The Book of Peach
Page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
PART ONE - Backstory
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
PART TWO - Unfolding
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
PART THREE - Reconciliation
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Epilogue
PRAISE FOR
Penelope Stokes
“Penelope Stokes is a bright beacon. Her stories touch the heart, engage the brain, and expand the spirit.”
—Philip Gulley, author of the Harmony series
“With abiding warmth and moving sensitivity, Stokes crafts an inspiring tribute to the power of true friendship.”
—Booklist
“A beautiful novel of dreams gone awry . . . speaks to the truths of our connection to the universe and to who we really are.”
—Joan Medlicott, author of Promises of Change
“You’ll want to buy several copies of this book, one to keep for yourself, the others to give to the women friends you are fortunate enough to include in your circle of grace.”
—Lynne Hinton, author of The Order of Things and Friendship Cake
“Stokes has an unquenchable penchant for using the symbolism of objects as a springboard for her stories . . . Her prose is smooth as butter.”
—Publishers Weekly
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
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This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
All poetry contained herein is the original work of the author and may not be used without permission.
Copyright © 2010 by Penelope Stokes.
All rights reserved.
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PRINTING HISTORY
Berkley trade paperback edition / August 2010
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Stokes, Penelope J.
The book of Peach : a novel / Penelope J. Stokes.—Berkley trade paperback ed.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-101-18923-8
1. Self-realization in women—Fiction. 2. Chick lit. I. Title.
PS3569.T6219B66 2010
813’.54—dc22
2010006128
http://us.penguingroup.com
For Pam,
now and always
Acknowledgments
Special thanks to my agent, Claudia Cross, and my editor, Wendy McCurdy, for their ongoing support and encouragement.
And to my family of choice, my family of faith, all the people in my life who love and support me in the valleys and on the mountains. You know who you are. Thank you.
Thou art thy mother’s glass, and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Preamble
Make no mistake; I was brought up to be a Southern Lady. Not a Southern girl, mind you. Southern girls are an accident of birth and geography. Southern Ladies are an intentional crafting, shaped in their malleable years until they are perfectly sculpted and flawless, ready to harden.
Contrary to popular opinion and Hollywood images, everyone in the South knows that wealth is not the primary issue in becoming a Southern Lady. Nor is beauty. Nor are character, integrity, honor, grace, charm, or any of the other virtues Southerners claim to revere.
What’s important is the Name.
A girl can be ugly as a mud fence and dumb as a brick, not to mention crafty as a cockroach, but if she has the right name and the right heritage, she can get by just fine. She will marry well, wear designer clothes, carry a gold card, and be recognized at a hundred yards by every waiter at the country club.
She will, in short, become a Southern Lady.
It’s all in the Name.
In the beginning, Adam was given the task of naming all the animals of creation. But before he even knew what hit him, Eve took over the job, and women have held the post ever since. Naming has been refined through the eons, since our First Mother pondered a giraffe, but it is nevertheless a heritage still closely guarded and maintained by the mothers of would-be Southern Ladies.
I grew up in Mississippi, in an obscure little town called Chulahatchie, on the banks of the Tombigbee River. As Mama is quick to remind me, however, I am not a child of Mississippi. My gilded lineage traces back several generations to a remote branch of the Bell family, one of Tennessee’s finest, from up around Clarksville.
By the time the Late Unpleasantness was over and the carpetbaggers had feasted on the spoils of war, the Bells no longer had two nickels to rub together or a pot to piss in. But they did have a couple of assets that enabled them to hold on to their place in society: a good name and an ancestral home.
The good name, of course, had nothing to do with honor or integrity, and by the turn of the new century, the ancestral home was falling down around the Bells’ patrician heads. But still they held the land, and still they held out hope for future generations. Hope in the form of the Name that would be passed on. The family Name, the bedrock, the mortar that binds together the disparate stones of crumbling Southern culture.
Because my Bell heritage came through my mother’s side of the family, the Na
me could easily have been lost to the ravages of time and social custom. Southern women do, after all, adhere to the old-fashioned notion of women taking their husbands’ names at the altar. But the Bell women weren’t about to lose their connection to the Bell line. If they couldn’t keep the Name when they married, by God, they would hang on to it elsewhere.
