Melanie Thon: Meteors in August

We found a corner table, barely big enough for our elbows. The band twanged out a song about a man who killed his unfaithful wife. Justin hopped up to the bar to buy a round, and Marshall tugged Nina onto the center of the dance floor, under the throbbing lights where every man in the place could see her and envy him. How many pretty women were there in this county anyway? Women watched her too. I expected jealousy, hands that itched to tear her yellow hair out by the roots, but their glances were confused, their looks wavered between pity and desire, as if they knew how little time she had, as if they were almost glad to be done with all of that so there was nothing left to lose. Men never think that way. They don’t worry about all the days a woman lives outside the circle of beauty. They want her in those hours of perfection. The future is of limited importance. The morning is a distant country. Even ugly men think they deserve a pretty woman; they take her as their due. But homely women know they’ll never lay their hands on the bare chest of a beautiful man.

Justin returned with two beers in each hand. “I’m not drinking,” I said.

“I am,” he said. “I’m drinking plenty. You just set that beer in front of you till I’m ready.”

Nina and Marshall rocked straight through four tunes, songs about men drinking and gambling too much, forgetting what town they were in, being saved or being drowned by a woman, lying to her either way to get free again and back on the road, lonely as it was, the only life they knew or could bear to live. There were variations, I suppose, silver-tongued devils and regret, a woman who left before the man had a chance to lie because she found the wedding ring he’d hidden in his wallet. She split with his cash and left the ring on top of the wallet so he’d understand why she took her payment. Every woman’s a whore in the end; the singer belted out the moral of the song. I think Justin and I were the only ones in the place listening to the words; everyone else was having too good a time to trouble with details. Nina held on to Marshall’s hands and leaned back, twirling round and round, a wild circle, a dizzy spiral.

They plopped down at the table and guzzled their beers. “Guess you didn’t need time to cool down after all,” Justin said, but Nina was blank, already forgetting that conversation on the porch, that long-ago talk more than an hour in her past. What did it matter? Now she was free, away from her parents’ house. Everything there faded to a blur: her sick father, his rheumy eyes, his damp hands, his bony ribs protruding; her mother standing on the porch, twisting a Kleenex till it came apart in her hands, dropping it on the porch when she waved good-bye, stooping, slowly — much too slowly — to pick it up. Yes, all that was blotted out beneath these sallow lights. Nina pulled out a cigarette and Marshall fumbled to light it; he was a poor gentleman, unpracticed and deliberate, but Nina eased his awkwardness by steadying his hand with her own as he held the match.

Marshall shoved his way to the bar for a second round. He brought four beers, then made a second trip to fetch three shots of Jack Daniel’s.

“Which one of you is going to stay sober to drive?” I said, and they all laughed.

Marshall said, “Lizzie’s not having a good time, are you, Liz?” He flashed that grin but did not enchant me. His teeth were crooked, too big for his mouth; his gums were stained from chewing tobacco.

Nina said, “My sister’s never had a good time.”

I thought, How would you know what I’ve done in my life? Where have you been for the past five years? And I hated her for the way she meant it, and for the ways she might be right.

Marshall asked me to dance, but I couldn’t. I said my shoes were nailed to the floor, and he chuckled as if I’d made a joke. Justin tried to fondle my leg, drawing circles on my skin with one finger. I stamped on his toes.

“Bitch,” he hissed. Then he moved close enough to spit words in my ear that Nina and Marshall wouldn’t hear. “You’re too homely to be choosy,” he said.

I knew that was true, but I figured even an ordinary girl has the right to choose nothing at all.

Justin talked Nina into giving him one chance. I saw how she suffered. Her legs had turned sluggish. Her head rolled back, tired, tired, the longest song she’d ever heard. She made believe she was all alone out there, eyes closed, swaying in her own dark room. A big man with a red beard cut in on Justin and he had to sit down, but Nina didn’t like this partner either. She headed back to the table as soon as the music stopped.

There was a third round and a fourth, whiskey and beer, always one extra draft for Justin. He’d stopped asking Nina to dance: when he wanted her, he yanked her to her feet. After the fourth round, she didn’t look as if she cared whether she danced with Justin or Marshall or some stubby cowboy. One brother was as good as the other, and strangers were no worse. All of them had rank breath, all of them whispered obscenities. If they pressed their hips into hers, she let them; if they put their hands too low on her back and their fingers inched toward her butt, she let them do that too. But she stopped giggling and she stopped smiling. She lit up a new cigarette before the last one was snubbed out. She tossed back her whiskey in one gulp, wincing as she slammed the shot glass on the table. Marshall quit drinking and looked around the room for a woman who was less drunk than Nina and not too ugly. He was tired of my sister, her cigarettes and sloppy talk. Men stopped cruising our corner. Justin torched a pack of matches and didn’t drop it in the ashtray till the flames reached his fingers.

The band wailed on: a preacher man got carried away with a choir girl and had to leave town when she got big and her daddy went crazy; a woman in Wyoming went looking for her husband and found him four years later in Tennessee, with a new wife and three kids.

“You drive,” Justin said to Marshall as we careened out of the Blue Moon. Marshall was a long ways from being sober but he was downright holy in comparison with his brother. Justin clung to Nina and lurched toward a truck that wasn’t his, wasn’t even the right color.

Marshall steered him in the right direction. “Yeah, I’ll drive,” he said, his tone more self-righteous than a man in his condition deserved to use on anyone. Nina sat between the boys and I sat smashed against the door. Marshall rammed the truck into reverse, lifting his foot off the clutch before we’d slipped into gear; we might have been jolted off the seat if we hadn’t been crammed in so tight.

Once we hit the main road and Nina’s drunkenness was a private matter, Marshall seemed to like her well enough again. We plowed through the thick night. As soon as he jerked us into fourth, Marshall put his free hand on Nina’s thigh. He didn’t bother being sneaky, starting at the knee and working up: he clawed at her skirt and grabbed the inside of her leg barely an inch from her crotch. A skunk had just been hit. The smell filled the cab and stayed with us all the way home. Justin pawed Nina from the other side and sucked at her neck. I heard a slurping noise, bits of flesh being pulled into his mouth. I wondered how he felt, pawing this drunken woman, this Nina who was once a girl he would not dare to touch, remembering the days when putting his tongue to her flesh would have been sacred or profane. Surely this was not how he envisioned it in those dark hours of dreaming, those bleak early mornings when he woke, his sheets damp, his belly sticky. Surely in those dreams she kissed him back, tenderly or viciously, even fury was better than this numb response, these closed eyes, this slack mouth, like Jesse’s mouth, watery and full of death. Surely her legs opened slowly, waves opening and closing around him, enveloping his body, lapping his thighs, warm, not the lake, not like that at all, a pool up the shore, water trapped behind a rock where the sun beat down on it all day till it was almost hot. But now, in the truck, the girl’s legs twitched where he touched her, neither welcoming nor forbidding, the twitch of a drugged animal, a dog on its way down, a sick pig, his favorite one.