Tim Sandlin: Social Blunders

“Remember when we moved in here?” she said. “That doctor Caspar rented from had dead animals on every wall.”

“You slept on the couch for three months.”

“Until Hank got me into bed.”

“Why the lie, Lydia?”

She blinked once and whipped open the medicine cabinet. One hand held a paper bag while the other hand scooped in pill bottles, aspirin tins, and boxes of Q-Tips. “You’re not going to let it drop, are you?”

“I can’t.”

A plastic jar of Mary Kay night cream missed the bag and hit the floor, where it rolled under the club-footed bathtub. Lydia’s back rose and fell, then she turned to face me.

“Okay, shoot. Accuse me of child abuse.”

I sat on the side of the tub with the VCR in my lap. Lydia closed the toilet lid and sat on it. The déjà vu element was amazing. We could have been mother and son in 1965, settling in for one of our sink-side bull sessions.

I repeated, “Why the lie?”

She blinked twice more. “I couldn’t very well tell the truth.”

“You didn’t have to tell me anything.”

She did the maneuver where she blew air straight up, lifting her bangs off her forehead. It translated as Give me a break .

“You kept hounding me for information, and then you found those pictures in my panty box. What were you doing in my panty box in the first place?”

Typical ploy—shift the defensiveness to me. “Don’t change the subject.”

“Times like this I would give anything to still smoke.”

The stall technique. I said, “Lydia.”

She crossed the right ankle over her left shin. “Sooner or later I had to come up with a story.”

“But gang rape?”

She dropped her eyes to the floor. Her voice was small. “That’s the story I told myself. After you tell yourself something a thousand times, you forget it’s not true.” She seemed to be drifting back in time, growing younger as I watched. “When you called to ask if their names matched Shannon’s list, I didn’t remember at first what really happened.” She looked up, willing me to believe her. “I was scared to death. I didn’t know what to do.”

“The truth might have worked.”

She uncrossed her legs. “I thought the truth would make you hate me. You may not believe it, but I don’t want you to hate me.”

I’d come prepared for anger and screams and gotten what I least expected—sincerity from my mother. Maybe. When you’ve grown up with the queen of manipulation, you learn to distrust anything that seems straightforward. My great fear was that someday Lydia would break down and speak the truth and I’d be too suspicious to listen.

She must have seen the doubt in my face. “What do you want from me, Sam?”

I stared at the VCR. “Remorse. Some indication that you’re sorry you screwed up my life.”

“One social blunder of mine did not screw up your life.”

“It’s not just the lie. You were never a mother. From the time we left your daddy’s house, I cooked all the meals, did the laundry, tucked you in at night.”

“You volunteered to cook and clean.”

“You never once told me to do my homework or pick up my socks. I was the only kid in seventh grade who could stay out all night without calling home.”

“Some boys would like that.”

“No, they wouldn’t.”

She snapped. “Okay. I’m sorry. Are you satisfied now?”

The vein in Lydia’s forehead beat a blue rhythm. She couldn’t help who she was. You can no more force your parents to change than you can teach a cat to stop killing songbirds.

I said, “There’s a big gap between apology and condescending glibness.”

Lydia almost fired off an angry retort, but something changed her mind, and she slipped back into sadness. She pouted. “I’m not the type for guilt.”

“I know.” My reflection in the VCR control panel was distorted by knobs and switches. If I moved my head a bit to the side, my nose looked like a pig’s snout. “I wonder why I’m nothing but a huge glob of guilt.”

“It must skip generations.”

What did that mean for Shannon? Lydia leaned forward on the toilet seat and laced her fingers into a web. She spoke to her palms. “I had you right after I turned fifteen, the poor little rich girl who’d never made a decision in her life. Pregnancy doesn’t give you instant maturity. It just makes you fat.”

She raised her hands to her face, thumbs on cheekbones, and looked at me through the web. “I’m sorry I did such a shitty job raising you.”

Maybe she meant it. Maybe not. I like to think she did. Either way, I’d gotten what I came for.

“I’m sorry I lied about the rape. I’m sorry I didn’t bake cookies and sing lullabies to you in your crib. I’m sorry you did the laundry. I’m sorry I let you stay out all night—what was the other thing?”

“Homework.”

“I’m sorry I never made you do homework.” She dropped her hands. “Anything else?”

“I guess not.”

“Can you get on with your life now?”

“Yes, I can get on with my life.”

“’Bout damn time.”

We celebrated with a conciliatory cup of coffee at the kitchen table. It’s a wonderful old table Lydia found at the estate sale of an old dude ranch where Owen Wister was supposed to have written The Virginian . I liked to imagine Owen writing, “When you call me that, smile !” then spilling his whiskey on this very wood. As soon as Lydia went underground and left me in charge of the house, I planned to steal the table and take it back to Carolina.

Lydia held the cup with both hands and blew steam from the surface. Ever since I can remember, Lydia’s held her coffee cup with both hands. She said, “Did you ever wonder what I did that pissed Caspar off so much he sent us west?”

“Only twice a day for twenty years.”

Lydia glanced at me, then back at her coffee. “Right after you turned twelve, I started seeing Skip.”

“Seeing?”

Her lips flattened in disgust at my stupid question. “Okay, fucking.”

Someday I meant to price lie detector tests. “Funny he didn’t mention it,” I said.

“Skip didn’t know who I was. We had to sneak around on account of his bitchy little wife and my father, so Skip never saw the house. He’d forgotten my name by then, if he ever knew it.”

Lydia with Skip and me with Skip’s wife made for a number of abstract equations.

“Whoever invented the term Southern peckerhead must have been thinking of Skip,” I said.

“Don’t I know it. I only saw him to upset Caspar.” Lydia smiled into her cup. “Upsetting Daddy was the prime directive of my childhood. I can’t tell you how many jerks I did nasty with trying to get his attention.”

“Caspar knew about my fathers?”

“I told him the rape story first, but he threatened to cane them in public, so I had to come clean.”

“You told your father the truth, but not me?”

“I already said that, Sam. Repeating it won’t change the facts.”

When I was young I had this strange feeling everyone around me knew something I didn’t know. Turns out I was right.

“So you screwed Skip, again, and Caspar found out—”

“Caspar always found out.”

“And he shipped us as far away as he could imagine.”

She nodded. “This house. Now that I’m leaving, I think I’ll miss it.”

“C’mon, Lydia. The bureaucrat in charge of dog gifts will open the FedEx packet, throw the toy in the trash, and that will be the end of it.”

Lydia looked dubious. Outside, a truck door slammed. Lydia clicked down her cup.

“Hank’s back,” she said. “Are we done with accusations and recriminations, because I have to hit the trail?”