Chimes from a Cracked Southern Belle

by Reinhardt, Susan

  “At least get yourself a new sofa. Let me buy you one, please. That old thing you salvaged has enough dust to sink a lung. You and those poor children are certain to come down with asthma or Legionnaires’ disease.” She was the type who thought all diseases and afflictions were out there waiting, focusing on people with a no-holds-barred hunger to infect. As if “catching” asthma was as likely as coming down with a cold. She was part of the clean and proper class of society, living in one of the better neighborhoods, Lakeside Park, in Spartanburg, South Carolina; or at least it had been until a development of stucco houses with imported tile roofs and a gated entrance had one-upped it a few years back.

  Mama lived where landscaping was a must, where the mailboxes came to life with hand-painted cardinals or hummingbirds, and every Saturday morning the whine of mowers and blowers joined a neighborly chorus of yard betterment and beautification.

  In Maple Heights, lawns ran the gamut from well groomed to growing wild. Most were in between: tangles of ancient shrubbery and scattered weeds, random flowers, along with the occasional meticulously tended beds. What I liked best about this neighborhood were the houses with white window boxes overflowing with geraniums. It was as if each window had a wide red smile, a way of sizing life up and figuring the good outweighed the bad. I’ll bet the women in those houses were the cheerful, pie-baking types. Married to the men-who-don’t-try-to-kill-their-wives-at-the-BI-LO types.

  “You’re 40 years old,” Mama said, “and starting over, living like a college coed in her first pitiful apartment with discards for furnishings. I tell you, Prudy, it is way long overdue—”

  “Dee. It’s Dee now. And I’m 38.” She loved to add years to make a point. At 25 she called me an old maid, and at 30, she decided I was a middle-aged woman frittering away her fertility and all but asking for a child with Down syndrome. “You and Bryce need to have children before your eggs go bad,” she’d said daily, years before my ex-husband plunged into stark-raving lunatic madness. She’d mail me the most horrifying stories of maternal-age-related birth defects. All sorts of trisomies and broken chromosomes—cleft palates, intestines flopped outside the body, spines that didn’t close, brains that failed to form—and she’d say, “If the Lord didn’t want women to have babies early, he wouldn’t have given them their periods at 12.”

  She licked the ball of her thumb and rubbed a smear of something from my picture window. “You’re doing much better,” she said, “so don’t go getting me wrong. You’ve at least got a roof over y’alls heads, but I won’t give it much more credit than that. I’ll tell you, Pru . . . Dee, and I know you’re tired of hearing this, but it’s not good that you’ve skipped out entirely on one of the stages of healing. You’ve got to get mad at Bryce if you want to find wellness of mind. You’ve got to remember the ordeal from the BI-LO parking lot or you’ll never be right in the head till you do.” She took great pleasure in quoting my last and final therapist, the words on her tongue giving her authority.

  Mama walked over to my vanity, the one decent piece of furniture I owned, and began messing with her hair.

  “In addition,” she said, trying to resurrect a flattened sprig of ash blond bang, “you don’t seem to even want to remember that mess. I pray every night you’ll face that day.”

  I try every night before closing my eyes to remember. All I can see is his face all red and bloated. Nothing comes into focus after that. Nothing but that scarlet face. That horrible sweaty red face and his right arm, high in the air, ready to strike, the weapon he clutched so small I never saw it coming.

  Mama began emptying the garbage cans in the kitchen, den and bedroom. She was not one to sit still. “I want you to know that other than this here gloomy, semi-trashy rental unit, your poor old mother loves you and is proud of you as I can be. Just think about running over to Dillard’s and seeing about the makeup counter job. At least you could get free mascara and all sorts of goodies. Whatever you do to make payments on this . . . this . . . dinky rental will be fine, I’m sure. I’ll be proud even if you have to sell McNuggets, sugar pie. You just don’t realize how proud you’ve made me and your daddy.”

  I thought about this carefully as I stared at the ceiling, noticing the brown outlines of past storms looping their circular calling cards in the plaster. Proud of what? That I could finally get out of bed and open a can of Campbell’s by myself? That I could drive to the store and buy toothpaste and tampons or fill out the paperwork to rent an apartment, sign my children up for school? That I could, on most days, walk without a cane or even so much as a blatant limp?

