Sleepovers Read online

  A nice lady opens the door on Peachtree Street and she’s got one of those faces that feels familiar like you’ve known her all your life. She buys a bunch of colored paper for her daughter who likes to draw. You ask how old her daughter is and she is four years younger than you. You ask what school she went to and she says that she kept her at home. You see her daughter peek at you from the hall and you think that maybe she was born wrong too. You figure she has never left this house. And you want to get her out of it.

  The next week you ask the woman if you can visit with her daughter. She brings you down the hall and into the sun room where her daughter is drawing. She’s quiet for a while and then she looks up and tells you she likes to sit in here and watch the birds outside. The light falls in on her hair like beach sunshine in the movies. There’s plants growing all around her. It’s like a jungle and you sit in the wicker chair across from her and wait for her to talk to you, like she’s a magical animal behind all the vines and leaves. All you can figure is that she’s just very, very shy. You think maybe you would have been this way too if you didn’t grow up in such a loud family.

  Her mother takes you two to the movies to see South Pacific and everything is going really nice until you get to the part when they’re jumping in the waterfall and swimming and you wish you could jump in the water. You think of your brothers and sisters swimming in the creek on the farm, laughing and swimming. You wish you could swim. How the cool water would feel like, moving so freely in it. You feel yourself getting upset, the popcorn starts to tremble in your hands and you’re afraid you’re going to spill it. But then the girl holds her hand out in front of you, like she’s asking you to hold it. You hold her hand, she calms you.

  You start saving money really hard. You start working really hard. Start selling paper and pens all over. You start thumbing rides to Virginia. People in Conway who pass you say that you can get to Norfolk quicker than they can just driving. It’s this myth that starts about you. And people still talk about it to this day.

  Everyone in town knows you by now, they say, “Hey! It’s Charlie!” when you walk into the bank or the grocery or the café. They all know you and they’ve all talked to you and you feel important.

  You get written up in the paper. The paper says real good things. You look like a real professional in the picture with your briefcase and nice hat on. You’re standing beside the road, squinting at the camera. It says: Here Comes Charlie! April, 1960.

  The next time you see the girl on Peachtree Street you show her the article. And she giggles and says that she’s already seen it. That she’s cut it out and hung it up in her room above her desk. You dream of her room and what she has on her desk. Colored paper and charcoal and colored pens and watercolors, nothing too harsh, only graceful colors. She goes to her room and comes back with drawings of birds.

  You haven’t told anyone this but you feel like you need to tell her about what you wanted to do to those baby chicks that time at the family reunion. And she listens without being afraid. She says it’s okay, we all get angry sometimes, we all want to run away sometimes.

  She points to the bird feeder outside the sunroom window where she sees her birds. Y’all wait and watch a bluebird come to the feeder. You’re afraid of hurting others but you feel it in your heart you can never hurt her. You know this more than anything. Before the bluebird flies away you ask her to marry you and she says yes.

  Your daddy says that no two people like the two of you should be together in marriage. You tell him you have your own money and punch him in the face in front of your mama. When your daddy falls back, the look on his face is both surprised and proud. He does not hit you back.

  Your mama plays the piano at your wedding and your sisters make cakes. It’s so hot in the church that June that your new wife swears she saw sweat roll off your nose. She’ll always love to remind you of this, and you’ll deny it every time just to see her laugh. Your mama and sisters help your new wife hang up her bird drawings in the house. They put them in the places that look the best. Your new wife insists that the bluebird must be hung over the bed.

  You feel it above you when you kiss her in bed. Your bedroom becomes a far, far away jungle. It feels like strange and beautiful branches lean heavy and circle from the ceiling, from the sky. You’re happy when she takes off her nightgown by herself. You’re surprised when she takes your hands and puts them on her body. When she pulls you to her by your belt. When she’s under you she’s soft and warm. You hold her without shaking.

  The first time you come inside her, she kisses you all around your face like a rainbow. You think of her watercolors. You think of God. Maybe it’s His still, quiet voice you’re hearing when she sounds out pleasure.

  You start to read the Bible she gave you when y’all got married. You like Colossians 3:12-14.

  Put on therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, bowels of mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, longsuffering; Forbearing one another, and forgiving one another, if any man have a quarrel against any: even as Christ forgave you, so also do ye. And above all these things put on charity, which is the bond of perfectness.

  You write it on a piece of paper and put it on the refrigerator. Your wife helps you pray about all the anger you’ve always had. You start tithing at church. You get baptized. You put on a compassionate heart. And send your mama and brothers and sisters letters apologizing for whatever hurt you caused them.

  Your mama passes away from cancer right before Christmas the year y’all got married. And in front of all her unopened presents your daddy looks at you and your wife with her hand on your knee like y’all are dumb. Turns his back to y’all to face the rest of the family. Your brothers and sisters drink whiskey and play cards and laugh loudly. Your wife does not say much to them and she follows you to the kitchen every time you get up to make her more chocolate milk. Your sisters tell her they like her sweater. Your nieces and nephews ask her to draw them giraffes.

  She cries to you when you get home because she can only draw birds. You comfort her. You protect her. You tell her that you love her for who she is.

