Sleepovers Read online

  The Country Woman

  When the woman’s ancient family died, she was left with their farm and farm house. She’d grown up there but left for college. In the city, she studied history, specifically Elizabethan, but more specifically, she went to parties and danced and twirled in the arms of anyone who would listen to her tell about where she was from. How she grew up without ever knowing a stranger. How she was related to everyone. How she dreamed of reading books about people she saw on PBS documentaries—she’d wake up in the middle of the night and come downstairs and sit in front of the TV, learning about worlds far from the cotton fields outside her window.

  “Don’t your parents read,” everyone would ask her.

  And she’d laugh.

  No one could believe it.

  Of course she couldn’t find a job in the city after graduating and there was only so much galavanting to museums and symphonies left to do before, as mentioned earlier, all her family died and she had to come back home to her inherited destiny: the land.

  The woman said goodbye to all her like-minded friends and cultural indulgences—goodbye banh mi, falafel, injera—goodbye hot yoga, femme book clubs, “safe spaces.” And she settled into her farmhouse a mile off the road from the nearest dying town. But she didn’t want to live alone so she bought a special little circus breed dog and a couple of pigs. And she busied herself renovating the old barn into an apartment and scouted potential renters when she went into town.

  She frequented J.J.’s, the local grocery store, because she often craved the tastes of her childhood like Cheez-Its and Mounds. And it was there that she met and fell in love with the checkout girl, Shania. And she quickly offered the young mother her barn apartment.

  Shania moved in with her son and boyfriend. The boyfriend worked at the chicken factory. It was his job to hang up the birds by their feet and press the button for the machine to cut their heads off. The boy was three and he liked to play in the yard early in the mornings with the woman’s little circus dog. The dog would jump and turn in the air for him and the boy would giggle.

  Then the woman would wave goodbye to all of them when they left for town and wait for them at the window in the evenings until they got home.

  But then one day a man came to install wifi at the woman’s farm and she seduced him. She bathed him and braided his hair and traced his dragon tattoos with her tongue. And then he started sleeping there every night.

  And sometimes they’d all get together in the woman’s yard for shared cookouts. Shania would bring hamburger from work and her boyfriend would bring chickens and the wifi lover would cook them up on the grill. Shania and the woman would share a bottle of Barefoot pinot gris and the boy would chase lighting bugs with the little circus dog. Then the woman would always look up at the stars and say to the little boy, “You can see so many out here can’t you?” “Yes,” he would always squeal.

  Spring turned to summer and summer turned to fall and, to keep herself from getting bored back in the country, the woman started chaining her lover up under the kitchen table for fun. It’s one of those nights when she has the man chained down there naked, whipping his ass with a belt and making him bark, when they hear sirens coming from a long ways off, getting closer and closer.

  The woman jumps to the window and watches a police car and then an ambulance fly up the path to her barn. The lights flash into the kitchen window, turning everything blue.

  The woman unchains the man. And they throw on their heavy jackets, walk into their boots, and head out to see what’s the matter. They are greeted by a policeman, one of her distant cousins, one she’d grown up with in school.

  You can see his breath as he talks and this is what he tells them:

  Shania called 911 about her son, she said he was choking on Kool-Aid. When the EMTs got there, the boy was in the middle of the living room floor, already purple. They went to perform mouth to mouth and when they cut open his little shirt to get to him better, they saw wounds all over his little body. It looked like the boy’d been choked with extension cords, whipped with a belt. Burns, deep, deep burns with pus all infected. And won’t no bandages, look like they ain’t never been cleaned. That little boy was neglected. Them wounds was trying to heal themselves. Ain’t no telling what all he went through.

  The policeman cousin clears his throat:

  Shania done it, her boyfriend told us standing right there. And I ain’t ever gonna forget how she looked at him while he was telling it. Just sick. Just pure evil…her own child.

  The woman feels herself falling. She clings to the man’s hip bone in the brown dry grass.

