“Maybe both are true,” Martha Lee said.
“Sometimes,” Mama said, “sometimes I think all opposites are true.” She gave a little laugh and started to sing “I’m just a walking contradiction” in her Kristofferson imitation. Off-key, as usual.
After that, things were quiet for a while, then Mama asked, “Do you think I was selfish? Going off the way I did?”
“It’s done, Cookie,” Martha Lee said. “You did what you had to do.”
“That’s not what Goody’d say,” Mama said. “My mama’d surely say I was selfish. She’s called me selfish since I could walk, and I guess I can’t rightly argue with her. ‘You’re the center of your own universe, Dinah Mae,’ she’d say.”
“What child isn’t?” Martha Lee said.
“I guess I just didn’t outgrow it,” Mama said.
“We seldom outgrow our foolishnesses, Cookie.”
“Goody would say that’s dressing it up, calling it foolishness. She’d call it plain sin, what I did.”
Sin? A mosquito landed on my arm, but I didn’t flinch him off. I didn’t even breathe.
“Lord, it’s confusing,” Mama said. “We’re given one life, and what we do with it—foolishness or glory or a mix of the two— is what we’ve got to answer for in the end.”
“According to some,” Martha Lee said.
I listened hard while Mama went right on. “And it doesn’t seem to matter if life is marked by days or weeks or years. It’s too little, whatever the measure. It’s a hard thing to figure, how to live life—the one life we’ve been given—and how to be true to yourself and to those you love. I just don’t know how to figure it out.”
“Who does?” Martha Lee said.
“I hope I have time left to do it in,” Mama said, and then added something more, but her voice was too soft to hear. When I stepped in closer, the porch floor creaked underfoot.
“Little pitcher,” Mama called out. “Your ears will burn up, you go listening to what isn’t meant for you.”
I backed away, back to the glider, and picked up my book. “What, Mama?” I called in my most innocent voice.
I’d been glad to stop listening. My brain hurt with all Mama said about sin, and not being able to go home again, and the puzzle of attempting to be true to yourself. I retreated to the safe distance of life at Tara. I’d reached the part where Scarlett was thinking how Rhett knew exactly what she was thinking and how odious it was for a man to know what was in a woman’s mind.
I sat on the glider and considered that idea. What if we could read minds? Then I would know everything my mama had been doing and what she was planning next. The snippets of conversation I heard about drove me mad. “Can you be sure?” . . . “see her again” . . . “give up hope” . . . “another big mistake.”
If we could read minds, I thought, I’d have some warning if Mama was planning on leaving us again, which had been my big fear ever since she climbed out of Mr. Tinsley’s taxi, though I’d tried to erase the idea. I pictured us the night before, eating the dinner Mama had prepared and watching TV. I consoled myself with this image and the way things seemed to have returned to the way they were before Mama got the Hollywood dream stuck in her head.
Much later, the sound of the refrigerator door closing brought me back. Then I thought I heard someone crying, but I must have been mistaken, because not one second later I heard the unmistakable sound of Mama’s laughter.
The sun was straight overhead, and I was hungry.
“Hi, darlin’,” Mama said when I went in. The tabletop was littered with empty Pabst bottles.
Martha Lee was staring off through the window, avoiding my gaze. I got a can of tuna out of the cupboard. Mama reached for another Salem.
“You sure you should?” Martha Lee said.
A little late to be asking, I thought. The whole kitchen stank of smoke.
“Don’t start,” Mama said, lighting up.
“I mean that with my heart,” Martha Lee said. “Not as criticism.”
“I know. I know.”
When I turned to ask Mama if she wanted a sandwich, I caught the way they were looking at each other. I was mistaken about everything being like it used to be. Something had changed, but I didn’t know what.
Weeks would pass and the tomatoes in Martha Lee’s garden would turn from green to red before I would learn that Mama’s coming home had nothing to do with movies and not getting the part.
I was trying to decide if I dared reach for the beer I’d hidden under the steps, when Martha Lee offered me a swig from hers, but all I could picture were the germs sitting on the can top, and that stopped me cold. That was one thing I was particular about. You would be amazed at the number of germs in the average person’s mouth. Dogs are even worse. “No, thanks,” I said.
