The Book of Peach

by Penelope Stokes J.

  And meanwhile the second condition went unspoken, hanging out there like a noose swaying in the wind.

  On the condition that she’ll live here . . . with me.

  29

  “Has she lost her ever-loving mind?” I yelled into the phone. On the other end I could hear Melanie stifling a laugh. “This is not funny,” I said.

  Melanie took a deep breath and tried to compose herself. “I know.”

  “Harry’s worthless. You’re the only one I can talk to,” I said. “So what would you do if you were in my place?”

  “Well, first of all, I wouldn’t be in your place,” Melanie said. “Why do you think I moved to California?”

  “You did not move halfway across the world to get away from Mama,” I said. “You moved because your husband landed a once-in-a-lifetime marketing job at Universal.”

  “Well, yes, Walton’s job was the prime mover, so to speak. But having a continent between me and Mama was a significant peripheral benefit.”

  I felt my stomach churn. “Melanie, I can’t do this alone.”

  A long and tense silence stretched between us. “Do you want the house? God knows Harry and I won’t fight you for it, if that’s what you’re worried about. As far as I’m concerned, the whole pile could crumble to rubble, and I wouldn’t even show up to watch the bulldozer bury the remains. Mama always loved that house more than she did any of us. When she’s gone, you can do whatever you want—sell it, live in it, whatever.”

  “As long as I stay here and take care of Mama in the meantime. As long as I let you and Harry abdicate your family responsibilities.”

  “Don’t be snotty, Peach. You don’t have to do anything. You have a choice. We can find a place for her. St. Agnes, maybe. Have you taken over the finances? There should be plenty of money. And if there’s not, Walton and I will help. Harry will kick in, too. I’ll make sure of that.”

  She went on talking, spinning out ideas and plans as if somehow the words would help. Finally I couldn’t take it anymore. “Mel, shut up.”

  “What?”

  “I said, shut the hell up. I don’t need your money, and I don’t need your plans. I don’t need you to take over and fix this thing. I need you to be a sister.”

  For a minute or two, she said nothing. Then: “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “And therein lies the problem.”

  After talking to Melanie, I didn’t have the energy to try to contact Harry, who was probably out climbing Kilimanjaro or something. Home for him was Louisville, Kentucky—not an entire continent away, but far enough. He owned a travel agency that catered to the Kentucky blue bloods who bred multimillion-dollar racehorses. Apparently the horsey set spent a lot of their time traveling to exotic places, with my brother as their guide.

  Not for the first time, I wondered how the two of them had done so well for themselves when my life seemed like such a mess. And then I thought about Melanie’s nervous breakdown after Daddy’s death and how Walton hadn’t come back with her for the funeral because (Melanie said) he had to meet with the Hollywood brass about some new project. I thought about Harry, the unmarried playboy, who wore his independence like a badge of honor, who laughed too loud and drank too much, and yet beneath the surface seemed like a sad and lonely little boy. I could close my eyes and see him, that day on the back porch when I cracked my skull open, standing over me yelling, “I win! I win!”

  He was still winning, but at what cost?

  You don’t have to do anything. You have a choice.

  Melanie’s words are still echoing inside my head, the same words I’ve heard from half a dozen therapists over the years: You always have a choice. Claim your power to decide.

  I called the old white-haired fool and filled him in on this new wrinkle. He chuckled and said, “Well, isn’t that interesting?”

  For him, maybe. For me it feels like the manipulation of the century.

  And that’s the bottom line, isn’t it? I’m furious at Mama, furious because I am, to use Dell Haley’s word, trapped. I’m angry at the circumstances—at Mama’s stroke, at the abdication of my siblings. I’m mad as hell about being left here to deal with this on my own without any help or support.

  Anger is what I feel. Rawboned, white-hot fury. But if anger is the manifestation of fear or pain, I need to go underneath the surface and ask myself what I’m afraid of and why I’m so hurt.

