Off Highway 75
by Laurah Norton Raines
My husband's father was a stockcar driver, or a mechanic, or something. His mother can't say for sure. She knew him only by a nickname—Buddy or Skip, depending on her mood. If this insults my husband, he doesn't tell me. He knows that his father had large, veiny hands like his own, and that he could fix anything. That's what his mother remembers.
She tells us, drunk on margaritas, that, when she was pregnant, her whole body smelled like motor oil. No matter how many times she bathed, she couldn't rid herself of it. She resorted to scrubbing her skin with blocks of orange Go-Jo, but the odor never left.Now she has brittle, dyed-red hair and fewer teeth than she should. Her lipstick is nearly lavender. She opens her mouth so wide when she laughs that I feel like I can see her insides. We are unsure around her. My husband was raised by his grandmother, a slim, not-very-old woman with congestive heart failure and a little oxygen tank she pulls around like a pet. She is always kind, if a bit forgetful; my husband blames that on the grain alcohol that she hides in the oven. She always offers us sweet tea, and asks us to watch her soap opera with her. I don't mind those visits. Her oxygen machine pumps in a way that's quite comforting. She keeps her tiny apartment cool.
They live in a town sixty miles from Atlanta, but we don't see this younger one, the mother he calls Darla, often. She works second shift at a plastics plant, and takes weekend trips to the Cherokee casinos. When we do visit, we take her to the only restaurant in their small hometown—Mexican and run by a Chinese couple with dark, searching eyes—to buy her a meal we can't afford. He wants to seem far away from the trailers that dot his mother's neighborhood like abandoned shoes. She doesn't notice him pulling the bill over to our side of the booth, or the too-large tip he leaves. She doesn't comment on our new wedding rings, but she does ask me if I'm getting fatter. My husband tells her I have earned my master's, and have been hired on at a university—that I will have my own office, practically. I know from his voice that he is proud.
She doesn't say anything for a while. Finally, leaned back against the burping vinyl, she levels her gaze on him and sniffs. She's too classy for you now, huh? She shows cleavage that's too middle-aged to be on display. Her bosom hangs low, skin fragile, used tissue paper. She's only sixteen years older than we are, but her face, its drooping curtains, seems a century away.
We sit politely as she eats basket after basket of free chips and picks at steak fajitas, the most expensive thing on the menu. Our plates have already been cleared. She licks the last drops of frozen margarita from her glass and declares it weak. Finally, I make excuses so that we can leave. We drop her off at her tiny trailer, the one she shares with her brother—his uncle—who is bedridden by migraine headaches and his own 400-lb frame. The things I know about him read like a list: he is on disability and collects samurai swords. Once, he was a roadie for some southern rock band or another; the mother of his only child is a whore. He has a casual acquaintance with the Klan, and hasn't learned my name. Like everyone else in his family, he calls me honey.
The trailer. My husband's mother has a boyfriend in there, somewhere, and cats. We don't go in. Sometimes my husband stands at the window to speak to his uncle, about video games and the project cars that sit half-finished in the front yard. I say nothing, or smile politely when his mother tells the Puerto Rican neighbors that I am a kindergarten teacher. Even if it's cold out, I start to feel warm.
Before we leave, my husband will speak quietly with his mother. I will stand a polite distance away, under one of the scraggly crab apple trees. I don't dare lean in to say hello to his uncle, even though his red Viking hair and long, sharpened fingernails fascinate me. Lately he's taken to lounging nude, and during our last visit, I caught an eyeful of bulging belly and suffocated penis. So I stand with my arms crossed, thinking of the groceries I will buy, the papers I will grade, the punk rock shows we will attend when we tire of trying to be grown-ups. I pretend not to see my husband slipping his mother a thin roll of bills. I decide not to wonder how we will afford printer ink and the soymilk that doesn't sour his stomach, because I can't protest. Instead, I watch the neighbor children play with a dead garter snake. They chatter in lively Spanish, having abandoned their cheap skateboards and Big Wheels to poke at the thing with the stubs of burned-out sparklers. It is still vivid green, but much too limp, and its eyes look like dull beads. This is when my own stomach starts to hurt.
I drive us home, ostensibly because my husband has a headache. He doesn't want to talk, so I let him turn up the stereo as loud as he wants. I don't complain when he cranks the windows down and my hair flies helter-skelter in the breeze. He doesn't sing along to the music—Black Flag—but his fingers jump up and down against his thighs, mimicking the drum beats, then the guitar, then the bass. He can play them all. I wonder sometimes if his father's hands were so restless, if they danced over everything like my husband's do—tools, instruments, my own skin. He can make anything hum. The muscles on his forearms pulse like water under paper, moving fading ink back and forth. Most of his tattoos are of demon women, surrounded in flame. I don't take this personally.
We don't talk until we're back inside the perimeter of Metro Atlanta, where we feel safer. Even then, it's idle chatter: our friends, his new job, my students and their ever-disintegrating grammar. His other life is like a dream, leaving vague impressions: green snake. Cheap margaritas. Gravel and cigarette smoke. It's all gone by the time we get home, to the smallish house in the edgy neighborhood the realtor had called up-and-coming. The sparse furniture and carefully framed rock and roll posters seem suddenly full of possibility. We talk of knocking down walls, of rugs and new paint. We are still young, after all, with so much time. But we don't ever talk about his mother, or his father, or his uncle's immense nakedness. Instead, I cook my husband anything he wants for dinner. I don't say anything when he ignores the ringing phone. I let him choose the television programs all night long.
Laurah Norton Raines teaches at Georgia State University, the same school that granted her MFA in Creative Writing. Laurah has worked as an associate editor for Five Points, and has just launched a new journal, SUB-LIT. Her work can be found in a variety of journals, including Fringe Magazine. Raines is a former Paul Bowles scholar, and one of her stories was a recent finalist for the Agnes Scott Prize. In her spare time, she goes to dive bars and half-heartedly engages in home improvement.