Pine Top, NC 1977
“Pretend you don’t notice,” Mama whispered as we watched Frances step off the bus. She’d been away at college on a scholarship that covered tuition, housing, and food. Lots of food, apparently. The last time I’d seen her, at Christmastime, we were the same size: a healthy ten. But now it was May, and Frances had bulked up considerably. Her jeans were about to pop off. Even her fingers looked fat.
When I reached out to hug her, she pulled away, and when I tried to help with her luggage, she told me to back off, and when, on the ride home, I asked how did exams go, she told me to shut my trap. I stewed in the back seat, staring out the window as dusk settled around us, turning the foothills fuzzy and purple. I’d been looking forward to having Frances around this summer. I figured we’d play backgammon on the porch, scope out the boys at Spreckle’s Lake, and restart our Two Sisters Babysitting Service, but now I worried that she’d outgrown me just as she’d outgrown her clothes. We were no longer the same size, and I wondered if what had happened to her could happen to me too. I was fifteen and needed a big sister, not a sister who was big.
When we got to Pine Top, Mama pulled into Arlo’s Pizza and turned to Frances with a smile. “I thought we’d eat supper here,” she said, “to celebrate your homecoming.”
“I’m not in the mood,” Frances said, but I knew she was just too embarrassed to go inside, all puffed up like a puffer fish. But I wasn’t embarrassed. I had on a new halter top and wedge sandals that made my legs look long.
“I’ll go in and order take out,” I offered.
“Get a large mushroom,” Frances said.
“What are you talking about?” I said. “We’re getting pepperoni. Same as always.”
“I don’t eat meat,” Frances said.
“Since when?”
“Since none of your business,” she said, and Mama said, “Please, no fussing.” She’d worked all day at Hickory Farms, and still had on her dopey uniform with the pinafore and puffy sleeves. When she handed me her wallet, I asked if we could get two pizzas, and she sighed extra loud, so I dropped it, even though everyone but Frances knew that mushrooms tasted like dirt.
As soon as my eyes adjusted to Arlo’s cave of darkness, I spotted Travis Jones. He was at a table with a crowd of junior boys, telling jokes and carrying on, goosing the waitress when she walked by. I stood at the register, swaying my hips to “Brick House” blasting from the jukebox. She’s mighty-mighty, just lettin’ it all hang out. You can’t stand still when you hear a song like that.
The next thing I knew, Travis was stumbling toward me, a big grin on his face. He wore a baseball shirt and faded Levi’s, and his hair had just the right amount of messiness. Before I knew what was happening, he scooped me up like a sack of feed. When I let out a yelp, he yelped too.
“What do you think you’re doing, mister?” I said when I caught my breath. I tried to sound mad, but I was giddy as all get-out.
“I’m following directions,” Travis said, wagging his brows at the sign that dangled from a chain above our heads. “PICK UP,” it said, with an arrow pointing down to where I’d stood.
“Very funny,” I said. “Now put me down.” But instead of squirming free, I clasped my hands behind his neck and pressed myself against his chest of steel. He smelled like beer and sausage and something hot and dark, danger itself.
“Don’t I know you?” he asked.
“‘Course you do, silly. I’m Iris, a sophomore.”
“Well, gimme your phone number, Iris-a-sophomore.”
I giggled though I’m not the giggling type.
“Your feet ain’t touching the ground till I get it.”
I know I should’ve told him to buzz off or mentioned my boyfriend, Baxter, the future minister. Instead, I gave him my number, and he lowered me to the ground, and while I paid for the pizza, he leaned against the counter, watching me. “Iris,” he said. I walked away on wobbly legs past the cigarette machine, and when I reached the door, I turned, slowly, to see if he was still looking. He was. I floated to the car.
The days dragged on. I went to school, Mama went to work, and Frances slept in. When I got home, I did my homework and watched TV till Mama got home. She’d change out of her uniform, and we’d fix supper together, which was a challenge now that Frances had turned vegetarian. We’d make barf-worthy dishes like spaghetti and meatballs minus the meatballs, or wax bean salad, or broccoli casserole. Frances, sniffing the air like a bear, would emerge from her room and join us glumly at the table. Mama and I would try to think of things to say, like Don’t the dogwoods look pretty?, or Where should we go camping this summer?, and Frances would bite our heads off, so we’d finish our meal in silence except for the scrape of fork against plate. At nine, we’d gather on the sofa to watch The Rockford Files, and at ten o’clock sharp, Baxter would call.
