Vidalia

Nonfiction by ​​Maddie De Pree

Before we leave, I walk down the road and snap a Polaroid of a palm tree. It’s tall, and the fronds whip around in the wind. I stand in the street and watch the photo develop. The palm tree appears, but the sky behind it shows up blank. All white.
 
I stand a while longer and breathe in the ocean air. In the driveway, a car door slams.
 
I walk back to them. My mother is at the wheel, windows down, angry. My grandmother sits beside her in a souvenir t-shirt. I slip into the backseat and lean my forehead on my grandmother’s headrest. My mother rolls up the windows. We drive.
 
I’ve developed some new attitudes about money, my mother says. Like going out to eat. What do you have to show for it? You shit it out and it’s gone. 
 
I eat out to spend time with people, says my grandmother.
 
My mother pauses.
 
What I like to spend money on is airfare, she says.
 
She drives on. I look down at my Polaroid, which has finished developing. The palm tree looks like a useless stamp against the yawning sky.
 
I lean my head on the warm window and watch the highway whipping by. We have 400 miles to go.
 
An hour passes in silence. The billboards are full of white babies and their demands: RESCUE UNBORN CHILDREN! LIFE BEGINS AT CONCEPTION! I close my eyes against the babies and remember a nightmare I once had: cradling an infant to my chest without knowing that it was mine.
 
My friends once asked me what I would do if I accidentally got pregnant. I said I would abort it so fast they’d all get whiplash.
 
The friends did not laugh at that, which made sense to me. They were just people I knew. They were not really my friends.
 
I wake up. My grandmother is pointing at something: an enormous Confederate flag flying up ahead. It catches the wind and billows around like an enormous, bloody bed sheet.
 
Just look at the size of it, my grandmother says.
 
You mustn’t think, says my mother. You mustn’t think that this is all the South has to offer.
 
Just look at it, says my grandmother.
 
She has not spent much time in the South.
 
We are almost out of Florida. The billboards are changing: fewer babies, more produce. We pass advertisements for a peach farm, an orange grove. One billboard yells, in bright capital letters, about fresh onions.
 
Vidalia onions, says my grandmother. That’s how you know we’re approaching Georgia.
 
Vidalia onions are very sweet, says my mother.
 
I look down at my body, sitting quietly in its seat. I feel like a pencil sketch. Two halves unaligned.
 
Some people eat Vidalias like apples, says somebody. Would you eat a Vidalia like an apple?
 
I say I think I would.
 
Another billboard materializes in the distance: an ad for pecans, $5.99 a pound. My grandmother says she would love to stop and buy a pound of pecans for just five ninety-nine. She says this is an excellent price.
 
Fine, says my mother. We need to get gas anyway.
 
We take the exit and pull into the pecan parking lot. It’s a huge building, white and square. My mom leans back her seat and says she is going to wait in the car.
 
I do not want to wait in the car. I pull myself from the backseat and follow my grandmother. The pecan warehouse is full of jellies, jams, syrups, honeys, dry rubs, candies, Goo Goo Clusters, t-shirts, shot glasses, pecans, preserves. Clear plastic bags of nuts lie in heaps around the warehouse. My grandmother and I walk over to a pile. She selects a bag and turns it over, squinting. The cellophane crinkles in her hand.
 
These pecans are ten dollars, says my grandmother. Why are they ten dollars?
 
I don’t know, I say.
 
I glance up at the ceiling. It looks four stories tall.
 
The billboard said they would be five ninety-nine, she says.
 
My grandmother buys the pecans, along with a bag of chocolate covered almonds and three Goo Goo Clusters. I pick out three jars of jam for myself. The girl who rings us up looks about sixteen and speaks with a melancholy Georgia accent. Beneath these high ceilings, she could be somebody’s god.
 
We rejoin my mother in the car and drive across the street to a Quick Trip. I use the restroom and wait for them at the front of the store. I stand near a display of chips and look around for my grandmother. My mother sees me looking and appears in front of me. She cocks her head at me and waits. I look at her eyes and tell her Hello.
 
Clearly you need to say something else, she says.
 
I don’t, I say.
 
Obviously you are harboring resentments, she says.
 
The gas station people are looking. I see my grandmother through the window, pacing outside. She probably knows what is happening. My mind feels like a smear. I think about stale food, my mother yelling, plates breaking against a wall. Then, a memory: myself at nine, watching a spider’s egg sac come apart in the window, the spiderlings breaking loose like a cloud. Cold house and lights-off. I want to go to dad’s. And my sister’s voice, saying I know. My mother narrows her eyes.
 
This is hard for me, I say. This reminds me of old times, I say.
 
My mother says I need to elaborate. I tell her I am mentally ill. I try to say something else but my voice crumples into a ball.
 
You win, she says.
 
We walk back to the car. My grandmother tries to ignore us and I try to sound like someone who is not crying. My mother’s voice stalks around in my head, hissing into space. Everyone adores you, it says. Because you’re so bright.
 
We merge back onto the highway. We are still an hour away from Atlanta. I place my head against the window again and watch an 18-wheeler pass us by. A sticker on its door says TRUCKING FOR JESUS.
 
I turn my face away and think about the evening before, when the three of us were sitting in the sand. My mother sat near us and stretched out her legs. Then she looked at us and held up a seashell, fragile and white, with a hole drilled through its top.
 
I am going to buy a very fine gold chain, she said. To string through this shell.
 
That’s a nice idea, said my grandmother.
 
A very fine gold chain, my mother said. That is what I will do.
 
We all nodded to ourselves. My mother placed the seashell in her pocket and closed her eyes against the setting sun. None of us knew that the shell would go through the laundry and break. Hot shards and white dust.
 
I unfolded a chair and leaned back in it. We stayed until the sun slipped out of view, listening to the shrieking of the gulls, their cries drawn out and bloody, their voices raked raw across the darkening sky.                                            

Maddie De Pree

Maddie De Pree is an undergraduate student at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina. Her poetry has been anthologized in Best Emerging Poets of South Carolina (2017) and America’s Emerging Poets (2018) and published in The Echo, White Wall Review, and Dollhouse Magazine. Her short fiction has been published in The Austin Chronicle, The Echo, and Zoetic Press’ Viable chapbook series. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in The Echo, The Thing Itself, Rue Scribe, Little Rose Magazine, and Mikrokosmos/mojo15. She is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of PHEMME Zine (phemmezine.com), a print and online platform that publishes marginalized authors and artists. You can find her on Twitter and Instagram as @maddiedepree.