Strange Folk, page 6
Meredith shivered and nodded under Belva’s intent stare. As she left the room, her gaze briefly lingered on Redbud’s powerful, flashing eyes in the picture, wondering what secrets she held.
FIVE
LEE
There was technically more than one bar in town, but this was the bar.
It had been more a figment of her imagination than a real place to Lee as a kid. She remembered waiting up late when her dad—and then her mom—didn’t come home, imagining a large room dominated by a demonic, glowing furnace. But it seemed much less sinister in person, by the dim light of adulthood. Every surface was made of wood, and the walls were covered in mismatched ephemera, like photographs of the Lions Club from 1982 and a stuffed deer head named Big Merle. It was the town’s storage unit for sentimental junk.
The hip restaurants back in California tried to create a sense of history and culture in the tastefully random placement of artifacts, but the vintage typewriters and the sepia photos purchased at flea markets represented no time or place. They were stand-ins for meaning, the idea of a memory without its nectary weight.
She wondered at her romancing of this place now, and she felt like one of those people that fantasizes about a rural life they could never stomach in reality. She knew better; she’d been gone for too long.
The bar was empty except for a few old men sitting in a back booth with their noses swollen and red. She took a seat at the bar, and a minute later, light blazed through the dark room from the front door. Otis walked toward her with the sun lingering in his outline, and something inside her whispered, There he is.
He took the stool beside her and ordered a whiskey neat. She ordered the same.
They had already covered the basic facts of the last twenty years at church—Otis had majored in engineering at the state school a few hours away and now worked for a firm in Cradleburg designing wastewater treatment plants. He had recently moved in with his dad to take care of him. No wife. No kids.
Lee studied the feral smile of a mounted possum above the bar and took a sip. “Have you ever thought about living somewhere else?”
He ran a hand through his hair. “I lived in Atlanta for a semester to intern at a big firm down there. I made friends with the more senior guys. Their lives were centered around going out to eat at expensive restaurants and living in these massive subdivisions of basically mansions with lawns, and I didn’t feel a real connection to it. It’s a nice place, but I missed being out in nature. Part of me was curious to spend time around city people who supposedly live these more sophisticated lives, but that wasn’t the case, for the most part.”
“I know what you mean.” Lee thought about her urban life. The endless days she spent driving around to shopping centers, buying food and paper and plastic. Some nights, when Cooper was in town, they would go to a restaurant with another couple and eat burrata and Brussels sprouts and steak and get wasted off wine twenty dollars by the glass. Conversation revolved around home renovations, resorts, other restaurants where they could have burrata and wine.
“It’s interesting to see you back here,” Otis said. “I know how much you wanted to ‘get out.’ ”
Lee nodded. “I wanted to leave so badly for so long.” Her grip tightened on the whiskey glass. “And then I got it. And even though I spent years trying to evolve and become a totally different person, I still ended up in a place that felt wrong. In a marriage and a life that felt hollow. So I had to come here. But it’s only for a few months. Just until I can figure out my next move. I don’t want my kids growing up here.”
Taking all of this in, he said, “It’s not a perfect place, but it’s not all bad.”
“Look, I know. I just want more for them.” He couldn’t understand what she was trying to protect them from. Otis knew pain. His sister’s drug problems, his mother’s death when they were in high school, his father’s meanness. He could understand her in this way, but he didn’t seem to feel a wrongness at the center of him.
He put his hand on hers. “I’ve had friends go through divorces. I know it’s hell.”
Lee thought back to a few weeks ago, when she found a pair of women’s shorts in Cooper’s laundry after a business trip. She wore the shorts around the house for a week after, but he didn’t notice. She still resented him for turning her into a cliché; at least he could have betrayed her with some poignancy. When she confronted him, he didn’t deny it. Instead, he turned it back on her: she had given him no choice; he needed a refuge from her unhappiness. It was an umbrella term he used to describe everything that was wrong with Lee—her antisocial behavior, her melancholy, her negativity, her drinking problem.
