He gestured toward me, offering three kinds of Tootsie Rolls as if I were a kid. “Come on back, Mrs . . . Ms . . .”
“Chuck? It’s Prudy. Well, I mean it’s Dee now, but I was Prudy. Prudy Millings from Spartan High?”
His face sort of dipped and rose, all the features in almost an ocean-wave movement. “Good God Almighty,” he said. “It is you. I read all the stories. Jesus Christ. Jesus.” He continued shaking his head and eyeing me up and down.
“Chuck, listen. I know we weren’t the best of friends in high school and maybe you thought I was a little snooty when I didn’t ask you to be my homecoming escort, but all that aside, I’m desperate for a job. And anyway, Mama wouldn’t let me ask you to be my escort ’cause she knew you drank.” Why couldn’t I just shut up? Why did nerves cause me to spout every irrelevant bit of information from the plaque of my quivering brain?
“I’m back on the air in 20. We’re playing a long set. If you zip the lip, feel free to sit in the studio and we’ll talk until I have to go back on the air and work my magic. Can you dig that?”
“Yeah. Consider it dug.”
I took a seat in the studio and faced Chuck who unapologetically lit a Kool cigarette and blew the smoke right at me. “Gotta maintain my gravely voice,” he said. “So. What can I do you for?”
I knew this wouldn’t be easy. I should have been nicer to Chuck in high school because you just never know where the losers of yesteryear might end up. I mean here I was, the belle and homecoming queen of Spartanburg High, now sitting in front of the “loser” ready to beg for a job. The irony of it all.
“I need a job and saw the ad in the classifieds.” My hands tingled at the fingertips, as if zero circulation could find its way to the edges of my body.
“Well, you and a thousand others,” he said, putting his feet on his desk, being the hotshot he thought he was. “I don’t remember us doing much together in high school. What I remember is I’d ask you out and you’d make up some excuse. ’Course you were a cheerleader and I was one of the outcasts, as I remember everything.”
“Look, I have to confess that since my accident or whatever you want to call it, I’m having to rebuild my entire life from scratch and could use whatever position you have. I’m groveling. How does that feel after all these years?”
He roared and coughed. “From what I recall in high school, you couldn’t type your way out of a trash bin. Wasn’t it 20 words a minute?”
“I just need a job. I’m a fast learner, can type like crazy and have two kids with shoes too small, and the bottom line is I’m broke. I have nothing else to tell you, Chuck, except if I didn’t date you in high school, that’s no reason to penalize me for the job, is it?”
Chuck Roland stared at me as if I were my own road kill. “I’m sorry,” he said. “We got candidates much better qualified than you for typing and shit . . . but you know, there is something we’re wanting to try out, but I don’t know . . . a new segment on the show. I’ll call you. Leave a number with the secretary and we’ll see.”
“Please, isn’t there anything I could do now?”
“Well, we do need a maid. Sorry, I think you call them housekeepers or domestic servants these days. How about I put you on evening toilet patrol, say two days a week? Shouldn’t take long to clean this joint and the pay’s pretty good. Like $200 or something.”
Chuck Roland, smug, pompous and offering me a maid’s job. I saw in my head the bills stacking up like a concrete wall I had little hope of scaling unless a rope dangled soon.
“Sure, I’ll take it,” I said and stood up, trying not to wince as pain shot through my lower leg. “Thanks for your time. When can I start?”
“Tomorrow evening if you want. Check you later,” he said. And that was it.
I walked out into the muggy South Carolina sunshine and wiped a tear before it fell. I planned to hold my head up high and clean every toilet necessary if that’s what it took to put food on my children’s table and buy decent clothes that fit them, shoes that weren’t coming apart at the soles or so tight they caused blisters.
God help me. That’s all I’ll ask for now.
The letter. I still hadn’t opened the letter.
