A Bed of Oysters
Sallie wasn’t sure how to tell her parents she was getting a divorce.
No one in her family took the coward’s way out. They stood at the altar young and naïve, married the right people and lived simple, happy lives or married the wrong people and suffered through it, but divorce—no.
The annual Thanksgiving pilgrimage back home was definitely not the time to tell them either. Too many blessings of family and togetherness. Too many aunts and uncles, too many cousins and family friends milling about. She’d wait until after the holidays when the tinseled, merry, self-indulgent world got back to the reality of bills and cranky knees and lonely suppers. When she could tell them over the phone—not see her father’s face, not feel her mother’s disappointed hug. That would be the time.
She tried to come up with an excuse to skip the family Thanksgiving, feigning fatigue with work and the boys’ busy schedules, but in the end she packed the car, buckled the seat belts, and doled out snacks to bored kids rather than face all the fabrications and prying questions she would have to endure to explain her absence. Sallie only had so much deceit-capacity, and The Lie, that her family life was blissful, her marriage happy, was enough of a burden to carry. In truth, she liked seeing everyone—for a day or two. But then, like all families she supposed, the happy-shine quickly wore off and what was left felt like chafing—politics, religion, money—all bubbled up in conversation over the course of days and sent everyone scurrying back to the safety of knowing they were right and preferring to love those who were wrong from afar. Everything would be fine, she told herself. After all, it was only one day. One afternoon for chrissake.
Her mother had called earlier in the week, prodding her to come down early, insistent that Brett could take a day off work, going on about missing the boys and them needing to know their grandparents.
“Brett can’t make it his year,” she’d said, and before her mother could ask why, she’d added, “He’s got a case coming up that has him swamped. But don’t worry, the boys and I will be there early. I promise.”
You don’t want to miss the oysters, was all her mother had said.
***
It was a three-hour drive from Charlotte, less than 300 miles, and the shedding of what seemed a century of progress. In Charlotte she lived in a house with central air, a lawn service, and smiling neighbors who walked Golden Retrievers and Frenchies, picking up their poop in eco-friendly bags. People wore modest bathing suits and cover-ups at the country club pool, not the cut-off shorts and t-shirts for wading in the creek back home. Everyone from the world she navigated day-to-day was pleasant. Fights went on inside with the windows closed. Affairs happened discreetly. No one cried in public unless attending a funeral or a patriotic event. Drunks knew how to smile and avoid slurring their words, not smash their beer bottles in the bar parking lot because their motherfucking girlfriend had danced with Ronnie, or Stevie, or Bill.
Sallie’d steeled herself for the shift from that reliable if not numbed world to the electric, rough-edged one of Home with an extra-long meditation and a run before tucking her sleepy boys into the van in the darkness of pre-dawn. She tucked two pies from Fresh Fields Gourmet Market under the back seat.
By the time they pulled into Cyprus Creek, the sun had begun to burn off the haze of early morning. The day was still hot and humid enough to use the air conditioning, but Sallie rolled down the window to smell what had once been home. It was a visceral punch in the gut, that smell that lit a panic and pleasure.
In the last five years she’d limited her trips to once a year, Thanksgiving seeming the easiest. The kids were only out of school for two days, so she couldn’t linger, there were enough people around to allow her to disappear into the crowd, and for the most part people were festive, forgiving. She felt her city skin slough as the tall pines closed in on the asphalt road and signs of progress were replaced with the random slouching house or rusted trailer, three cars gone to seed in their front yards, satellite dishes on ramshackle sheds. There was invariably a kid or two on the front porch of such misfit homes watching what little traffic there was, and, as always, the proverbial old man on a bicycle weaving into traffic, balancing plastic bags filled with cheap wine.
She felt the familiar tightening in her chest as she pulled into the driveway of her parents’ long brick rambler and parked behind a succession of pickup trucks. Confederate flags big enough to fly over a car dealership had been shoved in makeshift flagpoles (PVC pipe from Lowe’s) and reached skyward from their cabs. She saw the crowd of faces milling about the yard. She saw her mother.
