The Book of Peach

by Penelope Stokes J.

  What, I wondered, would the old fool make of that image?

  My mother did her best, God knows. And I tried—I really tried—to be what she wanted me to be. But no matter how much effort I put into it, I seemed destined to be a lifelong source of disappointment to the woman who had given me birth and committed herself to bringing me up as a Southern Lady.

  I stared at the words on the page and wondered if they were true. Had I tried hard enough? Could I have been what she wanted me to be if I had devoted more effort to it? And if I had turned out to be that perfect child, that Southern Lady, would I have been me at all, or would Peach Rondell simply have disappeared, like some defenseless earthling absorbed by an alien being with unlimited powers?

  Over breakfast, Mama and I had spent a tense and uncomfortable hour looking at one of the numerous family scrapbooks she had so painstakingly created. She had chosen the one I despised most, the one where she could ooh and aah over what a beautiful little doll I had been as a child.

  My customary response to this ritual was to sit in stony silence, while the soul within me battered at the bars of my cage like a trapped bird. All my life I have regarded Mama’s photograph albums as a form of covert torture—hated the pictures, hated the cruise down memory lane, hated the implied disapproval of my present self in her effusive gushing over the past.

  This morning, however, I had a different response. An unexpected epiphany.

  Now I retrieved the album from the bookcase in the den and took it out to the wicker table on the porch. I positioned the album on my left and the journal on my right, opened both, and waited.

  I’d looked at these photos a thousand times. But suddenly they appeared different, like a hidden code I could finally understand. Something secret, concealed in plain sight. You can pass by unseeing for years, and then once you see it, you see it. And once you see it, you can’t imagine how you could have not seen it for so long.

  Age Four: The Birthday Party. In a faded, brownish photo, a small girl stands at the head of a table full of prissy-looking children with their equally prissy-looking mothers arranged behind them. The candles on the cake are burning. Everyone is smiling—everyone except the birthday girl.

  I’m surprised my mother kept this picture. It was probably my father who insisted upon including it in the photo album. He would have thought it funny. My mother, no doubt, was mortified.

  In the picture, one side of my face is a distorted mass of purple bruises. One eye is swollen shut, and just at the moment the shutter clicked, I have lifted my dress up to my chin to scratch an itchy place on my stomach. My flowered panties are pushed down below my rounded tummy, showing my belly button.

  I remember little of the occasion, and wouldn’t recall the itch at all except that it is caught on film in all its candid honesty. What I do remember is what transpired three days before.

  Mama, who was busy getting dinner, sent me and my brother, Harry, out to play on the porch. This was before we moved into Belladonna, and our “porch” was an enclosure that stretched across the back of the house and served as a combination pantry and playroom.

  Mama’s instructions were clear: Harry was to put his toy soldiers away in the trunk and I was to amuse myself with my play kitchen—a collection of miniature appliances crafted of heavy plywood by my grandpa Chick. I had a little pink stove with an oven door that really opened, a pink cabinet with a tiny sink that pumped real water, and a toy refrigerator, also pink, which stood four feet high and was sturdy enough to stand on. It was every child’s dream kitchen—every child who dreams about Pepto-Bismol, anyway.

  No doubt my mother had put my grandfather up to this burst of creativity. The play kitchen had been my Christmas gift that year. I remember trying hard to look happy and not give in to tears when my brother unwrapped his present, also built by my grandfather—a bright red pickup truck, all wood, with a leather seat and pedals and a real steering wheel.

  I didn’t want my pink kitchen. I wanted Harry’s red truck. But my mother clearly longed to see me playing house, so I pretended. I set up tea parties with the dolls I despised, and then when Mama wasn’t looking, filched Harry’s toy soldiers and drowned them in the sink. Once I even shoved a crab apple into my best doll’s mouth and roasted her, stark naked, in the oven. Mama never understood why Harry called her Barbie-Q.

  That afternoon, as Mother cooked dinner, I tried once more to enjoy playing with my kitchen. When I was bored nearly to tears, my brother came up with a brilliant idea.

