Western Swing Page 5

  But to turn himself paranoid, depressive, neurotic, and an asshole on purpose. And it was on purpose. Loren knew he was slipping into compulsive fixation.

  “To obsess, you have to ignore something,” I said. “And you’re ignoring me.”

  “I cannot live in the present until I know what happened before. God better come up with some answers or else.”

  Which seemed okay. He’d always been a little abstracted by that Buggie thing. I figured to let him wallow in it until he got bored with misery and realized I counted for something.

  Only I never expected the side effects—the amazing amount of energy, the total lack of a need for sleep. He developed an awesome sex drive. I wouldn’t have minded that one so much, except, when we made love, he acted like he didn’t know who he was with. Twice he jumped me without saying a word before, during, or after. I can’t stand being ignored, especially when I’m fucking.

  I caught him in the bathroom, whispering to Zelda. He put a padlock on his shorts drawer. I walked into the study while he was typing and Loren lurched forward, covering the page with his whole upper body.

  At dinner that night, he babbled over an hour about his little sister that the Rangers killed. Sometimes he called her Kathy. Sometimes he called her Debby. He couldn’t remember.

  He said, “They killed her for collecting Barbie dolls.”

  Loren began to affect my peace of mind. I started waking up at three in the morning, unable to get back to sleep. I took four showers a day. As his sex drive soared, mine zilched, which upset me a lot because I’ve always been proud of my sex drive and I hate to lose something I’m proud of.

  “Let’s sit naked in the creek,” Loren said.

  “I’m not in the mood.”

  “I’ll borrow a horse from the VanHorns and we can make it at full gallop.”

  “I hate horses.”

  “I think I’ll go watch the moon rise.”

  “Go right ahead.”

  Loren went out to lie on his back in the yard and discuss life with the moon and I reached for a Milky Way.

  • • •

  I couldn’t have been more than seven when I became aware of Daddy’s dark clouds. Sometimes, for no reason, he quit talking to me, quit loving me as far as I could see, and I felt so awful that I took comfort in candy. Or maybe I punished myself for letting him down, I don’t know. All I know is, every few months Daddy sat in his chair with no intention of ever doing anything again, and I stuffed myself with cupcakes, soda pop, Hershey bars, anything sweet I could find. I was sneaky about it, hid Ding Dongs in my bottom drawer and chocolate kisses in my dollhouse.

  All through junior high and high school, I remember periodic nightmares of long silences and junk-food blues.

  Now, whenever I feel rejected, I gorge. Who knows why? But the day Loren caught me spooning down white sugar, I knew something was terribly wrong.

  • • •

  The next day I found a gray hair in my brush, scalded myself on the morning coffee, and my six-hundred-dollar, fourteen-attachment, will-pick-up-anything-from-tenpenny-nails-to-carpet-patterns vacuum cleaner broke. Midway through my own room, it made a clattering sound, smelled like burning rubber, and stopped sucking.

  Even sane, Loren can’t fix a drink, and in his infinite purity, he’d decided mechanical devices were beneath the dignity of him and his buddy God.

  “My mind must be free to roam the skies of enlightenment,” he said the time I asked him to light the oven for dinner.

  So, I had to take the vacuum cleaner apart, figure out the problem, and put it all back together again. Major decisions are ninety percent timing, you realize that? Three hours earlier, before the gray hair and the vacuum trauma, I wouldn’t have left Loren. I’d have brained him, but I wouldn’t have left. There’s no use talking that way, though, because you can’t change timing.

  None of the damn pieces fit. I sat in the center of a dirty rug, surrounded by long tilings and tiny things and clumps of floor crud, right on the narrow edge of screaming and hurling the drapes attachment through the window, when Loren wandered in the door from the kitchen and walked through my nuts-and-washers-and-doodads-that-don’t-go-anywhere pile.

  “Listen to this,” he said. “A one-eyed man is able to see, a lame man is able to tread. He treads on the tail of a tiger. The tiger bites the man.”

