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What Mama Wanted in life was to cruise around Florida like a Yankee tourist in a Cadillac convertible, Jimmy Dolan at the wheel. She wanted to wear dark sunglasses and drape a parrot-green scarf 13 страница



and I pictured her standing in shade next to a row of gray boxes beneath an orange tree white with blossoms, bees swarming around her, the air heavy with their buzzing. I 245

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closed my eyes and heard a low drone. I dressed Mama

in one of those beekeeper hats, hid her face behind a veil, placed a smoker in her hand. She always hated bees, afraid they'd sting her or us. I figured living with Henry must've really changed her. This was her new life. Still, it was hard to believe that she wasn't just visiting that place, that she actually lived there, surrounded by all those seahorses, all those orange trees, all that green.

She sent us a postcard of an alligator from Henry's store.

The words she wrote on the back sounded like something

a game-show host would say: When Henry isn't tending

his hives or working in the grove, she wrote, he runs Pete's Paradise. It's an open-air market like the ones we used to see on our way to Panama City. Remember those? Y'all used to beg your daddy to stop.

I felt sorry for myself when I put that card down; I got

sweaty just thinking about all that time me and James and Maisey spent being driven around in the backseat of the Fairlane, begging Mama and Daddy to please please please just stop and let us out at Shell World, atStuckey's, at Howard

Johnson's. I could still see the giant pink clamshell gaping open in front of Shell World; I could still see how it looked from the dusty rear window, getting smaller and smaller as Daddy drove away. I was ready to get into the driver's seat. Mama said she could buy all the taffy she wanted at Pete's Paradise. She didn't have to tell me what was in that store.

I knew. It was crammed top to bottom with jars of orangeblossom honey, ashtrays shaped like Florida, and coconuts

carved to look like monkey heads. I could just hear Mama sighing when she opened the door. "Isn't it wonderful? My own little bit of heaven."

B R E A T H I N G U N D E R W A T ER

/ never asked Mama how she met Henry, but from the pictures she sent it was clear he was as brown as she was, though, and I knew that wasn't a coincidence. She wasn't going to hide anything about this man now that she'd made her choice. I knew they cruised around Florida, lolling naked on sand dunes at secluded beaches, their skin coated with salt from the Gulf. I knew they ate shrimp dinners and slept in cheap motels with names like Stardust or Sand Piper. I figured all those souvenirs she'd brought us had come from Pete's and decided it didn't matter. I wasn't going to hold Henry against her. I was willing to let her have her life and didn't understand why she wasn't willing to let me have mine.

One day after school when I checked the mail, there was

a postcard of a mermaid from Weeki Wachee. Maybe she'd sent it as a joke. Ha! I beat ya!

I flipped the card over to see what she'd written. Thea the mermaid ate a banana and drank a Coke underwater-can you believe it? I could tell you this much about my mother and the mermaid: When Thea swam into the spring, Mama leaned forward to watch as she drank her bottle of Coke, gulping the liquid down, her eyes open wide. When Thea peeled her banana and ate it, her jaws clenched, her mouth forced into a grin while she swallowed, Mama thought she was having fun.

Maybe that's what it was that day, the day I drowned. Maybe Mama forgot herself watching me sink into the green; maybe she waited for me to sprout a tail and swim off, a silver-tinted flash of something, something just visible 247

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in all that green. Maybe she thought of my birth. How she thought I was a fish baby. Maybe she thought, If drowning

could be like this. I would never know what she thought

that day or all the other days. I closed my eyes and pictured myself saying to her all the things I could never say while

she was there: / was afish. You let me drown. I wasn't afish. I was a boy. I wasn't a boy. I kissed a girl. I was a virgin. I kissed a boy. I kissed another girl. I am your goddamn queer. Even though I said these things a thousand times, I could never make her say, "I know."

