She winked and inhaled deeply. I also took the opportunity to grab a deep breath, having held mine during the “interview” portion of our meeting. The room smelled like Lysol and a Glade Solid air freshener, floral scented. In most nursing homes, I could smell urine, but not in her office.
“In here, a psychology background will do you a lot of good,” she said, walking to a fake marble counter and pouring from a half-filled Mr. Coffee maker. “Would you like a cup?”
“Sure. Thanks. The coffee I make at home tastes like motor oil.” I took the hot coffee as Theresa Jolly settled back behind her desk, stirring the sugar with the tip of an ink pen. I liked her; she wasn’t pretentious. I thought I was the only woman alive who stirred milk and sugar with pens and pencils, forks, chopsticks, even hairbrush handles.
“I was thinking . . . a lot of our people . . . they could use your good company and counseling. You wouldn’t believe the number of residents who don’t get a single visitor. It’ll break your heart.” She placed a hand over her left breast, each fingernail vivid red and filed to perfect rectangles. “Listen here, we have no budgeted position, but I think the ‘miscellaneous’ account will allow me to pay you $250 for the three days. I’d also like you to come in and do hair, plus the visits and counseling. I could get you more money for the extra work. Now, this would be three full days to start. If you could arrive as soon as you drop the kids off at school?” I nodded. “Let’s say around 8 or 9 and stay till at least supper. Oh, and we eat real early around here, so you can help feed if we need an extra hand and still get out by 5 or 5:30. I tell you what, if there are leftovers, you can wrap them up and take them home to your kids so you won’t have to cook.”
“I’m so grateful, Mrs. Jolly,” I said, making a mental note to ask Mama or Aunt Weepie to watch the kids those three days after school. At least Chuck was allowing me to bring them to the radio station for my cleaning gig.
“Don’t mention it. Remember, call me Theresa. These little old men and women are going to love you, especially if you treat them like real people and not children or invalids.”
She told me I could start that week, the day after tomorrow, and that my regular days would be Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.
After my interview at Top of the Hill, I stood and clasped Theresa Jolly’s hand. She paused, then reached up to hug me. “I read all the reports,” she said. “You are the bravest, strongest woman I’ve ever had the pleasure to know.”
Ah, little do you really know, I wanted to say.
“There’s another one like you here,” she said, lowering her voice and whispering even though the door was closed. “She works on the East wing. C.N.A. level II. Husband shot her in the head. It’s a miracle she can walk or put two thoughts together since that bullet’s still somewhere in her brain. I’ll want you to help her out. She can train you as far as the job, but you can help her with her memory and the lifting.
“Oh, listen to me. Are you able to lift and do such heavy work?”
“The plates in my shin work better than the bones ever did,” I said and drank the last of my coffee, the bitter part, the hardest sip to swallow. “I can’t thank you enough. You won’t be sorry. I’ll see you Wednesday.”
I added the money in my head, $1,000, plus the $200 a month at the station, knowing we’d barely make it, but it was a good start. My only backup would be to break down and take the money Pauline Jeter, Bryce’s mother, was always trying to mail us to ease her own conscience. Mama and I decided to rip the checks in half every single month, though lately, I’ve begun to wonder if we shouldn’t reconsider.
At least Mama had sold Bryce’s Mercury while I was in the hospital and paid for our living expenses when we were with her. By refusing Jeter dollars and donations, she felt justified in keeping them from their grandchildren, except at Christmas and birthdays when there was a supervised meeting between Pauline and the kids, my mother lurking in the background, Dr. Jeter stewing back in Virginia, their home state, and refusing to visit.
Bryce’s church raised enough money for the children’s health insurance for a couple of years, setting up a small trust for them after the tragedy. It gave me new hope in the Baptist faith, that they would side with the victim and not the man in the pulpit. Yet one or two of the crazy old bats thought the entire incident was brought on by my actions, which vicious tongues decided were far from proper and churchy.
