And this time, the mistake would be mine.
Like my father would say, “In the end, you own your own future, sometimes unaware you had taken possession of it.”
Scarletta
AS USUAL, I ignored the steps, leaped off the school bus, and ran from Mr. Tooey’s shout of disapproval booming behind me as I jogged down the block to turn into our light-gray-tiled walkway. Almost always, he threatened to tell my parents and have me barred from riding his bus. He never did. Once, I looked back and saw an irresistible smile under his bushy gray mustache.
I held my book bag under my arm like a receiver on a football team holding the ball and broke my personal record for sprinting the half block to our front walk. No one happened to be outside his or her home to witness my long strides, not that I would have paused to say hello or waved. I thought some of the neighbors were snobby, not caring to know us.
Because of the curly black line in the middle of each tile running to the edges, the walkway looked like a thin stream of ink flowing toward the front steps of our family’s light-blue-shingled restored Victorian home in Pinckney, South Carolina.
The original house had been burned down during the Civil War. Ours was the third structure built on this lot, a lot twice the size of anyone else’s in this residential neighborhood. We had gardenia hedges around the front lawns and Thuja Green Giant evergreens bordering the back of the property. The cloudless sky and early-spring sun had everything glittering this afternoon. At night, the antique pewter pole lights lining the walkway flickered like gas lamps from the days of Jack the Ripper. That was how my paternal grandmother disdainfully described them after my mother had replaced the far simpler and economical LED lights.
Our property had the tallest and oldest oak trees on the street, too, one on each side of the front of the house. My father had named one “The Duke” and the other “The Duchess.” My mother never understood why.
“That’s ridiculous. Neither,” she said, “shows any sign of being masculine or feminine, Raymond. They’re trees.”
Daddy, however, claimed the Duchess had more curves and smoother leaves. I never said it in front of my mother, but I agreed with him.
Our home had been my paternal grandparents’ house, and from the day my parents had inherited it when my grandparents moved permanently to their retirement home in Clearwater, Florida, my mother was renovating it, rebuilding from the inside out. She changed wallpaper, repainted rooms, ripped up flooring, and replaced all the light fixtures, even the one in the kitchen pantry. Every appliance in the kitchen, whether it was old or not, was switched out, including the sinks.
A seemingly endless army of construction workers and technicians marched in and out through our front door, usually over a wide swath of brown paper to keep the bottoms of their shoes and boots from touching our new floors. By the time I was eight, she had exchanged every piece of furniture with whatever fit her fickle taste. It was fickle, because some pieces hadn’t lasted a month. When she had considered them over four weeks or so, she decided that they were either too dark or too light. Some were bigger than expected when they were actually placed in the room.
“You can’t truly anticipate how something or even someone will look within four walls of your house,” she said. “For most, it’s too late, and they’re stuck with their choices, but it will never be that way for me.”
All this drove my grandmother crazy, not simply because she had spent so much money on everything that had been removed but because my mother’s choices for replacements weren’t all one style. She liked eclectic, something my grandmother called chaos. I never said it, but chaos might have been the better description. The dining room was far more modern than the furniture in the living room or my mother and father’s bedroom. And the library-den looked like it had been lifted completely out of one in Scandinavia, minimalistic, with black bookshelves, black and white chairs and settees. It was a clean look but also a cold look. My mother claimed she wanted to enjoy a different feeling in different rooms. “Most houses,” she said, “are monotonous.”
My mother had decided to transform most of the landscaping as well, tearing out bushes and flowers, even small trees, creating rock gardens, and bringing in a fountain to be placed on the front lawn. She chose one that was a bit too large, with a cherub spewing the water from her mouth. My grandparents hated it when they first saw it, but my father didn’t side with them. “It’s Doreen’s choice,” he said, “and her choices are mine.”
My grandparents left a day sooner than they had planned and rarely visited us afterward. My mother wasn’t upset with their disapproval. I thought she even enjoyed it. It was as if she wanted to erase any evidence that anyone else, especially my father’s family, had ever lived here.
I once heard her tell Daddy that she didn’t want to be constantly in anyone else’s shadows. “I make my own silhouettes,” she had said. She was determined that the air would be scented with her flowers and the house would not remember the footsteps made by anyone previously. Old creaks were gone, and the wind would have to find new ways to invade the replacement windows, the new white shades with pink circles and velvet ruby-red curtains, everything too ostentatious for my grandmother’s taste.
“This house is you and me mostly now, Scarletta,” my mother told me. “Everything that came from your father’s family is practically gone.”
She didn’t even want their paintings and old family photos displayed. The attic had become a cemetery. I never went up there because it was full of the angry dead. Sometimes, on wintry nights, I thought I heard moaning from above. Everything stored was abandoned like old people who were shoved away somewhere to be forgotten in a world where the living were dead before dying.
But despite all this, I loved my house. I loved the way it stood out on our street, and not only because of its age and size. There was something important about it; it was there for so much history. Even the postman paused to look at it a little longer than he gazed at other houses. It commanded respect, and on July 4, with the flag prominently placed over the porch, it resembled the lead ship in an armada proudly sailing across the country, the Star-Spangled Banner woven in the wind that powered it. Surely strangers thought that whoever lived in this house were special, very important people. I always thought we were.
