Southern Discomfort

by Tena Clark

  “Oh, he loves you all right,” she said, warming the lotion between her hands, “but men like your daddy sometimes feel as if they have to wrap their love in a hundred-dollar bill.”

  And looking around Waynesboro, I could see I wasn’t the only one getting my love wrapped in hundred-dollar bills. If anyone cared to look close, and much of the town did, they’d notice that the young waitress and then the pretty bank teller and then the buxom cashier at the Lakeview Restaurant were all suddenly wearing new, expensive clothes in the latest style and doing their hair like Jackie Kennedy. My father may have reviled Jackie’s husband, but he must have thought Jackie was the most beautiful woman in the world because most of his women made themselves up to look just like her in a carefully coiffed dark helmet of hair. Often, the woman-of-the-month was also driving a shiny new Cadillac. All courtesy of Lamar Clark. At the time, I didn’t connect the dots, but the rest of the town sure did, and in typical fashion, they turned their backs on his and often their own husbands’ dalliances.

  My mother was another story. Even though for too long she believed she could change him and make the marriage something other than endless heartache, she nonetheless faced Daddy head-on with his countless affairs. Granted, she needed a bucket of bourbon to give her the courage, but she continually challenged him and dared him to come clean. He never did. Instead, in his own little version of the 1950s noir film Gaslight, in which the husband slowly drives his wife crazy by altering her reality, Daddy accused Mama of imagining things and demanded she stop listening to “idle gossip” and just “let it be.”

  None of us recognized it at the time, least of all my mother, but his subtle manipulation of her reality slowly began to eat away at her sanity. He played on the fact that drunks can’t remember the details of their own lives, never mind what happened the night before. So he turned her suspicions into what he deemed “pure fantasy.” The lipstick on his collar became her own from when she greeted him the night before, town gossip about so-and-so with their new Lamar Clark Cadillac became “just the waggin’ of old ladies’ tongues.” So over time and with Daddy’s unrelenting dismantling of her own perception of things, Mama came to believe that she was the one who had done something wrong. When she couldn’t remember the night before, it was easy for him to fill in the blanks with lies. But try as my father did to have it both ways—to cheat and to have his wife look the other way, to just let it be—he was never able to break her. Sure, she cracked, but she never broke.

  Sometimes there wasn’t enough booze in all of Mississippi to dull Mama’s pain and ease her rage, and she boiled over, like a pot of gumbo with too much flame under it—angry and foaming and stinking up the kitchen to high heaven. One of my earliest memories is of Mama in tears pacing the living room floor. I must have been three or four. She was balancing me on one hip, while she held a drink and a cigarette in her other hand, spilling bourbon and ashes as she bounced me back and forth across the room. My cousin Mary Joyce and my aunt Jean were there, trying to calm her down, and years later told me the way the conversation went.

  “He’s with one of his whores. I can feel it,” Mama said, taking a huge gulp of her drink, the ash from her cigarette falling into her hair. I held on for dear life, as her hold on me momentarily loosened and I slipped down her hip. She hoisted me back up and resumed her pacing. “Damn good-for-nuthin’ sonofabitch. Why in hell didn’t y’all stop me from runnin’ off with him?”

  “Ha!” Jean snorted. “A team of horses couldn’t have stopped you and you know it.”

  In her sister, Mama not only had a best friend, she had her best runnin’ buddy, and bless their hearts, they sure did their fair share of runnin’ all over Southern Mississippi in Mama’s various Cadillacs, passing a bottle of bourbon between them and cleaning out the bottoms of more ditches than I can count.

  Mama didn’t respond to Jean as she stopped by the front window, her eyes searching down the street for his car. Jean splashed some bourbon into her sister’s glass.

  “Well, honey, you have to make a choice with that little weasel,” Jean said, her dislike of Daddy and her jealousy of Mama’s nicer lifestyle never far from the surface. “You either leave him, or you stay and try to get him to stop his runnin’ around. That’s it. Either one.”

  Mama stayed, but she never got him to stop his cheating. One day, when I was about eight or nine and Daddy had begun threatening to send her off so she could “dry out,” she started to notice that one of her very own “best friends,” Frances Sawyer, was suddenly wearing expensive clothing and shoes. Frances had also changed her hairstyle to the “Lamar bouffant,” and yes, she was driving a spanking-new car, none of which her husband could have afforded.

