The Sacrifice Zone: Chapter Two (Free)
by Sandra Gail Lambert
Here’s the last paragraph of the previous chapter as a refresher: Shay, however, talked about everything. She loved people, all types. She laughed a lot, her first instinct was to be kind, and she was maybe smarter than Vic. Vic knew their affair wouldn't last because she wasn't any of those things and had always preferred to be the smart one. But for now Shay kept saying she liked the way Vic was and would name all the qualities relatives had tried to shame her with or other women had thrown in Vic's face—her ambition, her mule-headedness, how she cussed, the way she burped at will, her lack of sentiment. Shay wanted Vic to be more of who she was. No one else ever had. And at night, after sex, there was sometimes a sweetness between them that Vic had never known to want. Even though she never promised it to Shay, Vic stayed away from other women.
The Sacrifice Zone: Chapter Two
"Fly to Atlanta and drive home with me for a few days after Christmas."
Mellie and Vic had a weekly phone call. Mellie insisted. Vic called her cousin an old-fashioned Luddite of a textaphobe, but Mellie said hearing Vic's voice made her feel less homesick. When Vic was twelve and at her mother's funeral, Mellie had been the only one she could bear to have near her that day, except for the moment when she'd allowed Aunt Rose, Mellie's mother, to take her face in her hands and kiss her cheeks. Vic had braced herself against hearing yet another "poor dear," "terrible loss," or "the mother was an angel." Instead Aunt Rose had said, almost more to herself, that Vic was one of the ones, maybe, who could leave and stay gone. After the funeral, she'd moved Vic into her and Mellie's home and knew better than to try to enforce any sort of discipline.
Although Aunt Rose had corralled Vic enough to make her fill out college and scholarship applications. Ever since, through all the years she'd lived with Aunt Rose and Mellie, no matter how they argued, Vic would do anything to help Mellie. So Vic never missed a call, although these days Mellie's medical residency meant they were short.
"And bring that Shay with you. I want to meet her."
Vic had been considering the idea. She hadn't been home in years and it would be good to see Aunt Rose, but now Mellie had jerked the line too quick and Vic was swimming free again. Vic never brought women home. What would be the point? And she'd never expose Shay to her family. Although it made Vic grin to think of Shay meeting her and Mellie's other cousins. Shay would eat Chester and Charles alive, even Charles.
"Not a chance, Cousin Mellie. Besides, there’s no way to get flight reservations at this late date. Too bad."
"Yeah, about that. We already reserved tickets. For a Christmas present. No excuses. It's all set."
"We reserved tickets? Who is we?"
Mellie had called Shay behind her back. Vic wanted to be outraged. And she should be mad at Shay for getting roped into the secret plan, but she knew how Mellie was. She sounded all sweet and genuine, was actually sweet and genuine, but Mellie always got what she wanted. Still, Shay should have known better than to get mixed up in her family crap. Maybe now was when they should break up. It was already Vic's longest relationship, maybe only real relationship ever, so the end was coming, but she'd been holding out for graduation. That's when they'd be going separate ways anyway. But even for Vic, breaking up to spite Mellie was immature and cruel. This was going to be a disaster.
"Oh, your eyes are same beautiful green as Vic's!"
And after that first exclamation, Mellie and Shay didn't stop talking to each other. Even Snook liked Shay. Vic and Mellie had always had a dog in common, but these days Snook lived with Mellie. He and Vic had greeted each other with baby talk and slobber, and right that moment he was snuffling her neck from the backseat. It made Vic happy. And Vic was happy to be driving the old Dodge Dart again. It was something else she and Mellie had owned in common since high school. They'd ordered hand controls online, and between her and Charles and Chester they'd deciphered the installation instructions.
Vic drove down I-75 and listened to Mellie tell Shay more than she had ever told Vic about her new hot shot medical researcher beau. Her girlfriend and cousin found common ground in the ways their mothers used sarcasm to criticize their relationship choices. That made Vic wonder what Shay's mother had said about her. She filed that away for further thought. And it was true that Aunt Rose had a tongue on her. Between Mellie and Vic, her nickname was SQ, short for "Sarcasm, Queen of." But Vic's mother, Mellie's Aunt Violet, had been MQ for "Martyrdom, Queen of" because of her devotion to her husband Frank, Vic's father. Finally free of the Atlanta traffic, Vic relaxed into driving and half-listened to Mellie tell Shay the convoluted story of their names.
