Luckily, Sookie's telepathic powers now seem to include being the Smoke Monster, so she handily beats up the Rattrays again, but not before they injure her substantially enough that she's required to slurp a whole big mess of Bill's blood, turning her into yet another kind of giant superhero -- though not a vampire -- for the remainder of the day. Not bad for a first date, even one that includes your date licking blood out of your head wound. She tells him, in a funny memory montage, about how she could never date because all men are gross inside their hearts while Bill is gross right in front of you, and remembers how traumatic her gifts were for her parents. (Before they died, which was probably slightly more traumatic for them.)
Jason sits in the police station for twelve hours before they finally show him video that seems to exonerate him -- turns out he really did think he'd murdered Maudette after all. The video of their creepy sex involves him choking her to fake-death and leaving in a panic, and then her laughing her butt off at his dumbness. However, since the apartment was scrubbed of all other dirty videos means he's still under suspicion, and he has more ridiculously hot sex with Dawn in order to take the edge off. She leaves him the morning tied to her bed, as a little joke. I hope that doesn't have dire consequences!
Lafayette takes (his cousin!) Tara to a party, where she makes it clear she's an equal-opportunity asshole by scaring off a would-be suitor in a hilarious -- and mindblowingly Tara -- manner. Sookie learns more about the plight of Undead Americans from her TV, and the hateful Reverend who leads the anti-vampire coalition of religious nuts is found murdered by, presumably, a secret vampire cabal. Also murdered? The Rattrays, apparently by a tornado which Sookie knows is secretly named Bill. After smarting off at the local cops on the scene, she politely asks Bill not to kill anybody else.
Sam dares Sookie to look inside his brains at all his love thoughts, naively assuming she hasn't been aware of it the whole time, but there's a pretty much giant neon clue pointing to his true nature that you'd have to be blind -- or Sookie -- to ignore. In other romantic news not involving Bill, Tara gets this close to nailing Jason, doesn't quite seal the deal, and then laughs at herself in a charming and disarming fashion. Sexy Rene beats crap out of some jerks at the bar to defend her honor, but an overheard thought -- Arlene has gotten knocked up by him -- causes her to embrace Arlene and be brutally rebuffed. Lafayette continues to rule the entire world simply by standing there and saying normal things in a fabulous way.
Adele spends the whole day cleaning the house for Bill's first home visit, which goes weirdly thanks to Tara and Jason treating him like shit. Sookie apologizes by acting as a go-between for his home renovation needs, since most carpenters, electricians and the like don't work on the vampire schedule. She shows up at his house the night with contact info, sweetly enough, and is surprised by two visiting vamps: one very hot and scary, the other ridiculous and goateed.
Final score: I love Sam and Jason unreservedly, and Tara is Citizen of the Week. Hooray for no more Tara hate! You may just be the Brenda Chenowith after all. Now, if we could just work on those constant Six Feet Under comparisons…
Mack Rattray swings an imaginary chain in a circle over his head like a lasso, while his wife kicks the waitress in the stomach again. "Where's your fuckin' chain now?" He aims and kicks again, and Sookie screams aloud, calling out for God. They kick her together; Denise shakes her head by her ponytail, pushing it into the earth. "Here we go!" calls Mack, kicking her and howling at the moon. Denise laughs, and they kiss like Mickey and Mallory, the original trailer trash meth freaks, addicts indulging violence and sex and nature without rationality or mind, rebels without cause or effect, driven by need. Human.
A familiar dog appears, barking at them in fear and anger, and Mack smiles: "Well. Fuuuuuck you, Fido!" He pulls out a gun, and from somewhere inside Sookie pulls it together. She grasps him by one shin and throws him twenty yards or more, across the clearing. He slides down a tree, weakened but not out. "What the fuck...?" A tornado named Bill comes zooming in from the other side, and stabs him through the gut; Denise calls out to the tornado to show his face, and soon enough Bill's smashing her against trunks and roots and dirt, up and down again and to the side, until she stops fighting. The dog whines, and watches; its hackles raise, its skin goes cold. Sookie lies on the ground broken, blinking in and out, bleeding out, as the tornado's feet come to rest in her line of sight, and hands reach down.
Jason fucks Maudette Pickens on the video he should have known was there; Jason sits in the police station with Bud and Andy, watching Jason fuck Maudette Pickens. Watching Jason and Andy and Bud watch Jason fuck Maudette Pickens. "It's too bad I don't have fangs," he grunts. "Rip your fuckin' throat out. Fuck, yeah! Here it comes," he says, watching himself fuck Maudette Pickens, describing it as it's happening. Telling her what she already knows, as though she's a mirror. She's dirty, and Jason is clean; this is one way he stays clean, by conquering what's dirty. Everything is sex if you look at it right. Everybody knows he could do better than her; anyone could see his hands around her throat. She's a mirror; she's two bites on the thigh. "Are you ready?" He comes and comes and comes, squeezing her throat, hands moving of their own accord, left behind. Jason watches Jason's hands, left behind, like umbrellas in a taxi to the airport. Sometimes things just happen.
"That was intense, huh? Maudette..." Jason watches Jason shake her, hands tied to the ceiling, back arched, eyes open. "What happened?" If he had fangs he could have ripped her throat out. He shakes her, and starts to cry; he puts on his jeans and starts to run. Jason watches Jason run, and Bud and Andy watch Jason start to cry.
Jason watches Maudette Pickens start to laugh. She walks toward the camera to turn it off, laughing to herself, calling him a moron. As though he doesn't have a lick of sense; like he's a kid, in the way, not getting the joke. There are things in the world that Jason doesn't understand yet, but he will. He'll conquer the unknown and become a man. Everything is sex if you look at it right. We're all just trying to be seen. To matter. Jason watches Maudette laugh at Jason and starts to laugh himself. He pumps fists in the air: "I didn't kill her!" Andy points out that, well, somebody did. That's not what's important.
What's important is this: Bill, carrying a bloody waitress through an impossible forest. Her face is nearly unrecognizable, covered in blood; marked by death.
Well, it was a vampire, of course. Jason saw the fangs when he watched him on the video; Jason saw the fang marks on her inner thigh, back when sex was about pleasure. "We know, we examined the body." Sherriff Bud asks, as a point of interest, whether maybe this "vampire" is the same one Jason's sister is messing around with. "Okay. First, my sister ain't messin' around with nobody. My sister don't mess around. And second? ...I don't know. I never met the other vampire. I never met any vampire, and I hope to hell I never do." Jason describes the vampire from the video tape, remembering him and the ways he was inhuman: "Bald-headed. Weird skeleton tattoo. And he looked crazy. Crazy out of his motherfuckin' mind!" All true. Andy tells Jason this is the only tape they could find in Maudette's apartment; Jason says this is because it's a frame-up, and when Andy Bellefleur points out that Jason could be the one who hid them, so as to cover his tracks, it takes Jason a while to understand what he means. "Aww. Come on, Andy. I'm not that smart!"
Bill lays her down swampside, like the opposite of every fairytale; he says her name in a weird way, over and over. "Suckie. Suckie!" Her eyelids flutter; she suddenly realizes she can't feel her legs. (See, this is exactly why I don't get into gang wars with trailer trash crackheads. They have no sense of honor.) Bill props her up and bites into his wrist, ripping the flesh away. "Quick, drink before the wound closes!" Sookie's cognizant enough to ask if this will turn her into a vampire, and he says it won't. "Goddamn it, Suckie, do you want to live or not?" She resists for a moment, and then leans closer to the v-juice, getting its scent for the first time, taking her first taste. Then she ... gets real thirsty. Bill watches as she gets more and more into it, blood all over her face, drinking it down like a kiss. Like the hungriest kiss imaginable. (Wouldn't you feel like you were being possibly punk'd? I would not be able to film this scene without Alan Ball actually taking me into his lap and promising me that this is not a joke. "Okay Anna, so in this scene you're a paraplegic covered in your own blood in the middle of a swamp, and now you're fellating a dead man's arm. Take one.")
