Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.
Need a little bit more of my 12-ounce nutrition.
One more helpin’ of what I’ve been havin’.
I’m takin’ my turn on the sin wagon.
Most of us need a good ride on the Sin Wagon, and if I were to meet a man who was better looking than say, Yoda, I might treat him to some Serta hospitality. I’d like to have said this to Mama but could not because she is certain that a real Southern lady doesn’t enjoy the business at hand. She does her duty while considering what kind of vegetable to serve with spaghetti and meatballs. Once her husband’s finished, she’s got the whole menu figured out in addition to ensuring his good mood for the next 48-or-so hours.
My mother, the keeper and preserver of morals, a woman who can barely bring herself to even say the word sex, is a piece of work, a piece of pent-up, sexually fearful work. She is gung-ho on virgins. Thought they were about as godly as anything on earth. If I hadn’t been born, if my sex-kitten sister had not followed two years later, I would never have believed my mother capable of taking off her clothes and doing such a thing.
She can’t stand to see it on the nature channels. She fusses at the poor old TV, calling the humping lions “hussies and harlots” and punching the OFF button with exaggerated drama and grunts of disgust.
“I’d feel better if they were at least married,” she once said to the darkened picture tube. “Those nature shows are one undulation away from total pornography. I hope you don’t let your young children watch this filth.”
I smiled, turning down the Dixie Chicks as I got closer to the line of waiting children. I leaned back and felt the sun beating through the car windows, warming my forearms as they rested on the steering wheel, forgetting skin cancer warnings and enjoying the heat. Lolling in this daze of thought, I heard a car honk behind me, signaling it was time to move forward in the line. I gazed at Miranda’s feet, enormously large in shoes a size too big, Mama’s idea as a way to save money. I placed our assigned number in the window and worked my face into a cheery pucker of animation and delight. Happy mother. Semi-happy, semi-healthy, semi-normal mother of two, living in a fine albeit ugly-ass apartment in a culturally diverse part of town. Mother with no sex life, no prospects, no job or money, but with a wide, plastered-on smile stretching endlessly with optimism.
Miranda hopped into the car, her hands full of crafts, including a construction paper sunflower made from an empty Bounty roll, her picture right in the center. I tried hard to ignore the yellow devil horns coming out of the top of the flower, as they did on most of her artwork. We ate our Kisses and carrots, then drove to TCBY and had the sugar-free parfaits that were on sale, slowly eating until it was time to pick Jay up from big-boy school.
“I hope you aren’t gonna drink beer cans,” Miranda said right out of the blue.
“Beer? How do you know what beer is?”
“The people from drug addicts came to school and said it’s bad if your parents drink beer cans. Don’t ever drink no beer.”
“Any beer. It’s any, and no, I don’t plan to.”
Miranda had always been old. She was born a grandmother. An ancient and wise soul. She could lecture like a Catholic school nun and was the family’s youngest moral enforcer. She takes after her Mama Millings, both of them sitting in judgment and ready to pass on bits of wisdom via lectures to prevent sin. I dare not put a glass bottle into the regular trash. Miranda can go on a half-hour tangent if people litter or don’t recycle. Lord, the things the preschools teach children these days. In my day, we had a commercial featuring an Indian, back when we were allowed to say Indian instead of Native American. He was standing on the highway and a single tear rolled down his perfect face when he saw someone had littered the countryside. That was the saddest commercial of my entire life. Hard to imagine what that poor Native American would think if he saw my garbage when Miranda wasn’t watching—bags and bags of plastic, cans and bottles that weren’t separated according to materials. How can you explain to a 4-year-old, grandmotherly nun-child that the recycling man is $30 a month and we don’t have $3 for one lousy Happy Meal?
***
I glanced to see Miranda, as if reading my mind, gathering bits of stray paper in the floorboard of the car and dribbling them into her backpack. “It’s not good to litter or you could go see the jail.”
I nodded. I’ve learned to accept this Mother Theresa of a child and love every fiber of her vocal enforcements. “Like Daddy. Isn’t Daddy in the jail, Mama?”
“Yes. Yes he is, honey, but that’s not our fault.”
“I know. He got the flu in his brain. Some people get the vomit bug in their tummies. Mama Millings said his brain got all sick.”
“That’s right. You’re a very smart young lady.”
She took out her colored pencils and began to draw flowers with human faces and clothing. I imagined they’d have devil horns soon enough. “Do brains throw up?” she asked.
“His did.”
I started laughing and thank God she did, too. I wasn’t sure where this conversation was going. This had become our routine. Sometimes as we ate, the child would talk a mile a minute and asked questions about her daddy. Other times she’d stare off into space, as if juggling a thousand problems on her mind.
I wondered how much this had affected her. How much she remembers. What had she overheard as the grownups talked into the night about whether or not her mother would live, and if she lived, what kind of shape would she end up in? Whether it would be more merciful for God to go ahead and take her mama than leave her all wrong in the head or laid up with her limbs twisting and withering in bed the rest of her life. All of these questions had been thrown into the heavy air and batted around, along with the hostility and heartache a son-in-law’s sudden and inexplicable rage had caused—the destruction of an entire family in eleven minutes’ time.