Bryce had been accusing me of cheating off and on for most of the marriage, but especially the last 18 months as his craziness and irrational behavior escalated. I couldn’t even look at a man without him swearing up and down that I’d slept with him or wanted to. It started with the accusations that I’d given birth to a Hispanic baby girl, him thinking my trips to my favorite Mexican restaurant were more out of lust than desire for good salsa and ethnic food.
Every other day I drove to El Chalupa’s and pigged out on tostados and enchiladas, tacos with guacamole and pico de gallo. The smell of sizzling fajitas drove me crazy with cravings. The chips, the hot, spicy salsa and the fresh chopped cilantro the waiter always brought as a special favor. Bryce thought I had a thing for this one waiter who would bow and very boldly say, “Senorita is muy bonita,” as he delivered my cilantro in a miniature cast iron pot. Bryce did not like that at all, though he begrudgingly grinned his preacher man smile and plunked down a meager 10 percent gratuity at the end of the meal.
We had eaten at El Chalupa two hours before my water broke on the fourth stair of our home, and we rushed to the hospital, my contractions beginning with fury and immediacy.
I was in labor only three hours, squawking and begging for an epidural, being told it was too late by the nurse and that it “wasn’t God-like” by Bryce who relished in my suffering, that pompous anus.
They gave me a shot of Demerol, which did nothing for the pain but made me see double of Bryce—as if one of him weren’t bad enough. Mama was in there scampering about, pointing her video camera at my open legs.
“Close your legs, Prudy,” she’d say, darting around the doctors and nurses. “I’m seeing more than I probably should.”
“For christsakes, Mother, I’m having a baby. I’ve got to open my fuckin’ legs.” She and Bryce gasped. I was cussing up a storm because no one had ordered the $1,200 epidural. If they were going to keep me in the most intense pain of my life, this prying apart of the human body, one muscle, one tendon at a time, then I was going to cuss enough to split their eardrums just as this baby was splitting me.
“Cross them, Prudy,” she demanded, two frown lines perfectly parallel above her nose. “I don’t want to see that ole black curly pubic hair in my birth video.”
“I can either push a baby out of my ass or cross my legs,” I screamed through the pain of a contraction that had dilated me to eight centimeters, meaning I was in what they call “transition,” the most excruciating and productive stage of labor. I was shaking like a drunk coming off 10 days of fortified wine. I was throwing up and looking like Linda Blair in the “Exorcist.”
Mama came around to the side of the bed and pointed the Sony in my face. “Prudy, tell everyone about the name you’ve picked out for the baby,” she said in her narrator’s voice. “Tell us, hon, about this precious little girl on her way into the world.”
Pain seared and threatened to rip me in half. Bryce was in the corner, reading the Bible and taking furtive peeks at my privates, which mama kept draping with the sheet, much to the doctor’s utter annoyance. “We need to see what’s going on and check the progression,” he snapped at Mama every time she tossed the sheet over my region.
“What’s this angel’s name, Prudy?” She took the camera from her eye, made an odd face and fanned the area near her nose. “Lord, child, what have you been eating? I’ll bet these doctors can’t even focus on you with that oniony vomit breath you’re blowing in their faces. Here, have
a few Tic Tacs—you should have thought to suck one while all this was starting. It’s the same as with church breath and—”
“stop it! i can’t take this!” My eyes were on a telephone. I figured if she didn’t hush her mouth, I could hurl the phone onto the floor to get her attention. Before I could do anything, she’d stuffed a few white Tic Tacs into my mouth at the exact moment another contraction tore through me, a pain so wretched I shrieked as if in a slasher movie, choking on one of the little mints. The birthing team jumped up and then shut the door so other women delivering babies down the hall wouldn’t pack up and go find themselves a vacant ditch for their births. I wasn’t good for business. I was the live animal being torn apart limb by limb.
“What’s her name, Miss Prudy?” Mama asked, as if nothing had happened, oblivious to the hollering and anything but my breath, pubic hair, and the name of the baby because we hadn’t quite settled on one yet. “What’s this angel from God’s blessed little name?” She peeped around her viewfinder and grinned. “You can get closer to me now, Pru, because the breath mint has started to work and I . . . oh, what’s this precious little tot’s name going to be, hon?”