I’d drag the phone into my room and close the door, though I didn’t need privacy. Our conversations were G-rated and predictable. We’d talk about the weather and compare answers to our geometry homework. Before we said goodnight, Baxter would lead us in prayer, asking God for guidance and thanking him for our many blessings.
After we hung up, I’d lie in bed and offer my own prayers. I’d ask God to turn Frances back into a size-ten meat-eater and give Mama some body in her hair and a better job, maybe a bank teller or a secretary, so she could stop wearing that unflattering uniform. For myself, I prayed for one thing and one thing only: a date with Travis Jones.
The girls at school warned me that Travis was trouble coming and going. They went on and on about how he’d gotten kicked off the baseball team for fighting, drove a half-wrecked muscle car, and raised ferrets with his daddy on the seamy side of town. Some said he’d been in the mental ward; others said that’s where his mama was. They tried to scare me away, but their warnings only drew me to him more.
Like when I was five and Daddy took me to the Kmart parking lot to teach me how to ride a bike. He ran alongside me, his strong arms steadying me, a Marlboro dangling from his lips. When he let go, he called out, “You got it, Sissy!” But a spark of doubt flared in my mind, and my arms and legs lost their rhythm, and I heard Daddy shout, “Stay away from the light post! Stay away from the post!” It was early Sunday morning. The lot was empty except for Daddy’s truck and that post. I had a swath of glittering asphalt all to myself, like sky to a bird, but wouldn’t you know it? Smack! I hit that post dead on.
When I think back to that morning, I feel a tug of lonesomeness. When we got home, Daddy fixed my bike, and Frances drew me a picture of a horse, and Mama cleaned my bloody lip before making us all waffles with whipped cream. We were a happy family, but not too long after that, Daddy told me and Frances to be good girls, take care of Mama. Then he handed us a kitten and walked out the front door with nothing but the leather jacket on his back. Frances and I watched from the window as he hopped on the back of Tonya Martin’s motorcycle, wrapped his arms around her waist, and rode off to his new life without us.
Frances and I played with the kitten, who was completely white, and, we’d come to learn, completely deaf. We named him Casper and fed him sardines and brought him to meet Mama, who was in bed with a migraine. “Isn’t he the cutest thing you ever saw?” Frances said, and though Mama didn’t lift her eye mask to peek at Casper, she agreed that he was the cutest thing she ever saw.
Later I would learn that Daddy had met Tonya at the Mourning Dove Diner when she was passing through town. A former beauty queen, she was nine years older than Daddy, ten years older than Mama. “At least he didn’t leave me for a younger model,” Mama would say. “At least he’s not a cliché.” It took me years to understand what she meant, but by then nearly all my memories of Daddy had faded. He was just a man who smelled like cigarettes and tried to teach me to ride a bike.
Mama was the one who figured out Casper was deaf. We took him to Doc Jenkins who told us to keep him indoors for safety’s sake, but two weeks later, he escaped from the house and was struck by a car he never heard coming.
“She’ll bounce back to her old self,” Mama insisted whenever I complained about Frances. “She just needs time to unwind from the pressure of college.” But by the end of May, Frances was still as ornery as a mule and big as a cow, and I wondered if she might be pregnant. One night, when she was in the shower, I snooped in her room, looking for clues to explain her transformation, but the only thing out of place was the backgammon board on her bed. She’d been known to play against herself, which was no kind of fun. On her desk, she’d propped a photo of her and Daddy on the dock at Spreckle’s Lake. Frances was beaming, holding up a trout she’d caught. It seemed like an odd picture for her to display considering how Daddy turned out to be a deadbeat and Frances now ate tofu instead of trout. But I had to admit it was a good picture. Daddy with a mustache and suntan; Frances in her Ziggy T-shirt. The sun was setting behind their heads, and they looked almost like angels.
