by Janis Owens
As I passed through town and began the slow incline to Magnolia Hill, I saw that nothing had very much changed on Lafayette, a few trees dead or fallen, a few houses boarded up, a few painted, and someone had pulled a doublewide onto a vacant lot at the corner, but that was all. Mama’s house looked better than it had in years, with a shimmering new tin roof and spotless vinyl siding, Michael’s contribution, no doubt, but the effect was still country, for the whole yard was draped fence to fence with her usual Christmas trimmings, chipped reindeer and a plastic manger, and when I knocked on the front door, I could see through the curtains the twinkle of a Christmas tree that had probably been up since Thanksgiving. It restored a feel of simple innocence to the cold, bright morning, the donkey and the manger and the babe in swaddling clothes, and I was suddenly glad I’d come and knocked again. But still, no one answered, and after the third try, I went around back to look for the spare key, and found Mama in her old rocker on the back porch, shelling pecans for Lane cakes, and for the first time in my life, I saw she was finally grown old. Her skin was no more wrinkled, her hair no whiter, but there was a feebleness about her as she picked at the hard shells, the barren look of a woman bereaved.
“Mama?” I called from the yard, and she looked up, startled.
Then after a moment, she said lightly, “Gabriel?”
I cried when I hugged her, for Myra’s nastiness had primed my pump, but she was only happy, her hands tight on my shirt, trying to speak normally, as if there weren’t, and never had been, any Gaps between us.
“Son, son, you look sa good. You’re losing your hair, baby.”
“Well, thanks a lot, Mama.”
“No, no—it suits you, baby, it suits you.”
She had to cook, couldn’t be talked out of it, and after biscuits and tomato gravy and anything else she could pull from her cupboard was duly baked, fried, and consumed, the strain of the trip began to tell on me, and I took her advice to lie down.
“Right here, son. Here in your old bed. Simon says it sags in the middle, but I hate to get rid of it.” She was blank a moment. “You boys was raised on it, hate to just throw it out, like it was trash or something.”
So within an hour of my long-awaited second coming, I was tucked away in the bed of my youth, three decades and still sweating the same woman, and it was hard not to be bitter. I found myself rehashing the sad memory of my ill-received proposal (my third, in fact) and felt very sorry for myself, wondering what deep-seated neuroses had prompted Myra to throw whiskey money at an alcoholic. The whore part, now, that could be seen as possibly funny, but the liquor struck me as a very Sims kind of thing to do, and I again congratulated myself on being rid of her.
But I was too tired to dwell on it, and hadn’t realized how exhausted I was until I woke to a cold winter morning, the smell of coffee in the air and the sound of a vaguely familiar voice in the living room that I finally made out as Jimmy Swaggart, railing on the television. For a moment the shock was too much; it was as if I’d descended in a time warp to the days when Sunday was the day of early rising and last-minute lesson studying and begging Mama to let me walk down early so I could sit on the steps with my friends.
“Aren’t you going to church?” was the first thing she asked when I showed up at the breakfast table, wrapped in a quilt.
“I don’t have any clothes.”
“Well, wear them you had on yesterday. They’ll be fine. Nobody dresses for church like they used to. Clay wears tennis shoes.”
“No—” I backed out gently, not feeling up to facing a church full of Baptists. “I’m still tired, that drive—”
“Myra’ll be there,” she said slyly, her eyes on her coffee, but I was vague, standing and wrapping up tighter in the quilt, wondering why it got so cold in Florida, for the old frame house provided all the insulation of a wet sheet.
“That’s all right.”
There was a line between her eyes when she asked, “Well don’tchu wanna see her?”
I just shrugged. “Listen, Mama, I’m going back to bed. It’s freezing. Can we turn up the heat?”
