Dorothy's

This is part of a longer thing I’m working on—sharing in an attempt to get outta my head about not sharing stuff til it’s “finished”. Most of the folks mentioned in this are no longer living, but I changed their names anyway—except for my siblings. They don’t mind.

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DOROTHY’S

It didn’t take very long for Mom to realize Dad couldn’t be counted on to watch us while she was at work. It wasn’t that he didn’t have time—he hadn’t had a job since he got laid off. He just sometimes worked on people’s cars when they asked him to. The issue was more that, a lot of the time, he’d start the day with us and then we wouldn’t see him for the rest of it. I can’t remember if there was one specific incident that made her decide to find a babysitter for the four of us. Maybe there was one too many times of him letting someone else keep an eye on us, like when he would drop us off with Mawmaw and then vanish for the day with Uncle Jack. Or maybe it was one of the times he left us home alone. I was eight and knew he wasn’t supposed to, even if it was just for a few hours. But I liked that he must’ve thought I wasn’t a dummy and trusted me to make sure we were ok. Mom saw it different and found a babysitter.

We knew Dorothy and her husband Leonard from church. They lived in a doublewide at the head of Wolf Pen, less than a mile up the road from us, right across the creek from the church. Dorothy was old enough to be retired but always kept a house full of other people’s kids. I heard the grown-ups talk about how she didn’t pay taxes and she had more kids there than was legal and she better hope no one ever reported her. They just talked; no one ever turned her in. She didn’t have any kids of her own, unless you counted her three adult stepsons. They came by once in a while, but not enough that I could remember their names. By the end of their visits they were usually all fighting, yelling about Republicans and Democrats. Dorothy always got the last word in though.

Her hair was all grey, almost white, and some of the older kids were taller than she was, but it was always clear that Dorothy was the one in charge. She barreled from side to side when she walked, using her weight to move her forward, instead of her kid-sized feet that seemed too dainty for her stout Little Tea Pot body. When she got flustered, pink would creep onto her cheeks and she’d shake and mix our names up, spitting out a syllable of each one on her way to finding the right kid to yell at. That would get us laughing and sometimes she’d laugh too, but sometimes it just made her madder. When she really got mad, she’d send you to the Bad Boy Chair, her version of time out, or she’d threaten to make you go find a switch.

For the most part though, we got along with Dorothy. She could be funny, often without knowing it, and showed us kindness when she wanted. I saw it the day my stomach didn’t feel right. We’d just finished breakfast when the throw up started. Dorothy told me to lie on the couch in the living room, and she sat a plastic bucket in the floor beside me. She told everyone else to stay away. I tried to enjoy not going to school and getting to watch TV by myself all day, but I wanted to be anywhere else other than in my body on that couch. I’d never been sick at anyone’s house except ours or Mawmaw’s. At first, I tried to not throw up, until I realized the few minutes of relief after I vomited felt like pure and true happiness. I quit fighting it and gave in. For hours I sweated and shivered and heaved while Bob Barker asked for bids and As the World Turned. Dorothy would appear to lay a cool washcloth on my forehead and to give me saltines and sips of ginger ale from a jelly jar that tasted better than anything I’d ever had. When there was a vomit lull, she emptied and rinsed the bucket before returning it to its spot. Mom called from work to check on me and Dorothy pulled the kitchen phone receiver toward me until the cord was stretched as tight as it could go. If I raised my head up a little, it reached me on the couch. Mom said she’d be there as soon as she could, but she couldn’t leave work early. I was too exhausted to say much, and I knew it would just make Mom feel bad if I said I wanted to go home. She was at work because she had to be and making her sad wasn’t going to make me feel better.

Mom was working at the nursing home and had to be at work early, a couple of hours before we had to be at school. Most days it would still be dark outside when she woke us to go to Dorothy’s. She gave us enough time to put on our school clothes and then corralled us into the car. All I wanted to do was go back to sleep, but since it wasn’t even half a mile up the road, we’d get there before the car had time to warm up. None of the other kids got to Dorothy’s that early, so we got to do things we didn’t normally get to do there, like watch TV for over an hour. Sometimes I’d sit with my brother Heath while he grumpily watched Looney Tunes, upset that he had to get up so early to go to a babysitter that he didn’t need. He was eleven years old, not a baby.