On the first of June, Baxter turned sixteen, got his driver’s license, and borrowed his daddy’s Cutlass for our first real date. I wore my khaki jumpsuit, and Baxter wore a plaid Western shirt with pearl snaps, which was too big in the shoulders. I was hoping he’d take me to see Star Wars, which everyone was raving about, but he claimed that the movie was a satanic conspiracy, so we went to K&W Cafeteria instead. Baxter got fried shrimp and green beans, and I got beef tips and creamed corn. After we ate, I gave him the new Kenny Loggins album and suggested we drive over to Spreckle’s Lake. I wanted to be kissed and figured if I closed my eyes I might not care if it was Baxter doing the kissing, but he said he needed to get home. His mother had made a carrot cake; they were having a family celebration. I wondered why he didn’t invite me. It was still light outside when he walked me to the door. He didn’t kiss me. Not even on the cheek.
Inside, I found Mama and Frances in the kitchen eating supper—a cheese ball and rye crackers shaped like butterflies, courtesy of Hickory Farms. “How was your date?” Mama asked, and Frances snorted.
“Go ahead and laugh!” I said. “You’ve never been on a date in your life!”
“Girls,” Mama said, shushing us, but Frances shot up from the table, ran down the hall to her room, and slammed the door.
“She is so dramatic,” I said.
“I know it, darling,” Mama said, and poured herself some Pepsi.
I wanted her to say something cheerful, to promise better days ahead, but she just sat quietly, staring at the rise and fall of her Pepsi foam. I noticed a box of Raisin Bran left on the counter, a film of dust on the curtains, and the framed sign by the door that Mama had cross-stitched ages ago: A kiss a day keeps the lawyer away. Through the window, I watched the last scraps of daylight fade into the foothills, then I went to my room and prayed.
With one week left of school, everybody acted like they had no sense. Mrs. Carter stopped talking in the middle of a lecture about semicolons and stared out the window. Mr. McFarland wrote our geometry homework on the board and then erased it. He knew we’d forgotten all the formulas, snapped our protractors in two. The cheerleaders held a contest to see who could suck on a lemon wedge the longest. The kids who left campus at lunch came back reeking of pot. Nobody returned their library books. The janitor stopped sweeping the halls. Outside, the wind rattled the maples. Whirlybird seeds spun through the air.
I worried that Travis had forgotten me, that summer would come, and he’d spin off too, so I started walking by his locker every chance I got. He was usually in a crowd, cutting up and carrying on, but if he was alone, I’d approach him. “I like your shirt,” I told him one day. It was an ordinary blue work shirt, but on Travis, with the sleeves rolled up, it seemed special somehow. He looked at me and lifted his chin a few inches, a gesture I came to think of as the reverse nod, which looked cooler than a regular nod, where you dip your chin.
Another day, when the crowd cleared around him, I walked up and said, “I like your jeans.” They were regular old Levi’s, but they fit him just right in the waist, not too tight or too baggy, and the length wasn’t too long or, worse, too short. He did that nod again, the reverse nod.
This went on for a while until one day, laughing, he grabbed my shirt—a yellow knit top with multi-colored rhinestones in the shape of a heart—and pressed me up against his locker. He leaned in close and whispered in my ear, “Can’t you think of nothing else to say?”
I stopped breathing for a second. My throat felt full of ice. I tried to do the reverse nod, but I did the reverse-reverse nod, and ended up staring down at his Red Wing leather work boots, which had just the right amount of scuff to them, so they didn’t look too old or too new. “I like your boots,” I whispered, and he held me there, pressed against his locker, until the bell rang, and he let me go.
It wasn’t only school where craziness brewed. Come to find out, Frances had been sneaking out every night. Mama and I were unaware of her shenanigans until the phone rang at two o’clock one morning. I answered it right away, heart pounding, certain it was Travis, but it was Frances, and she was hysterical. “Put Mama on the phone!” she kept saying. “Put Mama on!”
Mama was sound asleep, her head a spray of pink sponge rollers, when I roused her and handed her the phone. “Slow down honey; I can’t understand you,” she said. Then, “Where are you?” And, “Wait inside till we get there.”
Frances, Mama informed me, had called from a pay phone outside the 24-hour convenience store a mile up the road, off Route 217. She’d driven the station wagon and had somehow lost the keys. I watched Mama as she pulled out her rollers and rummaged through the junk drawer for the spare key and a flashlight. “Don’t just stand there,” she said. “Get dressed! You’re coming with me!”
