Elizabeth Massie: Wire Mesh Mothers

The Friends of Animals held an event nearly every weekend, protesting outside a slaughterhouse in Albemarle County — “Meat? Would you kill and eat your brother, your sister?” — printing up and distributing brochures denouncing animal testing in the University’s biology department. Kate savored every daring moment. She felt a new life in her blood. She had discovered the thrill of doing.

And then she’d met Donald McDolen.

She had fallen in love. She’d skipped Friends meetings, had even returned to eating chicken and burgers on her dates with Donald. The Friends denounced Kate as a backsliding hypocrite, but Bill and Alice remained her friend.

Three days after graduation, Kate and Donald had married. And so it went. And so it had become.

Kate knew Alice and Bill would help her. They would be proud of Kate, reclaiming her power to do right. They would hail the delivering angel.

In the driver’s seat, Kate pulled the rearview around to look at herself. Kate forced her eyes to relax. She knew how to perform. She’d kept her cool during conferences with parents when their bodies reeked and their breaths came out like fumes from rotten blast furnaces. Kate knew how to play the role. No one would suspect the woman at the wheel to be a kidnapper.

“Mistie, you okay back there? We’re going on a little ride and soon, you can sit up front with me. All right?”

Mistie sneezed, and Kate took that as a sign she hadn’t suffocated to death under the quilt. She hoped Mistie had covered her nose but doubted it. Kate turned on the radio to FM 9.21. Oldies. “Build Me Up, Buttercup.”

The rearview was snapped back into position, the key was turned in the ignition. The car drove out of the lot, sliding down to the road as easily as a kid on a Water Park inner tube. Kate steered right onto Route 58 into the setting sun. She squinted and lowered the visor. She noticed her fingers were locked around the steering wheel like a drowning woman’s fingers locked about a stick. She forced them to loosen. Her knuckles were cold.

“What the hell you waiting for?” called Darlene from the sinkhole. Tony glanced back from the roadside and gave her sister the finger, though her hand was cold and she couldn’t really feel the finger wiggle.

“Where you goin’ dressed like that? You look like a clown! It ain’t Halloween, dumb ass!”

Tony turned away. She used to enjoy getting into it with her sister, loved to argue her and then punch her into the ground, but anymore it was a waste of time. Darlene was stupid as a slug. Let her get into it with the twins. Darlene was so brainless, an argument with Judy or Jody could keep her busy for hours.

Tony had much more important matters at hand.

Overhead, the sky had grown heavy and thick with impending sleet. The air smelled wet and metallic. Tony shook her head, and she could feel the blood ringing just behind her ears. Her arms and legs ached with the cold, but the revolver in her pocket was hot. The knife in her shoe was rubbing a blister, and it felt good.

Tony wasn’t exactly sure of the time because she didn’t wear a watch, though she had one. It was in her bedroom in the dresser with other stupid trash her family had given her for Christmases. It was a girly watch, a nasty, pink-banded watch with some sort of orange swirly pearly shit on the face. She’d been given it four years ago when she was eleven. Back when she still let them call her Angela. Back before she knew the truth of the matter, the reality of the world. Fuck it all, she’d been ignorant.

A low-riding station wagon drove by, slowed, and turned into the driveway of the peach house. Tony stared at it, imagining it bursting into flames and blowing bits of crack-heads all over the yard. The car door popped open after a few seconds. A thin, slow-moving man and a thin, slow-moving woman climbed out. They weren’t old — maybe early twenties — but walked like they’d been hit with a bat for the last forty years. They whacked on the splintery door; stood shifting foot to foot in the cold. The woman was wearing a thin sweater and no coat. The door at last opened and the heads went inside.

Tony bet there was a baby somewhere, left behind at the camper where these two walking trash bags lived. Maybe two babies. Little crack-addicted babies who cried all the time. Tony’s skin crawled at the thought.

A pick-up truck passed on the road, and a red El Camino. This car honked and Tony gave it the finger. She didn’t know them and didn’t want to.

“Who’s honkin’?” called Darlene.

Tony ignored her.

Just as it began to sleet, the sex-stinking Chevelle pulled up. Through the foggy glass, Tony could hear Whitey say, “Wait ‘til you see what we got, Tony!”

The rear car door popped open. Tony climbed in. Darlene, up in the sink-hole, watched with snide disinterest as her older sister, dressed like a clown, pulled away.

“You all right? Mistie?” Kate asked again, and then reached one hand back over the seat to make sure the girl was there and hadn’t somehow seeped out through the door crack or melted into the cushion. The lump was there, squirming mildly under the quilt. Kate nodded to herself and said, “Okay, then.”

The windshield was struck with a plop of sleet. Then another.

“Oh, now isn’t this just dandy?”

Another. She turned on the windshield wipers. On the radio, the Monkees’ “Auntie Grizelda” was playing. A little too frantic for the moment at hand. She switched it off.

The McDolen house was four and three-tenths miles from the school, off Route 58 and up a long, spruce and dogwood-lined drive which Kate’s husband had paved when they’d moved in nearly four years ago. The house was an elegant brick structure, built by Donald’s grandfather Owen Bennett McDolen in the late 1920’s. While everyone else in the area was scrambling to survive the Great Depression, raising extra vegetables in their gardens to can and pickle and stash in pantries in case things never got any better, God forbid, or moving in with other family members in the county when upkeep on their small farms was too much to maintain financially, and making corn moonshine to sell on the side for cash money when cash money had become a thing of legend, the McDolen family went on with life as usual in their brown brick manor house. They hired black jazz musicians — all the daring rage at the time for rich white folks — to travel from Richmond to Pippins to entertain at birthdays and other festive gatherings. They kept a firm hand and close eye on the bottom thirty to make sure the train-hopping hobos didn’t set up their tents on McDolen property. They bided their time on money they’d hid in wall safes and under mattresses and in foreign banks.

Kate had never been especially crazy about the house. The bricks were in eternal need of replacement as Owen had thought old bricks from England would be the most elegant when construction had begun. Elegant perhaps, but hardly hearty. They’d been made with too much sand, and time had eroded many of them, requiring constant, vigilant replacements. The interior echoed regardless of the area carpets and there was no air conditioning in the summer because it would “ruin the ambiance.” The basement smelled of old biscuits and there was a subterranean maid’s room, now full of old books and magazines that continually bred nests of field mice and centipedes.

Kate and Donald had lived several places since they’d married — Charlottesville, Richmond, and Alexandria as Donald completed his education as a lawyer, passed the bar, and joined a firm for a short stint with big-city legalities. But Donald had always wanted to come back to the place of his childhood. He was the only son. It fell to him, he said, to keep the home place in the family. And so to Pippins they had moved, hi-ho-the-dairy-oh, to Pippins they had moved. Donnie, who had been born in Richmond, was a little apprehensive at the idea of living in the country; he made Kate promise he wouldn’t have to wear overalls to school.