The Book of Peach

by Penelope Stokes J.

  It was such a simple, honest statement—Imani’s truth, uncolored by pretense or guile.

  I couldn’t speak my own truth to this innocent child, couldn’t say, Mama can’t miss what she’s never really known. Instead I said, “I miss you, too.”

  She caught the difference and cocked her head the way an intelligent and curious puppy will do. “Remember when we first came to Chulahatchie?” she said. “When Daddy and Mama first found each other again?”

  “Of course I remember.” I took her hand. “That was when I met you.”

  “I was afraid—of Daddy, because he was so big and strange, and of all the newness, and of not knowing what was going to happen. And you told me I didn’t have to like him, but I should at least give him a chance.”

  I looked down at her. “I’d forgotten I said that.”

  She nodded. “Well, maybe that’s what you should do.”

  Scratch pulled up to the curb in his pickup truck and tapped the horn. Imani waved to him, got to her feet, then turned and flung herself into my arms.

  “I love you, Aunt Peach,” she whispered in my ear. “And so does GranDonna.”

  She pulled away, slung her pink Power Rangers backpack over her shoulder, and went skipping down the walk to where her Daddy stood waiting.

  27

  “Pee,” Mama said.

  I looked up from my journal. After Imani left, I had joined my mother on the back verandah, where we sat encapsulated in our individual bubbles, with nothing to say to one another. It wasn’t the companionable quiet of two people who loved and understood each other, but the rigid silence of statues carved in stone, of enemies taking each other’s measure out of the corner of their eyes.

  The setting sun slanted over the Tombigbee, its lengthening rays laying down a path of gold and green from the high riverbank all the way up the lawn to my feet. It felt like an invitation to play, to shuck off my shoes and run barefoot through the grass and over the embankment into the slow-moving water.

  But I didn’t. Grown-ups didn’t go throwing themselves, fully clothed, into the river on a whim.

  “Pee,” Mama said again.

  I was just about to call for Tildy when I realized it was nearly five thirty. Tildy was long gone and wouldn’t be back until Monday morning. The weekend was mine to deal with. Mine alone.

  I sighed and heaved myself to my feet. “All right, Mama, come on; I’ll help you.”

  I brought the walker around to the front of her rocking chair and hoisted her up to lean on the bars. She narrowed her good eye and gave me an appraising look.

  “Na piss. Pee,” she said.

  The words jogged a memory somewhere inside my head—it was the same thing she said to me the day she came home, after I sent Gladys and Dymple Dalrymple packing. She had patted my hand and said, “Pee. Na piss. Pee.”

  “Yeah, yeah, Mama,” I said. “We’re going. Come on.”

  I guided her to the downstairs bathroom, settled her on the toilet, and stepped outside to give her a bit of privacy. As I stood listening at the partially open door, it struck me as ludicrous that I had to help her go to the bathroom but would still turn my back so as not to embarrass her.

  I waited. No tinkle of peeing. I leaned closer. “Mama? You all right?”

  A sound reached my ears, a strangled sob, like the cry of a wounded animal. I pushed the door open. There Mama stood, leaning on the walker with her panties bunched down around her knees, struggling with her good right hand to pull them up one side at a time.

  Time seemed to stop. I took in the scene like a living tableau: Mama, always dressed to the nines with perfect hairdo and makeup, now reduced to wearing a snap-front cotton housedress and tennis shoes, her face bare and wrinkled and soft as old flannel, her perm grown out and her roots undyed.

  The tears she couldn’t shed lodged in my own throat, and I tried in vain to swallow them down. “It’s okay, Mama. I’ll help,” I said in a whisper.

  “No!” she yelled. She shook her head from side to side, and the movement reminded me of a caged tiger I saw once at the zoo.

  I held up both hands. “All right, all right. You just take your time.”

  She slammed the bathroom door in my face and finally, after what seemed an interminable time, opened it again and shuffled out. I followed her back to the verandah. The sun was setting in earnest now, a blaze of orange and pink and purple clouds that arched above us through the branches of the trees.

