Brave New Wanda

by Lynda Rutledge

This is an excerpt taken from Brave New Wanda (WordFarm, 2004) by Lynda Rutledge. Copyright (c) 2004 by Lynda Rutledge. Used by permission of WordFarm: http://www.wordfarm.net.

Lynda Rutledge’s first novel, Brave New Wanda, follows 13 year old Wanda Louise Ledbetter in the aftermath of her mother’s death and stepfather’s abuse as she, her grandmother, her dog, and her mama’s old Cadillac take to the road to figure out just who Wanda is. Wanda learns that her father was not the source of her conception. Swiftly paced and punctuated by moments of biting humor, Rutledge’s story deftly investigates the medicine, the ethical implications, and the human effects of our advancing technology of birth. From Wanda’s point of view, it’s clear that such medical advances are not without consequence, for all the parties involved.

Sitting in the glow of the motel desk lamp, Wanda poised her pencil over a small, spiral-bound notebook:

Dear D—

“Whatcha writing?” Granny asked, leaning over her shoulder. “Always scribbling in that little book of yours.”

Wanda slammed the book shut.

Granny stepped back. “Well, excuse me. Didn’t know it was private.” The old woman went back to examining a pile of change on the desk, pushing it around with a wrinkled finger.

Pulling the small notebook to her chest, Wanda watched her granny as she raised her eyes from the coins, straightened the big hairnet that held her beauty parlor hairdo in nightly place, then moved stiff and slow as sorghum toward the bed. Wanda worried a little. “Granny, do you need anything?”

“I need a certain young lady to keep her promises,” she answered. “And a bigger bed.”

“I don’t like sleeping with you either, you know.”

Granny looked around. “You used to not mind. ‘Course you weren’t more than about 40 pounds back then.” Wanda’s grandmother plumped the pillow with a couple of jabs and eased her big self under the covers. “All I want is for you to take me to the Poetry Cemetery like you said, and then I want us to go home. My chickens are going to miss a feeding.”

Wanda felt a lump in her throat. Her granny wasn’t getting worse…. She wasn’t. “You don’t have chickens anymore. Please? Okay?”

Granny’s face went a little blank, confused, then straightened out. “Of course I don’t. Isn’t that funny?” She frowned. “Well, good riddance.”

Wanda put the pencil and notebook down and came over to the bed, stepping around Wild Thing, who’d plopped down on the floor, one leg high, licking her privates, to straighten the covers under Granny’s flabby arms. Her fingers lingered on the old woman’s hand.

Granny grabbed Wanda’s hand suddenly, urgently. “And good riddance to Harley Dean! Until that no-good came around, your mama was a decent, church-going woman. Your mama loved your daddy. I don’t deny they had a hard time having you, lots of trips up here to this hospital. But they had you, didn’t they?”

Then she let go of Wanda’s hand just as suddenly as she’d grabbed it, and lay back, spent. Wanda sat down heavily on the edge of the bed and pulled Wild Thing’s furry head close, stroking, squeezing her near.

Wild Thing moaned with delight.

“Your daddy loved you, baby.” Granny murmured.

“I don’t want to talk about him,” Wanda said. “I never knew him and I don’t want to talk about him.”

“You don’t talk about people, they go away, baby. I don’t know anything about my people. All I got of them are headstones and hand-me-down names and this big German honker. Your mama never talked about her side of the family, as if they had the plague. But your daddy’s and granddaddy’s side, the Ledbetters, they were talkers. And even though they’re gone too, I know all about them.”

Wanda headed toward the sink, pulling off her cut-offs and boots as she went, her granny’s voice following behind: “You are your daddy’s girl and your daddy was the manager of the J.C. Penney catalog store and his daddy was a soldier and his granddaddy was a sheriff and his grandmama was a mail-order bride. From Boston, Massachusetts. And oh. There was this Texas patriot they were just real proud of, swore he rode into the Battle of San Jacinto with Sam Houston remembering the Alamo. Before that, it’s for sure they all got off a boat somewhere, sometime, but they quit talking about ‘em and they disappeared. So you talk about ’em, Wanda Louise. Because you are your daddy’s girl. A Ledbetter.” The old woman paused, sighing sad and full of memory, her big breasts heaving. “From the day you popped outta your mama, and your daddy bought that brand-new Cadillac, he loved you. And your mama loved him. And your mama loved you.”

“And they all died happily ever after,” Wanda snapped. “The end.”

The old woman grunted. “Goodness, you’ve always been a tough one.” And then the old woman added sweetly, quiet enough to make Wanda glance around: “I used to listen to you in the night. Little cries that wouldn’t wake up a flea.”

“Lucy the Showgirl #3” by Scott Kolbo

Wanda turned sullenly back to the sink, but listening, listening.

“I said to myself, no one was going to have a hold on this one. This baby was singular.”

Wanda fumed, self-conscious, fighting to stay mean. “You’re rambling again, Granny. Changing subjects faster than a bumblebee farts—like Mama used to…” She bit off the end of the sentence.

Her grandmother crossed her big arms over the bedspread. “You’re mad at your mama, ain’t you, baby? You got a right to be. Maybe she’d have done better if she hadn’t had to move you two in with me. But she’d get so melancholy, hugging that Bible, living like a chain-smoking Baptist nun. No wonder she went with Harley when he came tomcatting around. Going without loving for ten years’ll make anyone that young melt like butter at the first sign of heat. She dropped that Bible, I tell you that.”

Wanda cringed. “I don’t want to talk about it. Geez!” She flipped on the faucet.

“Nothing wrong with talking about it. Not talking about it’s what gets you into trouble. I suppose you think you know all about sex, too.”

“I know enough, okay? I know where babies come from and all that crap.” Wanda began brushing her teeth. Loudly.

