You're on an Airplane

by Parker Posey

  I wore Muffin out so much that I got another one for Christmas. She’d lose her eyes again and get new ones sewn back on—big black pupils again, like the lens of a camera.

  4

  Nonnie’s Fireball

  There was no way Nonnie was going to be called “Grandma” or “Mee Maw” because names like that sounded old. She wanted to be called Nonnie, a name that no other grandmother I knew had. It’s abbreviated from the Italian nonna, which has a ring to it and sounds lyrical, lofty, and traveled. Her real name, Faye, means “fairy,” and she was very much otherworldly and wholeheartedly self-created.

  Nonnie’s mother, Sara Josephine Eskridge, was one of nine girls, all of whom went to college (and did cotillion and all that chic stuff women did back then). But Sara Josephine Eskridge married beneath her: a cowboy, a ranch hand named Jesse Thomas Baggett. Jesse did the rodeos, which was badass and cool, but the Eskridges couldn’t stand him—not that he gave a shit. No, this wasn’t in Italy. It was in Wichita Falls, Texas.

  I wish I could say that Jesse loved Sara Jo, because it would have set a good example, but, according to my mom, they had two modes of communicating: pretending the other didn’t exist (which is different from ignoring someone, although they did that, too) and fighting. Jesse doesn’t sound like much of a conversationalist, since sometimes he didn’t even bother to sit down to eat with his family, opting instead to pull a chair up to the fridge and eat from there. They slept with a sheet partition between them, which isn’t usually a sign of getting along. Sara Jo chased Jesse around with a skillet, apparently, and a knife at one point, threatening to kill him. I hear she was a warm and loving grandmother but favored boys, like everyone back then. Mom describes the dynamic between the couple as “a showdown,” and Jesse as “Texas tough.”

  When my mother was five years old, her family lived in Texas (this was before the move to Louisiana), and she remembers Jesse eating breakfast—three fried eggs with molasses on top. He stirred it all with a stick of butter, which he took a bite out of, like a piece of toast. They had their own cows and a dairy farm, so he could do with his butter what he damn well pleased. Thank God they had that farm to sell eggs and milk during the Dust Bowl days, when the sky turned black and dusted the very air they breathed, and during the Great Depression of the thirties, which decimated agriculture and left people starved and homeless. The weather alone was brutal and relentless year-round. It would get so hot in the summers that you could fry an egg on the sidewalk. As the radio DJ did just that, describing it animatedly and with humor, my mom would roll her eyes and think, “That’s supposed to make us feel better?”

  When Jesse barreled through the living room, outfitted in his cowboy gear (the gun, the holster, the whole nine), shouting, “Let’s corral! Let’s corral!” my mom and her two brothers, Tim and Jimmy, would spring off the floor. My mom remembers making eye contact with her brothers and her dad, all of them rolling their eyes at the ruckus and what a show of machismo Jesse made of it—that bit of extra that wild people take over the room with.

  Glenn Patton was my mother’s father and courted Nonnie when she was just seventeen. They met at a government-sponsored dance social in Amarillo, not too far from Wichita Falls. He was Irish and Scottish and was the seventh son of the seventh son. The religious connotations of this being something that gave him special powers didn’t go to his head at all. It was by default in actuality, since one brother died of tuberculosis and the other at childbirth, but that still counted, right? I loved it when that conversation started.

  Nonnie would gloat when she’d talk about it, saying yes, it did mean something, and it did count. We’d look at Glenn like he had special powers and he would laugh and shake his head, good-natured and reading his paper with a Benson & Hedges cigarette burning in his ashtray. He had a great sense of humor and humored Nonnie in her fantasy life. He had to.

  Their courtship story is upstaged by Nonnie’s older sister Lois’s husband, though. His name was Elbert Higgens. Lois was also just seventeen when she and Elbert dated for a bit and then married. He moved into the house when Nonnie was fourteen and she hated him—he was even wilder and more primitive than her own father. Anyway, on one of Nonnie and Glenn’s early dates, Glenn walked my grandmother up the driveway, where Elbert was hiding in a tree. When they passed under him, he farted on them and laughed like the crazy man he was. Nonnie hated his guts, and for good reason. I’m sure he tried to chase her down.

