Black Light

When she got home from the movie and her daddy hit her, Ivy’s feelings for him broke into a thousand pieces—like a souvenir that fell from its special place high on a shelf where she had been saving it to take down one day and cherish. He made clear he had washed his hands of her. She was not so lucky with Mama.

In the morning, she woke to the smell of fried eggs and bacon grease. Mama was on her way to the cotton mill. They would talk when she got home. Ivy was not to set foot outside the house. She spent the rest of her Saturday morning in bed staring up at the black-light poster on her wall—the wormhole hidden inside the ringed planet. All this time she had imagined Barry’s gift to be a doorway to another dimension, when, in fact, it was no better than all the junk she had hoarded from the flea market.

Mee-Maw and Aunt Tina let themselves in. Ivy peeked through her door at them sitting at the kitchen table, drinking sweet tea and filling the air with smoke. Then Mama came home and, still in her mill uniform, busied herself with refilling their glasses.

Ivy stepped out to face them, and Mee-Maw just stared, letting the smoke seep out of her lips and up into her nostrils. They were all dressed up, like they wanted you to think they had come from church. But it was Saturday. And Tina’s miniskirt was too short for church.

“I blame Hollywood,” said Mee-Maw. She adjusted her brassiere. It was evidently aggravating her eczema. Mama pressed her lips together and sat up straight in her chair. Ivy braced herself. If Mama cried, it always made Ivy’s tears come, too.

“She is just going through a phase,” Mama said and reached for the cigarettes. “Some boy has paid her attention, and she’s intrigued, I guess.”

“Are you intrigued?” asked Mee-Maw.

Ivy shrugged. That’s all they’d get out of her. Here in front of them, she did not even want to let herself remember the feel of his pleather jacket smooth against her cheek, his strong shoulder underneath.

“What is it you find so fascinating?” asked Tina. “I’m curious. I want to try to understand.”

“He’s nice,” Ivy said. “And smart.”

Mee-Maw sipped her tea and said how she knew when they integrated the schools, this was where they’d end up. When children started riding the bus together, it was only one little step further to hopping in a car and riding off to the movies. And now, she said, they had these Moonies everywhere, in their silk robes, with their Chinaman messiah and their gospel of interracial marriage. Mee-Maw asked Ivy if she had been approached by any Moonies. But, so far as Ivy knew, Moonies existed only on TV and in all of their minds.

“There won’t be a white boy to go out with you now,” said Aunt Tina, a note of triumph in her voice. “Or, if he does, he’ll expect you to put out.” Tina tugged at her miniskirt, but her panties still showed.

Mama went to the sink and reached up high to the cupboard, opening the door hanging by a single hinge. She took down a packet of aspirin powders and mixed them in her tea.

“I have tried and tried to tell her,” Mama said, “how hard it is to be a girl growing up in this neighborhood.”

“Don’t I know it,” said Tina, sucking her cigarette down to the filter.

“And I just cannot believe,” said Mama, “that she is so determined to make it impossible.” 

~

She had met Barry and his sister on the bus a month earlier, her first week at the consolidated high school. Consolidation was a four-letter word in her home. The preacher at the Pentecostal church her Mama’s family attended had been run off because he supported consolidation, just like the preacher who had been run off a decade earlier for supporting desegregation. Hailey Creek High School had joined with Crawford High, which was halfway to Charlotte and a lot more “urban.” Ivy had looked forward to the consolidated high school. New people. But the new people were harder to meet than she’d expected. Most of the kids clumped together with the same old friends. On her school bus, nothing had changed. Whites claimed the back, and the dozen or so kids from Double Springs sat up front. Usually two or three empty seats in between. But instead of riding the mile to the school in Hailey Creek, they all rode segregated together past seven miles of kudzu to the consolidated high school.

It turned out there were two new kids from Double Springs: a cute boy and a girl who looked a lot like him except half a head taller and no trace of a smile. The girl clearly did not want to be on this bus. Brother and sister sat together in one of the empty seats near the center. Ivy picked up her backpack and moved to the seat behind them. She saw the book the boy was reading, 2001: A Space Odyssey. She leaned forward and said she had tried to read that book but hadn’t gotten far before she had to give it back to the library. The boy smiled. The sister made a point of staring straight ahead.

After that first week, the sister moved up front with a friend. Barry and Ivy kept occupying two seats near the center. And every day he would give her an update on the novel, which was about a man trapped on board a spaceship with a paranoid computer. Barry got around to explaining how his family had moved to Hailey Creek to take care of his grandmama, after the death of his granddaddy earlier that summer. Maybe Ivy had heard of his granddaddy? No? He had served as the principal of the Double Springs School for three whole decades, until desegregation. “Ask your parents about him,” the boy said, but of course, Ivy was not about to do that.