Tara comes home after a night of terrorizing people in her own way; the TV's blaring so loud she can hear it before she reaches the door. On the coffee table there's more trash culture: Angelina Adopts Vampire Baby, which is funny five different ways, Can True Love Survive Hollywood?, an empty vodka bottle. She looks down at her mother, passed out on the couch, and sighs; on the TV a man is attempting to name states. Lafayette's driving when his phone rings ("Pick up the phone, biaaaatch, witcha sexy ass! Pick up the phone, biaaaatch, witcha sexy ass!") and he answers politely. "Hello, hooker. What's the T?" Tara pours great mounds of sugar onto her Lucky Charms and asks where he is. "I'm on my way to a party in Monroe. And hell no, I ain't swingin' by to pick your needy ass up." She begs. "My momma's passed out on the coach, and I can't face cleaning her up and putting her to bed. It's just too goddamn depressing." What's depressing, he explains, is how often Tara makes this call. "Why come you won't call Jason Stackhouse?"
Tara explains that Lafayette is a mean, nasty bitch, and he informs her right back that she needs to move her sorry ass out of her momma's house. He says he'll come to rescue her, but she'll need to find her own ride home, in case he gets lucky. "What do you mean, 'if you get lucky'? Your standards are so low you always get lucky." He laughs and agrees with a holy hallelujah. It shouldn't be this fun to be Lafayette, and that's the secret of Lafayette.
Dawn comes to her door at three in the morning, to answer a panicked knocking; Dawn watches Jason through the peephole. He wanders in, dazed and uninvited; this is the prerogative of mortal men, that they don't have to be invited. He stumbles to her couch and stares at her, unseeing. "You have no idea what I've been through since last night. I spent the whole day thinkin' I'd really killed Maudette Pickens." Jason picks up a random beer from her coffee table, and sucks it down. Dawn sits beside him, stricken. "I thought I'd accidentally strangled her during sex," he says; Dawn's impressed. "And Bud and fucking Andy waited twelve! Whole! Hours! To show me a videotape that proved I didn't do it!" He starts to cry again, leaning into her arms. His body curls into hers. "I thought I'd ruined my whole life," he weeps, and puts his forehead on her chest. Everything is sex if you look at it right; Jason watches Jason make love to Dawn as though sex is still about pleasure, as though sex is only part of nature. Other people's bodies remind us that our own exist. Jason watches Jason do what Jason does best, as he kisses her breasts and focuses his body on hers. Dawn watches Jason make love to her, and laughs.
Bill licks the blood from the waitress's forehead as she drowses, and she awakes with that curious focus she often has: "Do I taste different from other people?" He admits that she does, and asks what she is. "Well, apparently I'm not dead." She smiles weakly up at him, his confused and unbreakable gaze. "But what I am is telepathic. I can hear people's thoughts." Bill backs way up from her and this confession: "Even mine?" No. "That's why I like you so much. I can't hear you at all. You have no idea how peaceful it is after a lifetime of... blah blah blah..." Her eyes focus; her eyes focus on his, and she closes them again. Her head goes slack and he looks sweetly down at her. She opens her eyes again, feeling stronger, and laughs silently, trying to sit up of her own accord. There are slow violins, in the swampy night. It's the perfect place for a fairy tale about sex, and violence, and nature. He touches her cheek and helps her sit against a trunk: "May I ask you a personal question?" She goes into Alice mode: "Bill. You were just licking blood out of my head. I don't think it gets much more personal than that." Valid. "How do you manage a social life with men your own age? Their only thought must be..." Men are beasts. She explains she doesn't date, and remembers a few times she broke this rule.
One betrayal, as she poured mustard on her burger (Man, I can't wait to see her naked. I wonder if she's a natural blond. Nothing worse than a blond with a big, black bush...): that one got a squirt of mustard to the face, out of the blue, and was shocked, and pissed. Not every guy was a pig, though: (... kind of girl I could marry and spend the rest of my life with. And never have those thoughts of Matt Damon... Jake Gyllenhaal in Jarhead, with that little Santa hat...). That time, she got out of the car and never looked back.
Bill laughs with her. "...But it always ends up the same." Bill wonders aloud: there must be people in her life that know. "The people closest to me, but... We never talk about it. And I do my best to stay out of their heads. Over the years I've learned how. I figure it's kind of unethical to listen in on my family and my friends, my boss. But they know. Other people suspect or... they think I'm psychic. Most people just think I'm crazy." This is the prerogative of Sookie's kind: they don't have to be invited. Romance takes a lifetime, you learn the better parts before the worst; Sookie gets it all at once, like a poem, light and dark. "It's sort of like ... a stream of consciousness. Gets weirder when people are mad or... upset and... sometimes... (A woman stares at her husband, across the table at Merlotte's, and faster than a blink she's shattered a bottle across his face; a woman watches her husband and does nothing) Sometimes it's just images."
She shifts under his gaze; he wants her. "...I should be gettin' home." He doesn't move. She tries to stand, and is shocked into a smile. "Wow. I feel completely healed." She is. This is life we're talking about: Full is not heavy as empty, not nearly my love, not nearly my love, not nearly. He cocks his head at her. "Do doctors know that v-juice can do this?" No way. "And we wanna keep it that way. I should show you to your car." He looks at her a bit longer and stands, holding out a hand.
At the party in Monroe, Lafayette knows everybody. He's like Puck, Mercutio, a mascot, everywhere at once. Tara watches him from afar, balanced against Sookie and against Lafayette too: she holds people at a distance because she must, and because she enjoys it. Most people just think she's crazy; everybody knows she's a bitch. There's nothing worse than a beautiful girl that doesn't want anything from you. A ridiculous man with a pick in his hair swaggers over, humming his approval. She grins, because he's a tool, and they introduce themselves. Terrell says "alright" before and after every clause in every sentence. "So what's a fine girl like you doing sitting here all by herself?" She answers honestly: "I'm watching my fool cousin trying to hit on the straightest man here." Lafayette backs it up, booty-dancing on the crotch of a man caught between affection and hilarity and stark raving fear. Terrell advances the theory that he's actually the straightest man at the party -- she can ask any of the "honeys" at the party to confirm. He's got that whole vulpine metro lady's-man thing happening, like TC Carson on Living Single: almost unbelievable, but very sure about itself. Terrell watches Tara watch Terrell.
Tara informs her suitor that she's married, which he assures her is not a problem. She swallows fearfully. "Well, my husband is a mercenary. Yeah, Black oil. He just got back from assassinating some guys in Iraq." He's not buying, but she insists it's true: "He ain't worth me, I can tell you that. But if he ever caught me with another man, he'd kill us both. I'm not sure who he'd kill first. Probably me." Her voice cracks, hilariously, and her eyes go wild: "I hope so..." Terrell offers the opinion that she is a crazy bitch, which she's heard before. "He already shot one guy in the nuts, just for buying me a CD..." He's standing before she hits the punchline, and flees. Tara watches the party, going on all around her; she's not a part of it. It's her prerogative to uninvite herself from everything; Tara watches Tara at the party, going on all around her, having chased off another beast. She looks around for Lafayette, but he's gone; she sits back again. This is how she's most comfortable, because she's never comfortable.