  You tell her that riding with your sisters to Belk’s the next afternoon would be good for her. She never gets out of the house. It’ll be good for her to get out. You give her some money to buy her a pretty new dress.

  While she’s out you think of what kind of dress she’s gonna get. How she’ll look coming home into the door. If she’ll spin with her new dress on. You’re thinking of this as you sit down for lunch at your dining room table. You look out the dining room window and wonder how your wife’s cactuses are blooming in the winter weather. The blooms are so many, hanging heavy, bursting bright pink. Stars falling together all at once. You think she has made you a better person for being able to notice things like that. You tell yourself not to forget to ask her about the blooms. You die there choking on a peanut butter sandwich.

  When your wife comes home she is wearing exactly the pretty new dress you wanted her to get. It’s lilac with small white polka dots and it flows down her like waves. She puts your head in her lap and sits next to you at the table. She traces your ear with the silk hem of her dress until they take you away.

  At your funeral the church is packed. People are standing up at the back, people are all in the balcony, people are sitting back in the Sunday school rooms. People from all over North Carolina and Virginia.

  Outside the church your daddy tells the funeral director that your wife will sit behind your family. The funeral director says, But she’s Mr. Charlie’s wife. And your daddy says I’m paying for it so you’re gonna do what I want.

  At the graveside after it’s all over, the mayor finds your wife crying in the crowd, she’s between your baby sisters. The mayor gives her a key to the town in a cedar box. He says it’s in your honor. He says you’re a hero. The plaque on the box says your name.

  Over the next couple of months your sisters come and visit your wife. Try to comfort her. But she only
wants to read the Bible in a rocking chair. She takes down the bluebird above y’alls bed and places it in the back of the closet behind your briefcase. She only sleeps on the couch. Her younger brother moves in and lives with her until she dies of old age.

  When she dies your daddy is still alive. He’s in a wheelchair and chews on cigars but he does not want your wife buried next to you. He makes sure it doesn’t happen. Everyone in town is upset by it. So when your daddy finally dies at 102, your brothers and sisters raise enough money to move her next to you in the family plot. The brother you used to beat up the most brings flowers for you and your wife when he’s in town. He thinks about you every day, he dreams of you whistling as you walk with your briefcase. You never whistled though, you hummed. Yes, you always hummed.

  Mind Craft

  I was masturbating when Cole knocked on my door and told me Queenie had bit him.

  “I ain’t gonna die,” he said. “She’s bit me a bunch of times.”

  He held out his arm and stood real still and I touched it gentle with my masturbating smell fingers. His skin was raised around two little punctures and it was bleeding, right where her fangs went in. I’ve never seen a snake bite before. He said his mama puts apple cider vinegar and baking soda on it to take out the soreness. Cole’s a scrappy boy. I believed him.

  I coulda called Rhonda but seeing as she’s the one who called me down here to look after Cole and Daddy while she was gone, I figured I shouldn’t. She’s a saint for my daddy. And she’d been wanting to go on that ladies motorcycle trip to Dollywood for a long time. She’d been sending me pictures of them riding the rides all morning. I didn’t want to ruin her trip.

  I got the baking soda and apple cider vinegar out the kitchen cabinet for Cole and watched him make it into a paste. Daddy was out in his tool shed drinking Crown and Mountain Dew from his special shrimp cup with the little pink shrimp shaking his booty on it. I knew he was upset about Cole’s bite, worried what Rhonda would do when she found out. But I’d never seen him like this. Rhonda said he’s been much more emotional since she’s been getting him to ween off the weed.

  While me and Cole waited for the paste to sit on his bite a little, I figured since it was on my mind I might as well ask him. “Just between you and me,” I said, “how often do you see Daddy Bill this bent out of frame?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, like a lot.” Cole spun around on the top of his stool. “Mama told me he’s had a sad life, said that he raised you all by himself.” Then he stopped himself spinning. “Did your mama really leave y’all to be with another lady?”

  I told him yeah.

  Then he asked me when was the last time I saw her.

  And I said I didn’t remember.

  Then he asked me if I ever talked to her on the phone. And I said, “No.”

  “Not even for your birthday?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Don’t you miss her,” he said.

  I shook my head no and bit down on my fingers and tasted my smell. I was washing my hands at the sink when I heard Cole behind me.

  “Don’t you want to know where she is?”

  I just got out my phone and pulled up what to do about a python bite. “Look,” I told him, “this says we need to wash it now. And get some Neosporin.”

  “We need to ride to Walmart for that,” he said. “I used it all on my knee last week.” He pointed to his scabby little knee.

  When we told Daddy we were going to Walmart, he perked up the way he would around me when I was little. “Now look here, I know what’s going on,” he said. He put his arm around Cole, “This boy here’s been wanting to go to the Walmart all damn month. His mama don’t go to the Walmart for nothing. She don’t believe in it.” Then he looked at me, “I don’t know why but she don’t believe in the Walmart, Maddy.” Then he pulled Cole closer to him, “Now tell what it is you want at the Walmart, son. Go on now and tell us.”

