I learned rather quickly that the Madonna-Whore Complex is alive and well in rural Alabama, and am delighted to play either role depending on who is pretending to know how to pronounce my full name. Being single in Small Town, USA—a city that time forgot—is challenging. I’ve met Bobbys and Nicks and Joshes and Bryans, none of whom seem to be interested in unsolicited possum or hairless cat pictures. Sometimes these men are playful enough if they’ve been drinking. It’s always Coors Light, Michelob Ultra, or whiskey, and never will you marry me?
My first night in Eufaula was July 17, 2019. Places like Austin, Orlando, Melbourne, and Tallahassee had spoiled me rotten with an unmediated expectation of Triple A and Uber, but when I locked my keys in my car outside of Walmart, I learned that this is not the kind of place that supports 24-7 anything, let alone a service you can download from an app store on your phone. At times like these, I sense that there is too much space between what I have, need, and want. Sometimes, I am not sure if these variables are moving further from one another or if they are staying still, but I secretly hope to discover them in the crawl space beneath my porch. I’ve never managed to stay somewhere quite this long, which is an astonishment I like to Tweet at least once per month.
Since that first summer, I’ve cried many times in that same Walmart parking lot. Once I even woke up in the back of a truck with a hand full of fresh cotton, there—and although I cannot remember for certain, I am sure that I was weeping. But the first night was most memorable because the tears are how I ended up with a second bedroom, even before I’d unpacked my very first box. Bam, my landlord, pulled up in her Chevy SUV with a phonebook open and the mayor dialed up. “Get in,” she said, “those people look like they are up to no good.”
I climbed into her car, away from the men doing meth in their t-shirts, jeans, and boots and the woman whose husband had left her with a suitcase in the spot next to mine. Bam said, “If you stop crying, I’ll share the bonus room with you.” And when we got back to the duplex, she unlocked all of the secret doors in my kitchen and hallway, revealing my newly acquired guest bedroom. “I was only going to show you this if I liked you, and I do,” she said, handing me the keys to the Chevy and telling me to go back and get what I needed from the store. We’d known each other all of four hours.
Bam’s generosity fits into an unprecedented category. She is the adult that my second therapist told me to look for—a mother-figure whose altruism and empathy have been steadily repairing cracks left behind by some of my most unspeakable sadnesses. Les, Bam’s son, is the general manager of the Los Angeles Rams. When I first moved to this town, I spent four months alternating Friday evenings with a group of seventy-something year-olds at the Country Club near Foxridge where we sipped wine and ate the chef’s specials. And every Sunday, we’d collect ourselves in Bam’s sitting room to watch the Rams play whichever most important game of the season they were playing that afternoon.
Sometime in November, I met my first twenty-something. Katie is small with short hair; a person whose personhood is more prominent than any pronoun, pea coat, or pedestal could ever promise. They are loud and confident, and one Tuesday, we drank coffee and talked about the simultaneous beauty and horror of being an outsider on the inside of such an intricate social system. To claim any peace or allegiance among the groups in this county is to buy a brand new skin – and perhaps one that doesn’t quite fit the way that it should.
I’ve tried on skins of all shapes and sizes, here, which is not a peculiar turn of fate by any means. In Tallahassee, I floated between friendships, never quite dropping an anchor in any specific apartment, coffee shop, or bar, until I did. Heather—with her world map back tattoo and wearing one of my tank tops—met me at Poor Paul’s, unwittingly ushering me into a world punctuated with all the Connors and Bens and Lawrences I’ll ever need to know.
Connor only lasted about a week after I moved to Alabama. In the beginning he would mention coming to visit sometime – two and a half hours isn’t so bad. But after my first trip back, he kissed me on the lips in a parking lot and took nearly seven months to speak to me again. I’ve felt heartache before, and this wasn’t that. However, it was the ending of an era and the kind of closure that cures homesickness before it ever has a chance to settle in.
My house, as Bam calls it, is a cabin in the woods, which is just to say that it is snug between two patches of tall trees. It’s decorated with books, paintings, and a mannequin named Veronica who was a gift from a Tallahassee poet. Across the street, there’s a probably-haunted home called Fendall Hall where people get married and have big parties on the lawn. Behind Fendall, is Barbour Medical Center, and at 4:30 one morning during a tornado warning blackout at the start of a pandemic, I drove there in excruciating pain to have an ER nurse warn me not to pass out. She said, “If you pass out, we’re not going to stop the procedure.” Then she and the doctor drained a cyst on my tailbone and told me I needed to come back in three days so the day shifters could pull out the packing.
