Welcome to Heaven.
For the first time in years she thinks of Sugar Boss: her family tie. Sugar is a second cousin and the most famous citizen of Heaven, Oklahoma. Alice has her picture put away in the scrapbook with Taylor’s high school diploma and whatever else there is in the way of family papers. It’s an old picture cut out of Life magazine, summer of ’55. Sugar posed for a photographer with a pop bottle raised to her lips and a crown of daisies in her hair, leaning against the WELCOME
TO HEAVEN sign, and was seen all over everywhere in the advertisement. Alice saw her at the grocery checkout and couldn’t believe her eyes. She sent a letter, needing no more address than “Sugar Marie Boss, Heaven, Okla.,” and it got there, even though by then she was no longer technically a Boss but a Hornbuckle. Sugar wrote back.
They’d spent their last years of childhood together on the farm during the Depression, along with dozens of other people who showed up at Minerva’s door once they’d run out of everything but relatives. Of all the cousins, Alice and Sugar were closest, born a mere month apart. At nine they could pass for twelve and got jobs at the mattress factory, where it was all young girls, sewing up the ticking and stuffing in feathers. Their arms grew muscled and the down stuck on their hair, making them look like duck girls. Those times made bonds among people. The clotheslines ran from house to house and the wash ran between families like the same drab flag repeated over and over, uniting them all in the nation of washtubs and rough knuckles. There was love in that life, a kind of solid hope. Children ran heedless under the flapping laundry in a nation of their own. But it’s Alice’s impression that most of them grew up with hungry hearts, feeling sure that one day they would run out of everything again.
After their chance reconnection, she and Sugar shared their memories in long letters pressed into fat envelopes, but once they’d finished with the past, neither one had it in her to sustain the correspondence. Alice suspects Sugar’s life never reached the same elevation again; in her letters there was mention of daughters prone to pregnancy. Alice pictures a rattletrap house and flowerbeds gone to jimson weed.
But Sugar once put Heaven on the map, and that has to carry some weight still. Alice stretches her legs into the pale orange morning that is taking hold around her, and it dawns on her with a strange shock that she is still the same person she was as a nine-year-old. Even her body is mostly unchanged. Her breasts are of a small, sound architecture and her waist is limber and strong; she feels like one of those California buildings designed for an earthquake. As surely as her organs are in the right places, she feels Sugar is still there in Heaven. She could write her today. She’s kept feelings for Sugar, her long-lost relative who came home to her one day in the checkout line. Something like that is as bad or as good as a telephone ringing in the night: either way, you’re not as alone as you think.
2
A MEAN EYE
“LOOK UP, TURTLE. ANGELS.”
Taylor stoops to her daughter’s eye level and points up at the giant granite angels guarding the entrance to the Hoover Dam: a straight-backed team, eyes on the horizon, their dark, polished arms raised toward the sky.
“They look like Danny,” Turtle observes.
“Biceps to die for,” Taylor agrees. Danny, their garbage man, is a body builder on his days off.
“What do angels need muscles for?”
Taylor laughs at the thought of some saint having to tote around the overfilled garbage bags of heaven. “They made this back in the thirties,” she says. “Ask Grandma about the Depression sometime. Nobody could get a job, so they had this WPA thing where people made bridges and sidewalks and statues that look like they could sweat.”
“Let’s take a picture.” Turtle’s tone warns off argument; she means Taylor will stand under the angels and she will take the photo. Taylor stands where she’s placed and pre-pares to smile for as long as it takes. Turtle concentrates through the rectangular eye, her black eyebrows stranded above it in her high forehead. Turtle’s photos tend to come out fairly hopeless in terms of composition: cut-off legs or all sky, or sometimes something Taylor never even saw at the time. When the pictures come back from the drugstore she often gets the feeling she’s gone on someone else’s vacation. She watches Turtle’s snub-nosed sneakers and deliberately planted legs, wondering where all that persistence comes from and where it will go. Since she found Turtle in her car and adopted her three years ago, she has had many moments of not believing she’s Turtle’s mother. This child is the miracle Taylor wouldn’t have let in the door if it had knocked.