If You’re Feeling Froggy
Your mother always speaks of the scraps she got into as a girl the way other folks talk about Christmas. Nostalgic as she recalls waiting outside on some poor girl’s front porch, shoulders relaxed, light on her toes, fists ready to bloom. The family station wagon would be parked on the curb, engine off. The older sister or cousin who could drive, reclining in the driver’s seat with the windows rolled down. That’s just what we did, your mother shrugs.
You always laugh when hearing these stories. But secretly, inside, there is a low hum of dread. How you managed to avoid this rite of passage, to make it to ten years old without ever having to swing on anybody, is unknown. But surely, it’s only a matter of time. Eventually, some dark, determined thing is going to park itself outside your front door and find you lacking.
So you try to practice the only way you can: in your mind, a perfect circle. You stand on one side, crouched and ready. Your mother’s girl-frame laid over your own like tracing paper. Chin level, right foot back, knees slightly bent. And on the other side—well, that changes by the day. The boy next door, who hocks loogies over the fence while you ride your bike. Your cousin Erica, who pointed and squealed the first time you bled through your shorts.
But here, in the front seat of your mother’s Toyota Corolla, on a South Carolina back road riddled with potholes, you think of your Great Grandma Cookie.
You don’t hate Cookie. Not the way you hate okra or the white tights your mother makes you wear to church. But she is an ornery, pocket-knife of a woman with sprigs of silver hair on her chin and eyes that miss nothing, despite being clouded over with cataracts. Quick to call out that you’ve gained weight or your shorts are too short. To take that attitude out your lip. The thought of your fist connecting with her scraggly chin, of crumpling it like paper, wells at the back of your tongue. You suck on it like candy.
Today is the Fourth of July, which means that it’s also Cookie’s birthday and the whole family will drive out to her house in Bennettsville to celebrate. You don’t know how old Cookie is, but it’s old enough that your mother made these same drives when she was your age. Each summer, at the start of every trip, she reminds you that Cookie’s house, and the five acres of land it sits on, are important. That it’s been in the family for years, passed on from before Black people could even own property. And one day, maybe, it will even pass along to you. But you want nothing to do with that house. Its ugly yellow kitchen and sweltering attic will always remind you of old fruit, rot-soft and trembling with flies—even after you are grown and your quiet, guilty gratitude for the oh-so-patient land developers mixes with the thin shh-shhh of ashes inside Cookie’s urn.
You’ve traced the drive on a map, your finger snaking up I-20 and covering the distance from Atlanta to Bennettsville in two seconds. In real life, it’s four hours of mostly billboards—Sugartit Moonshine. Big Al’s Fireworks. Peaches!!! Preserves, Ice Cream, and Salsa. Girls! Girls! Girls! 5 miles. Antique Show. Gun Show. Antique Gun Show. The first three hours are always fine. Wonderful, even. You and your mother listen to her favorite CDs. Lauryn Hill, TLC, Parliament. She even suspends her ban on eating in the car, treating you both to chocolate frosties and fries. But the fourth hour is a different story.
Your mother has made sure to tell you about the red truck. You know that it had rusted fenders, a dent in its front bumper, and that it followed your mother, who was a little girl at the time, and your grandmother all the way from Mabelton to Cookie’s place. For those last forty miles, it was right on us and didn’t ease up until we pulled into Cookie’s driveway. She was right there, sitting in her porch rocker with a shotgun laid across her lap. Like she knew. For the last hour, your mother becomes a stranger. Tense. Surly. Her eyes move from the speedometer to the road to the rearview mirror and back again. She insists that you don’t stop until you get to Cookie’s, where it’s safe.
For several trips you also remained vigilant, the seat belt cutting into your neck as you continuously twisted to face the rear windshield. You were certain that you would know it when you saw it—an angry red dot punching through the horizon. But with each summer that the road unspooled quietly behind you, endless and inscrutable, any fears of a rusty truck fuzzed at the edges. A scary story turned feeble in the daylight.
Besides, from where you’re sitting, the only ones who should be worried are the animals. All types of roadkill litter the highway. Lumps of red and brown, with just enough stripes to identify it as a skunk or a raccoon. A lot of deer—does, specifically—crumpled on the shoulders as if they’re sleeping. Not for the first time, you wonder what made the doe think it could make it across. Perhaps a bear or coyote, driving her out of the treeline and into the road. Or maybe a buck, with big branching antlers and a slick black wet nose, whispering in her ears amongst the trees, goading her to cross. Bet you won’t. Bet you can’t. But the doe could, briefly, before the glare of oncoming headlights pinned her to the asphalt like flypaper.