Jason watches Jason fuck Dawn hardcore on the dresser; Jason screams and they fall back on the bed. Their sex is bed-breaking wild and brainlessly intense; Jason flips her over and watches Jason in the mirror. He's just a boy with a girl in bed, like he's always been. And she is human and he is human and this is the way we've always done things. This is what Jason's good at, in life; this is the protective posture he goes into. Every move he makes is closer to clean; sex is about everything else, if you look at it right. Jason points at Jason, congratulates him silently; Jason watches Jason fuck doggy style, and subdue the enemy again. Dawn is clean.
"How old are you? Am I allowed to ask that?" Bill was turned in 1865, when he was thirty "human years" old. (Weird term, but immortality must make those numbers so petty, counting out like the minutes of a dog's life.) Only thirty? He looks older. He's not offended: "Life was harder then." Sookie's excited to remember Gran's request, and asks if he was in the Civil War. Of course he was. "Would you be willing to come talk to my grandmother's club? It's... mostly a bunch of old people who had family in the war. They call themselves the Descendants Of The Glorious Dead." The music goes sort of ridiculously dramatic as Bill offers a short speech about the Glorious Dead, and war: "Bunch of starvin', freezin' boys, killin' each other so the rich people can stay rich. Madness." Sookie acknowledges that this is horrible, and that maybe reminiscing about the glory of war is different for the Descendents than it is for the Glorious Dead themselves; Bill just wants to know if it will make her happy. "Oh, It would make my grandmother ecstatic." Not the point. He asks again, and she nods: what he's handing her is an invitation, to call on him for a favor. To be a woman for a man. "Well... Yes." She stands at her car with a giant smile, and he says he'll do it, and looks forward to meeting Gran. "When may I call on you?" She's flirty, crushing, and says she's off tomorrow. "Just after dark, then," he says, and gives her some kind of vampy weird look that makes her feel shy. "Huh," she says, pointing at Sam Merlotte's trailer: "Sam's still up." But Bill is gone, vanished without a sound. "...That's creepy," Sookie muses to herself, and gets in the car.
Morning. Dawn. Jason wakes up and stares at the ceiling, gauges himself for the new day. Is he clean? Did he fuck it away? Did he find a clean woman and clean himself off? All that death, the curious betrayals of his body. How did he lose control like that? Not the choking, but the way the vampire was a mirror. Where did that come from? Is that normal? Would we all like to occasionally rip somebody's throat out, choke them while we come? Is that just nature? Gross me out. Better to rest your head on a clean woman's breast, to kiss her mouth, go back to the beginning, to be reborn, mouth and hand and cock; to watch Jason watching Jason fuck her. That answers the questions better than anything else; he could stay with her forever, now that he's seen the other side. Now that he's walked it, and been burned for it, twelve hours of torture and twenty-four of fear. Dawn's a nice girl, a beautiful girl. A normal, clean woman for a normal, clean man. He looks over at her, a new man: there are two marks on her collarbone.
Just like that, it's all taken away again. He's dirtier than ever, standing in the place where vampires have stood, doing the things that vampires have done. Making love to dirty women. Like he hasn't got a lick of sense; in this new world, v-juice and violence, where sex is no longer about pleasure, he's just a child. He's in the way. Alone in the world with what he thought was sex, his idea of sex -- like any other kind of addict -- as the answer to every question. Like nobody understands you, or even sees you. It sucks, that's what it's like. We're all just trying to be seen. To matter. And these women, the ones you want to be clean, normal, the ones that can give you the peace you seek, they all hold these secrets. This dirtiness, same as him. Laughing behind his back, getting it better than even Jason Stackhouse could ever give it to them. The only thing he's good at, and they're pretending it's the best they've ever had, and laughing behind their eyes. Tears spring to his eyes, for the unknown, inside and out. They just keep taking it away.
Reverend Theodore Newlin, of the church of the Fellowship of the Sun, on Sookie's morning television: "We never should have given them the vote and legitimized their unholy existence." Nan Flanagan, of the American Vampire League, shrugs with her eyes. "The American people need to know these are creatures of Satan! Demons, literally! They have no soul." Sharon, the host, reminds him of the consistently growing support for vampire rights, and he refuses to acknowledge that: "Those polls are fixed. Do you know how much money these monsters have given to politicians of both parties? As well as the corporate media?" It's the things we don't acknowledge that come up behind us, every time. Every thing we can't look at is a vampire; every time we choose blindness it's the dark that chooses us back. Nan calls this concept nonsense, and I'm guessing lies her ass off. "Vampires don't seek to control human policy, it's of very little interest to us." There's a coldness, an intensity and a brittleness behind her eyes, that no coaching, no amount spent on PR, can warm. This man is an insect.
"You can't trace any of it! It's all been laundered..." Newlin's going to die; this is the moment it happens. Nan goes twice as cold as dead: "Are you accusing my organization of criminal activity, sir?" Suddenly he's calling for mommy: "I will not speak to her directly, Sharon." Sharon asks why that is, and the answer is the usual. "My commitment to Christ Jesus, praise His name, compels me not to recognize her kind." The things we don't acknowledge. "Well, that's gonna make it difficult to have a dialogue." He begins to repeat himself, again, from the beginning, and even Sharon has to roll her eyes.
Gran and Sookie agree that Jesus wouldn't mind vampires; wouldn't judge a person based on this particular issue. Sookie asks if the sausage is different today, v-juice coursing through her still: "It tastes so much more complex than it usually does," she says, and Adele frets that it's gone bad. "No, it's delicious. It's like I can close my eyes and I can see the farm the pig lived on, and feel the sun and the rain on my face, and even taste the earth that the herbs grew out of." Gran stares at her, because that was a mouthful. Especially for a werewolfish cliché like this, so hoary and old that you don't need to really explain it. But this is about connecting nature, and violence, and sex: Sookie can't go after the sex part yet, because of her particular qualities and burdens, but she can get there through the food, through the violence and the death inherent in the food; through the pleasure and sustenance and sensuality of food. Tara enters, heading for the coffee, and Adele welcomes her, ordering her to sit and offering to make a new pot.
(Of all the kinds of intimacy this show and this episode is about, the whole invitation thing -- the places where we overlap with other people's living spaces, and how this itself overlaps with the ways our lives overlap -- made the biggest impression on me. I've always been fascinated and kind of insanely governed by the rules governing the host and hostess, the way we treat guests, the complicated choreography of invitation and welcome, of service to others, of pride in the home. Sodom was destroyed, for these: not the weird sex shit -- which the "hero" of the tale took to an even weirder place than the Sodomites, frankly -- but the other part: the part where socially, in the Middle East, to treat a guest with anything other than perfect respect meant death for them, in the desert. When all you've got are small houses and oases, with miles and miles of death between them, the art of the hostess is a matter of life or death. And, like anything unnatural -- i.e., that which resists nature, that which is Apollonian and not Dionysian blah blah blah -- that's necessary for society to exist, it becomes part of God's law. Even vampires must abide by it. Vampires don't have choices, they have hungers; humans don't have unbreakable rules, they have prerogatives. Which is scarier? Drink of one and you lose the knowledge of good and evil; drink of the other and you have eternal life. And thousands of years later Martha Stewart's on the Internet or channel 586 telling you five great ways to spruce up a front room using common household items... But we're still leaving the door wide open for Elijah. I like that.)
