Betty

by Tiffany McDaniel

  The next morning, I got up early to make sure the spot had dried. I dragged the nearby lamp table over so it would cover the area. Before I could start breakfast, Old Woman Slipperwort handed me a copy of Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams.

  “Return this to Chairfool,” she told me. “He let me borrow it after I told him I keep dreamin’ about a stick layin’ on the ground. The book wasn’t no help. Why you think I keep dreamin’ about a stick, Li’l Cherokee?”

  “Maybe you ain’t no good at dreamin’,” I said.

  She dropped her eyes and frowned. “I sure the hell used to be.”

  I tucked the book under my arm and headed into town.

  When I arrived at Chairfool’s Barbershop, I found Americus Diamondback sitting on a bench outside. He folded his New York Times and smacked the faded paper down on the bench as he shifted in his three-piece suit.

  “Your sloppy sister Flossie,” he said to me, “I know she did somethin’ to my dog.”

  He petted the hog he’d replaced Corncob with and had named Wall Street.

  “I don’t know what you’re flappin’ your jaws about,” I said before opening the barbershop door.

  Inside, Mr. Chairfool was training Trustin on how to sharpen a blade. Trustin had been Chairfool’s apprentice for a few weeks. It was strange to see him looking so respectable in a little white jacket and pair of black slacks. He liked working at the barbershop well enough. It gave him extra money to spend on art supplies.

  I handed the book to Chairfool. He pitched it through the open doorway to the back of the room. He turned around with a smile showing the gap in his front teeth while his reddish blonde mustache hung like feathers on either side of his mouth. He had the type of haircut I imagined his mother once told him looked best on him. Long enough to cover his ears and hide his hearing aids, but short enough to be respectable.

  “Trustin was about to practice shavin’ on me,” Chairfool said. “But since you’re here, Betty, he can practice on you.”

  “I ain’t got no beard.” I frowned and felt my face.

  “Oh, your brother ain’t even gonna be usin’ a real razor. It’s for him to discipline his wrist and his concentration.”

  Chairfool tapped on the jar of fireballs sitting on the shelf behind him.

  “You can have candy after,” he said in a singsong voice.

  I sat in one of the chairs usually occupied by the men of Breathed. I could smell cologne and sweat coming off the leather.

  “Trustin?” Chairfool folded his arms and looked sternly upon my brother. “What’s the jingle you’re supposed to say to every customer before they sit?”

  Trustin sighed. “She ain’t really a customer. Ain’t even gonna be payin’.”

  “It ain’t about givin’ a shave to a man who can pay,” Chairfool said. “It’s about givin’ a shave to a man who needs it. You’re lookin’ at this all wrong, son. Now, Betty, you stand back up. And, Trustin, you treat her as well as you’d treat the richest man in the world.”

  I stood with a smile on my face as Trustin hung his shoulders.

  “Sit down in the chair, fool, and you’ll leave lookin’ cool,” he said.

  “Now, Trustin,” Chairfool said, “you gotta say it loud enough for the customer to hear ya.”

  “Sit down in the chair, fool, and you’ll leave lookin’ cool.” Trustin had said it so loud, it felt as though his voice had echoed through Main Lane.

  “That’s good, son.” Chairfool smiled.

  I sat back down and giggled while Trustin unfolded the barber’s cloth. He draped it across me, tucking it around my neck. He used a brush to smear shaving cream on my face and down my neck.

  “It tickles.” I laughed.

  Next, Trustin picked up a small black comb. Chairfool cleared his throat as he nodded toward the strip of leather hanging from the back of the chair.

  Trustin stroked the comb’s flat edge against the leather like he was sharpening a straight razor.

  After a few seconds, he ran his thumb alongside the comb, checking its sharpness. Satisfied, he laid its edge against my skin. He shaved carefully, wiping the cream from my face with each new glide.

  “Don’t cut me,” I said.