  “Loren, you’re kicking my nuts.”

  “What do you think that means, Lana Sue? It sounds like if everything isn’t perfect and you keep going anyway, you’ll get bit by a tiger. Does that mean handicapped people should just sit down and never move?”

  “What book is that?”

  Loren turned it around to show the cover. “The I Ching.”

  “The whole damn house is falling apart and you’re reading the I Ching?”

  “It seems relevant.”

  I picked up a hollow, lightweight metal tube, usually used for vacuuming under things, and swung it as hard as I could into Loren’s temple.

  “That’s it. Crack. You’re off the list, Loren. I hope God can cook, clean, and fuck ’cause you can’t and I won’t.”

  Loren raised his hand to his head, feeling the place I’d whacked. “I don’t understand.”

  “That’s the first truth you’ve found all day. You don’t understand anything and you’re understanding less by the minute.”

  “Why did you hit me?”

  I turned and headed for the door.

  “Lana Sue, are you leaving?”

  Whirling, “I’m not going down with you, Loren. You want to go insane, that’s your business, but don’t expect me to go with you. And don’t expect me to be here when you come back.”

  He just looked at me, fingering the lump on his head.

  Since Loren wouldn’t argue with me, all the way out to the truck I argued with myself. “Lana, what are you doing? You love this one. Don’t blow it.”

  “I don’t have to put up with this crap anymore. There’s no excuse for living with a metaphysical boogieman.”

  “Sure there is. Kick the vacuum pieces in the closet. They don’t matter.”

  “I’m not killing my marriage so I won’t have to put a vacuum cleaner back together.”

  “Bullshit.”

  • • •

  I stopped in Jackson long enough to gas up the Toyota before heading south. South is the secure way to head in a crisis. It’s warm all year in the South. Daddy lives there.

  Rolling down all the windows, I jammed an Emmylou tape in the deck and cranked the truck up to 80.

  Life wasn’t fair all of a sudden. I’d married one man who turned into someone else who forced me to do something I didn’t want to do.

  I screamed into the wind, “My husband’s an idiot.”

  “The others were idiots,” another voice said—a voice from a part of me I don’t see too often. “Loren’s good. Nothing good ever happened to you before. Don’t throw it away.”

  “Fuck off, who asked you anyway?”

  “You always talk like a slut when you’re upset.”

  “Look what’s happened, I’m talking out loud to something that calls me a slut. This doesn’t happen to me…I’m normal.” I turned Emmylou up loud, hoping to drown the conversation, but inner voices are persistent suckers.

  “Don’t shout when you’re alone, Lana Sue.”

  “Shut up, creep.”

  “Loren accepts you. He doesn’t judge or want anything from you. He doesn’t force anything on you.”

  “He reads the I Ching out loud. He talks to the moon and it talks back. Do you want to live with a man who talks to the moon?”

  “Do you want to live without him?”

  I cranked the truck up to the 95-100 range, which scared me and my voices into shutting up. Wyoming flew past like it was on a video screen and nothing was r
eal. I imagined if the Toyota crashed, a light would flash, a buzzer would honk, and I’d have to put in another quarter—not a good pretend game to play when you’re driving. A stray antelope could have turned the Lana Sue story into a tragedy without even knowing what hit him.

  Emmylou sang a fast song about a pinball machine in Amarillo, Texas. I hummed along, picking the guitar breaks on the steering wheel. Our band played Amarillo several times—I even sang at the Golden Sandies Homecoming Dance way back in another life. I’ve had so many lives and sometimes they don’t connect.

  The high-speed emotionalism wasn’t safe, and I’m not stupid—at least not for more than ten minutes—so I backed off on the accelerator, watching the sagebrush slow to a dull blur. Digging through the glove compartment, I replaced Emmylou with Bru Hau.

  I got a hole in my boot, I got a hole in my coat, there’s a hole in my fancy shirt, I got a hole in my life, where my baby walked out.