  The evening had grown chilly. I ducked back into the house, retrieved an afghan from the den, and pulled it around Mama’s shoulders. She paid no attention, but rather glared at me out of her one good eye.

  “Liffen,” she said. “Wee hadda tall.”

  I gave her a stare that must have been as blank as my brain. I had no idea what she wanted.

  She rolled her eye and pointed with her right hand to her ear. “Liffen!” she repeated, louder this time, the way you yell at a person who speaks a different language, as if volume alone might bridge the communication gap.

  It seemed the ultimate irony. Mama and I hadn’t spoken the same language in years. Why start now?

  She leaned forward and grabbed my left hand with her right. “Pee,” she said.

  I exhaled heavily. “You just went to pee.”

  With a resounding smack, she slapped my hand. “Fay ashension,” she commanded, and although the words didn’t entirely register, I knew that tone of voice. I’d heard it all my life.

  “Pay attention?” I repeated. “All right, Mama, I’m listening.”

  Listen. Liffen. We have to talk.

  I hadn’t been liffening. I hadn’t been faying ashension. But apparently nine-year-old Imani Greer had, because she and Mama managed to communicate just fine.

  Mama looked intently into my eyes. “Pee,” she said. “Not Piss.”

  I shrugged and shook my head.

  “Peeee—ch. Not Piss—illa,” she repeated, trying harder. “Gaddie caw Pee Piss,” she went on. “But Pee na Piss. Gaddie’sh fool.”

  When I was a child, I’d sit in front of the Christmas tree and let my eyes slide out of focus so that my whole vision was filled with multicolored sparkling light. Now I listened that way, watching my mother’s lopsided face, letting my mind unfocus so that I could hear what she meant rather than what she said.

  Gladys Dalrymple. She was talking about Gladdie being a fool, calling me Priscilla when the name that fit me was Peach.

  Mama had never called me Peach before in her life, and now she squeezed my hand and said, “I sorry, Pee.”

  “You don’t have anything to be sorry for,” I said. We both knew it was a lie, but it slid past the truth meter on a slippery wave of emotion.

  “You know why I name you Pissilla?” Mama asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Pissilla Owerstreet,” she said. “Sheesh a good friend. Like a big sister. A minnow.”

  “A minnow?” I repeated. “You mean a mentor?”

  Mama nodded.

  “You’re talking about Purdy Overstreet? That old showgirl who just married Hoot Everett?”

  Mama grinned, and even the left side of her face turned up just a little bit. “She unnerstood me, in a way your granmamma GiGi never did.”

  I was beginning to comprehend her words more clearly, but I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

  “Wait a minute. You and GiGi were inseparable. The two of you were just alike.”

  “Not alike,” Mama said. “Jus’ want to please her. Try hard, but—” She shrugged, as if to say my grandmother was impossible to please. “Pissilla unnerstood me, an’ I letter down.”

  My mother lowered her head and stared at the bricks of the verandah floor. “Sush a waste,” she murmured, so low that I could barely hear her. “All those years tryin’ to do what she wanted—the pageants, the country club, ever’thing.”

  I waited, hoping for the full apology I had longed for all my life. The admission that she’d been a bad mother, that she’d
been self-absorbed and emotionally absent, that she hadn’t been there when I needed her, hadn’t accepted me for who I was.

  But it didn’t come.

  She turned her face back toward the river and stared out into the waning light of sunset. And in that moment I saw what she saw. Not the closing of a day, but the ending of a life. A life crowded with other people’s expectations, guided by principles and priorities not her own.

  I saw Melanie turning her back and crossing her arms in adolescent defiance; Harry standing motionless as a boulder in the river, letting the flow of family wash around him and never being moved; myself pulling on Mama’s skirts, demanding attention. I saw Daddy going about his business with important clients; saw GiGi shaking a warning finger in Mama’s face; saw Grandpa Chick sneaking a slug from a hip flask when nobody was looking.

  Where were Mama’s dreams, in this life now gone? Where were her ambitions, her hopes and joys and connections? Where were her regrets, her unfulfilled longings, her visions of a future?