And so the first thing Sookie does is tell Tara she looks awful (which is technically impossible, and invite her -- without being asked, which is her prerogative as a friend and a host, as family -- to take a shower and borrow some clothes. Tara's first question is about Jason, who has been released; she claims she knew he'd go free, but Sookie wasn't so sure. Tara's first question is about Sookie, who wasn't murdered by a vampire in the night like Tara assumed she would be. Tara has no idea how close she came to being half-right, or how completely wrong she is, about who kills who. Sookie looks down, caught, and Tara sighs loudly. "Oh, Sookie! Sometimes you are just plain dumb." Sookie tells her to shut up, because Gran is tolerant and kind, but still a grandmother. "Lucky Gran was already in bed when I got in last night." Tara asks if he bit her, and on her insistence that he didn't -- and again, the opposite is true -- reminds her of the rumor that vampires can hypnotize you, and feed without your knowing. I wish Jason were here for that part, because that part is true.
"Yeah, and black people are lazy, and Jews have horns," Sookie shrugs at her friend, but Adele returns before Tara can do much beyond grunting: this is different! Jews and black people are human, as discovered by the white man and that WAS relatively recently! Tara brings up Jason and Adele fusses over the coffee: "I can't even believe that they arrested him to begin with. I have a good mind to call Bud Dearborne and chew him out. Jason's a good boy, everybody knows that." Tara and Sookie grin about that, over the table, over a grandmother's selective blindness. The phone rings, the gossip grapevine, and Adele takes it into the parlor, exclaiming excitedly.
Sookie apologizes for being a bitch to Tara last night (specifically, telling her that Jason will never love her, which is pretty bitchy in all honesty) and Tara apologizes for mother-henning Sookie about the bloodsucking fiend she seems intent on dating. "I just worry about you, Sookie. You're basically my only friend..." These two girls, who have more in common than anyone else on earth: both unnatural, both slightly freaky, both terrified of seeing or showing too much. Jason enters, looking for breakfast, and Tara basically does a flip in the air trying to get his attention. "Hey, hey Jason. I'm so glad they didn't lock you up." He nearly makes a sour face, for being reminded, and whines that "somebody heard [he]'d been with Maudette." The girls ask if he was; Sookie's all, "Are you sure? She was a woman." Which is only so-so funny, but exists on the page only to set up his retort: "That's funny. At least she was human." So I guess it goes: Men, then women without sex lives, then everybody else on earth, then total whores (aka women with sex lives), and finally vampires. That's the official rubric. Good to have that out of the way, because I had been wondering, but I can't be entirely fussy about it, because of all the things that Jason Stackhouse is allowed to do to you -- which is of course a very long list if you have any taste at all -- choking you while he comes should never be on it, which is just like common sense, so Maudette Pickens actually kind of was a gross whore, self-esteemwise. Bless her heart.
Gran enters, ordering Jason to sit down so she can fix him breakfast, and all on fire about how a tornado named Bill touched down over at Four Tracks Corners, turning over the trailer in the clearing and killing the couple that lived there. Whom Jason knows, because all those boys bought drugs from the Rattrays. Sookie stares and stares; apparently they were trapped under it, and crushed to a pulp. I'm guessing there wasn't a shitload of blood at the scene, and I'm guessing they were already dead when the thing fell on them. Sookie, too: she drives her little yellow car to the scene, which is pretty much a disaster like you see on TV whenever a tornado trashes a trailer home, and what Sookie is wearing is, as usual, on that funny line between inviolate innocence and totally sexy lush wildness -- that green polka-dot bikini, under a barely-there sun shift that, as usual, serves as a foyer to her buttocks more than anything -- and it occurs to me that, in 2008, Sookie has to be both because there aren't any stock female characters that could possibly do the acrobatic character yoga that Sookie has to do, and who better to play this character than somebody who's still and probably always going to be a little bit hard to deal with, because we got to know her when she was a tiny little child and she's not exactly visually all that different from when she was a tiny little child.
Which is brilliant. Five years ago it would have been Ricci, but Ricci has gone all the way to sexy, plus she's weirdly skinny now, but once upon a time she had that whole Is It Okay To Fuck Wednesday Addams yet" thing happening, and it never occurred to me to wonder what would happen when Anna Paquin grew up, or how Alan Ball named his movie after the rose petals he threw at Mena Suvari's tits until it got uncomfortable, or how his new movie is about Aaron Eckhart fucking another child. And I guess if you line those things up that way, it might start to look creepy, but I don't know. Pedophilia is gross because there's no choice, just power and experience making decisions for somebody who's not old enough to even be in the room, but isn't it just as abusive or objectifying to only see it from that adult perspective? To assume that because a person looks young that they're incapable of making choices? It's provocative, not descriptive, to look at Sookie Stackhouse and say, "The only person with a problem resolving these two very different signals is you." Sookie's still a grown-ass woman making choices; it's just the wardrobe that's reminding you she's 5'5" and a self-proclaimed prude.
Anyway, the trailer is so fucked there's a chair in a tree, but so specifically targeted that everything else is calm and peaceful. Sookie stares and stares and a big black van drives up just then. There's a funny man in a boat, fishing, in an airbrushed painting on the side of the van. A guy named Mike Spencer gets out of the van in a coroner's vest and says hello; he was her parents' undertaker, which means she's known him I guess for most of her life. Now he's also the Parish Coroner, which Sookie notes is convenient for him, in terms of generating multiple streams of revenue. He laughs shyly. Sherriff Bud gets out of the van and tells Sookie it's a restricted crime scene and asks why she's there. She goes into Lolita mode automatically, perfectly innocent and perfectly intimate: "Oh, well when I heard what happened, I just had to come look. What an awful thing!" Bud allows as how Sookie wasn't fond of the Rattrays, and in fact heard from his niece, an ER nurse in Monroe, that "somebody" fucked up Mack real bad last night. (Which I can't figure out, because he's talking about the chain thing, but that was two nights ago at least, because Sookie wore this bikini the morning after that, and then went to work.) Mike says the rumor is that Sookie was the one that did it, and Sookie doesn't even give a slight fuck: "Well? They were hurting a friend of mine." I love that everybody, including Sookie and most viewers, just assumes she fights like a motherfucker and none of them even question how she could take down a couple of crackheads by throwing a chain underhand approximately one yard and then sitting back and watching quietly like she'd rather be knitting.
"This be that vampire I been hearing about? The one who was living at the old Compton house?" Sookie is enchanted! "The old Compton house? Just across the field from my house?" Mike Spencer asks Sookie if Adele's just letting her hang out with fangs now, and she turns a wild look on him: "You can take that up with her. I'm sure she'd just love to know that somebody thinks she's not taking proper care of me." She explains to Bud how they were draining Bill, which is against the law after all, so she was just doing her civic duty when she beat the shit out of them. "...And now they're dead," the Sherriff says, acting just like he does in every scene that every word out of his mouth is this Hercule Poirot like moment of glory where he's finally got you. "Um, tornado?" Bud levels yet another astounding feat of logic at her: "Tornados hop." Also, nobody noticed a tornado last night. Besides the Rattrays, of course, who noticed it like whoa. Sookie asks them if they're honestly suggesting that one man could do this, and Mike coughs: "He's not a man." Sookie thinks about that, standing in the wreckage that seems to suggest Mike's not entirely off-base, but quickly enough returns to her liberal whitewash rhetoric, masking a return volley as redneck education: "They're really not that different from you and me. If you bothered to try to get to know one..."
Bud's honestly concerned and barely judgmental: "-- Sookie. You're a good girl. I hate to see you go down this path." Well, it's frustrating, isn't it? All the good intentions in the world don't amount to much when what they're taking away is your choice, your right to make choices. Sookie has been treated like a child or a Carson McCullers character most of her life, rolls her eyes. She hates it when people treat her like she hasn't got a lick of sense; like she's still just a kid, without choices, or a burden, in their way. Or a trespasser. It sucks; she feels alone in the world, like nobody understands her. They barely see her. She's just trying to be seen. To matter. These are the parts of her life she's claimed as her own, and she won't have anybody talking to her like anything less than the lady she's chosen to be. "Well lucky for you, Sheriff Dearborne, nobody's forcing you to watch. Now, if y'all two rednecks will excuse me, I gotta go." Bud watches her leave.
