“Just because she’s not here doesn’t mean she’s not here.” She pointed at her heart. “I talk to both Cecilia and Digger every single day.”
Now, y’all, my grandmother is a very serious, no-nonsense kind of lady. To hear her talking about chatting with her dead husband and daughter, well, it just didn’t sound like the woman I had known and loved for seventeen years at all! “And they talk back… how exactly, Grandmama?”
“Honey, they don’t talk back with voices. Well, sometimes they do, just not all the time. Signs. They send signs.”
“You can’t be serious. Oh my God, you are!”
“Yes, ma’am, as a heart attack. I ask your grandfather what he would do in certain situations all the time and he is always sending me signs.”
“Give me an example.”
“Well, I asked him what to do about the house on Magnolia Street.” She was talking about the stately home she’d been born and raised in. “I’d been thinking it might be time to sell it and move into something a little smaller.”
“But that house has been in the family for over a hundred years!”
“Well, I know, honey, which is why I don’t want to sell it, I really want to hold on to it for you, but it’s been feeling a bit too big for me by myself lately.”
“So what did Granddaddy say?”
“Nothing. He just showed me that it wasn’t time to sell yet.”
“Cut to the chase, Grandmama. You’re killing me! How did he show you?”
“He sent you home to me.”
Wow.
“And then when I got you here, I asked Cecilia if there was something special she wanted me to do for you. The very next day the call for Magnolia Maid tryouts was in the newspaper.”
Okay, this was so out there, frankly, I didn’t know what to say, what to think. All I knew was that suddenly I felt nervous, very nervous. “Do you really believe this, Grandmama?” I asked quietly.
“The Lord works in mysterious ways, and I do believe this is one of them. You know, you might benefit from trying to talk to your momma, too, young lady. This is such an important time in your life. I bet she’s got a lot to tell you.”
And now my instinct was to run. As far, as fast as I could. Away from the good people of Bienville constantly reminding me of my dead mother. Away from my grandmother who was so ardently suggesting that I remove the bricks in my wall to let her in even more.
Luckily, at that moment, Grandmother’s best friend since forever, Louisa Mandeville, came over and launched into a whole monologue about the things they used to do when they were Magnolia Maids.
I laughed at an anecdote or two, then politely excused myself to go powder my nose. Instead, I beelined to the viewing deck on the roof of the Petroleum Club and found sweet solitude. In the fresh air, far away from the constant attention, I felt like I could breathe again. My eyes meandered across the view, which certainly lived up to its exclusive reputation. Tonight, a full moon cast a glow over everything it touched. Ships and tankers were docked in the port. Oil rigs rose from the sea in the distance. The lights of Mobile shone far away on the horizon.
Farther south, the Bird River was a gleaming ribbon. My eyes traced it from the bay inland until they arrived at a bend. The bend where Cecilia, Cosmo, and I lived when I was a little girl. Living at the river was Cosmo’s doing. Coming from a Greek shipping family, boats and ships, rivers and oceans, they were in his blood. He got antsy whenever he was away from them too long, so he convinced Cecilia to let him buy a piece of land down on Bird River and build them a house, what they call a Creole cottage. It was set on stilts to prevent flooding during bad storms and hurricanes, and to my little-girl self, it looked as majestic as a castle. Cecilia got her wide verandah and outdoor kitchen, Cosmo got his sprawling view of the river from almost every window and a trophy room for all his boating paraphernalia. Eventually, I came along and got my own bedroom and a sitting room filled with all the toys money could buy.
The boathouse contained three boats, all named for my mother in one way or another: Ceci on the Sea was the sailboat. Go Ceci Go! was a high-speed powerboat. And The Majestic Miss C was a fishing yacht for the days when Cosmo would motor deep out into the Gulf of Mexico and come back with an ice chest full of Spanish mackerel that he skinned and boned himself. He’d call Cecilia on the way home and say, “We’ve got fish for dinner!” and by the time he pulled up at the dock, she would have the house filled with laughter, champagne, and friends ready to eat the bounty of Cosmo’s trip to sea.