  The main attraction, and drawback, to country music is that if you’ve just left a husband, wife, or love of some kind, or even worse, been left by a husband, wife, or love of some kind, every single one of those syrupy, corny, otherwise trite songs touches you. Sometimes I don’t want to be touched.

  Sure, it’s all been said before, but as I try to explain to Loren, all real emotions have been felt millions of times. Nothing sincere is original. Trite is basic, and if your emotions are basic, you relate to trite.

  There was a hole in our love and she walked right through it,

  To get a better point of view you might say that I blew it.

  As Bru Hau’s heartbreak song got to me, the Toyota moved slower. I saw less and less of the high desert and more and more of what used to be. I slid into memories.

  You work me too hard and your jokes ain’t funny

  I can’t live in your life full of dreams and no money

  More than slid. Skimming along Highway 89, rolling south away from Loren, I got down and mud-wrestled with my past.

  Slime might be a better term than mud.

  6

  Daddy was a gynecologist. Grandma committed suicide.

  I come from a long line of moody people on my father’s side and social climbers on Mom’s. Dad’s family was wealthy and wanted to be normal, were desperate to be normal. Mom’s family was normal and wanted to be wealthy. The two lines culminated in me, Lana Sue Goodwin Potts Roe Paul, the moodiest social climber.

  My sister Dessie once said, “Daddy fell in love with Mom because her mom served dinner at exactly the same time every night and all the furniture in the living room was wrapped in plastic. He figured anyone that normal couldn’t put out crazy kids.”

  He figured wrong, of course. Dessie turned gay at eleven. I caught her going down on the baby-sitter the night Mom and Dad drove downtown to see The King and I. I thought she was playing hide-and-seek from me and had found a really dumb place to hide. Dessie lives in New York City now with a famous lesbian magazine editor. My sister never was cute like me. Maybe she got the wrong hormones.

  Dessie won’t go to Houston to visit Mom and Dad anymore, says they’re provincial and have bad taste.

  “I do not care to associate myself with anyone who serves Riunite on ice with a salmon loaf,” Dessie says, “even if they are my parents.”

  From the earliest I remember, especially after Daddy started having sad spells, much was made of “Grandma’s blood.” When Dessie sat in the middle of Wildwood Way and refused to budge, Mom said, “Grandma’s blood.” When I threw the veal piccata into the living room knickknack shelf, it was “Grandma’s blood.” I never found out what Grandma’s sin was, other than killing herself while her sons were off on Iwo Jima wasting Japs, but she sure got blamed for a lot of grief fifteen years later.

  Once every seven or eight months I’d come home from school and Mom would meet me at the door, whispering, “Grandma’s blood is in your father again. Why don’t you go to Roxanne’s for the night?”

  “Why do I have to leave?”

  “For one night. You can come back tomorrow.”

  “Daddy won’t be any better tomorrow.”

  “Yes, he will. He just needs some rest. You’ll be fine at Roxanne’s.”

  “Sure, Mom. We got any candy bars? I’m hungry.”

  I packed off to my cousin Roxanne’s with my toothbrush, a rolled-up nightie, and an overnight case full of junk food, which I finished off by bedtime. The next day I would walk home to find Daddy sitting in his overstuffed Naugahyde recliner, staring at his hand on his knee. He usually sat about a week, sometimes a week and a half or two, not talking, not even blinking as far as Dessie and I could tell. Each night around bedtime he’d exhale a sigh that tore my spine from bottom to top.

  I reached a time where I could handle the catatonic daddy routine by pretending he wasn’t really there, that man in the chair was a visiting plant, but I never got used to the sighs. I still remember how terrible the nightly wait was and how much I hated myself when it came.

  Then one morning I’d wake up and Daddy would be in the kitchen, teasing, rumpling hair, flipping pancakes, full of energy and projects. His favorite project was the garden. Daddy spent hundreds of hours piddling over strains of saffron, trying to find one that flourished in Houston’s climate. I don’t think gynecology was all that important to him. He only put in enough time at it to finance his real interests, like saffron.

