by Cynthia Webb
I was stunned into silence, a pretty unusual state for me. They thought I left to get away from them. They thought living in the city was a torture I endured just to be away from them. I would have left anywhere, fled from paradise even, to live in the city. But even so, what did they think there was to hold me here—fast food joints, dredged beaches, nylon pastel running suits? How about the little retirement houses with tiny lawns and home state license plates on the mailbox? The Lincoln Continentals with bumper stickers that said “Out Spending Our Children’s Inheritance”?
Well, yes, it’s true, I left my family. And I came back only for state occasions, and then I left again as soon as possible. I loved them, God did I love them, and I never meant to cause them pain. But, hell, it couldn’t be an accident, could it, that everything I wanted to do, everything I had to do, everything that made my life worth living, gave them pain? Was I a thirty-five year old adolescent rebel? Was there any cure for this condition that wasn’t worse than the disease?
We pulled into my parents’ driveway. Seth parked the car, took off his seat belt, and swung his car door open. Before he ducked his head to swing his big body out of the little car, he said, “I’m not forgetting you’re my little sister. I love you no matter what you do. Just stay out of trouble while you’re home. You hear me?” He was pulling my backpack out of the dinky little trunk when he added, like an afterthought, “Momma will kill me if I let anything happen to you.”
By then Momma had come in the yard to greet me. Three or four tiny lizards darted into the bushes before her approach. Wiry and thin, she moves like she means business, which she always does. Surrounded by an armor of perfume, she gave me a big hug that made me feel like a small child, even though I’m nearly a foot taller. Her hair was in a careful set from the hairdressers. She was wearing a baby blue jogging suit with white fringe and rhinestones across the chest, her earrings had fringe and rhinestones hanging from them, and so did her white leather sneakers.
“Baby Sister, I’m so glad you’re home!” I could have told you what she was going to say next. I could have lip-synced the words along with her. “You must be hungry. Come in, sit down, I’ll fix you a plate of something.” She turned to Seth, “You, too, Seth, I made the lady peas the way you like them.”
“Aw, Momma,” he said, “I surely appreciate that, but can’t I come by later? I really have to drop by the office.”
“Just let me make you a plate to take with you. It won’t take me a minute. Just some fried chicken, and biscuits, and a little gravy, and some of the fried okra that Baby Sister loves so, and a big helping of the lady peas.”
“I can’t carry all that to the office, Momma. I’ll come in and eat, but I’ve got to hurry.”
Momma hustled us in the back door. Nobody ever used the front door. The kitchen, which looked smaller every time I saw it, was cluttered on every surface. It smelled like a sweet dream of my childhood, like everything good I remembered about home.
Seth and I sat in the breezeway, at the formica-covered “breakfast table” (actually, every meal was consumed there, with the sole exception of Christmas dinner). Momma heaped plates for us of the greasy, cholesterol-ridden, wonderful food, and then brought us gigantic glasses of sweet iced tea.
The table looked smaller than I remembered. It was hard to imagine all seven of us eating supper here every night for so many years. Momma didn’t sit down; she never did. Every time either Seth or I finished a serving, Momma ran into the kitchen and brought back more okra, or biscuits, or whatever. I kept eating a long time after I should have stopped. I was filling myself up with everything I had missed. I love fried okra. There’s nothing like it. It isn’t the same frozen, and you can’t even find it in most grocery stores in the city. I saw some once in an Indian market in the city, and bought a big bag and brought it home to my apartment. When I dumped it out on the tiny surface in my kitchen that calls itself a counter, I saw that the pods were big and tough. Momma always used small, soft, fuzzy little ones.
I had watched Momma many times at the kitchen sink, cutting the okra into thin, even pieces with a small, sharp knife. She did it with incredible speed, slicing them against her thumb, never nicking herself.
I had a hell of a time hacking my dry old okra into uneven pieces, then I rolled the prickly, dry things in flour and fried them in oil. They turned out hard and tasteless except for the burned grease coating, and the oily smell had hung in my kitchen for days. Nothing like the tender nuggets in front of me.
