Wild Heart

Breakfast at the Grill

from the stories, May Belle Rooney and the Dickman Sisters: Life at the Grill    

"Sometimes, being a bitch is all a woman has to hang on to." Twyla was muttering as she made notes in her notebook.

“Can I quote you on that?” Lyla said, putting a breakfast special in front of Twyla. Two eggs over medium, two slices of bacon, two sausages, two pancakes, and an orange juice.

Twyla looked at her plate. “What’s this breakfast called?”

“The two-by-two.”

“Uh-huh.” She poked at her egg. “I feel like Noah. How come I get only one OJ?”

“Shut up and eat your eggs.” She turned to Nyla, who was nibbling on dry toast like she wasn’t sure it was edible. “Let me bring you an egg, sweetie.”

“Do I look like I need an egg?” Nyla said, indicating her skinny little body. Lyla knew that Nyla didn’t see in the mirror what everyone else saw in the flesh, which was very little fat under that flawless skin.

“Yes, in fact, you do. I’d say you could use a stack of pancakes with lots of butter and real syrup.”

Nyla lifted her skinny arm and looked at her watch. “I’ve got lots to do before I open the shop at 10:00, so stop talking to me about food.”

Lyla stopped. She couldn’t force feed her sister, and even if she could, Nyla would just throw it up first chance she got.

The Grill was getting busier by the minute, the sun now full up behind the back alley and the heat starting to rise off the sidewalks already.

“God almighty,” Cecil said, turning on his stool to look at the sisters. “You girls sure do know how to have a confab about nothing much. Now me and my boys, we don’t have one word to say before we head out to the fields, not one, and don’t need to, neither, seeing as how we can pretty darned much read each other’s minds about what needs to be done. That’s men for you.”

Not one of the Dickman Sisters even looked at Cecil. Twyla continued to poke her eggs until the yoke was running into her potatoes and Nyla took another sip of black coffee and jiggled one foot like there was music playing. There was, but not anything a skinny woman would be dancing to.

Lyla splashed more coffee into Cecil’s cup. “Where are the boys this morning?” Cecil could be a pain in the butt, but like most people he just needed a good listening to.

“Kenny’s in the field over by the lake and Bobby’s gone into Terre Haute to get more cement to finish the floor of the new barn.” He pronounced it CEE-ment.

“Didn’t know you had a new barn going up.” Lyla kept talking to Cecil as she set up more coffee and threw glances out to the room to make sure everyone was doing OK. Darla would be in shortly and take some of the pressure off.

“Yep,” Cecil said, “Shirl just about filled up the other one with all those boxes she won’t let me throw out.” He shook his head as if he had just said something profound. “Women—can’t live with ‘em and can’t live with ‘em.” This was Lyla’s cue to laugh; she never did, but Cecil didn’t notice, having forgotten what he’d said as soon as it was out of his mouth. Truth was that Cecil had been living without Shirl since she up and left him three years ago to go stay with her dying mother and had just never come back after the funeral. Apparently the two of them never even talked about it, Cecil not being a discussing kind of man and even if he had been, Shirl was a long talker on short subjects, so no one ever got a word in edgeways.

Darla came running in the back door in mid-apology. “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry,” she said in one breath like it was all one word. “Larry needed his old blue shirt outta the back closet before he could go to the plant today and he swore I was the only one could find anything back there, so I told him, I said, ‘Larry, if you make me late again, Lyla’s gonna fire me and then where would we be’ is what I said, not that it made any difference. Heya Cecil, how’s those boys of yours this morning?” She finished tying a dish towel around her waist and poured herself a cup of hot coffee. “Girl,” she said to Lyla with a whoosh of breath, “I tell you what!” Then she took a sip of coffee and never did tell Lyla what.

The neon clock ticked past early morning coffee and eggs and into late-breakfast pancakes and iced tea. Nyla had gone back to the shop, leaving most of her slice of toast un-nibbled. Twyla was making notes in a notebook and smoking another cigarette. Lyla refilled her sister’s iced tea glass.

