Warning: Some content published on this website contains potentially offensive language.
By Ra’Niqua Lee
When Tilly and her friends tired of staying up in the dorm lounge with coffee and computers, they went to Dino’s Pizzeria, a hole in the wall with subway tile and a stainless-steel countertop. Dollar slices and three-dollar pitchers kept the place busy, and Tilly loved to sit at the last table, watching people come and go. In college, she never saw a single face that didn’t look at least partially miserable. Even the bouncy girls who wore Greek letters and snowshoes in summer had frown lines in their foreheads before they smiled. That had to be why so many of them had bangs.
Tilly tried to flirt beer out of anyone who didn’t first look at her in disgust. This, trying to use her cleavage as currency, was not a thing Tilly had done in grade school. She had always been shy. Growing up an only child had impeded the development of certain social skills, learning to share, golden rules, do unto others, et cetera. But college taught her that she could talk to people as easily as she had learned to talk to herself, with quiet care or none at all.
Jaz and Florence appreciated Tilly’s efforts or, at least, laughed at Tilly’s efforts.
“Is there anyone you let have your number?” Jaz asked, shaking her soda. “I got a few professors who could use a good talking to.”
Marie had been fixing her hair in her front-facing camera. After their current potential beer supplier left, a woman who had leaned against a nearby table as she waited for her to-go order, Marie set her phone face-down on the table.
“It’s not funny anymore,” she said. “You keep acting like a slut, and people’ll start to think it’s not just pretend.”
Florence chucked a crumpled napkin at Marie.
“Not slut, just experienced,” she clarified, “broken-in, like rainboots.”
“I don’t mind being rainboots,” Tilly said, not even sure what that meant. She couldn’t make flirting and protective outerwear overlap in her mind. She’d always wanted rainboots as a kid, but Tilda wouldn’t waste money on a pair of shoes that were only useful a few days out of a month.
“I have to go to work in two hours,” Tilly said.
She looked at her friends for some sign that they understood. Jaz taught intro level Zumba at the university gym, and Marie was in the process of applying for an RA position. They must have felt it to, pressure cooking in them like a crock pot, scalding, pressing, burning, bringing them to a hard boil.
Florence nodded to a graying man in a stained shirt who had been watching them from another table.
“Think he could spare a few dollars?” she asked.
They all laughed, Tilly included. She only recently realized that they had been laughing at her as much as they had been laughing at him.
**
Spike drove by a tree with several Duff the Jackrabbit piñatas rocking beneath the branches. It was a tribute the honors society put up every year for rape victims or homeless people. Spike pointed to the piñatas and said, “College must be a whole lot of fun.”
“Wouldn’t know.” Tilly shrugged. “Not in school anymore.”
“But you’re going back,” he said, repeating what Tilda must have told him.
Tilly didn’t feel like correcting him. College costed money, another bill she couldn’t afford. When she was enrolled, her grades had dropped like fruit flies with every passing semester. She would have to repeat two science courses before she could declare a major.
“Yes,” Tilly lied. “I’m going back.”
“Enjoy it now,” Spike said “Eventually, everyone has to settle down.”
“Is that what you told Tilda?” she asked.
He looked away from the road long enough to blink.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
She meant that he didn’t know Tilda.
Tilly only knew Tilda’s side of the family. Grandma Rue and Pop-pop used to have a house in Atlanta but had since relocated to the suburbs. They weren’t as settled when Tilly was growing up. Pop-pop liked other women. Grandma Rue liked hard drugs and other women. Rolling stones, like the song. Grandma Rue often said she never even wanted to get pregnant. Tilda was their fuckup, and Tilly was Tilda’s, until now. Now, Tilda had a new baby, a shiny new fuckup growing inside her.
The bars in town had a similar run-down, under-renovated look to them. Every time Spike and Tilly rolled up in front of one, something in Tilly shifted. Spike would ask if Tilly thought that Tilda was inside and Tilly would say, “No.” The nausea returned like a gut punch. She blamed the ghost smell of the menthols.
They passed Center Pub, a bar sandwiched between the janky hookah place and a convenience store. They drove by Roadhouse and the place without a name.
“She likes that Mexican restaurant,” Tilly said, breathing through her mouth.
“Which one?” Spike asked.