When they first met, Cooper liked the novelty of her strangeness. But once they left the experiment of college and entered his rich, shiny world, things changed between them.
At first she was dazzled by its comfort and security. His parents bought them a beautiful house in a brand-new subdivision, and Lee couldn’t believe how clean and untainted it was. The fridge was filled with rows and drawers of gleaming food. The water gushed from the tap every time she swung the handle. For the first time in her life, her jaw unclenched and her shoulders relaxed.
But no matter how hard she tried to fit in with his family and friends, she couldn’t shake a feeling of otherness. It was her effort that set her apart, and subtle errors that compounded into a greater difference. It was also her own doing—she insisted on staying other because she deeply disliked these people. There was an essential weakness in them that she couldn’t respect.
She thought she and Cooper could hold on to their little life, but he started to see her strangeness through their eyes, and she started to see their weakness in him. He would make comments about her standoffish nature, or mention that she always led with negativity instead of gratitude. On the surface they were benign suggestions for self-improvement, but soon every move she made was criticized, as if there was something inherently wrong with her.
She and Cooper drank in the same quantities, but while he drank every evening and weekend with other people, Lee stayed at home and drank by herself. It was funny, because she’d only started drinking to please Cooper and his friends. She’d associated drinking with poor, ruined people until she left Craw Valley and discovered that people drank everywhere, even and especially the rich. She drank to become one of them, but eventually not even the booze could slide her into place among them.
Despite all of this, they continued to go through the motions. The arrival of Meredith and Cliff made it livable—they were the family she’d always wanted, and she didn’t need him anymore. When they were very small, Cooper had connected with them. But as their personalities emerged, the relationships became strained. Even with Meredith, with whom he’d always had a special bond, there was this disconnect. It would be easy to blame it solely on his emotional distance and his suffocating expectations. But there was also something organic that bound Lee and her children together that he wasn’t a part of. When she told him she was leaving and taking the children with her, he didn’t flinch.
The cheating was only pretense; it was a long time coming.
But Lee couldn’t help feeling like a failure. She had tried to find her people and build a new life outside of this town. But she had only brought her children into her strange, small world, and now they were unmoored and dependent upon others. This wasn’t the life she’d worked so hard to give them, or that she’d imagined for herself. Sometimes she wondered, Where is the life I’m supposed to be living?
She relayed pieces of this to Otis, who nodded intently and didn’t try to interject. “That must have been difficult to live with for so long.”
Lee knew what he meant, but the sad part was that she’d barely felt it. Not until the cheating had she really woken up to how truly unhappy she’d been.
“Have you ever gotten close?” she asked.
He took a deep breath and stared into the mirror at the back of the bar. “Naw, I’ve never found the right person.”
“No one? Do you date?”
“I’ve had girlfriends that were very kind and I enjoyed being with them, but it never felt like the kind of connection I’d want in a life partner. I’m not willing to settle for something less than that.”
Lee tried conjuring a woman for Otis in her mind. Someone with long, thick hair and a strong jaw.
“Do you remember the field?” he asked, smirking.
“I’m not sure what you mean.” She flushed with the memory of their kiss.
“At the time it sort of scared me, because I was afraid of anything I couldn’t understand. It made me feel anxious and inadequate. But now, I appreciate that. I wish strange things happened more often.” He smiled at her, but Lee just felt ashamed.
“I don’t feel like her anymore. I can’t imagine doing something so bold now.”
He didn’t leap to reassure her. “I think a lot of people walk around wondering if they’ve moved backward. We’re all trying not to fall apart after a certain age. It’s hard enough to maintain the status quo. I think this constant need for moving forward and growing is exhausting.”
“But that’s all I used to think about. Moving to a new place. Transforming into something better. I don’t know what to do or who I am if I’m not pursuing that goal.”
