Our Former Lives in Art: Stories by Jennifer S. Davis

Author:Jennifer S. Davis [Davis, Jennifer S.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-07-09T16:00:00+00:00

pilgrimage in georgia

Louis and Esther Peter discovered Blyght, Georgia, by accident when Louis made a wrong turn on their way to a writers conference in Atlanta. Louis had insisted on taking the back roads in order to experience the countryside, the barely populated towns where he said real people lived. “These are my people,” he’d said somewhat defensively to Esther, who, accustomed to Louis’s frequent indulgences in melancholia, simply pointed to her watch.

Blyght wallowed in decay: crumbling false-front buildings, graying white-columned homes in the “good” section of town. It sported a Kimmie’s Fine Dining and a Piggly Wiggly and a Bill’s Dollar Store, which had $1 old-fashioned panties staked like tents in the window. A spray-painted tiger, the high school mascot, leapt from the water tower, and Louis knew, because he just knew, that on Friday nights after the football games, some teenager got arrested for trying to climb to the top to get drunk and naked. It was the kind of town Louis wrote about, the kind he grew up in, and it stirred in him a nostalgia that made him want to unlearn himself.

They stopped at Kimmie’s diner and ate salty cubed steak and green beans cooked to mush with ham hocks and doughy biscuits to sop it all up, while blond, permed Kimmie sat at the lunch counter watching TV, her face pushed dangerously close to the oscillating fan.

“Where y’all from?” she asked when she wandered over to their table to top off their teas.

“Not far from here,” Louis answered, and she shot him a slightly skeptical look.

“Chicago,” Esther said. “We’ve lived in Chicago for some years now.”

“I bet you don’t get beans like that in Chicago.” Kimmie slipped their ticket onto the table. “Snapped them myself,” she said before moving on to another one of the few occupied tables, a sweating pitcher of tea cradled against her plump abdomen.

“Isn’t she beautiful?” Louis whispered to Esther, who sighed, then offered him a ten-minute lecture on the dangers of romanticizing poverty in literature and country-western songs.

“Have you lost your mind?” she said finally, picking the ham fat out of her beans. “It’s so sad here.”

“Look around, Esther,” Louis said. “Really look.”

A few feet away, an older, pink-faced man in work overalls quietly sipped soup from his spoon. A woman, presumably his wife, in a sweatshirt stenciled with a dancing bear sat across from him, sawing patiently at a pear with her fork.

Esther appeared confused, as if she were staring at one of those optical illusion posters full of dots, the kind that if you just focus hard enough, a beautiful butterfly or dove or something of the kind emerges like magic.

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