Margaret Sexton - A Kind of Freedom

“You satisfied with yourself gaining so much weight?” her mother asked, not even looking up, once Evelyn had finished one and was fishing through the jar for her second. “You think that’s a way to attract another boy, thickening yourself past recognition?” her mother went on.

Evelyn was so startled by the question — she had been so convinced she had cleared a reaction from her mother — she had to wait a while before an answer came to her.

“Ruby never had a problem getting men,” she said after many seconds. “I’m still not as big as she is.”

“Not everybody carries weight the same.”

No, they didn’t. Still Evelyn wondered about the pig lips. She was almost finished with this one, and she had anticipated putting a third on some white bread and spreading a spoonful of mayonnaise over it.

Evelyn’s mother sighed, and she looked down at her daughter’s feet. Gazing at her from that angle, she said, “I can imagine how you must be feeling, and for that reason I’ve given it three months. I know you loved that boy, and he loved you, but I just—” she paused here, “ Bon-temps fait crapaud manque bounda . I just don’t want you to throw your life away.”

“I’m not, Mother,” Evelyn said, tempering the part of herself that wanted to exclaim that her life was just beginning really, that maybe it wouldn’t proceed in the appropriate order, but no one would remember that part once Renard was home again.

“I hardly ever see you studying anymore.”

“We’re on a break, Mother.”

“You don’t even read your old books. You just mope around the house, eating, and sleeping, like you’re somebody’s widow. I didn’t raise you to fall apart because some man left you. Look at Ruby; she mourned for a while, but at least she’s going out now. She’s resuming her old life—”

“He’s not just ‘some man,’ Mother,” Evelyn cut her off.

Her mother sighed again. “That’s not my point, Evelyn. Whether you knew him well or not—”

“There’s no question about it really, whether I knew him. I did.”

“I just don’t want to see you lose yourself, sweetie.”

At that, her father walked in, and her mother stood to fix him a plate he wouldn’t eat. Evelyn noticed for the first time that if she had changed in those last months, he had too, that his hair had thinned around the middle and that his pants were bulky between his legs. He didn’t look up at her. He didn’t look at any of them anymore. He passed through more than occupied the place, his head down, his shoulders hunched.

Evelyn looked away too; she hardened any pity she felt toward him, the way she calcified her sadness after Renard left, and she realized how flat her life before him had been.

Renard was coming home though; in his last note he had said it, then he’d signed it “Don’t worry about anything, I’m safe, and I’m yours,” but she had considered the sentiment so much at that point the words themselves had no effect.

She reached back into the jar.

She thought about Renard in some unimaginable place across the sea, her picture the one she’d taken at her last debutante ball, upright beside his bed frame, and she smiled to herself. She walked to the icebox and swiveled a dollop of mayonnaise out of the jar with her finger, stuffed it in her mouth, then bit halfway into a pig lip.

It was November in New Orleans but still unseasonably hot, and Evelyn had taken to dimming the lights, drawing the drapes, and running ice cubes over her skin. She still kept up the charade of going to school, and sometimes she’d carry a book to bed before she fell asleep inside it. Otherwise, the house motored on without her. As Mother had said, Ruby was perking up, going out most Saturday nights. Evelyn didn’t think there was another man in the picture yet, but knowing Ruby, he was just around the corner. Daddy came home for dinner as if in allegiance to the family they had been, but instead of complimenting their mother on the meal, he spread it around on his plate, then excused himself. And Mother could be found upstairs any hour of the day, limp amid the out-of-season drapes and rugs.

A scene like that might have depressed Evelyn if she were living inside it, but it was impossible to notice it beside her world of promise. She knew just the place her own family would live, a little shotgun in Tremé, so close that she could see her parents but set apart from her childhood house enough that she and Renard could start their own life. She hadn’t decided how she’d get the money, but she knew with nearly two years of college, she could pick up a secretarial position. She was too big now, but once the baby was here, she could leave it with Miss Georgia and set to looking. In her airier dreams, her husband Dr. Renard August Williams, was head of hematology at the Negro hospital at Flint-Goodrich, and since she had graduated top of her class at Dillard, he often called on her to assist him.

She’d tried to get more detailed in her imaginings, but what did she know about hematology? She’d quit nursing school halfway through, and that was three months ago, one third of the way through a pregnancy that was gobbling up her mind. So she’d think about the house, how it would be so fine her mother would be embarrassed to remember how she’d treated her. Evelyn would learn the proper way to prepare tea for a lady, what order to serve the snacks in, which fingers to lace around the arm of the teacup, who should pour the first cup. Her daddy would visit every Sunday and hold her hand on the way out to the Cadillac she and Renard had bought him. He might not say anything, or maybe he would, but either way she would know he felt silly for how wrong he’d been. That baby of hers, he’d say or want to say, had salvaged not only Evelyn but all of them.

“You just going to lie around all day dreaming?” Ruby walked hard into the bedroom where Evelyn was draped over her bed.

“What else is there to do?” Evelyn barely looked up from her pillow.

Ruby stomped her foot in front of her. “School for one, girl. But I guess you forgot about that. I ran into Rose Haydel today, and she told me that you haven’t gone in months. I argued with her. I called her a two-faced low-life lying sack of potatoes right there in front of everyone, said she was just trying to spite me and my family by making up garbage, but then her worst enemy got in my face and repeated her, said everybody knew it.” Ruby paused then, seemingly for effect. “I looked around the circle that had formed, and it was true, everyone was nodding their heads. God, Evelyn.” Her voice rose and it didn’t seem as if she were putting on a show anymore. “I’ve never been so humiliated in my entire life. I walked all the way home thinking about what they’d said, going over it in my mind. I thought the worst part was how foolish I looked out there, but the more I thought about it, the worst part was that you’ve been walking with me every day for two months just pretending, and for what, all in the service of a lie?”

Ruby walked closer to the bed now, so close she could touch Evelyn if she stuck her hand out.

“What kind of sickness has crept in your brain that you would do something like that? And to me?” Her voice was breaking now. “Answer me. I thought we were close. Sisters, yes, but more than that, I thought we were friends.”

“I didn’t say we weren’t.” Evelyn still faced the pillow.

Ruby yanked it from under her face and threw it at her. “ You didn’t say we weren’t. You didn’t say we weren’t. Girl, wake up. Either you’re heartsick or you’re brain-dead or you’re—”

She stopped talking, surveying her sister’s body. She shook her head. “Can’t be.” She pulled up Evelyn’s nightgown without a fight, gasped at what she found.