“Who’s talking about babies? We used to have ’em because we couldn’t stop ’em. Now they can stop ’em and they’re raising Cain about having ’em. Baby girl, there’s more to loving than what gets left inside you.”

Wanda swallowed a mouth of toothpaste spit.

“If that’s all it is, there’s something missing no baby’s going to fill. I loved your daddy, but I’d never trade having him inside me for having your granddaddy inside me.”

Wanda gagged and coughed. “Gawd! Granny—!”

“Inside me. Beside me. Made no difference. And you watch taking the Lord’s name in vain.” She eyed Wanda. “There’s a world of things you don’t know on this topic, Miss Smarty.”

“Well, I don’t want to hear it from my grandmother!” Wanda whined.

“It’s my ovaries that are dried up, not my heart,” Granny went on. “And if my ovaries were more important than my heart, then they wouldn’t be what’s dried up, would they?”

“Can we talk about this tomorrow?” Wanda begged. “Please?”

“Like Wild Thing here. She’s a woman.” Granny nodded at Wild Thing going around and around in circles making herself a bed on the carpet. “It’s the most natural thing at certain times in her life to just offer herself up, but if she ain’t choosy, she’s stuck with a whole litter of Heinz 57 mutts uglier than sin.”

“Boy, I sure am sleepy—Aren’t you sleepy?” Wanda tried desperately. “We’re getting up real early.”

“You don’t know what early is. On the farm, we’d get up at 4 a.m. I’ve been talking to Johnny ‘bout this and he agrees with me now.”

Wanda turned out the overhead light and felt her way over to her side of the bed in the small sift of moonlight coming in the window. She had hoped she could stop her grandmother talking before she got to talking to the dead again. “He always agrees with you,” Wanda sighed. “I don’t think your reception’s so good. And you promised you wouldn’t talk about talking to dead people.”

Granny’s voice faded almost transparent. “What we had, death can’t just up and break. Love like that doesn’t die just because one of you quits living.”

“I know, Granny. True love.”

“Don’t make fun, sister,” her grandmother warned, swatting at her under the covers.

Wanda jerked away. “Research says it’s all just chemical, anyway!” she grumbled. “Preprogrammed by our genes to perpetuate the species. Lasts just long enough to mate and bear children.”

“Stop talking nonsense! You ain’t got the slightest notion what I’m talking about.”

“I didn’t say it! Scientists did.”

Granny snorted. “Chemicals. Hmph. Those scientists should be making themselves useful curing cancer or my hemorrhoids. I’m talking about something special between two people. Most women think it’s just gonna come riding by. Well, you can wait all your life, even marry what does come riding by and still be waiting. Such a link’s a gift of grace from God. Stronger than the grave.”

“Stronger than all your other dead husbands?” Wanda snapped.

There was a pause in the dark on that one. “Child. You are itching for a switching.”

“Why’d you keep getting married, if you loved Johnny such a big deal?”

“I had to survive, didn’t I?” Granny shot back. “I had your daddy to raise. That was how it was done then. You think I had a choice? Women today, they don’t know what it was like back then. But I ain’t talking about need. I’m talking about a little piece of God-love that makes a moment a true treasure, buried deep, rich enough for a whole lifetime.” An old, full sigh filled the dark.

“Lucy in the Corset” by Scott Kolbo :: Ink Jet & Mixed Media

“Everybody dies,” Wanda muttered. “So what’s the use?”

Granny paused. The silence hung over the bed. It made the night air seem hollow, used up, personal. “Some pain’s worth it.” She fidgeted. “Now I’m feeling melancholy. Tell me about the swans again from that big library book of yours.”

Wanda rolled her eyes. “I already told you a thousand times.”

“I could be gone by the morning and then how would you feel? Tell me.”

Wanda fidgeted. “Geese, Granny, not swans.” Then she repeated it all quickly: “Greylag geese mate for life, sometimes half a century. He runs all the other males away and begins his dance, squawking and calling, stretching his neck to the sky. Until she joins in. And they live happily goosy ever after. Okay?”

“It’s a rare thing.”

Granny’s voice had dropped so low, it drew Wanda’s face toward her in the shadows. The old woman’s eyes reflected in the moonlight were more clear and straight and intelligent than Wanda had seen in weeks. And it made Wanda very nervous.

“Baby,” her granny murmured low and serious, “your mama and Harley—I know what they were planning. But lately my mind and my heart, they keep finding Johnny. And I want you to know my world, baby, before I die. And I want to go back and see my cemetery tree. You said you’d take me.”

Wanda turned toward the window, to the broken piece of moon hanging there. “Don’t talk about dying.” The yellow dog came up and nuzzled under her hand.

The creaky old voice floated through the dark. “Latch the back screen door before you come to bed now. You hear?”

Wanda swallowed down a rising bit of fear that always threatened to take her over when her granny went off somewhere like that. But soon she heard her begin to snore.

As the moments passed and her granny was deep into snorting sleep, Wanda watched the piece of moon out the window and listened to the sounds of laughter coming through the wall, sounds like her mama and Harley used to make, quiet giggling, murmuring. She flipped on the table lamp, and, with an eye back toward her sleeping granny, reached for her pencil and little book and began to write:

Dear Daddy,
     Whoever you are, I’m going to call you that over Dear Biological Paternal Unit or Dear Genetic Donor or even Dear Father, because I choose to. Because I didn’t ever get to call anyone that. Because I think everybody ought to have someone to call Daddy sometime. Even if the person doesn’t deserve it.

Wanda eased off the lamp, nestled back into the cool sheets, and opened the book in her mind: Dear Daddy. Dear Doctor Daddy. Goodnight. And as she floated toward slumber, up bobbed another of the library book facts she’d stored away…