  She sighed, only with vocals, like a series of monotoned yoga groans. “One thing I’d like you to consider and get to quickly is the business of finding those kids a new daddy now that theirs is in prison till he’s old enough for swelling prostrates, or however you say it, and clogged arteries, and for death, which I look forward to coming premature if you want perfect honesty. I know it doesn’t sound very Christian, but that’s how I feel and I can’t help it.”

  She peered once more out the window, her eyes on the May sky, a diluted blue that seemed overpowered by the intensity of a South Carolina sun, a sun whose violent heat would hold us hostage from now through late September. I knew to let her keep talking; no point interrupting or it would take twice as long.

  “Jay’s nearly 7 and Miranda’s pushing 4. That’s two years with no daddy. Lord, I’d have thought you’d at least have a prospect, a decent respectable man to give those children an example. Even most widows I know only wait a year before getting back into the swing of things. The men widows are worse. They chomp around all lost and hungry, wearing wrinkled clothes and those fallen down faces. Not a month or two later, and most of ’em get a replacement wife before the first one grows cold. Remember Paul the fellow that runs the hotdog place downtown? He married Ann Trotter three weeks after Linda died. Did you know if a boy child grows up without a daddy, he could end up a homosexual?” She whispered the word, as if it were a sin just to say it.

  I’d heard this for more than a year since the trial ended and my ex, the Rev. Bryce Jeter, got his 25 years and the kids and I changed our last names back to my original, which sounds so much prettier than Jeter. This was when I decided instead of being Prudence “Prudy” Jeter I’d go ahead and become Dee. Bye-bye, Prudy Jeter. Hello, Dee Millings.

  Mama believed that once the proceedings were over and my injuries had healed enough, divorce papers signed and sealed, it was then proper and advisable to tiptoe back into the dating pool.

  However, that did not include sexual relations, which she was dead set against before marriage. And quite possibly even afterward.

  “Recirculate,” she’d said, rotating her hands. “You’re a beautiful girl, just like a Lane Bryant model before they started using those skinny ones. Lose a few pounds . . . or maybe not. Come to think of it, at least a few men find large fannies an asset. ’Course I keep telling you to cut off all that long hair you wear like you were an aging Hollywood star. I don’t know . . . you have a lot to offer and at your age you can’t afford to just sit around like deli turkey waiting to spoil. Every one of us has ourselves an expiration date. Be it with the Maker or in seeking out a proper mate.”

  I wasn’t sure I was ready for a new man and figured I’d already tested fate with my expiration date. It was my goal just to live on my own again, get a job, find a program for Jay who just so happened to be a bona-fide genius. It was enough just to step out of a bed when the sun made its morning announcements, trying to be the best mother I could under such extreme circumstances. Recirculating wasn’t foremost on the agenda. A job was. And going to nursing school. How in the world I majored in psychology and still married a psycho is beyond me. Kind of rattles a girl’s confidence in herself and future choices.

  I needed to bring in $550 a month to pay for this rented roof over our heads and another $500 or s
o to feed the three of us and put gas in the car and electricity in the lights, water in the faucets. Oh, and hook up the phone, cable and Internet. Then there was the issue of spending money for entertainment and camps, maybe some new clothes.

  Most importantly, it was my goal to get through a day with more smiles than tears and to be able to hold my children without breaking down and feeling I had failed them. Miranda may not remember the gruesome event, but Jay does. He has nightmares weekly, which I finally dealt with by letting him get into bed with us. Three of us. All in the same bed. I should have rented a one-bedroom apartment to save money, but Mama insisted it’s against the laws of common decency for a brother and sister to share a bedroom and certainly against the laws of nature for a mama to bed down with her young children once they got past a certain age, say four months tops.

