True. Mel and I went to Montreal for work last December and just decided to stay through the holidays, ordering room service and getting drunk and watching the CBC. We rang in the new year at a bar called the Velvet Hammer, hepped up on absinthe and Ritalin, surrounded by transvestites who kept pinching our bottoms and screaming, “Girls’ club! Girls’ club!”
“Y’all come down here,” Mom says. “I need to see you’re alive.”
I pinch my lips, too dumb and full-feeling around the ears to say anything but “Okay.”
—
That night Mel says, “I want to show you something.”
I groan inwardly. Another appearance from our fuzzy, plodding nonproject.
“Come on,” she says, and drags me into the living room.
There are two sketches on Mel’s drafting table. She’s taken an old lamp found at Goodwill and turned it on its side, training its light directly on the table surface. The rest of the room falls into shadow.
I linger in the doorway, not sure I want to see what she’s done. She prods me. “Come on. It’s not that bad. And if it is, then you say so, and I’ll chuck it.”
I sit at the table, look at the first sketch. It’s a soft pastel sketch of a little girl, back turned, sitting in the light of a television set next to an empty La-Z-Boy recliner. The TV glow outlines the girl’s silvery form, tapering to darkness at the edges. At the bottom, Mel has scrawled, Sharon, 1994.
The second sketch is a mock-up of a Warner Bros. sign-off, the hot red circle that surrounds Bugs Bunny with the cursive “That’s all Folks!” above his head. But instead of Bugs Bunny, Mel has drawn Stroke Sharon—what I looked like when I begged her for a mirror. One side of my face is slack, the left eye dead, my head bald. My lips are drawn back into a crooked snarl, my mouth dark and sinister. It’s grotesque. It’s amazing.
In her best Mel Blanc impression, Mel reads what’s she written above my head: “Yeh-yeh yeh yeh you’re fucked!”
There’s a deep well of silence before I start giggling. Mel follows. We sit there, cracking up. When one of us starts to calm down, we look at the picture and it starts all over again.
Something feels different, tonight. The sketch of Stroke Sharon—it has something that I want. I want to be able to feel this way all the time. To be able to laugh about the things that have happened to me, baggage and all, light and dark. To own it handily enough so that it could be funny and horrifying at once. Maybe this is the idea I’ve been looking for. Maybe this is something close.
When we quiet, I say to Mel, “My mom called me. She wants us to come to Kentucky to visit.”
Mel’s eyes go wide. Behind her there’s a third sketch. It is another me, prestroke, full in the face and chest. But this sketch is unfinished, empty space filling the eye sockets. It is a half me, a ghost me come straight from her hand, staring us down as Mel says, “Oh, we have to go. Of course. We have to.”
—
When we get the go-ahead from the docs a few weeks later, the weather is beginning to cool. We pack up the car and give Jesco the house keys. He flaps his hand at us. “Y’all are headed back to the big city, I reckon.”
“Kentucky this time.”
“Huh.” He peers close at me. “Well. Y’all be safe. Don’t get et up by a wildcat.”
“Can’t make any promises,” Mel tells him. We pile in. We head north.
FAULKNER
I was born in Faulkner, Kentucky.
My parents grew up there, and their parents, and their parents. With each successive generation, the family tunnel vision thickened until living outside the perimeters of the triangle formed by the Bert T. Combs Mountain Parkway to the south, Interstate 75 to the west, and I-64 to the north was unthinkable. I have always assumed that my leaving is the reason my family doesn’t like me, but it could be the other way around. It’s a circular problem, a snake with its tail in its mouth.
My very first job was at the Faulkner County Library, an annex to the WPA building that served as the town’s elementary school. It inhabited the basement, books dampened by the underground, carpeting the scratchy green found on outdoor patios. Mrs. Horsemuller, the county librarian and an epileptic, recruited me to keep an eye on the place whenever she had a seizure at her desk. She trusted me to pick her up (she weighed maybe ninety pounds) and carry her to the cot in the back office. Her husband owned Horsemuller Hardware down on Main and would stick his head in at lunch, whispering, “Was the little missus feeling sleepy?”