  Mr. Chairfool chuckled, but Trustin only turned my face to the side to get the angle of my jawline. He moved the comb in swift, graceful movements. I felt as though I was one of his canvases. A brushstroke here. Another there. Maybe in his eyes, he was doing nothing more than painting my portrait.

  Once he finished, he picked up the towel and wiped off the little smears of cream around my ears and under my nose. He patted bay rum on my cheeks and down my neck.

  “Not bad.” Chairfool gave my brother a slap on the back. “What you think, Betty?”

  “I like it.” I rubbed my face and smiled at my brother, who smiled back.

  Chairfool held out the jar of fireballs. I took three.

  I tossed one into my mouth as I left. I offered the second to Americus outside, who took it immediately.

  “I’m sorry your dog went missin’, by the way,” I said to him.

  “Hmm.” He popped the fireball into his mouth only to hold it against the inside of his cheek. “I bet you are sorry,” he said, “just as I bet a shotgun’s got morals.”

  I stuck my tongue out at him just before racing back to Old Woman Slipperwort’s. I handed her the third fireball. She took out her false teeth and started sucking on the candy with the joy of a small child.

  “What you gonna be wantin’ for dinner later?” I asked her.

  “Okra. Some beetroot, too. Need to eat somethin’ the color of blood. Keeps you healthy.” She filled her cheeks with air until the fireball shot out of her mouth. “Hee, hee, hee.” She laughed with a wide grin.

  After I finished my afternoon chores of sweeping and airing out her cabinets, I started dinner. While I tossed okra slices in cornmeal and dropped them into hot oil, Old Woman Slipperwort sat at the table and spoke of her youth. She said she could still remember how beautiful she used to be.

  “My hair used to be the color of fire,” she said. “Men would gladly burn in it just to kiss me. Now it is the color of ash.”

  As I stirred the okra, I asked her if she had always lived in Breathed.

  “Oh, yes,” she replied. “I could never leave the hills. The people I wouldn’t mind leavin’, but never nature herself. When I was a small girl, I used to think I was the daughter of Mother Nature. I would wear flowers in my hair that my real mother would take out because she was allergic. Ah-choo.” She faked a sneeze as we both laughed. Her nose twitched just before she sneezed for real.

  “Bless you,” I said.

  “I need blessed after a sneeze like that, dear girl.” She wiped her nose, then spoke about her love of trees.

  “I like nature, too,” I said as I stood back from the frypan and the popping oil.

  “Oh, I know ya do, Li’l Cherokee. When you leave Breathed, you’re the type of girl who’s gonna go from mountain to mountain, hill to hill, countryside to countryside.”

  “I won’t leave Breathed,” I said. “Sometimes I go to A Faraway Place, but I don’t really leave.”

  “It’s not Mother Nature you’ll leave, my dear. Don’t sound so frightened. It’s human nature you’ll wanna get away from. The thing about Breathed is that she gives you both the ripe fruit and the rotted in the very same bite. You’re the type of girl who’s gonna spit that rot right back out one day. You’ll go in search of a fruit that don’t spoil so goddamn much. The wider your hips get, the stronger this thought of leavin’.”

  “My hips won’t get no wider.”

  “Oh, sure they will. You got hints of it.”

  “Hints of what?”

  “Of bein’ a woman. But you ain’t there yet.”

  She spoke more
of her youth and beauty as I plated the okra and sliced some beetroot. When I sat with her at the table, she reminded me to put a fresh dollop of honey on the saucer. It was for the ants when they passed by.

  “Why you let ants in your house the way you do?” I asked her while I freed a small one trapped in the honey.

  “ ’Cause when you go back home,” she said, “the ants will be all I’ll have left.”

  She laughed as one of the ants crawled up her arm.

  After dinner, Old Woman Slipperwort went to bed. I fell asleep watching TV through the crawling ants and static. I woke a few hours later, needing to pee. I walked quietly toward her bedroom, hoping I could pass through to the bathroom.

