You think it’s possible to fall in love without meeting the person? my mother had asked me. Maybe, I’d told her. Maybe you can.
IT FELT BAD to have Cherry’s boxes strewn around my head as I slept, the haphazard shadows of the clutter looming against the wall at night, so I tried to move her things into the closet to make more room. For what I didn’t know. All my belongings were at the Lakes just where I’d left them. I’d been wearing the same jean dress I’d worn the day my mother left, the denim thick and stiff from my sweat.
The closet was its own spectacle, and in it I unearthed clear plastic tub after plastic tub of what looked like still and stiff stuffed animals that smelled of urine. I brushed a finger against a squirrel’s tail and it felt so real I pulled my hand back. It even had sharp little teeth. Under the squirrel were dozens of mice with long wormy tails and fear-struck eyes. Where had these come from, I wondered. I’d never seen anything like them sold in Peaches. I shivered and closed the lid and moved on to a duct-taped brown box. ROMANCE was written on the outside in black marker. I ripped it open and inside must have been forty compact paperbacks, looping cursive titles down each spine. I opened one to the middle and the first sentence I saw was he palmed her breast. I recoiled as if from a hot flame, tossed the book to the ground, kept my eyes on it like it was a striking snake. I called for Cherry. I pointed to the tawdry cover with skin spilling from corset and demanded who was reading such sin. She pressed her lips and said, “Wouldn’t crack a math book, but those your mother loved.”
I looked at them wary but I felt a strong pulling current coming from them.
“You was just a little thing, but you remember how it was before Vern, just living life to live, no meaning whatsoever.”
I figured she was going to take the books away, burn them in the yard. Call the church and report them. But she shuffled back down the hall. “Anyhow,” she called. “Don’t touch them animals in there. Them’s my specials.”
I looked back to the crates of stuffed animals, imagined them writhing inside, chewing one another’s little tails clear off. I heard Cherry turn the TV up in the living room. The books called to me. “God,” I said aloud. “Why are you testing me this way?”
I put my hand on one of the books and felt a warmth. Felt, maybe, my mother. I was powerless. I took to reading the entire collection straight away.
EARLY THE NEXT morning Cherry woke me by thwacking something against the floor by my head. I looked up to see a deep brown oiled cane in her hand, curved at the top and veined.
“What is that?” I said, poking the cane. I’d never seen her use it before.
“Made from the finest of bull penises,” she said. “Steal of a price, you would not believe.”
I turned away from it and groaned into my hands. Every waking was another reminder my life was real. Why wake up if all that was waiting for me was a cane made from a penis?
She handed me a metal scraper and a spray bottle full of bleach. “Time to clean the flies.”
CLEANING THE FLIES meant getting down on my hands and knees to scrape the brown fly larvae from the corners of the walls where, she showed me, they were piled and ready for the hatch. Under the refrigerator, around the baseboards, in the grooves of the windowsills, where she had a theory they were getting in. Wriggling maggots appeared from the brown and those needed to be smashed one by one, or if a group of them was discovered I was to warm soda until it was hot and thick and burn them alive. The already birthed flies swarmed the house in immense clouds. If I was still but a minute, three would land on me. And they were lazy. I could kill them easily but it didn’t matter. They appeared by the second. That morning I kept an eye peeled for baby flies thinking it might grant me some compassion toward them, to witness their helplessness, but they seemed to be born immediately adult sized and by noon I killed them one after another without remorse, stiff bodies crumbing the warped wood floors.
“When did this get so bad?” I asked.
“I hate to say it,” she said. “But it was about the time you arrived.”
I waited for her to laugh, or take it back, but she was serious as disease.
“No more cows in the fields for them to land on,” I said.
“Blessed land,” she said. Sadness pulled at her face. The land was like a person we missed. “Now make a plate of bologna sandwiches and come have lunch with your Cherry.”
She sat on the pink floral couch and patted the seat next to her. I made the sandwiches on white stale bread. The mayonnaise was on its last day. When I sat she flopped her head down on my lap, closed her eyes, and opened her mouth. “Feed me.”
I took a bite.
“Feed. Me.” She grabbed my wrist and brought it to her mouth and snatched a hank of bologna from between the bread. In between bites she whined on and on about what she called her wasted life. I watched her old teeth chew, the mayonnaise collecting around her gums. She told me how years before when she’d quit her job at the Pac N’ Save as the bakery manager, no one believed the reason, that she truly had dislocated her pubis, but she had, and not a soul cared not even her own grandchildren, not even me. Lyle was a boy of vigor on his way to something, of course, so she could excuse his not noticing easier than she could mine; me, who was headed nowhere but in circles.
I remembered Cherry working there, how my mother and I would pop in and Cherry would slide a free cake our way, or a cookie. The secret is just a spat of spittle, she’d say, and wink. I’d never taken her serious but after this I could picture her spitting into the batter easy. Those days seemed far from me now. I thought of Vern’s sermon when things had begun sliding back toward drought, just before he’d announced his idea of assignments. How he’d said that if we had a true faith we would not travel outside of Peaches for supplies. We would have belief enough that God would provide. I didn’t know what that really meant then, but now I knew we were a long ways from eating fresh-baked goods at the Pac.
“How do you dislocate a pubis?” I asked. She chomped the last bite of the sammy out of my hand.
“See, all I get is doubt.” She got up and started toward the door. “I’ve become a certain way living alone out here,” she said, kicking open the screen. “Goldie Goldie Goldie! Goldie Goldie Goldie!”
Goldie was her cat. It hadn’t been seen by a human eye for the better part of five years. I myself had seen Goldie’s remains on the side of the road not a mile from the house the very day Cherry had mentioned Goldie hadn’t come in for lunch. My mother had shaken her head when I pointed out the smear of orange fur. We resolved not to tell Cherry about it, but I thought maybe it wasn’t so bad. Maybe Goldie was happier dead. I remembered when she’d had kittens and became depressed and didn’t mother, but settled her plumpness over their bodies and smothered them. Cherry thought they were nursing and told me to go have a feel of a baby cat and I was already holding the tiny kitten in my hand when I realized it was not moving, not breathing. The feeling of a dead thing in the hand is unmistakable. On reflex I tossed the body to the ground and it hit the floor with a thud. On the way home, after I had stopped crying, my mother said it wasn’t at all strange that the cat had done that, how Goldie was too young to have all those babies, just a baby herself.
“Help me call now,” Cherry told me, so I stood next to her.
Her hand trembled, gripping the cane. Her voice shook as she projected it as far as she could.
“Goldie!” I called with her. “Goldie, come on home!”
But Goldie didn’t come on home. The dead don’t come back.
THAT NIGHT I sweated until my hair was wet and I dreamed of fat black flies in my sweet tea, in my mouth.
I LEARNED BY my second week at Cherry’s