He didn’t sound impatient, even though Tilly thought that he should. She wasn’t his responsibility. He knocked up Tilda. Maybe, on some fucked up morning that coming summer, he might be dumb enough to propose to her. Spike and Tilda would start their family. It would not include Tilly. She would go live with Grandma Rue and Pop-pop outside of Atlanta. If they didn’t want her either, she would find a comfortable bridge within walking distance of whiskey.
Tilly gave Spike the directions to Jim’s Cantina. When they got there, the grates were pulled down over the windows. The neon open sign had been switched off.
“Here?” Spike asked.
Tilly stared at the restaurant, clearly closed, and undid her seatbelt.
“No, not here,” she said. “You can’t take simple directions. Should’ve just let me drive.”
“Drunk?” he asked.
“I’m an award-winning drunk driver. No one would have even been able to tell.”
Every person Tilly had ever met at a bar after two AM had made the same claim. Based on the fact that people did die in drunk-driving accidents, she figured at least some of them were lying. Tilly might have been one of those people, but she didn’t wait for Spike to call her on her bullshit. She got out of the truck, bracing herself against the side as she waited for her balance to return.
“Where you going?” Spike asked.
“Stop asking me that.” She crossed the street for the old Wendy’s turned bar, O’Hannigans. She didn’t expect Spike to wait for her.
**
The first time Tilly realized her friends were not her friends, she had been crashing on the floor in Jaz and Marie’s dorm. Sharing an apartment with Tilda had not been easy. Tilda came home banging pots at four in the morning, had loud sex soon after that, and then tried to stick Tilly with all of the household chores. It was like all the worst parts of growing up except now Tilly was an adult and should have had a choice.
Living on campus was better, even if that meant sleeping on a cold, linoleum floor. There were streetlights everywhere, so Tilly felt comfortable walking home no matter how late it got, and in the mornings, she could go straight to class without having to drag Tilda out of bed for a ride.
Jaz and Marie were okay roommates. They shared closet space and tiptoed around Tilly’s pallet on the floor when she slept-in past noon. They only ever argued about Tilly staying out too late. Her ID card didn’t work on the dorms anymore, so either Jaz or Marie had to go down three flights of steps to let her in the building.
Out in the courtyard with massive beer brain, Tilly called Jaz. It was two in the morning, but Tilly ate all-nighters for breakfast and didn’t quite understand why her friends didn’t do the same. Jaz’s line went to voicemail. That left Marie.
Tilly walked a circle around the courtyard twice before she got the nerve to call Marie. The dorm made up three sides. Shadows moved behind the windows, but Jaz and Marie’s room was dark, which meant they were sleeping.
When Tilly did call, Marie answered on the first ring.
“It’s the middle of the night,” she said.
“Yeah, and it’s cold. Come let me in.”
The line was silent for a while. Then Marie said, “I have a final tomorrow, and I don’t want to get out of bed.”
“It’ll take two seconds. Don’t be a bitch.”
Again, there was silence, more silence than seemed necessary.
“I’m not getting out of bed.”
Marie hung up, and Tilly remained in the courtyard for an hour. Her temperature seemed to drop more and more as the alcohol left her system. Winter made quick work of her sundress and tights. She shivered by the dorm door and decided then that if she were to ever be homeless, she would also have to be an alcoholic. Eventually, another girl arrived, and Tilly followed her inside. Instead of going to bother Jaz and Marie, she found a couch in one of the common areas and slept there. In the morning, she got her things and went back home to Tilda.
**
The inside of O’Hannigans held too much smoke. It wasn’t crowded but cramped all the same. The dining area had been divided in two, seating along the far side and a bar up front where people used to order double cheeseburgers. The new owner couldn’t purge the space of its fast-food past. An Irish flag and a few soccer oil paintings couldn’t transport the place across the ocean.
On the “Wall of Flame,” Tilda’s picture appeared among many. She was still the Fireball queen. Ten shots in one minute. Tilly looked at the picture, thinking, instead, of her old friends. Their names floated with the smoke. Closer to the end, they had started going out without her, and Tilda had filled their spot in Tilly’s life too easily. At bars, she’d thrust her double D breasts at the cashier and laugh like she had hooves instead of feet.
In the back booth, instead of finding Tilda, Tilly found a man with dimpled cheeks and no hair. He looked like the Buddha she’d seen pictured in a sociology textbook. He puffed a cigarette and had one leg stretched across the bench seat.
“Nice flowers,” the man said.
Tilly reached up and yanked free another daisy along with a few coily strands of hair that had gotten tangled around it.
