Fanny Says Page 5

  your knees. Forgive me for the hours we waited

  in the ash and gum and grease, the angry men pacing angry, the women on their knees

  changing diapers, babies back-flat on the cold tile floor.

  Forgive me. For while we waited, I fooled with the official initials:

  Elephants Pick Olives.

  Elves Pursue Orchids.

  Egypt Ponders Ontario.

  Eggs Produce Odor.

  Again, I’m so sorry:

  Evelyn Punched Out.

  Eve Pinched Ocher.

  Edith’s Pussy Opened.

  Enough, Please, Ouch.

  Everyone Pummeled Over.

  Each Pushed Out.

  Forgive me. I thought I could stomach what happened to things jerked

  from their homes—jellyfish puddled to wet tissue on the shore

  the same as a yellow iris cut and brought inside, how quickly the bloom

  makes Kleenex of her beautiful face. You wore your hair in rollers under a scarf

  wrapped so tight it looked like you were an immigrant to your own country,

  a lady prepared for snow in spring, and your signature at the bottom of the form

  was old-fashioned, practiced, perfectly slanted, and I mused:

  Even if she never really learned to write, she sure made certain

  her signature looked good. When the caseworker called

  your married name, he insisted he talk to you alone.

  Forgive me, I let him do that, I let him, and you swallowed and sweetly said,

  Alrighty then, here goes.

  Fanny Says at Twenty-three She Learned to Drive

  So we were driving down Broadway towards Fountain Ferry in his new pickup. I was about twenty-three, with four kids and this stringy hair. And I look out the window and seen it: the most beautiful lightest green car you ever did see.

  I knew Monroe had been promising me a car but wouldn’t do it, and so I called Betty Sue in the morning to get the number of the dealership, and she said, No, you can’t, sister. Monroe will kill you, and I said, Well, it wouldn’t be the first time.

  So I called and said, Is this a salesman? And he said, Yes. And I said, Well, this is Mrs. Monroe Jackson Cox. And well, they didn’t know Monroe from Adam, but I said it just like that: Monroe J. Cox, C-O-X, with authority, because no one knew him, but they eventually would cause I would make him known.

  I said, Do you still have that light green car in the window? And he said, Yes. And I didn’t even know the name of the car or nothing but asked for it, just like that—pale green—and he said, Yes. And I said, Good. I’ d like to buy it. And he said, You’ d like to buy it? And I didn’t ask the price or nothing but said, Yes.

  Those were the olden days so there was no contract or nothing, and so he said, Okay, Mrs. Cox, when would you like that delivered? And I said, Twelve noon, because I knew that’d be right before Monroe got home. And they delivered the car, and I told them they had to pull it around for me to the back (see, we lived in a little old house, in Germantown), and we had steps—one, two, three—leading up to the back door, and my kitchen was right there, and the man said, You don’t want to pull it up yourself? And I said, No. I don’t drive.

  He said, You don’t drive!? And I said, No, I’ ll learn tomorrow. (And later, of course, I said to Monroe: I’ve learned everything else with you, so you’ ll learn me this too.) And the man said, Okay, and left the car right there.

  Shortly after, Monroe came home, just a glarin at me and asked, Whose car is that? And I said, It’s mine. And he said, Give me the keys. And I said, Okay. Then he looked at me square in the eyes and said, I’m going to put some gas in it, cause I bet they didn’t leave you a nickel’s worth.

  And he did, and he started riding around, and he pulled up his sleeve to show his arms. He was so young and handsome then, with his strong, dark arm hanging out the window. And I know’d what he was thinking: he was thinking he was hot shit riding around in that thing, so he never said a word.

  Dixie Highway

  1.

  Past the starting line in Louisville, Dixie’s a six-lane tangle,

  used car lots made carnival—balloons and barkers, cheap

  strings of lights and triangle flags—then discount

  recliners, country kitchen oak, concrete

  ducks dressed in bonnets for your lawn, racks and racks

  of knock-off jeans, knock-off bags, and for the working man,

  manly bins of wife-beaters and white tube socks.

  Dixie is all-you-can-eat—ribeye, T-bone, sirloin—

  you pick your own piece of meat—and the buffet ends with

  soft-serve, sprinkles in every color for the kids.

  Here, the highway’s bottomless, buy-one-get-one-

  free, come on down to Big Tom’s, we’ ll do ya up right,

  until the road bends to

  girls with big tiddies and bad teeth, girls doing

  best they can at Dixie’s Trixie and Go-Go-Derby Gals,

  and when we drove past, it was always

  breakfast time, the trucks still parked in those gravel lots

  looking terrible lonely

  in broad morning light.

  2.

  Outside town, Kentucky was all winter,

  mud wind-whipped to beige

  ice and trees brittled

  bone, the lanes blood-smeared with

  deer and stray dog,

  and on walls of rock

  blasted from the mountain,

  limestone wept long stalactites

  of frozen white.

