Little Altars Everywhere (4 page)

I don’t know what to do next. So I say, Mama says brown cold drinks cause pimples.

I don’t know what possessed me to say this and I feel like a complete ignoramus as soon as it comes out. Aunt Jezie reaches down and changes the radio station and Charlene slowly bites into a french fry.

Then Charlene starts to say something, but Aunt Jezie cuts her off and says, Sidda, I believe I hear your mother calling you.

I don’t hear anything, I tell her.

Then I realize she is just trying to get rid of me.

My palms are dented in where my fingernails cut into them. I walk back over to Mama’s car and I can feel my pride leaking out all over that blacktop parking lot.
They don’t want to be seen with me. I embarrass them.

I climb into the back seat of Mama’s car where Lulu and Shep and Bay are all sucking on milkshakes. Mama hands me a strawberry one in a tall frosted glass.

What’s wrong, Sidd? she says.

They don’t want to talk to me, I tell her, ashamed.

Well, I could have told you that, dahling, she says. But you took off without asking me.

I want to die. I just want to die.

Mama props her foot up on the dashboard and explains, Your aunt, the Queen of Sheba, acts like she’s over there on a
date
or something.

She goes on talking, but I blank her out. I am looking at my stomach poking out between the green plaid shorts I’m wearing and my too-tight crop top. No wonder they don’t want anything to do with me, I think. I am sickening. I sit in the car, hating myself, and I deliberately suck the milkshake down so fast it makes my head hurt.

It happens overnight, the way Aunt Jezie and Charlene become best friends. One day they barely know each other, and me and Aunt Jezie are having a good summer together and Charlene is teaching me to dance and letting me visit. And then the next thing I know,
they
are doing stuff together every day of the world!

They drive all over Thornton together in that white convertible Skylark looking like a homecoming parade, and Aunt Jezie starts taking Charlene horseback riding instead of me. Every time I call over to Buggy’s, Aunt Jezie is out doing something with Charlene! I am the one who introduced them to begin with. Charlene was my friend first! They never would have even met if it hadn’t been for me. And now they act like I have evaporated right off the face of the earth. It makes me so sick, I want to get scarlet fever and die and then see how they’d all feel.

Charlene keeps on being as sweet as ever at dance class. When I have trouble with my time steps, she takes me aside and works with me. And she makes me Queen for the Week a second time when I tell her about Mama and the tiara. But I am so mad I can’t enjoy any of it. Aunt Jezie just takes all the pleasure out of everything, stealing Charlene away from me like that. I wish over and over that the ugly horse Buggy rented her for the summer would throw her off and stomp her to death.

One night I’m at Buggy’s, and my aunt the poot-faced thief goes out with guess-who. Just takes right off and leaves me with Buggy and her dog Miss Peppy. So I tell Buggy I’m looking for my rosary so she will let me go into Aunt Jezie’s room. Normally that room is off-limits unless Aunt Jezie gives you permission. Once I get in there, I dump all her perfumes right down the bathroom drain and fill up the bottles with plain old tap water. Then I open her makeup drawer and take out her lipsticks and smash them into the dresser. Then I put their covers back on and put them back in the drawer for her to find them. I hate her guts and I hate all her stuff, too!

A couple of days go by and I spend my time mainly thinking up more ways I can get back at Aunt Jezie. But then she and Charlene come and get me one evening at Buggy’s and whisk me right off to the Roxy Drive-In. We have so much fun that I forgive them for everything. It’s a real starry night with no clouds and there
we are in the convertible, which Aunt Jezie says is the only way to go to the drive-in. We rub Six-Twelve all over ourselves and light the mosquito coil and watch
Pal Joey
and sing along to “The Lady Is a Tramp.” I get to sit up front between them and eat all the Nutty-Buddies I want. The three of us share a chocolate shake, all sucking right from the same straw, and when I get sleepy, Aunt Jezie takes out one of Buggy’s cotton throws and drapes it over me.

We drive home through the sweet night air over the Garnet River bridge. You can smell the water and the cotton poisoning from the nearby fields and the radio is playing “Around the World in Eighty Days.” When Charlene bends down and hugs me goodnight in front of Buggy’s house, I can smell her hair and it smells so pure.

Then Aunt Jezie and I go inside and fall sound asleep in her big bed. The window air conditioner is turned off, and the attic fan pulls cool air in, making the curtains billow the whole night long like they’re waltzing.

I just know for sure that our night at the drive-in means the three of us are going to be best friends from here on out.