"We're double cousins because our mothers married brothers, both of them pretty much losers. When Vic's mother died she changed her last name to our mothers' maiden name and hid Uncle Frank's name in the middle. My mother did the same after the divorce, so that means Vic and I have the same surname."
Vic liked that she and Mellie had the same last name, but she didn't especially like Mellie telling Shay all about it. Now Mellie was spewing more information.
"It's been a couple of years now since Dad was found dead on his boat. The state police had said it was a heart attack from a drug overdose, but of course that is ridiculous. But understandable, since outsiders don't know."
Mellie stopped talking when Vic gave her a warning look in the rear view mirror. Mellie regrouped and continued with the family's theory that he'd shorted product for one of his business partners. Things had been distant between she and her father when he passed. Mellie regretted that. Vic ignored Mellie's clumsy, sideways attempt to bring attention to how close they were to the prison. Instead she enjoyed the way Shay stumbled out condolences on "Mellie's loss." It wasn't often that Shay was taken aback.
Vic kept quiet as she drove south on I-75. She sped up, but as the upcoming exit sign for the prison whipped by Mellie said, "We could visit. He’s kept your name on the list." Vic kept her eyes pinned out the front windshield, but she knew Mellie was glaring at the back of her head. Vic didn't answer, but the muscles in her neck went hard. Shay, of course, noticed and, of course, asked, "Visit whom." Mellie had the good sense to keep quiet. It was up to Vic to answer or not.
"My father is an inmate about fifteen miles from here."
Shay reached a hand over to Vic's thigh. Vic jerked it away. Snook hated when Mellie and Vic or anyone argued, even silently, and he grumbled low barks. When it was clear that Vic wasn't going to say anything else, Shay asked Mellie if the gift she'd brought for her mother, a woven table runner she'd found in a market on her last trip to Peru, was appropriate. Mellie picked up on the change of subject and chatted too eagerly about her mother's pride in setting a beautiful table
Mellie then peppered Shay with questions about travel and what that was like. Vic listened for the moment when Shay would get it that Mellie had never traveled farther away from home than Atlanta. And she was prepared to dump Shay out on the side of the road if she made Mellie feel like a hick. When it happened, Shay's voice hesitated but her innate graciousness did that thing it always did, and Mellie never noticed. By the time they'd reached the Macon bypass, Vic's mood had improved. She suggested a DQ stop in Unadilla and drove the rest of way south sipping on a Strawberry Watermelon Julius and listening to the quiet laughs of Shay and Mellie becoming friends.
In the late afternoon, Vic made the final turn toward Sour Orange Hammock. The wall of trees fell away, and the narrow road, almost at the same level as the water, wound through a flattened mosaic of land and salt marsh. It was low tide and to either side white birds shimmered as they strutted over exposed oyster bars and through mud flats that looked like wet silk in the sun. Swaths of pale maidencane and black rush clung to each other and curved together off toward the waters of the Gulf.
Mellie and Shay had stopped talking. Vic could see in the rear view mirror that Mellie had closed her eyes and was breathing almost in gasps. Vic opened the windows for her. Shay was open-mouthed as she looked out the windshield, at Vic, and out at the landscape again.
"Vic, you didn't tell me you lived in perhaps the most beautiful place in the world."
Vic 's eyes relaxed into a long stretch over the long distance of water that touched the horizon. Shay was right. It was beautiful. And the heat, thick and wet even in December, and the way it soothed deep into her shoulders felt great. But she didn't live here anymore. And she wasn't like Mellie who looked like she was in the middle of a religious conversion. Mellie's face glowed, her voice sang, and her arms made wide, graceful gestures as she introduced the landscape to Shay as if it were a friend.
Mellie told Shay how cedar trees liked to grow in the lime of the decaying oyster shells piled into mounds that were pretty much the compost piles of the ancients. Shay asked about the sheared-off tops of the palm trees. Vic and Mellie said, "hurricanes" in unison and pointed out a concrete pillar they were passing. It was topped with the grilled cylinder of an evacuation siren. A flock of ibis flew up out of the grasses beside the road and winged past the car. Shay groaned the way Vic had only heard in bed.