Chapter Four
Rise and Shine, Prudy. I know it’s not 7 in the morning, but it’s my guess you are napping yet again, so I’m sending an afternoon message for a change: Don’t repay evil with evil. Wait for the Lord to handle the matter. Proverbs 20:22
Mama’s Moral: Prudy, the above proverb hollered out to me this afternoon as I was reading my Bible and rewashing my hair. It’s my own moral to myself. I’ll try to heed it and quit sending mean mail to Satan’s Twin.
Here’s yours for the day: My son (daughter), how happy I will be if you turn out to be sensible! It will be a public honor to me. Proverbs 27:11
Aunt Weepie’s picking me up for the funeral at any moment, though I expect she’ll be her usual 15 minutes late and smelling of two ounces of Beautiful sprayed all up and down her glorious body. She said she had a surprise, and I told her it better not be that man, that a funeral is no place to bring a blind date.
Aunt Weepie’s the one with whom to discuss the letter, men, sex and anything else for that matter. It’s hard to believe that crazy woman and my very own mother share the same DNA.
Weepie’s joys in life are two funerals per week (purely for the food), sex most days (even when she says she can’t stand her husband another moment) and martinis taken extra dry while settled beneath the wooden slats of her mahogany four-poster, where she’s constantly adding a blanket here, a pillow there, a reading light and various junk food. That’s where Aunt Weepie goes to drink, sleep, snack, escape and solve all her problems.
Mama, on the other hand, won’t discuss sex and claims total chastity prior to marriage.
“We kissed,” she said.
“With tongue?” I asked.
“Of course not. That would lead most girls into other things. That and the fact the boys always thought if a girl performed wet kisses, she’d then let him paw her.” Mama was against Frenching, pawing and anything but upright dry kissing prior to marriage. After marrying my father, a man who loves shocking her with off-color remarks brought on by bourbon and water, I tend to believe she remained either in a state of total frigidity or was the hottest little housewife on earth.
My sister, Amber (who hit the jackpot with the popular name, the thin gene and the rich husbands), was never pounded with the “sex” lectures I received. While Mama was instilling the values of sealed canals to me at 16, my hot little sister with the stripper name and body was out riding on the sin wagon with a boy who looked like a frog with his big bulging eyes and his green football jacket.
Aunt Weepie says we’re all wrong about Mama, that she’s putting on “her pathetic virgin act,” when she’s really one scorching mama beneath her ice-blue packaging.
She sure looked the part. My mother, Lucinda “Never call me Lucy” Millings, was a first runner-up in the Miss South Carolina pageant two years before I came into the world. While in her late teens and early 20s, she had the annoying habit of spouting off her beauty-pageant battle cry—“I’M A VIRGIN!”—at every opportunity.
Aunt Weepie said, “Your mama told the judges, ‘I am firmly against sex before marriage,’ and they ate that right up. I swear she’d have won, but she couldn’t sing a lick. Everyone was roaring. She stood there on stage and started howling and warbling up real high, all this fake opera she made up as she went. Nothing Italian about it. Just pure dog-wailing jibber-jabber.”
Mama’s still got her beauty queen figure and wears her hair the exact same strawberry blond shade of Kathie Lee Gifford, though she really doesn’t like the woman, thinks she’s a closet fornicator with untamed urges. My mother can still swing it, too. She can throw those skinny hips
out and wiggle around town like some kind of pin-up for Social Security.
She dresses in the fashions of the young and hip except on Sundays when she completely transforms her style into that of an ancient old spinster in floral print. She walks in the sanctuary, gliding down the aisles and toting three different Bibles, “in case the minister or someone else in the congregation doesn’t think one of the versions is as ‘Christian’ as the others.” She makes certain all the biblical bases are covered.
As for a mother’s duty to teach her daughters the facts of life, Mama sheepishly handed Amber and me a Disney book on the subject.
“Y’all take this to your room and read it in private. If you have any questions, I’ll try my best to answer them.”