“I don’t know who’s going to go first,” she said, “Nyla from starvation or you from lung cancer.”

Twyla fake-coughed by way of an answer.

* The first line comes from a movie I don't know the name of. My friend Jan gave it to me to use as I please, so Twyla took it and ran with it.

Ada Peck and Major Dickman

from May Belle Rooney and the Dickman Sisters: Life at the Grill

It was love at first sight. How could it not be for a girl like her, dark-haired and dark-eyed, a dark flower in her daddy’s greenhouse of white orchids. And there he was, blond and blue-eyed, built slight as a romance novel character come walking across her daddy’s woods toward her like he was walking out of the ocean, born brand new from the brow of Zeus.

Well, her heart wanted that young man right then and there. Daddy was harsh; he loved her, but he was hard on her, and Mama—well she was as dreamy as those scentless orchids Daddy grew in the greenhouse, while she—Ada—was a hot house flower of another kind, protected and fecund, her whole entire body vibrating with love when she laid eyes on Major Dickman that day. Oh, she had seen him before, of course, Flinton being a small town, but they did not run in the same circles, not by an eyelash did they run in the same circles. She had no circle but the one Daddy circumscribed, and Major—well, she had heard stories, half of which she did not understand and the other half—oh! how those stories made her blush among her friends, and then when she was alone, she used her imagination to fill in where her friends left off, where they trailed into giggles, the brainless things. What she wouldn’t give for a frank discussion about desire with someone who could answer her questions.

The one time she tried to talk to her best friend Belle about the feelings she was having, Belle said she should ask Father William, that anytime she had had questions that troubled her soul, he was ever so kind. Ada wondered if Belle had any feeling at all down there or if she was so corseted she had gone numb from the waist down. No, talking to Belle was no use, and given that Father William was—well—a priest for goodness sake, and she knew what celibate meant—he was no good to her at all. Mama had never talked to her about anything more personal than what color went best with her hair and would probably throw a swoon if she knew what Ada dreamed about on hot summer nights when the windows were open to crickets and frogs and soft breezes.

One look at Major Dickman slouching out of the south woods and into her daddy’s greenhouse and she could have thrown a swoon herself, she was that light-headed. For his part, Major Dickman didn’t even notice her standing there in the shade of the elm. His mind was bent on getting this job with Jake Peck so he could get himself up to Terre Haute and win back what he had lost last week, win it back and then some. He had washed up good, put on a clean shirt and his only pair of black pants and the cleanest hat he could find, and he took himself across the field behind his Pa’s house, across the railroad track, and into the dark woods that separated the mighty Pecks from the likes of the lowly Dickmans.

It was just as well he hadn’t seen Ada, just as well that Jake Peck looked him over as if he was nothing more than a dirt-poor country kid who had a gift for growing things and not as the bounder he was. He had heard that Peck was a smart man, and certainly he had taken his father’s million and doubled it before he was 30. He was money-smart, but he was daughter-stupid,  something Major could tell within the first two minutes. Years later when he got drunk one night and ran into Jake Peck outside Hulman House in Terre Haute, he had yelled at Peck that this whole goddamned mess had been Peck’s own fault: for keeping his girl locked up like he could save her from having the good time she was bent on having; for not seeing right through him that first day. My god, Major was known all over three counties for his prowess. What the devil was Peck thinking to hire him with her just yards away?

“And I’ll tell you what, old man,” he had yelled at Peck that night, “she was the one started it. She was the one took me out back behind your own greenhouse and took my trousers down and . . .” but before he could yell out the indecent details, Peck’s meaty fist plowed into Major’s face and broke his nose.