~

While the church was looking for a new minister, men from the congregation took turns in the pulpit. Mr. Breedlove acted like he was a real preacher. Red in the face, battling the fires of hell. Pacing back and forth in front of the altar, he sounded like he had a fishbone stuck in his throat and he was trying to cough it up.

“Satan has been turned aloose in this community, A-ha! I say we need a Savior to protect us from Satan’s dark power! A-ha-ha!”

She was pouring sweat, smothered by Mee-Maw’s flesh on the one side and poked and prodded by Aunt Tina’s raw bones on the other.

At the end of the sermon, Mr. Breedlove launched into his altar call, pleading with sinners to step forward and be washed in the blood of the Lamb. She had sat through altar calls her whole life, terrified to step down that aisle alone and finally discover whether she was worthy of salvation.

When she slid out of the pew, the sweaty jeans stuck to her thighs. If Mama had been home instead of work, she would have made Ivy put on a dress. At the altar, the preacher knelt with her on velvet cushions. He laid one hand on her shoulder while he prayed into a microphone. She closed her eyes and waited for the magic, tried to make herself believe it was Jesus himself with his hand on her shoulder, his hand strong from years of gripping a hammer, a hand that wanted nothing but her wellbeing.

 ~

On the way home, Mee-Maw and Tina lit up, and Ivy had to breathe their smoke. Mee-Maw talked on and on about how she had never been prouder. You would have thought Ivy had won the spelling bee.

“It’s such a shame your mama couldn’t be there,” Tina said.

Ivy rolled down her window for air. At the edge of town, they passed the old Double Springs School, where Barry’s grandfather had served as principal for three decades. The windows were covered in plywood, and spray-painted onto the boards were some cuss words and a Confederate flag.

“Honey, you ain’t said a word.” Mee-Maw pulled off onto the gravel road that led to her house. She glanced back at Ivy. “I been running my mouth and ain’t give you a chance to tell us what it felt like?”

“What what felt like?”

“Why, being filled with the Spirit of God! I still remember being saved like it was yesterday. When the shackles of sin fell away, I could hear them crash.”

“It was a physical sensation,” Tina agreed. “The nearest I can describe it is being covered in filth from the swamp and then being hosed down with cold water. I get goosepimples still today just remembering.”

Ivy pushed her head out the window to breathe, but her chest still hurt. She wondered if her daddy was awake yet.

“Are you going to talk to us?” Mee-Maw said.

“I didn’t feel nothing,” Ivy shouted, as if the lack of sensation was their fault. “No magic. Not a thing. I guess I must be going to hell, after all!”

~

At home, Mama and Daddy were arguing again about rumors that the mill was due to close. Mama paced the room, while Daddy sat at the table in his plaid pajamas.

He said if they wanted his job that bad in Mexico, they could have it. He had about decided he wasn’t cut out for the regimentation of factory life.

Ivy stepped by them to her bedroom, but before she could close and lock the door, her mother was there asking about church.

“I don’t have to work next Sunday,” Mama said, “We’ll be done with this inventory. And maybe after church, we can stop by Tastee Freez.”

“I’m not going next Sunday. In fact, yeah, I’m not going ever again.”

“What!”

“I found out today what I needed to know. Like Aunt Tina is always saying, there’s only two kinds of people in the world. Well, I found out which kind I am.”

When her mama finally left her alone, she unscrewed the white light from the desk lamp and replaced it with the black one from her desk drawer. She pulled the window curtains closed and then twisted the knob. A faint purple light shined out from the lamp. Well, that was disappointing. She held the light right up against the new poster on her wall, but you could hardly tell. Too much sunlight came pouring through the window. If there was a wormhole in the center of the planet like Barry had said, she couldn’t see it. She felt just as trapped in her life as ever. Maybe later, after dark, she could try again.

In the kitchen, she heard her name. Daddy was taking her side. He said she was old enough to decide whether or not she wanted to attend church.

“She’s beyond the age of accountability,” said Mama, dead serious. “And she ain’t never been saved. If something was to happen . . .None of us knows about the Rapture. It could come tomorrow, like a thief in the night.”

“Shit fire,” said Daddy, “Ivy’s just like me, too ornery for the Devil to handle.”

 ~

The following Sunday morning it was a knock-down-drag-out, but Ivy had made up her mind she was not going. After the service, Mee-Maw and Aunt Tina came over for lunch. They had banana pudding for dessert, and then when they started smoking, Ivy asked to be excused and locked herself in her bedroom. She knew they were talking about her, so she cracked the door to hear.