And that was the extent of our sex education via Lucinda Millings.
***
Please, Aunt Weepie, please be on time, I begged, sitting along my bay window, watching the clouds as they appeared to float up from nowhere, bumping together in the sky, a couple of them already turning a threatening gray.
“I will, hon,” she said when I phoned her. “I’m too hungry to be late; you know that.” But she was late, and I was counting the minutes.
Free time, idle moments aren’t favored or savored at this juncture, and I was tapping my good foot, twitching and jiggling with jangled nerves in the humid apartment, feeling myself melt between my breasts as I watched the clock, then the street, looking for that gold Mercedes 450 SL.
I tried to remember the last funeral I’d attended, but as always, a vision of Bryce Jeter in his burial blues raided my head, him preaching all serious and voice sonorous, nothing at all like his rowdy motioning and pounding during regular Sunday services for the living.
I was thinking of all the people at my trial, and how if I’d died, only a few of them would have come to the funeral. Everyone turned out for the legal lynching. They were all too happy and eager to sit in the courtroom and watch the drama unfold. This was, after all, a smaller Southern city where scandal was the bread and gossip the butter on which many dwellers thrived and fattened. I remember looking out at the “audience,” where people had to stand in the aisles and against the walls for a peek at the plaintiff and defendant. That’s how it was. You were much more interesting to them if you survived what few could. A freak, almost. People have always been drawn to the freaks and I’d become one. I should have told Chuck Roland I was a freak now, too.
***
The church was fairly full and Aunt Weepie and I were barely seated before the first song, a piped in version of Enya’s “Only Time,” emanated from a hidden speaker system, which I spent the better part of the first ten minutes trying to find.
Aunt Weepie purely oozed sexuality in a black rayon dress that fell to her ankles, but not before catching every single curve on her body. She wore a pair of spectator pumps in black and red and carried in her hands a red handbag, a fake Chanel. She sported her faux Gucci watch and her sunglasses with the Chanel logo on the sides. She’d obtained all her accessories from a friend who goes to New York twice a year and hits the knock-off markets that sell their phonies on the city streets.
She was wearing too much foundation, and I could see the orange line where she’d either forgotten to blend or didn’t bother. This is the very reason I always put on my makeup at the kitchen table. Only natural light will show a woman what others will see. I leaned over and tried to blend it for her, but she swatted me with the program as if I were a large mosquito.
“Stop it, Prudy. I’m concentrating. Let’s not talk until I’m in the zone.” Mother had told me a few times that Weepie sat stiller than the dead themselves when she was getting into “character,” preparing for her throwdown of despair as insurance for the invitation to the big meal afterward.
She opened her purse during the first preacher’s meaningless words, the warm-up preacher who’d probably never met the deceased before in his life, a ghost-faced man who was saying this and that about her being a wonderful mother and the salt of the earth. They all said salt of the earth unless the departed was in the Junior League, or was a prominent man’s wife. Then they called her “a vibrant and irreplaceable member of society.” Aunt Weepie rustled in the bag, pulling out a tube of fire-engine-red Chanel lipstick, a compact, and finally, the pack of pink tissues, already opened, one peeping out and ready for the taking.
She took a practice sniff. Then another until she’d managed to produce some sort of fluid in her nasal passages. She sniffed repetitively and then began dabbing at the corner of her still-dry eyes with the first of many tissues she would use. We hadn’t been seated twelve minutes when the first stab of agony hit her and she let rip an audible and melodramatic gasp of anguish, so loud half the church turned back to see who in the world was crying her eyes out over the death of a 92-year-old woman who for what we’d learned so far was salty and had a great love of crocheting and turning toilet paper rolls into frilly commode décor.