  But the policeman cousin keeps going:

  And then another little boy ran out from the back bedroom. Did y’all know she had twins?

  The woman coughs, she chokes.

  Yeah, she’s got twins and was keeping one inside the house to beat on and taking the other one out into the world like there won’t nothing wrong with it. Ain’t no telling what that boy went through. He may not have even learned how to walk or talk or nothing. And none of her folks say they knew a thing about him.

  The woman looks back towards the cop car and watches Shania bang her head against the window. Shania’s son is squirming in the arms of another policeman, trying to get loose. He’s watching his mama and crying. And the little circus dog is right there underneath him too, barking at the sound.

  In the morning, the man leaves to install wifi. The woman feeds her pigs. And she walks through the tall grass to Shania’s. She goes inside and lays down in the middle of the living room floor. She wants to know why the hell she never heard the boy crying when he was getting beaten and strangled, burned and bruised. Was he able to transcend? Turn into a spirit and leave his little body like an angel? Did he hover above himself, never looking down to see what was happening? Only up and smiling.

  And Shania. Where is she now? In the county holding cell combing her fingers through her hair. And how does she feel knowing the little thing she could always beat on is gone?

  A few days pass and the lover leaves and Shania’s boyfriend goes to live with his family. The circus dog waits in the path to do tricks for the little boy, but the boy’s riding a bus, being sent to a children’s home in Raleigh.

  The woman is alone again. She sits down and writes letters to all the unborn children her friends from college are carrying. In Kentucky, Minnesota, Ohio, Illinois. She stops to go outside and pick cotton fluff, something from home to send them. “Let them rub it under their noses,” she writes. “That’s what I did as a baby.” The evening light falls in on her.

  She walks all the way to the end of her path, puts the letters in the mailbox. She runs back to the house and climbs the magnolia tree as high as it’ll take her. She screams out to her land. And if you keep pulling up, you’ll lose her in the tree, but you’ll see the moon shining on the tin roof of the farmhouse. The farm all alone, way outside town. The wilderness that surrounds them. The slick of the pigs’ backs, moving in the dark. And even this far away, you can still hear her. And you can feel the boy near you, floating in stars.

  Snowball Jr.

  W When I was a deer I was a doe. My mother pushed me out, nuzzling a great oak tree. It was spring. There was a creek nearby. Birds were always singing: meadowlark, grasshopper sparrow, nightingales. I could hear everything better than I’d ever heard before. But I didn’t know if any loved ones from my old life were there with me. I missed them.

  And I missed things I shouldn’t have. I missed the man with stubby fingers, the smell of his awful butter lube. The peach-tiled bathroom. The vibrating bed and banana pudding milkshakes. The married man who called me Mama. He patched my tires, bought me groceries. Choked me in his ill-lit apartment during Jeopardy. Mad Dog 20/20. Omegle. Spit dangling from my lips onto his. Biting his rat tattoo.

  I missed the man who looked like Bob Dylan on Blonde on Blonde. He wore paint-splattered jeans. We met in LAX. I handed him my copy of VICE. I told him to read the st
ory “Malibu” about a man stuffing his fist into a stranger woman’s mouth. It was a night flight and I watched the top of his hair glowing rows ahead. He was reading. It was thrilling.

  But when I was a deer, the wind blew and I could smell the insides of flowers far away. I could hear cars coming like oceans. I could hear bees building hives.

  In the summertime, me and mother ate from the soybean fields. That’s where we liked eating best. It was open and easy, delicious and nice. And in the fall when I got bigger, my mother took me into the backyards of the country people. But only early in the morning when the sky was purple-pink and dew glistened on the apple trees. My deer mother would stretch her long neck and pick apples for me. I wanted to ask her—what did she hear? But I could only communicate with her in acts of service. This had also been my language before, rubbing Kiehl’s Creme de Corps into his cracked knuckles, sweeping his floor; him filming me on my knees, my first video.

  I let my deer mother clean me with her soft tongue. I drank her milk so gladly.