Mama said it was a rebellion that most girls went through.

Mee-Maw said maybe Ivy was too young to properly feel the conviction of sin.

Aunt Tina said, “Not so. I got saved right after I had my first period.”

Ivy laced up her sneakers and, without making eye contact, stepped through the kitchen choked with cigarette fumes. She walked around to the backyard where Daddy was busy with his bees.  He had the hive torn apart and he was working the bellows on his smoker to calm the bees. Daddy was still wearing his plaid pajamas, but he had on his bonnet to protect his face. He always said he didn’t mind if he got stung on the hands, but he believed in protecting his face. Mama didn’t like him to work the bees on Sundays. He said it was his way of worshipping Nature, which was his God. Ivy figured a man who could look into a hive crawling with thousands of bees and not be afraid could also make up his mind not to fear hellfire. Daddy said to rob that sweet honey, he had to put every worry out of his mind. Bees could smell fear.

Ivy walked to the other side of the house and removed the hatch to the crawl space. She stepped down into the dark and musty air and moved across the mud on all fours until she came to Daddy’s stash of homebrew and behind that his stash of honey. Through the floorboards above her, she could hear the murmur of her Mama and Mee-Maw and Aunt Tina. She pulled a quart out of the box and then moved back to the rectangle of daylight. She stuck her head outside to make sure nobody was coming. With the jar of honey hidden inside her T-shirt, she stepped across the yard to the driveway and on down the gravel road until she came to the woods and the trail that led to the creek.

The current was running fast and high. The water splashed against her shins and soaked her jeans clear to her thighs. Kids from her neighborhood had claimed the creek as their own, but they hardly ever climbed this bank on the far side. Holding tight to the honey, she dug her free hand into red clay. She reached for an exposed root and pulled herself up and rolled over onto a carpet of brown leaves that crunched beneath her. These leaves belonged to Double Springs, a place she was strictly forbidden to go. She looked back across the water toward home, feeling like she had traveled through a wormhole to some distant part of the galaxy.

She didn’t have to walk far before she could see the backs of old houses, most of them needing a coat of paint as bad as hers. But there were a couple of brick homes and on top of the hill one two-story sparkling white with a veranda that wrapped all the way around and a million flowers in tended beds. On the bus, Barry had told her how his grandmama was obsessed with flowers. Ivy waded through broom straw until she came to the edge of the yard. Nearby, there was a fence with chickens inside. Up on the hill, all the windows in the house were dark, and she didn’t want to trespass.

She lay down in the soft broom straw that smelled so clean baking in the sun. Overhead, a jet plane crept tiny and slow, leaving two thin trails of vapor. To be so far away, the plane’s roar shook the heavens. It would be a day like this, a clear sky, when the Rapture came. Supposedly all she had to do to be saved was invite Jesus into her heart. She focused on the fleck of light way up there and thought about the spaceship in Barry’s book, what it would feel like to be trapped alone in outer space. She was just about to give up and walk home when she heard the rooster crow.

She rolled over onto her elbows and looked up from the broom straw. There was Barry, carrying a pail. Inside the fence, orange chickens pecked the dirt. Barry unlatched the gate, and the rooster crowed again, flapped its wings.

Ivy raised a hand to wave, but Barry didn’t see. He upended the pail, dumped scraps for the birds. The rooster charged him, and Barry jumped back and latched the gate. When he turned, Ivy saw the tie strung around his neck. His white collar looked starched, and his slacks were stylish and new. Church clothes. For the first time, she felt ashamed that she had stayed home today, ashamed of the mud on her knees. It was almost enough to make her sink down in the broom straw and hide. But there was the honey in her hand.

“Hola!” she shouted and stepped out of the field and across the yard. “Cómo estás?”

“Huh?” He looked as shocked to see her as she felt to be here.

“My daddy says if we all learn to talk like Mexicans, then maybe we can fool the boss into believing he already moved to Mexico, and the mill won’t close.” 

“Okay?” He laughed.

She passed him the honey and told him how she had tacked up the poster on the wall by her bed and how she planned to try the black light again tonight when it got dark enough. She asked if he had ever found any arrowheads down by the creek. She had two in her rock collection and plenty of rosy quartz. She could show him the best places to look.

He glanced over his shoulder toward the house. There on the veranda stood the sister in a white dress. A hundred feet away, and Ivy could feel her judgment.

“I’ll have to take a rain check,” he said. “We got family visiting.”