“Her name is . . . is . . .” a contraction plowed like a backhoe. The sheet Mama had once again thrown over my necessary birthing parts was askew and she was frantically trying to cover me up as I writhed and shouted. “Her name is . . . ohhhh . . . shit . . . it’s Vageena,” I yelled. “It’s spelled just like one of these,” I said, tossing the sheet and pointing downward, “but we are going to pronounce it differently.”
I was, quite simply, possessed by the pain. I tried to jerk the camera from Mama’s hands as she was erasing “Vageena,” from the birth video. “Help and get her out of me!” I grabbed the nurse’s teddy-bear print coat before she could run out of the room. “Get her out now!”
Jay was an easy delivery. I went in, had an hour of tolerable pain before the doctor announced he was breech and they numbed me up and performed a C-section. Nothing to it. No legs spread or exposed privates for Mama to fret over. Nothing but a tasteful laying out on a gurney and a few choice slices through the abdomen and uterus, and then it was all over, and I had given birth to a genius with a perfect head, having not squeezed him through the birth canal.
My sister’s firstborn had a squid head and red splotches and welts for two months. He looked, to put it mildly, chewed up. She toted her Bratwurst-headed boy to every portrait studio in town, proudly propping him up and causing a few horrified yelps among young inexperienced photographers at Kmart and Olan Mills, people who hadn’t seen coneheads and storkbites of that magnitude. My Mama waited till his head shrank and the red patches faded, around the child’s six-month set of photos, before she’d put one on her fridge or show her bridge biddies her new grandbaby.
“Time to push,” the doctor said, while mother jockeyed for a place near my outer thigh in order to get a documentation of the birth that wouldn’t earn an X-rating.
Bryce held my hand with one of his, the black Bible in the other. He said things like, “Breathe, in the name of Jesus,” and Mama would say, “Give her another mint, first,” and I was ready to haul off and knock both of them out cold. Half an hour later the most beautiful child I’d ever seen came squirting and sliding out of my body, her head hardly squidy at all but her coloring as brownish red as any minority baby born on the ward that day. For a second I thought she was part black and wondered if Bryce had any African Americans in his family.
Everything grew quiet as the nurse plopped the ethnic-looking baby on my breast and allowed us a quick bond before she cleaned and weighed her. My child started rooting and nursing immediately, and Mama turned off her camera because a shot of my nipple, stretched to the size of a small satellite dish, simply wouldn’t do, though she was all gung-ho on breastfeeding because she read it would increase IQ. She had seen the results of nursing Jay the Genius who hung in there for two years, though Mama said it ought to “be outlawed to have one hanging on the teat for more than six months.”
“But the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends a full year,” I’d said back when Jay was a little over a year old and they were all fussing about his need to keep nursing.
“They don’t have class and decency,” she said.
“They’re a bunch of flaming liberals,” my father had shouted from his bourbony perch in the green recliner.
***
After a while, they cleaned and bathed my daughter, Miranda Grace, the name Miranda all my choosing and Grace coming straight from Bryce, though I did find it lovely and appropriate. She was gorgeous, my sweet 8-pounds, 4-ounces of love, and they’d dressed her in a little white T-shirt that had built-in mittens to cover her sharp little fingernails. I was immediately smitten.
Not my in-laws. Not the Jeters who drove from Virginia and arrived later that night.
They brought me a single rose, one pathetic little flower from the hospital gift shop that cost $3 and wasn’t even in a vase. They eyeballed my baby and poked around in her bassinet, then turned to Bryce.
“Son, we need to see you in private.”
They left the room and shed one lingering frown at my baby’s bassinet, not even bothering to say goodbye. When Bryce returned, he was alone and droopy-faced, all sagging in on himself, not like those old baby cards from the ’60s where it shows a man’s chest swelling with the pride of fatherhood and a button popping off.