  My mother before never nursed me. She never left the bed. She grew fatter and fatter every year of my youth. She stomped when she walked. I hated it. Once, we went to Disney and the Space Mountain attendant couldn’t strap her in. She got a sleep apnea machine so the fat on her neck wouldn’t smother her at night. She fed me Little Debbie cakes and chip sandwiches. Then she got gastric bypass, slimmed down, started wearing low cut tops and eyeshadow. She jumped from job to job, waitressing. She gossiped like middle school. The cooks and local policemen came by to see her on her shifts. Her necklaces got tangled in the skin tags on her neck. She begged me to mash cysts on her back. She could be so mean. She loved Prince and Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Bachelorette and Princess Di. She brought me a clean set of cotton panties when I got herpes. She didn’t read, she didn’t cook, she never cut her fingernails. Her daddy called her Snowball.

  And I was Snowball Jr. I was a white-tailed deer, a doe. The apples I ate every fall were crisp and sweet. They smelled clean when I crunched them. It made my piss smell strong.

  That’s when the bucks started coming, they were rutting for me.

  The first time I was mounted by a buck, I’d wandered far from home. I’d crossed two country roads to get to a patch of peanuts. And I laughed in my head, remembering when I was a little girl, my fat mama sat me down with a book called Where Did I Come From?

  “Penis,” it said. “Like Peanuts without the T!”

  The buck smelled like oily hair and piss, akin to mine just mustier. And I wondered who the buck was, if he’d been anyone before. He could have been Napoleon, Cleopatra, or Mary Magdalene. Ted Bundy or Robert E. Lee.

  When the married man filmed me on my knees he said I could make a lot of money. I needed a new set of tires and my wisdom teeth removed. He took out his pocket knife and cut through my tights. But this buck had trouble balancing. Every thrust pushed my front hooves further into the dirt. The land was dry and dusty. It was dark, but in my mind it was like a movie. I saw a spotlight shining from behind him, the shadow of his antlers, a piercing tangle before me. I heard the nightingales singing.

  After the buck finished I started running back to my mother.

  I couldn’t really see, I was running so fast.

  When I was little I played sick so I could stay home and cocoon myself in blankets. I’d poke my head out and watch the History Channel. As a form of meditation, Queen Elizabeth would translate English into Latin and then Latin back to English. She wrote a whole book of prayers that way. I was thinking of this, the steady stroke of her quill, when a car struck me.

  I made it across the road but my insides started bleeding out of me. I fell in the lawn of a country church and a big rain came down. It fell into my eyes, onto my spongy tongue. The ground was getting soggy and I felt myself sink. I knew what would happen to me.

  I’d seen it almost every day, the big black buzzards. When they got full they put out their wings and stood still as a statue, shining warm in the sun. But something I didn’t know was the sound their feathers made when they were still. The wind pushing through their tight feathers made a long, high-pitched whistle.

  But when I was a doe, I wanted my ending to be different. All I could think of was the great erotic Debussy composition. “Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune.” And I wished I could have been listening to it there while I died. From what I remember, in the beginning, there were harps and a french horn.

  The Hunting Lodge

  While Joyner Lee was away at college her car broke down. It needed a transmission rebuild. Her family couldn’t help her. So she sold the good car parts she had for $500. Then she used the $500 to help her pay for books and get a good haircut. Joyner Lee studied English and she worked at the record store.

  Her boss gave her a bike to ride back and forth to work with. So Joyner Lee rode for miles on the sides of the roads and on the little dirt foot paths when there were no sidewalks. She never hit a rock or got scraped up. Her legs got very strong. She was a very good record store salesperson.

  Then one day, on the way home from the record store, a car full of men pulled up beside Joyner Lee at the stop light. They hung out the car windows and asked what kind of underwear she was wearing. She ignored them and waited for them to drive on so they wouldn’t follow her home. She was on her period. She wanted to pull the bloody tampon out of her and sling it right into their sweaty laps.

