She tells how Papaw started out as a poor kid selling papers on the Dallas courthouse steps, but now he has friends in the newspaper business in New Orleans, Beaumont, Houston, every town in the South, how he can walk down the street in New York City and meet a friend on every block.
And then she laughs and says that Jewish men make the best husbands, and she shakes my arm.
I remember how once in the car Daddy said that Granny got so mad at her Dallas Country Club friends that she almost turned into a Jew.
I open one eye and peek at her. I want to ask her again, What is a Jew? But she’s opening a door in the bedside table, taking out a small bottle, slurring her words now, but going strong, louder and louder.
And I am interested in Granny’s stories, in all of their stories. And they all tell me their stories. But right now, I just need to rest my eyes.
Papaw comes to the bedroom door in his striped pajamas and makes his little whistle signal, which seems to mean Watch out!
“Come on to bed, Jeffee; it’s late.”
“You go on to bed. We’re having a lovely time in here, aren’t we?” She looks at me. “Just don’t you worry about us!”
“All right, but don’t be long now.” And he goes to bed, clearing his throat about fifty times.
Granny drains her glass again, shakes my arm again. Then she starts in with what she always gets to—about how she couldn’t help it that she had to leave her first husband, my mother’s real father, even though divorce was such a disgrace that she had to lie to her own mother. She says Homer worked for the Star-Telegram, was from a nice Fort Worth family, had gone to college, and was always going to church, but he was such a mean man and told her every day she was nothing but trash, gave her the silent treatment for weeks, and was even in the Ku Klux Klan.
“What’s the Ku Klux Klan?” I manage to ask, my eyes closed.
“It’s a club for mean, ugly men, and you don’t need to know about it,” she says. I want to ask more about Oliver, but she’s talking too fast, saying how Homer did not know how to have fun.
She says how for years she’d told this Homer man she was going to find somebody else and leave him, and when she did find Papaw, at a big party for newspaper people, and Papaw sent her a dozen roses, then she said to Homer, “Ha! See there! I found somebody!”
Then Homer said, “Yeah, a Jew!”
The Braid
Mama’s hair grows long and longer, down to her waist, where she trims it off even, brushes it out, and then she braids it in a long, thick braid. And then she twists it and coils it and pins it up against the back of her neck. And Mama’s hair is dark like mine is, but it is fine and silky and smooth against her head, not dense and wiry and full of cowlicks like mine is.
She wears it like that always, right through times when such hair is not in style, and Mama is a very stylish woman. She wears it in the braid right through the pompadours and pageboys, and everything else. She just keeps on braiding that long braid and then wrapping it around and around in back and pinning it with the black wire hairpins, and then anchoring it with the giant tortoiseshell hairpins, almost as if that coil is holding herself and all of us in place as well as the hair. No matter what is being done, Mama just goes right on doing what she has always done and knowing that it is the best.
And it is the perfect thing on her, because Mama’s face has a greater evenness on the two sides than any you have ever seen. And she has a high, wide, smoothly rounded forehead, which comes square to the hairline, where the hair flares gently away before being pulled back into the coiled braid. Such a high, smooth forehead demands hair with seriousness, with innocence, with all the authority that hair can ever have.
And she always wears it up, and always neat. If any ends are pulled loose, or are blown loose by a wind of greater force and roughness than any to which Mama has ever intended to be exposed, then those ends will be quickly tucked in again.
When she takes it down, she pulls the hairpins out with one hand, moving rapidly, searching, and gathering, and removing pins, and placing them hurriedly on the dresser, and with the other hand she holds together and manipulates the coiled braid until it is ready to come down. When the braid comes down, she removes the rubber band and starts running her fingers through, separating and undoing it. Then she brushes it out upside down.
I like to watch Mama’s hands braiding that long, thick braid, her body leaning to one side, head tilted over, she and I both watching it lengthening in the mirror, her fingers moving in and out in that particular dance that produces the braid, bit by bit, holding and adding on, holding on and adding, and then tying it off, winding up the end with a tight rubber band—making the end into a hairy little nub to be tucked underneath and never seen, so that the circle of the braid at the back of her head appears to be continuous, with no beginning and no end.
I often sit on the edge of Mama’s bathtub and watch as she brushes out her hair until it crackles with electricity, and then as she divides it and smoothes it and starts making the braid. The bathroom smells of lotion and face powder and of the particular smell her hair had when she brushed it out like that. Sometimes I help with a strap or hairpin, and I study the way she goes through all the motions exactly the same way every time, looking for clues on how to be a woman. But looking in the mirror, I can not help but see how small and graceful and smooth Mama appears, and how tall and clumsy and red-faced I am, looking back at myself with dismay, hair flying in all directions.
When the braid goes up, Mama’s face goes through a subtle change that I cannot describe, except to say that her neck seems to elongate—in that moment, it seems that she is as self-sufficient as a cat. She seems to have a secret that no one else can share, a secret that lives in the house with us but that only once in a while can be glimpsed, and then only out of the corner of your eye. You would almost swear a shape was there, but when you try to look at it, there’s only an empty space.
