Sugarland Read online

  Sugar

  LAND

  a novel by

  Joni Rodgers

  Spinsters Ink

  Duluth, MN

  USA

  Also by Joni Rodgers

  Crazy for Trying

  Sugar Land © 1999 by Joni Rodgers

  All rights reserved

  First edition published May 1999

  10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2

  Spinsters Ink

  32 E. First St., #330

  Duluth, MN 55802-2002, USA

  Cover art and design by Sara Sinnard, Sarin Creative

  Production:

  Liz Brissett

  Claire Kirch

  Charlene Brown

  Kim Riordan

  Helen Dooley

  Emily Soltis

  Joan Drury

  Amy Strasheim

  Tracy Gilsvik

  Liz Tufte

  Marian Hunstiger

  Nancy Walker

  “Write Me in Care of the Blues” by W.S. Stevenson and Eddie Miller

  “Sheik of Araby” by Benjamin W. Green

  “Melancholy Baby” by Phillip John Mattson

  “Them There Eyes” by Maceo Pinkard, Doris Tauber, and William G. Tracey

  “Old Man River” by Oscar Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern

  “Minnie the Moocher” by Cab Calloway, Clarence Gaskill, and Irving Mills

  “Gloomy Sunday” by Laslo Javor, Samuel M. Lewis, and Rezso Seres

  “All the Pretty Little Ponies” Traditional, additional lyrics by Kenny Loggins

  and David Pack

  “I See the Moon” Traditional, additional lyrics by Joni Rodgers and

  Linda Darelius

  “All of Me” by Gerald Marks and Seymour B. Simons

  “Jolene” by Dolly Parton

  “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” by Eric Bernard Griffin and

  Regenia E. Anderson

  “If I Only Had a Heart” by Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg

  “Beat Me Daddy Eight to the Bar” by Eleanore Sheehy, Hughie Prince, and Don Raye

  Excerpt from Tao Te Ching by Lao-tzu translated by Steven Mitchell

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Rodgers, Joni, 1962 –

  Sugar land : a novel / by Joni Rodgers — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 1-883523-32-X (alk. paper)

  I. Title.

  PS3568.034816S8 1999

  813’.54—dc21

  99-11176

  CIP

  Special thanks to

  The Literate Chicks:

  Carole Silvoy

  Debbie Robertson

  Sydney Burgess

  Gaylynn Pruitt and

  Andrea Schultz

  and to Fred Ramey

  for reading and sharing insight into

  early versions of this manuscript.

  Thanks also to

  Dr. Wendy Harpham

  Dr. Jung-Sil Ro

  and Nurse-Midwife Connie Graham

  for oncological/obstetrical information

  and to Gary Rodgers

  for technical information and a steady supply of sushi

  and to Malachi Blackstone Rodgers

  for his amazing vocabulary of endearments and invectives.

  I’m especially grateful to

  my editor, Joan Drury,

  and the staff of Spinsters Ink

  for making this manuscript be a book.

  This book is dedicated

  with great love and deep respect to

  Gary Rodgers

  and to the memory of

  Ursula Bird King Rodgers.

  You have ravished my heart

  my sister, my bride,

  you have ravished my heart

  with a glance of your eyes.

  Song of Solomon 4:9

  Vamp

  You know it’s nothing good when the phone rings and it’s past twelve and your husband isn’t home and you’re sitting in the bathroom with your jeans around your knees; no, you know your daddy has died or the place where you work is on fire or an old lover of yours is holding ten people hostage in an abandoned warehouse and for some dang reason he gave the cops your name and said you better come with a helicopter and that little faux leopard skin Frederick’s-of-Hollywood number or everybody gets it. You know it’s not the opportunity you dove for all day, running every time that phone rang, grasping for a friendly voice, a free carpet cleaning, the church quilt raffle, but no, it’s the principal’s office or a bill collector or the click! hummmm of somebody too rude to even tell you sorry, wrong number, please excuse the ring, and then after midnight, it grates through the air like a burglar alarm, cutting between claps of B-movie thunder, waking the babies and making your heart jump into your stomach, and this is the moment you know. That’s it.