When I was too sleepy to watch TV, I’d go with my two little sisters to Dorothy’s spare bedroom. They weren’t old enough to go to school and got to sleep in as long as they wanted. The door of the room was always kept closed and no one was allowed in there any other time. I’d never seen it in the light, only when it was so dark I could barely make out the green satiny quilted comforter. It wasn’t like at home where, if it was too dark, at least I knew what was on the other side of the dark. In that room, I didn’t know if the shadows were furniture or things to be afraid of. I’d close my eyes, snuggle up to my sisters, and try to sleep for a couple of hours.

Dorothy would shake me awake when it was time for breakfast. I sat with Heath at the round wood dining table, in the nook by the kitchen, beside a curio cabinet full of things not to touch. She filled our bowls with milk and Fruit of the Looms, as she unjokingly called them. Dorothy sat at the table with us while we ate, with a round magnifying mirror on a stand in front of her. She wore knee-length shorts and a floral sleeveless housecoat with pearl snap buttons down the middle and a big pocket on each side at the waist. I wasn’t so sure they were meant to be worn as shirts alone, but aside from her church clothes, that’s all we ever saw her in. She squinted into the mirror, moving her top lip down so that the skin above her lips was stretched tight over her top teeth and like a cat stalking its prey, she moved slowly and without a sound, closing the tip of tweezers around one of the dark hairs trying to be a mustache. She paused just for a second and then jerked her hand back away from her face, so fast the table shook. This was repeated over and over until her upper lip and chin were free of hairs. While she was plucking, I found myself staring at the big brown mole on the side of her armpit, peeking out of her sleeveless housecoat-shirt. There was one black hair sticking straight out of the middle of it, asking to be pulled, but she let that one be. Me and Heath thought her Tweezer routine was funny and gross and probably not breakfast table behavior, but we just crunched our Looms, wordlessly commiserating.

After breakfast, we would head to school, walking over the bridge that crossed the creek and up the set of concrete steps that hugged and curved around the hillside, leading up to the back gate of our elementary school. It felt like a secret path, invisible from below. Weeds and wildflowers grew on both sides of the steps and vines wrapped themselves around the metal handrail that sometimes-housed yellow jackets. At the top of the steps, you were as high as the tip of the church steeple. Looking down, you could see Dorothy’s trailer from there, and just beyond it was Smitty’s garage and McFarland’s junkyard—two of Dad’s favorite haunts. The gate to the school was hardly ever locked and at night the high school kids would hang out on the steps and sneak into the school playground and do older kid things. On our walk, we’d see the evidence they left behind—Funyuns bags, empty beer cans, and cigarette butts smashed down. The stale beer and honeysuckle sweetness mixing in the air.

In the summer when there was no school to break up the day, the hours creeped along, some felt longer than others. On most days, if he was home and not in the garage, Dorothy’s husband Leonard could be found in the den, breathing heavy in his chair by the front door. It was a sagging recliner made of scratchy fabric, oranges and browns that matching the tobacco stains inside the Styrofoam spit cup he always kept on the floor beside him.

If we wanted to go outside or come back in the house, we had to go through the door beside his chair. There was a side door that went outside, off the living room, but we weren’t allowed to use that one. It was too much commotion while Dorothy was trying to watch her stories. When I came back inside from playing, if Leonard was in his chair, I’d try not to get close, leaning into the wall, sliding along it as I walked, trying to disappear into it. Sometimes I got past and into the next room with no trouble, but other times Leonard would reach out and grab my arm, pulling me over onto his lap.

He smelled sweet from the tobacco, but it made me sick to my stomach. His white button up shirt, spotted with tobacco juice, didn’t always cover up his enormous belly. It was hairy and stuck out so much there was barely any lap. Everything about him had a yellow tinge—his white slicked back hair, sideburns, and gapped teeth—even the lenses of his glasses.

He wrapped one arm around my waist and rubbed my arms, saying You’re my lover. We’re lovers, aren’t we? I ignored the question, but he kept asking until I finally nodded silently, not looking him in the eye. I didn’t know what else he wanted from me, other than answering his questions. He seemed offended that I wasn’t smiling and laughing while sitting on his lap, like some of the other kids would. They were my age or younger, boys and girls both.