  Hurt and betrayed on all sides, it only got worse when some other “friend” called Mama, crowing about how Lamar had just been seen with Frances and that they were headed to their regular meeting place behind the Western Auto Supply. So Mama called Jean, who came right over; their niece, Mary Joyce, also joined the “party” (truth be told, they were all flirting with serious alcohol problems by then and nothing titillated a drunk more than a fool’s errand). They dressed my mother up in a trench coat, sunglasses, and hat, and drove to the Western Auto. Sure enough, there were Daddy and Frances, steaming up the windows of Daddy’s Cadillac. After confirming the gossip, the two sisters and their niece drove away. Rather than confronting him then and there, Mama bided her time, waiting for her revenge. She got it.

  It happened soon after at a Waynesboro Central High School football game, and as usual at a football game in the South, the entire town was there, including Frances, who was sitting a few rows below us. I watched the scene play out as if it were in slow motion. I saw Mama look at Frances, and Daddy look at Mama, and Frances look at both Mama and Daddy. I knew whatever was coming wasn’t going to be pretty. When the game was over, Mama timed her exit so as to meet Frances at the bottom of the stairs. A second too late, Frances looked up to see Mama directly above her. She smiled hesitantly, but Mama’s face was stone. Without breaking stride, Mama took her last step down the stairs, turned, and using her entire six feet of body momentum, elbowed the five-foot-two-inch Frances Sawyer clear over the railing and onto the muddy field below. Mama kept walking, a huge smile now on her face and her head held high. She never looked back as shocked observers ran to Frances’s assistance, pulling her out of the mud and dabbing at her ruined dress with white handkerchiefs. It happened so fast I wasn’t sure if anybody else knew what had taken place. But four of us were damn sure: me, Daddy, Mama, and poor, muddy Mrs. Sawyer.

  Daddy ended his dalliance with her soon after. Once exposed, he later admitted that the affair had lost its “fun.”

  Chapter Nine

  * * *

  It took Daddy less than a month to move on to the next affair—this one a poor girl who was barely out of her teens and a student at a nearby college. Word of it got back to Mama right away. One afternoon, Virgie was scrubbing the kitchen floor and I was watching The Huckleberry Hound Show in the den when we heard Mama on the phone in her bedroom.

  “I finally got him this time, Jean!” Mama yelled to her sister over the phone.

  She had received an anonymous call. I’ve long suspected it was one of Daddy’s other lovers, hoping to get him thrown out of our house and into hers. The woman told Mama that Lamar had just been seen on Highway 84 driving toward Waynesboro in his Cadillac, his arm draped around a young woman who was all but sitting in his lap.

  “I’m on my way over to pick you up,” Mama told Jean. “We are finally going to stop that cheatin’ sonofabitch once and for all.”

  Virgie stood up from the floor, wiped her hands off on a dishrag, and walked over to me.

  “Come on, baby girl,” she said, reaching down to me on the floor. “Let’s you and me go to the barn ’n see what that old mule of yo’s be up to.”

  As I took her hand, Mama rushed into the room with her .38 Colt, which she’d grabbed from under her pillow, snatc
hed a fresh bottle of Jack Daniel’s from the cupboard, and ran out the back door. I felt Virgie’s fingers close tightly on mine, giving them a couple of quick squeezes, as if to say, It be all right, baby, you just hold my hand, real tight, and it be all right.

  Virgie and I trailed after Mama and watched her jump into her car, slam the door, and turn the radio up full blast. Without even looking in our direction, she put the car in reverse. Come to think of it, she didn’t bother to look in the rearview mirror either, just threw it into reverse and gunned it out of the carport, taking a long pull off the bottle before slamming on the brakes, putting it into drive, and zigzagging down the driveway, gravel and dirt spitting from under the tires. As she roared past us, we could hear a song blaring from the car radio. I recognized it from Mama’s stack of records—Little Richard’s “Slippin’ and Slidin’ ”:

  I’ve been told, Baby, you’ve been bold

  I won’t be your fool no more.

  The car disappeared around the last curve in the driveway.

  “Virgie! Mama’s gonna kill Daddy this time!” I cried.

  Virgie gave my hand another squeeze. “No she won’t, chile. Come on over here and let’s sit a spell.”