“Boys, listen to me.” She turned to her young sons in the back itching to get out. “No guns. Go nowhere near the guns.” She pointed her finger at each one for emphasis. “No woods without your boots,” she continued, “and if they start talking ugly, you come over to me. Do you hear me?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“I’m going to say it one more time; do you hear me?”
“Yes, momma, we know. Just let us out.”
She unlocked the car and the boys piled out, running to hug their grandmother before blending into the cacophony of cousins. She saw the looks, even though they tried to hide them. She was The Outsider, the only one in the family who’d left. Everyone else lived within a ten-mile radius, an orbit of aunts and uncles, cousins, and in-laws, her parents the center of their universe.
“Hey baby,” her mother met her in the driveway, gave her a hug, and handed her a red Solo cup, two fingers of Jack Daniels amber in the bottom. “Have you lost more weight? I swear, you’re getting scrawny.” Her way of saying I love you. “Come on see your brothers and Daddy Mac.”
The men were in the backyard hunkered around the steaming oysters. Eight cinder blocks supported a 4x8 foot piece of sheet metal laid over a glowing stoked fire. A bushel of oysters had just been poured onto the metal bed, and wet burlap sacks served as blankets to keep the heat from drying out the fragile meat. There was nothing better than an oyster right off the roaster, she had to admit.
“Look what the cat drug in,” was her brother Freddie’s acknowledgment of her presence.
“If you were a fish, I’d throw you back,” her Daddy said.
“Not enough meat on you,” her brother James added, to which they all laughed in low agreement.
Sweeping back the burlap, grabbing oysters from the heat with fireman’s gloves and filling tin pails for the family, her father softened. “Come on, Baby Girl, get yourself an oyster.” He handed her a pail and knife. “Be careful with that thing.”
Between the Loblolly pines scattered about the property, her father had nailed one by sixes about chest high to serve as tables. No one needed a chair, so there was always someplace to park for food.
She found a spot and put down her bucket. The whiskey, the pine needles slippery beneath her feet, the smell of the open fire, the rough gray oyster shell nestled in the palm of her hand all felt familiar and sweet. She pried open a calcified shell to reveal the curled and tender meat, which she scooped out, doused with hot sauce and ate on a Saltine cracker. It tasted so good.
Freddie came over with a flask. “Fill ‘er up?” he asked as he poured, not waiting for an answer. She laughed and drank another deep swig. She should check on the boys but was suddenly starving. “Them boys are getting big,” Freddie said as if reading her mind. “You should let me take them hunting. Next time you come, stay over a night.”
Sallie shot her brother a look. “We don’t do guns, you know that.”
“Oh, that’s right. You’re all anti-gun and global warming, all that sky is falling shit.” He took a swig from his flask. “If it’s as bad as you think it is, they better know how to use a gun to protect themselves when the world comes to an end, don’t you reckon?”
In Charlotte she could take command of this conversation. Roll off statistics, state the hard facts, shut the nonsense down. But here she felt small and silly. She could smell the sunscreen on her face, in November for God’s sake, and knew her brother could too. “We just think differently,” she said, looking down into an empty oyster shell, the center an indigo blue.
Freddie wouldn’t let it go, not looking at her but fixing his eyes somewhere off in the distance. “Yeah, you don’t come around here no more. Judging us with all your NPR shit.” He paused, “But you don’t tell us your husband’s run off to be a fudge packer.”
An alarm went off in her brain.
The oyster knife slipped and the sharp edge of the shell buried itself into the palm of her hand. A zing of fire lit up the synapses in her brain and ran straight down her spine. “What are you talking about?” she closed her hand over the shell, feeling the wet blood.
“You know what I’m talking about. And so does everybody here.” He swept his eyes across the lay of the yard. “You think we’re stupid or something? It was in the paper, Sallie. The goddamned newspaper.” He lay both his broad hands on the wood slat and looked up at the sky. “Arrested in the Sheetz bathroom for soliciting a minor.”
“Do Momma and Daddy know?”