There were only three steps to the front porch. With a running start on the walkway, I leaped over the short stairway and landed on the recently restored hardwood floor, my feet slapping down with a solid thump. I thought I might have shaken the house, even though at fourteen and five foot six, I barely weighed one hundred ten pounds. However, I was already the second fastest on the varsity track team. Some said I resembled a deer leaping over obstacles, my long legs opening like scissors to cut the air.
If my mother saw me fly over the steps, she would have shouted her disapproval, calling me “unladylike, as are so many of those unsophisticated women who walk like men to show their defiance.”
I paused to smooth out my pleated plaid skirt and straighten the right strap of my bra, which had slipped off my shoulder when I ran and jumped onto the porch. I buttoned up my sheer blouse as well. Teresa Golding had told me that sometimes I looked like a nun trying to smother her sex; so when I was in school, I undid the top two buttons, revealing the entrance to my deepening cleavage, where promises welcomed the fantasies of boys. My mother had seized my hand as if I was drowning and practically dragged me out of the house to buy me two bras the moment she had seen the buds formed on my chest when I was almost twelve. Right after she had purchased my bras, she warned me about permitting a strap to show.
“It makes you look cheap,” she said.
“Why cheap?”
“I mean lower-class, like poor white trash, Scarletta. No matter what I do, that’s the way your father’s family thinks of me, so I won’t have you looking like that. They’d expect me not to teach you the finer things, and we’re never going to let them be right about me. Ever!”
Th
at comment about my grandparents surprised me. Was that really how they saw my mother? Years later, when the storm clouds had thinned and gone, my father would tell me that my mother actually thought she was better than him and his family. That was really what she was always out to prove with a vengeance, and not vice versa.
Nevertheless, restoring my clothes to the way they looked when I had first left in the morning was something I always did before I entered our house after school or after track practice. It was as if our community still had debutante balls and I was about to be presented to critical society. Those festive occasions were rarer now everywhere, but I often imagined older women with their noses moving like the noses of sniffing rabbits, lined up on both sides of our entryway waiting to judge me and decide if I was ready to participate in social events and even find a steady boyfriend.
My mother hated it when I looked disheveled and unconcerned about my appearance, no matter how old I was. My father claimed even my diapers had looked like fashion statements. “Even when you were only seven, she made your appearance the subject of an important lesson.”
He wasn’t wrong, but he never sounded that critical about it. Most of the time, he sounded proud.
My mother pulled me to her side when I was only a little girl to watch her do her makeup and her hair at her ivory marble vanity table with what I used to imagine was a magic mirror, its ivory frame embossed with doves. I didn’t have to be forced to watch her work on herself. It was fascinating. She sat down wearing one face, and in minutes she had put on another.
She trimmed her eyebrows and penciled them in; she added fake eyelashes to lengthen hers, and she used makeup to make her eyes almond-shaped, exotic. She instructed as she worked, talking about foundation, the right amount of blush, and the way to put on lipstick, even though it would be years before I could do what she was doing.
When she was finished, she turned to me and said, “Imagine a frame around you when you leave this house, Scarletta. Everyone is looking at you, so you have to be the prettiest you can be. Whether we like it or not, that’s how women are judged in this world. We never stop being debutantes.”
From then on, whenever my mother saw me looking less than what she would consider perfect because something I was wearing was out of place or I hadn’t brushed my hair well, she would shake her head and say, “Frame.”
My father had no idea what that meant. When he asked my mother, she said, “Girl talk, Raymond. You wouldn’t have a clue.”
“You could say that again, Doreen,” he replied, but smiled. The sharper she spoke to him, the deeper and wider that smile would be.
However, the mystery continued for him until he couldn’t stand it any longer. He took me aside one day when my mother wasn’t home and asked me.
“What does she mean when she says ‘Frame,’ Scarletta? You can tell Daddy.”
I didn’t see any reason not to tell him. My mother didn’t tell me to keep it a secret. It was just that I wasn’t sure how to explain it, so I drew it and showed him.
“Of course,” he said. “Of course. How dumb of me not to have realized.”
“You’re not dumb, Daddy,” I said.
I was old enough to believe that a man who owned his own furniture-manufacturing company and employed more than two hundred people couldn’t be dumb, even though he never had gone to college like my mother had. He had inherited the company from his father. My aunt Rachel, four years younger than my father, didn’t want anything to do with the family business, even though my grandfather tried to get her to be a bookkeeper.
Instead, she attended Bennington College, pursuing a major in liberal arts, and then married my uncle Benjamin, who had just begun his dental practice in Raleigh, North Carolina. They had two daughters, Tess, who was now eighteen and in college, and Nora, who was fifteen. We rarely saw them. My mother told me that my aunt was a snob and looked down on us, “because she was married to a professional, and we wouldn’t have the money we had if your father didn’t inherit the family business. I wouldn’t have married the man she married even if he was real royalty. Your uncle Benjamin is dwarfish,” she said.