"Mellie, now I understand about how hard it is for you to be gone from here."
Shay didn't understand. The way Mellie and all of Vic's relatives got homesick wasn't some simple missing of a beautiful landscape. Vic herself missed the smell of salt in the air, but the place seemed to have an almost malevolent hold on Mellie. Every few weeks she was pulled back as if she'd reach the end of the stretch of a bungee cord. And the rest of the clan never left except for things like a quick trip to an equipment auction in Ocala or to hit the outlet malls in Orlando.
The car slid under a canopy of live oaks. They'd reached Sour Orange Hammock—the last of relatively high ground before the Gulf. Oak and hickory and palm trees lined the road, and they passed the one gas station, one grocery store, pitiful as it was, one restaurant (seafood), one marina, and one of the four bars. People waved. Vic raised a finger up off the steering wheel, but that was it. She didn't want to talk to anyone. But Mellie yelled out the window and asked about kids and illnesses and complimented new hairdos. She was adored. She always had been. In a few years she'd be back here and spend the rest of her life doctoring to them. In time, she'd no doubt be the head of the hospital a few miles inland. They'd been called "The Saint" and "The Sinner" since second grade. Mellie hated the nickname. Vic embraced hers.
They turned off the main road and into Vic's old neighborhood where the lots were positioned like jigsaw pieces around saltwater creeks and man-made canals. Snook barked out the window. Neighborhood dogs welcomed him home with their own howls. He barked even more. A right over a culvert, a left over the hump of a small bridge and they were on Aunt Rose's street with its mix of newer houses up on stilts of concrete blocks and the original small homes that sprawled flat over their yards. Shay being there made Vic notice the litter that spilled out of car ports—crab traps, cracked plastic shelving, rusted bicycles, beat-up coolers, and the cliché of old cars up on blocks with their tires off.
They arrived at the yellow house with the red door. Aunt Rose must have been on the screened porch looking out for them, because she was down the steps and alongside the car just as Vic put it in park. She reached through the window and patted Vic's cheeks over and over. Vic put her own hands over her aunt's. The way they loved each other was always mixed up with missing Vic's mother. But that was okay. They were used to the sadness of loving someone who was dead. Since Vic had left home, she'd had a break from always seeing the flashes of her mother's face in Aunt Rose's. Aunt Rose was luckier since Vic looked more like her father with his thick eyebrows and solid jaw, although that did mean she looked like Aunt Rose's dead ex. But all the family inbreeding meant that mostly everyone looked like someone else.
Still, the face leaning in the window blurred and for a second became fully her mother's. Vic tightened her hands over the ones on her cheek and pulled them away to keep from crying. Aunt Rose stepped back from the car.
"You're like a cat—two pats on the belly are fine, but by the third you bite."
Aunt Rose left to go envelope Mellie in a hug. Snook jumped his paws against her butt. Shay was mid-stretch when Aunt Rose grabbed her up. She took them each by a hand and pulled Mellie and Shay toward the house. Snook trotted behind them, and Vic was left alone to begin her more involved routine of getting out of the car. Her family had always averted their eyes from anything to do with her gimpiness. Vic straightened her legs and swung up on one crutch to standing. She leaned against the door and paused before she reached down for her other crutch.
The sour oranges were thick on the branches. Maybe Aunt Rose had made a pie with them. She was a brilliant baker. If she wasn't so hidebound, she could have ended up in a town big enough to support a bakery or even famous and on television with her own cookbook. Aunt Rose sometimes put a thick layer of chocolate over the filling. Sour and sweet tickled along the sides of Vic's tongue. Tomorrow night there'd be a big family dinner. A pie along with some of her great, great Uncle Slick's brew would help. And if Aunt Rose had also made one of her hummingbird cakes, Vic would work on being polite to the great great generations.
The next morning Charles and Chester arrived early. They made no secret of wanting to check out Vic's "lady." Right off, they'd sized up both Shay's clothes and vocabulary and thought the best way to mess with her was to take her out on the water to pull up crab traps and do some shrimping. It wasn't long before they were motoring up into the warm outflow from the power plant near enough that the twin stacks loomed between them and horizon. Manatees, attracted to the heated water, huffed to the surface around them. As kids, they'd come here each winter and ride them. They'd called it "going to the rodeo." Environmentalist types were horrified when they heard Vic telling that story. Which made Vic tell it more even though she knew they were right. Ribbons of pelicans flew by. Word was the nuclear power section was going back online again. It had been shut down for most of Vic's life ever since some workers had drilled where they shouldn't have. Its claim to fame these days was being the site chosen for the upcoming initial deployment of "World's Ease," which was touted as a miracle solution for energy shortages.