Sometimes, thoughts float across your mind, delicate as soap bubbles. What if you were to suddenly catch on fire? What if you bit into a lightbulb? What if you opened the car door on the highway? What if the blue sheet of sky above isn’t sky at all, but the bottom of a giant blue shoe coming down on you? Breaking telephone towers like twigs. Making roaches of Walmarts and Taco Bells. Flattening traffic signs and grinding the pavement so thin the car feels like it’s moving over gravel. That must explain the pressure on your bladder, as it strains against the seatbelt.
To be fair, your mother told you to go to the bathroom when you’d stopped for gas an hour back in Ardenville. She’d looked you in the eye as she handed you a crisp twenty-dollar bill and said fifteen gallons on pump four—make sure you go. But that gas station’s bathroom was filthy; you could tell by the outside. The stick of the floor on the bottom of your shoes. The smell of sugar and gasoline that hung on your clothes. The small circles of sweat under the cashier clerk’s armpits, his eyes locked on you from behind the counter. And you’re not a good squatter; your legs are too skinny and weak to keep you up, safe from whatever is waiting for you on that toilet seat.
So instead, you’d bobbed up and down the aisles of Honey Buns, Fritos, cheese peanut butter crackers, BIC lighters, sunflower seeds, and batteries until you found it—that blood drop of a package. Wrigley’s Big Red chewing gum. You’d never liked the way it tasted, its spice hollow and detached. A thousand sewing needles pricking your tongue. Not at all like Cookie’s chow chow—the bite of the peppers buoying the sweet tang of sugar and vinegar like an ocean rocks a boat. But perhaps when Cookie inevitably gets in your face, she’ll smell the cinnamon on your breath, a rattlesnake shaking its tail, and leave you alone.
The gum isn’t doing you much good now, though. Your molars have reduced it to rubber. By the time you cross into Mabelton—a white wooden sign bidding you welcome in curling red script—your bladder is screaming. Your mother keeps her eyes on the road and drives exactly the speed limit, which is twenty-five miles per hour. You wedge your hands between your legs and squeeze, even though you’re too old to be doing that. Even though it’s not ladylike. For a tiny second, as you press and wiggle, a small light flickers in your belly. In a year or two, it will click that you can only masturbate if the door to your bedroom is slightly open—the threat of discovery looming in your periphery. Only then, amongst that thick bramble of anxiety, can you go searching for those tiny pinpricks of light.
There is one road that goes all the way through Mabelton, like an arrow through a target. On it, there is a church, a post office, and a general store. The general store is a saggy thing, made entirely of wood. Old tin signs decorate the front porch, Coke and Marlboro and the South Carolina lottery—Today could be the day. Out front, two men sit in rockers while a third loads the ice machine, only his back visible.
Surely, the general store will have a bathroom. You whisper to your mother to stop. That you’re sorry. You’re not going to make it. The admission alone is enough to let loose a hot trickle, eager to bring the whole tide with it.
But your mother says nothing. Her eyes flit between the speedometer and the rearview mirror, her body rigid like an invisible rope is pulling her upwards. And the general store is getting closer, the man still waist-deep in the ice machine. The car inches along, slow enough that the bright red speedometer needle seems frozen in place. Slow enough, you think, that you can unbuckle your seatbelt. Grab the door handle. Push open the passenger-side door.
You are pulled in two directions, like a rubber band.
There’s the road, a nubby gray tongue licking off your right flip-flop in one swift motion, sending it cartwheeling underneath the car’s two back tires.
Then, there’s the digging of fingernails into the back of your neck, pulling you back inside the car before the road can get a taste of the rest of your foot.
And, suddenly, your mother’s face inches from yours. Her eyes big and round. Her one hand is still on the wheel, the other clenched around your shirt collar. Her lips are moving, and you can feel drops of spittle landing on your mouth and nose. Coffee ranks her breath. But all you hear is a gentle ping ping ping, announcing that the car door is open, that someone has unbuckled their seatbelt, that this does not bode well for a vehicle in motion. You think of the perfect circle, your mother’s girl frame nowhere to be found, leaving you naked and vulnerable. You’re terrified to see her on the other side, chin level, right foot back. The time for practice, over.