“Hell, like I said—they all know. My question is, do your boys know? Cause if they don’t somebody’s gonna tell them. And it will be a hell of a lot easier coming from you.”
Her father let out a whistle from across the yard. “Come on everybody, let’s pray and eat.”
Sallie turned back to the house, her fist still tightly balled around the crenellated, calcified shell, and the pain of the cut shifting from surprise to a dull ache. She could feel the disappointed eyes of her brother watching her back. Only when she sensed his gaze had moved away from her could she drop the shell, look at her hand. She studied the one-inch slice in the center of her palm, turning her hand up to the sky only to see blood begin the ooze down her wrist.
The kitchen was bustling but the hallway to the bathroom was dark and still. She let herself in and quickly locked the door. Ran her hand under the cold water and winced at the sting. The band-aids were where they had always been, stored in the medicine cabinet along with Mentholatum, Kaopectate, and her father’s blood pressure medicine.
She cleaned the wound as best she could and stretched two band-aids across her palm. Looking up, she caught her reflection in the vanity mirror. They were right, she was too thin. Her face looked gaunt and sallow in the harsh, fluorescent light. She had done her roots before coming down, but instead of taking age off her, the brittleness of her hair blanketed in the brown dye made her look older than forty years. Of course everyone knew. It was as if she’d worn a placard across her shoulders to greet everyone: My husband fucked a man. While he was fucking me, he fucked a man. No, a boy. A boy five years older than their oldest son. While she was planning the school’s auction and playing Canasta, he was cumming.
***
The food was spread across two picnic tables. Country ham and potato salad, turkey and dressing, squash casserole, green beans cooked in fatback, corn pudding, rice and giblet gravy, the proverbial congealed lime Jello salad with cottage cheese and crushed pineapple. There were biscuits and cornbread, pickled figs and watermelon rind, cocktail onions and gherkins. Desserts were gathered at one end, pecan pies and pumpkin pies and coconut pies and pineapple upside down cake, banana pudding with meringue, and store-bought cookies shaped like turkeys in case there wasn’t enough.
Sallie found a seat for herself, her boys taking their plates to sit by their cousins. For a delicious thirty minutes everyone kept to the task of filling their bellies with food. She looked down the table at Freddie, his face focused on his laden plate, and moved the scant helping of rice and gravy around on her own.
“That’s why you’re so damn skinny,” her sister-in-law in spandex shorts and a man’s extra-large t-shirt teased, her plate happily heaping, bowing with the weight of Thanksgiving abundance.
Sallie smiled and reached for a biscuit, politely laughing at the right time when someone told a story and sharing silly anecdotes about the boys who looked down at their plates upon hearing their names out loud. She could tell they were embarrassed at being the center of attention amid all the tales of their cousins’ riding four-wheelers into ditches and getting pulled out by the sheriff, or shooting their 22s at an airplane and getting beat by Daddy Mac. Even they felt less than among these people when they should have felt anything but. Her boys had flown to London. Rafted down the Colorado River. Skied in Vermont. Yet Sallie knew they could feel the silent judgment, and for a few days when they returned, their private school blazers would feel like lead jackets.
When everyone’s appetites were finally whetted, Sallie jumped from the table to be the first to help put things away. She liked cleaning up. It was easy, mechanical. Leftovers wrapped in foil and sent to the kitchen; everything unsalvageable dumped in black trash bags hanging from nails at the end of either table. She worked alongside the other women, reminding them and herself that she was one of them.
“Why don’t we set on the porch?” Her mother’s suggestion to all the grown women a polite order. “The boys are all going down to shoot skeet.”
Sallie scanned the yard for the boys. They were standing between the house and the back field as if cemented between obeying their mother and the exhilaration of watching the men shoot off guns.
“They’ll be fine,” her mother said quietly, and grabbed her hand. “It’s skeet shooting. No one’s gonna kill nothing, and their uncles ain’t going to let them touch a gun. Don’t fret so.” She pulled Sallie towards the porch. “Come on, set a little.”