  The fear is the terror of quicksand, pulling me down so that I’ll never get away. That’s pretty easy to figure out. The hurt is more difficult. Am I hurt because this is just one more example of Mama trying to control me? Am I hurt because I feel so terribly alone?

  Melanie and Harry can throw money at the situation until Judgment Day, and that doesn’t give me what I really need. How can I shuffle Mama off to St. Agnes where some stranger would have to help her settle on the toilet and pull up her panties afterward? I might get furious as blue blazes at her, but I can’t just turn my back and walk away.

  I was all set to go, to leave Chulahatchie and get my life back. Now lightning has struck, and I’m that single tree standing out in the middle of nowhere, split down the middle and smoldering.

  “Why?” I said. It was the question I’d been asking myself ever since Mama dropped her bombshell at dinner on Saturday night. Now I was asking Dell.

  “I don’t know,” Dell said. “Maybe she’s scared, Peach. Your mama’s always been fiercely independent and capable.”

  I gave her my best sarcastic grimace. “You think?”

  Dell didn’t take the bait. Instead she just smiled and went on talking. “Now she’s had the stroke, and her whole life has changed. She’s lost her identity. She’s lost her freedom. She’s drowning.”

  “And she wants to take me down with her?”

  “I doubt that she has any truly evil purpose in mind. I expect she’s just scared.”

  “Well, so am I.”

  Dell gave me an intent look. “What are you afraid of?”

  I thought about this for a minute. “All my life, Dell, I’ve been tangled up in my mother’s plans for me. She was determined to bring me up as a Southern Lady. Soybean Queen, Miss Ole Miss, all of it. For God’s sake, she had me fitted for the Miss America crown by the time I was six. And when it didn’t happen, when I disappointed her, there was hell to pay.”

  I took a sip of my coffee and toyed with the slice of fudge pie in front of me. “And I always disappointed her, Dell. Always. It was never enough. All I ever wanted was for her to be proud of me. Of me. Not of what I did or accomplished or won, but of me. Just me, myself. Proud of the person I turned out to be.”

  “Are you proud of you?” Dell asked.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Are you proud of yourself?” she repeated. “Do you like who you are, the person you’ve become? Are you enough for yourself?”

  “Well, yes,” I said. “For the most part. I mean, I’m not proud of some of the things I’ve done, but I’ve grown a lot in the past year. I feel more centered, more comfortable in my own skin.” I reached out and touched her hand, just lightly, then pulled away. “I’ve got friends.”

  “Then does it really matter what your mother thinks?”

  We sat in silence with the question hanging between us. After a minute Dell got up, gave me a quick kiss on the top of the head, and squeezed my shoulder.

  “If you really want to understand why your mama did this,” she said, “I’d suggest asking the only one who knows.”

  30

  The whole world, it seemed, was blooming on Mother’s Day.

  I got Mama up, fixed her hair, and helped her dress, and together we went to church. The minister preached, predictably, about the high and holy calling of motherhood and all the sacrifices mothers made for their children. The Gospel according to Hallmark.

  The old anger stirred in me again. I wondered briefly if church was supposed to leave you mad and seething. This time, however, the anger was not directed a
t Mama but at a society that led us to believe in this kind of unattainable perfection.

  My mind drifted, and what surfaced in the mix of random thoughts was a vivid recollection of the bad poetry I’d shuffled through at the card store two days earlier:

  Mom, You’ve Always Been There for Me.

  Nope.

  A Mother’s Love Is Forever.

  Not exactly.

  Mother, I Hope I Turn Out Just Like You.

  Lord, deliver me.

  I ventured a sidelong glance at Mama. She appeared to be listening intently and drooling just a little on the left side. I took a tissue out of my purse and dabbed at her chin. She turned and looked at me.

  She wasn’t drooling. She was crying.

  Back at home I got Mama out of her church clothes and into her housedress, and I was about to go warm up leftovers for our lunch when she stopped me.

  “Hep,” she said.