Finally Momma brought us bowls of banana pudding, with sliced bananas and vanilla wafers and whipped cream on top. She poured herself a cup of coffee, and sat down at the table beside us. Seth said he had to go change and get to the office. He thanked Momma for the food, and went out the back door, leaving his dishes on the table. She carried them into the kitchen, and then came back and put artificial sweetener in her coffee from the little bowl in the middle of the table that held the tiny pink envelopes.
It was kind of nice, for a moment there, Momma with her coffee and me with my banana pudding. I’m sure there must have been moments like that when I was growing up, of peace and contentment between us, but that’s not the way I remember it.
Momma looked at me, full in the face. I had her attention for once, and, in spite of myself, I was enjoying it. She reached out and stroked my hair thoughtfully. “I can make an appointment with Reginald for you. He’s booked up ahead for weeks, but I know he’d work you in right away for me.”
“Reginald?”
“My new hairdresser.” She delicately patted the blond structure on top of her own head. It reminded me of those “floral arrangements” advertised on television. The ones you can order by number from a book of photographs anywhere in the country. Within twenty-four hours, your designated recipient will be delivered an exact replica, each flower and piece of greenery standing stiffly in its assigned spot.
“You don’t go to Bobby Ann’s anymore?”
“Why no, honey, she closed down her shop and sells real estate. Everybody gets done at the mall now.”
For as long as I could remember, my mother had had a standing appointment at Bobby Ann’s House of Beauty, every Thursday morning. The “House” was actually what used to be the garage of Bobby Ann’s small, concrete-block house. Her construction worker husband had converted it to a beauty shop. I had been forcibly compelled to accompany my mother there on many occasions. The fumes of hair spray and permanent solution and nail polish remover burned my nose and throat while I flipped through the exotic magazines: Today’s Hair Styles; Soap Opera News; The Star. I half-listened to the women’s gossip. Their facial expressions and voices were entirely bright and cheerful, and yet there was something terribly sad underneath it all. The talk was about who was pregnant (Again! Already? They’re not Catholic, are they?) Whose husband had left her. Whose husband was drinking bad again. These were hard-working women, for whom this was a rare opportunity for female companionship and conversation. I think it took the strong combination of community grooming standards and the purifying effect of the pain inflicted (the pulling of strands of hair with a crochet needle through tiny holes in a plastic cap looked excessively sadistic to me) for them to allow themselves this luxury.
Although I had submitted to Bobby’s arts on very few occasions, and then only under the most extreme compulsion, I felt a strange sense of loss. The rituals of Bobby Ann’s House of Beauty, which had appeared to me to be at least as sustaining to my mother as those of her church, were no more.
I pulled back from my mother’s reach. “No, Momma, I like my hair just fine the way it is.”
The puzzlement on her face was obvious. She couldn’t understand why her only daughter wanted to look so tacky, her hair hanging down all wild and witchy like that. What had she ever done, except sacrifice her own life to her children, that would cause her daughter to ruin her own looks just to spite her mother? Shit, I thought. My plane had landed less than two hours earlier, and already I was
stuck in that mess again. To save myself, to keep from getting sucked into the quicksands of my complicated family currents, I had to keep my focus on why I’d come.
“Momma, did you ever know anyone named Elijah Wilson?”
She frowned. “I don’t think so. Should I? Is he one of the Grove Hill Wilsons?”
“No.” I hesitated, then plunged in. “Momma, did you know any of the black people who lived around here? Back when I was little, and even before that, before I was born?”
“What a question! Let me think. Well, you know, you just did not see many black people around here in those days. Not like in some cities or towns. There just weren’t any around. When I was a child in Selma, well, everybody had their colored help. But, by the time I got married and moved here with your father, only the best-off did. And I didn’t know any of them personally, if that’s what you meant.”
“When they integrated the schools, where did the black children come from?”
“Oh, them. They lived way out over by Piney Woods Road. A few families, not many. I don’t know where they did their shopping, because we never saw them in town. Some of the men were grove workers for your Uncle Billy, and Miller’s Groves, but I don’t know any more about it than that.”