  Like the night before, I found her naked and sitting on the edge of her bed. Unaware I was there, she continued to massage her legs, their blue-green veins twisting beneath her skin. I wasn’t as afraid seeing her body this second night. In the folds and creases, I saw her history. Her skin was the diary of her soul. All the springs she had watched the flowers bloom. The summers she had stood before the moon and kissed its face. The autumns she had grown wiser. The winters that had frozen the initials of her name. Each wrinkle was a record of this and of every hour, minute, and second she had lived. All her secrets were written in her skin. The things she had asked God for. The things she had cursed the devil about. In such age before me, I saw only beauty.

  “Your legs hurt bad, huh?” I said against the silence of the room. “I could make ya some tea out of alder bark.”

  She turned to see me, but didn’t scare at my presence.

  “Don’t fuss with any tea for me,” she said. “I’m fine.”

  She didn’t have her teeth in, so her words were followed by a slight whistle.

  “I’m fine,” she said again as she stood. She stepped in front of the full-length mirror. She stared at her body, turning side to side to see her waist and its edges.

  “Growin’ old as a woman is like an attack. Never grow old, Li’l Cherokee. Not that you can help it. Unless you die young. I wish I had died when my hips were still erotic things.”

  She twisted her hips as best she could.

  “I am decades dirty and decades old.” Her voice cracked. “I used to be a journey a man wanted to take. Now I’m just Old Woman Slipperwort. That is my name now. Old Woman. There is nobody alive who remembers how beautiful I used to be. No one alive but me. Cherish your beauty, Li’l Cherokee. It’ll be gone before you know it.”

  “I’m not beautiful.”

  She stared at me as if in shock. “How can you say that, silly girl?”

  “I look like my father.”

  “Our fathers all give us somethin’, but so, too, do our mothers. You have your father’s skin, but you have your mother’s shape. You have your father’s jaw, but you have your mother’s lips. These are the things we are given. How can you not know you are beautiful? C’mere.”

  She grabbed me by the hand and pulled me toward the mirror.

  “Say you’re beautiful, Betty,” she said as she turned me to face my reflection.

  “But I’m not.”

  “Who has told you this?”

  “My mother.”

  “Of course she has, my dear.” Slipperwort chuckled. “You are a reminder of everything she’s losin’. All mothers are envious of their daughters to a certain degree because the daughters are at the beginnin’ of youth while the mothers are losin’ theirs. It’s only natural to feel jealous. That’s all your mother is doin’. Rearin’ her jealous head because as you grow more beautiful, she fears losin’ her own loveliness. If you know your own magnificence, there goes her power. Her tellin’ you you’re no beauty is her bein’ a woman before bein’ a mother.”

  She stepped away from the mirror and sat on the edge of the bed as if she’d just walked from one end of town to the other and was so very tired because of it.

  “Reach me that lipstick, would you?” She gestured to the basket of makeup on the dresser top.

  “I still put on lipstick for every kiss,” she said. “But the kisses no longer come.”

  I gave her the red lipstick and watched her apply the color to her thin lips as I sat beside her.

  “Did you like sex, Miss Slipperwort?” I asked while I had the nerve.

  She thought about it before saying, “I was a very sexy person with very sexy people.”

  “It’s true what they say about you then?”

  “What do they say, child?”

  “That you used to be the woman all the men visited if they had enough money to do so.”

  “Are you callin’ me a whore, child?” She smiled. It was all gums.

  “No, ma’am. But other folks do. They say the only thing that stopped ya from spreadin’ your legs was gettin’ old.”

  She laughed. “What else do they say?”

  “Pretty much just that. Over and over again.”

  “Do they ever say anything about Lavannah?”

  “About what?”

  “Not a what, dear. A who.”

  She took my chin gently in her hand and began to apply the lipstick on my lips.

  “All the folks who knew about her are long dead now, except for me.” She sighed. “She was a girl born in Savannah, Georgia. Her mother wanted her to be named after the place she come into this world in. But she was a baby born late in the day, so they took the L of that lateness and put it in place of the S in Savannah. When I last saw her, we were merely a couple of seventeen-year-old girls who bit our nails with a smile. How old are you, Li’l Cherokee?”

