Chapter Text
Does such thing as 'the fatal flaw', that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.
— Donna Tartt, The Secret History
May 1964
I wore the name Randle like an out-of-season dress, in my father's house, and he never let me forget it.
"Frank's probably driven himself straight into the highway divider by now," Lyle said as he tapped his watch, as though willing the seconds to slow down; I called him Dad to his face, he wouldn't have stood for anything else, but it was difficult for me to think of him that way in the privacy of my head. "And then I'm going to be late for lunch with the dean, cleaning all of that up."
He gave me a look I would've quivered beneath when I was younger, but the close prospect of escape made me bold enough to match it. "I said I would've taken the bus—"
"Alone?" he scoffed, like the two-and-a-half hour drive between Wichita and Tulsa was a ride on a covered wagon along the Oregon Trail. Dropping me off himself was not even a consideration. "No, ma'am. I have a few things to say to him, anyway."
"You're too hard on her," Thelma said, adjusting the cold, damp cloth on her forehead. She was lounging on the sofa like Daisy and Jordan in The Great Gatsby, her white dress straining around her stomach, wilted and languid in the heat. "I think it's kind of sweet, she wants to get to know her mom's family better."
I smiled at her, out of politeness, but I wasn't fooled by her sudden burst of solicitude; Thelma didn't care about me. If I wasn't going to be around to babysit Jeffy, at least I wouldn't be using up any more of Lyle's money. "I think I'll be lucky if she doesn't come back chain-smoking and pregnant," Lyle said. His heavy footfalls left grooves in the carpeting.
The second social services deposited me on his doorstep, Lyle became determined to get me off of it. He'd succeeded at enrolling me at St. Teresa's in Kansas City for the fall, where I could board for the school year, but that still left the question of the summer open— and he hated open questions. He wasn't much fonder of making me happy, vulgarity in any way, shape, or form, or the memory of my mother, all of which Uncle Frank's offer to take me in promised in spades, yet there was something token to his protests, what he thought a good father should say rather than what he actually felt. He could've shown up here vomiting and reeling, and he still would've let me go.
I didn't have a good explanation for his antipathy towards me, no matter how hard I tried to analyze it. We were more alike than I cared to admit; all of my best sneers came from him. Maybe it was because I was a girl, which left a stain of sentimentality and weakness on me that couldn't be washed off, maybe because his hatred for my mother left no room for any love of me. I wanted his approval at the same time as I, logically, realized that I would never gain it, and sitting here and swinging my feet in his parlor, crushed beneath the weight of his disdain, I felt the wild urge to beg him to let me stay. To let him make me good again.
A knock at the door interrupted my thoughts, as I toyed with the chain of my necklace; Jeffy tore off from where he was messing with the hem of Thelma's blouse, before the long-suffering maid, Miss Marjorie, could get it. "Uncle Frank!" he cried out, though he wasn't, technically, any uncle of his. "Did you bring me anything?" Jeffy was kind of a brat, but when I heard a high-pitched squeal come from him next, I was still a little concerned until he came back into the room on his shoulders.
I hadn't visited Uncle Frank and Steve in Oklahoma for a few years, though I used to spend the better part of every summer with them; he and my mother had had some kind of falling-out, either over someone's drinking or someone owing the other money, and the sting of the argument was enough to keep them apart. I was surprised by how much he'd physically deteriorated even since the funeral, his burst capillaries red starbursts on his cheeks and his eyes bloodshot, though he'd shaved and put on a clean shirt to come here. I was even more surprised when he deposited Jeffy back onto the floor and pulled me into his arms. "You look just like your mama," he said, as I inhaled stale bourbon and stale sweat. "I know suicide's a sin an' all, but Christ, we still gotta believe she's in heaven now."
I did look like them, like a Randle, with dark brown hair, green eyes that could shift into gray, and a face that was all angles, my nose too long and my chin too pointed for me to be pretty rather than striking. I was less convinced by his analysis of my mother's death, though having found her foaming at the mouth next to a bottle of barbiturates, the coroner had concluded the same; she, God rest her, wasn't exactly what you'd call an intellectual powerhouse, and I had no trouble believing that she'd never known you couldn't mix them with alcohol. Still, I liked the hug more than I wanted to admit, though it simultaneously made me feel uncomfortable and itchy; nobody had held me since her death, and I was unused to it, in a household that placed high premium on personal space. You couldn't wash the stink of formaldehyde out.
Lyle cleared his throat, which made us break apart. "I'm sure you both want to get on the road," he said, his eyes flickering towards my suitcase with what you might call longing. "And I'd hate to get in the way of that— Chez Pierre won't hold our reservation for much longer. But I need to just make one thing clear: you are returning my daughter in the same condition I left her, and that condition is not fast."
