| She's an all-American eighth-grade droput teeth missing eyes bright directed at the ground. She used to fuck in dugouts and on rooftops and lost it in a Camaro, lost it, lost, made a wreck of the seat covers and of her first life. She feathered and ratted and teased her hair, depending on the weather, and she is all lips and smiles and smudges of frosty lipstick where they do not belong. She's an all-American rodeo queen with a streak of mean and a silk purse of sow's ears and dollar bills in tips and the names and numbers and notes of cowboy truckers whose lives, they say, she has blessed. She's an all-American whore and an all-American saint, her arms spotted up with age and her tapered fingers weary and arthritic. Her freckles once hid behind the paint and now they hide between lines; she walks upright in high heels, even drinking, and is small but having started early can certainly hold her liquor. She can't contain her meanness, her contempt for men and vermin: She beat her ex and a possum out of the house on the selfsame night with the selfsame broom and slept soundly. The cats shit in the garden which she does not water or plant. She believes in tall weeds and full-length mirrors and the science of soaps and Oprah and Ricki and Montel. She smokes without filters and does not decorate her walls. She's American and clad, nonetheless, in deep green velour and immersed in Motley Crue. She's a waitress, trucker's ex, the mother of two. Leather and cotton and Clairol and fluorescent lights and one-night stands: These are her mothers and this is her country. Sheila is American and tough as rocks. |