“What’s the matter?” I asked. “Where are your parents?”
He turned red and clenched his teeth. His fists made two white balls by his side.
“Gone home.”
I was shocked.
“Prudy, that isn’t my baby,” he said. “You’ve had yourself a . . . you’ve gone off and given birth to a . . . a . . . wetback.”
I glared at him like he was crazy, then I laughed and couldn’t stop laughing. Tears rolled down my face, and it felt like my bottom was going to open up and deliver another child.
“A what?” I wiped my cheeks and reached for Miranda Grace. I lifted her pink-knit hat and stared in amazement at the loads of jet-black hair she sprouted. No one in either of our families had hair that dark or thick except my grandmother on my daddy’s side. And no Jeters had met Grannie because she died a few years back. The proof was in the cemetery. Lord, we’d have to find some old photos of Grannie. My own hair coloring was a mystery. I hadn’t seen anything but the roots since I was 15, product of growing up with a mother who was a beautician without a parlor.
Bryce peered into the bassinet where Miranda was trying to get a mittened hand into her mouth, those beautiful bow-shaped lips puckering. He touched her hair and recoiled.
“Look at her,” he shouted. “She’s a Latino of some sort. She’s as much a Mexican as any I’ve seen from that restaurant you’ve been frequenting. I knew you were going more for the illegal immigrants than the food.”
“Go home. Go on. Get your thick-headed, prejudiced self home and don’t come back. Mama’s coming after a while with Jay and I don’t want them to hear your filth.”
“Prudy, you know you’re breaking several commandments as you speak. You need to get right with the Lord and—”
“I’m going to lay you out on this hard floor if you don’t get out of my room and away from us.”
It took an entire month for Miranda’s jaundice to clear up, and three more months for her skin to lighten from brownish orange to olive and for her black hair to fade to a softer brown. I will admit she did, indeed, appear to be Mexican. But that’s no reason for a husband to accuse a woman of cheating. He ruined the birth. Up and ruined it.
There were lots of things he ruined, actually.
***
Mama was going to be thrilled I’d found some gainful employment. She and Dad had said they’d help out in a pinch, but that’s not how I was operating anymore.
No more charity, either in the form of possessions or over-attentiveness. If I stayed in that apartment any longer than necessary it would all come back. Too much spare time isn’t good for people with tragedy on a leash.
What had happened in Asheville after the trial could happen again. I might stay in bed and not be able to get up. The sun might reach in, nudging with its blinding wake-up call, but I knew how to crawl deep, far away from the light and from anyone or anything. Bryce Jeter and his threats and letters would not have that hold on me any longer. Not if I could do something about it.
I walked to the children’s room, fell into Miranda’s pink butterflies and closed my eyes. The day, though it was only noon, had pressed like a lead coat, but if I just curled up on the corner of my daughter’s canopy bed I could sleep until time to pick them up for the afternoon. Just a bit of sleep. Not the kind like last year, the long, fretful slumbers when I couldn’t get up for days and days, weeks and months.
Not like when the Aunt Brigade took over and would brush all three sets of teeth at night. They’d hop from bed to bed, saying prayers, though for the longest time, my children slept with me, my son’s arms clutching me as tight as a child has ever held onto a teddy bear.
This, I told myself, holding the pillow to my chest, was a garden-variety nap to refresh the mind. A small, innocent nap of the sort that normal people who haven’t been dead off and on might take midday.
The sunlight slipped through the plastic blinds and turned the wall into a pattern of slats, like those from a grill. Like those from steel bars in a prison cell. I took my hand and touched each shadowy stripe, like a child who plays with her mobile before drifting into the uncomplicated sleep of babies.
I would not, under any circumstances, dream about Bryce or think about the letters and how they got to our address. Nor would I relive the months in the hospital or the various ways I could have made it all different by leaving sooner. I will not touch those places, nor the physical ones—the indentations along my neck, the holes in my chest and shoulders that made my skin appear like land that had been dug and tilled, readied for new life.
Chimes from a Cracked Southern Belle Page 10