  Where, in this claustrophobic crush of otherness, did she even have a chance to breathe? I had only a brief glimpse of her reality, and it was enough to send me bolting for the nearest exit.

  And then another truth rose briefly to the surface and sank again, the final wave of a soul going down for the last time:

  She did the best she could.

  Maybe not what I would have wished for myself, or for Melanie, or for Harry. Maybe not what would please my grandmother GiGi, or impress Daddy, or pacify Chick, or earn her a trophy as Mother of the Year. Certainly not what she’d want engraved on her tombstone, but reality nevertheless.

  She did the best she could.

  A sound pulled me out of my reverie. A quiet whimper. I looked over at my mother, now a silhouette in the fading light. She was crying. Rocking, shivering, clutching the afghan around her with her good right hand, leaning forward as if to follow the last rays of sunset into darkness.

  Raging against the dying of the light.

  28

  I’d like to say that from that day forward, I thought more about Mama than I did about myself—that I considered her feelings, understood her better, made a concerted effort to slog through the tangled swamp of past hurt and relate to her as one adult to another.

  I’d like to say that.

  But inner transformation is about honesty, about getting to the core of my real feelings, and if I’m going to do that, I have to admit that I didn’t turn into Mother Teresa after one blazing vision on the Damascus Road. And yes, I know I’m mixing my metaphors, but I absolutely cannot relate to Paul, that great Apostle of Chauvinism, and I’m sure as hell not going to use him as my image of epiphany.

  I will say this: Once I started listening, I heard more than I’d bargained for.

  Somebody (I forget who; probably one of the myriad therapists that came and went over the years) told me that when you squeeze a lemon, you don’t get grape jelly. I take this to mean that when life brings on the pressure, what you really are on the inside comes out.

  The doctor warned me. He said that because of the stroke, Mama would have no social filters. She might respond like a person who’s had a bit too much to drink, when the walls come down and the inhibitions get stripped away.

  I interpreted this in the same way Tildy did, that Mama would become more critical, more demanding, more self-centered and narcissistic.

  Instead, the stroke opened up a place in her I never expected to see. And what came out of Mama shocked the living daylights out of me.

  “Pee,” Mama called.

  I came out onto the back verandah wiping my hands on a dish towel. “Dinner’s almost ready,” I said. “They’ll be here any minute. We’re having ham and black-eyed peas and collard greens and corn bread. Just like you wanted.”

  “Peas make me fart,” she said.

  “I thought you liked black-eyed peas.”

  “Dinn’t say I dinn’t like ’em,” she said. “Said they make me fart.”

  “All right. Well, Mama, if we could just not talk about farting at the dinner table, that would be great. We’re having company, you know.”

  Another of my brilliant notions, suggesting that Mama might want to have a few friends over. I figured we’d have a little midafternoon tea with the country club girls, an hour at most, with cucumber sandwiches and lemon squares. Nothing elaborate, nothing labor-intensive.

  Instead, we ended up doing dinner for eight on a Saturday night when Tildy wasn’t there to help out. It was all Mama’s idea, or an idea she and Imani cooked up together.

  Mama had been crystal clear about who was to be invited—none of the country club girls or the bridge group. Instead she wanted Scratch and Alyssa, Dell Haley and Fart Unger and Boone Atkins. And Imani, of course.

  For some reason, this annoyed the blue blazes out of me. Why usurp my friends, when she had friends of her own? Never mind that they were society snobs and unmitigated idiots. They were still her friends—people like Gladys and Dymple and the two platinum blonde skeletons whose names I could never remember.

  But when I brought it up, Mama was adamant. “No,” she said. “Assholelutely not.” She grinned at the pun and snickered. “Mani’s parents, an’ Dell, an’ Dell’s beau—wha’s his name?”

  “Fart Unger?” I said.

  “Yeah.” She nodded. “He loves her. I can tell by the way he looks at her.”

  I was making the list.

  “An’ that boy who brought you home from the dance.” She motioned for me to write it down. “The queer one in the bad suit.”