  “Come on, Peach, let’s play Jack an’ the Beanstalk,” he suggested, pointing to my pink refrigerator. “I’ll be Jack, you can be the giant, and we’ll use your icebox for the beanstalk.”

  Sounded like a great idea to me—and a lot more interesting than a tea party or cooking a pretend meal for a pretend husband who would come in from the office, eat his pretend dinner, and then disappear to his den without even pretending to be grateful.

  With some difficulty, I hoisted myself and my frilly little dress up onto the stove, and from there to the top of the play refrigerator. “Fee, fi, fo, fum!” I yelled in my best imitation of the giant’s voice. “I smell the blood of an Englishman!” I knew the story, so I should have been prepared for what happened next.

  Harry, playing Jack, began to chop down the beanstalk. He put all his heart and soul into the task, pushing against the plywood refrigerator until it began to rock precariously on the hard tiles of the porch floor. My patent Mary Janes, slick on the bottoms and with absolutely no traction, slid out from under me. Both the refrigerator and I came crashing down. I landed square on my head, and blood went everywhere. My brother stood over me hollering, “I win! I win!”

  I don’t recall much after that, except vague images of being snatched up and rushed to the hospital. A concussion, the doctor said—not life threatening, but I would have some pretty significant bruising. My father held an ice pack to my temple and murmured soothing words about how much he loved me and was glad I would be all right, and what a brave girl I was that I didn’t cry. Even my sister, Melanie, who was seventeen and above us all, condescended to be nice to me.

  My mother said, “Young ladies do not climb on kitchen appliances. It’s just not done.”

  I hadn’t planned it this way, not deliberately, but the outcome was more than I might have hoped for. The next day my father took my play kitchen to the garage and disassembled it. For years the neighbor’s dog, a German shepherd named Bullet, suffered in embarrassed silence in a pink plywood doghouse.

  I felt sorry for poor old Bullet. But getting rid of that pink kitchen was the best birthday present I ever received.

  Age Five: The Christmas Pageant. In this picture, I am standing in front of the fireplace dressed in a flowing white gown, wearing iridescent wings trimmed in gold and a glittering halo. My hair—which is by nature straight as a Baptist preacher—is curled around my ears in a hideously fresh perm. I look like a Christmas ornament some demented child might make in Sunday school, using a Brillo pad for the head.

  My expression in this snapshot is appropriately angelic. I am smiling graciously, looking off in the distance as if overcome by some heavenly vision. The truth was, I had a secret.

  If you look closer, you’ll see, beneath the floor-length hem of the angel’s robe, a pair of black boots peeking out. Cowboy boots. Harry’s boots. I couldn’t have my own—it wouldn’t be ladylike, you know—so I stole his.

  I remember that Christmas pageant vividly—it was the most fun I ever had at a church function. I guarded my secret closely, and my mother never knew what I had done. Nor did my brother ever find his boots.

  But to this day, my mother keeps a framed copy of that photograph on the big square grand piano in the front parlor. It reminds her, I suppose, of how proud she once was of her angel, her little lady.

  Maybe someday I’ll tell her. Meanwhile, every time I see it, it makes me smile.

  Age Six: The Ballet Recital. Here we have a study in contrasts—Three Gr
aces. Or, more aptly, Two Graces and a Dump Truck. The two lithe, slender girls showing off their poise for the camera are my cousins, Belinda and Cynthia. They’re doing a perfect plié. I look like I’m squatting to pee.

  I had seen my sister Melanie’s ballet photographs. Hell, my parents even had a jerky black-and-white home video of her recital. I knew what I was supposed to look like—tall, willowy, graceful, smiling into the lights. Perfect.

  Melanie was always perfect.

  Clearly I was not Melanie, but my mother was a woman of great hope and purpose. What better way for a proper young Southern girl to learn grace and finesse than by taking dance lessons?

  I’ll give my mother credit—at least she attempted to make this torture bearable. On the principle, I suppose, that misery loves company, she enlisted my two cousins to join me. Twice a week, after school, we donned leotards and slippers and took our place at the bar. The dance instructor, a skeletal creature with protruding pelvic bones and veins in her neck the size of sixty-amp wiring, shouted to us over blaring classical music.