“Your flower’s beautiful,” I said, wiping chocolate from her moon-round face. “Great job.”
“No it isn’t pretty. It’s not ’posed to be. This here is Daddy. See there?” She lifted the flower by the newly drawn set of horns.
“Well, that’s okay. One day you’ll get tired sticking horns on everything, sweetie.”
“No I won’t. Mama Millings doesn’t. I see her drawing a million gabillion horns a day and all night, too.” I reached for her, rubbing her sun-drenched head ringed in curly dark hair. “I saw her drink a beer can, did you know that, Mama?”
I considered this and knew it couldn’t possibly be true. “You’ll have to tell her it’s not nice next time you see her, babe.”
We turned into Jay’s school, a place for young geniuses where we lucked up and got a scholarship. The clientele here was different from Miranda’s place of preppy moms and dads. The parents of genius children, I’ve learned, are quite the diverse group. Some are earthy and wear Rastafarian dreadlocks and smelly crochet hats, their infrequently washed skin soaked in Patchouli. Others are rich, some dirt poor; then you have the trust-fund moms or the flat-out rednecky types. You name it.
Jay sulked out in the May sun with his head down, eyes on the cement. He opened the car door, slung his book bag onto the rear dashboard and said nothing.
“Did you have a good day?” I asked, all fake in my chirpy good mommy voice. “We’re going to the zoo with your grandmother. How about that? They have four new monkeys.”
“Monkeys suck,” he said. “I hate the bastards.” Mercy. I made a mental note to get him back in counseling.
“You don’t need to talk trash.”
“You sound like Mama Millings. She sucks, too.”
“Watch it, bud. That’s your grandmother.”
“Every single person on the planet Earth all the way to Pluto sucks, so there. And by the way, Pluto isn’t even a planet anymore.”
We drove the 12 miles chatting about mindless things like the best Popsicles on the market and the new Groovy Girl bed. By the time we pulled into the gravel parking lot of the Spartanburg Celebrity Zoo, I had a pounding headache. I looked in the mirror and cringed. The heat had enlarged my pores and caked my makeup. My eyes had that tired look even though I’d slept nine hours. The more I slept, actually, the worse I looked.
“We’re here,” Mama chirped. Her voice had never been higher or more operatic. She was beaming with either a caffeine overdose or her ultra-strength prescription of change-of-life hormones. “Did y’all know they have animal movie stars here? They get all the old has-beens that used to be featured in TV commercials or movies. All the elephants and primates—a primate is a monkey, Jay.”
“Duh. And we descended from them.”
“We certainly did not. We were made in the image of God.”
“Well I guess God’s a monkey.”
“Prudy, you’ve got to do something with this child before he,” and she mouthed the last part, “turns into his daddy.”
She took out her church fan. “Lord have mercy. Anyway, sweeties, they’ve got ’em some rhinos and tigers and all sorts of animals that went from New York to Hollywood and ended up in good old Spartanburg. Aren’t we lucky to have the poor things?”
“Papa Millings drinks beer cans and we learned at school it will make you kill people with your cars,” Miranda said.
My mother momentarily stopped chewing her gum in order to process this shocking statement. She shook her Diet Dr. Pepper and took the last sip before popping the spent gum into the opening.
“Your granddaddy’s one of the finest men on this planet, honey.”
“Beer cans make your brain sick. Is that what happened to Daddy?”
“You stupid freak,” Jay hissed. “It’s not beer cans, you just say beer. The cans have nothing to do with it.”
“Listen, this is enough. Let’s just go see the monkeys and all get along, okay?” Mama said. She made her typical noise of disgust and judgment, a short and deep grunt, then opened the car doors as we stepped into what felt like the inside of a dragon’s hot mouth.
“I really need to be out hunting a job,” I told Mama as she paid the $12-a-pop ticket price so we could all enjoy a stroll in the heat and smell of hot beasts and their excrement.
“These children need sunlight, Dee, or whoever you are today. You can go hunt you a job later. It’ll be too hot to visit this place in June, plus I heard these monkeys do all sorts of fun tricks and I aim to show my grandchildren a good time. As you can see, I’m the one paying the admission so you can at least act grateful. That’s all you have to do, if you can manage it.”
We wound around the perimeter of the zoo, visiting sleeping and depressed llamas, camels and more varieties of goats and sheep than I could count. The chimpanzee cages lined the south end of the zoo and signs with black stars and painted movie cameras led the way. Below each cage a podium and plaque told the story of this or that animal and what its claim to fame had been. Most were in short-lived TV shows and commercials for pantyhose and rental cars.
We stood for at least ten minutes watching chimps and orangutans, baboons and other monkey types, screech and howl, pound the bars, cut flips for peanuts. Jay laughed for the first time in a week, and I wasn’t about to pull him from this small peephole of light shining on his troubled little soul.
“Look at their butts,” he said, and Mama hissed for him to hush and not say words like that.
“Fanny,” Miranda corrected. “You’re ’posed to say ‘fanny.’”