But after a few days, I realize I am wrong. They don’t call me, don’t stop by, don’t ask me to go anywhere, anytime, anyhow. The only time I see Charlene is at dance class. Aunt Jezie picks her up afterward and they just zoom off and leave me standing on the curb sweating in my leotard.

So I decide that the reason they’re ignoring me is because they’re planning a big surprise for me. Something really special—like a trip to New Orleans or a swimming party or my own high-heeled tap shoes. I spend whole days fantasizing about how they’re going to surprise me.

One afternoon a couple of weeks after
Pal Joey
, I’m staying over at Sherry Jenkins’ house. I tell her all about me and Aunt Jezie and Charlene.

We are best friends, I tell her. We go to the drive-in every night, and ride horses every day, and sit around and talk, and just do everything in the world together. The only reason I have any time to play with you at all right now is because they’re so busy preparing this huge surprise for me.

Sherry says, I don’t believe you. You’re making that up.

Sherry, I tell her, you are so ignorant, you don’t know anything.

Then I get my big idea—I’ll take her over to Buggy’s house and show her where Aunt Jezie hides her lucky horseshoe. Showing off that I know Aunt Jezie’s most secret hiding place will prove to Sherry Stupenagel that I’m telling the truth.

But I’m not supposed to walk off my block, Sherry says, like a real whiny-baby.

I say, If you don’t come with me, I’m going to tell everyone about that time we saw your parents when they didn’t have their clothes on.

That shuts her up. And when we get to Buggy’s, there isn’t a car in the driveway. It looks for sure like nobody’s home.

I want it to seem like a big adventure. I whisper to Sherry, You wait at the kitchen door and I’ll go in through the back and let you in.

I sneak around to the back, and I slide open the glass door to the added-on den, where steps lead up to Aunt Jezie’s room. The window air conditioner is humming real loud and you can’t hear anything else. It’s cold and dry compared to the wet heat outside. I get a thrill being in the house when no one knows I’m there. I’ve never done this before. It makes me feel like I’m the boss.

I eyeball the den like Nancy Drew, looking for a mystery. Then I hear a little gasp coming from Aunt Jezie’s bedroom, a sound like someone has just dived into cold water and come up for air.

I think, That’s Aunt Jezie in there getting ready to scare me! Every single one of Mama’s family loves to sneak up on you from behind and scare you to death.

I tiptoe silently up the white-carpeted steps to Jezie’s room where the window unit is blasting out arctic air. When I get to the top step, I drop down on my knees to the carpet. Right in front of me, in broad daylight, are Aunt Jezie and Charlene Parks in the four-poster bed.

Buck naked!

Their clothes are tossed on the chaise longue by the
window. I recognize Charlene’s powder blue wrap-around skirt. And they don’t even know I’m there!

I crawl over by the dresser so I can get a good view of them. They’re kissing each other on the face and shoulders, and Aunt Jezie’s hand is on Charlene’s leg and Charlene is breathing like she’s been dancing hard. I can see Aunt Jezie’s nipples. They’re brown and hard and standing up in little peaks. From what I can see, Charlene’s nipples are much lighter, like salmon-pink crayolas. Her hair is loose, spreading out all over the pillow.

I can’t get over that hair. I’ve never seen it look so wild and messed up! Even when she performs her solo from
West Side Story
, her hair always stays up in a neat ponytail.

My face is all hot and I feel twitchy like I have to go to the bathroom or something. I want to go find Buggy and Mama and Charlene’s mother and the man who runs the Community Center, and
tell on them!
They shouldn’t be doing this! And I also want to climb up there in the bed with them and have them kiss me too, and I want them to let me suck on Aunt Jezie’s nipples and to bury my face in Charlene’s hair! I want to be grown-up and drive my own convertible and live in a different town where nobody knows Mama or Daddy.

I want so many different things. And the worst part of all is feeling like I’ll never get any of them.

Then I remember Sherry. What if she gets tired of waiting for me at the kitchen door? What if she comes
back here, and sees what’s going on?! God, no one else can know about this! Just me.

I sneak down the steps and ease the sliding-glass door open. Once I make it outside, I break into a run. Sherry is sitting on the kitchen steps just like I told her to. What a little dumb-ass.

I jerk her up and say, Come on! We’ve gotta get out of here!

We run all the way down to the bayou by City Park. It’s scalding hot and the air is thick and damp, but Sherry runs right alongside of me. She will do anything I tell her.

We finally stop on the bank where Little Shep and his in-town friends sometimes crayfish. Sherry keeps saying, What’s the matter, Siddalee? What’s wrong?

I tell her, Shut up, you are such a moron. You’re sickening.