  Show’s over.

  Table of Contents

  The First Trimester

  The Second Trimester

  The Third Trimester

  A Memory

  Sugar Land, Texas 1969

  “Once upon a time,” said the mommy, drawing the story out of the ruffled curtains and onto the floor, “there was a woman of uncommon beauty, far beyond what earthly men had ever seen, and her name was Psyche, which is the Greek word for soul, you know.”

  “Here’s Psyche, y’all! Skipper is Psyche,” said the littler one. Skipper twirled—lithe, blonde, and leggy in those little-girl hands—as the less littler one propped up stiff-limbed Barbies and Kens to admire her.

  “But Psyche was a very lonely girl on account of, while her great beauty inspired an abundance of flattery, she longed for the true love that’s awakened when you see into somebody’s heart.” Then the mommy made Chatty Cathy’s voice, regal as Venus, “‘What’s this? Am I, Aphrodite, scorned while worshippers cast flowers on this little ol’ mortal girl?’ And she got green-eyed mean jealous when she saw it, and she said she was gonna make Psyche marry a loathsome hideous monster and make her like it!”

  Skipper Psyche sighed and begged, but her doll father’s painted-on propriety did not waver. She dutifully advanced in her wedding dress to lie on top of the dollhouse, submitting to the will of the gods and all the world who worshipped them.

  “Poor Miss Psyche, she laid herself down and cried herself to sleep. And then...”

  The little girls shrieked with fright and loathing as a cackling Mr. Potato Head swooped in on the power of large ears that were stuck in his armholes to form piggish wings, and their mommy made music like the Wizard of Oz flying monkey theme.

  “Dee-da-deet-dee-deee-deee! But then! Ah-aaah-da-da-daaah!”

  The monkey music turned into an aria as Ken soared, naked and magnificent, his bread-bag wings flared and shimmering.

  “Eros, the god of love, he was the son of Aphrodite, and she told him to fly on up there, and he did, and he had a bottle of joy in one hand and a bottle of bitterness in the other. And he started to pour the bitterness into Psyche’s mouth to make her fall in love with the monster—”

  “But if she was in love with him, Mama, she wouldn’t think he was a monster, would she?”

  “Shut up! I like this part!”

  “Say, Bitty Kitty,” the mommy reprimanded, “we don’t say ‘shut up.’ It’s not ladylike.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “He went to open her mouth like this,” the mommy smoothed her fingertips across their mouths, “but when he touched her lips, Psyche opened her eyes!”

  Skipper bolted upright with a startled cry.

  “Now, of course, she couldn’t see him on account of he was invisible, but he looked into her eyes and saw how brave and good she was, and he leaned in closer, and ‘Aughl’” she groaned for him as the number two pencil stub grazed his thi
gh. “He accidentally poked himself with his own magic arrow!”

  “He poked himself! He poked himself!”

  “Now, he has to fall in love!”

  “Yes! And instantaneously—”

  “Mama, what does—”

  “It means right this very second. He instantaneously this very second fell desperately in love, and when he went to kiss his own true love, he spilled that bottle of joy all over her.”

  This part was more fun in the bathtub when real Mr. Bubble joy could be spilled over Psyche’s breast, but for now, the mommy tipped an empty bottle from an old Pretty Me Pink play makeup kit.

  “And he called his friend Zephyrus to carry her down to his garden of great delights.”

  The little girls made the whispering voice of the wind god, mouths like kisses as they wafted her away the way they would do for dandelion feathers. They cupped their hands and floated her down to the rose-colored carpet, sweet Eros at her side. He enfolded her in his plastic embrace, and his wings quivered in their twist-ties as he kissed her.

  “‘Oh, most beautiful Psyche, you shall be my wife,’” the mommy spoke for him, gentle and low, but raised his inflexible hand above her golden head. “‘As long as you obey the rules. You have to stay right here in this house, and you can never see who I really am, ‘cause if you ever try to get a look at me, I’ll fly away.’”

  “And then what happened, Mama?”