  The teacher terrified me. She had long dark hair pulled back in a bun so tight it made her eyebrows arch into her hairline. I cannot recall her name, but once, in an art gallery, I saw her portrait—an expressionistic offering called The Scream. To this day I think of her as the epitome of a face-lift gone bad and wonder where Edvard Munch had the misfortune to meet her.

  If, in my formative years, I suspected that I might not make it into the ranks of proper Southern Lady- hood, ballet class proved it beyond the shadow of a doubt. Belinda and Cynthia did their arabesques and chassés to perfection. My arabesque resembled the opening stance of a karate demonstration, and my chassé, as I see it in retrospect, looked like a hippo with hemorrhoids.

  While the two of them won kudos from Madame de Sade and rapidly advanced to the head of the class, I struggled valiantly just to keep my leotard from crawling into my butt crack. “No, no, no!” she would shriek, her veins bulging and her eyebrows rising impossibly higher. “There is a name for this movement, this grabbing of the buttocks? No? Then it is not done in ballet. Eyes forward; one hand on the bar, the other extended—thus!”

  The day Daddy shot the Three Graces photo was the worst day of all—our ballet recital, when the parents and friends of all these young lovelies gathered to sit in awed rapture as we danced for them. Belinda and Cynthia, of course, had prominent roles. Belinda was the lead swan; Cynthia, taller and even more graceful, with long blonde hair, had been cast as the princess.

  They should have called it Swine Lake. When my turn came—I was the last swan, farthest from center stage, and nearly hidden by the backdrop—I waddled on for my three seconds in the limelight, a porker doing a pirouette, my sausage legs struggling furiously to keep up.

  I made one leap successfully, albeit a mere two inches from the floor, but on the second, a glissade leading to a jeté, my balance failed me and I went tumbling tush over tutu. The audience laughed and applauded graciously, as if they knew I had meant to do it from the beginning.

  Mother withdrew me from ballet class the following week. Cynthia and Belinda went to Ole Miss on performing arts scholarships. My mother’s plans might have panned out, after all, if only she had been given the right sort of material to work with.

  One lone photograph remains from my dance debut—this still life, showing two graceful swans and a stubby baby duckling. I like to think Mama kept it around to remind herself that you can’t make a silk tutu out of a sow’s behind, no matter how hard you work to bring the sow up right.

  History, of course, assures me she had no such epiphany.

  5

  I shut the photograph album and put it away. (“A place for everything, and everything in its place,” Mama always told me.) Then I sat for a while looking out into the yard at an angle, down toward the river bluff. It had rained in the night, and the sun had come out, dazzling the eye with diamond drops on every leaf and blade of grass. One of those glorious spring mornings you get in the South, when mist combines with sunlight to create magic and mystery.

  My favorite book as a child was The Secret Garden, and the backyard at Belladonna had always put me in mind of the walled garden where miracles took place and motherless children found healing and hope. My therapist would make a mountain out of that molehill, no doubt, finding all kinds of hidden significance in my identification with crippled, angst-ridden orphans. And perhaps he was right. Perhaps in my deepest subconscious I did feel abandoned and alone in the world. I certainly never fit in the world my mother had created.

  The question that wouldn’t let me go was, Why did it matter so much? I was forty-five years old, a grown woman, a fully developed and differentiated individual. And yet as soon as I set foot inside this house, some bizarre kind of mother-spell worked on me to turn me into a child again—that child, the one in angel wings and halo and stolen boots, the pudgy little porker in an ill-fitting tutu. The child who always tried so hard and always disappointed.

  I asked Robert this very question once, back in the early days when we still tried to talk, when he still tried to care about what I felt and at least acted like he gave a damn if something hurt or upset me.

  Against my better judgment, we had come to Chulahatchie for the holidays, one of Mama’s huge elaborate Belladonna Christmases. “It’s Christmas,” he said. “What could possibly be so awful about being with your family for Christmas?”