Sallie waved the boys off and watched them, first standing for a moment in disbelief and then running before she could change her mind. It was like being out at sea, watching the rescue boat turn and chug away.
She let her mother guide her to the rambler’s front porch. Two steps off the ground and the width of the house, ragtag rockers and straight back chairs from inside collected from end to end as the women let the fatigue of all the cooking and the frenzy of all the eating settle in their bodies. Each had a cup or a glass, but everyone sipping the same sweet liquor. Freddie’s wife passed her a teacup filled with bourbon. “Here you go,” was all she said.
Sallie almost jumped from her chair at the first gunshot. Embarrassed, every particle of her psyche concentrated itself on anticipating the next one and when it came along with hoots and hollers in the distance, she squirmed miserably. I’ll get my boys and go, she thought. I don’t need these people. Instead she clenched the teacup and listened to the women mindlessly bicker and chatter. She felt invisible among these giants. Their girth and sense of place, like the pines that stood in the yard and refused to be blown down by hurricanes or wormed by disease, shrunk her to a nub. No one included her in the banter—it was like she didn’t exist to them. Then she understood. They were trying to be kind. They felt sorry for her. If she didn’t leave now, her body would turn into dust to be swept off the porch at the end of the day.
She saw the boys—they were coming back. She watched them running from the field, laughing and throwing themselves on their cousins, each one taking a turn being tackled to the ground. Now was her chance. Sallie stood and yelled across the yard. “Boys, say goodbye to your cousins. We’ve got to be heading back home.”
They came up to the porch red-faced and sweaty. “Mom, we just got here,” they both cried. “Why do we have to leave now?”
She turned to her mother and watched her face work to mask her disappointment, her hands smoothing the apron she perpetually wore. “You know, traffic,” Sallie said lightly, shaking her head in feigned frustration. “On Thanksgiving, it’s a bear.”
A few of the women looked away, a few tried to bridge the awkward silence between mother and daughter with take care nows and see you soons and those boys sure are growing up fast.
Sallie stepped off the porch, absentmindedly brushing the dirt off the boy’s shirts and smoothing their tousled hair. “Well, we’re off then.”
“Want some leftovers?” her mother asked.
It was then she remembered the two pies still under the backseat of the van. “Oh no, we’re good. But thank you. Everything was delicious as always.” She smiled. “Right, boys?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Say goodbye to Nannie and give her a hug.” She watched them earnestly wrap themselves around their grandmother. They loved her in an innocent, uncomplicated way. “See you soon Momma.”
“Next Thanksgiving.” A comment meant to cut, and it did.
“I’ll call when I get home.” Sallie put her arms around her mother, nuzzling the small of her neck to inhale the talcum and hairspray and some other scent she could not name but made her want to cry. “Tell Daddy bye for me.” She looked at the women, solid on the porch, and walked away without a waving goodbye.
She settled the boys into the van. Put a movie on the iPad for them to share. Fastening her seatbelt, she turned on the radio to occupy her own mind for the car ride home. Already she was feeling more like herself. Guns were dangerous. Good grammar wasn’t negotiable. Dental hygiene and proper footwear, learning a second language and drinking water instead of Mountain Dew.
Her hands felt steady on the steering wheel. She winced at the reminder of the knife and its slip, the sharp edge of the shell and the beauty of the nacre, blue and iridescent, the painful conversation with her brother that left her raw and aching—but knew as the van pulled onto the two-lane road and turned towards home that with each mile closer, everything would right itself.
“Why did we have to leave? We didn’t touch the guns.” A voice came from the back seat. “I promise.”
She glanced back in the mirror, her younger son’s face in that child’s restful trance as he watched the passing world outside the car window, pines and blue sky. They were such beautiful boys.
The oldest caught her glance in the rearview mirror. “Momma, what’s a pickle smoker?”
Amy Branson is a fiction writer whose work has appeared most recently in Penstricken, Tough Poets Review, and Movable Type. When she's not writing, she spends most days on her yoga mat, wandering in the woods, and chasing sticky babies.
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