The moon hung like a letter C in the sky, and as we walked, we listened to the eerie song of the chorus frogs. When we finally got to the Kwik Pik, we found Frances, shaking, by the entrance, her cheeks dripping with tears. In the bright fluorescent light, I couldn’t help but notice that her bell-bottoms were too tight. She’d embroidered them herself. She looked like a girl caught between trying too hard and giving up completely. She let us hug her, and that’s when I noticed she smelled like a sewer.
“What in the world happened?” Mama asked, and Frances lied and said she’d gotten thirsty and drove to get a Tab since all we had was Pepsi. When she threw the empty bottle in the dumpster, she said, she’d tossed the car keys in too by mistake. She’d spent the last hour rooting around in the trash trying to find them.
Mama sighed and said, “The important thing is, you’re safe.” Then she drove us home.
I thought Frances would calm down once we got back, but she got worse instead. She lay on the couch, shivering and blathering like a crazy person, then she went to the bathroom and threw up. When she came back to the couch, she pitched another fit, and Mama gave her half a nerve pill, which made her dizzy and drunk acting. That’s when she confessed everything.
It wasn’t an empty can of Tab she’d tossed in the Kwik Pik dumpster along with the keys. It was an empty carton of fudge ripple ice cream. She’d been buying and eating a half gallon every night for weeks. On top of that, she’d failed zoology and economics, and was on academic probation, at risk of losing her scholarship. She didn’t want to be pre-med. She didn’t have any friends. And then she told us about the day she was running late to psych class. Two boys approached her outside their frat house. They grabbed her hands and spun her around. When she finally wriggled free, she realized what they were up to. A row of similar boys were holding up cards with numbers on them. They were rating all the girls who passed by, and had determined, unanimously, that Frances was a four.
“Oh, honey,” Mama said, hugging her, and I wondered what score those boys would give me, and if this had happened to Frances before or after she’d gained weight, but I didn’t ask. Instead, I told her that those boys must be blind.
“You’re not a four,” I said.
“You most certainly are not!” Mama agreed, but our protests set Frances off again.
“It’s not about the number!” she screamed. “It’s about their arrogance and lack of respect for women!”
Frances wailed so loudly that Mama gave her the other half of the pill and rubbed her back, and pretty soon Frances fell asleep on the couch, and Mama put a blanket over her, and I went to my room, and then Mama knocked on the door. She thanked me for being supportive and told me to go easy on Frances. She was used to being the smartest one in the class, and now she was at college where everybody was smart, and she was confused, but she would be okay. I wanted to believe Mama, but her theory made no sense. If you couldn’t be the smartest one, why on earth would you try to be the fattest?
I wanted to blink my eyes like I Dream of Jeannie and set everything straight, but my world was disintegrating. The day after Frances confessed to her late-night ice cream runs, Baxter broke up with me between fifth and sixth period.
He wore that plaid shirt again, the one with pearl snaps, which made it a little easier for me to let him go. He put his hand on my shoulder. It was the only time he’d ever touched me. He smelled like pencil shavings. “Things aren’t working out,” he said. “I didn’t want to tell you over the phone.”
“What happened?” I thought maybe he’d heard some things about me that he didn’t approve of, like how I’d walked along the highway with Mama in the middle of the night, or had a crush on Travis, or went to see Star Wars and liked it, but he just said that he was leaving for the summer to work as a counselor at a Christian camp in Tennessee. He was sorry for hurting me. “I need to focus on my relationship with Christ.”
I wanted to ask, What does Jesus have that I don’t? But I said, “Well, okay, if that’s how you feel.” Part of me felt relieved, but part of me felt sad. I was confused and tired from being up the night before. “Frances had a nervous breakdown last night.” I don’t know why I told him.
“I’ll put her on my prayer list,” he said. “And you and your mama too.”
“Thank you,” I said, my eyes filling with tears. He was like an old dog you don’t notice till he’s gone. I watched him walk down the hall, and then I shouted, “Hey, Baxter,” and when he turned around, I called out, “I forgive you.”
He shrugged and shook his head, and I went to Civics where Mrs. Felts tried to teach us to play gin rummy, but everyone threw cards at each other and then we all walked out of the classroom, and Mrs. Felts didn’t even try to stop us.
A week after school got out, Travis finally called. He invited me to a keg party at Buddy’s house that night. I worried that Mama would forbid me to go, but she just asked if Travis was a nice boy, and I said of course, and she told me to be myself, but her words sounded hollow, like she was reading them from a book.