  Poor Mama married the wrong money. She didn’t want a family of temperamental neurotics. She wanted a television commercial life. A household where the biggest problems were choosing a feminine spray and stains in the toilet bowl. She wanted two large American-made automobiles and a separate family room away from the dining and living room combination—a bathroom of her very own.

  Lord only knows what Daddy wanted—to get through it all, I suppose, to grow old with a presentable wife, plenty of insurance, virgin daughters, and enough money to bury himself with dignity.

  That was the problem right there—virgin daughters. His spells coincided with my first period, my first date, my first C in school. Any excuse from me and Daddy’s eyes filmed over and he shuffled around the house like an old man for a day, then he moaned out loud and sat down and I got sent to Roxanne’s for another night.

  Mom knew who to blame, all right. Daddy had a spell just before I ran away with Mickey. It started on Christmas Eve, midway through Perry Como.

  Perry sat on a three-legged stool, singing about the bells of Saint Somebody while Mom hummed along. She had set up a card table for stringing cranberries and popcorn. Mom just couldn’t accept the fact that we were not a regular, wholesome American family like the ones on Donna Reed and “My Three Sons.” Daddy leaned back in his recliner, smoking a cigar. Dessie was upstairs with her best friend, Brenda.

  I sat on the couch, eating a TV dinner and wondering how Mom would feel if I told her Dessie wasn’t upstairs gossiping about boys. Wouldn’t it be neat at sixteen to surprise your complacent Better Homes and Gardens mother with, “My sister’s up in her room licking Brenda’s clit, Ma.” I’d love it. She could never act so damn self-righteous around me again.

  But, I didn’t. It would be too much like stepping on a puppy’s head. Instead, I silently chewed Salisbury steak and watched Perry Como and my mother fake the Christmas spirit.

  Daddy leaned over and took off his left slipper and threw it at the television. Mom and I stopped in midhum and chew, staring at the slipper on the floor.

  Daddy groaned, “Jesus Christ.”

  He didn’t say another word clear through The Tonight Show—just sat there with one slipper on his foot and one slipper on the rug.

  Before bed, Mom caught me in the hall and pulled me into her and Daddy’s bathroom with the fuzzy toilet seat cover. The towels were red and green, used only during the holiday season.

  “Grandma’s blood is acting up in your father again,”
she whispered loudly. “What did you do?”

  “I didn’t do anything, Mama,” I said, though I knew better. I didn’t know what awful injustice I’d committed, but I knew Daddy’s depression was my fault. It was never Dessie who caused him to stop talking. Always me, I was older.

  “You’re so pretty and sweet,” Mom said, touching my hair. “You have all the advantages, Lannie. Don’t break your father’s heart.”

  A week later, I ran off to get laid and become a country star, but if someone says you’re breaking their heart before you’ve done anything, you might as well do something. You get blamed either way.

  A couple of years after the twins were born, I took a course in psychology at Rice. The course gave me just enough undergraduate ammunition to try defending myself.

  “Daddy’s manic,” I shouted at Mom. “It’s bad chemicals he inherited from Grandma or too much salt or something. I don’t cause these episodes. They just happen.”

  Mom looked at herself in the lavatory mirror, holding her narrow chin up and to the right. Every serious talk I ever had with her took place in the bathroom. It’s like the woman can’t express herself more than three feet from a douche bag.

  “If only you hadn’t run off with that musician.”

  “The spells were as bad before I left as they are now.”

  “That’s not true, Lannie. Your father has never been happy since that first night you didn’t come home.”

  “My father’s never been happy since the day I was born. I can’t vouch for earlier.”

  Mom’s lip quivered and she blinked quickly. “Don’t say that. We were happy when we were young. I remember.”

  “I’m sorry, Mama.”