The organist played a song and another soloist, this one a man who appeared hung-over and in need of a stiff drink, began a deep baritone rendition of “Bringing in the Sheaves.” Aunt Weepie was not about to be upstaged by a bellowing drunkard. She began to wail to the beat of his baritone. I wanted to crawl under a pew. I managed to slide down far enough that it would not seem I knew her, and when I did so, she threw off a mean look. I noticed her mascara had begun its first estuary down her suntanned Estée Laudered face.
I inhaled deeply, smelling the flowers of death and a hovering cloud of old lady perfume, an intermingling of all the ancient scents Estée Lauder hides behind its glass counters for women over 70.
Weepie’s shoulders rocked and her whole body began a series of convulsions. She put her hands over her eyes and let it all out, moaning here and whimpering there, tearing out her pain and throwing it like confetti at the other mourners. The man hurried through his song on account of Aunt Weepie ruining it, and she lifted her head toward the cathedral ceiling and released the mascara’d tears turning her skin into black tiger stripes. She was completely torn apart by this Mrs. Pearlie Mae Corn’s departure. Everyone at the funeral except Aunt Weepie was well aware Mrs. Corn had suffered and withered to bones in a Hospice cancer ward. Goodness gracious, all Aunt Weepie had to do was read her program and it said as much right there in italics. The family of Pearlie Mae Corn would like to thank Hospice for all their care during this most difficult time.
When it was all over and the final preacher had surprised even the hardcore Baptists by issuing an altar call at a funeral service, asking sinners to come repent and get saved, Aunt Weepie actually stood to go down the aisle.
I yanked her black dress. She whipped her head around and growled, that mascara making her look like a character out of a horror movie. “Stop it, Prudy.”
“You can’t go down there,” I whispered. “No one sane gets saved at funerals.” But I knew this to be untrue. Rev. Bryce Jeter, Satan’s Soulmate, had led 26 men and women to salvation during funerals. I always thought it strange that a preacher would issue a call for live souls while trying to send dead ones off with a reverent bang.
“I’ve done it many times,” Aunt Weepie said and turned her ample body sideways and sashayed down the aisle like a broken-hearted bride in black. She sniffed and sighed. She daubed at her face. She paused at the old woman’s coffin and curtsied, then threw her arms across it for a full horrifying 30 seconds. The reverend pried her loose and she managed to stand before the mourners, accepting whatever the man was offering. Salvation. Redemption. The last ticket to eternal life. A better shot at a three-bean casserole. A pint of tears emptied onto her face.
By then I had managed to switch sides and was sitting near a stained glass window far away from Aunt Weepie’s Chanel bag.
“Who’s that woman?” the lady in front of me whispered to her friend. The other lady shrugged her shoulders an
d both of them laughed so loud they had to bow and pretend they, too, were crying. That set off a chain reaction of similar laughter masked as grief, and by the time it was all over, all the pews were shaking to one degree or another.
After the service Aunt Weepie found me hiding in the funeral home bathroom.
“Where have you been? We’re going to miss the graveside.”
“There is no way in the world I’ll go there, Aunt Weepie. I had no idea you put on such a show. Mama never told me the extent of your actions.”
“That’s the furthest I’ve gone. It’s progressive. I’m getting much better. What’s wrong with you, anyway? I used to could count on you for all kinds of fun. You gotta put that evil deed behind you and find your fun again. Get it back. Life’s too short to be all uptight like your damned mother.”
My mother would not have lasted the first three minutes, much less remained seated for the entire 28, and believe me, I was counting every minute, every mortifying second. “I think I’m not feeling well. Do you mind if we skip the graveyard service?”
“Are you out of your mind? You are going nowhere, Miss Gloom. I’ve had four people give me directions as I was hunting for you just now. They want me there. Once you make it to the hole in the ground, you are good to go for the covered dish. Only those who watch the dead go down get the buffet afterward. It’s the reward for attending, sweet Prude, and probably the only one you’ll get, since I couldn’t bring that man for you. He canceled at the last minute, damned fool.”
Thank God for small miracles.
Chimes from a Cracked Southern Belle Page 7
