of your shoes in the morning, down there—would send her climbing up the bookshelf and wailing. She could gut a coon or skin a snake without a wince, but flying roaches drove her nuts, which is odd because she seemed fearless that day, going after the locusts.
After a while all the flying around in there stopped. In fact, everything seemed to stop. The day itself stopped. Lecia elbowed me in the head to shut up my crying, so I did. Then for a long time there was just that clacking, humming sound.
They passed as fast as they had come. Lecia nudged me again, to look, and I lifted my head from my folded arms just in time to watch them peel away from the back windshield. You could see the cloud assemble and thicken before your very eyes. All over the inside of the curved back windshield, there were splats of locust goo with legs and antennae kind of spronged out, and a few hairy legs still flailing. Other than that, you could almost forget they were individual bugs at all and just look at the cloud. It rose up and seemed to shrink away, and blue sky appeared around it, and the humming receded. On either side of the road were bare fields, and it was that strip of naked road we followed to the outskirts of Lubbock and Grandma Moore’s house.
Grandma never did sugarcoat her opinion of Daddy. In fact, any skills she had at sweet-talking or diplomacy were said to have died with my grandfather, decades earlier. She said something about Mother coming to her senses, then immediately set us all to work putting up an evil sweet relish she called chowchow. Open jars cooling on all the cupboards steamed up the whole farmhouse. I was a fairly lazy child, unaccustomed to chores, and it seemed Grandma always had peas to shuck or stinging cucumbers to pick or some big piece of furniture we had to buff real hard. So I tended to drag-ass and generally make a poor impression, whereas Lecia thrived on instruction.
My memory of that day drifts into focus again with all four ofus in Grandma’s bathroom, which seemed vast as a barn. The old woman was just out of the tub and dabbing drugstore powder all over herself with a big yellow puff. When I was little, she’d given me an enema once, and I could never look at her without fearing her bony strength. But naked, her body put me in mind of something real easy to hurt, like a turtle without a shell. Stripping down came more naturally to Mother. This was back when women’s underwear was like armor: the bra cups were rocket cones, and the hose stayed shaped like somebody else’s legs when you took them off. Mother wiggled out of her long-line girdle, which immediately shrank up with a dull snapping noise at her ankles. Why she wore that thing I don’t know, because she hated a girdle in summer like nothing else and sure didn’t need it. The diamond-shaped control panel left a mean imprint on her belly, where there was also a slanty scar from when I’d been born. (I had been a difficult birth, feet first,
like Caesar
, Mother liked to say.) She stepped into the steamy water with a grace she must have learned modeling for life study classes during art school in the forties, all flowing lines and violin curves.
I was sitting on the toilet waiting for my own bath and fiddling with one of Grandma’s hair clamps. Grandma had cocked her hip out and leaned it against the bathroom sink while she crimped her lead-colored hair. She used these steel clamps with little teeth that made deep marks on my index finger as I played with them. Grandma had told Lecia to rinse out Mother’s stockings in the sink, but Lecia was idly playing at fitting her arm inside one and peeling it off like a snakeskin. So Grandma kept cutting her a look as if to say,
Get on with it.
Every now and then, from my spot on the toilet, I’d lean out and try to snatch the other stocking away from Lecia, but she was way too fast.
“You can’t keep raising these children like heathens, Charlie Marie. The little one can’t even tie
After a while all the flying around in there stopped. In fact, everything seemed to stop. The day itself stopped. Lecia elbowed me in the head to shut up my crying, so I did. Then for a long time there was just that clacking, humming sound.
They passed as fast as they had come. Lecia nudged me again, to look, and I lifted my head from my folded arms just in time to watch them peel away from the back windshield. You could see the cloud assemble and thicken before your very eyes. All over the inside of the curved back windshield, there were splats of locust goo with legs and antennae kind of spronged out, and a few hairy legs still flailing. Other than that, you could almost forget they were individual bugs at all and just look at the cloud. It rose up and seemed to shrink away, and blue sky appeared around it, and the humming receded. On either side of the road were bare fields, and it was that strip of naked road we followed to the outskirts of Lubbock and Grandma Moore’s house.
Grandma never did sugarcoat her opinion of Daddy. In fact, any skills she had at sweet-talking or diplomacy were said to have died with my grandfather, decades earlier. She said something about Mother coming to her senses, then immediately set us all to work putting up an evil sweet relish she called chowchow. Open jars cooling on all the cupboards steamed up the whole farmhouse. I was a fairly lazy child, unaccustomed to chores, and it seemed Grandma always had peas to shuck or stinging cucumbers to pick or some big piece of furniture we had to buff real hard. So I tended to drag-ass and generally make a poor impression, whereas Lecia thrived on instruction.
My memory of that day drifts into focus again with all four ofus in Grandma’s bathroom, which seemed vast as a barn. The old woman was just out of the tub and dabbing drugstore powder all over herself with a big yellow puff. When I was little, she’d given me an enema once, and I could never look at her without fearing her bony strength. But naked, her body put me in mind of something real easy to hurt, like a turtle without a shell. Stripping down came more naturally to Mother. This was back when women’s underwear was like armor: the bra cups were rocket cones, and the hose stayed shaped like somebody else’s legs when you took them off. Mother wiggled out of her long-line girdle, which immediately shrank up with a dull snapping noise at her ankles. Why she wore that thing I don’t know, because she hated a girdle in summer like nothing else and sure didn’t need it. The diamond-shaped control panel left a mean imprint on her belly, where there was also a slanty scar from when I’d been born. (I had been a difficult birth, feet first,
like Caesar
, Mother liked to say.) She stepped into the steamy water with a grace she must have learned modeling for life study classes during art school in the forties, all flowing lines and violin curves.
I was sitting on the toilet waiting for my own bath and fiddling with one of Grandma’s hair clamps. Grandma had cocked her hip out and leaned it against the bathroom sink while she crimped her lead-colored hair. She used these steel clamps with little teeth that made deep marks on my index finger as I played with them. Grandma had told Lecia to rinse out Mother’s stockings in the sink, but Lecia was idly playing at fitting her arm inside one and peeling it off like a snakeskin. So Grandma kept cutting her a look as if to say,
Get on with it.
Every now and then, from my spot on the toilet, I’d lean out and try to snatch the other stocking away from Lecia, but she was way too fast.
“You can’t keep raising these children like heathens, Charlie Marie. The little one can’t even tie
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