  “Eleven.”

  “You have some growin’ yet to do.” She put my hair gently behind my ears.

  “Where is Lavannah now?” I asked. “Is she an old woman, too?”

  Slipperwort looked off, her eyes glazing over.

  “You know that patch of quicksand on Quicksand Lane?” she asked. “That’s where Lavannah is. One day, she stepped in that sand, her own self sinkin’ in the mess of it all. If there is a bottom to be had, she’s there. I remember after she sank, all kinds of ants came runnin’ out from the sand like it was their home and she’d disturbed it.”

  “Ants?” I asked, looking at the little ones crawling across her wall.

  “I reckon that’s why I like havin’ ’em around,” she said. “They’re the last of her.”

  “Why would she kill herself?”

  “Oh, it wasn’t her fault,” Slipperwort said. “She was never quite right in the head after she came back home from that asylum her parents sent her to in order to be cured of her mental illness. That’s what they called me and her wantin’ to be together. A mental illness. Somethin’ that was perverse and needed to be corrected. But really, all it was, was love. I don’t suppose you would understand, only bein’ eleven years old.”

  She studied me as if deciding whether to continue.

  “It all started after my daddy caught me and Lavannah up in the attic on Granny’s old bed,” she said. “Neither me nor Lavannah heard him comin’ up the steps. We were both naked and kissin’ on one another like we were the only two left on earth.”

  Slipperwort looked at me with her brows arched and waiting.

  “Ain’t you gonna say somethin’?” she asked. “Ain’t you gonna tell me I’m disturbed for layin’ naked with a girl?”

  “No, Miss Slipperwort.” I shook my head. “I ain’t gonna say that. Is that why they sent her to the asylum? Because of what your daddy saw?”

  She nodded as she said, “Daddy wanted to send me to the asylum, too, but Momma convinced him it would be best to beat the demon out of me at home. While I contended with my daddy’s belt, Lavannah’s folks sent her off with the men in the white coats. When they let her return home, her head was shaved and she had crescent-shaped scars all over her body. She was so thin. It was as if she did
n’t eat one damn meal while she was away.

  “I tried to talk to her, but she wouldn’t say a word back. The only thing she seemed to want to do was to walk around real slow. I still remember the string of drool at the corner of her mouth. I swear, she could look right at ya but not see ya. They’d taken a girl away and returned a ghost. Folks say she committed suicide by walkin’ out to that patch of quicksand, but she was already dead. Can’t kill someone already dead.”

  Slipperwort started to use the lipstick to draw bright red crescent shapes on her flesh.

  “That’s why I become a whore,” she said as she drew more crescents. “I was so afraid of bein’ sent away, I laid with every man I could. They don’t try to cure a woman who beds men. They pay her. Funny thing is, my parents didn’t mind me bein’ with a hundred men. There was less shame in that than bein’ with one girl.”

  She dropped the lipstick to the floor. It was all used up anyway.

  “I look back on it,” she continued, “and I realize that whole time I was so scared of endin’ up like Lavannah that I ended up sendin’ my own self away. I locked myself up in the asylum inside me out of fear of knowin’ who I really am.”

  She stood and stared into the mirror, stepping closer and closer to the glass until her hand and the reflection of it were touching fingertips.

  “It ain’t easy bein’ a woman, Li’l Cherokee,” she said. “It especially ain’t easy bein’ a woman who spends her life afraid of who she really is. They all call me Old Woman Slipperwort. Old woman. That is who I am. The woman who walks in flat, rubber-soled shoes to the store to buy potatoes and milk and bread. Stains on my dress from the breakfast I eat alone. My back hunched, my stockings fallen down on legs that are veined, blue and purple. A head of white hair and a face no one sees. I have lived ninety-seven years on this earth. All I have to show for it is me, alone in a bedroom, starin’ at the reflection of a woman who was too afraid to be herself.”