“Ass,” he said loud as he could, and Mama shook her head and lifted her hands to the heavens as if to say, Lord, I give up.
“I’m calling the therapist,” I whispered. “Don’t worry.”
The monkey show was all a great hoot until one chimp decided to treat himself to exhibitionism and pumped his hand furiously at the little thing between his hairy legs. I sat frozen in fascination, having never seen any creature do such, and here was this monkey, mouth open, grinning as if saying to all us humans, “See this, dumb people. Stick around. Don’t leave till I finish my show. Y’all don’t know what you’re missing not doing this in public. It’s twice the fun.”
I led my children away, though Jay jerked from my grip and rushed straight back for the cages. I tried to interest Miranda in giving the baby goat a bottle and saw that Mama had also stayed behind with Jay, her eyes transfixed while the monkey finished what he’d started.
“What’s he doing?” Jay asked, but before Mama Millings could answer, the monkey reared back his arm and flung his results at her, coating her coiffed hair with primate sperm and setting off in her a wave of screams that had the whole zoo at her side.
She had swooned and collapsed on a wooden bench and everyone was fanning her, paper-toweling her hair and bringing her water as she kept rolling up her eyes to the sky and saying, “Oh, lawsy. Oh, have mercy on my soul. What, pray tell, did I do to deserve this? What kind of perverted place is this?”
Jay had his hand over his mouth and his bony shoulders shook. I knew he was laughing and I tried hard not to join him, but the pain of the past two years seemed to drop like dead skin from my body and I fell to the sidewalk in waves of unstoppable mirth. Tears streamed down my face, I laughed so hard.
“Prudy!” Mama screamed, calling me the old birth name. “Have some decency and take your children away from here. Where’s your sense of motherhood?” She turned to the zoo staff. “You people are going to read about this in a Letter to the Editor. If you can’t get your monkeys to control their urges, you oughtn’t have such filth for my grandbabies to see. Why, I never even knew monkeys had . . . had . . . well that sort of thing between their legs or that they could do such a thing.”
“Oh, yeah,” a man in a jungle-print official zoo shirt said. “They are smart as we are.”
“You think that’s smart? Is that what you teach your—”
“Ma’am we’re so sorry about all—”
“Prudy, take the children away now. Go get an ice cream! Will you please get me some fresh paper towels so I don’t have to go home with sin caked in my hair? You will be hearing more from me about this, I can assure you.”
By the time Mama got in the car, she wasn’t talking, but her face was puffed up and pink. She folded her arms over her chest and kept emitting that grunt. A grocery bag covered her entire head, held together like a turban with a Scrunchie.
I drove along in silence, letting the children carry on about the zoo, all the while trying to placate my mother with occasional pats on her knee and offerings of Juicy Fruit gum. She had chewed and spit out three pieces by the time we turned into her subdivision, the glare of late-day sun blinding.
“Mama, watch out,” Miranda screamed. It was too late. I felt the small body of a something hit my tire. I slammed on the brakes. “Mama! You kilt it.”
I pulled over and saw a squirrel lying in the road, pawing the air, its tail swirling like a helicopter. “It’s not dead,” sweetie. “Hold on, okay? Mama, watch the kids, hear?”
I got out of the car and scooted the squirrel to the other side of the road with my foot. It was still moving, but didn’t seem to be breathing. One leg was at an odd angle and blood r
an from its foot. I crouched over its little body and made a small O with my thumb and index finger. I placed the O over the squirrel’s little mouth and blew two small puffs of air into its lungs, alternating this with two-fingered chest compressions. No sooner had I begun my rodent CPR did Mama fly from the car and start yelling.
“Get away from that thing right now! Are you crazy? They carry rabies. Prudy, I’m not going to sit here and let your children see this spectacle. What in God’s name is wrong with you?”
I removed my mouth from the O and stared at Mama. “Get back in the car, please. I know what I’m doing.”
“You could get rabies. I didn’t raise you to French kiss road kill. This is the most embarrassing and—”
Both kids had by then freed themselves from the car and crossed the street to watch. “That is so cool,” Jay said.
“Gross, Mama,” Miranda said. I continued my CPR and chest compressions until finally, the little animal began to breathe on its own.
“Look, y’all, he’s breathing,” I said, spitting onto the road and wiping my mouth with a Kleenex. “Run to the car, Mama, and get that empty box out of the trunk. I’ll put him in there.”
“I won’t do any such a thing. I’m taking you home and you’re going to wash your mouth out with Listerine and scrub those lips with Ajax and Lysol. Now let go of that filthy old thing and get in this here car. I’ve had an awful day and we could both use scalding showers.”
Jay had fetched the box from the car’s trunk and lined it with straw and grass, small twigs and even a rock. He was really such a sweet boy, just needed some guidance. “Here, Mom.”
“Prudy, I’m not about to go home with—”
“It’s Dee now, Mama, and I’m not about to let this animal die. I’m taking it to the vet so you can either walk home—it’s only two streets down the road, you know—or we’ll be happy to give you a ride.”
Chimes from a Cracked Southern Belle Page 4
