My back teeth tapped together to absorb the shock anxiety. My heart beat in my chest with the fear that I would surely pull out onto the road, and only enjoy a few yards of my first driving experience before ending up like Mama when she was a Mississippi teenager, in a ditch, with a metal plate in her head. I imagined that the metal plate was the fun-house mirror that distorted all of Mama’s truths; the beginning of what made her reality one of unintended lies, lies that she believed because every time she went back to check the real memory, there was the reliability of contorted truths on her metal plate. This could happen to me, I thought.
“Go ahead, pull onto the road.” Ella Mae’s voice and the smell of exhaust from the tail pipe brought me back to the moment. “Slow,” she said again.
“I know!” I yelled out over the rumble of the truck, “or it’ll cut off.”
She nodded for me to coordinate, clutch and gas, the way I had done in the yard jostling over the dirt and stone. “Well, ain’t nobody come’n try it now.”
My pulse throbbed in my neck, and I unbuttoned my white blouse. My hands shook to coordinate steering and clutch and gas pedal. In the yard my driving lessons had been in bare feet that now squirmed in my school shoes. “Maybe I should be barefoot,” I pleaded with Ella Mae. “Odessa, jus go,” she said with one hand on the dash board.
I swallowed before letting off the clutch, slow and jerky like riding a bull, “Give it gas!” was all I heard above the grind of the engine, and the cloud of dust submerged the truck. There was the violent crunch of steel belted radials grinding dirt and rock and then the quiet of asphalt road, above the high pitched squeal of hot rubber, then I remembered to add the steering wheel to the coordinated dance. I swerved to turn away from the sight of open field, then away from the sight of woods, then the road came into view again.
Ella Mae hollered, like she was hollering for the chickens. “Yee-yee-hee,” and we broke into hysterical laughter that quieted, slowly as we rode closer to the church. The pinched spaces in my lungs had opened. I smelled juniper, the sulfur of hot mud and craw fish, of dried hot magnolia leaves pressed into earth. I could feel the muscles in my arms and legs, feel the solid lock that my knee and elbow joints make to hold me in place, feel the slow trickle of sweat from the heat of my body. I had shifted, and Odessa Lacey was different from Odessa Blackburn. Odessa Lacey liked to take a salt shaker to the garden and enjoy the taste of salt on tomatoes picked right off the vine, liked the minerally taste of well water, liked driving a raggedy red truck with no seat belts, the windows rolled down.
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