I said as little as possible while sitting there, looking around the room trying to find anything else to think about. A discarded Matchbox car on the floor, the velvet trim on the curtains, the tree branch waving at the corner of the window. I hoped he’d get bored or someone else would come along, so I could get my feet back on the floor and into the next room. That plan didn’t always work because sometimes he’d just grab another kid as they went by, adding them to his lap. He would pull the bottom of his shirt up more to show us his scar from heart surgery, a pink bubbly line running down the middle of him. It looked like a shiny pink earthworm and like it could pop back open at any moment. He would tell both of us that we were his lovers. I didn’t know what he meant by it, but it didn’t feel right. Plenty of people loved me, but no one said lovers. It felt and sounded more like how they said stuff on soap operas. The word made me cringe and still does.

Some days Leonard would take an afternoon nap with the little kids, all piling into his bed together. I was thankful I was old enough to get away with not taking a nap. I often wondered if I was wrong about it all and felt uneasy for no reason. I wasn’t even sure how to explain it, even if I had decided to tell someone. It was just a bad feeling I got. There were so many other kids there and they didn’t seem to think anything was wrong. They all seemed to love him and called him Pawpaw. I sure wasn’t going to do that. I already had two pawpaws and they were both good.

In high school math class some years later, my desk sat across the aisle from Stacey Gibson. We’d been good friends all the way through middle school but weren’t as close as we once were. We had grown apart as our identities had started taking more shape. Stacey had gravitated toward show choir, academics, and student council. My idea of participating in school activities was managing to stay awake for a whole class period. Though we were living in different universes, as far as high school was concerned, I always liked talking to Stacey. She was smart, funny, and a little weird--even when she was trying hard not to be.

For some reason we started talking about Dorothy. Stacey had also gone to her house after school for a few months when we were in third grade but had abruptly stopped. Her face, with its freckled upturned nose, turned serious as she told me that she quit going there because of Leonard. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who had felt uneasy about him. Stacey had told her mom about him, and she never took her back there again. What she told her mom exactly, she didn’t say, but I knew, at the very least, it was what I wished I had been able to tell someone.

If the sun was shining, Dorothy usually deemed it too nice to play inside and sent us out to the yard. I didn’t mind. I liked being outside and didn’t have to worry about Leonard since he stayed inside for the most part. The yard was a small rectangle of grass, about double the size of her trailer. A chain-link fence went all the way around the yard, an easily climbable barrier between us and Wolf Pen, the one lane road that ran parallel to the fence. Older boys would fly down the road on four wheelers, unbuttoned shirts flapping in the wind, popping wheelies, and raising their chins hello. A neighbor kid would hop the fence to play. A random dog would wander up to the fence, wanting to be best friends for the day, never to return after that.

Even with something or someone always popping up, there were days that felt forever. Ones where we couldn’t wait to hear the clicking of Mom’s station wagon coming down the hill. It was a day stretched out like that, and there was no peace and quiet to be found, that I headed to the swing set. The air was hot and wavy. Kids were shrieking and running around and declaring all over the place. No, I didn’t! Did too! I’m telling! If I swung high enough and fast enough, I could get away for a little bit. As I swung, I pulled back on the chains when I went forwards, higher and faster, until I got to the part where two of the swing set poles started to come off the ground a few inches when I swung out. I stopped pulling the chains back, so I could stay at that speed, keeping my eyes closed and not hearing anything except the sound of nothing air whooshing against my ears. I didn’t weigh anything anymore and could’ve been anywhere. Maybe I had turned into the air. I never knew how long it had been. Maybe one minute, maybe ten. I kept going until I got my fill of the floating quiet and then I’d press the chains into the crooks of my elbows, coasting for a bit and then slowing down, the noise creeping back in. I heard one of the kids ask, what’s that sound?