I was waiting on the porch when Travis pulled up in his beat-up Chevelle, spewing gravel everywhere. I’d planned to saunter slowly to the car, let him take full stock of me in my babydoll dress, but before his car came to a full stop, I’d barreled off the porch, my sandals slapping rocks, as if somebody in the house was firing bullets at me. I flung the door open and jumped, breathless, into his car.
“Well, hello missy!” he said. With one hand propped on the wheel, he leaned over and planted a kiss on my neck. He smelled of cigarettes, and I breathed him in like a pocket of air.
When he pulled onto Route 217, KC was playing on the radio. “Tell me a secret,” he said.
“Like what?”
“Something you never told nobody.”
“One night Mary Ellen Wilkes and I split a Coors, and I called up that old coot Mr. McFarland, the geometry teacher, and asked him could he explain to me a love triangle.”
Travis smiled. “That’s good.”
“It was a dare,” I said.
“What’s another one?”
“No way,” I said. “It’s your turn.”
“There’s the Big Dipper.”
“That’s no secret,” I said.
“I was born on April Fools.”
“You can do better than that,” I said.
He scratched his jaw, peered over at me. “I think you’re pretty.”
I gripped the armrest to keep myself from floating out the window, toward the pale rising moon.
Compared to Baxter, Travis was a ride on the tilt-a-whirl. He didn’t have the slightest idea how to act normal. When we got to Buddy’s, he climbed onto the roof with a fishing pole and cast it into a crepe myrtle. Later, he pulled off his cowboy boot, filled it with beer, and guzzled it without taking a breath. Then he drove off with a bunch of whooping boys hanging out of his car. They came back with a baby goat. Travis played ping pong and quarters and wrestled with Buddy, then with the goat. When someone put on Clapton’s “You Are Wonderful,” he finally noticed me, standing in the corner, pretend-sipping from a plastic cup of beer.
He put his hands on my hips and pulled me toward him. We slow-danced onto the patio. He smelled like goat, but I didn’t care. He danced us over to a bench by the edge of the yard. We sat down, then he pulled me onto his lap. For some reason, I thought of Baxter, who’d never even held my hand.
“You ain’t scared are you?” Travis asked, brushing his lips against mine. His eyes were closed, but mine were open.
“No,” I lied.
Travis kissed me, gently at first, and then not so gently. Hidden parts of me began to tingle and throb. I got the feeling he was used to girls falling to pieces in front of him. He grabbed my hand and led me into the woods. Part of me didn’t want to go, but all of me went. He laid me down on a bed of pine needles, and unzipped my dress, peeled off my panties. I wanted to say something, but I couldn’t speak. I stared at a branch above our heads as he explored every inch of me. Later, he took off his clothes and boots and came at me from every angle. I was a pile of clay he pummeled into shape, a fish being gutted, a baby bird bursting from its egg. Travis helped himself to me as if I were a pie made especially for him, and when he was done, he lay back in a sweat, his breath heavy. “Alrighty now,” he said.
Tears ran down my face and pooled in my ears, the notch between my collarbones. My skin felt stingy and raw. I couldn’t move or think. “Iris?” Travis jiggled my shoulder. “You in there?” He found my panties and slipped them on me. Then he sat me up, and pulled my dress over my head, threaded my arms through the arm holes, zipped it up, as if he were putting me back together, but you can’t ungut a fish. A mosquito lit on my knee, and I let it bite me.
It was 2 a.m. when Travis dropped me off at home. We didn’t say a word the whole way back. He didn’t ask me for a secret. He knew all my secrets now.
I half expected Mama and Frances to be pacing the floor, worried sick about me, but their doors were closed, the house quiet and dark. I cried in the shower, dropped the shampoo bottle five times, four on purpose. I wanted them to burst in, carry me to the sofa, slip me a nerve pill, but they slept through it all, and the next morning, when I walked into the kitchen, Mama sat at the table, drinking coffee and reading the paper, like it was any ordinary Saturday. “How was your date?” she asked, her eyes glued to the paper, and I said, “Fine.” I grabbed a box of Hostess Ho Hos from the cabinet and slinked back down the hall.