But that first day as he walked those woods that used to be his daddy’s, he didn’t know anything about the Peck girl, and he sure as Hades didn’t know that the following spring he’d be a married man. It wouldn’t have surprised him to know he was a daddy—it wouldn’t be the first time—but he usually planted his seed in Terre Haute or in Indy. But that day was the first day of true summer, hot and steamy, and the smell of earth in those woods made him think about the last time he was with Scarlett Jimson in that canopy bed all draped in red velvet—and he stopped there, took his thoughts out of that brothel and straight back to the hear and now to think about dirt and loam and seedlings and such, so that when he met Old Man Peck, he kept his head about him and played yes-sir and no-sir like Pa had taught him to do. So Jake Peck hired Major Dickman to haul rocks and pull weeds and turn the compost—forever ruing having hired that boy who ruined his little girl.

Major did good work for all of two days before Ada was all over him with her eyes and another two days before she was all over him with her mouth. He had been walking home after a long day of sweating and swearing over Jake Peck’s compost heap, hauling and dumping and stirring and mixing, and he was muttering his displeasure so that at first he did not hear her on the path behind him.

“Mr. Dickman!” she called, and when he turned he nearly fell over at the sight of her, out here in nature wearing gauzy white cotton and lacy white gloves and little bitty black shoes laced up on ankles he could glimpse as she stepped toward him.

“I am Ada,” she said, holding out a hand clad in a white lace glove, which he did not take, his hands still lined with soil from her daddy’s greenhouse, even after washing, and she had laughed, looking him directly in the eye as she took off those white gloves very slowly, tugging one finger at a time, her breath growing quick as if she was doing hard work, and he had laughed, wiping his hands on the thighs of his dirt-dusted work pants and the jays in the trees squawked and settled down to watch.

In all his years of experience, he didn’t know girls could get as horny as men could, and he felt like he had just won the biggest pot at the table the first time he kissed that dark-eyed girl, only the truth be told, she had kissed him and what was he to do but kiss back and let her lead the way.

Afterward, all sweet as cherry pie, she said, “I thank you so much, Mr. Dickman.”

“Ma’am,” he said, and thinking of nothing better, added, “You could call me Major if you would like.”

Lacy Dickman

from May Belle Rooney and the Dickman Sisters: Life at the Grill

Lacy Dickman had lived all her life in the three-bedroom house on Broad Street. She and Lu Ellen were born there within five minutes of each other, Lu being the older sister, and then a year later there was Larry—the three Dickman kids, children of Ada Peck and Major Dickman. Ada never did carry Major’s name, but she gave it to the three offspring, and as mothers go, she went—gone all the time on some business or the other, and if she was horsing around somewhere behaving no better than she ought to be, well what of it? She was barely turned 16 when the twins were born, and after behaving like bunnies the first three weeks she and Major knew each other, she hadn’t cared a fig for him, and the wonder was she ever got pregnant a second time, but there was no doubting that Larry came of Major’s sperm. All you had to do was look at those blue eyes and those blond curls, and if Ada hadn’t been torn from stem to stern the whole time that boy was coming out of her body, she would have doubted he was her own, for all he looked like a Dickman.

Ada was at least twice as smart as Major and rarely missed an opportunity to tell him so. Many’s the time they had a shouting match in the front yard of that big house Ada’s daddy had bought for her when she married, and she would have let it go to wrack and ruin if not for the help Daddy sent over. Ada was a business woman, not a housekeeper or groundskeeper and not much of a wife or mother either.

Everybody in Flinton said that if it hadn’t been for Trudy, Major’s little sister, those kids would have been raised by wolves and better for it had it been a choice between wolves and Ada. This was the Roaring ‘20s, mind you, and Ada was the first to raise her hems and chop her hair and flounce about in Terre Haute as if she didn’t have three kids raising themselves and a husband she had long since sent back to his cabin in the woods where he and Pappy Dickman brewed bathtub gin. It was a blessing all around, Old Miz Rooney used to say to her girl May Belle, that Trudy moved into Ada’s house to take care of those kids and didn’t have to live out in the Dickman cabin putting up with god only knew, and a blessing that those kids had Trudy, and what Ada and Major got up to was their own business as long as those kids were taken care of.