Adele's vacuuming the parlor when Sookie enters; she looks at her Gran bemusedly, hands on hips. "You know, he sleeps in the ground all day, I don't think he's gonna even look at the rug." Gran explains that we don't do this for them, we do it for ourselves: "So I can be proud of my home... And how do you know where he sleeps?" Sookie giggles and admits that she doesn't, and Gran starts vacuuming again. Sookie notices a smell, a rotten smell or something, which Adele can't smell, and gets a funny, low-key response: Gran sort of shivers all over, and goes, "Well find it!" Sookie moves the piano bench, and finds something small, like a bit of cheese or something, and takes it toward the garbage, confusing Gran.
"Oh. Sookie." Sookie turns. "Jason and Tara are coming over this evening as well." Sookie's horrified, but Adele says it's their prerogative: "Well, they invited themselves! Jason said that he wants to meet the vampire for himself, and Tara said she thought she ought to be here as well." Sookie's frustrated, pretending to be just bewildered by everybody "getting their panties in a wad about some stupid vampire," and Gran asks if she'd prefer to be alone with him. Sookie falls into a goofy grin and says she doesn't know. "Maybe." Gran smiles to herself, and Sookie asks if she's not going to tell her -- the one person one earth who's allowed -- to be careful, and Gran applies some majorly masterful grandmotherly mojo to the situation: "You're always careful, Sookie. About what counts. And I can depend on that. Isn't that right?" Sookie nods, Adele having put the kind of whammy on her you have to be in your sixties to play, and leaves. Gran worries a little bit, but she keeps vacuuming.
Dusk. Jason's truck arrives. A bit later, Tara watches Jason open a beer for himself. "Look, I'm just saying. Do you want a vampire sucking blood out of you?" Sookie complains she's just trying to get to know him, but Jason's not done: "That's where it's gonna end up. Always does." Sookie asks WTF he even knows about vampires, and he says portentously that he knows a lot more than he cares to, causing Sookie to flounce exasperatedly for the parlor, dropping silly folksy weirdo colloquialisms in her wake. Tara watches Jason bring the beer to his mouth, and finally speaks up. "Uh uh, that's my beer. You asked if I wanted anything to drink, and I said I'd have a beer. And that's when you went to the fridge." His hands were like umbrellas, forgotten in his thirst; he exercised his prerogative and forgot what he had offered her. He apologizes vociferously; she drinks deep and watches his ass as he gets another.
Sookie's sweeping the front porch when he arrives, again, without a sound or warning. She gasps, and realizes it's boundary time: Bill, I... I don't like it when you do that." He worries that he's upset her, and she assures him it's fine, putting the broom aside. She makes way for him to enter the house, and he doesn't move. She giggles, but he explains that she has to invite him in; he can't even try, though she dares him to like always. She loves this part. "That is so weird!" She calms herself down and grins. "Oh, Bill, won't you please come in?" He thanks her, but she steps in front of him, asking about the other half: "So. If I were to withdraw my invitation, would you have to leave?" He nods as though the thought is mortally wounding to him; maybe it is. Maybe he's in love. "Well, I'll have to remember that," she says, once again reminding him of all the ways she retains the power here, and steps aside.
There's nowhere to cut because all the main characters are in the same room, so it's just later. Adele offers little sandwiches to the suspiciously staring Tara and very angry fangophobic Jason -- who takes too many and must arrange them on the tail of his Alabama Thunderpussy t-shirt as though it's a plate -- before turning to their guest. Bill shakes his head, a little awkwardly, and Adele gasps, remembering immediately that he doesn't eat and horrified that she's caught him off-guard. Across from him, Jason takes a big lovely bite.
"Your people, Mr. Compton. They were from this area, I believe?" Yes. His father was a Compton and his mother was a Loudermilk. "Oh, there are a lot of Loudermilks left! But I'm afraid old Mr. Jesse Compton died last year..." Bill nods. That's why he's back in Bon Temps, there aren't any living Comptons, so he's taken over the old Compton place. "And as I expect the VRA to pass, I..." Jason interrupts immediately, ignoring Sookie's stare. "I wouldn't be too sure about that if I were you. A lot of Americans don't think you people deserve special rights." Bill points out that they're not special, just equal, and as usual in this conversation Jason ignores him altogether: "No, I'm just saying there's a reason things are the way they are." Bill agrees, and calls it out as injustice, which infuriates Jason even more: "Listen! It's called This Is How We Do It!" He points at the floor with every word. "This is my house," Adele says quietly. "I will not tolerate rudeness." Jason grumbles. Where logic fails or contradicts, we will always have the status quo; wherever a man benefits from his circumstance, he will always name it tradition; whatever a man recognizes in himself, and fails to acknowledge, must be regulated in all others.
Gran puts a new smile on a new conversation. "Did you know the Stackhouses, Mr. Compton?" He did; she squeals with joy. "I remember Jonas Stackhouse. He and his wife moved here when Bon Temps was just a hole in the road. I was a young man of sixteen..." Jason rolls his eyes. "Isn't this the house he built? I mean, at least in part?" It was. Adele squeals again, basking in the light of the Glorious Dead. Tara speaks up suddenly, intruding: "Did you own slaves?" Bill didn't, but just in case Tara decides for the first time in her life to calm down, he admits his father did: "A house slave, a middle-aged woman whose name I cannot recall, and... A yard slave. A young, strong man named Minus." Adele bounces up and down: "Oh, this is just the sort of thing my club will be so interested in hearing about!" Tara doesn't back down: "About slaves?" Sookie's like, "Dude?" But she has a point, I mean, she's sitting right there. I'm as uncomfortable with Southern nostalgia as I would be if you opened up a door in your house that led to the Nazi memorabilia. There are infinite better things to do with our shame than simply deciding that it's to be celebrated -- and then expecting everyone to agree with that, lest they be accused of intolerance. Give me a fucking break. There's historical interest, and then there's pride in legacy, and what's really hard to explain to a racist is how they're two different things. Gran's great, but nobody is one hundred percent great. You can love her without indulging her inherent racism, which is all Tara's doing, and Gran knows that: "Well, about ... Anything having to do with that time."
Awkward stares abound, and Bill decides to try his hand at being charming. As usual, it comes off stilted and creepy. "I look forward to speaking to your club, Mrs. Stackhouse." She giggles; he stands. "Now. If it's all right with you, I thought that Sookie and I might take a walk. It's such a lovely night." Adele, who couldn't be more into Bill Compton if he were a living human being, says it's fine with her if it's okay with Sookie, and Jason puts down both his beer and his foot. "I don't think that's a good idea," he says officiously, and Sookie tells him it's none of his business; Adele backs her up. He throws a hissy fit about how he's "the man in this family," and it's only out of affection that everybody in the room doesn't pat his ignorant ass on the head and laugh in his face. In a shirt that says Alabama Thunderpussy on it, which still has crumbs from the sandwiches he just ate in a manner not unlike that of a five-year-old child, he says this. I mean, it's adorable. "You are a man in this family, but I am the oldest person here, and this is my house. You better respect me, boy."
In the awkward quiet, you can really hear the eponymous Fiona Apple song for the first time, speaking the words that Sookie can't say; the words not even Tara can say for her: I do not struggle in your web/ Because it was my aim to get caught/...I'm finally growing weary/ Of waiting to be consumed by you... The last words Jason would ever say, now, a clean boy in a dirty world, watching the fangs take over his house like they've taken over his body and all his women and his thoughts and his dreams and his blood: Give me the first taste/ Let it begin, heaven cannot wait forever/ Darling, just start the chase/ I'll let you win/ But you must make the endeavor...