Why are you mad at me? she asks. I didn’t do anything.

And then I slap her. Not hard, just a medium slap. I don’t know why I do it. I just have to. And also I know that she’ll let me. She looks at me so innocent, it makes me sick.

I say, Let’s kiss. She looks confused, but she obeys me. We kiss one long kiss and then I break away. I say, If you tell anyone about this, I will ruin your whole life, Sherry, and you know that I can.

She says, I won’t tell, Siddalee, really, I promise you. I won’t tell a soul.

Back at Sherry’s house that evening we have ice-cream sandwiches after supper and play cards and then go to sleep. In the middle of the night it starts raining real hard, and I wake up because I can feel raindrops coming in through the open window. I sit up and watch the rain falling and the lightning shooting across the sky. It’s thundering loud, but Sherry keeps on sleeping. When the lightning flashes, it lights up her whole body. It makes her look like she’s in a theater with a stagelight shining on her. Or like she’s caught in a searchlight trying to escape from a Communist concentration camp. It looks like she could be electrocuted at any minute and she wouldn’t even know it.

Big Shep, 1962

S
ometimes I’ll turn my head in the middle of the day and out of nowhere I’ll still think I hear the sound of Pap’s black Ford hitting the gravel road. Then I get a fist in my stomach and my lungs clench up.

My Daddy wasn’t really that big of a man. He just
seemed
big. When he walked into a place, he sort of pushed the air out all around him and took up all the air me or Mama or whoever needed. He was a handsome man when I was a boy. Thick head of brownish hair, big old cow eyes. My kids all got his eyes. I got Mama’s eyes—hazel. He called them liar eyes.

Pap was a hard worker. Came from an old family—you can check it in
The Walker Family of Louisiana
book. But he was from the country and didn’t have quite the education Vivi’s family did, and they have never let me forget it. When me and Vivi announced our engagement, Buggy Abbott started crying like someone had died.

It didn’t matter that Pap had managed to hang on to three plantations during the Depression, while all the rest of those blue-blood gentlemen farmer friends of the Abbotts lost the shirts off their backs because they didn’t want to get dirt up under their fingernails. None of that crowd could take it that my father trucked potatoes to hold on to his land, while the rest of them holed up in their old run-down Civil War houses whining like spoilt babies about Huey Long.

Pap had opinions on everything. And in between being a good man, he could be the meanest sonovabitch you ever saw. Used to pop me upside the head so hard I didn’t know what hit me. My kids think they get whipped? Hell, they don’t even know what a whipping is. Mama and Pap both whipped. But he was the strong one, he was the one that got carried away. Mama was more of a swatter, like if I’d run out into traffic or sass her real bad. But not Pap. He was a fighter.

One time he lit into me in the front yard. He came at me because I’d left one of the tractors out in the rain. Had just forgot to pull it up under the shed before I left off to go to a picture show in town. Pap didn’t even bother taking off his belt, just come at me with his fist. I wasn’t ready for it, I’d just got outta the truck and walked into the yard, carrying a sack of Ruston peaches for Mama in my hand. Took me a while to even realize what was happening—you know how you can get caught off-guard. I thought he was just reach
ing for the peaches. He came at me so hard, he had me on the ground in a split second. Mama was sitting on the porch shelling butter beans. She watched for a while before she stood up and ran down the steps. Out the corner of my eye I could see that bowl fall out of her lap, butter beans rolling across the porch. I could smell those peaches with their full sweet smell, smashed on the ground.

Mama yelled out, Bay, that’s enough! Leave him alone!

He turned on her and said, Get away from me before I knock you upside the head too!

She went on back up to the porch. She was wearing that blue printed-cotton housedress, the one with the flowers that looked like bluebells.

He busted me in the eye, knocked one of my teeth loose, and did something to one of my ribs. I don’t know if the rib was broke, no doctor ever looked at it. But I couldn’t take a deep breath for weeks without hurting. If I coughed, I near-bout fainted with the pain.

I don’t care how much my four kids rile me, I never knocked loose one of their teeth. I never broke a one of their ribs. I hope they remember that when they get older. When they count up the things I did and didn’t do.

I never gave the drinking a second thought. It was normal as eating in Pap’s house. Everybody in the state of Louisiana drank like that, far as I knew. Never
thought one way or the other when Mama used to take her “naps” in the middle of Christmas or Thanksgiving dinner. Never said to myself, Mama’s not napping, she’s passed-out drunk. Never even questioned it the time Pap peed on the goddamn radiator one night instead of in the commode, he was that juiced up. Piss-steam rising up everywhere, Mama leading him out of the room, and me standing at the edge of the door thinking, Maybe he did it to be funny.