I was, despite having a mother like mine, closer to a sloth hanging from a tree than any kind of fast. Lyle never would've allowed a child of his to not be at the top of the class, and at my old high school, I'd been a year ahead in Latin and did calculus with three senior boys in the basement as a sophomore. I also had the unhappy distinction of being a grade-A bluestocking, whose chances of getting invited to Beta Club carwashes, sock hops, or slumber parties, like a limit, were rapidly approaching zero. I couldn't imagine that if the kids at El Dorado Senior High considered me a terminal loser, and even my most sympathetic teachers gave me advice on coaxing my pin-straight hair into bristle rollers, that Tulsa's rougher crowd would be any more likely to embrace me with open arms. I still didn't appreciate how quickly Uncle Frank snorted. "Hell, I'm hopin' she'll be a good influence on my boy and that lil' girl he's always suckin' face with, wasn't thinkin' so much about the other way around."
Lyle's lips narrowed the way they did when he found fingerprints on the china cabinet or ribbons of dust left on the bookshelves, before he fired another careless housekeeper. He had a hell of a time hiring new help these days. "I'm well-aware of what neighborhood you live in," he said. "I haven't raised Faye to behave like the girls from East side Tulsa, you understand me? She's brilliant, the kind of mind you don't see in women often, and I won't have you screwing that up."
(Lyle never praised me this effusively in private, only as a bludgeon to use against others. I hated how I still soaked up the words like sun rays, basking in the glow of being brilliant, his brilliant girl.)
Uncle Frank snorted again. "A guy like you knocked my sister up, bub— and don't think I've forgotten you never had the decency to marry her, neither. Round East side Tulsa, at least someone would've dragged you to the altar with a shotgun."
Thelma gasped like she was in a bad movie, even clapped her hands over Jeffy's ears while he squirmed and tried to get away. Lyle looked like he wanted to slug him, if it wouldn't get blood on his cufflinks, and if he wasn't guaranteed to lose the fight. I thought if we didn't get on the interstate in the next millisecond, it wouldn't be soon enough. "Get out of my house," Lyle finally managed to say as he slashed his hand through the air, like a director had told him that this scene needed a touch more melodrama. "Both of you."
"Gladly," I dared to say as I heaved my suitcase up. All things considered, it was a more pleasant goodbye than I'd anticipated. "Bye, Dad. See you in September," I added, a perfunctory nicety, as though he was looking forward to it.
Uncle Frank and I got about halfway down the interstate before we started locking horns. Honestly, I was surprised we even made it that far.
"You want me to drive?" I asked more than a little irritably as we cruised over our millionth pothole, hard enough I bit down on my tongue as we landed. I was loath to agree with Lyle on anything, but with the way he was taking sips of 'driving whiskey' every five minutes, I wasn't optimistic about our chances of making it to Tulsa without crashing into the highway divider, either. There was a small scar on my forehead from when my mama had rammed into a buggy in the Piggly Wiggly parking lot, piss-drunk on bourbon lemonade, and this was giving me unpleasant flashbacks.
"Awh, honey, you even old enough for a license yet?" he asked, still in a languidly good mood. His car had a cassette player, and he was blasting, of all songs, 'Love Me Do' right now.
"We won't make it home alive if you don't figure out how to hit the brakes," flew out of my mouth, as he did just that and slammed the back of my skull against the headrest. As obsessed as Steve was with all things cars, it wasn't an inherited trait; I could hardly believe what Frank drove was street legal. The backseat had a rusty hole half-covered with duct tape. Someone honked at us; Frank stuck his middle finger out the window, which he'd left cranked down. "I want a helmet."
"I'm not about to let no broad drive my car, especially not with all this traffic— motherfucker, they issuin' the blind licenses at the DMV now?" The other driver told him to go do something unprintable, as well as prohibited under sodomy laws in both Kansas and Oklahoma. "Don't start coppin' no attitude with me, Miss Priss, I ain't in the mood," he added with an exaggerated sip. "I'm tellin' you, a little Jack helps me focus."
Instead of continuing the argument, I batted some strands of hair out of my face and pulled a pack of Parliaments out of my purse. I had enough sense not to antagonize my new guardian an hour into my stay, and unless I wanted to walk to Tulsa, I didn't have much of a choice in the matter. "You got a cigarette lighter in here?"
He pointed it out above the cupholder. "Your daddy let you smoke?"
"No, he didn't." He considered it disgustingly low-class, especially in women, and kept up with the latest lung cancer studies the way some people kept up with the space race, but Thelma couldn't seem to kick the habit no matter how many diatribes he delivered about it. She'd offered me one when I caught her at it going for a glass of water, and it became mine, too, a petty act of rebellion that soothed my jangled nerves in the bargain. My next question would set the tone for the entire summer. "Are you going to let me?"
"So long's you light me one too." He held his hand out; I obliged, though I was down to my last few. I didn't expect I'd have any difficulty getting new packs, where I was headed. "Guess you ain't so much of a bobby-soxer as he makes you out to be, huh? Lord, here's hopin' all our stupid doesn't wear off on you, before you manage to find the cure for cancer."