I keep my place here tidier than any of the many others I have had before, which is probably because I have developed a sense of permanence and a taste for spiced pumpkin scented Yankee candles. There’s something intoxicating about the juxtaposition of fresh- mopped floors against lavender-scent laundry detergent and gourd-flavored air. All year long, I spend my days switching between the heater and the air conditioner, which would confuse the thermostat if it were a sentient being, but it is not. I am, though, and I like to think that I fit here, except on the occasions when someone visits and cannot reconcile the state of being in a home with the state of being in the presence of a mannequin.
Katie is not the only Katie. There are Kathryns and Kaitlynns, and Katelyns for miles – so many so that it’s nearly impossible not to sleep with one’s ex-boyfriend, ex-best friend, ex- husband, or the present-tense of any or all of the above. They all prefer to go by “Katie,” but the best is the Katie who invited me over the night after the first night I couldn’t remember. The one whose mother-in-law painted the portrait of Yoholo Micco I keep on my desk, and who sends me podcasts about serial killers and leaves slices of homemade cake on my front step.
After Katie, I met Kiel. His hair was longer than mine in late 2019, and sometimes he’d trade me a paisley scarf for my red-rimmed reading glasses. We’d spend Thursdays at River City, letting Kris—high school math teacher by day, bartender by night—pour one after another even if we knew that another one was nearly never a good idea. It was sometime in January 2020 before I lasted late enough into the night to join a drunken caravan to a post-party at the Hilltop, which is where I was when I first heard the lyrics let me love you on a backroad.
There’s a delicious quality about a Southern twang, especially when it’s bouncing off a plastic dartboard and sifting through cigarette smoke. In Eufaula, the backroads claim more than virginities and empty beer cans. They are red clay rivers when it rains and Mars dust dancefloors when it doesn’t. I think I may have traded a soul to one for a ride in a lifted White Ford—but I’m not sure whose. Some nights, it makes the most sense to climb up and in, introducing yourself during the first pee break. Everyone here likes to pee outside, even if you tell them how often you douse your bathroom with bleach. No one has ever heard of the word neurotic, and somehow they are all capable of staying up to celebrate consecutive sunrises.
Bam has become my Alabama Grandma, and she does not approve of the Hilltop or the best friend I made during my first May. When Jasmine first met Bam, she had already been staying at my house for about two weeks, which is longer than she generally keeps one hair color. She wears sweaters and compression pants with Adidas, and always a scrunchy wrapped around one of her shrinking wrists. I’m not especially proud of the days or nights I spent at the Hilltop, which is not located near or at the top of any hill. In fact, one might speculate that the name is nothing more than a euphemism for the activities that take place behind the swinging door of the kitchen on the patio. I’ve washed dishes there, and rearranged half-empty seasoning shakers. Once, I even thought I was falling in love, but it turns out I had mistaken an Alabamian for an ex-lover who was busy finding his next soulmate in Ormond Beach.
I cannot keep referring to each place I live as The Island of Misfit Toys simply because I cannot figure out whether I am an island, a misfit, or a toy. If I were a toy, I’d be the kind that dogs chew—something bright with a squeaky center. Sometimes, my voice hits an inaudible pitch. Much less rarely, I come across house pets on the sides of residential streets, but when I call the phone numbers punched into the tags attached to their collars, old women answer saying things like, “Of course that’s my dog” or “Of course that’s my cat” and “No, I do not want you to bring him back. He likes to roam, so please let him be.” This is how I met Socks, the not-stray cat, and Lucy, the one-eyed dog. Nick, though, is neither a not-stray cat nor a one-eyed dog, and the first place we met was nowhere near a residential street. Headed to Echo, which is a tiny town tucked between Abbeville and Ariton, I lost my driver’s side fog light to a large raccoon, who consequently lost his short life to my driver’s side fog light. I’ve felt heartache before, and this was that, but also the start of an era made of taxidermy deer heads, greens, ham, and black- eyed peas.
Desire Ameigh is an English instructor at Wallace Community College in Eufaula, Alabama. Her work has been published in Fresh Picked Prose, Prometheus Dreaming, and Beyond Words. She will join the Graduate English Program at Auburn University in Fall 2021.