  I stared at her. “Boone Atkins?”

  “Yeah.” She nodded vehemently. “He’s your friend, right?”

  “Well, yes, but—”

  “I wasn’t very kind to him,” she said.

  “Mama, that was years ago. I’m sure he doesn’t even remember.”

  I was sure Boone did remember, because we had talked about it, but I wasn’t going to tell Mama that.

  “I be nice to him this time.”

  I patted her hand. “I’m sure you will, Mama. It might be better if you didn’t use the word ‘queer.’ ” I went on making the list. “I’ll get a lasagna from the deli and make salad and garlic bread. That’ll be easy enough.”

  “No,” Mama said.

  “What do you mean, no?” I gaped at her.

  “Mani likes ham and greens and corn bread.”

  “Imani can get ham and greens and corn bread every blessed day of the week at the Heartbreak Cafe,” I said. “I’m not baking a ham and cooking vegetables from scratch.”

  In the end, of course, that was exactly what I did. Plus making a homemade banana pudding, which was Imani’s favorite dessert.

  I might have done the cooking, but even with one hand tied behind her back—or in this case, paralyzed in her lap—Mama was the hostess with the magic touch.

  We set up a table outside on the verandah and watched the sun set over the river. Mama told stories about funny things that happened when I was on the pageant circuit, and everybody laughed and had a wonderful time and didn’t seem to notice that she slurred her words and drooled now and then.

  When the banana pudding was gone and the coffee had been served, Mama dropped her bombshell.

  “Tank you for coming,” she said. “When Pee and I talked about ’viting some friends for dinner, Pee thought I meant my old friends, the ones I used to have. But they’re not my friends anymore. When I had the stroke and got all tristed up and confused, they weren’t the ones who came to help me.”

  She looked around the table. “Fart, you built me a ramp so I could get in and out of the house. You got a funny nickname, but Dell loves you and I can tell you love her, too.”

  Fart went beet red right to the top of his shiny bald head.

  “Dell, you brought me food when Tildy wasn’t here. I know you did ’cause Pee’s not that great a cook.” She grinned at me. “Although she did real good tonight.”

  Everybody laughe
d.

  “Scratch and Lyssa, you gave me the best gift of all. You let me be GranDonna to this precious child, and she brought me back to life. Again.”

  Mama wiped a bubble of spittle from the left side of her mouth and went on. “I don’t suppose I’ve been a very nice person during my life,” she said. “And I don’t deserve having anyone be nice to me now. But sometimes we get more than we deserve. You folks have all been like family to my Pee and cared for her like I couldn’t or wouldn’t do.” She choked up with tears and couldn’t go on.

  Was this my mother? The woman who never admitted to being wrong about anything? The woman who had given me birth and then spent a lifetime trying to remake me in her own image?

  When the doctor said that her inhibitions might be affected, I braced myself for a backlash of nastiness. Not this soft gooey inner core, this outpouring of emotion and mush and candor. I wanted to stop her, to keep her from embarrassing herself.

  And me.

  But Mama wasn’t done.

  “Ever’body knows, or at least suspects, that I got money,” she was saying. “I dinn’t do a thing to earn it ’cept marry Pee’s daddy, and most of my life I’ve spent it on myself. But that’s all changed now. You can’t wait until you die to tell the people you love how much you love them. By then it’s too late. So this is what I’m gonna do. I’m dividing my estate and giving a third of it to each of my children. With one exception: This house and everything in it will belong to Pee.”

  The scene before me lurched and shifted into slow motion. Mama was giving Belladonna to me? This house, with all its period furnishings, had to be worth a small fortune—maybe even more than the cash value of the estate.

  What would Melanie and Harry think? And—the thought shouldered its way rudely to the front of my mind—was this a blessing or a curse?

  Mama was still speaking.

  “On one condition,” she said. “That she’ll live here and not sell it.”

  There it was: the curse wrapped in the blessing.

  The shock of it froze me in place. I couldn’t move or react. And I wasn’t the only one. Around the table, in the gathering dusk, no one stirred or shifted or uttered a single sound.