To break the tension and continue his flirtation with Gran, Bill points out that he's the oldest person there, by like 75 years, and everybody laughs except Jason, who makes a hilariously ugly fake-laugh face. Because he's so grown up, you see. Bill escorts Sookie out of the house, and Jason whines that Adele made him look like a fool in front of Bill Compton. "You don't need any help looking like a fool," she says kindly, patting his cheek. There's no way for him to explain that it's just survival. This is the area of his life he's trying to claim as his, his body and his home and his family, and here they are invading on every level. He's just trying to stay clean and afloat, and they keep taking away his options.
Walking through the yard, toward the field, Sookie puts it on the table immediately: "I went to the Rattrays' trailer," she says matter-of-factly. She doesn't have much to say about that, other than knowing they need to talk about it. It's a nice note on her character, that the Rattrays have offended enough of her rules -- e.g., No Killing Sookie -- that she doesn't really seem to care that they died. If Bill hadn't shown up, I wonder how far she would have gone. He follows her lead, deadpanning that she knew he was strong, and she's hilarious as usual: "I don't believe I fully gauged the extent of your strength." He says they get stronger as they get older, and better at hiding their tracks. She points out that in this case, a highly implausible tornado that acts like no other tornado ever was not the best option. Their laughter is whistles past the graveyard of their differences and the realities -- blood, sex, death -- of his existence. And hers. And ours.
"So. I guess you've killed a lot of people?" My God, this is like every date I've ever been on. Bill admits that he killed a few at first, when he was new, just by accident: "I was never sure when I was gonna get my feed... But it's all different now! There's Tru Blood, I can get donor blood from a clinic in Monroe, or I can glamour someone into letting me feed on them for love, and then they'll forget all about it..." Sookie stops and asks if he ate the Rattrays. He did, while she was out of it and healing: "You drank a lot of my blood," he says, like that's his excuse. Maybe it is, I lost my moral compass about a mile back. "Yes, I drank the blood of those crackheads we magically beat up, and then stashed the bodies under their home, which I destroyed. As is my prerogative. But to be fair, you had sucked a lot of blood out of my body at the time, and I was fairly hungry." Sookie summons her courage and asks the question she's got to ask: "What will that do to me?" Keener senses, hyperactive libido, they both blush and she asks if that's it. She doesn't look up; she knows there's more. What's the most romantic thing you can think of? If you shared bodily fluids with somebody, out in the night air, what would you want to be true? "I'll always be able to feel you. I'll be able to find you fast. If you're ever in trouble, that could come in quite handy." She looks him in the eye, conflicted: "You're gonna have to give me a minute here, Bill. I'm feeling a little overwhelmed." She walks on and he follows behind; she looks at him over her shoulder.
It's high school fantasy zipless-fuck talk, but there's something else there. Something about territory, about having a mark on you. The marks of death, calling you out in the night, an arrow pointing to you, leading something that kills to your door. She gave up her prerogative here, to invite, when she drank. You can't undrink v-juice any more than they can undrink us. She can't hear him, but he will always hear her, now. When you're Sookie, you have to keep reminding people, men, that you have control, because men are beasts. But on the occasions you're not in control, or the circumstances in which you're not the one in power... It's a good thing he's courtly.
Men and women are consistently fascinated and kind of insanely governed by the rules governing them: the way men treat women, gallantry and chivalry, the complicated choreography of invitation and welcome, of service to others, of pride in ourselves. Men have the advantage, physically and socially, over women. Their right to choose whether or not to have sex, is naturally -- in terms of nature -- simply greater. So the art of the gentleman is a matter of life or death. And, like anything unnatural that's necessary for society to exist, it becomes part of God's law. Marriage, chastity, rape taboos; the way men keep trying to sneak rape in under other names and with other cover stories: Men don't have choices, they have hungers; women don't have unbreakable rules, they have prerogatives.
Think about the choreography of dating and marriage -- and I mean, like, the corsage kind from the Olden Days -- and how much (all) of it is about protecting women from the physical intimidation of men. Giving women all the power and permissions for intimacy, while depriving them of any power or individuality separate from their sexuality; making God's law out of common sense and then regulating women's sexuality on their behalf. Let gays get married, or women have sex before marriage, and maybe the whole thing falls apart, but I don't know. Nonconsensual sex is evil because there's no choice, just power and experience making decisions for somebody else. But isn't it just as abusive or objectifying to only see it from that paternalistic perspective? To assume that because a person looks weaker or smaller that they're incapable of making choices? It's provocative, not descriptive, to look at Sookie Stackhouse and say, "The only person with a problem resolving these two very different signals is you." Sookie's still a grown-ass woman making choices; it's just the wardrobe that's reminding you she's 5'5" and a self-proclaimed prude. She needs her body to be a sovereign nation in two ways -- as something safe and protected unto itself, and something empowered to make its own choices -- both of which men have been engaged in undermining as long as there have been men and women. Which is half the charm, I think, with Bill: he's courtly, he'll play the game, but all the same he's unafraid of her body. Between the two beasts from her memory, the overly interested and the utterly uninterested, he strikes a balance that suits her perfectly. Plus he's a murderer, most of whom can usually be trusted.
Jason is reclined on the couch when Tara enters, carrying two beers, and sits as closely to his body as is humanly possible, which: why wouldn't you, and starts the very awkward business of acting like a human being just long enough to fool Jason into falling in love with her. Inviting him in, to a place nobody knows about; asking for invitation into his own secret place that she just knows is there. "I don't know why your grandmother was so short with you. You're just trying to protect Sookie." Jason complains: "I hate it when people treat me like I ain't got a lick of sense. Like I'm still just a kid, or... I don't know, in the way." Tara says she knows what that's like. Of course she does. "It sucks, that's what it's like!" She nods sagely. "You feel alone in the world, like nobody understands you, or even sees you." He nods, and really notices she's sitting there, for the first time; she's working overtime to do that thing her cousin does without trying, that thing her best friend can't help doing, that human thing where you listen to somebody and understand them, and then you say something and they understand you. Intimacy. "That ain't right, because everybody is, you know, somebody. ...We're all just trying to be... Trying to be seen, to... To matter." He stretches his body across hers, his legs in her lap, stretching and laughing, settling into the sofa, innocent and intimate at once. "How'd you get to be so smart?"
This part she knows, and so do you: "I'm not smart at all, Jason. I'm not. I am constantly doing things I shouldn't and end up getting me in trouble. I'm a fucking idiot sometimes." That's half the equation, and he fills in the other half: "Well, can I tell you a secret? I am too." That's the deal done, then; the rest is just the math. Showing your work. "It's not that much of a secret," Tara says, as is expected; giving permission. He tickles her there, on the couch, legs entangled, laughing and agreeing. When it's done, she's in his arms, snuggled down tight into the warmth of him, the length of his body underneath hers. Capable of anything. And just at the last second, just as she's steeled herself for the step, just as she's about to ask for her invitation, he jumps into the air: "Shit! I was supposed to pick up Dawn from work!" They sit up, he curses, and finishes up his beer -- I guess to help him drive better -- and whines about how she's going to be pissed. (Although, to be fair, by the end of the episode you're going to be a lot more sympathetic to that particular fear.) He calls goodnight to Adele, and alone in the sitting room, Tara laughs ruefully at herself. "...Well, shit." And that's what we call falling completely in love with Tara, because OMG was that a little too close to home.
