You will have made home the worst place on earth, so what feels wrong will feel like where she is supposed to be, even if her instincts tell her to run away. The impulse to run away will be as normal as breathing. She will always want to run but will not know how to do it. The trust she would’ve naturally had for the voice in her head will be absent. You will have taught her the voice is amiss.
She will become a lopsided, cockeyed perfectionist, attempting the mental and emotional equivalent of running a marathon with no feet and relying on the stumps at the end of her shins. She will never think she is good enough for anyone, anything, or any place. She will still try desperately to prove that she is until she gives up. She will overachieve. She will bend over backward. She will be pissed when no one notices. She will then let things slide.
Her personality will deteriorate and fragment. She will either fight it and become full of rage, trying to scratch and claw her way back to an intact self, or she will succumb to the sadness you installed in her heart and act as a pitiful doormat for anyone who wants to scrape their nasty feet on her.
She will not know where her oppositional behavior comes from—and she will above all be oppositional—unless she spends years in analysis. You will cost her time and money she could spend on more worthwhile pursuits.
If you hit her mother too, she will think that’s what love between two adults looks like.
She will think nice people are boring.
She will live her life carrying shame on her shoulders. It will weigh her down. It will keep her from believing she deserves anything good or whole.
She will flash back to your fists colliding with her skin and muscle and bone and she will cringe as she relives it over, over, and over again. She will eventually figure out how to dissociate and play it all back for herself as if it is a movie.
She will never feel safe. Her heart will be shattered. She will hurt more than you can imagine, but she will want to and even try to forgive you in approximately two hundred eighty-seven different ways.
She will wonder why you hated her when you were supposed to love her. She might eventually understand that you hated yourself first, but ultimately, she won’t care and it won’t matter any longer what your problems were.
Football
Sissy used to beg me to play football with her out in the yard since I was the only other child around and therefore her sole playmate. I preferred to stay in the house most of the time unless I was playing with a dog or cat or riding my bicycle and pretending I was Daisy Duke out in the sandy driveway. Ball didn’t interest me, but Sissy was a natural athlete with great hands and was fast like a whippet. She never understood why I wouldn’t catch the ball when she used her perfect spiral to throw it at me. It would usually just hit me in the chest. I’d stare at it after it fell to the ground. If I did get lucky enough to catch it, she’d then wrestle me down, which was something I couldn’t comprehend. I asked her how was I supposed to run with the ball toward whatever goal we’d designated if she jumped on top of me. She’d just laugh and tell me that was a tackle. We were opposites in many ways. Still are.
Hairbrush Microphone
I don’t know what Sissy thought about as she sang into the Goody vent brush she used to fix her hair. Feathered Farrah Fawcett hair was what we all wanted. Nanny had a made-up word for hair that wouldn’t do anything but wrong, and mine fell into that category. Kadoncha (kay-DON’T-cha): “Can’t comb it and don’t you try.”
Sometimes I’d sneak up behind Sissy as she was singing her heart out into that hairbrush, then I’d laugh and run off when she noticed me. She was probably picturing thousands of people watching her as she stood in front of the mirror, singing along to her Barbara Mandrell records. The live one was her favorite. Even I knew every note and word on it and not by choice. It came out in the late summer of 1981 and had “I Was Country When Country Wasn’t Cool” on it. Barbara had a television show at the time and we had to watch it every Saturday night.
Sissy never dreamed, not for one day since Daddy first put her up on a table at Shakey’s Pizza Parlor when she was three to sing “Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue” with the house band, that she’d do anything with her life but fill it with music. So she hardly ever has.
“PETER, PETER, PETER,” SISSY TEASED, LAUGHING AS SHE turned to run out the door of the music room. She’d caught me reading into our tape recorder.
Frankville was in the middle of nowhere and we were the only children for miles. We often resorted to activities like recording ourselves when we wore out all of our other options, or when we wore out on each other.
I sat on the floor with my dog-eared copy of Peter Rabbit, narrating the adventures of Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, and Mr. McGregor through a hoarse voice and a case of sniffles I carried around almost constantly. The pile of 45s was stacked up right beside me. Sissy would often tape herself playing deejay, back announcing a song like “Rock-A-Chicka” or “Yesterday” that came from that stack. Those records are the soundtrack to our childhood.
Most of them had lost their sleeves and lay there naked, scratching up against each other. We knew them by heart. Mama had written her name, Lynn Smith, on the ones that belonged to her. I studied the labels on them. I knew the RCA Victor ones were likely the Elvis singles. To this day, every time I hear “All Shook Up,” I’ll hear a skip in it because the record we had was broken. We played it anyway by making sure we fit the edges together just right before we put it on the turntable.
There were the orange-and-yellow swirly Capitol ones, and I knew when I picked up one of those that it was likely by the Beatles. Mama had most every Everly Brothers single, and I knew how to find them by looking for the Warner Bros. or RCA Victor labels. We sang a lot of their songs, from “Dream” to “Brand New Heartache” to “When Will I Be Loved.”