  “They lived happily in the castle together. And soon Psyche was expecting a baby.”

  “And then what?”

  “Then they all went to sleep because they had to work the next day.”

  “Mamaaaaa...”

  “Mama, pleeeeease?”

  “You left out the part with the king of the ants!”

  “And the rams, Mama! The terrible rams with the golden fleets!”

  “And the part where she drinks ambrocious and becomes immoral!”

  “Nope nope nope. We leave for San Antonio at seven. I told them you’d be there for a radio thing before the two o’clock show.”

  The mommy swept the company of gods and goddesses off the bed and lay down, pulling the little girls next to her, each on a side.

  “What’s ‘immoral,’ Mama?” asked the littler one.

  “Immor-tal, Moon Pie. Big difference. Immortal means a goddess. Immoral means plain ol’ human being.”

  “Did she get wings?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose she could have.”

  “Did she have the baby?”

  “Yeah, Mama, did she have a boy or a girl?”

  “I don’t remember, my sweeties. It’s time to go to sleep now.”

  The mommy got up and turned out the light, and the little girls scootched closer together in the ruffled canopy bed, peering into the dark for the focused glow of the Jesus-shaped night-light.

  “You know what I want to be when I grow up, Mama?”

  “What, Moon Pie?”

  “An immoral goddess. With wings.”

  “Well,” the mommy kissed her forehead, “good luck with that.”

  She leaned across to the other side of the bed.

  “How ‘bout you, Bitty Kitty? What would you like to be?”

  “Oh, a goddess, I guess,” Kitten yawned. “Or a mommy.”

  The First Trimester

  The butterfly sleeps

  well, perched on the temple bell...

  Until it rings.

  Buson

  So you’d think Kit would have known better than to answer that stupid phone again. She should have known to stay right there in the bathroom, reading “Can This Marriage Be Saved” from a rippled back issue of Ladies’ Home Journal till she lost the circulation in her legs. She should have let that phone ring until the whole street cried uncle.

  She couldn’t leave the house, run screaming into the night. That was impossible, because Mitzi and Coo were upstairs sleeping in their footie pajamas, jungle-print sheets all kicked down and tangled up. She was trapped like a wayward skunk in a stainless steel Humane Society trap with that stupid dang phone ringing and ringing and ringing itself half off the kitchen wall and refusing to be slighted. She ran down the stairs, struggling her jeans up, leaping and dodging stuffed animals and Tonka trucks and Mr. Talkity II and Barbie’s racy pink Corvette.

  “Hello?”

  She wouldn’t say “Prizer residence” in the middle of the night in case it was some kind of homicidal schizophrenic or salesperson or something.

  There was nothing for a moment, so she said again, “Hello?”

  “Kit...” The voice on the far end of the line was instantly recognizable as her little sister, even though the voice was choked with tears.

  “Kiki? Are you okay?”

  “Kit, you gotta come pick me up because W-Wayne ...”

  She was in full sob now, and there was no point in trying to understand a word she said, so Kit just hushed her and hummed to her and tried to talk her through it like usual.

  “Kalene ... shhh. Kiki, honey, what’s happened?”

  “We’re really over this time, Kit. He says he loves somebody else.” And there was a heartful of sobbing then.

  “Oh, Kiki... no ...” Kit pushed her hand against the front of her shirt, as if it were her own life coming undone. She let Kiki cry for another minute or two and then said low and firm, like a mommy who knows best, “Kiki, you listen to me. You put Oscar and Chloe in the car and come over here right now. I don’t care what he says, that car is half yours, and he can fight you for it later. No, I can’t. I don’t have any way to pick you up, sweetie. Mel is working overtime, and his truck was outa gas, and so he took the station wagon. Yes, you can, Kalene, because that’s what you have to do. Well, then wait till he has to go to the bathroom or something and then ... No, you don’t need any of that. Just put them in the car in their pj’s. They can borrow stuff from my kids in the morning.”

