Lyla, page 25
Emma Claire straightened my jacket collar, making sure it was just so. The necktie was cutting off the circulation to my face.
“I don't mean any disrespect, Emma,” I said. “But I've got to ask it.”
“Ask what?”
“Ask you if you're you sure about this. You don't have to go through with it you know.”
“With what?”
“Everything, the wedding.”
She smiled at me. “I'm very sure about it, you can stop worrying now.”
Not a chance.
“Spencer seems like a good man,” I said. “Don't misunderstand me, but I just want you to be smart about this. You don't have to do anything you're not ready to do.”
“What I want is for you not to worry about me today. Just for one day, can you do that?”
“I'm not worrying, I'm only doing what brothers do.”
She shook her head. “No, you're doing what pessimists do.”
“You mean the jokers who invaded Russia?”
“I'm surprised you even know about that.”
I was smarter than the average cracker.
Emma Claire leaned forward and embraced me. I couldn't tell who she reminded me of in that moment.
Mother or Daddy.
She wouldn't have known which parent she took after anyway. Emma Claire told me once that she was unable to remember anything about Daddy, not even the way he looked. That meant she had no idea how much she resembled him, or how much she acted like him. But she was his twin. In fact, most everything she did reminded me of him.
Emma Claire leaned forward. “I'll be fine,” Emma said into my good ear so that I could hear her.
I did not answer her.
Neither was I sure she was right.
God, how she looked like my daddy.
The only images Emma knew of Daddy were from the strip of carnival photographs Mother had in her dresser. It was a skinny strip of black and white photos that showed a young man's serious face staring at the camera. He was as skinny as a reed. His big serious eyes looked like they might've popped right off of his face.
“Spencer's a good man,” Emma Claire assured me.
“I'm sure he is.”
“He is.”
“I believe you.”
“No you don't.”
I was a terrible liar.
Emma Claire sat down on the wood bench, crossing her legs. Her bouquet was one that Sonnet had made for her. I had no idea how Sonnet learned to make bouquets.
“Spencer kind of reminds me of you,” Emma Claire said.
“Well, that's generous of you,” I said. “But I'm a cracker, and that's a far cry from being a doctor.”
“You're not a cracker.”
“I hate to break it to you Emma, but we both are.”
“We are not.”
“I promise I won't tell Spencer.”
“I'm not a cracker.”
She said it like she meant it.
“Emma Claire, I'm sure he's figured it out by now.”
I sat down next to her and exhaled. My suit was about to choke me to death, and I was overdue for a cigarette. I hated suits. I didn't even wear one to my own wedding. The only time I ever cared to wear a suit was at my funeral.
“Oh, Quinn.” she stood up and walked over to stained glass window.
I shook my head. “What is it?”
“Mother and me.”
“Huh?”
“We were both horrible. Selfish.”
I shifted in my seat. “Hush, now, it's your wedding day Emma Claire.”
But she wasn't finished.
“Sometimes, I'm not sure who was worse, Mother or me.” She touched the stained glass, running her fingers along the lines between the colors. “You know, I hated her.”
I leaned against the wall. “I know.”
It was no secret.
“I hated her for a long time. Long before she–” Emma grew silent. “Well, you know, before she did what she did.”
I knew what Emma was talking about.
Very well.
“Do you hate her still?” I asked.
“No, I miss her.” Emma Claire's eyes became heavy with tears. “If you can believe that. Now that she's dead, I realize how much I loved her.”
It was the first time I'd ever heard Emma Claire speak in such a way about her own mother. It made my heart heavy.
“I miss her, too,” I said.
Emma Claire dabbed her eyelids with a lacy handkerchief. Her profile was like a long-necked bird against the bright glass window of the dressing room.
There came a light rapping from the wood door of the room.
“You two ready?” Rena asked, poking in her head. “Because it's time.”
