Literary Orphans

It’s Better to Know Us
by Elizabeth Elving

___que_no_desemboca_by_natalia_drepina

I called her Sylvia. Grandma, or any variation thereof, was out of the question. She would say, “I’ve been called enough names in my life, I’m not taking another one at my age.” And anyway she never struck me as a grandmother. She loved to spit, for example. I’ve never known another grandmother to spit, and Sylvia was world-class at it. Her spit was an exclamation point. One time she did it at the dinner table. She made a remark, spit into her water glass for emphasis, and told my sister to bring her a new water.

I was the third of three girls, and the only birth that Sylvia was present for. My father’s investment slackened with each baby. By the time I came around there was a vacant seat in the delivery room, which Sylvia begrudgingly filled. Begrudgingly until, as the story goes, she took my gooey body in her arms and after one look at me said “Finally. Here’s one of mine.” That sealed it.

So it was only right that I be the one she called about the diagnosis. I was twenty-four by that point and living in Nashville, sixty triumphant miles away from my mother and sisters. Sylvia did not sound afraid of her cancer, only peeved by it. Just as if she were talking about her refridgerator leaking for no reason, or who on god’s earth wants to watch a reality TV show about moose hunters, or any other baffling irritation.

“In my lungs, right where I knew it would be. Little bastard.”

“Isn’t there something they can do?” I asked.
“There sure is. They can empty my pockets making me miserable for the next three years. Out of the question. Now, hon, I need your help. Are you sitting down? You should be sitting down, and you should probably light a cigarette for this, too.”

 

A year before this phone call took place, Sylvia had come to visit me in Nashville. I wanted her to think of me as a social person, living a fulfilling life in the big city. So I invited my only friend to have dinner with us. Her name was Eileen, and she had waited tables with me at the diner until she lashed out at a demanding customer, calling him a “Nazi Jew.” The manager thought it prudent to fire her despite her defense that the insult “cancelled itself out.”

Eileen was not for everybody. But I liked her, and after she was fired I found myself spending my days off in her drearily carpeted one-bedroom, amidst the hostile stench of stale tobacco (from her) and ferret shit (from her undertended pet). We would get stoned and argue about the underlying themes of novels that neither of us had read. I had hoped that Sylvia would appreciate Eileen’s brashness and deem her a “pistol” or “firecracker.” But the dinner was a failure. Eileen was twenty minutes late, responded sarcastically to Sylvia’s non-sacarstic questions, and had five glasses of wine. Sylvia and I both stopped at two, but Eileen kept ordering them. When the bill came, it was clear that Eileen had assumed that Sylvia would be paying. She was correct, but it still felt presumptuous considering the additional three glasses of wine. Standing outside, after Eileen had left without a ‘thank you’, Sylvia told me “you’re selling yourself short with that one” and spit into a potted plant.
I could hear the click of Sylvia’s lighter over the phone.

“That’s how you get a hold of one of these things. You have to know someone who knows someone.”

“I don’t think I know anyone.”

“Now, don’t try to play Girl Scout with me. I know you’re familiar with that element. I remember that piece of work you made me share a meal with. That girl has ‘I know someone’ written all over her.”

Sylvia was right about Eileen. But in the year since the dinner I had made other friends. People from the diner, people who hung around at the pub next door to my apartment building. I hadn’t spoken to Eileen in months. If she had been anyone else I would have felt sheepish about calling her for a favor after all that time. But Eileen’s lack of regard for social decorum extended to the people around her. When I called her, it was “hey, how’s it going?” as if there had been no gap. I described what Sylvia was looking for, and she knew what I was talking about. She even knew another name for it.

“Orange Crush. They call it that because the pills are orange. And because it crushes you. You know, like, it kills you. You know it kills you, right?”
“Yes.”

“And not on accident. That’s what it’s supposed to do.”

“It’s for my grandmother.”

“The old lady from dinner?”

“Yeah, she has cancer.”

“That sucks. OK. I have a friend. But all I can give you is a number. Not a name or anything. Orange Crush is super illegal in America.”

“That works.”