  She slowly walked over to my yard-sale-bought chest of drawers, tapped on the wood, then wiped her hands on the front of her pale pink Levis of the dirt she imagined was accumulating in my “rental.” What a striking woman she was. Even at 60 she had the same figure and bone structure of Linda Evans in her Dynasty heyday, even wore her hair the exact same way. Her nose was small and delicate, her face thin and cheekbones high enough to hold age at bay far longer than women of lesser genetic fortune. She stood 5 feet, 10 inches in bare feet and always wore modern and fashionable shoes that lifted her above most creatures walking this earth. She meant well. Only I wasn’t well enough for what she meant.

  “Your Aunt Weepie said there’s a boy her husband met at work that she’d like to fix you—”

  “Do you want some lunch, Mom? I’ve got some tuna or I could make a grilled cheese. I don’t have to get the kids for another hour or so.” Anyone Aunt Weepie knew I wanted nothing to do with. I wasn’t in the mood to discuss a possible blind date, especially some guy my mother’s funeral-crashing older sister had dug up from God knew where.

  “No, honey, Weepie and I are going over to the Red Lobster for some shrimp. We like to go at lunch ’cause it’s cheaper and we can get us a Bloody Mary. Actually, she’s taken to drinking two of them. Last time we went she insisted on tootling over to the Red Cross, where she gave them a pint of her Vodka’d up blood and promptly passed out and threw up all over my new Town Car.”

  Soon as Mama got Weepie home she wouldn’t let the poor woman in the house.

  “Stripped me and hosed me down like livestock,” Aunt Weepie had said, retelling the story about once a month. “Threw me a dingy—and stained, I might add—piece of shit night shirt to put on, then called 911. I’ll never forgive her, I don’t care if she is my sister. No woman wants to enter the ER in Mee-Maw panties and a housedress.”

  I led my mother out of the apartment and walked down the dark, steep stairs, gripping the railing, determined to keep from limping despite the shooting pains in my right leg. I shouldn’t have taken a place with stairs, but the rent was affordable, provided one was employed in some capacity, and the rooms were huge, with high ceilings and thick plaster walls carved with built-in bookcases that I’d immediately fallen in love with.

  I imagined filling the shelves with Brontë and Austen, all the classics on the upper shelves, newer authors in the middle, then all the books I’d try to read to my children—The Absolutely Essential Eloise, Goodnight Moon, Where the Wild Things Are, Shel Silverstein’s collections and the science and solar system books for Jay. I would take them from the cardboard boxes and wipe off the dust, stack them with their straight and strong spines, and maybe I’d feel the same joy I’d felt buying them, the happiness of a normal and sane mother who had children without wretched pasts and daddies in prison.

  In addition to the bookshelves, another plus for the apartment my mother believes is pitiful is the bathroom with its floor swirls of creamy pink tile and the grout surprisingly clean. Along the back wall, beneath a curtainless window I’d covered with a swag made from an old scarf, sits a clawfoot tub. A completely wonderful, big deep tub where I could escape for hours listening to Elton John or Allison Krauss, the Dixie Chicks or Miles Davis on the small Sony CD player I’d filched from home after the attack.

  I could light a couple of candles, pour in lavender, ginger or jasmine oils and almost forget the rent was due and I was jobless. At least I was finally getting out of bed in the mornings. That was progress, I wanted to tell Mother. First let a woman learn to wake up and make oatmeal. Then she can worry about finding another man or a gig glopping on makeup.

  The truth was I didn’t want another man. It wasn’t that I hated them, it’s just I didn’t trust my instincts after what had happened. He seemed so normal. How many times have I said this to myself and others? Normal normal normal.

  ***

  For a while after the near-murder and the trial, I hid from mornings, slept right through them, until the wooden blinds in the bedroom offered nothing but a purpled dusk that eventually turned to blackness before I could ever move. I’d become nocturnal, the woman who awoke after dark with matted hair and a ragged, uneven hunger. I’d stuff a bowl of dry cereal into my body then wander into my children’s room, crumbs falling from my damp T-shirt, and listen for their heavy, steady breathing, watching their eyes dance beneath transparent, vein-laced lids.

  I’d touch their faces, cheeks always cool even in the bathwater air of a South Carolina summer night, and their breath would catch, then settle once again into the rhythm of a peace I couldn’t find. Many mornings I’d wake up in their beds, clinging to them as if they were the mother.