If Mama were around, this would be the time they’d start telling tales, the “Remember” stories I called them ’cause they always started out with “Remember when we . . .”
“Martha Lee?” I said after a minute.
“Yeah?”
“Tell me a ‘Remember’ story.” I sounded like a baby. I didn’t care.
She stared off into the woods that ringed her property.
“A Duane one,” I said.
When they were girls, every Halloween, Mama and Martha Lee would fashion a dummy out of straw and dress it up in my granddaddy’s old clothes. Then they would dream up a prank using the dummy. They named every dummy Duane, after this boy who had such a crush on Mama in the fifth grade that he told her he’d shoot himself if she didn’t go to the movies with him. Sometimes, at night in bed, I’d imagine Spy Reynolds telling me he’d kill himself if I didn’t go out with him. I’ll have to think about it, I always said, before I conceded, not wanting his death on my conscience. “Did Duane really die?” I asked Mama once. “Better,” Martha Lee said. “He ended up marrying Effie Webb.” And naturally this would set them off.
Sometimes, when they started telling these stories, they would laugh so hard—scream with laughter, actually—that Mama had to beg Martha Lee to stop or she’d pee her pants. They must have told these stories a hundred times, but each time they’d laugh like it was something they’d done only the week before.
One Halloween they took one of the Duanes to the overpass south of town and then waited for the ten o’clock that went from Washington to New Orleans. When they saw the lights making the curve, they lifted Duane and tossed him over the fence and onto the rails. Even knowing it was a straw-filled sack of my granddaddy’s clothes, they gasped at how it looked like a real man lying down there on the rail bed. Then, to hear them tell it, all hell broke loose. Mama maintained you could hear the squeal of the engineer laying on the brakes all the way to Memphis. Next, in what looked like slow motion, the train derailed. It just folded up like a child’s toy and bucked off the track. Mama and Martha Lee took off, heading for the woods by Elders Pond. They stayed there half the night, listening to the sound of sirens crying in the distance.
“We could go to jail for that,” Martha Lee kept whispering to Mama, “it’s a felony or something,” and Mama kept telling her to shut up. The story was front page for a week. By some miracle no one was seriously injured, but even so, the state police were called in to investigate. Mama and Martha Lee made whispered phone calls every day all that week, agreeing they’d confess if Duane’s clothes were traced to my granddaddy, even if it meant they’d go to jail.
The Doberman story was my favorite. That Halloween they were sixteen and had heard about a monastery just over the border in Kentucky where the monks raised Dobermans. They borrowed Samuel Curtis’s car, the one papered with God Is the Answer and Jesus Cares About You stickers on it—which, in the telling, only made the whole thing funnier—and headed for Kentucky with Duane the Dummy sitting up front with them, riding shotgun. They got lost twice before they finally found the place and got to toss Duane over the chain-link fence. Within minutes, those old Dobermans went crazy, barking and yapping
and spitting drool. “They went ape shit,” Mama used to say. Then the whole place lit up, and all these bald monks came running out of the house dressed in their underwear. They would repeat this part to each other over and over, crying with laughter.
Once, Goody was there when they were telling the Doberman story and she got up and stomped out. “That’s a fine good example you two are setting for Natasha,” she sniffed, which only set Mama and Martha Lee off again, doubled over and peeing their pants.
“Tell me a Duane story,” I said again.
Martha Lee lit a cigarette and stared off in the distance.
“The one about the monks and the Dobermans,” I prodded.
She reached over and ruffled my hair. We sat there listening to the catbirds. She never said a word.
I know what she meant. It wasn’t the same.
We sat awhile longer, then I got on my bike and knocked back the kickstand.
I was pedaling down the drive when Martha Lee called after me. “Hey, Tallie.”
“Yeah?”
“The Furl is closed on Monday, right?”
“Right.”
“Come over Monday morning.”
“What for?” I didn’t even turn around. It wasn’t her fault Mama was gone, but the heaviness was setting so hard in my chest that I had to punish someone.
“Well, do you want to learn to drive or don’t you?”
Daddy wasn’t home when I got there.