She said she would, but the line between her eyes never eased, and I knew I was in for an interrogation sometime in the foreseeable future, but retreated back to the bed, feeling warm and guilty at the crack of the screen on the back door when she left. When I was a child, the only divinely-ordained excuse for missing church was an actual fever, and whenever the thermometer cooperated, Mama would set me up with a TV tray filled with medicine and Coke, along with many instructions to lie still and rest. I’d manage a weak nod of assent and wait till they were safely down the road, then pull out a book and read, while all around me Magnolia Hill emptied out, leaving the homes beneath the old oaks calm and peaceful, gradually filling with the rich smell of roasts and hams, slowly baking for Sunday dinner.
After three years in the city, I could almost taste the calm, and I put aside my grievance with Myra to lay there and savor it and wonder if it was about time I was coming home. Mama wouldn’t be around forever, and I could live here weekends and teach somewhere close by, maybe Troy or FSU or Auburn. Somewhere within commuting distance, I thought, and after a moment, I realized I was reconstructing my youth, and if I succeeded, I’d be restoring 1963, living on Magnolia Hill with Mama, spending my days in a classroom, agonizing over Myra in my spare time.
I laughed at the idea, not really very shocked at my digression, and when I heard the low hum of a diesel engine in the drive, I knew who it was before she hit the porch. The front door opened with a bang, and she came straight in the bedroom without a knock, all dressed up for church with her hair curled and sprayed in place, her very beautiful, artfully made-up face harassed as she stalked toward the bed.
I didn’t know what was going on, but her expression was far from pleasant, and I pulled the quilt to my chin, “Myra? What the—”
“The peepbox,” she snapped, dropping to her hands and knees and putting her head under the bed. “Cissie forgot it.”
For a moment I just looked at her tail poked into the air about a foot from the bed. Then I started laughing.
She straightened up and looked at me very narrowly. “Don’t you start that crap with me again—” she began, but I only shook my head.
“Myra, don’t you see what’s going on here? Mama—” I laughed harder, “—she’s fixing us up here. She knows I’m still in bed, so she turns up the heat and sends you over here dressed for the kill. I tell you what, if that woman’d been in the Pentagon, Vietnam would be the fifty-first state.”
She only looked at me a moment, then ducked back under the bed, and after a little rooting, began tossing brightly papered shoeboxes on the bed.
“What do you call these?” she asked, and my smile vanished, disappointed in Mama, thinking she had indeed grown old.
“’Look for Creation,’ she told me. ‘The primary class is waiting.’“
I sighed and held the eyeholes to the light, finding all the old standards that had been rattling around the house since Daddy made them in the early fifties: David and Golaith, Zacchaens, Daniel in the Lion’s Den, but no Creation, and they were beginning to pile up on me when I finally peeped in on Adam and Eve, standing there naked in the garden, modestly shielded by a lion and a palm frond.
“Here you go,” I said, and while she stuffed the other boxes back under the bed, I leaned against the headboard, the peep-box still to my eye. “You ever notice how there’s always a lion standing there in front of Adam? And that very convenient limb hanging there in front of Eve’s—”
She jerked the box out of my hand. “You ever noticed you need therapy?” she snapped, but I only laughed at her.
“I don’t know why. If they were buck naked it’d only be scriptural. Hey, it’d increase Sunday School attendance by a hundred percent. Maybe you should give it a try.”
She didn’t bother to reply, only coming to her feet and heading for the door, but after a cursory peep in the box, she came to a dead hal
t.
“This ain’t Creation” she said in disgust. “This is Adam and Ever
“That is Creation.”
“It is not” she said and went back to the floor, snatching out boxes. “Creation’s the black one with the moon and star cut-outs.”
She ignored me completely this time, holding each box to the light, and when they were scattered all around her, Genesis to The Revelation of St. John the Divine, she sat back on her heels and murmured a barely audible “shoot,” then went to the living room. After a moment, I could hear her, speaking quickly into the phone. “Brother Dorsey? Listen, could you run down and ask Cissie where the Creation peep-box is? Tell her it ain’t under the bed.”
