Terrible Positions

I remember when you and I checked groceries at Publix and you had lost all your black thread so you’d sewn your buttons back on with pink and it didn’t match against that ugly lime green uniform. I prodded you to tell me who was ripping them buttons off when we were slow and you blushed and looked down, but didn’t tell. I was teasing and could tell you liked it. I suppose you were in love. And that prevented you from realizing the terrible position you got yourself in. 

This happened more than once. I told Momma about the buttons. And that I thought you were in love. “Is she?” Mom said smiling which annoyed me. You were always Mom’s favorite. She got on the phone with Uncle Frank and then got on the phone with Uncle Joseph. I had to hear the story all over again but different each telling and Joseph was hard-of-hearing and wanted to make sure he understood so it was told a few times very loud. It was creepy hearing my little sister’s romantic liaisons getting told over and over with male relatives, but they were all more excited about your beau’s government job at the Custom and Border Protection agency keeping the Spanish and Caribbeans out of this country than whatever you got into in the bedroom. I didn’t really understand what kind of border work there was to be had in Tennessee and I still don’t. 

This was not long after cousin Phyllis had gone hitching west, planning on going all the way to California, and been picked up by a crazy man on the interstate. She was just another victim—he’d killed a whole bunch and had done unspeakable things to their privates and chopped off their heads and whatnot, some not discovered until they were skeletons. Creepy devil staring at the camera after they caught him like he didn’t have a soul or what he had done was kind of nice or something to be proud of. He had been a killer of prostitutes and Phyllis got lumped in with that lot, though I know she weren’t no prostitute, just a pretty star-struck girl who wanted to see if she could make it in the movies and who could blame her seeing as she weren’t never that smart and only had a part-time job at KFC and lived at home. I couldn’t just dismiss Phyllis as a prostitute, though, could imagine her screaming and questions and praying but knowing things weren’t going to end well for her as they drove through the night with all those cities sparkling so near that she could almost touch them, people impassive and deaf to her fear, headlights bouncing around inside the car, red tail lights in the distance. And maybe she jumped from the car and maybe he chased her through the woods and under bridges with a knife, but in the end, all she was was meat. And her wig was found first, mashed down soggy with weeks of raining. The newspaper said that. 

But Phyllis was more to me than a wig or meat. She was also a little girl once, a girl that you and I ran with through the hills in the foot of the Smokey Mountains with cousins Seth and Maureen playing basketball in their dirt-packed driveway or Superfriends amidst the buttercups, snapdragons, geraniums, eucalyptus, and ivy covered hills, sun sinking until it became a moon, reds and greens turning to pinks and oranges as the houselights came on, day’s heat turning to cool, air filled with fireflies and mosquitoes, until we finally wandered into our cousins’ white aluminum-sided house to drink cokes and cut slivers off a block of round cheese, peeling the red wax, to eat it with Triscuits. 

I remember the first day I worked at Publix. I was sixteen and training to be a cashier and learning to bag groceries and after the first fifteen minutes, I was so bored I thought I would die if I had to stay the whole six-hour shift. I thought that I might walk out the door and not come back, not even to get a paycheck for these fifteen worked minutes. But by the next fifteen minutes, or maybe it was thirty, anyway, not too much longer, I realized that I could do it. And then it was seven years later and I had health insurance and a five-year pin on my uniform and ten dollars an hour and you’d joined me and I was thinking of how much longer I got to do this until I can retire. 

Judah came in. He was a sweaty guy with receding hairline, the start of a gut and sparkling eyes with a hint of red. I felt, after seeing him with you, the way he shook my hand and kissed your cheek, the way he waited patiently at the front while you went to get your purse and punch out, that he was mostly harmless. And, I suppose, compared to the guy that picked up Phyllis, he was. He just cheated on you. Slapped you around a little, busted a lip now and then. Gave you two babies and then left you high and dry. But I was gone by then. I got in my old Escort and hit 75 going north. I wasn’t going to make Phyllis’ mistake. I wouldn’t stand on the side of the highway and wait for some man to come and kill me. I’d take myself out of there, hitting Interstate 10 going west and who cared if my car didn’t make it. I’d stop off in some other metropolis and live since I didn’t really give a shit about being famous. I could wait tables or check groceries in any city, maybe attend school at night to make something more of myself. I guess, just like Phyllis, I’d been taught by the movies that that’s what girls do.