Aunt Dinny sat at Mother’s kitchen table snapping green beans for our supper. I sat across from her, shucking ears of sweet corn to be steamed, cut from the cob, and frozen. Mother had bought the fresh produce from our neighbor, who had a vegetable garden in his backyard.
Looking down at the beans as she worked, Aunt Dinny said, as if to no one, “If any girl ever got herself pregnant and accused my son of being the father, I would send her packing right quick.”
Since my father died earlier that summer, she and my cousin Payton spent most of their time at our house with Mother and me. She said they were helping us mourn. Many of our afternoons were spent with Dinny, Mother, and me in the kitchen preparing the evening meal, while Payton sat in a corner staring off toward the window over the sink, looking as if he were contemplating his escape.
She continued snapping, first pinching off the stem and blossom ends of each bean, then breaking the pods into pieces. Snap, snap, snap. Sharp little pops that sounded to me as if she were breaking the necks of mice or baby rabbits.
“No girl is going to trap my son by getting pregnant,” she said.
“Yes,” Mother replied, “if a girl gets herself pregnant, she’s on her own.”
During that summer, Aunt Dinny started telling me that I was Payton’s girlfriend. I didn’t need to think about other boys, she said, because Payton was right there, pining away for me. “He’s all the boyfriend you need,” she’d say.
She put the snapped beans in a pot with some pork and broth and turned on the stove.
“Payton,” she called, directing her attention to her son in the corner. “It’s time to put the ointment on your knees. Go get it.” With a muffled grunt, he got up and shuffled down the hallway toward the bathroom. “Payton’s knees have been bothering him. They ache at night,” she said.
Payton himself never mentioned any pain in his knees, but then he never said much of anything.
I had just turned thirteen, and Payton was nearing his eighteenth birthday. He had been what Aunt Dinny called a sickly child, so she had kept him out of school and watched over him to see to all his needs. That involved dosing him with ointments and potions obtained from an herbalist in town whom she must have kept in business with what she thought were his many ailments.
Now that he was a teenager—almost an adult—Payton’s interest in girls became clear to her. The herbalist must not have had a pill or potion for his growing sex drive, so Aunt Dinny had to figure out for herself how to take care of this problem.
Since Daddy died, Mother seemed to have lost touch with what was going on around her. She went out on errands with Aunt Dinny in the mornings, leaving Payton and me at home alone. She didn’t seem like Mother anymore, as if Aunt Dinny had extracted her brain, the way the Egyptians used to do with their dead, and filled her skull with clay.
Or maybe she had some awful secret that Aunt Dinny swore not to tell only if she would cooperate with making me Payton’s girlfriend. Or maybe she was obligated by some long-established sister pact that neither of them ever mentioned.
Though I was only thirteen, I understood how girls got pregnant. I felt the tension between what Aunt Dinny demanded that I do and her warnings about the possible consequences of doing it.
On those summer afternoons sitting at Mother’s kitchen table, I imagined myself standing alone along the side of a road somewhere, on my own, wondering what to do next.
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Previously Published on Georgia Kreiger’s blog
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