When I try to remember my little-girl days, it’s not full scenes that come to mind but swirls. Tiny flashes of sights and sounds. Cosmo’s warm, tanned arms scooping me up off the dock and setting me down into the boat. Cecilia sunning herself on the bow as Cosmo threw fishing lines over the back. Me skipping on the sandy beach of an uninhabited island no bigger than a sandbar. Giggling at the feel of wind in my face when Cosmo opened the speedboat up to maximum velocity.
And then Cecilia fell.
That I remember clearly. It’s permanently etched in my brain—not swirling at all. It happened on the dock in front of our house. She wasn’t even doing anything weird. She was just walking and carrying me. I was about five, maybe too old to be carried, but exhausted from a long day on the river. One minute I was half asleep in her arms, the next I was flying through the air and into the water—a good thing, because I wasn’t hurt at all. Just scared and spluttering, until Cosmo dove in and pulled me to the surface so that he could swim me back over to the ladder and hustle me up onto the pier. “What the hell, Cecilia? What happened?” She was still splayed out on the wooden slats, pulling herself together. Studying the pier around her where she had made the misstep. Looking for some cause for the sudden fall. “I don’t know. I couldn’t move my leg.” Cosmo helped her to her feet, and they both chuckled and chalked it up to too many Heinekens underneath the afternoon’s hot Alabama sun, and off we went back into the house.
Until she fell again.
And again.
Bit by bit, the “random incidents” could no longer be passed off as the result of too many cocktails or a snag in the carpet. Out of nowhere, Cecilia flew down an entire flight of stairs, landing hard on her butt and cracking her tailbone. After tripping into the stove and knocking over a simmering pot of gumbo, she ended up in the emergency room with third-degree burns all over her arm. An unexpected careen into the Cocoa Puffs cereal display at the Piggly Wiggly was not only publicly humiliating but required two stitches above her left eye. Falling became a regular part of Cecilia’s day.
It was endangering her life.
Here’s what I remember about first grade: Miss Mary Melinda teaching us to sing “Puff the Magic Dragon” and read and write our names. Running out the doors of St. Peter’s School for Girls to see that it was Henry, not Cecilia, who was picking me up AGAIN at the end of the day to take me to Grandmother’s house. Snacking on oatmeal cookies and milk in her breakfast room until little Luke Churchville came home from school. His family lived two doors down from Grandmother’s and he became my constant playmate. We played in a tree house we built until Cecilia came to get me. I would ask where she was, and the answer was always quite believable. “Oh, she’s over to New Orleans doing some Christmas shopping, Miss Jane,” Henry would say. “She’s playing tennis at the club with Lacey Wilkes,” Grandmother would tell me.
Cecilia wasn’t playing tennis or shopping in New Orleans. She was in doctors’ offices and laboratories first here in Bienville, then later in Mobile and Houston when Bienville doctors couldn’t come up with any answers. She was apparently quite determined to keep things normal for me; she and Cosmo never talked about her health problems in front of me. I knew something was going on, though. How could I not when I was the one who wiped gumbo off her arms while she cried in pain? When I was the one who sat with her at the bottom of the stairs and read her Madeleine stories until she convinced herself to stand up?
Here’s what I remember about
second grade: Cecilia and Cosmo both coming to pick me up from school one day. What a delicious day that was! Cosmo never came to get me! He was always working in his office at the Maritime Building until at least five o’clock! They took me to their favorite restaurant, The Revelry, and they let me order chicken fingers and fried shrimp and a Shirley Temple with extra cherries and french fries and cheese poppers and Mississippi mud pie! I stuffed myself until I couldn’t breathe, barely noticing the glances they kept exchanging. Cosmo repeatedly started sentences with “Janie, agapemenee mu,” but then Cecilia would shoot him a look and he’d close his mouth and stare out the window at Bienville Bay while she asked me a question about my day.
It wasn’t until we got home that they told me. “Mommy is sick, agapemenee mu,” Cosmo said. And then came a big, long disease name that I couldn’t wrap my seven-year-old mouth around, but that was okay, they told me. I could call it by its letters, ALS. “What kind of medicine do you take for it?” I asked. There was no medicine for it, they said, which very much perplexed me. “Every time I go to Dr. Taylor, she gives me medicine. Why don’t they have any for you?” “They just don’t, honey,” Cecilia said, and a tear trickled down her cheek. “You have to be a big girl, Jane,” Cosmo rasped. “You have to help your mother. She is going to need you a lot from now on.”