They both took a sip from their drinks.
“The truth is, you’re not her anymore. You’re Lee.” He raised an eyebrow and smiled into his glass. She knocked her shoulder against his.
“Ha ha. It was my chance to start over. No one at college knew about my family. I could be anyone I wanted. Opaline is a country girl no matter what she does. Lee is ambiguous. I wanted to be ambiguous.”
He smiled. “I like Lee. She’s… not soft. But maybe… open. More vulnerable.”
“So now I’m a sad, soft woman, huh?”
He ignored her. “You know, I’d wanted to ask you out for a long time before we went to the field. You were this mystery, and I wanted to know what was behind it. I had a feeling it was something special. But you were also a little scary. I thought you’d bite my head off if I asked.”
They both laughed. “I was a little scary, huh? I used to have so much rage. I know it wasn’t approachable, but I miss it.”
Suddenly from the back of the bar, a woman drawled, “O-pa-line Ford, ho-ly shit.”
Lee turned around, and there was Kimmie Ryder, standing with a pool stick in one hand and her right hip cocked. If there was any indication time had passed, this was it. She had once been smooth-skinned and muscley, but now her face was wrinkled and pocked under heavy foundation and thick black eyeliner. She had the skinny limbs and slightly bloated torso of someone who didn’t eat very often but drank liberally; her rhinestone tank top stretched across her middle like it might bust a seam.
Lee, Kimmie, and Dreama had once been an odd trio forced together by family. Whenever things got bad at home for Kimmie, she’d run away and live with Belva for a while before the Ryders dragged her back. The Ryders were somehow related to them, and Lee had always been aware of the simmering feud between their families, but she’d only had a child’s vague understanding.
Redbud hadn’t explicitly cut her off from Kimmie when her father died, but without Belva to bring them together, they slowly grew apart.
“I heard you were back.”
Lee stood up and went in for a hug, and Kimmie picked her up and spun her around. She set her down and made eyes at Otis. “Sorry to interrupt.”
“That’s fine. How you doing, Kimmie?” Otis asked.
“Oh, you know.” She signaled for the bartender, and he poured her a shot of tequila. “Needed to pay the power bill, so I came here to wipe the floor with these sorry fucks.” She gestured toward the back room where a few bearded men loitered around the pool table. She took the shot and slammed it down. “Hey, O. Let’s go out tonight.” Kimmie raised an eyebrow at Lee.
“We are out.”
“Are we?” She gestured around at the mostly empty bar. “I know a place. Back holler shit. It’ll blow your tits off.”
Lee thought of her kids sleeping safely back in Belva’s cabin. As essentially the only caregiver for her children, and then her mother before that, life hadn’t granted her the luxury of spontaneity. She’d been so careful. So afraid she would get stuck in this town, or later that they would take her new life away from her if she made a wrong move.
But in spite of her efforts, she’d lost it anyway.
She wanted to be bold again, as she’d been with Otis that afternoon they kissed in a field.
She returned to her stool and turned away from Kimmie. “What do you think? Might be fun.” She slid her knee between Otis’s legs.
“You continue to surprise me.” Mirth sparkled in his eyes. “Let’s do it.”
* * *
Otis and Lee pulled up to a large clearing deep in the woods with cars and trucks parked in long, disheveled rows. People poured out, calling to one another and carrying six-packs of cheap beer. There was the whole spectrum of young and old, from men with long gray hair to teenage girls clutching each other’s arms. They all moved toward a bonfire at the center of the clearing like woodland creatures gathering for a pagan ritual.
Lee had never been to a party like this, never attended a single booze-drenched throwdown in high school. She’d been too terrified. She had imagined alcohol and drugs were a kind of paralyzing agent that kept you from leaving the house or this town. That’s what it’d seemed like with her mom; she got fucked up and then she lay down and didn’t get up.
As Lee and Otis moved toward the flames, she noticed a few women loping by like deer and staring her down.