Mama can braid so fast and with such deftness and control that it seems to me she could do it in her sleep—could do it without noticing what she is doing. In fact, she braids not only her own hair but also mine and that of my younger sisters—she’d do this every single morning, and again at night if our hair needs to be recombed for some social event.
We sisters wear French braids, which are braids that start small, with a small amount of hair on the sides of your forehead, and then, as they are woven closely down on your head, more and more strands are added in a gradual accumulation, until every hair on your head is caught up into these two tight ridges running from front and back on both sides, all the way down your head, and then the two pigtail extensions stick out behind your ears. Ours are braided so tightly that they curl back toward the front, and our scalps get to be tough. Mama goes to a lot of trouble to keep all the hair in the family under control. She does not tolerate any flyaway hair or messy hair or hair in the face. Often she asks me if her own hair has any strands escaping or hairpins slipping out of place, and it is part of my position as the eldest of three daughters to help keep an eye on this for her, as well as on the same situation with my younger sisters.
Once in a while, I come across a long single hair that has somehow escaped with its full length and is lying curled around and around itself, unnoticed, black and spidery, on the white bathroom tile. I pick it up and hold it and marvel at its length and its singleness, and once, knowing how much effort keeps them disposed of, I kept one of these escaped hairs. It was a particularly long and heavy one. I wound it up on my finger and put it into my little box of found objects, which I felt had to be kept. And then I hid the box, because she keeps the house so neat and clean, and sometimes she throws my things away.
Except for when she is combing or washing it, I don’t see Mama’s hair down. Living with her, you don’t have the sense of being around someone with all that hair, because it is always done up, except for rare occasions.
One day she picks me up from school with her hair still wet from wash
ing it. When I get in the car with my books and see that long, tangled, wet black hair streaming over the back of the seat like some strange animal, I am horrified. I can’t stop looking at that hair and at her, and am afraid some of my friends might see it—somehow it seems to be something indecent. She laughs at me and gives me a funny look, and she tells me that when I was still in a crib, she had once leaned over to pick me up with her hair wet and loose, and it fell, sudden and dark, across the crib and I would not stop screaming for an hour after that.
When we have a grade-school fair, Mama dresses as a fortune-telling Gypsy wearing her hair down and around her shoulders like smoke, and has lots of veils and bangles and things on, and with her dark eyes and pierced ears, she really does look the part. I keep walking past her booth and looking and looking at her, and she calls out to me to come in and have my fortune told, but I just keep walking past. She has it dark in the booth, with candles, and it looks as if her hair is moving behind her as the candles flicker, and every time I walk past, she calls out again, and I don’t know why, but I don’t want her telling my fortune. I just want to look at her again and again without her seeing me doing it. But she is always seeing me. It seems to me that there is never a time when she doesn’t see me before I can see her.
As it is getting to be spring, Mama and Daddy are going to a big party where everyone is supposed to dress like Hawaiians, and she tells me that after dinner she needs my help getting dressed. Like always when they go out, there is an atmosphere of bustling and subdued excitement, with whiffs of perfume all around the house.
In her bathroom–dressing room, the air is humid from the bath she has just taken, and heavily scented from the oils and lotions and makeup that have been opened and used during the course of the preparations. She and I can see and talk to each other’s reflections in the long foggy mirror over the dressing table, in which her face is lit as if onstage, and mine is dimmer and behind hers, a watcher and an assistant.
She has gotten a grass skirt somewhere and has strung masses of flowers together and has also bought a dozen bottles of Touch & Glow suntan-color makeup because she does not have time to get a deep tan. I am to help with putting this makeup on her back and where she can’t reach.
Her skin is so white against the black hair. It is an opaque kind of gardenia white, not transparent and blotchy like mine. The whiteness of her skin as she stands there in the bathroom in her underpants makes her seem all the more naked, and as I smooth the orangey tan makeup on her back and shoulders, being careful not to get any in her hair, and then on her legs, I feel funny, because ordinarily there isn’t that much touching between us, and because it seems to me that Mama’s nakedness is being covered by the makeup and yet uncovered at the same time. She makes up her face and neck and arms, and the color change seems to transform her curving, compact, almost Oriental face and body into something tawny and muscular. She puts on the grass skirt, and then Mama lets her hair down.
She bends over, brushing and brushing her hair until it seems to be moving of its own will and the bathroom is filled with its animal smell. Then she suddenly straightens up and shakes out the now-flying mane, letting it fall around her shoulders and down her back, moving now with a kind of power, a music to which the air sways and bounces as she moves. The hair seems to be breathing. She looks at herself in the mirror with an expression I have never seen before, and I stand back in the shadows to watch Mama.
Word Study
We hear the school bus’s honking horn.
Oops, you forgot to hurry up!
“What on earth is wrong with you?”
Obviously, something is.
“Why aren’t you ready for school?”
I do not know the answer to this question.
The kids from our stop are already on the bus when I get out there, and they jeer and laugh with lots of noise as I climb on, like always. I laugh like I don’t care. I see Nathan, but we don’t sit together on the bus. He sits with the boys in the back, where they alternate between urgent whisperings and explosions of sarcastic glee.