  Glenn was a pilot and took her away from all that. He taught at the flight school in Amarillo, and his father had been mayor of Amarillo in the early 1900s because he was the “wet” candidate (translation: he was for booze) and had his own saloon. His name was J. H. Patton and he saw the first pavement laid on Polk Street. J.H. was charming and fun, liked to socialize in the public square and kept candy in his pockets to give to the kids.

  The saloon was called the Old Forester, where you’d pay with cash in exchange for wooden coins you’d keep tight in your suit pocket for drinks and maybe even a glass flask of whiskey. Those coins are collectors’ items now. My cousin Todd was on a website and saw an old bottle of whiskey and some bar tokens with our great-grandfather’s name on them, but the guy who ran the site wouldn’t sell Todd the coins or that old bottle. Maybe he held a family grudge and would take the memorabilia to his grave, along with some rifles—yup, don’t mess with Texas.

  * * *

  –

  Nonnie and Glenn settled for a bit in Amarillo and had children. My uncle Tim was first. As a kid, he remembers Uncle Elbert perching outside on the air conditioner in only his underwear, holding a gun. The family was having dinner and a prisoner had been released from Leavenworth prison, which was six hours away, so Elbert was on the lookout. One time, probably to entertain my uncle Tim (or maybe it was some ritual, since Elbert was a Mason), he stood on the kitchen table, unscrewed the lightbulb from the fixture, and stuck his finger in the socket to make his hair stand on end. He learned that from the carnival, where he met my great-aunt Lois. She was blond and beautiful, and at Elbert’s funeral she had a broken arm. It was a funeral Nonnie was happy to attend.

  When I was little, Nonnie was, for me, a queen: tall and thin with dark hair—a raven beauty. She dressed like a movie star and would go to Neiman Marcus for inspiration and return home to sew her own clothes. She had a movie-star way of talking, too, and of comporting herself. When she’d say, “I’m just a country girl,” she sounded and acted just like Susan Hayward—not like a country girl at all. She’d sashay around in high-heeled boots, swaying her hips in pencil skirts, with nowhere to go except lunch at the Piccadilly, or bingo at the Petroleum Club, which served a delicious buffet dinner. The names of both places reeked of high class to me—and truly, even though the Piccadilly was just a cafeteria, it was a big deal to go there. Glenn would put the copper-colored coffee thermos on the table and Nonnie’d say, “Who will do the honors?” and gesture to the thermos like it was Waterford crystal.

  At night, Nonnie added Sweet’N Low to her zinfandel wine—tapping the pink packet into her glass like it was gold dust—and she’d say, emphatically and with feeling, “I can’t stand the bitterness.” She always said it with profundity, as if it were the first time she’d realized this. I’d give her a new reaction each time, as if the cameras were rolling, each take better than the last. She prefaced the most mundane comments with phrases like “Forgive me if I must say so,” and then would go on to say something that wasn’t anything she’d need forgiveness for, which muddled my Catholic brain.

  * * *

  –

  She let me stay up late with her to watch talk shows and old movies, and we’d sponge-roll our hair or pin-curl it and do our nails. In the morning, I sat on the couch with the Yorkies, Benji and Teddy, their framed photographs blending into the wood-paneled walls. We’d brush our hair out and she’d lament, “Why, I could’ve been a textile designer in New York. Mmhmm. I really
could’ve.” I would zone out staring at the dirty feet of the boys in a reproduction print by the baroque painter Murillo, which was the only other picture on the wall in the TV room. “Why, if I could do it all over again, Mittens, I would’ve married a man who’d give me gifts. Someone who’d take me out to places.” I’d spin her globe, close my eyes, and stop it with my finger, then take it to Nonnie, and she’d tell me where I ended up. Glenn would be at work during the day, at Sunbeam Bread.