  I turned to see her holding out the Mother’s Day corsage the church had provided for all the mothers. It was rather pathetic, really, a couple of carnations dyed lavender and held together with florist tape. But she wanted it, so I pinned it to her dress, where it clashed mightily with the blue and pink stripes.

  “Let me change clothes,” I said, “and then I’ll fix us some lunch.”

  “Take a time,” Mama said. “I be onna perch.”

  I smiled to myself. For over thirty years, ever since Daddy bought and renovated Belladonna for her, Mama had steadfastly refused to use the word “porch” and instantly corrected anyone who dared to utter the word in her presence. Verandah, she said. It was a verandah, not a porch.

  Poor people, I suppose, had porches. Only the privileged few had verandahs.

  With the stroke, our back verandah had been demoted. It was now the porch, the reading room, the dining space, the place for Mama to sit and watch the world go by.

  And today the world was putting on quite a show.

  Down the lawn the azaleas were still in high bloom—hot pink, pale pink, and fuchsia; lavender and white and dark purple. A curving swath of color punctuated by an occasional splash of yellow. Clumps of bluestar and butterfly bushes, red-hot pokers and bright yellow sedum.

  I came out and sat beside her, following her gaze out toward the river, breathing in the mixed perfumes of grass and flower and fresh spring breeze. When I let my eyes unfocus, the colors mingled and swam before me like the Christmas lights, like a gift unwrapping itself layer by layer.

  “Beauty-full, inn’t it?” Mama said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  And it was. I felt as if I were seeing spring for the first time, the loveliness of Belladonna, the quiet of the early afternoon. As if it had been there all along, but hidden behind a veil of painful memories.

  I thought about Dell’s advice, that if I wanted answers, I should go to the only one who held them. “Mama,” I said, “why did you decide to leave Belladonna to me? And why the condition that I had to live here?”

  “Dahlin’,” she said, “inn’t it obvious?”

  “Not to me,” I said. I wanted to add, Unless your purpose is to blackmail me into staying here against my will. But something stopped me. Some look in her eyes—a look I had never seen before, or if I had seen it, I hadn’t recognized or acknowledged it.

  Love.

  “You are my chile,” she said. “My younges’, my daughter, my baby. I try to bring you up right, to teach you ever’thing I knew. I dinn’t do such a good job. But you grown up real good, and now I’m old, and it’s your turn.”

  She bit her lip and blinked back the tears that were almost always with her now, at the first sign of any emotion. “Nobody wans to have a shroke,” she went on, “but there’s always a blessin’ on the backside of the curse.”

  I stared at her, waiting. This was my mother, talking about blessings and curses, opening a vein, revealing herself with such vulnerability? I didn’t dare speak or move, and besides that, I had nothing to say.

  “The blessin’,” she said, “is insight.” She paused and rubbed at her paralyzed left hand. “I always cared too much about appearances, about what other people thought. People like Gaddie an’ that biscuit-dough lump of a daughter of hers.”

  I tried unsuccessfully to hide the grin, but Mama saw it and smiled, too, ducking her head the way Imani did when she was feeling shy or embarrassed. “But look a’ me now. I got all the external stuff stripped away, and this is what I’m left with.” She lifted her left claw and waved it awkwardly.

  I opened my mouth to protest, but she shot me a look that shut me right up. “I got eyes,” she said. “I can see. And this is what I’ve learned from being trapped in here: What’s important is what’s on the inside. In the heart. In the soul.”

  She fixed her one good eye on me. “You wanna know why I lef’ Belladonna to you?” she asked. “It’s because I don’t have anythin’ else to give you. I’ve watched you this year. You got a good heart. You got friends who love you. You been kind to me when God knows I didn’t give you any reason to. You dinn’t abandon me when I got sick.”

  “Oh, Mama, I couldn’t have—”

  She held up her hand for silence and turned her face out toward the river. “Look at this place,” she said. “It’s peaceful and beautiful, and—” She paused and took a breath. “It’s yours. It’s the kind of place a writer ought to have.”