My Daddy drank his bourbon as far back as I can remember. Him and Mister Thibeaux used to sit back on the porch of the playhouse and tell stories and drink their highballs in those café glasses Pap bought wholesale by the case. The man was always proud as hell anytime he could get anything wholesale. Sometimes he’d end up with things he didn’t even need, just because he’d run across them wholesale. Bought fifteen cases of those little no-good triangle-shaped café napkins one time, just because he got a good deal on them at a restaurant sale. They were too tiny for napkins and he ended up making us use them for toilet paper.

It was a few months ago when I was driving Vivi and the kids home one Sunday evening from Chick and Teensy’s that the drinking started crawling across my mind. Vivi and I were both pretty sauced and the kids were cranky and I was driving fast so we could get home. Must of swerved or something because some
G.D. policeman pulled me over. I got out of the car to shake his hand before he even asked for my license.

I said, Shepley Walker. What can I do for you, son?

He paused for a minute, then he said, You Shep Walker? Mister Baylor’s son?

Yessir, I told him, you got that right.

He looked at my car, then down at his shoes.

I said, What’s the problem, officer?

He said: Oh, well…I guess there isn’t no problem. You know, your daddy got my brother a job with Wildlife and Fisheries. He’s been with them for eight years now.

Is that a fact? I said.

He nodded and said, Sorry I bothered you, Mister Shep. Have a good Sunday evening. And he walked back to his car.

I got back in my car and all the kids said, Daddy, what happened? What’d yall do out there?!

I said, Oh, it was a man wanting to talk to me about a dog, been having trouble catching up with me. Old podnah of mine.

Vivi laughed. She said, Shep Walker, you just slay me.

But Siddalee looked at me like: You liar, Daddy, you big liar.

I don’t know why I’m thinking about these things—except I got some half-ass idea that if I think enough, I might be able to breathe better. This asthma is a old length of chain that wraps tighter and tighter around my chest every year. In the middle of
the night when I wake up, it’s all these thoughts that fly at me like cats off the wall. Sometimes I have this dream where I just tell it all, and then this special-made vacuum cleaner comes and sucks all the crap out of my lungs. Stops me from drowning. Clean oxygen reaches deep in my chest like it hasn’t for so goddamn long. In the dream I tell it all, and I breathe like a baby. I forget to worry about the next breath, just trust it’s gonna come.

Siddalee asks too many questions. I don’t know where the child gets those thoughts. She pins me to the wall with all the stuff she asks. Sometimes I wish she’d lose her voice. And sometimes I want to go and sit in front of her and ask her questions. I’d like to say: What do you want me to do? Tell me what to do—step by step—to get out of the mess we’re in here in this house.

But I know it’s foolishness to think my little girl can pull me out of the swamp. I’m ashamed to even admit it. The child was born old, though, and it tempts you.

Siddalee is the smart one. She’s the talker. Hell, she’s nothing but a kid and she’s already using words I never knew how to pronounce right. The child picks up new words everywhere she goes, comes home with them in her pocket. I still can’t believe Vivi and me produced something like her. Neither one of us are what you’d call Brains. Although God knows, my wife can sure run on at the mouth.

Siddalee was barely in first grade when they said she had to have that eye operation. Almost paralyzed me just to hear about it. I got mad as hell at Viviane because the wandering eye came from her side of the family. It didn’t come from mine. Siddalee’s eye—the left one—was wandering off to the outside, making her see double. Hell, what’d people expect of me? People in this parish don’t get their eyes cut on. The damn operation had only been performed six or seven times in the world, and that was in places like Boston and what-have-you.

I didn’t know what to do. Viviane had lived with it all her life and it hadn’t killed her. Hell, when her eye wandered at parties, men thought she was flirting with them. She used to make bets with people that she could see what was going on off to the side without turning her head. She made jokes about it, said she made her beer money in college taking bets in the dorm on what-all she could see with that eye.

I just did not understand why we had to cut on my daughter’s eye. But Dr. Claude Hathaway told Vivi about this operation to correct it. Said he could go in there and take a little tuck in one of the muscles that were lazy and that’d do the trick. Siddalee’s eye would quit wandering and look straight ahead. Soon as Vivi heard about it, she just had to get it done right away. Just had to.

I said, Well Vivi, why don’t we wait awhile, see if it doesn’t straighten itself out?

You cheap sonovabitch! she hollered. It’s just like you to be too goddamn stingy with a nickel to fix your own daughter’s eye!