So as I was saying, Lacy had lived in that house all her life. Lu Ellen was the first to run off, falling for that Charles Something-or-Other, who dumped her in Chicago, and by the time Lu got back home, Lacy was so darned mad at her she had put all the furniture out in the yard for the neighbors to pick over. All that was left when Lu got off the bus at the downtown square was the blood-stained mattress and three chipped bowls. Old Jake Peck, their granddad and owner of the whole town of Flinton, made the neighbors give everything back, which they did, sneaking down the alley behind the house in the dead of night to return what they had taken, and no wonder—Jake Peck was not a man to cross. But Lu Ellen never did get back her cedar hope chest with all those linens in it, and after that she went all skinny and purse-lipped, reading the Bible like she found something there good as sex. 

Lacy wasn’t going to live like that, not her. She had some fun to get first, but unlike Lu, Lacy was as fertile as a cat in first heat and howled like one too, so the neighbors reported, especially when the aptly named Dick took her to bed and they hardly went out for food those first three weeks. He left when she got pregnant, just like the other two had, but at least by then she knew what all the fuss was about.

Before Lacy had even turned 20 years old, she had two in diapers and one on the way. In that way she was like Ada—plunking out babies like gum balls from a penny machine. When Lyla was born, the fourth in the line of annual Dickman babies, the doctor told Lacy that her uterus was about wore out, but she was too young to have her tubes tied, no matter how much she begged and cursed him for a fool.

“You’re still a girl, Lacy Dickman. You may meet a man who wants to have kids of his own.” Lacy rolled those words over in her mouth: “Kids of his own.” And just whose kids were those four girls if not some man’s? It wasn’t fair: men got have a roll in the hay and women had to deal with the fallout.

So Lacy gave up men and took up beer. Seemed like a good exchange at the time. The kids were growing up, able to take care of each other so she didn’t have to work so hard. Twyla Faye was a right little mother by the time she was five, and Lyla Jaye, the youngest, was easy as pie. Nyla Raye had more energy than a sackful of kittens, and Hyla Kaye? well, the less said about Hyla the better. Lu Ellen had moved back in and took care of Lacy when Lacy was feeling poorly—which was all the time, or so she said—and Aunt Trudy took up raising Lacy’s girls just as she had raised Ada's.

It worked out pretty good until Billy Walters came along and Lu Ellen got sweet on him. He drove a truck route and took to hanging out at the Grill when he was in town, which is where they met him. Lu hadn’t been sweet on anyone since that Charles rogue had left her high and dry in Chicago, so how was Lacy to know that Billy wasn’t up for grabs. So she grabbed—and howled—and was pregnant in a jiffy. When Billy Walters was gone, Lu pursed her lips closed except to pray. When Billy Junior was born, he was the spitting image of his granddaddy, Major Dickman, and as sweet as he was beautiful, not a sign that Billy Walters had ever had anything to do with him. Lu took to him like a mother and Lacy let her do it. Lu had missed out on Billy Walters, so let her have Billy Junior was the way Lacy saw it.

The new generation of Dickman Sisters ran wild, and Lacy took after them with a wooden spoon or a pancake turner or just the flat of her hand. The way she told it at the Grill was that she was raising those five kids alone with no man to help her, doing the best she could to keep them in line, even though she could hardly walk anymore her feet were so bad, and all she had for help was Lu praying over them or Trudy dropping by to pretend she was the real mother and Twyla wiping the oatmeal off their chins before she went to school of a morning.

Lacy sat back in her recliner, picked up the TV remote, and clicked through the channels looking for All My Children. Lu brought her a beer and took away the empty chocolate wrappers. Lacy ran her tongue over her front teeth and folded her arms over her sagging breasts. No, she hadn’t turned out one bit like her mother, and that was a blessing. But as they said at the Grill, Lacy Dickman wasn’t half the woman Ada Peck had been, but what Lacy lacked in smart she made up for in sly, and that was a known fact.