There was a pause of about a minute, and when I got to the living room door, still wrapped in my quilt, she was sitting there in Mama’s old easy chair, one hand holding the phone, the other rubbing her eyes. “Really?” she said, “Oh. Well, tell her I said thanks. Thanks a lot.”
She hung up, but kept rubbing her eyes.
“What?”
“It seems,” she said, “that Sister Catts remembered that she’d lost the Creation peep-box the minute I left the parking lot.” She dropped her hand and looked at me. “However, she sent word not to worry, that she had everything under control, and Brother Sloan wasn’t preaching, some missonary was, so if I was detained, everyone would understand.”
My faith in my mother was instantly restored, and I laughed aloud. “See, see? You were supposed to find me in bed and wake me up and we’ll be dressed again by the time Mama gets back, wrestling with guilt, promising it’ll never happen again.”
“You’re serious, aren’t you?”
I almost shouted. “Of course I’m serious! It’ll make up for the time she set you up with Michael. Oh come on, Myra, quit being so damn stubborn. We still got time, hours—”
But she only looked at me. “Has anyone ever told you your mind’s not right?” she asked. I finally saw that she wasn’t budging an inch and collapsed on the couch, feeling a headache coming on.
“My mind’s fine,” I told her. “It’s my liver and my prostate that’s got me worried.”
“Oh,” she said, and kicked off her shoes, these high-heeled snake-skin pumps that I would estimate cost a week’s salary.
I opened an eye and looked at her. “That lithium hasn’t made you frigid or anything, has it?”
She stood up and began walking around the room in her stocking feet, her arms folded against the cold. “No, why? Did the liquor make you impotent?”
I raised up on my elbows. “I tell you what, Myra. Alcoholism is nothing for you to be making these smart-assed jokes about.”
She turned and looked at me. ‘And manic-depression is?”
I faced her off a moment, then lay back down and closed my eyes. “I thought you were schizophrenic.”
“I’ve been upgraded,” she said. “PTSD. With manic components.”
“What the hell is that?” I murmured.
She answered wryly, “Bad nerves.”
Then she strolled into the bedroom, and I heard the blinds being pulled, then no other sound for a long time. I finally grew curious enough to investigate and found her standing at the side window, looking out at her childhood home that stood desolate in the cold December morning, almost consumed by the kudzu, the roof caved in, orange stickers from the health department plastered on the doors and windows, pronouncing the place condemned. Suddenly, I was ashamed of harassing her, remembering Michael’s words the night I learned she was pregnant: “—and a certain kind a man, and they hit on her, they bit—”
“I’m sorry, Myra,” I said, sitting on the foot of the bed.
She glanced at me curiously. “For this?” she asked, with a nod at the house.
I tapped my chest. “For this.”
“Oh,” she said, then, after a moment, she shrugged. “It’s all right. I’m getting used to it. I tell you what, I’ve heard more lines this past year than I did when I was sixteen.”
“From who?” I asked, suddenly outraged, and that small smile began playing around her mouth again.
“Oh, men I been seeing.”
“You been seeing men?” I shouted.
She looked at me. “What do you think I been seeing? Dogs?”
“Well, that’s just wonderful: Michael’s lying dead in the grave, and I’m sweating it out in New York, puking Antabuse, while you’re down here living it up with the rednecks!”
She didn’t seem too moved by my outburst, only looking at me. “Well, what was I supposed to do? You left the funeral in a huff, so drunk you couldn’t walk—”
“I was not” I snapped. “I drove all the way to the airport. I was perfectly fine.” I jerked at the quilt. “Who’ve you been seeing, anyway? That idiot Randell?”
“Good Lord, Gabriel, forget poor Randell. He weighs about three hundred pounds, has a wife and two grandchildren—”
“Then who?” I insisted.
She was vague. “Oh, just men I know. Mostly the new associate pastor, Carlym Folger. He’s a nice man, Gabriel. The children love him. But he’s only thirty-one—”
“Thirty-one?” I cried, then something else occurred to me, and I really howled. ‘And he’s been giving you a line? A preacher? Damn, I hate these hicks. They always got one hand on the Bible, the other on their fly—”
She only laughed. “Gabriel Catts, you are the most outrageous hypocrite I’ve ever met in my life—”
“Hey, I’m Espiscopalian. We can do these things, we’re allowed.”