My aunt was a few inches taller than her husband. She wasn’t half as pretty as my mother, and Uncle Benjamin, besides being much shorter than my father, was nowhere nearly as handsome.
My father was six foot three and lean like a champion tennis player. He was a tower of strength to me. He could lift me with ease and, when I was very small, sit me on his shoulder and walk with me riding him like some Indian princess on an elephant. I loved being up there and looking down on people. Eventually, my mother thought I was too old to be carried like that. She had to say it only once, and when she did, my father brought me off his shoulder quickly, almost too quickly, because I landed like someone whose parachute hadn’t opened. My ankles hurt, but I didn’t complain.
“You’re messing her up,” my mother snapped.
My father knelt to fix my blouse and then looked up to see if my mother was satisfied. She didn’t smile; she just kept walking. Of course, now I had to walk, too, but it wasn’t far. We were going to a restaurant “just to get out of the house,” my mother had said. She had chosen my clothes and my shoes and brushed my hair.
Sometimes I felt like a doll, a toy my mother had decorated with this outfit or that, but then, when I turned eleven, she suddenly stopped doing it.
One evening, before we went out to a restaurant, I went to her room to ask her how I looked. Her approval was always the ticket to the outside world.
“You’re at the age when you should be in total control of your appearance,” she said, surprising me. “Especially with all I have taught you, Scarletta. What if I wasn’t here? You had better start working on your self-confidence. A woman is never more vulnerable than when she lacks it.”
I didn’t know what that meant. Did she think I was already a woman? I was simply hoping for some compliment for the outfit I had chosen and the careful way I had brushed my hair, the same coffee-bean color as hers. There wasn’t a strand out of place. Instead, she turned away and concluded by saying, “I have enough trouble looking after myself now.”
I knew what she meant by that. She would burst out in howls when she discovered a new wrinkle in her skin or one growing deeper. My father told her she was putting her plastic surgeon’s kids through college all by herself, but if she gave him that sharp, hard look, focusing on him with her unusual brown eyes with gray specks that looked like minuscule diamonds, he would retreat like a smacked puppy.
I had my mother’s eyes, too. She told me so, making it sound as if I had escaped some horrible fate by looking more like her than I did my father, even though I and most of my friends thought my father was handsome, a George Clooney look-alike.
“We both looked up at the night sky as soon as we could and captured some of the glow of stars,” my mother had told me. She made it seem as though we had been touched by angels at birth. I liked that. Everyone I knew thought my mother was beautiful, even if they didn’t like the way she spoke to them. At Janice Lyn’s house once, I overheard her mother talking about mine. She concluded by saying, “You have to give the devil her due. The woman is stunning.”
I believed that and tried to imitate everything about her, even how she sat, held her fork, sipped from her glass, and especially her posture when she walked. When-ever we went somewhere, it was as if she was strolling down a fashion runway, modeling some famous designer’s latest creation, her eyes forward, oblivious to the stares of admiration or curiosity she collected as she stepped forward. Sometimes I would let go of my father’s hand and run to catch up to her and hold my head the same way.
“Both of you look like you think the world was created just for you,” my father said once. It wasn’t a criticism, even though my mother looked like she thought it was. He quickly added, “But why shouldn’t you? I think it was.”
As I grew older, I really was beginning to look more and more like her. Whenever anyone said so, my fathe
r would smile and agree. He’d say, “I don’t know if I had anything to do with her. Maybe it wasn’t a birth but a cloning.”
He really wasn’t upset. He was happy. “I’ve been blessed twice,” he’d say.
My maternal grandmother was annoyed with him often, even before we had moved into my grandparents’ house and he had approved all the changes my mother was undertaking. I heard her bawl him out for what I thought was a strange thing: worshipping my mother. He never said prayers to her, but she made it sound like he went to his knees and lit candles every night in front of the large portrait of her above our fireplace before he went to sleep.
My father had paid a famous artist from Florida nearly seventy-five thousand dollars to create the painting from his favorite picture of her in a gown she had worn to their fifth wedding anniversary celebration at the Carolina Country Club. Her dress was a tailored embellished silk and taffeta gown nipped in at the waist, with a voluminous pleated skirt. The bodice was French lace with shimmering paillettes. She wore the string of natural pearls and matching pearl earrings he had bought her for the occasion. I dreamed of someday wearing it all. It was the sort of gown that would never be out of style. It still hung in her closet, everything else kept away from it, as if another dress or a blouse would contaminate it.
Her portrait was really the most beautiful picture in our house and proved how true and important what she told me to think about myself was. “Capture your beauty in front of your own mirror first, and then share it with the world,” she had said. Her declarations always did sound biblical. If anyone worshipped her, I did.
Imagining the frame around me now, I opened the front door and stepped into our wide entryway with the slate-tiled floor my mother had installed a few years ago. She had bought and hung a large antique oval mirror framed in walnut across from the coatrack. Daddy’s soft full-grain black leather topcoat hemmed at the top of his thighs was hung there. It was a birthday gift my mother had given him nearly seven years ago, and he wore it so much, even when it was too warm to wear it, that it had begun to look like a second skin. At least, that was what my grandmother had said.
The Silhouette Girl Page 2