The female trunk of the family tree, then, went something like this: My grandmother GiGi, Mama’s mama, carried the name Georgia Bell Posner Barclay. Mama was Donna Bell Barclay Rondell. My older sister, who was thirteen and humiliated when I was born, was christened Melanie Bell Barclay Rondell. And I, with infant tongue unable to protest, was saddled with Priscilla Bell Posner Rondell.
Peach, to my friends and most of my family.
Mama, of course, refused to acknowledge this nickname and always called me Priscilla. Or if she was really angry, “Priscilla Bell!” To this day it gets my attention. I was a Bell, my mother would remind me when I got out of line, and I had better learn to act like one.
It was rumored—and my family fed the supposition and blew upon its dying embers, I suspect—that my ancestors traced back to the original Tennessee Bells, hosts and victims of the famous Bell Witch. All during my childhood and youth I heard stories of the Bell Witch, tales designed to instill in me a healthy respect for my foremothers and a reverence for the Name that had been handed down to me. My warped, rebellious little psyche had great fun with the concept. For years I entertained myself with the assertion that all “belles” were witches, and of course my own mother confirmed that belief at every turn. Once I learned the forbidden word, I played with puns inside my mind: belle + witch = bitch.
I knew that “bitch” was an ugly word, not a word that a Southern Lady would use—in polite company or anywhere else—and so it delighted me all the more. For hours, as I practiced before a full-length mirror learning to “carry myself,” I would mouth the word over and over under my breath: bitch, bitch, bitch. I said it behind my mother’s back when she corrected my posture, and I repeated it as a silent incantation to block out the incessant lectures on what was and was not appropriate behavior for a Southern Lady. She never caught me, not even when I said it over her head as she was hemming my gown for the Miss Mississippi Pageant.
It was an invisible victory, a tiny hairline fissure in the plaster of my mold. But it was a beginning. A harbinger of things to come.
The day after my graduation from college, I shook the red clay of Mississippi off my pumps and vowed never to return again.
That was twenty-three years ago.
Now, God help me, I’m back.
PART ONE
Backstory
Erasing
rubs the words away
but still the imprint
on the page
remains.
Unlearning
is the hardest lesson
of them all.
1
It’s all my psychiatrist’s fault.
The turning point came the week I turned forty-five. One Friday evening in October I celebrated my birthday with my husband, Robert; my best friend, Julia; and her current boyfriend, Kenneth. It was one of those magical autumn evenings in Asheville—a glorious pink and purple sunset over the western mountains, followed by a diamond-studded dark blue night sky and a crescent of silver moon. Champagne and candlelight at the Grove Park Inn, dinner on the Sunset Terrace, music on the crisp, cool air. Perfect.
The following Monday afternoon, while I was at the Grove Park Spa getting a massage with the gift certificate Julia had given me as a birthday present, Robert left a voice mail informing me that he had fallen out of love with me and into love with someone else.
Ironically, it was the birthday that hit me hardest—harder even than Robert’s abrupt and unexpected departure. At forty, I could still claim to be closer to my thirties than my fifties. Even at forty-four, I hadn’t quite crested the hill.
But when I turned forty-five, I suddenly found myself standing on the dizzying precipice of middle age, looking down the dark valley of dotage. One short slide away from being a bona fide dowager. A crone.
What’s more, when I glanced back over my shoulder, I saw precious few mountaintops gilded by sunlight. Mostly just a maze of aimless paths and dead ends and quite a number of smoldering ruins, most recent among them the demise of my twenty-year marriage.
It took me all fall and winter and into the early spring to come to these insights. In late February I finally made the mistake of confessing my self-doubt to my therapist.
I sobbed and sniffed and told him everything. “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” I said. “I’ve run out of money. Robert’s going to take over the house because I can’t afford to keep it. I’ve got no place to go, no job, no prospects. I’m forty-five years old, and I have no options.”
“There are always options,” the old fool said. “Always choices.” He peered at me with bright beady eyes over a hawkish nose. “The past both informs and transforms the future. Maybe you could spend some time at home. A month or two—or more, if you’re so inclined. Get your feet under you. Decide what you’d like to do with your life. Revisit certain issues in the way you were raised.”
My head snapped up. “Raised?” I said. “Cows are raised. Cabbages are raised. Southern Ladies are brought up.”