  Because my body was small, I still fell

  asleep to rocking things

  and dreamt to the tires’

  pop n churn, pop n churn

  waiting for Fanny to say,

  Wake now up, Koey,

  hours later when Tennessee

  pines greened things up again.

  Next came the long fingers

  of moss haunting

  Savannah’s branches,

  then came

  orange groves, miles and miles

  of fruit polka-dotting a waxy sheen.

  Finally, a miracle—a wonder

  like a troll doll spun

  on a pencil’s eraser end—growing not

  out of dirt or clay or what men

  tracked in on boots,

  but from clean, easy-to-sweep-away sand,

  a tree without leaves that fall

  and need to be raked but fronds,

  the kind cut and braided at church

  Sunday before the capital-S son goes and dies

  all over again.

  We’ ll go with Fanny, and we’ ll go to the beach every day, all our problems

  gone, Mama said, because at the end of Dixie is The Florida Turnpike,

  at the end of the turnpike’s the sea.

  3.

  We took Dixie because Dixie was made for

  a car like Fanny’s, a car that preferred

  old highway, a car that wanted nothing to do with

  needless speed, a car that was built

  to coal-barge glide, owning the damn road.

  It was a Cadillac, her Eldorado, a car impossibly

  long with impossible fins, white and waxed and gassed

  ready-chrome-go, the interior kid glove in Atomic Red,

  a climate-controlled bomb shelter, an escape hatch,

  an automobile called home.

  The factory mats were replaced with white shag rugs,

  and because I was a child, I was allowed to be the little animal

  I was, curled up and hiding in that woolen nest

  behind the driver’s seat. Up front, my matriarchal line

  laughed and cussed and flicked so many cigarettes

  we were our own comet,

  tiny red stars sparking down that road.

  4.

  Dixie starts in burning cold, in gas stations

  where you have to
ask for the bathroom key

  and the man hands you one chained to a hubcap that opens

  the kind of toilet Mama and Fanny say not to touch

  with a ten-foot pole.

  They suspend me over, my arms hooked

  around each of their necks and their arms holding

  my legs. I am a little girl made cable car, a cloud high above,

  I am a giggle of weightlessness until Fanny says,

  Enough now, pee.

  Later, bathrooms don’t get any cleaner, but each state

  has treasure to sell—in Tennessee, it’s homemade

  lemon drops and cast iron to shape cornbread

  into little fish; in Georgia, it’s billboards

  for Pecans, Peanuts, Peaches every five miles

  though all we buy is a bologna sandwich

  that gives Mama the shits.

  Across the final line, it’s saltwater taffy

  in every Miami Vice shade, and Roy Rogers welcomes

  weary travelers with stale biscuits and sticky showers

  and Pac-Man machines. Mama gives me some quarters,

  whispers,

  You see? I knew it. Even the rest

  stops are better, everything’s getting so green and warm and clean.

  5.

  How many times did we make the trip,

  Kentucky to Florida and back? So many

  I can honestly say maybe that long tar-patch highway

  is where I was raised.

  It was a move we made whenever we could, more times

  than I care to count; it was a chance to leave

  behind the men and the cold; it was a long stretch

  with Howard Johnsons in between.

  Ho-Jo’s is the only place clean enough to sleep, Fanny said,

  and once my weary drivers drifted off,

  I’d sneak out to the hotel pool, slip under

  the surface, hold my breath,

  open my eyes to the blue lit from within.

  Amniotic, a mermaid then, a girl with nothing

  but sunshine ahead, without a clue

  as far as we got, wherever we went,

  there we would find

  ourselves, there we would still be.

  Fanny Linguistics: How to Say What You Mean

  If angry, simple—say, That really pisses me off. But just frustrated? That burns me up. Or if that lawyer is after you and he’s all bent out of shape, you might decide not to pick up the phone, cause the more you stir shit, the more it stinks.

  If your daughter finally did something right, like fix the cable box, say, Shoot fire, bout time, or you may want to give encouragement (you want her to hook up your VCR too) so snap your fingers, exclaim, Handle it, Roy! Handle it!

  If someone tries to deceive you—a car dealer, rolling the Caddy’s odometer back, or your granddaughter, blaming a dent in that new car on a mango that fell green from your tree—say, Don’t you piss on my head and tell me it’s raining.

  If winter, leave one window open, because you can’t stand being closed in, but make sure to fuss—It’s cold as a witch’s tiddy, and if below zero, the witch should be in a metal bra. If hot, you’re flashing, which happens most year-round, it will likely be hot as a dick, hot as piss, somebody get me a fresh Pepsi, crank up the air, quick.