  On the front porch stairs, Virgie pulled me into her lap, and the two of us sat while she rubbed my back and talked in her low, smooth voice, telling me it was “gon’ be ok, baby girl. She ain’t gonna kill yo’ daddy, cuz yo’ daddy too fast.”

  In the telling and retelling of the story I heard over the years to come, the details of what happened next were eventually filled in. First, Mama picked up Aunt Jean at her house in town and the two of them sped west on Highway 84 headed toward Laurel, where my father had last been seen heading east toward Waynesboro. With the windows open and the radio blasting, they passed Mama’s bottle of whiskey between them. When she drove, Mama drank her whiskey as neat as anyone I ever saw: straight out of the bottle. She steered the car with her left hand, passing the bottle and holding her cigarette with her right. She took a minute to pull her pistol out from under her left leg, where she’d stashed it, to check and make sure it was loaded. It was, but it wouldn’t be for long.

  “There he is!” Jean shouted.

  They saw my father’s car approaching from the other direction and, sure enough, a young woman was sitting close enough to be in his lap. Daddy’s fedora was pushed back on his head, his left hand holding a cigarette and the wheel while his right arm dangled off the girl’s shoulders.

  “Take the bottle and grab the wheel!” my mother yelled to Aunt Jean, then she all but threw the Jack Daniel’s at her sister, who caught it but not before a splash of bourbon splattered across the front seat.

  What came next was one clean series of motions, as elegant as they were miraculous: Mama tossed her cigarette out the window, pulled the pistol from under her leg, half stood, half knelt on the seat to hang out of the driver’s-side window, and with the car still careening down the highway driven by her sister underneath her, opened fire straight at Daddy’s straw fedora through the oncoming windshield.

  Lamar Clark had just enough time after spotting his enraged, wild wife pointing a gun at him to shove the terrified girl’s head under the dashboard and duck behind the steering wheel. He knew Vivian was aiming to kill. Just as he raised his arms to shield his head and face, the windshield exploded in front of him, and a split second later, the driver’s-side window shattered in a thousand pieces, showering the front seat and Daddy.

  As the cars finally passed each other, Mama sat down, resumed control of the wheel, and looked over at Aunt Jean.

  “You think we killed the sonofabitch?” Mama asked, her voice calm and her breathing even. She might as well have been asking Jean if she felt like stopping at the Humdinger for a Coke.

  Jean took a long swig from the bottle before passing it back to her sister. “I don’t know but I sure as hell hope so, because if he ain’t dead, he’s gonna kill us both!”

  The sisters laughed until the tears ran down their cheeks, slapping the dashboard and gasping for breath as they reran the scene—Mama’s acrobatics, Daddy’s eyes “buggin’ out like a frog’s,” and teaching that “lousy sonofabitch a lesson he won’t soon forget.” Finally recovering, Mama took the bottle and Jean lit them two fresh cigarettes.

  “Well, he had it comin’. Sure as hell did,” Mama said. “That bastard. Just wish I’d killed him sooner. Hey, what say we go to the White Hat to celebrate?”

  And so my mother and aunt, both thinking they had shot and killed my father and possibly the girl in cold blood, hit the gas and kept driving west to their favorite bar to celebrate. Rumor had it the girl ended up in an insane asylum. I could totally understand why.

  Daddy called Georgia to clean up the mess.

  Of all of us Clark girls, Georgia was the least like our parents. Where Penny, Elizabeth, and I were all big, loud personalities with opinions to match, Georgia was quiet, steady, and practical. And, aside from Virgie, she was my safety and my steady anchor. There’s a picture of Georgia holding me when I was only days old, and even then you could see in her embrace a protectiveness, a shelter that she felt she was put on the Earth to provide for me. Mama always said, “She never wanted to leave your side.” And she never did. While Penny, who would argue with a fence post just to make sure she won, was picking fights with Daddy, and Elizabeth, the beauty queen, was ironing her gown for the next cotillion, Georgia was making sure I got to my dentist and doctor appointments.