Bill and Sookie are now wandering through a graveyard. I mean, jury's still out on Bill because he's not that interesting so far -- being mostly at this point a personality-free and imminently projectable floating romantic signifier, like any good sparkly-skinned vampire boyfriend -- and you know I love Sookie to death, but: queer much? "How did your Goth As Fuck date with vampire boyfriend go?" Oh, we wandered through a graveyard and talked about his long-dead relatives and then we went to his house and read Caitlín Kiernan stories to each other and we watched some flowers die and talked about permanence and evanescence and then we listened to some Evanescence and I painted a little curlicue under my eye and he gave me a silver ankh and then we listened to This Mortal Coil and I made little cuts on my leg and then we put "Trust" by the Cure on repeat like a hundred times and things were getting hot and heavy -- or I guess in this case lukewarm and heavy -- and finally I go "Fuck me like Lestat would" and he's all, "...Up the ass?"
Sookie backtracks to the whole "glamour somebody into letting you bite them" thing and asks if it's like Tara said, something like hypnosis. He admits that it's similar, and something to which all humans are susceptible. So of course Sookie's two main questions are 1) Is that why I'm into you (no) and 2) Why not give it a shot? He is infinitely uncomfortable with the idea and steps away, and she calls him chicken, because she wants to try all the things there are. There's challenge in her eyes and he laughs at this transparent maneuver, but he goes for it. It is hilarious. He turns suddenly and fixes her with a creepy eye, and steps closer and closer like a snake charmer and she's all breathy and vague and staring and he goes, "Suckie. Can you feel my influence?" It's kind of hot, and he's leaning in, and her lips part, and he's all mojo guy in her face, and finally she cracks up. "No! Not a bit. Sorry!" He's something like bothered by this. "Well, Suckie, this is very strange." She gets in his face, having won like round a hundred, and laughs at him. "You don't like not being able to control people, do you?" She drags him off through the graveyard, skipping along with his hand in hers. "It's not a very attractive trait." He admits that he's taken aback, but only insofar as that humans are generally much more squeamish about vampires. She stops so she can have another memory download and asks how on earth she's supposed to be freaked out by a freak.
Jason and Sookie were playing in the sprinkler, in the yard of a modest home, while Dad worked on the car himself, and Mama sat sunning herself in a lawn chair. Sookie knelt to play with her dolls, and her mother worried. (How can our car insurance go up so much after just one ticket? Damn it all to hell, I hate having to ask Mama for money...) "Damn what all to hell?," Sookie asked into the silence. "I can break open my piggy bank if you need some money." Dad asked her who said they needed money, and Mama swore she hadn't said a word. Mama and Daddy stared at their daughter; Jason watched them stare.
Sookie sat in a school classroom with a psychologist, staring at her amazing face. "Sookie, Do you know why you're here? Your parents, they're concerned about something that can't possibly exist. But you and I are gonna put all this silliness to rest today. Now, can you tell me what I'm thinking? (I'm thinking about the color red, and the number nine.) "The color red and the number nine." The therapist stared at her.
Sookie and Jason sat at a picnic table, and Mama brought their food, explaining that Sookie was just adept at reading body language, and highly observant. "That's a relief," Daddy said. That's bullshit," Daddy thought. Jason asked what body language was; one day it'll be the only language he speaks. (Why was that doctor so scared? Because she was lying to me, that's why. Because there is something to be scared of inside my little girl.) Sookie looked at her Mama, listening; Jason paid attention to the body language without knowing that's what he was doing, and learned a thing about normal and about what is acceptable, and what we do when the secret truth invades. ...Oh my God, she knows everything I'm thinking, Mama thought, and was running away before she knew what she was doing. Oh, sweet Jesus. What do I do? Poor child. She can't... And Sookie watched, and word by word she learned what she was.
"I was diagnosed with ADD. They tried to put me on drugs, but my Mama wouldn't let them. She knew that wasn't it. She tried to protect me. Even though I scared her." Bill asks when Sookie lost her mother, and she explains: "Just before I turned eight. Both my parents. Flash flood." They keep walking; Bill tries to identify. "I lost my wife and my children. Everyone I knew from my human life... Most of them are buried here in this cemetery." Sookie looks at him, trying to figure it out: "You really don't consider yourself human at all?" He's not. It's pretty simple.
Later, they escape the graveyard through an old iron gate, heading toward the Compton house. Sookie asks him if he can turn into a bat -- "There are those who can change form, but I'm not one of them" -- or levitate, or turn invisible. None of the above. "Well Bill, you don't seem like a very good vampire. What can you do?" And his answer, I admit, is awesome: "I can bring you back to life." He gives her a shy smile and walks around her; she feels romantic for a bit and then follows him toward the spooky, gorgeous old house.
"This is where you live?" Jesse Compton had no living heirs when he died, so assuming the VRA passes, ownership reverts back to him. (I love this about the VRA because of a Roger MacBride Allen book I was obsessed with in high school called The Modular Man, which was entirely about the same legal precedent: assuming immortality, nobody even has to pay estate taxes, so the accumulation of wealth goes virally exponential because the money never changes hands. It didn't go to the Secret Society place in that book, but obviously that's part of what's going on here.) And until then? "Well, I haven't been getting in any trouble with the renovations I've been doing. Although of course I've been doing it myself, in the night. I need an electrician, but I can't get anyone to return my calls." Sookie offers to make some calls in the morning, and bring contact info by after work tomorrow. He thanks her, and considers her again. "Take your clip out." She shakes her hair free, and he looks at her. "May I?" She nods, and he touches her hair, one side and then the other; he looks into her eyes and leans in, turning her face, exposing the soft skin of her neck. He smells her hair and she closes her eyes, his breath on her skin, and he kisses her neck. She turns to kiss him, but he just stares down at her. "I can smell the sunlight on your skin," he says. There's sadness in it. He steps back, and she grabs his head awesomely, bringing it in for a proper kiss. After a moment or two she gasps and pulls back: his fangs are out. He doesn't even have a schoolbook to hide it; he feels creepy about it. "I should see you home," he says apologetically, willing his fangs to go down again, reciting antebellum sports scores in his undead head. She doesn't protest.
Dawn. She's putting her makeup on for work as the sun comes up; Jason whines somewhere behind her. "What's the matter, baby? Don't you like me?" In the mirror you can see it's not a metaphor: "Oh, sure I like you, Jason. I wouldn't tie any old man up to my bed." His arms are tied above his head with scarves; he is naked, as is to be expected, and tells her Sam won't mind if she calls in sick. "One, Sam would mind. And two, we've had sex like three times today. At this rate, we're gonna burn out by the end of the week, and then you're gonna get all weird and closed-off, and I've already been down that road with you, baby." Okay, Dawn's pretty awesome too. She climbs atop him and looks down archly. "But I'm horny!" he fairly shouts, and she laughs indulgently. "Well, I'll be back by midnight." He whines a bit more and she fakes sympathy. "You just better be happy that's all I'm doing to you, baby." She kisses him and tells him to think of it as foreplay as she climbs slowly off the bed, offering a good view of her ass. He doesn't really start to panic until he hears the car door slam, and the engine start up.
That night, a middle-aged woman with faded makeup and low self-esteem, calls out to Tara: "Hey sugar, make Mom another stinger, would you?" Poor choice of words; Tara jumps on her viciously but she can barely focus on Tara's face. "You listen to me, Jane Boathouse. You're already drunk as a skunk. Ain't no man in here gonna wanna take you home. Sam will have to call your son to come and get you just like he always does, even though everybody knows it humiliates him to death. Ain't you ashamed of yourself?" Jane stares at her hazily, forming words. "What'd you just say to me?" Tara sucks on her lollipop and bats her eyelashes. "I said, any particular brand of cognac?" Jane sighs. "No. Whatever you have that's nice. And cheap."