Emma Claire walked over to me, and I stood up with the help of my cane. She hooked her arm around mine and squeezed it. I looked at her, there by my side. I remembered the girl who wandered through the backyard in stained clothes. The girl with a trail of feral cats following behind her. The child with skinned up knees. I couldn't tell whether my sadness was the happy kind, or if my happiness was the sad kind.
Maybe a little of both.
Emma straightened her veil in the mirror. “Yes, we're ready.”
She drew in a breath through pursed lips, and it made me smile to see her so damned nervous.
“What about you?” she asked me. “How're you, Quinn?”
I adjusted my weight onto the cane and looked at my ugly face in the mirror. My ears were large and pink, and my nose looked like the fat snout of a pig.
“Well.” I exhaled a big breath. “I am of old and young.”
She furrowed her eyebrows. “Huh?”
“I am of the foolish as much as the wise,” I said. “‘Regardless of the others, ever regardful of the others, maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man.’”
“What are you talking about?”
“Walt Whitman.”
The piano in the church began to play the pounding familiar melody that accompanies love and tuxedos. I could hear the people in the congregation stand to their feet like a herd of cattle. The thick chapel doors swung open. A hundred smiling faces glared back at us.
“You and that stupid poetry.” Emma Claire rolled her eyes. “I have no idea what in the hell you just said.”
͠
Emma Claire's new in-laws owned a sprawling home positioned right on the Gulf, out past Carrabelle. It was the biggest thing I'd ever seen. It almost made me dizzy to look at. Their massive home was a wooden marvel. It reached toward the sky with a gabled roofline, cedar shingles, and tall paned windows.
It must've taken a century to build.
Spencer's father had hired a brass band from Tallahassee to play for the dinner guests. The band arranged themselves on a small stage that faced the Gulf. They played fast paced colored-jazz for a slew of eager dancers in nice clothes.
Strings of glowing lights draped over the flat pinewood dance floor. They lit up yellow and orange, like big fireflies on a telephone wire. Sonnet wanted to dance, but I was a cripple, and neither of us knew how we would've managed such a thing.
So we didn't.
The truth was, Sonnet only knew how to buck dance anyhow. Buck dancing wasn't done on dance floors, but around campfires, with corn liquor. Sometimes, Sonnet would hike up her skirt and buck dance in the kitchen, just to remind herself she could still do it. Pin would clap his hands watching her, and I'd laugh while she pounded her heels on the floorboards.
She was the prettiest cracker you ever saw.
I took a sip of my whiskey and winced at the flavor.
It tasted like sweetened outhouse water.
I watched Emma Claire out on the floor with her arms wrapped around Spencer. She knew how to dance. I wasn't sure how she'd learned. Her feet moved with the rhythms of the music like pistons in a straight engine, deliberate and smooth. She and Spencer weaved beneath the lights, all the other dancers all grinned at them.
It was her night.
She deserved the grins.
The dinner guests clapped their hands at the end of each song, and the horn players took grand bows on the stage. They looked like happy musicians. I often wondered what it would be like to play an instrument. I'd always wanted to learn to play the trumpet. It looked like a fun instrument to play.
I once saw a visiting soldier play the trumpet down at Norma's. His face turned as red as a strawberry, and his cheeks looked like they might pop. He played jazz, and it sounded like he was having a real time. But crackers didn't play the trumpet. The banjo, or the fiddle maybe. Never the trumpet.
You couldn't sing along with a trumpet.
I was never one to toot my own horn, anyhow.
I set my glass down and wandered from the crowd. I stabbed my cane on the sand, walking and out toward the restless Gulf. The gray, weathered pier that jutted out into the waves looked like it went on for miles into the night. The wind whipped around me. It made me cold. I looked at the water, spreading itself outward like a dark, wooly blanket. The incoming tide beat upon itself, crashing with white foamy slaps onto the sand.
Mother.
I wondered where her soul had gone off to, or if she'd revisited earth as an animal, like Daddy suggested. It was a foolish notion, but I'd grown to embrace it through the years. It was one of the last things of my daddy's that I owned.
His beliefs.