We hung up after some weak suggestion of hanging out again some time. I texted Sylvia letting her know that I had a lead and she responded with a smiley face emoticon. I was the one who taught her how to use the emoticon feature on her phone. Two Christmases ago I had visited her condo, and she had poured whiskeys, and after an hour of cackling and gossip she tossed her cell phone into my lap and said “you’re young. Show me how to use that fucking thing” and we’d sat side by side on the couch while I showed her how to work the different settings, how to change her ringtone to something less ear-splitting, how to adjust the time so that it read the local time and not West Coast time as it had defaulted to. She kept saying, “I’m not going to remember any of this.” But she appreciated the emoticons because she found them “fun” and because they spared her the supreme annoyance of texting, which she ardently despised. I remembered this day with Sylvia and spent the rest of the afternoon weeping on the couch with the TV on.

The next morning I walked in thickening heat to the bus depot. I had the directions, relayed over the phone by Eileen’s nameless friend, scrawled on the back of a grocery receipt in my pocket. I was to take the 44 Eastbound and look for the Baptist Church. The Church had a sign out front with a dove on it, holding a branch in its mouth. I was to take a left at the church, walk to the end of a cul-de-sac, and look for a yellow house with an inflatable Santa Claus in the front yard.

When I’m nervous I can’t eat, and when I don’t eat I get a headache. I felt a bad one coming on as I waited for the bus. Each pulse of pain came in a little louder, like approaching enemy drums. The clouds were getting heavier and I hadn’t thought to bring an umbrella. The 44 pulled in at 9:45, its entire bulk wrapped in one giant advertisement for a local bail bond service. The faces of the two proprietors were displayed hugely, spanning the height of the vehicle. Two men, bald and thick-necked, with identical tough guy expressions that said we don’t take bullshit from anybody, but we’re here to help. Between them their business motto was displayed in bold orange capitals: IT’S BETTER TO KNOW US AND NOT NEED US, THAN TO NEED US AND NOT KNOW US. I strained through my headache to understand what these words meant.

Inside the bus, the backside of the advertisement formed a dark grey mesh that almost completed obscured the view from the windows. In order to see outside I had to hold my face very close to the glass and squint through tiny holes.

I was worried about what I would look like to a drug dealer. Everything about my appearance suggested a self-tormented teen. I had a young face, no makeup, and I wore the same oversized t-shirt and black leggings I’d owned since high school. Also, my hair was green. I had started dying it at sixteen because my sisters were cheerleaders and because I grew up in the kind of town where people would leave you alone if you had green hair. I didn’t want people to leave me alone anymore. But I had gotten used to the way it looked, so I kept buying the little jars of green dye called ENVY for my monthly reapplications.

Envy had always stuck out to me in Sunday school as not belonging amongst the other deadly sins. My mother found Christ after the first baby. She raised us all Methodist, to Sylvia’s dismay. If Sylvia came over to our place for dinner we had to pray before she got there because she would not so much as sit at a table where grace was being said. I asked her once if she thought envy was a sin. She said, “I don’t believe in sin. I believe in not wasting time, and envy is absolutely a waste of time.” That’s what I was doing here. Rescuing Sylvia from wasted time.

The bus took a lumbering 90-degree turn into an unfamiliar neighborhood, and I realized the darkness outside was only partly to do with the advertisement and partly to do with a change in the weather. We turned another corner. I saw the dove, and pulled the cord. Stepping off the bus the air felt heavy and poised. The trees and plants braced themselves in anticipation.

It was easy to find the place. There stood Santa, slowly deflating on the front lawn of a yellow, wood-panneled bungalow. My knock was answered with a fierce bark on the other side of the door. Then, “SALLY!” I recognized the voice from the phone. “SALLY FUCK. OFF.” The man who answered looked twenty-five but he could have been thirty with a youthful face like mine. He wore a sideways trucker cap and Tennessee Titans jersey. When he spoke I saw that he had one gold tooth, perhaps an effort to counteract an otherwise non-threatening appearance. His image was further toughened by the presence of Sally, a bulldog of alarming stoutness and wideness. He had her by the collar and while she only came up to his knee it required all his strength to keep her from lunging at my throat.