Vic had propped herself into the bow to have a good view of the upcoming show which started when Charles threw a shrimp net for Shay to catch. It dripped with muddy seaweed. The weights on the end wrapped themselves around Shay's knees with enough force that the rest of net flattened against Shay's body like a wet shower curtain. Charles was the oldest of the cousins and the roughest. Although early on, he'd been the writer in the family. Each time Vic had gotten up to a class that Charles had been in before her, the teacher would say, "This is well-written. Not as good as your cousin Charles used to do, but you might get there." By junior year they weren't saying that anymore.
These days Charles knew everything about boats and fishing and the Gulf and his sense of humor, like Vic's, was physical and crass. Both he and Vic cackled at the plaid pattern of muddy water the net left on Shay's white shirt. Vic knew she should be supporting Shay, but it was too funny. Shay stared at her with not much expression. She blinked once. Vic knew that look and was now worried.
"Gosh, this is too wet to work in." And with that, Shay took off her shirt. Sunlight bounced off the pink expanses of the bra. The woman liked her neon, and the bra held her double ds up into the air as if they were perched on a shelf. Charles dropped the crab bait bucket and chicken necks slopped over the side. He liked boobs. Like Vic did. Growing up they had competed for everything—essay contests, fishing tournaments, and sometimes, when Vic was older, women. Vic knew Shay knew this. Vic didn't like the way Charles stared. Shay knew that as well, and she was serving out some perfect kickback at Vic for mocking her. Vic could only admire a move well played. Chester was the youngest of them all and delicate in comparison, even to Mellie. He faced away and pretending to fuss with the motor.
"So, like this?" Shay put an edge of the net between her teeth, threw some over one shoulder, and stretched a length tight across her breasts and between her arms. She twisted at the waist and threw her arms out and let the net fly. It billowed high into a perfect circle and dropped into the shape of a skirt as it fell into the water. It was Chester's turn to jeer.
"Bam. She got us. You didn't know she could do that, did you? Either of you?"
They hadn't. Shay had mentioned she spent summers growing up at the family place on some Cape, but Vic had imagined bonfire parties on the beach and playing badminton in the sand.
Shay's arms streaked with mud as the she pulled in the net. Chester offered to help, and she accepted since it was heavy with shrimp. Charles had positioned them over the perfect low-tide hole. By the fourth cast, shrimp were pirouetting all over the boat, and Vic and Chester chased them down and tossed them in the cooler by their tails. Next they checked Charles’ crab lines, and he showed Shay how to grab them by the back flipper and throw them in the basket. By the end she was helping him hook rancid chicken into the traps before they reset them. He still stared at her chest from time to time, but for Charles, he had become respectfully circumspect.
But Vic had decided that Shay should be looked at. The way she shifted the weight of her hips to stay centered on the boat, didn't worry whose face her butt was pointed at when she bent over, and grabbed the sides of the bra, lifted, and shook to re-position her breasts after each throw—all her moves were unaffected and expansive. She moved her large body around the boat with a practical ease and took no notice of an outside gaze. Women didn't do that often.
Even with these cousins, Vic had always been secretive when she took off her braces to go swimming. She would tuck them under a seat with a towel over them and put another towel over her legs. It made her more comfortable. Or maybe she did it in response to how they always looked away from anything to do with her disability. But that was better than then rest of her extended family who would stare and mutter their disgust. But Shay, Shay diminished nothing about herself. Vic thought she should be looked at the way you'd look at dolphins leaping in your wake or pause to watch an osprey's screeching dive toward the water.
They drove back to the house with twenty pounds of shrimp and four baskets of crab. Mellie, Aunt Rose, and three ancient aunts who were over visiting joined them on the back dock. Two massive pots were already boiling water on a propane heater set up in the yard. Batches of crab and then the shrimp were poured in. Some were set aside whole for the dinner that night, but the rest they set to peeling and picking and loading the meat into plastic bags for selling to restaurants and for freezing.