  He found out. The week had been tense and strained and full of false cheer, and the last night, lying in Robert’s arms in my childhood bedroom, I cried and cried and asked him, “Why?”

  “Because she’s your mother,” he said.

  I twisted at the hairs that covered his chest. He hated for me to do this, but I couldn’t seem to help myself; it was a comfort thing, like thumb sucking. He endured it for a while and then closed his hand over mine. “Mothers always hurt their daughters,” he went on. “It’s some kind of leftover evolutionary instinct, I think. Some fish eat their young, you know.”

  I didn’t say anything. I sensed that he was winding up toward profundity, shifting into philosopher mode. I could almost feel the adrenaline pumping through his body as my hand lay on his chest, and I knew that once he got going, he was capable of holding forth half the night on almost any subject. Any residual concern for my feelings would soon dissipate in the energy of his thought processes.

  God, the man did love the sound of his own voice.

  “Perhaps,” he said, “the navel itself is the primal wound inflicted by one’s mother.”

  When Robert began to talk like this, he always adopted an intonation that signified a trumpet fanfare, a drumroll, a clash of cymbals. The ultimate ta-da that called everyone’s attention to his intelligence.

  “The umbilical cord is cut but never totally severed. We enter the world bleeding and crying and forever bear the scar that reaches inward, all the way to the core of our being.”

  Over the years I had come to despise Robert’s philosophical turn of mind and the superior tone of voice that came with it, but I had to admit he had a point. A good one. Every woman I knew had issues with her mother. Every counselor I’d ever visited seemed to think that motherhood was the logical place to start in therapy. Even my current shrink, the old fool, recognized the grit of truth inside this pearl of a stereotype.

  That’s why he’d sent me home to Chulahatchie.

  Disgusted with myself, I got up and tried to shake it off, this morose turn of mind. It was a beautiful day. I ought to get outside and soak up some vitamin D, quit moping around. And I ought to do it before Mama got back, or I’d be stuck for the day.

  I dashed upstairs, retrieved my car keys, and bolted for freedom.

  I was loitering in the produce aisle of the Piggly Wiggly, buying a cantaloupe to counteract the supreme deep-dish pizza and Bunny Tracks ice cream already in my cart, when I heard a voice behind me.

  “You don’t want that one.”

  I turned. “Excuse
me?”

  He smiled—a quirky, lopsided grin punctuated with a little apostrophe of a dimple at the corner of his mouth. “The cantaloupe. It’s not ripe.”

  He came close enough for me to feel warmth emanating from him, catch a whiff of spicy cologne. I backed away, suddenly self-conscious and glad that, to pacify Mama, I had made the effort to put on makeup this morning.

  “Let me show you.” As he took the cantaloupe, his fingers brushed mine—deliberately, I thought, but that might have just been my imagination or wishful thinking. “You press here, on the navel, and if it’s soft, the fruit is ripe.”

  “Since when do cantaloupes have navels?” I blurted out.

  He laughed—a nice laugh, low and warm—then shrugged. “It’s where the vine was connected, like the umbilical cord, so wouldn’t that qualify as a navel?” He put the melon back on the pile, chose another one, and handed it to me. “Try this one.”

  “Okay, thanks.”

  He picked up an orange from the adjacent display, rolling it around in his hands like a baseball. “Do you think you might like to have coffee with me sometime?”

  “Coffee? Sometime?” I repeated like a half-witted parrot.

  He picked up two more oranges and started juggling them, right there in the produce section. “Sure,” he said. “Coffee or tea, lunch or dinner, whatever.” He kept his eyes on the flying oranges—up, over, around, faster and faster. “Say yes so I can stop.”

  I couldn’t keep from laughing. “Okay, yes.”

  “Thank God.” He caught the oranges, replaced them, and turned to face me. “I’m Charles,” he said.

  “I’m Peach.” We looked at each other. I don’t know what he saw, but I liked the view from where I stood. He was tall, with a boyish, round face, slightly receding hairline, and nice eyes. Not a hunk by any definition, not a movie star. Just a nice, ordinary, moderately attractive middle-aged man who looked into my eyes and seemed interested in getting to know me.