The man offered her a beer, and Tilly didn’t know what she wanted other than to sit. Strangers weren’t scary. Not like the people who knew her, the people she thought she knew. People who would listen to her secrets and still forget to call, strike her name from their contacts. Replace her the way she had sometimes wanted to replace herself. College was supposed to save her, so why had she felt like she was drowning in her courses? Drowning or failing, which was sort of like drowning except you could do it more than once.
She took a seat in the booth with the stranger. By the time she left the bar, she had forgotten about Spike and his truck. She walked off in a direction that might take her to Tilda, left and sort of sideways.
Spike seemed to appear out of nowhere. He stood in front of her with his gut bulging under his shirt, his hands in the pocket of his faded, dad jeans. A car passed by, and the headlights caught him in a blinding glow. He should have been angry, but he smiled.
He’d waited for her. How long had she been inside, drinking beer with Buddha?
“Didn’t find Tilda, huh?” he asked.
“She wasn’t there,” Tilly said.
“What now? You got the reins.”
Tilly liked the idea of having the reins, being in control. She wasn’t, though, so she turned around. She wobbled on her feet. Her head was a flood, and her feet failed her. One. Two. The ground was rushing toward her face until Spike caught her by the arms and yanked her straight.
“I know a diner that’s open all night,” he said, walking close beside her. “You should get something in your system. Eggs are good. Bacon cures everything.”
He sounded like he was speaking from personal experience. He had wisdom to pass on to his unborn child, and this was it. Salted pork.
“I’m not hungry,” Tilly said even though she was. “You can stop pretending like you care now. We didn’t find Tilda.”
“She got off work thirty minutes ago.”
Tilly told him he was wrong.
When they were on the road again, she felt like she had menthol under her fingernails, sticking to her skin. The windows didn’t roll down without the hand crank, a broken stub. She leaned against the glass and crushed one of her daisies. She untangled it from her hair wondering why she had let the man at the bar buy her that beer. Those beers.
Tilly directed Spike to one more bar. It was after four in the morning. Tilly didn’t want to go home. She wanted to say she understood now, how a woman could be persuaded to have another baby she didn’t need. The same way a woman could be persuaded to drink beers she didn’t need. It happened. Everything happens. She wanted to understand.
Tilly opened the door before the truck stopped rolling. One foot in and one foot out, she said words that Spike didn’t need to hear, words she had been shuffling around in her head like crumbs with a broom.
“Tilda doesn’t love you,” she said and, thankfully, got no response. Maybe he hadn’t heard. She settled back into the passenger seat and pulled the door closed. There was the truth.
“Bacon cures everything?” she asked.
Spike nodded. “I believe it.”
Tilly paused a moment and then said, “Whiskey cures everything.”
Spike smiled and knocked at his chest like he expected someone might answer him.
“Pharmakon,” he said, and when Tilly looked at him like he had spoken Swahili, he added, “What cures us, kills us.”
At the diner, Tilly made them order their food to go. “Too wrecked to eat in front of strangers,” she said, and Spike didn’t argue. He ordered an extra meal for Tilda, gravy biscuits and cheese scrambled eggs.
“Protein,” he said, “Good for the baby.”
On the drive back to the apartment, Tilly considered her childhood with Tilda. They moved around a lot. Sometimes, they didn’t have enough to eat, but Tilda was a force not even relative poverty could stop. She did what she wanted, even if that meant leaving Tilly at home alone all night. Little Tilly often woke from nightmares, called for her mother, and got no response. She would drag her blankets onto the floor. Curled up behind her bed, she would hope that no one broke in, nowhere caught fire, and nothing tipped her over or caused her to fall. The cure to all that was adulthood. As a legal adult, she was supposed to save herself. She had been fifty percent of her own trouble.
At the apartment Tilda and Tilly shared, their Oldsmobile was back and parked in its usual spot. Spike didn’t say anything when Tilly pointed it out. He handed her the daisy she’d left behind in his truck and hummed as they trudged up three flights of steps with breakfast. His nasal crooning should have been annoying but wasn’t quite, and Tilly let the fight slip out of her. She knew her liver was probably working overtime, purifying her blood, bringing her back from the party, the man who liked her daisies, back to herself.
Ra’Niqua Lee is a PhD student of English at Emory University, where she works as an editorial associate for the online, open-access research journal Southern Spaces. She received an MFA in fiction writing from Georgia State University, where she was a Paul Bowles Fellow. She has a vested interest in seeing her particular visions of the South represented in print.