It isn’t until your mother pulls to the side of the road and turns off the engine that the pressure releases inside of the car, like your inner ear popping on a plane. Even the push on your bladder has momentarily disappeared. Your mother still grips the wheel tightly, as if she’s holding the whole car together. She looks down quickly, to confirm that you are okay—which, miraculously, you are—then instructs you to close the passenger-side door and put on your seatbelt. She keeps her voice even, but you can hear a small wobble, as if she is peering down from a great height. The three men in the general store are staring at you, their faces hard and flat. One of them spits into the styrofoam cup sitting at his feet. It twitches.
It is only once the car is moving again, past Mabelton’s town limits and easing into the final few miles to Cookie’s house, that you open your mouth. Your mother holds up a single finger, gives a small shake of her head. Her face is as hard as the men on the porch. A new terror rises in your chest as the implication is clear: I’ll deal with you soon. The bucking and keening below your waist begins anew.
Last summer, you and your cousins, itching with boredom, got into the pepper patch that Cookie grows off the left side of her front porch. Goliath Jalapenos and Fish Peppers. Serranos, Golden Cayennes, and Medusa Heads. A riot of red, yellows, greens—even purples. The word contest was never used, but in twenty minutes, the ground was littered with peppers, only the ends bitten off. All of you giggled through burning lips and runny noses. You’d already cleared out all of the Chocolate Habaneros and were just starting to eye the Scotch Bonnets when Cookie found you.
She lined everyone up and gave two choices: get the switch for wasting her peppers or finish eating the ones you held in your hands. You were first in line. The switch she’d chosen was long and wispy. You knew that its insides would be bright green, and when Cookie drew her arm back, it would slice the air, quick with water. You knew the sound it would make as it came down. What it would feel like when it hit the back of your legs. You simply didn’t know if you could finish the peppers, unable to see the other side through all that burning. So you made your choice.
The welts were already emerging on the backs of your legs, the switch arching its long spine, when the rest of your cousins simultaneously realized that there were more of them, and they were faster than an old woman. When the switch came down again, its crack echoing across the fields, they scattered like crows off a telephone wire, whooping and hooting the whole time.
When word inevitably got back to the other grown-ups, what happened became why became you think that’s bad, when we were your age became you remember when—and just like that, everyone was laughing and shouting about some punishment meted out decades ago. The pepper incident not forgotten, just tucked away, a space made for it on the shelf of your family’s collective memory. It would be brought down and dusted off—the vestiges of today’s foolishness surely close behind—decades later when you have a daughter of your own. A daughter who will eventually come to understand, as Cookie and your mother and you do, finally, in those last few miles, a simple truth. When pressed against the unbearable, sometimes the only choice is to get your licks in while you can.
When you finally arrive at Cookie’s place, several cars already line the driveway, parked end-to-end like dominoes. You can hear music as you walk up the path, can feel the deep bass of somebody’s sound system in the sole of your bare foot. Then, the cool wood of Cookie’s front porch. To your left, the pepper patch winks at you in the sunlight.
As your mother knocks on the door, her other hand clamped around your wrist, you imagine choosing differently, sliding one of those peppers into your mouth, stem and all. Cookie’s face buckling as you crush the seeds in between your teeth.
The front door swings inward, and there are those pewter gray eyes. Your mother wraps Cookie into a side hug, her other hand still holding you in place as if you might vanish. But you stare Cookie down. You wait until you feel the slightest tug, your mother trying to pull you inside, before deciding to let go, forcefully and loudly, all over Cookie’s front porch. The puddle blooms rapidly, urine encircling your mother’s sandals completely and nicking the toes of Cookie’s house slippers, before sinking down, staining the pale wood. Both women flinch at the smell, the kinks in their faces yet to unfurl. But this delicious lightness takes you up and up, until you are ten feet tall. All that bright heat and pressure between your legs seep away, cooling you to steel.
Kayla Lightner (@LightnerKayla) is a writer and literary agent based in the D.C. area, where she lives with her husband and mischievous dog. Her fiction has appeared in the Indiana Review, Pithead Chapel, phoebe, and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated for Wigleaf’s Top 50, Best Small Fictions, and was named a finalist for Best of the Net. Kayla is pursuing an MFA in Fiction at University of Maryland and serves as an assistant fiction editor at Pithead Chapel. You can learn more about her work at kaylalightner.com.