  After graduation, Joyner Lee moved back home and no one would hire her. Not even at the Family Dollar, Dollar General, or Dollar Tree. And it was really hard for her to talk to her family about all the things she missed back in the city, all the things she had seen. She had one aunt who read Amish Christian Romance novels. And everyone she knew went to church.

  She became incredibly lonely and posted on her Instagram story almost anything she ever did throughout the day, like eating apples and putting her hair in ponytails. Then one day a writer commented on her Jack Kerouac post, a picture of his “40th chorus” from San Francisco Blues:

  And when my head gets dizzy

  And my friends all laugh

  And money pours

  from my pocket

  And gold from my ears

  And silver flies out

  and rubies explode

  I’ll up & eat

  And sing another song

  And drop another grape

  In my belly down

  “That’s a God one,” he commented.

  “Good one,” she commented back.

  She laughed and he sent her a dm.

  “My name is Sam,” he said.

  “Well guess what, Sam,” Joyner Lee said, “I don’t live that far from Rocky Mount. Rocky Mount’s my nearest bookstore. That’s where Jack Kerouac lived.”

  “Yes, I know,” Sam said. “But tell me about you—I want to hear the whole story.”

  So she started at the beginning and when she got to the end he sent her a picture of his shoulder. He was in the bath. She could see half his face and his lips were beautiful. His name was Sam and Joyner Lee fell in love with him.

  Summer turned to fall and her cousin said he’d pay her some money if she’d clean his hunting lodge in between hunters, so mostly a two-day-a-week gig, but it was better than nothing. So Joyner Lee stripped the beds and washed the sheets and towels. She scrubbed the kitchen floors. She stood up on the top of a stool and swiffered inside the bobcat’s mouth, cleaning cobwebs from his teeth. And she picked bottles of deer piss off the bathroom floor.

  She sent Sam pictures of everything. Told him how hunters used deer piss to attract deer. And the differences between button heads, toe heads, and bucks. “Wow,” he said. He sent her heart eyed smiley faced emojis. And gasp emojis that made her laugh. He lived in L.A. and ran on the tops of mountains. He sent pictures to her of dry valleys and shrub-lined paths. She thought it looked biblical like Damascus Road. “Holy, holy, holy,” Sam said.

  They found out they both were horses in the Chinese Zodiac. W
hich meant they were both charming, intellectual, and free. So Joyner Lee started running too, into the woods behind the lodge, when she was done cleaning. She’d jump over mudholes and snakes. And she’d always search for turkeys because that was Sam’s favorite word: turkey. He loved the way it felt in his mouth when he said it. She loved the way he said it. He spoke so precisely and correct. He’d call her from bar bathrooms, sometimes even his bedroom late at night. He lived with his parents but was moving to Nashville soon. She’d never been anywhere he was. She’d never been anywhere he was going to.

  She put the money she earned in a purple Crown Royal bag under her mattress. She lived alone in an old house. And houses in her neighborhood were getting broken into all the time. Her cousin helped her keep her propane tank filled for heat so she wouldn’t freeze and he told her she needed a gun.

  Fall turned to winter and sometimes after cleaning, if her sister couldn’t pick her up, Joyner Lee’d get rides into town with the old men in their rattly cars. The men told her they remembered her when she was little, playing in yards. They’d tell her the nicknames of old dead family members she never knew. Everything would smell like thick exhaust with the gospel radio blaring. And she’d remember some of the songs, the words coming back to her through hurts past and present. She was happy she had Sam now. Joyner Lee asked them but none of the old men had ever been to Nashville either. One of them gave her a pair of fuzzy gloves. And her cousin gave her deer sausage and sweet potatoes to eat, so she wouldn’t have to buy groceries.

  Sam sent her books about mermaids and Paris and a postcard with blue maned horses that said, “Horsing Around in Nashville Town.” He said his family would love her. He said they’d all get along. He said he’d take her to his neighbor’s New Years Eve party. Every morning she looked forward to a text from him saying BABY BABY. And a call from him saying she was the real deal every night.