 ~

Back at the creek, she found a better place to cross, where the water was wide and shallow, with stones flat and dry. She didn’t see the man until she had crossed back over. He squatted in the water upstream. His hair and clothes were soaked. He dipped his hands into the water and brought them to his face. When he looked up, fear surged through her like an electric current. The man’s face was swollen with pink whelps that ran from his hairline down his jaw and neck. His lips and nose were lopsided. He looked like a monster, like a demon set loose from hell. The man stared hard at her. She wanted to run, to look away, but there was something familiar about him that scared her and that held her gaze, and then she recognized the plaid pattern of her daddy’s pajamas.

He explained that the bees had gotten into his bonnet and he had panicked. Then he’d bumped the bee box and the whole hive swarmed him. She dipped her hands into the creek and poured water onto his bald spot, covered in knots. The swollen scalp and the way his hands trembled made her ashamed she had stolen his honey. Corpses of bees eddied around him, and live ones crawled on the netting of the bonnet on shore. She stayed with him there at the creek until the light in the woods changed and he said he was ready to go home and face her mama. She reached a hand to help him up, and he turned his swollen face on her. His puffy eyes narrowed, and he stared at her like she was the stranger in the woods. In a tone of voice she had not heard in a long time, he asked her what she had been doing across the creek in Double Springs. Except he didn’t say Double Springs. He used the word he always used, the word everybody in her family and on her street used. The word she often heard at school and at church. A word she herself had sometimes used until only recently, when she had met Barry.

Ivy didn’t like to lie, but there was no way she could tell Daddy she had taken a quart of his honey to her friend in Double Springs. It was easier to say she was chasing a baby deer.

 ~

In the days to come, she and Barry would agree to meet by the creek, on his side. They hunted for quartz and skipped rocks on still water. They raced sticks at the stretch of rapids she called the racetrack. They stood together in the treehouse his granddaddy had built for him when Barry was still a child. She wondered if he might try to kiss her. She had never kissed a boy. She had spent a lot of years ashamed of wanting to be kissed, but now she told herself she was not ashamed, and whatever that said about her, she didn’t care. 

Every morning on the bus, Barry told her what was happening in his novel, which kept getting weirder and weirder. The spaceman had been transported to a far corner of the galaxy, where he had a vision of ancient civilizations populated by alien beings. Barry said one thing he was looking forward to about living out here in the country was learning the constellations.

“When you learn them,” she said, “maybe you’ll teach me.”

~ 

Ivy had grown up playing in the woods, and after she finished her homework, Mama didn’t mind her spending time down by the creek. No need to mention Barry. Daddy was still on second shift, so at supper, it was just her and Mama. One night, when the two of them fixed Ivy’s favorites, barbecued chicken and baked beans, Mama said she wanted Ivy to consider coming back to church. They had a new minister now, and she wanted Ivy to give him a try.

She shook her head, and when Mama pressed her case, Ivy dropped the half-eaten drumstick onto the plate and went to her room. She lay on her bed and thought about the new minister. She knew everything he would say without having to hear a single word. She turned on the black light and tried to relax in a purple room, concentrate on her poster of the ringed planet and its portal to an alternate universe. She tried to make the wormhole open and suck her through. But the doorway was shut. And, as she always did while lying in bed, she got to dividing everybody she knew into two groups, the wheat and the chaff, those who would be taken up with the Rapture and those who would be left behind with her while evil conquered and ruled a lonely planet. Seven years of Tribulation. Plagues. War. Daddy would be there, too. Neither of them had been saved. But Daddy was already so distant, so what help could he give her to resist the mark of the Beast?

 ~

Ivy saw the movie advertisement in the Gastonia Gazette and couldn’t wait to tell Barry. 2001: A Space Odyssey had been re-released and was playing at the Webb Theatre. She was speaking her fantasy. She would never have dreamed of asking either of her parents for a ride, even if Mama hadn’t already been moved back to second shift. 

“My sister can drive,” Barry said and, the next day, confirmed the date. Friday night. Ivy offered to meet him at his grandmama’s. It would be easier for her to walk through the woods, she said, than for his sister to have to find her house.

She arrived just before dusk, picking beggar’s lice from her jeans. It was clear in an instant his sister had not been expecting her. Barry tried to smooth things over. The sister shook her head.

“You said a friend. I thought you meant Boone or Jomo.”

“Well. You should have asked.”

Ivy did not get much out of the movie. From that opening scene with the apes and the bone they tossed into the air that turned into a spinning spaceship, she knew her mama would find the story somehow blasphemous. The movie was slow, not much action, but her mind was not on the movie. With his sister sitting on the other side, Barry reached out and took Ivy’s hand, their fingers slick with butter from the popcorn.