  * * *

  –

  Nonnie sat in her rich leather chair in front of the built-in bookshelf, which mostly held the Encyclopaedia Britannica. There were other things to look at on those shelves that I liked: a tiny figurine of Ganesh, who when I asked about him, she’d say, “I don’t believe in him, Mittens, I just like the aesthetics.” She had regular playing cards that I got to use, and a double deck of cards encased in French provincial-style covered compacts, which she used for bridge. There was a Buddha and a sumo wrestler and a geisha woman and her fan, harmoniously placed. I liked looking at her book about ikebana floral arrangements.

  She’d say things like “I love the Orient” as if she’d visited there, seen all the sights, and had a fabulous time. She would sort through the paper, cutting coupons, and say things to the newspaper as if people lived in there. “Serves you right,” she’d say with her quiet genteel judgment. “Mmhmm, yes. Serves you right.”

  * * *

  –

  When I finished fixing myself, I’d put the pins or rollers away and move from the couch to the floor and do back bends or splits and watch TV. I’d watch Nonnie watching the TV, and I’d see how content she became as she placed herself inside it; she was happy and humming, swinging her crossed leg or shimmying her shoulders to the music. She’d throw her head back and laugh, watching Gwen Verdon or Liza Minnelli, and she adored Bob Fosse. “Mittens, why do you think homosexuals make the best choreographers?” she’d ask. Bob Fosse wasn’t a homosexual, but she probably thought he was. I was around eight years old, so I didn’t really know what she was talking about. (I got to meet Liza on a film I did called The Oh in Ohio and told her how much Nonnie giggled at the sexuality of Fosse’s choreography, and Liza said that she’d made him laugh. “I didn’t even know what I was doing was sexy! But he’d sit in the audience, just laughing at me.” By the way, Liza needlepoints on set, in what she called jazz, or freeform, style.)

  Nonnie and I played cards in our time together, too. She taught me how to play solitaire, a game she loved, as she was always happily self-absorbed. She enjoyed having conversations with herself—her interior life so loaded that snippets of dialogue would naturally come out. I loved it when she sang as she got dolled up, whether or not she had anywhere to go. She let me be, and I enjoyed that—playing with the plastic buttons in her sewing box, respectful of the “nice” scissors (the ones to cut fabric, not paper). I hummed along with her as she waltzed around, through the kitchen and into the bathroom, where the “good” towels were folded perfectly in the cabinet and never used. I’d open the cabinet and stare at those towels like they were King Tut’s tomb. There was a soap dish in clear plastic wrap with decoupage flowers—never opened, never touched. Then I’d look at myself in the mirror. My hair, brushed out and curly, looked like a wig. It reminded me of Judy Garland and her movies on TV.

  * * *

  –

  At my brother’s wedding, Nonnie danced the night away, and took breaks to alternately puff on a cigarette or her asthma inhaler—she was in her early eighties and still living it up. She kicked through the Charleston and said, repeatedly, “I could dance forever. I just love dancing.” Since Glenn had passed away, she’d been partying it up with the Greeks at the Orthodox church in Shreveport and they loved to dance, apparently, so she had a fun group of friends. “I love the Greeks,” she’d say, with the certainty and fervor of a politician. I’d picture her friends looking like Greek statues.

  What Nonnie didn’t love was her son-in-law. My dad didn’t kowtow to her or treat her like a queen. She didn’t find him charming or funny, which drove him to act even more provocative and obnoxious. She’d met her match in him. They both ruled any room they entered, but my father, with his sense of humor, could bring any house down, including and especially hers. They needled each other with mind games worthy of the theater. It was not boring, but it was not peaceful.

  When the air was tense and drama was being whipped up—when the family spoke their resentments toward each other in silence, and when the drinks got made—I liked to sit on the floor in the kitchen and spin the double-tiered lazy Susan that held the canned goods. Green beans, asparagus, deviled ham—which came wrapped in white paper, a little red devil modeling with a pitchfork. The miniature Morton Salt with the girl on the label—she was my age and had a pageboy haircut and yellow raincoat. Her umbrella produced the rain under her parasol and she was happy on her walk. I’d spin that lazy Susan again and again, grabbing the cans and stacking them before they whipped away and back around. It was a game between heaven and hell: the can of deviled ham against the Morton Salt girl. She raises her umbrella and shoots the rain that drowns the devil back to hell.

