Page 61 - The Geography of Women

The Geography of Women 47

to be a mama, bein still so much too young. I felt exactly
like my Daddy usta tell me: “Sometimes, Sport, you just
act like you’re lost in the Dead Letter Office.” He sure hit
the nail on the head. Upstairs alone in my bedroom at the
Apple house, I lay awake nights, so blue, listenin to my
transistor radio, hopin to hear some new record by some
certain new girl singer, watchin the shadow a branches
against the moon, wantin wantin wantin Jessarose.
Mizz Lulabelle finally got to be a pain where a pill
couldn’t reach an a doctor wouldn’t dare. “Laydia,” she
said, diggin her needle in, “you might as well be in love
with Amelia Earhart.”
“Sometimes, Mizz Lulabelle, I wish you were the
missin woman, like some Hollywood missin woman like
Mizz Janet Leigh.”
“I haven’t taken a shower since I saw that show,” she
said.
“You will,” I said. “So I’m keepin my wig handy an the
butcher knife real sharp.”
“I always wanted to be killed by a jealous lover,” she
said. “It’d be so romantic, just like...”
“...the famous Mizz Vivienne Chastaine,” I said. “I’m
gonna burn that dirty ol ten-cent paperback book on you.”
“Threaten me some more, cuz I love it.”
There was just no stoppin her.
“I can be in love with Mizz Amelia Earhart if I want.
You been tryin to run my life ever since I moved in to
work for you. An just in case you don’t know, even the law
says grown adults have the right to disappear if they want
to. I know that for sure cuz I read it in my Daddy’s True
Detective magazine.”
“But why would she want to disappear? She got to
have a reason.”

©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved
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