I opened my eyes to see what was going on, but the bright made it hard to focus on anything. As I adjusted to the light, and things started to take shape again, I saw the other kids looking around trying to figure out where the sound was coming from. It wasn’t talking, but I could tell the sound was being made by people. One of the kids pointed to the steps that went up to school. I saw two people not quite standing and not quite laying down. They were all tangled up in each other, but not trying to get apart. I squinted against the sun and could see that one of the people was Tara Raines.

Tara was in my older sister Heather’s class at school and she lived nearby. Her mom died when she was two months old, so her great aunt Oshie was raising her the best she could, but she couldn’t always keep track of her. Last summer, before Heather and Mom and Dad had the big fight, Heather still lived with us and Tara would show up at our house to hang out. Tara talked to me and let me follow her and Heather around on their walks up and down the road, while they talked in voices too quiet for me to hear. I wanted to look like Tara. Her brown hair was almost black and always looked like she had a tan. Her eyes were like a movie star, dark long lashes all the way around, making it look like she was always wearing eyeliner. They talked about secret important things wherever they went—on walks, when they sat on the front porch, when they were in Heather’s room listening to Cyndi Lauper. Secrets were told and kept. I wasn’t always in the loop, but I didn’t mind. I still felt like I was part of it.

The other person on the steps was Rusty Slater. I’d never talked to him, but everyone knew who he was. He was at least ten years older than Heather and Tara, already out of high school. He looked like a man but acted like a kid. People said he wasn’t right in the head. I didn’t know if he’d always been like that or if something had happened to make him that way. There was a kid at school who acted similar. He had drunk gasoline on a dare and never been the same since.

Tara and Rusty kept up what they were doing, not noticing they were being watched. The screen door swung open, hitting the side of the trailer. Dorothy barreled out onto the porch yelling, What are you all looking at? She looked towards the moaning and her mouth dropped into a little circle, pink rushing to her cheeks. Quit looking at that nasty stuff and get your hind ends in the house! Little bits of spit came out with the words. Dorothy said they should be ashamed and held the door open for us to file back inside. I knew Tara wasn’t bad and figured whatever they were doing couldn’t be that terrible, but Dorothy sure thought it was.

Not too long after we saw them together that day, Rusty started spray painting around town. On the concrete steps, under the interstate bridges. He’d always write the same thing. Tara Raines is a virgin and that is true. It was a testimonial that confused me. I couldn’t tell if Rusty was saying something bad about Tara or defending her. Virgin was one of those words I couldn’t figure out the meaning of on my own. I didn’t want to ask anyone what it meant and get made fun of for not knowing or get in trouble because it was something dirty that I shouldn’t be asking about. It seemed like maybe it meant more than one thing, like how Aunt and ant sounded the same, but meant different things. They were spelled different though, so maybe that wasn’t it. At church, virgin mean something good. In Sunday school class we learned that it was a miracle that baby Jesus’s mom was one, even if what one was exactly was never explained to us. Then at school, the older kids would yell it at each other as an insult. Madonna sang about being like one and people thought it was vulgar. I didn’t know what Rusty was trying to say about Tara. And now, years later, I realize that knowing what virgin means doesn’t make Rusty’s declaration any easier to make sense of.

Rusty wasn’t the only one who liked to give testimonials. People like to testify all over town--not about Tara, but about letting God and Jesus into your life. Timmy Thaxton lived beside Dorothy in a little stone house with a neat yard and a wood sign hanging on the front door that said The Thaxtons. He was just a year older than me, but he didn’t act like a kid at all. He would walk to school with us in the mornings but didn’t seem to care much about being friends with anyone his age. He dressed like an old man going to church and liked to spend his time with women who were at least forty years older than him. He didn’t have any brothers or sisters and I’m pretty sure his mother Doreen was his best friend. He would sit around with her and her friends, saying did you hear about so and so? Bless her heart, shaking his head and pursing his lips just like them. His boney arms and legs crossed, his feathered back hair mimicking theirs.

When we got to school, Timmy would head straight to the cafeteria to hang out with the lunch ladies before class started. They were all women over fifty, most we knew from church. He spent breaks, lunches--and pretty much any time he didn’t have to be in class--with them. Years later, when we were in high school, he even started working with them during lunch. He’d be behind the counter, wearing a hair net and plastic gloves, plopping mashed potatoes onto our lunch trays with a metal ice cream scoop.