I took a long drag, let the nicotine seep into my blood and settle me down. "Steve's getting into trouble now?" I asked on an exhale. I remembered a smartmouthed kid with scraped-up elbows and knees from when Darry Curtis had taught him to do gymnastics tricks, the only person in my family who would play chess with me and got jumped for bringing schoolbooks home. I had a hard time picturing him as some kind of jailbird now.
"He just got out of juvie, spent his birthday in there," Uncle Frank grunted, and I started hacking on the next mouthful I'd inhaled. Guess my assumption hadn't been that far off the mark. "Did three months for stealin' hubcaps, the little shit, and that's after I paid a lawyer who wasn't a public defender, too." He sucked so hard on his cigarette, I was convinced it was dissolving bits of paper into his mouth. "Runnin' around with the worst kind of hoodlums... he sure as shit wouldn't be actin' like this if Alma was around." Aunt Alma ran off to Muskogee with another man right before Christmas 1955. If Steve had any thoughts about her, he kept them to himself. "I could blame his friends, but I'm more inclined to blame him."
I'd never known anyone who'd been to juvie— not in El Dorado, where the worst trouble kids got into was 'borrowing' their dad's car for a joyride or TP'ing their football coach's house, and not at the Wichita school Lyle had briefly enrolled me in, where keeping up with the criminal blotters was at the bottom of my priorities list. Was gangly Cousin Steve really learning how to make shanks and brew homemade moonshine? (I didn't even know if 'shank' was the right noun.) "Don't sweat it about him, sweetheart," Uncle Frank said, which put the brakes on my runaway imagination. "Wouldn't have even brought it up if your daddy hadn't decided to start goin' off on me, 'sides, I think seein' the inside of a cell might've scared him straight this time. We're gonna have fun this summer, as a family, yeah?"
The way he threw the empty whiskey bottle out the window made me think we might've had very different definitions of that word.
We got home around four, miraculously, uninjured. Uncle Frank and Steve lived in what could be called a nice house on the bad side of town, or, well, it had probably been nice when it was first constructed. The lawn was mowed and watered and the paint was unchipped, unlike some of the houses on the block, but inside the carpet was covered in an inch-thick layer of dust and cigarette butts, and the less said about the kitchen, with its overflowing sink and abundance of takeout containers, the better. Maybe it was missing a woman's touch, since Uncle Frank had never remarried after Aunt Alma left him, and I wasn't sure how serious Steve was about that girlfriend. It was really too bad for them that I'd been excused from home economics class.
My room, or their guest room that had only ever housed one guest, was the same, though, a time capsule from when I was twelve. It was better described as a refurbished closet, with just enough space for a twin bed and a chest of drawers, the walls painted a pale pink, a couple of dolls hidden under the bed after Steve had made fun of me for still playing with them. One of my mother's cardigans hung from a nail by the windowsill, from where she'd shrugged it off and never remembered to put it back on. I shoved it into the back of a drawer, before I could spend too much time dwelling on it.
Uncle Frank had to go to 'work' right after he dropped me off and carried my suitcase inside; I suspected otherwise, but I didn't push the issue, and spent the rest of the evening unpacking and finishing that pack of cigarettes on their front porch, too unsure of myself in this neighborhood to leave the house and with no knowledge of where I could go. I couldn't concentrate on a book either, probably because I had a well-enough honed sense of danger to know that once Steve got home, there would be one hell of a fireworks show. It didn't come until late that night, long after I'd given up hope of seeing him and gone to bed.
"Where you been, huh?" Uncle Frank's voice cracked out like a whip with no sense of direction, and in my groggy, half-awake state, I almost insisted that I hadn't gone anywhere at all. "Didn't I tell you, this house ain't no fucking twenty-four hour motel, you don't just get to waltz in here at three in the morning?"
"Don't give me no Ward Cleaver act, Frank, ain't in the mood," Steve said, his own voice thick like Tupelo honey with the desire for trouble. I didn't recognize it, at first. "You don't remember kickin' me out in the first place? I wasn't sure when I was allowed to come back in."
"Faye came down from Kansas today, you didn't think you oughta mark that down on your calendar, drop by long enough to say hello? I had to leave her alone the second I got her settled, I can't imagine what she thinks of us—"
"Oh, I bet that's just what lil' Faye's biggest problem will be, my bad manners," Steve snorted. "Can't believe she wanted to come to this shithole for the summer— one week of watchin' you piss away the rent money on booze, she'll be runnin' right back to Wichita, to her rich daddy. Mark my words." There was a pregnant and dangerous pause after he finished the sentence. "You look soused as shit. Smell like it, too. You drive her drunk?"
"Of course I didn't," Uncle Frank said much too fast, and Steve just laughed.