“Do they still live out there?”
“I really don’t know. I haven’t been out that way in quite some time. It was all country back then, you remember, between here and there, but you wouldn’t recognize it anymore, the way it’s built up.”
You wouldn’t recognize it anymore. I had heard that phrase so often, whenever I came back to Port Mullet. I was finally beginning to realize the fundamental truth of it. I wouldn’t recognize anything. What had made me think that I was any more qualified than a Californian or Texan or hell, a Japanese, for that matter, to come waltzing into town and start researching the life of a man who had drowned thirty-five years ago? I hadn’t really been here even back when I lived here.
Momma picked up my glass and took it into the kitchen, then returned with it refilled with ice and tea. “Now, Baby Sister, I don’t want to upset you...” I held my breath as she continued, “...but I saw Johnny the other day.”
“Johnny who?”
Tears welled up in her eyes, messing up her blue eyeliner and matching eye shadow. “You’ve got no business talking to me like that, young lady.”
I sighed. “All right. I’m sorry. How is he doing, Momma?”
She wiped under her eyes. “He still hasn’t remarried. I think he still holds a candle for you. He always worshiped the ground you walked on. You know, I always thought that if you’d gone for counseling from the Reverend Andrews...”
I tuned her out for a few minutes. I knew she could go on indefinitely about my ex-husband, Johnny Berry, and I couldn’t bear to listen. I tuned back in again when I thought I’d let her ramble enough.
“...you know, if you got your hair fixed, Mary Sue down at the Clothes Carousel could help you pick out some nice clothes, and you’d be a fine police chief ’s wife.”
“Police chief ’s wife? Me? Who’s the chief of police?”
“Why Johnny, of course. Your daddy and I did a lot of politicking for the new mayor in the last election. So did Johnny’s folks. After the election, old Billy Thompson retired, and, why, Johnny got promoted.”
I felt certain now that this was an alternate universe, and one where the air mixture didn’t suit my breathing, and the gravity had strange effects on my limbs. In New York, I was a happy person, a funny, bright-colored fish on a coral reef full of other bright, exotic creatures. I fit right in, and had a great time swimming around. But here, in this dark and dangerous world, I’d just discovered that my ex-husband was the god-damned chief of police of all things. I had a funny feeling that meant, among other things, he wouldn’t like me going around telling the story of how I taught him to smoke pot. Or the time we drove through the night at a hundred miles an hour, all the way to Key West, just to steal the sign that says “The Southernmost Point in the US.” And then drove back, singing songs and drinking Tequila Sunrises out of a gallon thermos.
Why did I have to go and think about that? Why did I ever have to think about Johnny again? Now, it’s Johnny my family feels sorry for. But here’s the god-awful truth. I got hurt mighty bad there, too. I haven’t really ever gotten over it, and I don’t think I ever will.
By the time I was twenty-two, I’d been married and divorced, so I wasn’t being arbitrary when I said that I wasn’t cut out for any kind of long-term monogamy. It was what you might call a field-tested proposition.
Momma said that Daddy was out in the Gulf, fishing. I knew I wasn’t supposed to take it as an insult that he wasn’t there to greet me. Everyone knew that when the fish were biting or the hunting was good, the men would be gone, business or family be damned. There was even a nightly fishing report on the local news station, ending with the slogan, “Remember, if you’re too busy to go fishing, you’re just too busy.”
My own Daddy wasn’t the worst, not by a long shot. We knew some families where the men left for their hunting camps before Thanksgiving and didn’t return until after New Years. Other men, “real good family men,” drove up to their own houses in the late afternoon on December 24th, in their bloody, dirty, camouflaged shirts and pants, with muddy boots, reeking of whiskey. Good sports, they tried to be patient with the childish Christmas rituals. Their patience lasted until about 9:30 Christmas morning. They’d be sitting in their recliners, surrounded by ripped-open boxes, and messy piles of wrapping paper. Noisy, over-excited children begging for batteries and for help in putting together their new plastic toys. The women were busy in the kitchen, but the comforts of dinner were hours away. It was too early for a beer or a bourbon.