I sit alone nearby, the only girl on the block. I look out at fields, fences, trees, creeks, houses, the clattery wooden bridge on Walnut Hill Lane I’m afraid will break down and crash into the rushing creek below.
I hope it’ll happen, because I haven’t done my word-study homework. I imagine how we all might save one another, escaping from the wreck, getting to know one another and becoming friends. I look at the other kids at each stop, each one climbing on to the cheers, jeers, jokes, or silent looks of the boys in the back. It’s the same every day.
Our little country public Walnut Hill Grade School has just been taken into the Dallas city limits. It’s small, and our class includes all kinds, from a couple of rich kids whose big houses are hidden behind tall trees and gates to a family of dirty-faced, towheaded boys who it’s said sleep three in a bed and get beaten up every Saturday night. Their pale, thin-lipped faces look out the windows or at the floor.
A boy named Timmy with glasses and flat hair gets on every day to complete silence. Everyone looks at him. Someone whispers, “His dad was killed in the war.” He glares redly back.
We live with the war still, not really knowing anything about it. The boys draw fighter planes and tanks with their crayons and call each other “Nazis” and “Jews” and “Japs,” and the one being called this becomes deeply hurt. And then the teacher gets unusually mad.
Our teacher’s young and pretty and has red hair. She writes numbers on the blackboard while I look around for whom to ask what to do. Not the teacher—too busy.
Not Nathan—too far across the room, and we don’t talk much at school. Not any of the boys, who will laugh.
Not Gloria—the only one I talk to, because she talks to me. She sits across from me at our worktable, has naturally curly hair and patent-leather shoes, and is not really my friend, because when I draw pictures in my workbook, she says in a certain kind of voice that I am not supposed to do that.
But I have to do it. The pictures need me to draw them.
All of a sudden, the teacher’s handing out sheets of paper with numbers on them and saying we’re supposed to do them, and we have ten minutes. I stare at a long page of arithmetic problems. I missed something. I don’t know what to do.
“You’d better hurry up,” Gloria whispers.
I don’t know what they want. I don’t know what to do. I was not listening. I am afraid to ask. I sit with pencil over my paper, not moving, head pounding, the clock ticking. Why do I have to do this? I want to sneak out, run home, hide in the woods and watch hovering, darting dragonflies, but I am trapped.
“What is wrong with you?” says Gloria, “You’d better hurry up!” She’s finished hers. How does Gloria always know what to do?
The teacher says “Time’s up!” and starts gathering papers.
Gloria hisses, “You’d better hurry up.”
Then the teacher’s standing there, looking at my blank paper with drawings in the margins. The teacher gives me a worried look. Gloria looks like she feels sorry for me and is glad.
“Is something wrong?” says the teacher, leaning down to see my face, which I am trying to hide. She puts her hand on my forehead.
“Do you have a headache?”
I nod. Yes, that’s it—a headache.
She tells me to put my head down on the table.
I put my head down again and wish I could escape like those kids in books. I try to remember the words for word study, but the pictures I need to draw to keep from crying are flying around on the ceiling. I hate school! Gloria keeps looking. I can feel her seeing whatever it is that’s so shameful about me.
It seems there is something wrong with me. I missed something. I keep waiting for something. There seems to be a part of me that refuses to allow the whole of me to move forward one single inch if certain other parts are not saying Okay! Okay, we got it that time! Okay, it is time now to move onward with all of us, every bit of us,
all accounted for, ready and here in step at last, and all together now!
Other people do not appear to be having this problem. Grown-ups of course, but even many other kids seem to know what to do and just join in. I keep waiting to be told. I keep thinking someone will explain things to me, but it does not happen that way. That someone who will be my friend never comes.
So what can I do but pretend and hope no one will notice.
After that, on the playground at recess, we’re all just let loose, the teachers leave us alone, and everybody runs wild, chasing, capturing, fighting, and the boys always pulling the sash off my dress.
It’s a big bare field of a playground, sloping down from the small stucco, tile-roofed building. There’s a long bank of swings on one side, a long bank of black walnut trees on another, a chain-link fence all around. There are old seesaws, heavy and splintery. There’s a dingy sandbox, a jungle gym. All is gray steel and weathered wood, on pounded, cracked black dirt with patches of johnsongrass, clover, chickweed, stickers that cling to my socks, dandelions, and here and there an anthill I can scuff into and watch the ants go nuts.
Once in a while, some kid rides a horse to school.
The girls play hopscotch on cement sidewalks next to the building, using found white rocks, which last longer than the store-bought chalk we steal from classroom blackboards. Sometimes I play hopscotch, but mostly I watch the boys.
I see Nathan out there with other boys, playing ball, and he holds his own. The boys seem to have a lot more fun.
SCRUB IS A SOFTBALL GAME everyone plays in the neighborhood yards and vacant lots every chance we get. When you play scrub, you might start out in the field and rotate in through all the positions to get up to bat, and if nobody gets you out, you could stay at bat for the whole game. There’s no rule about how long the game lasts, so on the other hand, if you keep getting put out, you could spend most of the game standing out in the field.
Hap and Hazard and the End of the World Page 9