Going past, Sam reminds her that he told her to buy a uniform; she asks why he doesn't wear one. "Because I own this place and wear what I want." Well what about Terry Bellefleur? "I've spent enough time in uniforms," Terry snickers, but Tara shakes her head. "No. Because you're a man, and Sam don't feel the need to sexualize the men in his employment the same way he do the women." Exasperated, Sam gives her leave to ignore the uniform policy, and she thanks him kindly. "Remind me why I hired you again?" She smiles. "Affirmative action." It makes Terry laugh, at least, and he's still laughing when she brings Jane her drink.
Sookie brings a table of stupid young studs their loaded skins and pitcher of beer, and asks if that's all they want. (...Serve them nachos offa them perfect titties, we'd all be mighty obliged. Ain't nothing I like more than lickin' food off...) She nods abruptly and leaves, and as she turns to go -- (...girls tits and ... that's a fine ass, too...) He reaches out and squeezes Sookie's bottom; Rene appears out of nowhere and twists the kid's arm behind his back. "You wanna let go of the lady, you? Or you want me to knock you into week?" The kid whines that he's about to break his arm, and Rene tells him to apologize. "Maybe you and your friends should find someplace else to eat, yeah." As they file out, Rene stares one down: "Don't look at me, you." When they're gone, Sookie tells Rene he should have let her handle it herself, but he pays it no mind. "Ahh, Merlotte's is a nice place, and we all want to keep it that way. And besides, you remind me of my baby sister, you." He pushes her hair off her forehead. "I hope to God that somebody will stick up for her if some asshole ever does her that way." She smiles weakly and leaves, weirdly; Rene wonders if she's retarded after all, and busses their pitcher of Bud.
In the kitchen, Sookie asks Arlene to thank her boyfriend for helping her out. "I was so flustered I think I might have seemed ungrateful." (Please let me get my period tonight... Even though Rene wants one of his own... I sure don't want him to feel like he's being forced into...) Sookie grabs Arlene, throwing her arms around her without a second thought. "Did you just read my mind?" Arlene asks, pushing her away. Sookie apologizes and explains she's off her game tonight. "My private thoughts are none of your business!" She runs away, and Sam appears, calling Sookie into his office.
"I swear I try not to listen, but I can't always keep my guard up..." Sam asks her if it's true, and she can't hear Bill at all. She gives a tiny nod, and he smiles for her. "God, that's... I mean, that must be very relaxing for you. You know, not having to work so hard not to hear." He's so sweet; she nods at him. He gets it. He smiles and asks if she can hear him; she'd die before admitting she already has, and recoiled from him. The way he smelled her, the strength of his love. There's a picture on the wall between them, a painting, but it's out of focus. "I don't want to hear you," she grins coyly. "I'd have to quit if I read your mind, and I like it here." He promises she wouldn't, but she shakes her head. "I've had to leave every job I've ever had because I could hear my boss' thoughts." Inexpertly, pushing her -- What's the use of having the power to have conversations without saying anything, if not to get past the scary parts? The terror of intimacy is trust, but without the ability to lie there's no fear in trust -- "You might be surprised by what you find." She tries to be smooth, too. "Not all surprises are good," she says, closing the book on it, but he's not done: "Try sometime!" The mysterious painting throbs behind her, on the wall. She smiles at him, he wants her to... Finally he taps her knee, breaking the spell. "Now listen, don't you worry. You got a job here as long as you want one." She smiles at him; the presence of his feelings for her fill the room. "I should get back to work." She hops up, and the picture on the wall finally comes into focus, a fairytale image: the wakeful collie, watching over the sleeping girl. The beautiful and the faithful, together forever. We all just want to be seen. To matter. She leaves and he puts embarrassed head into useless hands. "Come! On!"
She scoots past the kitchen; Lafayette calls out to her. "Baby girl, don't even let that get you down!" She's still unsure about Lafayette; he's Tara's cousin and her coworker, but he says things that are true and crude and frightening. He's a guide but she can't see that yet, because he's a guide to a world she's spent her life ignoring. "Don't let what get me down?" Why fall in love with a dead man unless you're afraid of the living? And there's nobody more living than Lafayette; he lives more lives than most of us ever will. "Don't let nothing get you down," he says, fanning himself. "It's the only way to live," he says, kicking one ironic, parodic heel in the air, Prior Walter for a moment and someone else the . There's such ill-earned wisdom, such lofty sadness in this latest truth. He knows; the encyclopedia of things that don't get him down, half the things in it she can't even spell yet. Sookie leaves, not entirely convinced yet about Lafayette's awesomeness. But just like Sam, and the dog, and now Bill, just like Tara and Gran and Jason, he'll be there the moment that she needs him. That's how guides work. "Ain't that right, Big John?" You actually get a glimpse of the inordinately agreeable Big John for a second, running something to the stove: "Right."
Tara casually asks Dawn how Jason's doing, just making conversation, and Dawn laughs to herself about how he's probably pretty pissed at her right about how. "You know, I have to say I... I'm surprised you and him got back together," says Tara. Oh, Tara. High school must have been really bad for Tara, if she's still this cruddy at this game. "No more than I am, baby. Believe me," Dawn says easily. Tara asks if it's going to last, and Dawn asks if there's a reason she's asking. Tara pushes, all wrong, completely outmatched: "No. But ever since I've been friends with Sookie, I've just gotten a kick out of watching Jason's escapades with women, you know..." Tara! You can't play Mean Girls with an actual Mean Girl. Stick with fat white ladies and your boss and work your way up. Dawn rolls her eyes: "Mm-hmm." She turns to go, without taking her eyes off Tara: "Sort of." She cackles at the fumble as she goes; it's not even cruel, it's not even about disliking Tara or being jealous about Jason, it's just: For real? So: Dawn 2, Tara 0.5. Maybe forever.
Sookie heads back onto the floor, but doesn't even get back to her tables before the TV catches her attention: a tragic car crash in Dallas claimed three lives today. "Theodore Newlin, his wife Yvette, and their 18-month-old daughter, Bethany... All pronounced dead on arrival at Baylor University Medical Center." Sookie stares, swallows. The Rattrays were one thing, but now it's just getting sloppy. Nan Flanagan, I expected better from you. "...total of seven other casualties as well in the freak accident, apparently caused when a... " Cut to Sookie's car zooming toward the Compton house.
The lights are on on the bottom floor, some industrial Goth As Fuck music's playing as she walks toward the house. There's a truck parked outside, license plate FANGS 1, stickers including VAMPIRES SUCK and HONK IF YOU'RE A BLOOD DONOR. She walks toward the house with the electrician's contact info in her hand and the scariest question yet in her throat. She looks at the doorbell, the window by the door, stalls for awhile, and finally as she's reaching out to knock, the door opens. It's a hot black chick in '70s disco wear: gold lame flashdance shirt, giant black rose-colored afro, giant hoops. She leans against the doorframe intimidatingly, and smiles. "Well hey there, little human chick." Sookie does her best not to be terrified, and states her business. She asks if he's there, and the woman says, "Maybe." Then: the dumbest thing ever. This total tool with a goatee and ridiculous accent appears wearing blood-colored silk, like some kind of polyamorous LARPer dork, and goes, "Mmmm. She smells... fresh..." They both fang up, and then suddenly behind Sookie is that same drama queen tattoo guy, with his tongue going nuts and his eyes rolling off to opposite sides and they're all acting like the Dilophosaurus in Jurassic Park, right? The ones that ate Newman. And you know what, even that could still be awesome if, week, some cool vampires immediately show up and give them vampire wedgies. I'm not ruling that out.