Holy shit, I thought. I’m channeling my mother.
He leaned forward and laid a bony claw on the arm of my chair. “Sometimes we discover where we’re going only by finding out where we’ve come from,” he said. “Go home. Talk to her. She’s in that big house all alone; surely she’d welcome an extended visit from her daughter.” He grinned, showing crooked white teeth. “Besides, you’ve always dreamed of becoming a writer. Consider it research. Keep a journal. Listen to your soul.”
A journal. A record of my life, of my relationship with Mama, of my feelings about Robert’s rejection, of the downward spirals and abysmal failures that brought me to this place. A fearless, gutsy, unedited confrontation of myself. An attempt to squeeze insight from experience and find a way back to my center.
Terrifying. Utterly terrifying.
Therapy is no stroll in the park, or even a precarious climb up a raveling rope ladder. It is free-scaling. Finding hand- and toeholds in the smallest of seams, hanging on for dear life, and reminding yourself with every grueling inch that you can neither stay put nor go back down again. No climbing gear, no safety hooks, no rappelling ropes. No tether. Just you and the mountain, and some white-haired old fool on the ground below bellowing encouragements into the shifting wind.
This is not a journey for the faint of heart. It takes a stalwart soul to look into one’s dark places and bring the light. I’ve encountered, in dreams and nightmares and even when I’m wide awake, things that would make space aliens and monsters seem tame by comparison. I’ve battled them, these fire-breathers that wake after sundown. I’ve done my best, only to find myself retreating from the fray with eyebrows singed.
And now he is sending me back into the dragon’s lair.
To my mother’s house.
Lord, how I hate being a stereotype.
2
Mama’s house—the house Daddy bought and restored for her—was a six-thousand-square-foot Greek Revival mansion, built of slave-made red brick with a wide front verandah and six huge square columns. The original plantation, once called the Mabry Estate, had spread out for a thousand acres on both sides of the river.
Most of the land had long since been sold and the slave quarters razed. Now the town of Chulahatchie encroached upon the place like kudzu, and all that remained of the old plantation was the big house, the small brick kitchen, and the carriage house. Perched on a bank above the river, the home lay surrounded by four acres of lush greenery and a wide driveway flanked by a gauntlet of ancient live oak trees draped in Spanish moss.
In a brilliant turn of wit, Daddy had punned off Mama’s name and dubbed the place Belladonna.
She though
t it was a tribute to her, his “beautiful lady.” I suspect that what he really had in mind was deadly nightshade. Poison of choice for the ancients.
Daddy.
The thought of him raised a lump in my throat the size of a grapefruit. The last time I’d been home was for his funeral a year ago in January, and before that, only a handful of times in the twenty-some years Robert and I were married.
My brother and sister came to the funeral, too, bound by filial duty but dragging their heels in the dust. Harry, as always, remained aloof and untouchable. Melanie curled in upon herself with the pain of the loss of Daddy. I moved numbly through the visitation and funeral, vaguely aware of townspeople coming and going but never seeing their faces or hearing the words of consolation that were spoken. All I remember was Daddy lying in the open coffin, his face waxy and pale, with two spots of mortician’s rouge on his cheeks, to make him look “lifelike.”
Standing there looking down at him, I felt the weight of a thousand regrets, a thousand questions, a thousand sorrows. It had never occurred to me to wonder what my father’s life with my mother had been like—whether he truly loved her, and why. Whether, when they were alone, they ever laughed together, or wept, or touched. Whether he understood why the children he adored had left home and rarely returned even for the briefest of visits.
Now he was gone, and the sweeping entry to Belladonna suddenly looked shriveled and empty and forlorn.
All my life, I never caught my mother unawares. Whenever I came home from wherever I had been—an afternoon of shopping, my senior prom, my first spring break during my freshman year in college—she seemed to know instinctively the exact moment of my arrival. How she did it will forever remain a mystery, but even now, after all these years, I turned in the driveway and she was already on the porch, waving a handkerchief in my direction. For a moment, as I paused between the first two oaks and caught a glimpse of her in the distance, I had a flashback to the dollhouse that took up a quarter of my bedroom when I was a child. A miniature of Belladonna, complete with a little Mama doll in a blue shirtwaist and matching low-heeled pumps.