I’d forgotten to stop at the Cash Store, so there wasn’t much in the house to eat. Sometimes I got so tired of cooking and keeping house, I’d pray that Daddy’d get married again. Rula Wade said after she got used to her step-mama, it wasn’t half bad.
But I didn’t really want another mama. What I wanted was my own mama back. I would have given anything for her to be standing at the stove preparing supper. Pan-fried catfish and butter beans. Or her potato pancakes with applesauce. Or her salmon patties with white sauce. Blackberry cobbler for dessert.
I heated up some canned spaghetti. Fried with some chopped bacon and onions, it wasn’t so bad. After supper I went to my room and got my notebook. Sometimes, when I was missing Mama fierce, I’d read over the list I’d made of everything I remembered about her, starting with the easy things, like when she was born and stuff about her parents and her brother, Grayson, and where she went to school, and how she met and married my daddy.
They met at a dance in Lynchburg. You wouldn’t think it to look at my daddy, but that man can really dance. Mama said that was what first attracted her to him, but what made her fall in love was his smile. “He had the most beautiful smile,” Mama used to tell me. “The first time I saw that smile I just fell ass over bandbox in love.”
At first I liked the story about my daddy’s smile and how it had the power to win my mama, but after a while, when I really thought about it, it made me nervous. It was unsettling to think of a simple thing like a smile having the power to change a person’s life. I was too young to know a person could want that kind of thing, could give herself over to it, regardless of consequences. As it turned out, losing yourself over something as simple as a smile was what the women in our family did. Like marrying down.
When I first started making the lists about my mama, I’d put on her red cashmere sweater and breathe in a mixture of My Sin and cigarette smoke. I did this until the smell wore out. I’d write down all the things she used to do. Like how when I was real little she’d pretend her eye pencils were little kings and queens and would make up stories, putting on and taking off their sharpener-top crowns. And how sometimes she made hand puppets out of rolled-up socks. And how she could walk with a book on her head, could even go up and down stairs without it sliding off. And, if she and Daddy had been out late the night before, how she’d lie on the rug and put cucumber slices over her eyes and make me do it, too. I’d write about how she loved to dance. She could do the Twist and the Chicken and all sorts of dances with weird names that she taught me. She could boogie like a backup singer, shaking till you’d think her tits might fall off. Mama was the only adult woman I knew who could stand on her head.
At school they made me go to a therapist for a while. “How are you doing?” he asked me the first time I went, which was such a stupid question, I didn’t even bother to answer. I mean, duh. How did he think I was doing? Then he asked me to talk to him about Mama, so I told him some of the things on my list. He listened like he really cared and then he asked me if I thought it was possible that maybe I was “idolizing” her, and after that I didn’t say a word to him. They’d pull me out of P.E., and I’d go sit in his dumb office and stare at him and not say one thing and finally they stopped making me go.
Another thing. Mama loved birds. And butterflies, which she said were bugs with birds’ souls. She was plumb crazy about butterflies. She got chickadees to come and eat seed from the palm of her hand. And she knew the Indian names for all the full moons. Names like Snow Moon, and Feather Shedding Moon, Strawberry Moon, and Travel in Canoes Moon. And she could recite by heart all the lyrics of songs from the ’40s to the ’80s. Even the sad old ones like “Isle of Capri” and “Streets of Laredo,” and she’d sing them loud. Pat Boone. Little Richard. Elvis. The Platters. Patsy Cline. Barbra Streisand. Reba. She knew them all. The other thing was she had this really bad voice. She couldn’t hold a tune in a ten-gallon pail.
Mama taught me things that I kept written down in a book I called my rules for living. Forks go on the left. Always stand tall. Everything tastes better with a little salt. Everything. And if you really, truly want something, you can have it.
Which wasn’t true.
All the wanting in the world wasn’t going to bring my mama back.
Tallie’s Book
Forks go on the left.
Everything tastes better with salt.
Always stand tall.
Things don’t always require a pattern to make sense.
Use the juice of a lemon to bring out the shine in your hair.
three
Wanting hasn’t one blessed thing to do with the way things turn out. Or with what ends up coming our way. During the winter of 1988, when Mama was off pursuing her dream, I’d spent every waking moment wanting her back. But when she came home that June, I still wasn’t satisfied. I wore discontent like a second skin. I wanted more. I wanted everything to turn back exactly the way it used to be, as if she’d never gone away.