I said, It’s not the goddamn money. I never been under the knife. None of my family has ever been under the knife.

She wouldn’t listen to me. She didn’t know what I was thinking:
I don’t want my little girl to come out blind or gouged up. I’m not cheap, I’m scared. It’s the story of my life: not stingy, just a goddamn coward.

The whole time, Viviane and me fought like dogs. I didn’t think about my child, my hands were so full fighting her mother.

Viviane handled it all. I’d never seen her like that, didn’t think she had it in her, taking charge like a man. She set up the hospital room, the doctor, jerked Siddalee out of school and put her up in St. Cecilia Hospital. Siddalee’s hair was that long red, almost to her waist, and she’d been wearing glasses since she was three, trying to correct that wandering eye.

I wouldn’t have a thing to do with it.

I told Viviane, This is on your head. If anything happens to that child, don’t come blaming me. You are the one that can’t live with the wandering eye. Siddalee’s wandering eye doesn’t bother me. I can live with the wandering eye.

Viviane and her Mama took over. Buggy moved the four-poster bed into the living room and got it all ready for Siddalee to come home to recover in.

Dr. Hathaway called me the day before the operation. He said, Shep, I’d appreciate it if you’d drop by my office this afternoon, if you have the time.

I said, What for?

I’d just like for us to have a talk before I perform surgery on your daughter, he told me.

I said, I don’t have anything to talk about. This is Vivi Abbott’s doing. Don’t call me up again, hear?

The day they cut on Siddalee’s eye, I went out to the duck camp. I cleared and burned some brush. Then I started drinking and cooked a duck gumbo with some birds I had in the deep freeze. I didn’t call, didn’t go back to town, didn’t do a thing. Viviane couldn’t get in touch with me and I didn’t want her to.

I stayed gone the whole time Sidda was in the hospital. I didn’t go up to St. Cecilia’s at all. Drove in from the camp to do a little farming, then drove back out there to sleep. Didn’t come back until she was home.

They’d set her up in the four-poster bed like she was a little princess. When I got there, her Aunt Jezie was reading
Black Beauty
out loud to her, and I could smell Buggy cooking some peanut-butter fudge. And there was Siddalee. Sitting up in that bed, wearing this little pink satin bed jacket one of the aunts had bought her. Her eyes bandaged from ear to ear. Nothing but white gauze.

I stood at the doorway looking at her, and Jezie just kept on reading, like I wasn’t even there. My daughter
didn’t flinch, didn’t have a clue that I was anywhere around. At one point while Jezie was reading, Siddalee asked her to stop for a minute and I thought,
Maybe Sidda knows I’m here.

But she just laid there still for a minute, then said: Aunt Jezie, would you read that part over again?

I wish Sidda would of sensed me, would of smelled me. Would of known I was near, even though she couldn’t see me. But then I’m always expecting too much from the girl, wanting her to know things she can’t see. That’s not one of the things I’m proud of, it’s something I wish I could rip up out of the ground.

I’d bought her some of these velveteen headbands from Bordelon’s Drugstore. I remember standing there in the store, thinking: She can rub her hands on the velvet and feel it, even though her eyes are bandaged. I got the salesgirl to gift-wrap them.

I wanted to walk the four steps over to my daughter propped up in that bed and say: Hey, Red! Here’s a strawberry-colored headband. I know you can’t see it, but just rub your hand on it. Feel? It’s gonna look so pretty against that long hair of yours.

But I never walked over to Siddalee laying there in the bed. I just stood right inside the doorway of the living room for a minute, then turned around and walked out.

Buggy and Jezie Abbott both moved into the house to help Viviane with the kids. They were camped out in the kids’ schoolroom, but their stuff was spread out everywhere. You could smell them all over the place.
And Buggy had brought Miss Peppy, that rat of a dog, with her. It wasn’t my house anymore.

I left the headbands on the kitchen table and went out and checked on some business at the cotton gin. When I got back home that evening, Vivi was sitting at the kitchen counter talking on the phone, describing Sidda’s operation blow-by-blow to one of the Ya-Yas, like she’d been the one that got cut on. I walked in to look at Siddalee in the living room. It looked like she was asleep, but I couldn’t be sure with those bandages.

Before I knew it, Vivi slammed down the phone and flew into the room. She grabbed me by the arm and pulled me out into the living room.

What do you think you are doing? she said.

Peeking at Sidda, I told her.

You put all the responsibility on me, she said. And I don’t want you anywhere near that child now. You stay out of there. Don’t you lay a finger on her! I don’t even want you talking to her, do you understand me?