Sometimes the well-meaning patriarch would let it slip that “Hell, Christmas would mean a lot more to me if it didn’t come right in the middle of hunting season.” My father once said something like that. It didn’t seem to bother my brothers, intent on their presents from Santa. They had G I Joe’s at first, and toy guns. Later there were b.b. guns, and not long after that real shot guns. I’m still bitter that the boys each got mini-bikes on their thirteenth Christmas, while I got a pink bicycle with a white wicker basket on the front.
When I realized I was sitting there, filled with rage for Christmases of twenty years past, I decided to get up and get started. Momma refused my offer of help with the dishes, a pleasant switch in our relationship from the days when I lived at home.
She was willing enough to loan me her car, but uneasy about letting me drive: “If I call Seth, I’m sure he’ll come right over and drive you where you want to go. He’d be happy to do that for me.”
“I can drive, Momma. I had a job delivering groceries when I was in high school, remember?”
She looked like she was going to cry again. “Of course I remember. It’s just you’ve lived so long in that city, without a car. I worry about you up there, walking alone at night.”
I tried a sweet, conciliatory voice. “Really, Momma, I appreciate your concern. But I’ll be fine. I promise I’ll drive real careful.”
“You just watch these old people. I don’t think you realize what terrible drivers they are.”
I doubted that it would be more dangerous than taking a cab through midtown Manhattan at rush hour, but I knew enough to let the conversation end there.
I took the keys off the hook near the door. Momma stood there, looking forlorn. It’s not like I was leaving her without a car. Daddy had taken his truck and both his Buick and her Oldsmobile sat in the driveway. What I really wanted to do was rent a car, but I didn’t know a way to do that without Momma taking it as an insult.
In Manhattan, I was properly contemptuous of Florida’s bull-dozed lots, rows of identical houses with tiny windows, and central air in every house, blasting all day and night, every single day and night—except, of course, the two cool, breezy days a year. The lawns were seeded with scraggly St. Augustine grass, which re
quired extensive watering to keep its appearance from imitating well-done bacon. From Manhattan, the use of electricity and water had seemed heedlessly extravagant. But when I tried to slide into the car, the seats were so hot that it felt like my legs were blistering through my jeans. The metal ignition and the turn indicator burned my hand. I felt like I couldn’t breath in the thoroughly-stewed air. Sweat ran down the back of my neck. Air conditioning seemed an inspired idea. I turned it on full blast.
I was a little rusty in my driving skills, but my main problem was the big car. It felt like I was steering a yacht. I was also unfamiliar with power brakes, electric windows and locks. Even the control to move back the front seat was electric and complicated.
I drove through the downtown proper, and was amazed yet again at how right Momma and Seth were about one thing. I almost didn’t recognize the place. New houses everywhere. More people moved here all the time. My God, what did all these people think they would find here? What was it that they hadn’t found wherever it was they came from?
Every year I’d been in school here, my classes grew larger. I’d been born into a small Southern town, surrounded by orange groves, and open countryside. But I had left a homogenized Sunbelt blight of development after development. I was maybe nine or ten when building really took off. People retired to Port Mullet for the low taxes and the warm weather. Construction workers were brought down from up north to build retirement villages for retired firemen and teachers and insurance salesmen from Ohio and Michigan and Maryland. When the masons and carpenters and roofers saw the nice weather, and the low cost of living, they sent for their families and settled them in little concrete block houses. Their cousins moved in next and opened pizza parlors. (Up until then, we’d thought of pizza as an exotic foreign food.) Then suddenly there were miniature golf courses and drive-in movies and bowling alleys, fast food restaurants and car dealerships. It wasn’t too long before as many kids in school talked Yankee as talked right. And yet the development continued. Each time I visited Port Mullet I thought, that’s enough, there’s no more room, but the next time, more tacky little buildings were crammed in.
