“It’s good, Lou Ann. Nothing personal, I’m just in a crappy mood.”
“Watch out, there’s peas in there. A child’s windpipe can be blocked by anything smaller than a golf ball.”
For Lou Ann, life itself was a life-threatening enterprise. Nothing on earth was truly harmless. Along with her clip file of Hispanic bank presidents (which she had started to let slide, now that Angel was talking divorce), she saved newspaper stories of every imaginable type of freak disaster. Unsuspecting diners in a restaurant decapitated by a falling ceiling fan. Babies fallen head-first into the beer cooler and drowned in melted ice while the family played Frisbee. A housewife and mother of seven stepping out of a Wick ‘N’ Candle store, only to be shot through the heart by a misfired high-pressure nail gun at a construction site across the street. To Lou Ann’s way of thinking, this proved not only that ice chests and construction sites were dangerous, but also Wick ‘N’ Candle stores and Frisbees.
I promised her that I wouldn’t give Turtle anything smaller than a golf ball. I amused myself by thinking about the cabbage: would you have to take into account the size of one leaf compressed into golf-ball shape? Or could you just consider the size of the entire cabbage and call the whole thing safe?
Lou Ann was fanning a mouthful that was still too hot to swallow. “I can just hear what my Granny Logan would say if I tried to feed her Russian cabbage soup. She’d say we were all going to turn communist.”
Later that night when the kids were in bed I realized exactly what was bugging me: the idea of Lou Ann reading magazines for child-raising tips and recipes and me coming home grouchy after a hard day’s work. We were like some family on a TV commercial, with names like Myrtle and Fred. I could just hear us striking up a conversation about air fresheners.
Lou Ann came in wearing her bathrobe and a blue towel wrapped around her hair. She curled up on the sofa and started flipping through the book of names again.
“Oh, jeez, take this away from me before I start looking at the boy section. There’s probably fifty thousand names better than Dwayne Ray, and I don’t even want to know about them. It’s too late now.”
“Lou Ann, have a beer with me. I want to talk about something, and I don’t want you to get offended.” She took the beer and sat up like I’d given her an order, and I knew this wasn’t going to work.
“Okay, shoot.” The way she said it, you would think I was toting an M-16.
“Lou Ann, I moved in here because I knew we’d get along. It’s nice of you to make dinner for us all, and to take care of Turtle sometimes, and I know you mean well. But we’re acting like Blondie and Dagwood here. All we need is some ignorant little dog named Spot to fetch me my slippers. It’s not like we’re a family, for Christ’s sake. You’ve got your own life to live, and I’ve got mine. You don’t have to do all this stuff for me.”
“But I want to.”
“But I don’t want you to.”
It was like that.
By the time we had worked through our third beers, a bag of deep-fried tortilla chips, a pack of individually-wrapped pimiento-cheese slices and a can of sardines in mustard, Lou Ann was crying. I remember saying something like “I never even had an old man, why would I want to end up acting like one?”
It’s the junk food, I kept thinking. On a diet like this the Bean Curd kids would be speaking in tongues.
All of a sudden Lou Ann went still, with both hands over her mouth. I thought she must be choking (after all her talk about golf balls), and right away thought of the Heimlich Maneuver poster on the wall at Matties store. That’s how often she fed people there. I was trying to remember if you were or were not supposed to slap the person on the back. But then Lou Ann moved her hands from her mouth to her eyes, like two of the three No-Evil monkey brothers.
“Oh, God,” she said. “I’m drunk.”
“Lou Ann, you’ve had three beers.”
“That’s all it takes. I never drink. I’m scared to death of what might happen.”
I was interested. This house was full of surprises. But this turned out to be nothing like the cat. Lou Ann said what she was afraid of was just that she might lose control and do something awful.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. How do I know? Just something. I feel like the only reason I have any friends at all is because I’m always careful not to say something totally dumb, and if I blow it just one time, then that’s it.”
“Lou Ann, honey, that’s a weird theory of friendship.”
“No, I mean it. For the longest time after Angel left I kept thinking back to this time last August when his friend Manny and his wife Ramona came over and we all went out to the desert to look at the shooting stars? There was supposed to be a whole bunch of them, a shower, they were saying on the news. But we kept waiting and waiting, and in the meantime we drank a bottle of Jose Cuervo plumb down to the worm. The next morning Angel kept saying, ‘Man, can you believe that meteor shower? What, you don’t even remember it?’ I honestly couldn’t remember a thing besides looking for the star sapphire from Ramona’s ring that had plunked out somewhere. It turned out she’d lost it way before. She found it at home in their dog’s dish, can you believe it?”
I was trying to fit Angel into some pigeonhole or other in the part of my brain that contained what I knew about men. I liked this new version of an Angel who would go out looking for shooting stars, but hated what I saw of him the next morning, taunting Lou Ann about something that had probably never even happened.
“Maybe he was pulling your leg,” I said. “Maybe there never was any meteor shower. Did you ask Ramona?”
“No. I never thought of that. I just assumed.”
“Well, why don’t you call her up and ask?”
“She and Manny moved to San Diego,” she wailed. You’d think they had moved for the sole purpose of keeping this information from Lou Ann.
“Well, I’m sorry.”
She persisted. “But that’s not even really the point. It wasn’t just that I’d missed something important. I kept on thinking that if I could miss a whole meteor shower, well, I’d probably done something else ridiculous. For all I know I could’ve run naked through the desert singing ‘Skip to My Lou.’”
I shuddered. All those spiny pears and prickly whatsits.
She stared mournfully into the empty bag of chips. “And now it’s Valentine’s Day,” she said. “And everybody else in the whole wide world is home with their husband smooching on the couch and watching TV, but not Lou Ann, no sir. I ran off both my husband and the TV.”
I couldn’t even think where to begin on this one. I thought of another one of Mama’s hog sayings: “Hogs go deaf at harvest time.” It meant that people would only hear what they wanted to hear. Mama was raised on a hog farm.
Lou Ann looked abnormally flattened against the back of the sofa. I thought of her father, who she’d told me was killed when his tractor overturned. They’d found him pressed into a mud bank, and when they pulled him out he left a perfect print. “A Daddy print,” she’d called it, and she’d wanted to fill the hole with plaster of Paris to keep him, the way she’d done with her hand print in school for Mother’s Day.
“I always wondered if that night we got drunk had something to do with why I lost him,” she said. I was confused for a second, still thinking of her father.
“I thought you were glad when Angel left.”
“I guess I was. But still, you know, something went wrong. You’re supposed to love the same person your whole life long till death do you part and all that. And if you don’t, well, you’ve got to have screwed up somewhere.”
“Lou Ann, you read too many magazines.” I went into the kitchen and checked the refrigerator for about the fifteenth time that night. It was still the same: cabbages and peanut butter. I opened a cabinet and peered behind the cans of refried beans and tomato sauce. There was a bottle of black-strap molasses, a box of Quick Hominy Grits, and a can of pink salmon. I considered all of these things in various combinations, then settled for another bag of tortilla chips. This is what happens to people without TVs, I thought. They die of junk food.