  I frowned at her. “A writer?”

  “ ’Course,” she said. “Ever’body knows that’s what you want to do. Mani told me. Dell told me. Your queer friend Boone told me.”

  “Gay,” I said.

  She ignored this. “It’s all you ever do, write in that journal of yours.”

  I didn’t bother telling her that journaling was a kind of therapy for me, that if she read what I’d written about her, it’d curl her hair so tight she’d never need to get a perm again. I didn’t tell her how much I dreaded the idea of living in this house and taking care of her for the rest of her life.

  Instead I said, “But Mama, Chulahatchie’s not my home.”

  “Home is where you’re loved,” she said. “Home is where people accept you for who you are.” She gave a one-sided shrug. “No wonder you never felt at home here.”

  It was the closest she ever got to admitting the truth about our relationship as mother and daughter. Before the tears overtook her, she rushed ahead. “You got friends here, folks who love you and need you. Family, like Dell and Boone and Imani. If you don’t feel quite at home, then just visit for a while longer. Give yourself time to write that book that’s been stewing around inside your head.”

  I knew what my answer had to be. I’d known it even before we started this conversation, but that didn’t make it any easier. All the heaviness in my heart came out on a sigh.

  “All right, Mama. I’ll stay.”

  I have to admit, she’s right about one thing. I do have people here who love me—love me enough to forgive me when I screw up, love me enough not to hold my woundedness against me. It’s more than I could say for the place I once called “home.” All I have there is an ex-husband who traded me in on a younger model and—if the lack of communication is any indication—took all our mutual friends along with him.

  I’m staying in Chulahatchie for the time being, not because Mama has signed over Belladonna to me but because it’s the right thing to do. At the moment my motivation is eighty percent duty and twenty percent love, but I have hopes that in time I’ll arrive at the tipping point where love moves up front and center and duty takes a backseat.

  Still, duty’s not such a bad motive where mothers and daughters are concerned. I never thought about it from that point of view, but maybe being a mother is sometimes eighty percent duty and twenty percent love, as well. And if Mama did the best she could with me, well, then, I guess I’ll just do the best I can with her.

  I told my therapist everything, and he asked the one question I hadn’t thought of: Does it really matter what the motive is? Doesn’t it matt
er more that you do the right thing and let the feelings sort themselves out in their own time?

  Maybe the old fool really is worth eighty bucks an hour.

  I’m still working on it, this business of letting the emotions sort themselves out. I’m not so good at being patient. Not so good at waiting, at holding life with an open hand.

  It’s the Buddhist way, Boone tells me: centering myself in my truth, letting go of outcomes, trusting the universe to bring things right. A Catholic Buddhist—now, that seems like a pretty significant oxymoron, but then Boone’s always danced to his own rhythms.

  “Pee?”

  I looked up as my mother shuffled out onto the back verandah, leaning on her walker. “Hey, Mama.”

  “I dinn’t mean to interrupt you.”

  “It’s okay, Mama. I’m just journaling.”

  She sat down with a thud in the chair next to me, reached out with her good hand, and began stroking my fingers. “I talk to Jane Lee Custer at St. Agnes,” she said. “They got a studio apartment available; I can move in next week.”

  I might have had a minor TIA of my own; her words went right past me like an echo in a dark chamber. “What are you talking about, Mama? What do you mean, move?”

  She gazed at me with the softest expression I’d ever seen on her face. Even ravaged and lopsided, she had never looked more beautiful. “Honey, I dinn’t give you Belladonna so you could nurse me. You got other things to do. Important things. You dinn’t think I was gonna live here with you and expect you to take care of me?”

  “Well, yes, I thought you were going to stay,” I said. “I thought that was the whole point.”

  “The whole point?” Her expression shifted from tenderness to inexpressible sadness. “You thought I gave you Belladonna in exchange for—”

  She shook her head. “It was a gift, honey. Always a gift. Never a bribe.”