“What’s up?” His voice was not unfriendly, and he looked me right in the eye.

“I’m a friend of Eileen’s. I’m here for-“

“I know what you’re here for. Come in.” he closed the door behind me.

“You hang out for a second. I’ll be right back.”

He looked like every boy I’d gone to high school with, but there was a flavor to the way he spoke that made him different, exotic even.

He left the room with Sally in tow, her unclipped nails scraping against the hardwood floor. The living room was sparse. A flat screen TV playing a muted nature program, and a few mismatched armchairs around a too-small table. At the center of the table was an enormous glass ashtray bearing a precarious mound of cigarette butts. At the other end of the table I saw, with a grip of shock, another person. A wiry figure half sunk in a white leather la-z-boy, with a two-foot bong between his spread legs. Tattoos crawled from under his t-shirt up his neck and down his arms. Angry coils of reptilian machinery, stopping abruptly at the hands and jawline, like some demon virus had been halted just short of devouring him altogether. I could hear thunder outside, in long, low notes. The nature program went to a commercial break and the tattooed man became aware of me in the room.

“Where’s Fontaine?”

“I don’t think I’m supposed to know his name.”

“Why not? Or shit, are you here for Skelly?”

Another name. One time Eileen said “the worse the drug, the more names they have for it.” I shrugged my shoulders.

“Damn. I hate this so much. You’re like the fifth cute girl coming over here for skelly. All these cute, sad girls. What are you so sad about? How do you not get it that the world will give you anything you ask for?”

I could have explained that it wasn’t for me. But he had essentially called me cute, so I froze. Fontaine returned with a calmer Sally clattering at his heels. He was holding a little blue pill bottle with a child-safe cap and no label on it, which he handed over without hesitation. Inside it was an orange oblong pill. It could have been mistaken for a vitamin. Fontaine watched dully as I placed the bottle in the outside pocket of my purse, zipped the pocket shut.

“OK listen. You don’t want to eat for three hours before taking this. If you do eat before taking it, it will still work, but it will take longer. That could become unpleasant. If we were in France right now this would be happening in a doctor’s office, no problem. Everyone has a right to do whatever they want to do. It’s gonna be one hundred dollars.”

That was the accent. He was French. A French drug dealer in a Tennessee Titans jersey. I handed him five bills, crisp from the ATM and folded once over. He took the wad, counted it, and examined each bill under the light. Fast, confident, precise. He had a criminal’s intimacy with cash.

“I’m gonna move out if you keep giving that to people, dude.” The tattooed man on the couch had tilted his head against the cushion to witness our transaction. Fontaine shrugged.

“I’m not giving it. I’m selling it. My poverty and not my will.” He looked back at me. “Normally I ask if you want to chill and smoke a bowl. But it’s different with Skelly. I keep my distance. You understand.”

And that was it. I was back on the sidewalk so fast that the overloaded clouds had not yet split.

At the bus stop it was me and my headache and the anxiety of waiting under a coal-colored sky with no umbrella. I got out my phone to text Sylvia, trying to decide what to say. Everything felt too trite, or too cruel, or too dramatic. If I called, I might cry again, and she would not tolerate that. I put my phone back in my pocket. I looked at the sign for the Mt. Zion Baptist Church across the street. The painted dove with the olive branch forever locked in its beak. And below it in individual lettering, John 14:17: YOU WILL KNOW HIM FOR HE LIVES IN YOU. Better to know him and not need him, I thought. The 44 pulled in to the stop with a mammoth yawn. I paid the fare with my right hand. My left hand held tight to my purse, feeling the outline of the bottle through the canvas. I took a seat towards the back and looked out the window. That’s when it began to rain.

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Elizabeth Elving is a writer and middlebrow culture enthusiast from Washington DC, currently residing in Nashville. She has a degree in religious studies from the least religious college in America, and a stochastic professional background. She is a member of the East Nashville Writer’s Group, and habitually airs her grievances at whoaskedher.blogspot.com.

el photo

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–Art by Natalia Drepina

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