  * * *

  –

  Nonnie made recipes straight out of Good Housekeeping magazine. She’d make brisket or marinated crab claws, pimento cheese and artichoke dip, and she’d serve canned asparagus as if they were fresh. She exuded such intense imperiousness over everything that my uncle Tim didn’t know she hadn’t invented the BLT until he went to college.

  She also adored Atomic Fireballs (those bright red jawbreaker candies), which she kept in a big white box on the island in the kitchen. My cousin Samantha and I would climb on the table to get to them when Nonnie wasn’t looking and run them under water to let the heat out. We stared at the only picture hanging in the kitchen: a somber old man praying to a loaf of bread. When we asked who the man was, Nonnie said it was God. We asked questions about that—like “How can someone take a picture of God?”—and Nonnie would leave the room, which made us laugh. I took catechism, so I knew God made everything and knew everything and was in everything. It was inane to think that this man was God, because why would he choose to be photographed praying to a sad loaf of bread? And why look so glum? Jesus, it just didn’t make sense.

  One Thanksgiving on Lovers Lane, after we’d eaten and were sitting around in that post-turkey dip, my dad had this ingenious idea and put down his drink and went into the fridge. He snagged the innards of the turkey from the crisper and cupped them in his hands. Then he went up to Nonnie and said, “Nonnie, the meal was delicious, but”—cough cough—“I don’t feel so good.” He pretended to throw up and coughed some more and showed her his bloody hands holding the turkey remnant’s entrails. If she thought this was funny, she sure as hell didn’t show it, and I doubt she thought it was funny. She put herself above laughs that she didn’t orchestrate herself. It was a Texan showdown stare-down, to be sure, and my dad won. Nonnie was “on a mad” for that number, stoic and beautiful in her resentments as she conversed with herself—holding tight and chewing all that bitter material.

  The following day, when we were in the kitchen eating leftovers, my father started cutting the turkey, and it started rolling back and forth. He put down the knife and picked up the turkey and there it was—Nonnie’s Fireball. It was smaller and not as bright red as it was before but still mobile enough to hold and rock a carcass with a knife. How the Fireball got under there is still a mystery.

  * * *

  –

  In tribute to Nonnie, as well as to the Patton side of my family, I’d like to turn you on to the Fireball Cocktail. You can call it “Nonnie” if you’d like. It’s inspired by the Manhattan cocktail (like my aunt Peggy likes) but has a Fireball thrown into the mix. When the Fireball releases its potency, it sweetens the drink and turns it red. A few dashes of bitters are balanced out by the pure sweetness of sugar. The drink takes beaut
iful shape, like a cosmos.

  Fireball Cocktail, aka the Nonnie

  1½ ounces Rittenhouse Rye

  ¾ ounce Punt e Mes vermouth

  2 dashes of Ms. Better’s Batch 42 aromatic bitters

  1 Atomic Fireball candy

  Lemon peel, expressed

  Place ingredients over ice in glass and stir. Pour in shaker and shake (dance, please). Express the lemon peel’s oil over the finished cocktail and drink. Then express yourself and get loose. Cheers to our lineage and being able to live on the planet at this time, and don’t forget that resentment is poison. And good luck with your regrets; they’ll leave you lonely and you can’t dance with them.

  5

  Pansies Are for Thought

  I spent time at my other grandmother’s, too. Granny’s name was Nautis DeLatin and she lived in Shreveport as well. She was the landlady of one of those old Southern homes on the corner of the street. It was three stories and had a huge wraparound porch. Off to the side where the traffic whizzed by was a bench swing, maybe twelve feet from the high ceiling, that hung by long chains. We’d shell peas and shuck corn together on the front porch as neighbors strolled by. Yes, she’d sit in a rocking chair and there was a metal glider couch, too.

  I never saw her tenants but they lived around and above.

  She taught me how to sew and embroider and I made a rag doll out of her old pillowcases and slept on a rollaway cot where I could feel the bedsprings. This was in the back of the house in a little screened-in porch room. When it rained I could smell the hydrangeas just outside and the damp air contained the scent. I’d wake up to look at them and notice how the petals had speckles of soft pink, like a watercolor brush had sprayed them.