I felt a dull thudding on the wooden planks of the pier behind me. I turned to see Sonnet walking toward me, carrying two glasses in her hands, and her shoes tucked beneath her arms. I recognized her wide-skirted green dress as one of Mother’s old ones.
The green one with white flowers.
The fabric swayed back and forth against Sonnet's shins like a lime flag in the night breeze. I'd seen that dress a hundred times before. Maybe two hundred times. I remembered Mother wearing it long ago. I remembered when Mother first made the dress.
God, how she loved to make dresses.
Sonnet handed me a drink. Her lips moved, but I could not hear her, the wind was too strong. That, and I was getting more deaf every day.
I took the cold glass and sipped from it.
It tasted God-awful. Like bitter licorice and lemons.
“It's horrible, isn't it?” she said.
“Terrible,” I said. “I thought fancy liquor was supposed to taste good. This tastes awful. I'd rather have some shine.”
She took a sip. “I reckon it's all a matter of what you're used to drinking.”
I took another drink. Its warmth traveled down my throat.
“What are you doing out here by yourself?” she asked.
I shrugged. “Thinking, I guess.”
I looked again at the water. I thought about Pin, about how he sometimes romped in the backyard. That boy wandered. He'd play near the bay, on the soft ground, marching like a soldier. How the cats loved to creep behind him in a line. It reminded me of a younger version of Emma Claire. Though Pin didn't look like Emma. No.
Pin looked like Mother.
A little more every day.
Sonnet and I would gang up on Pin and tickle the life out of him while he lay on his bed. He'd laugh until he almost choked to death. He sounded just like Mother. Then, Sonnet would sweep him up in her arms, tuck his head into the hollow of her shoulder, and sing a made up song to him.
I suspected Pin felt the same about Sonnet's singing voice as I did. I needed to warn him about her. I decided that I would tell him the story about my black eye.
For his own protection.
“You miss her?” Sonnet asked, laying her hand on my shoulder.
I loosened my tie and took another sip. “I do.”
“Yeah.” she nodded. “I do too.”
“Especially tonight. She should've been here.”
“I know.”
“She would've loved it.”
Sonnet gave a half smile.
It was true. I missed Mother. I missed all the trouble she made for me. I missed her sassy attitude, even her selfishness. Mother was a woman who launched out too soon. Like a young girl dangling on the rope swing by the creek, jumping into the water too early.
That was never a smart thing to do.
I speak from experience.
My mother had surrendered her youth early on and exchanged it for my well-worn father. She'd become stunted. She never grew up, not all the way. The fifteen-year-old girl made a mess of our lives, and hers. Though, I don't believe she meant to, I believe she did the best she was able to do with herself.
And with us.
Whether it was true or not, I believed.
And I believed it because I wanted to.
That's the way things work sometimes.
You believe what you want to, so that you can make it through. And you do make it through. Somehow.
Sonnet leaned her head into my chest. “I miss her spirit. It was one of a kind.”
I exhaled in agreement.
My mother's spirit was one of a kind.
Few could see my mother, who she really was. The men in town only saw her small waist and round hips, their wives saw her scandalous beauty. My father saw her irrational youth, and he loved her for it. Emma Claire saw her bleak failures, and she hated her for them. But beneath the exterior of my mother, just a few layers below her sticky selfishness, I knew her essence. And I knew her. She was beauty and sadness. All wrapped up into one person.
My mother was good and bad.
Beautiful to a fault, and fidgety as a flea.
Both righteous and selfish.
Hot and cold.
She was Lyla.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sean Dietrich is a columnist, humorist, and novelist, known for his commentary on life in the American South. His columns have appeared in South Magazine, the Bitter Southerner, Thom Magazine, Tallahassee Democrat, and he has authored six books and three novels.
An avid sailor and fisherman, when he’s not writing, he spends much of his time aboard his sailboat (The S.S. Squirrel), along with his coonhound, Ellie Mae.
Sean Dietrich, Lyla