Back in Hailey Creek, Barry’s sister was not about to let Ivy walk through the woods, even with a flashlight. When they pulled into Ivy’s driveway, a fire in the backyard burn barrel was pumping out black smoke, chased by a whole galaxy of sparks. From the way it stank, plastic. Her daddy, who was supposed to be at work, came out onto the porch barefooted, without a shirt. He shouted her name and stepped down the cinder blocks. Backlit by the bare porch light, he marched directly toward the car.

~

The morning after the movie, she woke and rubbed her sore jaw where Daddy had smacked her. Mama made her leave her bedroom and come eat breakfast. Daddy woke early and went out to work his bees. He didn’t even glance in her direction. Mama was on her way to the mill. Ivy had never understood why Mama had to work Saturday mornings and Daddy didn’t.

Mee-Maw and Aunt Tina arrived and filled the kitchen with cigarette smoke. After Mama got home, Ivy left her bedroom to face their interrogation. The movie. Her friendship with Barry. Mee-Maw pulled a fine-toothed comb through her hair, checking for lice. Aunt Tina insisted that Ivy open herself to salvation.

“You need to get this done,” said Tina. “You’re very clearly beyond the age of accountability. I understand you might think it exciting to live dangerously—”

“She’s playing with fire,” said Mee-Maw.

“Like playing Russian roulette with her soul,” said Tina.

“You never know what tomorrow will bring,” said Mee-Maw.

“If not the Rapture,” said Tina, “then maybe a fatal car crash.”

“Your appendix could burst,” said Mee-Maw.

“You could contract some exotic, incurable illness,” said Tina.

“Maybe you already have it,” said Mee-Maw. “Some people are born with the thing that will kill them.”

“And then, like that,” Tina said, snapping her fingers, “your soul will be cast into hellfire for all of eternity.”

“Why risk it?” said Mee-Maw.

“She likes living dangerously.” Tina took the cigarettes from her purse and thumped them against her palm. She luxuriated in the ritual of lighting the cigarette and taking that long first drag.

 ~

The next morning was Sunday. Ivy woke while it was still dark. She turned on her bedside lamp and tried to read the novel she had borrowed from Barry. They both figured that after hearing him summarize, chapter by chapter, the entire space odyssey, it would be easier.  But the sentences still resisted her. The book made her feel defeated and dumb. She tossed it to the floor and flopped back on her bed. Still another two hours until it grew light. And then she would have to dress for church. She turned off the lamp and lay still, imagining herself the prisoner of a computer in a spaceship—in suspended animation.

When the bulb had cooled to her touch, she unscrewed it, then replaced it with the black light bulb she kept hidden in her dresser drawer. She removed the lamp shade so the purple light could fill the room. Stretched out on top of her quilt, she stared at the poster on the wall. It was a trick she kept practicing without success. Focus on the tiny pink cubes that made up the ringed planet. Blink and, presto, if the trick ever worked, Barry had explained that the planet was supposed to reveal the eyeball, which then transformed into a 3-D wormhole. Just relax her body, starting down at her toes and moving upward to her knees. Empty her mind. Breathe. When she got to her belly, she felt again the panic that had buzzed through her and that had filled the car, there with Barry in the backseat and his sister up front behind the wheel, when Daddy had stepped out onto the porch and shouted her name. She could not stop smelling the hot smoke from the burn barrel or stop seeing the way Barry’s sister had stared into the back seat, signaling for her to get out. And Barry, how while Daddy moved through the dark, shouting obscenities, hunched forward and carrying what might only have been a rolled-up newspaper, Barry had tried to smile but could not hide the fear on his face. Maybe everything her family said was true, that hell was a real place. Pain and punishment beyond her wildest imagination.

But this morning, she was still free to create the world she wanted to inhabit. Long, slow breaths. She set the lamp on the bed and held it between her knees so that the purple light bathed the poster and the pinks popped from the wall. She stared at that planet and blinked. Stared and blinked again. She could keep doing this as long as it took. Her eyes found the rhythm until she forgot where she was and found herself empty, floating in a trance. And then, blink, yes! There it was! Not a planet but an eyeball, the pupil dilating until it became a wormhole through space, a door to another dimension. And then the door opened and out stepped Barry wearing a shiny blue spaceman suit. His shoes flashed in the light of an alien sun. He paced back and forth across some cratered surface, sliding his feet like he did when they waded the creek and came to the stretch of flat rock covered in slick algae. He held out a hand and fixed her with an unwavering gaze, waiting. All she had to do was take his hand and step through that doorway. But understand, once it closed behind them, there was no coming back to Earth.