The rent and utilities we split fifty-fifty. Lou Ann had savings left from Angel’s disability insurance settlement-for some reason he hadn’t touched this money-and also he sent checks, but only once in a blue moon. I worried about what she would do when the well ran dry, but I’d decided I might just as well let her run her own life.
For the party I was making sweet-and-sour chicken, more or less on a dare, out of one of Lou Ann’s magazines. The folks at Burger Derby should see me now, I thought. I had originally planned to make navy-bean soup, in celebration of Turtle’s first word, but by the end of the week she had said so many new words I couldn’t have fit them all in Hungarian goulash. She seemed to have a one-track vocabulary, like Lou Ann’s hypochondriac mother-in-law, though fortunately Turtle’s ran to vegetables instead of diseases. I could just imagine a conversation between these two: “Sciatica, hives, roseola, meningomalacia,” Mrs. Ruiz would say in her accented English. “Corns, ’tato, bean,” Turtle would reply.
“What’s so funny?” Lou Ann wanted to know. “I hope I can even fit into this dress. I should have tried it on first, I haven’t worn it since before Dwayne Ray.” I had noticed that Lou Ann measured many things in life, besides her figure, in terms of Before and After Dwayne Ray.
‘You’ll fit into it,” I said. “Have you weighed yourself lately?”
“No, I don’t want to know what I weigh. If the scale even goes up that high.”
“I refuse to believe you’re overweight, that’s all I’m saying. If you say one more word about being fat, I’m going to stick my fingers in my ears and sing ‘Blue Bayou’ until you’re done.”
She was quiet for a minute. The hiss of the steam iron and the smell of warm, damp cotton reminded me of Sunday afternoons with Mama.
“What’s Mattie going to be on TV about? Do you know?” she asked.
“I’m not sure. It has something to do with the people that live with her.”
“Oh, I’d be petrified to be on TV, I know I would,” Lou Ann said. “I’m afraid I would just blurt out, ‘Underpants!’ or something. When I was a little girl I would get afraid in church, during the invocation or some other time when it got real quiet, and I’d all of a sudden be terrified that I was going to stand up and holler, ‘God’s pee-pee!’”
I laughed.
“Oh, I know it sounds ridiculous. I mean, I didn’t even know if God had one. In the pictures He’s always got on all those robes and things. But the fact that I even wondered about it seemed like just the ultimate sin. If I was bad enough to think it, how did I know I wasn’t going to stand up and say it?”
“I know what you mean,” I said. “There’s this Catholic priest that comes to Mattie’s all the time, Father William. He’s real handsome, I think he’s your type, maybe not. But sometimes I get to thinking, What if I were to strut over and say something like, ‘Hey good looking, whatcha got cooking?’ ”
“Exactly! It’s like, did you ever have this feeling when you’re standing next to a cliff, say, or by an upstairs window, and you can just picture yourself jumping out? The worst time it happened to me was in high school. On our senior trip we went to the state capitol, which is at Frankfort. Of course, you know that, what am I saying? So, what happened was, you can go way up in the dome and there’s only this railing and you look down and the people are like little miniature ants. And I saw myself just hoisting my leg and going over. I just froze up. I thought: if I can think it, I might do it. My boyfriend, which at that time was Eddie Tubbs, it was way before I met Angel, thought it was fear of heights and told everybody on the bus on the way home that I had ackero-phobia, but it was way more complicated than that. I mean, ackero-phobia doesn’t have anything to do with being afraid you’ll holler out something god-awful in church, does it?”
“No,” I said. “I think what you mean is a totally different phobia. Fear that the things you imagine will turn real.”
Lou Ann was staring at me, transfixed. “You know, I think you’re the first person I’ve ever told this to that understood what I was talking about.”
I shrugged. “I saw a Star Trek episode one time that was along those lines. All the women on this whole planet end up naked. I can’t remember exactly, but I think Captain Kirk gets turned into a pipe wrench.”
The six o’clock news was half over by the time we got the TV plugged in. There had been a mix-up with the women next door, who were waiting for us to come over and get the television. They didn’t realize they had been invited for dinner.
Meanwhile, Estevan and Esperanza arrived.