The Buck Owens records were on Capitol but they mostly had purple labels. We loved Buck. I used to study how Don Rich would sing harmony with him, and try to get my voice to do the same kinds of things that his did. I picked up, by watching old television performances that Daddy showed us of them singing together, that I should watch my sister’s mouth to predict when she’d let loose of a phrase or word so I could match her with my harmony perfectly. So that our voices, our very similar voices, could become one chord. I was always looking for the chord, the details, the little moment that would make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
There is a version of “Under the Double Eagle” at the end of side two on the double album Willie and Family Live that finishes like a collision of bumper cars. It’s a wreck but it’s a soft one and there’s no damage done, it just makes you laugh. Someone hit the wrong chord on the very last note but it’s not spectacularly bad in the way that some things are so wrong they make you cringe. Someone just clammed. It’s a moment that does not make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up in a good way. I was a stickler for details even as a girl, and noticed that someone had hit the wrong chord upon first hearing the recording. When I revealed this to my sister, she looked at me like I had three heads. It was true that I was almost missing the point entirely, but the little things meant everything to me. I’d pick out the smallest details on a recording and would often fixate on them, waiting for them to come around every time I’d listen—a faraway harmony part, a double-time strum on a guitar, the acoustic upstrokes between every spelled-out letter on the chorus of “D-I-V-O-R-C-E.” The details always connected me to the ground and reminded me that even if everything else around me was too unpredictable to depend on, I could count on the records not to vary. I could trust them, and not a whole lot else.
I don’t know when I began to know that, but I don’t remember ever not knowing.
I was three years old when my second bout of pneumonia landed me in the emergency room at the Jackson hospital with my body covered in ice. Submerging me was the only way to lower my fever. Mama had to leave the room. She was too tenderhearted to stand to hear my cries or see me writhe, so Nanny staye
d with me and helped the nurses hold me down. Nanny was tough.
They stripped me of my clothes for the ice bath, but I refused to let them remove my shoes. Nanny said I threw such a fit that they decided to just leave them on my feet. I laugh now when I think of two little brown rough-out Dingo cowboy boots poking through the ice on an otherwise naked child. I’m brought to tears when I think about inheriting them from my sissy. I wish I still had them but I’m sure they got passed down to a cousin. If I did have them, I’d put them on a shelf where I could see them every day. My fondness for footwear is irrefutable. My love for my sister is unshakeable.
Baby Book
A laminated clipping from the Mobile Press-Register announcing the birth—girl, 6 lbs. 15 ozs., 10:41 a.m., June 21, 1972—is between the front cover and the first page of this little pink book. The clipping gives our address as well as my details, which seems dangerous to me now—a sort of invitation for a baby snatcher. Mama filled out the first two pages of my baby book and wrote down when my first checkup was on the weight and height pages—I gained almost two pounds in a month—but there is nothing on the other pages. There are a few cards and photographs stuck inside, plus a letter from Brenda saying that “Shelby told Larry Allison was prettier than her.” I wonder who told Sissy that. I don’t think she ever thought anything different after that got put into her head and it makes me mad and feel guilty. Especially since it wasn’t and hasn’t ever been true. There’s a card from Aunt Maggie. Aunt Maggie lived up the road from us toward Bladon Springs, and would send a dollar in a card for every birthday Sissy and I ever had until she died. Sometimes she’d send five. She was Daddy’s aunt and she loved him. She didn’t really get along with Mammy very well—not sure why. Mama and Daddy used to leave us with her overnight sometimes so they could go out. We watched television with her in her front room. Her house was small, hot, and smelled like kerosene.
LOVE IS RARELY A SIMPLE CONCEPT WHEN PEOPLE GET their hands on it, and it certainly wasn’t simple in our family. It was there, but it wasn’t a grounding force, it was something we chased. It was the piece of paper and not the paperweight. We learned to lick our fingers and hold them up, always taking readings, always trying to adapt to the constant changes in atmosphere.
Mama was warm and tender in the best ways a mother can be. She always provided a hug and kiss, an “I love you” when she tucked us in at night or dropped us off at school, and had an easy, affectionate comportment that I have thankfully carried with me. But she wasn’t always available. Daddy kept her off-kilter and distracted. I saw none of the same ease in him and he died without ever telling me he loved me. I never heard him say he loved Mama either, but he demanded her attention like a needy toddler would unless he was gone or passed out. Sissy and I were born three years, seven months, and thirty days apart. By the time I arrived, she already knew what I would soon learn.
Mama used to tell a story about catching Sissy lifting me out of my crib. She happened to walk into the room just in time to coax me out of Sissy’s arms and back down into the baby bed. I’ve always wanted to know what her plans were. I don’t know if she wanted to get rid of me, run away with me, or just hold me. I understand all three impulses. I suspect that it was one of the latter two, though I’m not sure and she may not be either.
Sissy told me a few years ago that I came out of the womb with a protector, that she was “primed and ready” by the time I arrived. When we were little I thought she would take on anything that came at her, and she probably would’ve. She always had a look about her that suggested she might be about to roll someone. She never backed down from a fight, while I tried to smile through it all, knowing that was my greatest power. Sissy emulated Daddy, not only because she in some ways idolized him, but to also try to satisfy him somehow. We all lived striving for his approval. We acted like scared dogs, cowering but coming out from under the table if he offered a treat or pat on the head.