I wanted Mama to restore order to our lives. Instead, she acted like every rule ever made was designed for other people. Later I wondered how I could have missed this neon clue that something was wrong. Nobody changed overnight like that. Not without a reason.
Before she went to Hollywood, Mama used to take pride in her housekeeping even though our house wasn’t much, nothing like Mama’s childhood home. “You deserve better,” Goody used to tell her, which was her common theme. By “better” we all knew she meant better than my daddy. According to Goody, Mama’s marriage to my daddy was the biggest disappointment in her life.
“It killed your daddy,” she’d tell Mama. “Just killed him.”
“The thing that killed my daddy was living with you,” Mama’d shoot back. “If anything gave Daddy a heart attack it was living with you.” Mama was the sweetest thing in three counties; Goody alone could make her take off like that.
Anyway, after Mama came home from L.A., all the rules went out the window. She left dishes in the sink and the beds unmade. She drank soda for breakfast and didn’t check to see if I’d brushed my teeth at night. She didn’t make me wait an hour to go swimming after I ate. “An old wives’ tale,” she said, although the summer before, if I’d taken so much as one bite of a soda cracker, I would have to sit on the blanket and wait for a full sixty minutes to be marked off on her watch.
That summer, I spent a lot of time swimming at the creek, working to get in shape for the swim team and outdo Sarah Reynolds, my biggest competition. Sarah was small, like Mama, but she was tough. A good swimme
r. We were school friends. She was a rich girl, but not a bitch girl like the others who lived up on the hill in two-story houses. Back then, my biggest secret, the one I even kept from Mama, was the crush I had on Sarah’s older brother, Spaulding. If I married Spy, I’d be marrying up for damn sure.
All the other kids went over to Elders Pond to swim, so Mama and me would have the creek to ourselves. While I practiced the breaststroke and crawl, Mama’d lie stretched out on the blanket, smoking and calling out instructions. “Head down, Tallie,” she’d yell. “Legs straight. Keep your legs straight.”
Buoyed by the water and Mama’s attention, I would lock my knees and flutter kick, knifing through the creek, growing stronger every day. Florence Griffith Joyner was setting records in the U.S. Olympic Trials that summer, and Mama cut out pictures of her and pasted them on my mirror. For inspiration, she said. For a role model. Mama said Flo-Jo proved a woman could be loaded with glamour and win medals, too. It was a useful thing to know, she said.
On the way home from the creek, we usually stopped at the Dairy Queen. Mama drove a used Dodge with rusted-out rocker panels, but she’d pull right up to the drive-thru like she was driving a new Buick. One afternoon she unfolded a twenty that my Uncle Grayson had sent her. “Get whatever you want,” she said. This wild permission so unhinged me, I settled for a single cone, no dip. “You sure that’s all?” she asked, then ordered a butterscotch sundae for herself. With whipped cream and extra nuts. And she didn’t jiggle her knee, her tip-off sign that she was nervous about something like spending too much. Mama told me that whenever Daddy was feeling bad about something he did, he’d whistle an old Bo Diddley tune called “I’m A Man.” He didn’t know he did it, and Mama didn’t tell him. And I never told Mama about her knee jiggling.
Nothing was predictable about Mama that summer. Some nights we’d have cereal for dinner. Other times she’d fry up a chicken. One day she spent the whole week’s food budget on a leg of lamb. “For a barbecue,” she’d announced. I watched while she sliced an entire bulb of garlic into little slivers and stuck them in the meat. Then she put it on a platter and coated it with oil. A marinade, she called it, which sounded like something she must have learned about in California. Then she made a little tent for it out of aluminum foil and set it over coals on our old charcoal grill. All afternoon, while she napped and I rested on the glider and read, the smell of cooking meat filled my throat and drew the Bettises’ yard dog. Later, when Mama took the lamb off the grill, it was lumpy and black, charred beyond recognition, but instead of being upset—all that work, all that money—she just laughed and tossed it to Old Straw.
Leaving Eden Page 4