  Back then, I needed them; now they needed me.

  ***

  Once we were outside the house, Mama turned and glanced at the place as one might stare at a filthy child. We stood on the sidewalk, the Carolina heat building while we said our goodbyes. She held out her arms and I hugged her, feeling the softness of her sleeveless summer sweater against me, inhaling the ammonia of her Miss Clairol hair dye, realizing she must have freshened her color earlier today. She gave me her usual wet lipstick kiss on the cheek and stepped back to check me over. “Your eye bags are better,” she said. “They don’t look like they’ve given birth to another set.”

  We both laughed, and I thought at that moment I could live through anything as long as she was alive, as long as she would appear on a daily basis or call with a proverb and tenacious willingness to lead me into a life I was trying like hell to invite back.

  I knew she couldn’t help herself. She was from the generation that believes a man would cure everything, and what I needed to get over this hump, this unfortunate tragedy of a very bad choice, was nothing more than a new and improved choice, a man with thicker wiring and no chance of short-circuiting.

  It was now or never for me in the dating department, she and my Aunt Weepie would say, trying to be casual though the message was clear. At my age, according to all the magazines that scare us post-30 women to death, beauty begins slipping until it becomes a steady falling off, a sloughing of firmness, time cupping its cruel hands and blocking any sort of youthful glow.

  Mama focused on two things: finding me another husband and paying back the first for the evil he’d unleashed.

  “By the way,” she said before heading toward her car. “I sent Satan’s Twin another letter today.” She hissed out the pet name she calls my ex. “Mailed it to his prison oasis on my way over here to this rented hovel. ’Course he left you penniless, every little dime he had going to God-knows-what but certainly not to God, to hear his congregation tell it.”

  She walked to her car, me following behind, and craned her long neck up and down the road, right, left, assessing. Always assessing. “A lot of good families grew up here before it became so run-down and full of hippies,” she said, facing the house once again. “After that, the blacks began moving in, but lately, I’ve begun to realize they have much more class than most whites. You rarely see a black on Jerry Springer, not that
I sit home and watch it . . . but you just don’t. They have more couth than to stoop that low.”

  I ignored her comments on my neighborhood and the racial observations. I was thinking about her mean letters to my ex and all the threats she’d made to him the past couple of years. “You know those corrections officers don’t give him your mail,” I said. “You’ve been warned and warned.”

  “This letter wasn’t so threatening. I didn’t promise I’d rent a Greyhound and aim it right at him.” Oh, but she would if she knew Bryce had been writing to Jay that first year post-rampage when we were still in Asheville, North Carolina, a mountain city about an hour or so from Spartanburg. She would if she’d seen the letter he’d typed and addressed directly to me shortly after the first anniversary of the BI-LO showdown. Thank God, the letters had stopped when we moved in with Mama, and now there was little chance he’d find us in this neighborhood. Little chance. Please, God.

  Mama wrinkled up her pointy nose and unwrapped a piece of Wrigley’s Spearmint gum that I could smell from where I was standing. “I simply clipped out a movie photo of Freddy Krueger. You know him? That hideous old creature with the blades for fingernails and that horrible face? I wrote down at the bottom, ‘I’m on my way. Prepare yourself, you old wife killer.’”

  “You didn’t,” I said, knowing full well she had, and I was grateful for every scathing letter she’d sent.

  “I used an extra stamp with one of the old presidents on it. Gosh, I hope it was a Democrat ’cause I’d hate to desecrate a fine Republican. Well, anyhow I colored it red and black with horns and a beard and little pitchfork. Turned my 40-some-odd cents into a message from Hell.” She smacked her gum like a bored waitress might, though she’d never chew gum in public, only at my trashy rental unit. She tends to adopt whatever type personality suits the environment. At the Spartanburg Country Club, she sits stiff as a queen, regal nose tilted just enough to let people know she’s a woman of great manners and breeding. She speaks in a low, quiet voice, barely audible, and holds her shoulders as rigid as if they were encased in a brace.