Right as I passed Frances’s door, she opened it and glared at me. She wore one of Daddy’s shirts as a nightgown, and her face was dotted with Clearasil. “Not so fast,” she said. She tried to grab the box from my hand. “Those are mine.”
“We can split them,” I said.
“No way!” she said. Up till now, all our fights had been the verbal variety, but in that moment, something snapped, and we grew rough as roller derby queens. Frances tried to grab the box, and I held it over my head. When she reached for it, I tried to toss it toward my room, but Frances blocked me. I called her a fat tub of goo, and she called me a slut, and then I tucked the box of Ho Hos under my arm and elbowed her in the ribs. She punched me in the chin. When I pushed her, hard, onto the floor, she clipped her cheek against the baseboard. Blood trickled down her face. She grabbed my ankle, and I came down on my knee and felt a sharp pain between my legs. I ripped open a Ho Ho and smeared it in her hair, and she grabbed my neck, and then Mama was running toward us, screaming, “Have you lost your minds!”
We ended up in the emergency room. Frances got three stitches in her cheek, and while the doctor examined me, my whole body burned with shame. My heart pounded hard in my chest as he peppered me with questions. When I told him about me and Travis, he called in a nurse who talked to me in a kind but serious voice, and I got some pills and an ointment. When Mama came in, the nurse talked to her so I didn’t have to say it all again. Mama cried and squeezed my hand tight, and said, “I got you,” like that time when I was six, and we went wading in the Catawba River, and the current nearly carried me away.
June blurred into July. Doc Jenkins, the vet, walked into Hickory Farms one day and walked out with a bag of summer sausage and a date with Mama. Frances found her tribe: the National Organization for Women. She wrote to Congress in support of the Equal Rights Amendment and decided to switch her major to pre-law. Baxter got kicked out of Bible camp for making out with another counselor, and when he returned to Pine Top, he called and asked me out. He said he’d changed and was ready to make up for lost time. I told him I’d changed too and hung up. I turned sixteen and used all my savings plus a loan from Mama to buy a VW bug, then I got a job at Casual Corner, a women’s clothing store at the mall. I steered customers toward styles that flattered their figures, and they came back asking for me, Iris, personally.
Frances and I went from avoiding each other, to barely speaking, to playing backgammon a few nights a week. One night while we were playing, Travis called. I couldn’t understand what he was saying. There was barking in the background, and I froze, and Frances grabbed the phone. “Drop dead, cocksucker!” she shouted and slammed the phone down. We laughed and laughed, though a part of me wasn’t laughing at all.
“What did you ever see in that kook?” Frances asked. I wanted to tell her how Travis was a splash of red paint on the dull wall of my world, but I feared she wouldn’t understand.
Not long after that, Travis left town. Some said his daddy beat him up, and he went to live with an aunt in Rockingham. Others said he was sent to a juvenile detention center, or a military school, or a mental ward. I never heard from him again.
In late July, Mama, Frances, and I went camping at Carolina Beach State Park. We swam and fished and hiked Sugarloaf trail, and in the evenings, we walked to the drug store for candy and Coppertone. Then, in early August, Frances went back to college. On the day she left, I gave her a cowl-neck sweater in acrylic knit that looked and felt like real wool, which I’d bought with my employee discount. She thanked me and put the sweater in her trunk, but I could tell from her expression that she’d never wear it.
“I wish you’d ride to the bus station with us,” Mama said, but I lied and told her I had to work. I figured Frances would make fun of me if I told them that my boss, Christie, had invited me to join the Teen Fashion Board. Our first show, the Fall Fashion Gala, was that afternoon. I’d agreed to model a Danskin bodysuit and wide-flare pants.
I worried people might snicker at me or wonder what the heck I was doing alongside those tall, skinny girls. While we lined up in the dressing area, my shoulders began to shake, and Christie placed her hand gently on my back and whispered, “You can do this.” In that moment, something blossomed inside me, an inner knowing. What I’d longed for wasn’t Travis but the feeling I got when I was near him, the same feeling I got now, as I stepped onto the makeshift runway and was greeted with applause. Call it superficial, but, for me, it was a necessary thing: the solace of being seen. I knew then, all the way to my toes, snug inside a pair of wedge-sole boots, that what had happened with Travis wasn’t my fault. I had nothing to be ashamed of. I was Iris, a rising junior, and the force was with me.