  After a little more coaxing and hushing and firmness, Kit hung up the phone and went to pull out the couch bed. She had thought of telling Kalene to stop at the Uni-Mart and pick up some chocolate-chip-cookie-dough ice cream, but asking a woman to buy her own comfort food at a time like this would be tantamount to telling a child to kiss her own boo-boo. She checked fridge and freezer, but ten days after the big payday grocery shop, there was little in stock to succor a broken heart. Kit and the kids had eaten macaroni and cheese with sliced up hot dogs for supper the last three nights.

  She checked their lunch boxes. Mitzi had a Rice Crispy square that one of the other kindergarten mommies had sent to school as a hand-out birthday treat. That was a possibility. Coo had an X-Men comic book, a Fruit Roll-up, and a neon green “Fourth Grade Rules” bookmark, but all three looked like he might have been chewing on them a little.

  After double-checking the impoverished cookie jar and even the dusty potty-training reward can, Kit plugged in the air popper and measured a quarter cup of kernels. They could munch on popcorn and split the last can of Diet Coke, she decided, spreading sheets and afghans on the couch bed. Oscar and Chloe could sleep in sleeping bags on the floor upstairs, and in the morning, she’d make pancakes so it would feel like a big camp-out adventure instead of the death throes of a bad marriage.

  As the popcorn whirred and snapped, overshooting the mixing bowl, Kit picked up paintbrushes and tubes of acrylic color she’d been using to stencil tulips on the corners of her cupboard doors. She untaped the stencil and pulled it away from the wood, smearing the still-wet paint.

  “Dang.”

  So much for her third try. The door was beginning to look thick from being painted over.

  Kit couldn’t understand it. This was not a difficult task. She’d been doing far more complicated designs, stencilled and freehand, every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for the last nine years over at Scandinavian Design and Furnishings. This was something she was supposed to be good at. Under her practiced hand, a plain piece of wood blossomed with gardenias to wilkommen friends to a front door or remind
a kitchen that Kaffetåren den bästa är av alla jordiska drycker. Customers would commission a dry sink or chair backs or a nursery ensemble, and Kit could pick up the exact design from a length of wallpaper or scrap of fabric. She could imitate a Gauguin fruit bowl, transfer cartoon characters from a video game box— whatever they wanted—which is what made this cupboard door all the more infuriating.

  First, she’d tried to freehand small groups of cherries, but they somehow looked like little red castanets when she was done. She painted over them with daisies, but those inexplicably began to look like the Maguire Sisters, much the same way Ebenezer Scrooge’s door knocker transmuted into the face of Jacob Marley. Over those, she was now attempting a pathetically simple U-Can-Do stencil from the craft store. She even practiced on the doorjamb first, but the smooth white surface of the door continued to bait and switch on her, warping beneath her touch, resisting any acceptable pattern.

  Kit was a believer in signs and omens. This was God telling her to take care of the laundry instead of wasting time on aesthetics. She picked up the drop cloth, pressed lids on the plastic paint containers, put the brushes back in her take-to-work bag, and unplugged the popper.

  Upstairs, she pulled sleeping bags from the top shelf of the linen closet, then went to Mitzi’s room for extra pillows. Mitzi stirred and whimpered when the closet door slid open, so Kit paused to kiss her and stroke her cheek.

  “I love you, my Mitzi,” she whispered. “You can be anything you want to be. You are strong and smart and beautiful.”

  An article Kit had read in a parenting magazine said the mind is very receptive while in the alpha state, so she made it a practice to deliver positive reinforcement to her children while they were sleeping. One of the other mommies at library class swore it was the breakthrough for her un-potty-trainable Kevvy.

  “You are Millicent Jane Prizer,” Kit said, stroking the key acupressure points, “Attorney at Law, Doctor of Neurophysics, Majority Leader and Speaker of the House of Representatives.”

  Next door in Cooper’s room, she tucked him back under his blankets and whispered, “I love you, Cooper Theodore Prizer. You are a talented and intelligent individual. You are sensitive to the needs of those around you and value them for who and what they are. Truth, love, and justice are your armaments, and you are gonna pick up after yourself and be very nice to your sister tomorrow.”