“I think you have a few admirers.” Lee raised an eyebrow.
Otis didn’t respond and instead shifted his gaze to a group of men and women who were setting up chairs on the far side of the fire and tuning instruments. Lee noticed a small piano placed behind them, and wondered how they’d gotten it up here.
Kimmie approached with a few men, and the crowd seemed to part for them. Lee recognized Kimmie’s brother TJ. She remembered the animal magnetism of him, prowling the halls of their high school, tinted further by her vague understanding of a fraught family connection. They were somehow related, but not in any direct way that she could track. She’d fantasized about his lean chest in a white tank top and the freckles along his cheeks and collarbone, aware that there was something taboo in this fantasy.
He’d since filled out into something meaty and menacing, with the perpetually flushed skin of an older man even though he was close to her age. Under one arm he held a small white puppy that was red-eyed and raw like it’d been pulled from its mother too young. TJ stroked its soft skull with his thumb.
He and Otis hugged, and Lee remembered they were friends. TJ took a step back and looked Lee over from head to toe in an exaggerated gesture. “Opaline. Looking good, girl. That real cashmere?”
Lee looked down at her black sweater and flinched. She’d tried to dress more simply since she returned, knowing she’d be mocked if they caught even a whiff of elitism. But she’d been married to a rich man for fifteen years, and all of her clothes were on the higher end.
“Yes, good spot.”
“I know about shit. I ain’t just an ignorant redneck.” He smiled and continued to pet the dog. She studied him more closely and noticed that his jeans looked expensive and the rhinestones in his ears glinted like real diamonds.
“How’s your granny doing?” His smile was replaced by a more shifting, unreadable expression.
“She’s fine. Why do you ask?”
The smile returned. “It’s called manners, Opaline.”
A woman cleared her throat across the fire, and their heads turned toward her. She stood in front of the band, ready to sing. Every instrument was made of wood and animal hair, and gut and throat, so that when the rich sound of the bluegrass music began, it seemed at one with the place, a chorus of nature surrounding them with its plucks of trunk and falls of rain and the keening of an animal searching for a mate.
As they listened, she could feel the solidity of Otis’s body a few inches from hers, prickling at the edges. Not touching, but sensing one another. They let that feeling hang heavily between them as the music pulled them into its orbit.
After a few songs, the slow and steady rhythm gave way to something harder and grittier. The musicians laid into their instruments as if to destroy them with their playing, and the singer’s sweet, luscious voice like fermented fruit turned to a scream.
A few boys made a circle and started crashing into one another to the music, their bones meeting in full force, going horn to horn. Lee watched as Kimmie dove into the cluster of them, flailing, catching one boy on the cheekbone with her fist. He brought his elbow up in response and made her mouth bleed. She laughed at him, spraying red into his face, and they howled together up at the moon.
The music slowed again, turning hypnotic this time, and the moshers’ movements slowed with it and became more like a dance. A few girls entered the circle and started moving like nymphs, their arms swaying back and forth.
Otis took an airplane bottle out of his pocket, pulled on it, and handed it to Lee. She took a sip and felt the warmth of his mouth on the rim. She realized it was the same oil can liquor she’d found in the shed, but this stuff tasted fresher. Pure, shifting nectar. It slid like venomous honey down her throat.
She looked closer at the bottle where someone had taken off the label and affixed a sticker with the emblem of a black flower.
She started to ask Otis about it, but he took her hand and pulled her into the fray, and she was pleasantly shocked as he started to dance around the fire with the rest of them. Kimmie swiveled her hips suggestively as she drank from a glass jar with the same black flower. She made eye contact with Lee, challenging her to join.
Lee gave herself over to it. In its breathless plush, it felt as if she and Otis were the only two people, and everything else became a blur around them. They danced without touching, like bees in a mating dance, weaving shapes between them as the music kept time with the rhythm of the blood coursing through their veins.