Here’s what I remember about third grade: Spending an afternoon at Alabama Medical Supply shopping for Cecilia’s new motorized chair after her latest fall sent her to the hospital with a concussion and a dislocated shoulder. The doctors informed her it was better if she didn’t walk anymore. Even a walker couldn’t support her enough. “That’s okay,” Cecilia chirped. “I can’t walk, but my hands are good as new! I can cook! I can bake chocolate brownies with my Janie. We’ll be just fine!” I immediately dubbed the chair “Scooter-boy” and lurked about waiting for opportunities to steal it while Cecilia was in the bathroom or sitting in the wing chair on the sun porch reading. I rode Scooter-boy everywhere there was a smooth surface. Up and down the elevator Cosmo installed. Into the handicap van he bought. Down the ramp he built to the dock. “Your mother has more vehicles than I do now!” he joked. Then he lifted her into the boat and we zipped off into the blue.
Fourth grade: I learned to crack open eggs, knead bread, take casserole dishes out of the oven—the things that Cecilia could no longer do so well now that her hands were acting up on her. It was so much fun, helping her out every day after school. Sure, I wanted to be out playing with my friends, but I loved these afternoons in the kitchen talking and cooking with my mother. I relished the sense of victory that came when we brought a beautiful and delicious feast, the result of our chopping and mixing and measuring, out of the oven. But that all ended the day of the bread knife. It was a Thursday afternoon, and we had baked cranberry-pineapple bread for something—a Girl Scout badge, maybe? Cecilia was in the middle of telling me that my friend Teddy Mac was coming to spend Saturday with us so his mother could go shopping in Dallas when I noticed that she was having trouble cutting the bread. “Mom, what’s wrong?” “No, nothing,” she replied, struggling again to wrap her fingers around the knife. When it became obvious that her hand was not planning to cooperate anytime soon, I tried to console her. “It’s all right, Mommy,” I said. “I’ll cut it.”
She didn’t say a word. She dropped the knife and quietly navigated Scooter-boy down the hall and into the elevator, where she sequestered herself. I had no idea what to do. She refused to come out no matter what I said. Cosmo wasn’t home; in fact, he wasn’t even in town. By then, his business was taking him more and more to Greece and London, so he was no help. And when she started crying, a deep, mournful keening, I really didn’t know what to do. I went back to the kitchen and sliced the bread and attempted to coax her out with it, but all she did was take the elevator to the second floor to get away from me.
I called Grandmother.
“Cecilia! Open this door!” Grandmother had been in the middle of semifinals for the Bienville Ladies’ Bridge Tournament, but she was at our house within twenty minutes of answering her cell.
“No!” called Cecilia, her voice muffled by the two sets of elevator doors.
“Cecilia Jane Fontaine Ventouras! You may be an adult, but the Lord God says honor your mother, and as your mother, I say open this door right now!”
The door creaked open to reveal Cecilia’s face was swollen and shiny with tears. There’s nothing worse, when you’re a kid, than seeing your parents cry. It makes you feel like the world’s coming to an end. “Oh, Mommy!” I cried, pushing my way into the elevator and maneuvering myself into her lap so that I could hug her hard. As if my tight squeeze could make her tears, and this cruel disease, go away.
Over my head I heard Cecilia say, “I can’t do this, Mother! I can’t live this way.”
Grandmother wrapped her arms around Cecilia and me and rocked us both as if we were little babies. “Darling, what’s happening to you I would not wish on my worst enemy. But the Lord, he never gives us more than we can handle. You have to keep your spirits up. You have to live each day He gives you to the best of your ability.”
“But this disease is eating away my abilities!” Cecilia cried. “I can’t even cut bread anymore! Soon I’ll be a lump of—”
“Hush, you hush now. I’m calling Henry, and it’s all going to be fine, you hear me?” said Grandmother, and three days later, Henry and his wife, Charisse, moved into the guest quarters above our garage so that he could take care of the house and carpool me wherever I needed to go. Charisse handled the cooking and took care of Cecilia, which, as her disease ravaged the motor neurons connecting her brain to her muscles, meant things like pureeing her food into mush so that she could swallow it, putting her on the toilet, bathing, and dressing her. Cecilia never cried again, though. At least not that I ever saw or heard.