  “Minecraft,” Cole said, smiling.

  I started laughing.

  “This boy wants that Mind Craft, that video game,” Daddy laughed too and finished off his Crown and Mountain Dew.

  I’d heard of Minecraft. It’s what Patrick plays all the time. When I get done with classes and go to his place I can hear the music coming from the living room as soon as I come in the door. And there he is, sitting there in a trance shooting arrows into zombies. And I sit next to him hoping he’ll put his arm around me or something. Because he’s always got night shifts delivering pizzas. But nothing. Then when he does touch me he is full on boner and ready to go and so we go to his bedroom and we have sex and then he comes and we lay there a little and he lets me lay on his chest and I listen to his heartbeat and he tells me that I need to talk about my mama more. Patrick says my mama has shaped me into who I am now. He says she is still shaping me. He says this because, among other things, I take the pillow cases off pillows when I sleep. He’s a philosophy major. And I already know what Daddy would say about him if they met. He’d say his handshake felt limp as a dishrag.

  But I think it’s pretty good sex. My dormmates tell me about guys going down on them like it’s really wonderful like they’re in another world. Patrick has only done it to me twice since we’ve been together and I don’t think I ever came when he was down there. I mean, I didn’t feel any different. I think it’s ’cause I don’t shave down there. When we first started dating Patrick said that some girls shaved the whole thing and he asked me if I ever did that and I said no. So one day I did it to surprise him and it took forever and then he didn’t even like it that much, I don’t think, and I hated how it made me itchy and I looked like a baby. I looked his ex up on Facebook and she was sitting on a yacht in a bikini, with a big bow in her hair. Patrick said her daddy was real rich. Christine was her name. They lived together and everything.

  At Walmart, Daddy gave Cole a piggyback ride to look at some tools and I grabbed the Neosporin and went to get some hamburger for supper. Hamburger Helper is what me and Daddy always made together when I was growing up. He’d smoke a fat joint and add a lot of extra cheese. Rhonda don’t like it too much because it ain’t that healthy. When she moved in she planted a garden. It’s off the porch he finally finished with her help. She’s always sending me back to school with fresh tomatoes, enough for the whole hall. But I wanted that night to be like old times. So I got the meat that looked the best and headed on to the electronics and games.

  When Daddy and Cole won’t there, I figured they were still looking around. Daddy loves to look at everything in Walmart. Him and Cole were probably caught up in some rods and reels.

  The girl who was working in electronics and games had huge breasts. I’d never seen her before. And I thought what I always think when I see huge breasts. I wondered what it would be like to suck on them. They would probably be nice and soft in my mouth. Patrick would say this has something to do with breastfeeding and my mama. I don’t know if she breastfed me or not.

  Her nametag said “Cammie”. I asked her if they had Mind Craft for Xbox 360.

  “You mean Minecraft?”

  “Oh yeah, sorry,” I laughed. “My daddy calls it Mind Craft.”

  “Well, yeah we have it, people have been going nuts over it lately.” She led me to the shelf where it was and grabbed it for me. “You ever play it,” she asked.

  I looked down at her handing it to me and said, “No, but my boyfriend does.”

  “It looks boring. I mean everything is just blocks.” She looked at the block-headed people between my thumbs. “Is it boring?”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. I was thinking about how big her nipples might be compared to mine and I said, “The music is kind of relaxing.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Well I’ll ring you up now I guess.”

  I told her I didn’t want the receipt. I told her that when a half-drunk man and a kid with a swollen arm came up to buy Minecraft to tell them that Maddy had already bought it for them and she was waiting in the truck.

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sp; “Okay,” she said. It sounded like she said it in a way she doesn’t say it every day.

  Patrick called me on the way to the truck. He’s always worried when I’m at home because he says it’s a place of no opportunity and poverty and high crime and teen moms. He’s looked at the statistics. He grew up in Raleigh. He’s a city boy. But he says he loves my brain. “It’s your brain that got you out of there Maddy,” he says to me. We met in Honor’s World Lit first semester freshman year.

  I didn’t answer because I’m mad at him anyways. He’s obsessed with this old house downtown and won’t take me to go see it. And he won’t stop going on and on about it.

  He was standing in my room just a couple nights before I came home, telling me about it, freaking me out. He told me he’d been going to see this house every night I wasn’t with him. He said he’d been doing it for like three weeks. He said he needed to see it before he went to sleep. He told me he’d even gone to the state records and looked up the names of everyone who’d lived in the house. Then he’d gone to the cemetery and did gravestone rubbings of everyone whoever lived in the house. When he was in my room the other night he showed me one, rolled it right out on my bed.

  “Here,” he said. “I want you to have it.”

  But he couldn’t tell me why—him, out of all people, who knows the reason for everything—he couldn’t tell me why he had to look at that house at night. The way he looked at me. I’d never seen anyone look like that before. He said, “I wish I could tell you why.”

  He said at night when the moon is in the center of the roof of the house across the street, the moonlight shines in a high window on the house and you can see the spiral staircase that leads up to the widow’s walk.

  I asked him to take me and show me and he said he couldn’t do it.