“Yeah,” she smirked, “I bet.”
I lay back on the bed crossways, closing my eyes, feeling a definite headache coming on at the idea of this unforeseen competition, while Myra continued easily. “Yeah, ever since Michael’s obit hit the papers, they been calling, all kinds of men, all kinds of lines. They love me, love my red hair, love my children, love my—how do they put it? My strong convictions.” She lay crossways beside me on the bed. “Love my Mercedes”
I opened an eye and looked at her. “Hey, don’t look at me. I drive a Volvo. Sixty thousand miles and new tires. I ain’t hurting.”
She threw back her head then in the high arch I remembered and laughed and laughed. “Oh, I do love you, Gabriel. I do, I do. Maybe Michael was right. He said to wait, to give it a chance.”
“Did he really?” I asked, and she rolled on her side and pressed up against me just like she used to do in the good old days in the servant’s quarter, except back then she was usually naked, and today she was still in her coat, talking with that friendly confidence, her fingertips absently rubbing my chest.
“Yes, he did. I don’t think he liked the idea of some stranger stepping in—”
“Myra, honey,” I said, interrupting her, “if you aren’t planning on being naked here in the next few minutes,” I pointed at her fingertips, “don’t be doing this.”
“Oh,” she said, and rolled to her back, “sorry.”
After a moment, she sat up and pulled her coat around her, and in a much smaller voice, “I’m really not just being a tease here, Gabriel. I mean, I am a Christian, and I do have some convictions that it’s the right thing.” She shrugged. “Anyway, Missy’s almost fifteen. What am I supposed to tell her? That it’s all right for me, but not her?”
“You’re a grown woman. She’s a child—” I began, but she waved me away.
“Michael waited. So can you.”
It wasn’t that I was so hot to hit on her anymore, but simply that her argument was flawed, and I raised up on my elbows. “You were a seventeen-year-old Baptist virgin with Michael—of course he waited. We’re adults; this is different.”
“You’re forgetting your ancient history,” she said, standing and going to the window. “I was seventeen-year-old damaged goods. I’d been treated for syphilis twice when Michael met me.” She paused to let the horror of that remark sink in, then finished. ‘And he respected my wishes, and so can you.” She turned and looked at me.
“I think.”
The rotting old house loomed behind her and I sighed. “Of course I can.”
She smiled very brilliantly then and held out both hands. “Well, we don’t have to wait long. What’s to stop us? I’ll just have to call the children, and you’ll have to go see Peter, our lawyer. Michael left everything all tied up. You’ll have to talk to him. He’ll have to explain—”
So Mama came home at two with some line about having been detained by Brother Sloan, and, finding us making wedding plans over the kitchen table, had a very smug look on her face, like Sherman telegraphing Lincoln from Savannah. Myra, of course, was still smiling the smile of the unvanquished, and I was left to chew my nails and wonder if this might not be the shape of things to come, but I had a damn-the-torpedoes fatality about the whole thing, and insisted we get the details out of the way before I lost my nerve. By evening I’d made arrangements with my landlord over my stuff (including the cat), and been tentatively released from my contract at NYU by my very sympathetic dean, a Jewish mama’s boy himself, who understood perfectly my need to relocate when I described the horrid conditions I’d found my mother living in (“—rats everywhere, no heat. Boy, when I see my sister—”).
Myra easily got in touch with Missy in Georgia and found her blessedly enthusiastic, only wanting to be a bridesmaid and wear an aqua dress and nothing more. Clayton, who’d come home from church with Mama, was equally accepting, only looking at me levelly out of his Michael Catts eyes, but not in an unfriendly manner, not the way I’d feared a child who’d once screamed when his mother left the room might react.