One night, months after she left, I fell asleep and



dreamed of Mama. She sat on the muddy bank of the Apalachicola River, her cane pole arcing out over the river. Her eyes had a soft look to them, and she seemed to be whispering something. For the life of me, I couldn't figure out what it was. The wind caught her voice like a kite and shot it high up in the air out of my reach. It seemed as though she was saying something serious, something that might change my destiny, something other than the story of my blue-and-silvery fishbirth. Or my drowning. Then Mrs. Lubjek arrived, took one look at Mama, read her lips, and turned to me laughing, speaking the words so I could hear them. "She wands you to geb her another cand of worms." That dream was the last time I saw Mama while she

was still alive, and I could believe it was really her, that she actually showed up in my head. She was killed in an accident driving home drunk from the beach. It was just that simple. She left us and she died. When I heard the 248

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news, it wasn't really news. Like Daddy said after she shaved her head that time, she was one surprise after the other. In the end, nothing she did was surprising. Not even getting killed when she was finally starting her real life, the one she'd imagined for so long. I wondered if she thought of her new life that way—as her real life, as if the one she'd lived with us had just been a bad dream. I wondered about the difference between a real life and an imaginary one. Which one is real? The life we imagine for ourselves or the one we actually live? I thought of Rae and Ronnie then, how the straw houses, the shack, and Ronnie's garage were imaginary. I'd imagined a self to live in them. Then I thought of Cat's porch. I remembered how alive I felt lying on that porch beneath the stars, everything imaginary stripped away. I knew then that I didn't want to wait like Mama had, to live my real life. I wanted it now.

We Had a simple funeral at Mt. Pleasant. I thought about getting Mama one of those concrete markers with a number

on it, but I didn't think anyone else would appreciate the joke. She would have, I think.

After it was all over, after all the flowers from Nichol's Flower Shop, all the lilies and the roses and the carnations, wilted and turned brown on her grave, I tried to picture Mama, tried to remember what she was like before, when she still dreamed of being a beauty queen and driving that convertible Cadillac. When she had babies one after another instead. When she held me in her lap and softly murmured the story of my birth into my ear, her breath warm against my skin.

LU V I C K E RS

But I found that I couldn't even remember the sound of

her voice, the way she called me home at dusk, turning my name into a song, Lil-ly, Lil-ly. She was already fading, color draining out of her like a photograph left too long in the sun. I couldn't remember how she looked in her white cotton nightgown, either, leaning over me and Maisey at night, nibbling words into our ears, Mmmmmmm, I love you. Her breasts brushed against the sheets as she bowed her body over our bed. I couldn't remember her smell, whether it was the delicate scent of Johnson's baby powder or the sweet almond smell of Jergens lotion.

I couldn't remember how she looked asleep or how she looked when she woke or how she looked in her white uniform when she tiptoed into our room to kiss Maisey

and me good-bye before she went to work at the hospital.

I couldn't remember the shoes she wore or how her feet looked or what dresses she owned, her shorts or her shirts or her sunglasses, her favorite color or whether she even had one. I couldn't remember her walk or her run. She wanted to run awayfrom you, James said. I couldn't remember how she sat in a chair or stood to talk on the phone. I don't know who she would've talked to. She told the women she worked with that you were pregnant, said Maisey.

I couldn't remember the exact brown of her eyes or

how long her eyelashes were or how her lips were shaped. I couldn't remember her fingernails or the palms of her hands, how it felt when she slapped me. I couldn't remember how she sounded calling me a goddamn queer long before I knew it myself. I couldn't remember how she looked underwater, her red hair floating above her head in all that green.

I couldn't remember how she looked when she caught a fish, peeled a potato, or drove our car. I couldn't remember how she looked hanging our clothes out on the line, bending over the basket to grab a shirt. You were supposed to help her because you were a girl, said James.

I couldn't remember how Mama looked walking through a Jackson County farmer's field picking White Acre peas under the hot summer sun or how she looked later at home sitting on the porch, shelling them into a big, green bowl.

I squatted at the end of a row and peed in the soft brown dirt while Mama stood over me and I stared above at the bleached-out sky. That was the moment I knew the Earth was round; I could see it curving away from me, the way Mama curved away from me as soon as I was born.

 


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