Timmy didn’t often venture into Dorothy’s yard when it was full of other kids, but on that day, he must’ve felt a calling. He hopped the fence--the most kid like thing I’d ever seen him do—walked around to the backyard and jumped up onto an old tree stump that was about a foot and a half wide. He told all the kids to gather round and for some reason, maybe because of the oddity of it, we listened. A half circle of kids formed around him, some stood and some sat in the grass. Even Heath wanted to see what was going on, watching from off to the side of the group.

Standing on his pulpit stump, Timmy started with a long, drawn out Brootherrrs and Sisterrrs. Then he started talking faster, running one sentence into the next. He wouldn’t breathe until he absolutely had to, and then it was an Amen and a big gulp of air.

When you step out of this world, absent from the body, present for the Lord. Amen. In my Father’s house there are many mansions. For each and every one of us saved by the Blood of the Lamb. Streets of gold. Amen. Gulp.

Timmy acted and talked like all the preachers we knew. He stood stick straight, sometimes a hand on a hip, other times pointing to the heavens. He stretched words out, emphasizing them at random and there in sharp scoffs and shouts. His expressions rotated between smiles, smirks, and concern. He might’ve been mimicking what he had seen on Sundays, but he wasn’t faking it. He really meant it when he urged us to find the Lord.

We won’t have no mail man in Heaven. Praise God. We won’t have no bills. Praise the Lord. But I’ve got JEEYUHZUS. I’m not ashamed of him. There was five foolish and five wise. They all slept and slumbered. When the bridegroom comes, when it’s time for you to check out, do you got oil in your lamp? I said, do you got oil in your lamp? Cause the foolish, they turned their lamps up and their lamps went out. They didn’t have no oil in their lamps. Amen. Gulp. What’s that oil? That’s the holy ghost. That’s the spirit of God that’s inside you. You ask him and he’ll come in. He’ll put tent pegs up and he’ll stay with you. Praise God. Hah! WOOO! Wouldn’t today be a great day to get your name written in the Book of Life? Amen. Gulp.

We never heard Timmy say more than a few words to other kids, but now he couldn’t seem to shut up. I wasn’t following a lot of what he was saying and the sight of him so serious on that stump made me want to bust out laughing. I looked over at Heath, standing there with his arms crossed and head slightly tilted, and could tell the same was true for him. But we just watched and listened and didn’t say anything to make fun. God had spoken through a donkey and a bush before, so on the off chance he was speaking through Timmy Thaxton, we didn’t want to be the ones who had laughed.

Seeing people all worked up out of nowhere, talking about the Lord wasn’t that unusual. And it was often good entertainment. At church, grown men would stand to testify, quivering and crying one minute and then all of a sudden, they’d take a notion to stand on a pew, jumping up and down. They’d shout and throw their arms up in the air, seeming to forget who they were and sometimes even how to form words. They made whooping sounds and were so wound up they sometimes could only say bits of words.

Leonard was one of the ones who liked to testify at church. He didn’t jump on pews, but when he stood up, we knew it was going to be awhile. He looked uncomfortable in his polyester suit, sweaty, with his strands of yellowed hair all slicked back. The stubble that was usually on his face was shaved for Sundays. He talked about the dreams he had. God always appeared vividly to him in these dreams, talking right to him. When he got to the part about seeing Hell and the shadowy demons with beady eyes trying to grab him, he’d start crying and carrying on. Around the room there was lots of Bless you, Brother Leonard and Amens, encouraging him to go on. I believed in Heaven and Hell and demons too, but I had trouble believing what Leonard was saying. I wasn’t the only one his evangelizing was having the opposite effect on. Heath told me years later that listening to Leonard in church was when he first realized that Christians can be liars too.

Even as kids, we knew that things, even in dreams, weren’t as straightforward as Leonard described them. Nothing was as simple as God talking right to you while you slept, saving you from cartoon demons. Things were harder to make sense of and even harder to predict. Bad things could happen at places where they weren’t supposed to. And you could feel God, or at the very least, that feeling of true peace the preacher talked about, in places you wouldn’t expect. Like on a swing set, swinging as high as you could possibly go, without it tipping over.