Even when people stopped coming to see us. Her friends. They didn’t know how to talk to her because she couldn’t talk anymore. My friends. They didn’t know what to say to me. My father. He… frankly, I don’t know what he thought. He just stopped coming. Everyone stopped coming.
Except Luke Churchville. But even he, in the end, was taken away from me.
Fifth grade: How packed the church was. How loudly we sang “Shall We Gather at the River?” How kind Reverend Burbank sounded, even if I wasn’t listening to a word he said. Cosmo, finally returned, his face carved ice, squeezing my hand so hard I thought it would break. Me, Cosmo, Grandmother pouring what remained of our beloved Cecilia into the Gulf of Mexico. Gray ashes meeting deep blue sea. The current sweeping them off into the Gulf Stream, knowing that it flowed in the direction of the Bahamas, then North Carolina, before curving up toward Europe and the north Atlantic. That’s nice, I thought. Mom always said she loved London.
Alone on the viewing deck of the Petroleum Club, I wondered if maybe Grandmother was right. That maybe Cecilia could guide me. Maybe she could hear me. Maybe she could help me. I glanced south, toward the gulf, vaguely in the direction of the place where we had poured her ashes in the water all those years ago. “Okay, Cecilia,” I said out loud. “Can you hear me?” No answer. I forged ahead. “Let’s just pretend this is going to work. Tell me, why do you want me to be on the Magnolia Court? What in the world am I supposed to do on it? What in the world am I going to do with these girls? Besides give Ashley a hard time, which will be fun, don’t get me wrong. But this whole thing is sooooo not me, Cecilia, can’t you tell? How in the world am I going to survive it? Cecilia? Cecilia? Mom?”
I studied the horizon. Stars twinkled, but not a one fell from the sky in symbolic response. Ships and boats plied the waters, but none used Morse code to signal an answer. The wind whistled, but I caught no secret messages.
I sighed. Bienville was a town full of ghosts.
And I was the most haunted ghost of all. “SOS, Cecilia,” I said as I turned away from the night sky. “SOS.”
Chapter Four
And so I settled into
the slow lane called May in Bienville. Because I had gotten kicked out of Stanton Hall so late in my junior year, Grandmother determined there was no need to enroll me in any one of Bienville’s fine educational establishments, public or private. The result was daily lessons throughout the month of May at home with Mr. Charles Dumas, tutor to Bienville’s upper crust. Mr. Dumas was tolerable, even if he was periodically besieged by sinus flare-ups that made him snort like a horse. God bless him, he had a tendency to drone on about the Hundred Years’ War, even when discussing Algebra II. How he was able to find a connection between the Fibonacci sequence and the Battle of Calais is beyond me. At least the medieval tapestries of Joan of Arc were pretty.
In general, I had nothing much to do, and no one much to do it with. I finished Mr. Dumas’s assignments like a good little girl. I fired up my Netflix queue with constant requests for Veronica Mars and Alias. And I ran. Oh, how I ran. I know, it’s an odd thing for a smoker. Maybe it’s because I feel like I need to make up for the fact that I am destroying my little pink lungs with every puff. Also, I have a truckload of nervous energy. I’m not one of those people who is constantly on the move, but every once in a while a wave of anxiety crashes over me and I feel like I have to move or I will die. And since we wouldn’t want that, I run.
Grandmother’s house was in one of the oldest neighborhoods in Bienville, Magnolia Oaks, and as such, it was a stone’s throw from downtown. Every day after the mid-afternoon rain shower, I stepped out the front door, turned right, and took off at a slow jog through the residential streets canopied with oaks and lined with grand old homes on giant plots of land. That time of day, the humidity is insane, so I often felt like I was breathing water vapor. But I kind of liked that I would get so sweaty so fast. At Commerce Street, I picked up speed, racing cars heading into the business district. At Government Boulevard, I turned right, ran past town hall, the city courthouse, and the chamber of commerce (where I sometimes waved at Mr. Walter). I’d hit the port and run along the docks, dodging forklifts and weaving my way through shipping containers. Then I’d loop back home, throw myself in the shower, and call it a day.
Never Sit Down in a Hoopskirt and Other Things I Learned in Southern Belle Hell Page 4