Sissy has always been brave. Primed and ready is an understatement—she, in some ways, searches out and craves the comfort of confrontation. We want what we know.
What Sissy knew was disapproval and anger. She’d heard, just as I had, Daddy accuse Mama of being unable to give him a son, so she tried her best to be the one he seemed to want. I’m sure he thought we were out of earshot when he’d say it but we weren’t. She played music with him, hunted and fished with him, and often put herself in between him and Mama. It wasn’t that she didn’t like playing music—in fact, the very center of my sister is music—or hunting and fishing with him; she most certainly did. But I always got the feeling that the time they spent together was about her fascination with and fear of him, her trying to hold things together or repair them.
I was flintier. I’d watch things go pear-shaped and then extract myself from whatever debacle was developing, at usually just a few moments past the right time. I knew more about protecting myself than Sissy did and it occurs to me I might’ve learned how to do it by watching her not be able to. I knew what to avoid. I ran out while she ran in.
We knew Mama was helpless against Daddy’s rage. We clung to her but felt her fear, reveling in the time we spent with her away from him. He liked to stay out late at night so it was just the three of us a lot of the time.
Mama had an old Chevrolet Impala. It was white with a red vinyl interior and was the first car I remember us having. Frankville was thirty-some-odd miles away from Jackson, where she worked and Sissy went to school. The radio in the Impala didn’t work so we had no choice but to sing on the way to Jackson and back. That’s where we really started to learn.
Mama knew so many old songs. I remember “Side by Side” in particular—the way the end part went into call and response—Mama knew every note of the Kay Starr version like Sissy and I still do now. She was something else. She could hear every part as easy as breathing.
Not much else was so easy for her. She used to have to tote a boiler full of water from the stove out to the car to pour it on the iced-over windshield some mornings. We didn’t have a garage or a carport and instead parked the car on a worn spot in the grass between the kitchen door and the fence that separated the yard from the pasture. People think it doesn’t get cold in South Alabama but it does. I always expected the windshield to crack. I guess she knew some things wouldn’t.
Teardrops
We sat in the car one morning waiting for her to come out of the house so we could drive to Jackson. Mama worked as a legal secretary for McCorquodale & McCorquodale. Sissy was either in second or third grade, and I’d go to preschool or to Nanny’s if I wasn’t feeling well, which was often.
Daddy got out of bed before we left, which was rare. He was on Mama’s ass about something, torturing her as only he could. She finally managed to get out of the house but when she reached the car door she froze. It was the first time I remember seeing her cry. She held on to the door handle as her face contorted and two big, black, mascara-tinted tears ran down her face, ruining the makeup she’d so carefully applied. She always took care with her makeup. She loved to feel feminine and often overspent on products at the drugstore.
I’m quite sure she’d cried in front of us before, but this was the first time I was old enough to absorb what I saw as real sadness. I didn’t even realize until that moment that adults could cry. I had it in my mind that when you reached a certain age or birthday that your tear ducts just stopped working.
Mama was the world to both of us, and seeing her so upset wrecked me and I’m sure it worried Sissy to death too. My heartbeat quickened and pounded in my ears as I watched her fumble for her car keys with her other hand. I wondered what I could do.
Just as quickly as those tears had run down her face, they stopped. She gathered herself—it was like a curtain going up and a show starting—and got in the car, started it, drove around the house, down the driveway, and out onto the road that led us into the rest of our day. I had watched her make some sort of deal with herself. Then she just wiped the tears away and g
ot on with things. As you do.
THE CHOIR DIRECTOR AT FRANKVILLE BAPTIST CHURCH asked Mama to come to practice one Friday night and to bring us with her. I was only four, Sissy was seven or eight, but he’d heard us sing and thought we’d all three be good additions to his group. Mama grew up going to McCann’s Chapel, one of the Methodist churches in Jackson, and Daddy was raised going to every Sunday service, dinner on the ground, Bible study, and youth group that Frankville Baptist could put on. By the time Sissy and I were little he’d all but turned away from it and hardly went to church at all.
I guess Mama thought we would beat him home after practice was over the one night we went, because he was usually way past late getting there, especially on weekend nights. But when we got to the house he was waiting and wanted to know where we’d been. He was livid when Mama told him. Nothing she could say could satisfy him. We all stood in the dining room while he tore into her.
Mama, in one of her attempts at spiffing up our old, run-down house, had hung one of those awful seventies globe lamps from an iron hanger by the doorway that separated the dining room from the living room. It was about the size of a basketball and made of faceted, amber-colored glass. It hung from a chain that matched the hanger. It hadn’t been up there for very long from what I recall and Daddy hated it, saying he had to dodge it every time he walked by it. In one fell swoop, he jerked it down from the hanger, its cord from the wall, and hurled it across the dining room and through one of the kitchen windows. It landed in the side yard between the house and his workshop. Glass went everywhere.
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