The old women greeted Shay politely enough. They knew better than not to since Aunt Rose was there. They didn't say much to Vic, but that was usual. Most of her clan, at one time or another, had freely expressed something to the effect that she should have been thrown back the way they did for undersized catch. Anyone unhealthy skeeved them out. Not that Vic had been in the hospital or had surgeries as a kid because she was unhealthy. She'd been as robust as the rest of them. She just had weak legs. But they'd never understood the difference between illness and disability. Plus she'd been able to leave and had been gone for years. Just that made her decidedly not one of them.
Instead the aunts focused their interest on Mellie and her new boyfriend. They wanted to know what he did and were impressed that he was a mycologist until Mellie explained that meant he studied funguses. Then they butchered the pronunciation of his name, Ramprasad Chatterjee. When Mellie couldn't stand it anymore, she shortened it for them. "I just call him Ram. Everyone does."
“Ram, like ramming something?” The old aunts repeated the mispronunciation among themselves until Mellie snapped at them. “No, there’s no ramming.”
No one said anything but eyebrows twisted and arched around the circle. Mellie blushed as she realized her mistake. They were a raunchy lot of old ladies. Great, great, maybe another great Aunt Vergie opened her mouth but shut it when Aunt Rose held up her hand even though Vic could see that Rose was biting down on a smile. Aunt Vergie stayed silent, but her wattles shook. Rose and Vergie alternated desperate inhalations that built into whistling squeals. Exhalations staggered out of their lungs. It was the laugh some of the women in Vic's family had. By the time the women were in full bray, Vic threw her head back and joined in. An ex-uncle by marriage had described it as a herd of asthmatic donkeys about to die. Shay looked at Vic as if she'd never seen her before. Mellie protested and tried to uphold her boyfriend's dignity but only got as far as "Ram is a perfectly respectable name in India," before her own breath stuttered, and she was howling along with them. Snook joined in. By the time it was done, they were tilted sideways on lawn chairs or had fallen backward against dock posts. For once, Vic felt an included part of the family.
"Indian? From India? Aren't those people half-colored? Like Shay here?"
And with that, Great Great Aunt Cora’s racism ended the mood. While Mellie laid into Cora, Chester graciously asked Shay if she wanted to come see some of his artwork. He had a shop next to Aunt Rose's tool shed. Shay let herself be removed from the situation, and Vic followed. She was already embarrassed for Chester. His "art" was most likely high school woodworking projects like a pine box with a hinged top. Or if he'd gotten fancy—a checkers board.
By the time she caught up with them, Shay was wandering through a small shed filled with wooden carvings. Vic watched her stroke along the rippled back of an alligator sunning on a bank and palm the beak of a great egret standing tall beside it. They were made of pine rubbed to a golden gloss. She knelt to look at the otters floating side by side on water carved from cedar. They each clasped a crayfish on their bellies. She ran her finger over the little holes in the wood that made the otter fur look wet.
"Oh, those are natural. Pecky cypress it's called. All those odd holes and slits are from a fungus that lived in the tree. It's terrible hard to find, but I knew it was what I needed for the otters."
It made Vic mad. Chester should be in an art school somewhere. In fact, she could tell Shay was already scheming for that to happen. But no way he'd ever leave. Instead, in a few years, his knuckles would be thickened by salt water and the brute labor of fishing and no good anymore for the fine work she saw all around her. The useless, incomprehensible waste of human beings was another reason she hated coming back. But none of them thought of it like that. They were their own jailers.
No one said or did anything horrible at dinner. It helped that her family wasn't much for the Lord so there wasn't all that sort of talk even with the leftover Christmas decorations. Shay murmured her surprise about "the sparseness of Christian references." It was odd if Vic thought about it. Her relatives were more pagans than anything the way they knew about the land and sea, not that they would ever call themselves anything but Christian. There was pie and hooch, and Vic had loosened up enough to take part in a cutthroat Yahtzee tournament with the old uncles and aunts. Shay kept trying to understand how everyone was related, but she stayed confused since she never quite got how old some of them were.
Later that night, in Vic's old bed, Vic tried to explain to Shay why her art school scholarship idea wouldn't work, but she couldn't make Shay understand. It wasn't something Vic had words for. Everyone down here just knew what was possible and what wasn't. Shay didn't push, and they'd made love smelling of alcohol and salt water and sunscreen.