  If hungry, this one’s easy—I’m bout to starve—but if really hungry, add to death or my ass off. After two bowls of pinto beans and cornbread with green onion and sliced tomato and Frank’s Red Hot, you’re full, ask for your Tums, make a metaphor of your bloat to a tick, high up on a hog, about to pop.

  If a lamp’s expensive, say, Shew, that’s high, and use the card, but if you could never afford it, not in a million years, that lamp’s as high as a cat’s back. Say, You can keep your money, I won’t let the back of your door hit me in the ass.

  If a girl’s got pocked skin, buck teeth, and stringy hair, say God bless her, but if she’s gone off and given head to every boy in the eleventh grade, the whore’s heart might be pea-picking, little, or worse—both—as in, God bless her little, pea-pickin heart.

  Now, if something real sad happens to the lady next door—the cancer took over, there’s nothing left the doctor can cut away—say, Ain’t that a cotton-pickin shame, but if her husband’s running around while she’s pumped with chemo, close the door, talk only in a whisper, even if no one else is in the whole house. Start the conversation with I ain’t one to say nothing, but you wouldn’t believe; end with We better not say nothing, no, not a word.

  If you’re the one brought low because that neighbor is your sister and you heard what’s in her tumor-blocked bowels has started to come out of her mouth, It ain’t worth going into, there’s nothing to say. Best to make the girls ammonia the chandelier and fluff the couch pillows and brush the shag rugs and windex the mirrored backsplash and take all the just-cleaned crystal down to clean again—This house is filthy. We ain’t discussing it. Now, leave me be. Hey, I bet there’s something good on the tee-vee. Don’t give me no shit now, really. Don’t you know Grandma’s had enough—enough of tears?

  Pheno

  as in barbital, as in Luminal, as in an injection

  gone wrong that stopped the apricot hearts

  of fifty institutionalized children

  before the second war. Pheno—as in a barbiturate,

  designed to depress, to hypnotize a seizure with the static

  of its blank screen, pills like snowflakes to slow

  the body’s quick ticking to a single, white

  note that’s not happy, exactly,

  but too leveled to care.

  Pheno, as in the quack days when a dentist

  diagnosed gum disease and convinced her

  to have every tooth jerked out of her

  pretty face before she hit thirty-six, as in the quack days

  when she opened her legs for a

  douche singed with Lysol to keep herself

  fresh, back when folks died of ptomaine poisoning

  from punctured cans and when cigarettes assisted safe delivery—

  smoking being a safe way to keep the baby from being

  too big to birth.

  Used before the FDA and never

  formally cleared, Pheno is a renegade drug,

  a cowboy hee-hawing outside town, not giving

  a good God-damn, so it makes sense

  for forty years she popped them

  whenever she felt frayed—Koey, I’m a wreck.

  Could you go get Grandma her nerve pills?

  Pheno, because some things Monroe did right—

  You can take the medicine, Fanny, he said,

  but no wife of mine’s getting shocked.

  This was when women didn’t get depressed or upset

  but had full-on nervous breakdowns, and for that, applied

  warm gel to both temples and enough voltage

  to make a bad thought into a small, wild

  canary about to land before—bye-bye, birdie—it just

  flew off.

  Pheno, pronounced Fee-No, a good name

  for a horse, a twitchy filly ridden

  by an 89-pound jockey in pink and green silks,

  a smart little switch in his hand. Watch her

  come down the inside line, she’s a beauty,

  every bit as fast as the boys, she’s making a run

  for the roses until the mud catches her deep

  stride, snaps her femur, and from the stands

  you watch them put her down,

  a thing gone from majesty

  to dog food, right there

  on the track.

  All bets off, you cross Central from Churchill Downs,

  find Granger’s Pharmacy, the only place that will still

  fill a prescription that went out with Technicolor film.

  Behind a bookie board soda fountain is Mr. Granger—

  he expects you, he knows why you’ve come.

  He ha
s the yellow bottle waiting and never charges you a dime.

  If this is drug-running, you don’t care: you always do

  as she says. Every month, you pick it up, package it,

  and mail it priority to her home on the Florida coast.

  Pheno, a drug known to work different on

  the old, making the elderly hyperactive, restless,

  unable to sleep, up at three in the morning

  wondering who stole her pretty aqua hand towels

  and that new yellow bowl, accusing her son

  of trying to kill her by bringing home

  a clearance picking of culls—grainy tomatoes

  and chicken black to the bone.

  Pheno—as in her stash of—hundreds of pills

  squirreled away in the bottom dresser drawer

  she couldn’t bend down to reach no more.

  By then she was so sick she was sucking rock salt

  off pretzels and throwing the rest in the trash—

  An iron deficiency, someone said. A loss of blood.

  It was then I held the bottles in my hand,

  wondered how many

  I could swallow down before I knew

  what it felt like to be her, before I could

  quell this sorrow out smooth as

  her satin quilt.

  She woke then and did something she hardly ever did: