"The Book of Polly"

Kathy Hepinstall's spunky southern domestic novel has a lot of comical moments but a not very convincing ending.

• My mother never cried, at least not in front of me. Instead, her green eyes got greener, more sparkly, as though the tears were fuel for that color and nothing else.
• * She wore no makeup except for a burgundy lipstick, in the shade of a knowing glare.
• entered the sphere of her fragrance, lilacs with an undercurrent of honeysuckle, the only gentle and forgiving part of her outfit, for it was the perfume she wore to church to be sniffed by her Methodist God.
• “I am not the oldest living mother,” Polly answered. “I’ve actually been beaten by mothers in South America, China, and even the U.S. I would call that a slight exaggeration, not a lie.”
  She sent me daggers with her eyes, as did the bird. My mother was somewhat sensitive about her age, and happy to look much younger. I sank down lower in my chair as the litany continued.
  “You can make an obscene gesture with your toes.”
  “Yes, I can, with the left foot,” Polly said proudly. “I would show you, but I’ve got hose on.”
• Polly fixed her with a steely gaze. “We were all born into a world made of Hatfields and McCoys. And as you grow, you need to ask yourself: Am I a Hatfield? Or a McCoy? Because there is no middle ground. You are one or the other, and Willow’s going to be the best she can be.”
  “It’s just that these stories she is telling around school . . .”
  “Are true. It’s not my fault that the gray of everyone else’s stories makes the color stand out.”
• * Several more moments passed before she composed herself. “Yes,” she said at last. “I have a tail. A very small, dainty tail. Barely noticeable, and certainly I don’t go flashing it around. I wish my daughter would have been a bit more . . . respectful of my privacy. And yet, I’m proud of it. I’m proud of my tail.”
• “Now it’s going to spread all around! Everyone in town will hear about the crazy old lady with the tail! The Homeowners’ Association will find out! The Garden Club. The people at church. Mr. Tornello will use it against me. Maybe Good Morning America will do a special on it. Would you like that? A special on your mother’s tail?”
• She was so much older than the other mothers, and I was determined to make her bigger than life so that she would never die. I couldn’t let her die without knowing her secret.
• My fears about Polly’s health and life span left me with a certain undercurrent of daily anxiety that ruined even good things for me: the upside-down Jell-O molds she’d make for me, holding more cut fruit than needed; the movies we watched together; and my favorite sound, that of a car door locking.
• He shrugged. “Things die. That’s one thing I’ve learned. My dad says my mom’s love for him died one day when they were arguing about who left the lunch meat out on the counter. Boom. Dead.”
• * On the one side was Darcie Burrell—a reed-thin woman with a permanently conflicted expression, as though, deep inside her, someone was trying to bathe a cat.
• shaking her head and murmuring, “Sweet mother of a son of a bitch!” I followed her gaze, disbelieving. A fat squirrel sat on top of the owl, eating a green pecan. Its tail was draped sideways over the owl’s head, as though the owl were wearing a Daniel Boone cap... The squirrel beat it out of our yard so fast it was just a blurred image, a continuum of fur and tail that made a quivering line to the fence and then shot up and out into the yonder. She was cursing now at the outer reaches of her cursing limit, ass and damn and thieving bastard and big-balled son of a bitch... “Jesus would understand!” she bellowed back at me. “Jesus threw a fit in the temple with the money changers; they were the squirrels of Jerusalem!”
• Portrait viewing: Mr. Chant began a story about his dog and kept right on going while Polly turned the blender on high and whirred up some courage... Her jaw was frozen, her smirk terrifying. One nostril was bigger than the other. Her eyes were an unnaturally bright, satanic green, and she had very little neck.
• The air from the beer was cold and I had forgotten a sweater, but I leaned in right next to him to remind him that among his beer choices was a living, breathing little sister who had to know.
• * old letter burning: “Mom, no, don’t!” I begged her, but she was in her own world, a Polly-world of black and white, a cut-off-your-nose-to-spite-your-face landscape scarred and damaged and flanked by burning bridges. You could not disturb her in this world, or lure her into softer pastures. You could merely watch.
• But I didn’t know the loamy soil of the deep past that lived within her and that grew the varied crops of her life. <> I didn’t know that part of her and I needed to. If I knew her, then perhaps it would somehow make her eventual death more bearable.
• A rage seized me. I could feel a line forming between my eyebrows, a Polly trench that signified a human being not fully in control of her faculties. I darted toward the back door, opened it silently, and ran into my brother’s room.
• * baby squirrel: Her love of babies—baby humans, cats, dogs, deer, even varmints—was the trump card laid on top of the others, and I could not help but imagine her doting over me when I was a baby, everything harsh drained from her like wax running off a candle, leaving only this maternal wick from which a knot of warm flame burned without faltering.
• You think a store-bought Snickers can beat my secret cookie recipe? Well, do you?”
  “No . . . no, ma’am!” Dalton stuttered.
  “Well, next time you throw up in this house, it better be something homemade.”
• I thought of the letters, and almost confided in Otto but stopped myself. A boy that sniffly couldn’t be trusted.
  He nodded. “A Methodist church. My dad says she might as well go to a nightclub.”
• “It’s on the wall.” I pointed to the painting that Mr. Chant had done of Polly, which was covered in her old tablecloth. “It’s a portrait of Polly, presented by the Church of Satan.” With a flourish I removed the tablecloth, and there she was in all her blood-curdling splendor, strange hair, terrifying smile, unholy eyebrows, and the foreboding, bright eyes. <> Otto’s mouth fell open. He began to wheeze.
  But I was calm inside. I didn’t care if I was going to be punished. There lived a streak of defiance in me that came up in unexpected times. There was no bargaining or reasoning with it. Otto had insulted Polly and I wasn’t sorry for anything.
• “That was a very bad thing you did. Do you understand that?”
  “Yes,” I said.
  “Your heart is good, Willow. But your mind is evil.”
  She handed me a dollar.
• Any other time, men come home for one reason only. Cause something broke. You ever see Elmer in this yard? Hell, no. That’s because Elmer is off somewhere being Elmer. Shel doesn’t know how to be Shel anymore.”
• “You know what sucks, Willow? Knowing someone. Having that knowledge is like having a tattoo you can’t burn off. I know which part of my leg she used to rest her hand on when we watched a movie. I know what kind of pillow she liked. I know how she slept, and at what time of night she would kick off her blanket.
• “Husband’s never there. Twins are evil. She and Polly don’t get along, either. Her grass bullies Polly’s grass.” <> Shel snickered. “That’s a new one. Someday I’m gonna write a coffee-table book called The Feuds of Polly, and Bully Grass will be on page one.”
• * Shel and I drew close to Polly and her determined stroke, half freestyle, half dog paddle, and then we slowed down, instinctively letting her lead, letting her win, and the sun went down and we swam in darkness, stars overhead. Polly and Shel would lift their heads to snipe back and forth at one another, and I wished that dock was a million miles away and we could keep swimming together in the lake of recalcitrant fish and warm water, on and on and on.
• He was nutty as a pine cone. Remember when he adopted that bear from the woods?”
  He looked into the pier glass mirror in the foyer, studying his face. “Hello, seventeen-year-old Phoenix,” he murmured. “Here we are again.” <> I didn’t want to disturb him, so I waited patiently until he and his younger self finished their reunion.
• “You promised to stop drinking.” <> He let out his breath, and I imagined the last precious molecules of his beloved liquor moving out of his mouth and floundering around the kitchen like birds kicked too soon from the nest.
• Shel drinking: We were there together and yet we weren’t. I could no longer share the joy of the news. He had corrupted it by celebrating it this way, by doing something Polly feared and hated and could not control, here on the evening of her victory.
• I could not resist. I climbed on the boat and sat down cross-legged, listening as he spoke from his swivel chair, on a motionless boat in a waterless sea made of neighborhood and asphalt, putting my anger at his weakness aside for the moment, as I had done so many times that summer.
• “I didn’t know, Ma! I swear I didn’t know it. I would have stopped her!” Shel cried, and then Polly was leaning down to me. “My baby . . .” <> I sank into darkness to a noise that sounded like an argument taking place in an aquarium, anger encased in bubbles that rose as I sank down to the bottom of it all.
• Polly solved that possibility by procuring an answering machine at a garage sale, so that for a mere ten dollars her heart could be broken, day after day, by a lit red “0” in the box that designated the number of calls,
• * “I don’t mind him, actually. Even though his daddy cares nothing about maintaining a decent house or yard, it’s hardly the fault of the son. Besides, I believe it’s best for you to start out with someone who’s already afraid of me. I’m getting too old to have to put the fear of God into some new boy every few months, so hold on to him. And call him and tell him to get down here and help me clean our rain gutters.”
• * Polly’s eyes flew open wide. “Ron!” she gasped. She bolted from the room, the rest of us hot on her heels as we rushed through the den and into the backyard, where we found Mr. Tornello next to the pecan tree, laid out on his back. <> “Oh, my God,” I breathed. “The squirrel zapper!”... And so there it was. The end of the worst dinner ever, with my mother traumatized, Mrs. Burrell horrified, and unkillable Mr. Tornello dead in the grass under the passive eye of his cat on the fence, who did not move or seem alarmed.
• “A garden is God’s way of saying life goes on, so get over it,”
• Mr. Tornello, also dead in the grass. His eyes wide open, pupils frozen, eyelashes still. An old man’s skin full of nothing. Three meals somewhere in his belly. All the cantankerousness snatched by something no one could see. All the years, the memories, aches and pains, threats passed over the fence. All gone. An old man and then a shell. A cat and then a shadow. Living things and then something of the same consistency as the contents of my mother’s pile of mulch.
• * “Ah, sarcasm. Been through that, too.” She said it as though sarcasm was a very hard winter and she’d sat on the porch watching satsumas burst.
• * Dalton and I were intently committed. It was our world, so perfect, and it was a new one. I wasn’t borrowing music, I wasn’t playing old games. I wasn’t growing up inside the blown glass of someone else’s story. We were new and we were alive and if I had one foot left in Polly’s world, it was only because she clung to an ankle.
• “Mothers are still supposed to be young when their kids become teenagers. It’s like coming down with the flu, only the flu is made of hate. How will I survive this?”
• In front of cancer hospital: He opened the door and got out quickly, leaving me in the car with the suddenly frantic creature. Both of us were watching our masters walk into that building, both of us were quivering and whining, hearts beating fast, because neither one of us understood the universe, and its notions of separation and time. We both lived in a black-and-white world where nothing existed between complete security and utter desolation.
• * Her hair fell out in tufts. I’d come home and find them sitting on the backs of couches, sills, balanced delicately on the napkin holder, caught in the machinery inside the toaster, or simply floating through the air like tiny, faintly orange fairies, too weary to grant any wishes.
• was a tangled world of anything goes, of bone-tired slaphazardry. The steak knives pointed any which way, a bottle opener thrown in somewhere, anywhere. What did it matter? said the drawer. I’m so tired, said the shelves of the refrigerator. Is it not yet night? The day is so long, said the keys of the piano, dusty and still.
• I was no longer interested in Ava and Samantha. I found them suddenly shallow and dull. Always talking about clothes and boys, as girls in healthy families are allowed to do. Completely absorbed in their own world, safe enough to be obnoxious and unloving and uncaring and not pay the price.
• But now, the lessons had decomposed into the ramblings of middle-aged women who were there to make a living and drill into me things that may or may not mean anything at all. School had become like church to me, and I was not a believer.
• * He did not appear to live in the past or in the future, but in such a precise fraction of now that you could not pare the now down any thinner and still contain him. Like a dog, he lived completely in the present, those easy moments made up of comfortable slices: the length of a dropped treat, the distance between an open mouth and a thrown Frisbee, those moments between the circling and the lying down.
• We had listened to Tom Waits in the backs of broken cars. We had grown up together. We were meant for each other. He was precious to me, vital, and somehow this all meant that, to save my mother, I had to give him up.
• She’d like to hear the story of sick Polly. It would connect the dots so cleanly and evenly. Sick mother equals sad daughter and Mrs. Spencer could ledger out the problem mathematically and solve it with some kind of structured empathy she’d learned in a book.
• A steep pause, the silence a hiker makes while dropping from a cliff of medium height.
• “The chemotherapy is not working,”... She had reached over to take my hand and I had closed two of my fingers around hers but not the others. Enough to comfort but not to surrender. This news would not leave us clutching each other. It did not deserve such a gesture.
• * “Yes, she can! What do you know?” Tears streaked my face.
  “Yeah,” said Lisa, her voice rough and angry and pre-Christian. “What do you know?”
  My sister and I leaned down to Polly and spoke as one.
  “You are not alone!”
• * Clocks were alive, counting the seconds, always moving forward, undoing things, that slow pulling of the shoelace that would murder the bow. Time would take our mother away from us, tune her sleep down to an empty space.
• He dropped his head and began to cry into the crook of his arm, and I wanted to let go of my bike and run to him, embrace him and tell him I loved him, too, but I thought parts of me would stick to him. Parts I needed for my mother. I began to cry, too, as I pedaled away.
• Her eyebrows were thinking it over. Twitching, rising, falling, pausing, debating, stalling, bargaining, as Phoenix rocked gently back and forth, a hopeful metronome. Finally Polly’s eyebrows smoothed in grudging acceptance.
• Phoenix stood with his hands clenched at his sides as Polly and her partner separated and began to dance freestyle, my mother kicking up her heels and twirling and bowing and shuffling in perfect time to the music, but as fast as the music went, it could not outrun my mother.
• We had adjusted to her appearance over the months of her illness: the hollow cheeks, the scarf, the way the skin had shrunk on her collarbones. But his eyes clearly showed how much she’d changed, in that unflinching way that instincts measure before graciousness kicks in.
• His eyes met mine again. “But you have to be. You have to be, because you are Little Squirrel, and you will have to be Little Squirrel all your life. Right now it’s Little Squirrel and Polly, but someday it will just be you. And that won’t be okay for a while, maybe for a long time. But then out of the clear blue sky, you’ll have a good day.”... “She’ll be part of every good day. No matter what. And someday, there is going to be a good day that we are all part of. I’m not sure where that is, or what it looks like, but I believe in that day.”
• She had seemed so energetic today, so much like her old self, that it was hard to remember that her strength was a ferociously empty lie.
• * But here’s the gift. Not for my glory, but his. Not my wishes, but his. You will be healed Saturday afternoon at the revival. You will be set free. And I will be healed. I will be set free. Because I can’t live for my daddy all my life. That makes my life not worth much. That’s God’s message to me.”
• As I approached the counter, still looking at the man, I heard what he was saying to the customer: “I’m at the age where what I say to the mirror is both nonproductive and inflammatory.”
• “—and my little sister traipse off down the river alone? Hell, no. Soon as he heard the plan, he drove to Bethel to investigate. Where he ran into Aunt Rhea, and then she led him to me. I met Phoenix at Joe’s three days ago and we followed you down the river, then we got a lift back to Leesville. Phoenix went back to Texas, and I just got back here. I’ve barely slept.”
• I had fooled myself all along with the idea that the desperation of my journey somehow affected the fate on the other end, as though fate were a prize given at the end of a swim or a battle, when in actuality I had simply been moving, at top speed, toward a destiny that would never think to consult me.
• The little dog was headed straight for Polly, who, deep in conversation with Garland, their fingers entwined, paid no attention.