In Vic's mind, things would end for them when they got internships in different cities. But their fame scored both of them gigs in New York. They'd been offered places at all the big mainstream news organizations, but Shay had chosen an upstart website. Vic figured that's what having money meant—you could take risks like that with your career and not worry.
Vic took the major television outlet offer. And it wasn't just to spite the professor who'd advised her against it. He said he was just being real as he'd recited his list of her impediments to an on-air career: those big shoulders, too many muscles in her arms, she wasn't pretty, the handicapped issue, of course, and—he sighed this last out—the hair. She'd smiled at him that smile that showed all her teeth. Vic had used it with every school counselor who thought she should be a teacher, for special needs kids, of course. It had made them squirm and stutter. It made this guy do the same. But Vic wasn't unreasonable. She'd stopped shaving the sides of her head and let the blue in her forelock grow out.
Which meant she was looking fairly respectable when she met Shay's parents. It didn't happen often for Vic—meeting parents. But Mrs. Cromwell had sent a lovely note inviting her to join Shayna and them for an after-graduation dinner. For sure, it had been Shay's idea, but Vic knew she couldn't refuse unless she was willing to split with Shay that very week. Vic knew the end was coming, but she couldn't hurt Shay like that. And in a moment of honesty, Vic admitted to herself she wasn't ready yet. She wanted a little more time.
Right off she knew Dr. and Mrs. Cromwell didn't like her much and why would they. But that made it a challenge, so Vic started by complimenting Mrs. Cromwell on her earrings and used her brightest eyes as she listened to a story about the tiny, exquisite jewelry store Mrs. Cromwell had found in Paris when her parents had taken her there for her eighteenth birthday. Vic could be Lothario-level charming when she worked at it, and by the end of the appetizer and first glasses of wine the mother had relaxed. But then Mrs. Cromwell made a joke with Shay about the almost matching mother-daughter outfits they had on, and didn't manage to hide a flick of disdain when she glanced at Vic's casual slacks and shirt. How was Vic supposed to know they were going to such an upscale place, not that she had a better outfit?
Shay's university president father didn't have any give. Even his breathing was rigid. No matter how much Vic complimented his most recent book about the influences of Guyanese immigrant literature on the American canon (Vic had done her due diligence before the dinner.), the father held on to his imperious superiority. By the end of the main course, he was outright ignoring her questions. She did have a Cuban great grandmother on her father's side who'd given Vic darker hair and eyes than the rest of her family, but she decided playing up some put-on common Caribbean cultural descent wouldn't make it better. And she couldn't blame him for a lack of enthusiasm about someone he probably thought was from a racist, ignorant, tobacco-spitting family, which she was, dating his daughter. Vic went into her neutral polite mode and told herself the evening would eventually end.
But then Dr. Cromwell said something snooty about having visited Florida with its "ubiquitous, decaying trailers." That pissed Vic off. Not the ubiquitous part. That was true. But had he been in a trailer? There was nothing decaying about them. Her people's places had an array of fancy kitchens, wall-sized televisions, and big-ass bathtubs with jets.
Vic couldn't help herself. She went all drawl and dull-witted. She talked at length about how much she missed her dog Snook, that he was a black-mouthed, yellow cowdog, bred from a fine mix of Florida cur and Catahoula leopard, how she'd stolen him from some hog hunters who'd been treating him bad, how one of them, a third cousin of hers or maybe second or maybe both, with no more sense than a turnip, had come to steal him back, but she'd met him on the porch with her father's old shotgun, the gun left behind when "Daddy was incarcerated," and that cousin had changed his mind quick as a snake after a mouse.
Through all of it, the parents stared, not at Vic, but past her. The mother's dessert fork hung mid-air, the father's after dinner coffee went untouched. Vic ended her monologue by asking Dr. Cromwell if he had a dog. He didn't answer. Mrs. Cromwell asked if Shayna would be able to help open the summerhouse this year. After dinner, in the taxi, insisted upon and paid for by the parents, Shay was angry at not her parents, but at Vic and had expressed it with the carefully modulated tones that always grated on Vic nerves. Instead of her usual yelling, Vic went sullen. Shay hated that. Later, they made a sort of peace.
END OF CHAPTER TWO
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