  Georgia had chosen one of the few available careers for a woman in the 1950s—bank teller, and steadily worked her way up until she was the bank’s de facto president. But the actual job and its handsome salary went to one of the men she had hired and trained years before. If the blatant sexism bothered her, she never showed it, at least not to me. She had married her husband, Bobby, right out of high school, had one son, and lived in a series of houses our father built for them around Waynesboro. Over the years, she filled in the gaps in my life that Mama was incapable of filling because of her drinking. It was Georgia who went over my report cards and made sure all of my assignments were in on time. It was Bobby who taught me how to swim and ride a bike and hook a worm and swing a golf club. It was to their house that I often ran when Mama and Daddy’s fights dragged on and night began to fall. And after our mother’s windshield-shattering rampage, it was Georgia who spent most of the night pulling the shards of glass out of our father’s skin with her eyebrow tweezers. She plucked them one by one while he sat on a stool in her kitchen in his boxer shorts and a white tank top, wincing as every shard dropped with a plink into a bowl on the counter. He looked like he had the measles with a hundred tiny nicks in his face, arms, and neck. Watching the scene from the corner of the kitchen, my eight-year-old’s instinct was to giggle, but I wisely held my laughter.

  Daddy refused to go to the hospital because he knew the whole town would be talking if word got out, and he just plain hated doctors. So he had his daughter spend all night pulling the glass out of his skin.

  Rather than explain to Georgia or my other sisters, who hovered nearby in the kitchen, why the college girl was in his lap in the first place, he ranted on about Mama’s being “a c-c-c-crazy, drunk lunatic who could have k-k-k-killed me! Hell, she wanted t-t-t-to kill me! She needs to be locked up! G-G-G-GODdamn fool drunk.” He kept it up until Georgia told him to “hold still.”

  At some point in the night, Mama somehow found her way back home. She was a damn good driver, even when she was drunk. Miraculously, she managed to avoid getting in a serious wreck, although her cars always looked the worse for wear with the dings and dents and scrapes of her many fender benders. Daddy always knew she’d been on a wild ride when he’d find her car crazy-parked near the back door, grass stuck in its front grille and clumps of mud puddled underneath.

  In the morning, Georgia came over to the farm to make sure Mama got herself out of bed and ready for the day. Then she walked into the kitchen where Daddy sat sullin’ up ove
r his coffee with his face and arms covered in tiny bloody scratches and scabs.

  “Daddy, Tena can’t continue dealing with all this crazy stuff,” Georgia said, wishing she could say more, wishing she could insist that I move in with her and Bobby and once and for all get out of the house and away from the insanity of our parents’ dysfunction. But she knew she could never say those words and make those demands because they would never, ever fly with Daddy. Instead, she said, “It’s too much for a little girl.”

  He was silent for a few minutes while she stood in front of him, waiting. Then he lit a cigarette, exhaled a puff of smoke toward the ceiling, and looked at my sister with unflinching eyes.

  “Let it be, Georgia,” he said. “You know your m-m-m-mama’s crazy. I didn’t do n-n-n-nuthin’.”

  After Daddy had gone to work, Mama finally got herself into the kitchen.

  “Mama! You nearly killed Daddy last night!” Georgia said.

  Mama looked at her, her eyes furrowing in consternation.

  “You mean to tell me that sonofabitch is still alive?” she said. Truly angry and disappointed, she reached for a bottle in the cupboard and poured herself her first drink of the day.

  * * *

  Mama did most of her drinking alone. She had to, because except for some wild times Daddy had with Mister James when he was younger, he was never much of a drinker. Maybe it was living with a drunk. Maybe it was because he never wanted to lose control. Maybe it was that he came from a family of teetotalers—not one single drunk in the lot, which is saying something for any family, particularly one in the Deep South. Whatever the reason, he would spend an entire night out at a club in New Orleans or at their friends’ dinner parties, nursing just one whiskey sour on the rare evenings when he drank at all.

  So when she needed company, my mother found drinking buddies elsewhere. Sometimes when I came home, Mama would be entertaining—not one of her lady friends from church or one of Daddy’s business partners’ wives, but Beulah Mae, who’d stop in on her way home from Georgia’s to sit a spell with Mama. They’d be at the kitchen table, each with a tall glass of what looked like sweet tea or ice water but without the ice, laughing and slapping their thighs, telling stories. Sometimes Beulah Mae would just be listening and Mama would be talking, low and steady. My mother seemed almost happy those afternoons sitting and sipping with Beulah Mae, and seeing Mama happy in the afternoons was a rare thing indeed.