to not take the chance of hurting anyone’s feelings.
S
he knew exactly who gave her each one.
With a black marker, s
he
would wri
te the
person’s
name and the year on the inside of the cone
underneath the angel’s garment on both the ugly and the pretty ones.
Throughout the year, the door to her sewing room was usually kept open.
During the holidays when the “good” angels had been moved out and the ugly angels moved in, that door stay
ed
closed unless company came calling.

Mom had just sat down to eat when the knock at the door came.
I stood up and offered to get the door for her.
She stood too but I put my hands on her shoulders, gently pushing her back down into her seat.
She sat back down to appease me.

“I’ll get it, Mom, don’t worry,” I said.

“Will you open the door to the sewing room, dear?”  she asked.

The knock came again.
I unlatched the lock and opened the door to find a s
tout
bulky man in crisp blue overalls with a
kelly
green shirt underneath.
His ears were bright pink from the cold weather, along with his
fat round
cheeks.
His crew cut hair was as white as the snow.
He nodded and a dentured smile grew across his face when I appeared from behind the door.

“Hello
,
”
I said puzzled, thinking he must have been a de
a
con from the church
, but he was dressed more like a farmer
.

“Hello there.
You must be Travis,” he said with a deep booming voice like the bass singer in a choir.
I found his tone oddly comforting.

“I’m sorry.
You are?”

“Calvin
.
Calvin
Baiter
.”

We shook hands.
His handshake was warm and firm, and a bit greasy as if he had just put on lotion.
I thought he might have
come
to drop off a gift
for
Mom, another fruit cake, but there were two large handle bags at his feet filled with wrapped boxes.

“I hope I’m not too late.
I had some last minute wra
p
ping to do,” Calvin said looking down at the bags.

I was confused.
Mom appeared over my shoulder.

“Travis, you’ve met Calvin.
Hello dear, come inside out of the cold.
Travis, will you get those bags for Calvin, please?”

“Hi
Lorraine
.
I can manage these just fine
,” he said.

He lifted the bags and stepped inside
the door, banging the snow from his boots on the threshold.
I stepped aside as he e
n
tered, shutting the door behind him.

“Merry Christmas, dear,” Calvin said taking off his coat and kissing my Mom on the cheek
, right there in front of me.

He hung his coat on the rack behind the door as if he’d been here before.
Mom and Calvin ignored the stunned look on my face as she took him by the arm and led him into the dining room.
I picked up his two bags of gifts and moved them over by the tree.

When I entered the dining room, Mom was fixing Ca
l
vin a plate.
Sebastian and Martin stood to shake Calvin’s hand like he was an old friend.
I walked over to Mom and touched her hand.
She looked at me, and I raised my eyebrows in que
s
tion.

“Calvin and I met at church a while back,” she said in a whisper as if that explained it all.

Mom served Calvin his plate of food as he sat down next to her place at the table.
I sat back down too and aimlessly listened to Martin, and Sebastian laughing and talking
with Calvin
the way they once did with Dad.
I watched Mom
gaz
ing
at Calvin with that look in her eyes.
She was in love, and she had failed to tell me.
Even Ellen and Clare had got up to hug Ca
l
vin’s neck like he was a favorite uncle.
I was now a strange in-law in the room that no one
likes
to talk to.

I was lost.

I remained quiet
through the rest of the meal.
Mom asked everyone if they’d like to eat dessert in the living room before opening gifts.
Calvin asked if it would be alright to light the fireplace, something Dad had always done right after di
n
ner.
Everything about him seemed so familiar, even rehearsed like a joke this strange man and my mother had planned out.
I must have been the only one aware because everyone else acted as though they’d known this man for a long time and that his nice demeanor was quite usual.

Mom plated pie for us and loaded the kids up with cookies and brownies.
They disappeared into the den to watch Calvin
light the
fire.
I started clearing the table although Mom told me to just leave it for later.
I had soon filled the trash can with our paper plates
and cups.
My intentions were to take out the trash, an excuse to step out of the house for a moment and get my thoughts together.

I stood at the edge of the house staring off into the
darke
n
ing sky.
The lazy sun had already disappeared behind the grove.
I spotted Mom’s cat hunting something out under the trees.
He crouched low ready to pounce, a black shadow against the snow covered ground.
The air was cold and still.
It was so quiet I could hear the squeal of
a
field mouse as the cat leap
t
upon it and pinned it down.
The cat carried the poor ve
r
min down the hill and disappeared into the woods.

I wanted to follow it and become lost in the woods m
y
self.
It was easy to do back when we were kids.
Our imaginations transformed us to distant worlds every summer, far away from the confines of home.
Too bad it was only pr
e
tend and couldn’t work now for me.
Once again
, I felt like a complete stranger among
st
my own family.
I doubt they were even missing me now back inside.
The screen door creaking open and knocking back against its frame several times, finally coming to a rest, broke my far off gaze.
Someone had stepped outside.
I looked over my shoulder to see Ellen standing there.