Chimes from a Cracked Southern Belle

by Reinhardt, Susan

  “Jay’s loyalty is being tested,” the therapist had said after I’d told her about Round One of the letters, the batch to my son. “Give him space. Don’t make him feel guilty for wanting a connection to his father.”

  Well all right, but the next group of letters were too much by anyone’s standards. I could never show them to Mama or she’d start up with a shotgun, Bible and trips to the Charlotte prison. Since she went through the change some eight to ten years ago, not even her synthetic hormones could completely level her out. No way I’d tell her about the recent flurry of letters. Her blood pressure would soar and she’d surely blame my bad choice on her vessel explosion. Lately, she never stopped telling me I was one incident away from putting her in her new burial drawer. “Good thing I went ahead and bought it and the two dresses, too,” she’d say.

  I read the letters in the employee lounge during my lunch break.

  Dear Jay:

  I sure do miss you. Maybe it won’t be too much longer until I’m dismissed. My lawyer says he thinks there’s a way for me to get out of here a lot sooner than the judge had said. Wouldn’t you like that? We could go to the baseball games and eat hotdogs like old times. I could take you to the go-cart track and wherever you want to go. Nana P. told me you played soccer and T-ball this past year and I hate that I missed it. I think by the time you’re ready to hit your first home run, I should be in the stands to see it. Don’t show this letter to anyone. Please, son.

  Love, Daddy.

  P.S. I think about you 1,000 times a day. P.S.S. Your mother isn’t telling you the full truth. There are two sides to every story. Never forget that, son.”

  The third letter wasn’t really a letter at all. It was a drawing done in chalk and obviously not of Bryce’s hand because I’d never known him to have a talent for art. The card was about the size of a 4x6-inch photo. The front had a meticulously drawn man, finely chiseled jaw, streaked blond hair, muscles bulging on his arms as he bent and busted the steel bars of his confinement. The head was out, body halfway there, one leg stepping into freedom, jaw set in a determination to do what was necessary at all costs.

  The man wore a pair of blue trousers and a white T-shirt with the name Jeter printed so small, I had to use a magnifying glass to see it. But it was there. All five unmistakable letters like a secret code. The man in the drawing was identical to Bryce, only more exaggerated (but not by much) and super-heroish. I opened the card and found three words printed in charcoal. Square identifiable print.

  see you soon.

  “Over my dead body,” I said to Kathy Lumpkin, the nurse’s assistant who’d been shot in the head, as she entered the break room and came over to see what I was reading. We were waiting on Miss Annie Sue to put on her wig and all her makeup, her good earrings and stockings with the fewest runs and snags. Several years ago Kathy‘s husband followed her down I-85 toward Greenville, inched his car up next to hers as she veered off at the White Horse Road Exit. She rolled down her window to see what the hell he wanted, riding her bumper for the past 20 miles. Before she could budge, she saw the gun flash against the sunlight, and an explosion ripped near her temple.

  The next memory she had was one month later, waking up in a rehab center after weeks in a coma. Just as I had, she had survived what most couldn’t. She didn’t so much limp as lean, and she forgot things but wanted to work and the residents adored her. They didn’t mind if she failed to pack fresh ice in their water pitchers or changed their diapers twice in a row or not at all. She did fine as long as she stayed on the same hall, saw the same faces. If no one steered her down another floor, she could perform her duties and do so quite well.

  We had an easy friendship, easier than with some of the victims of abuse I’d met during my long-ago required group therapy visits—those women who’d go back to their partners, or who got better and moved on, no visible wounds and disabilities to glue them to hell. Kathy and I had both been in critical condition, all but dead as we lingered in Intensive Care, both of us too stubborn to die. Both of us mothers of small children so that we couldn’t die. Somebody had to pack peanut butter sandwiches and wait in the pickup lines after school. Somebody had to sign newly fatherless children up for Cub Scouts and tap dancing, hold them in the night through fevers and stomach flu and dreams of their daddies coming to kill them or polish off their mommies.

  “He’s yanking your chain,” she said, her one-sighted eye boring into the letters, the other eye blinded by the .32 caliber bullet. “Mine did that at first. I didn’t respond and it stopped. He’ll stop.” She took her paper bag out and unwrapped a tuna sandwich and a bag of Ruffles, three baby carrots and a Kosher dill. I sat with her through her lunch break and drank a Diet Coke and ate a Snickers bar, my stomach too unsettled for real food as I waited on Miss Annie Sue Higgins to get gussied up for her final trip to the Department of Motor Vehicles where she would try once more to get her driver’s license renewed.

  Tomorrow was her 104th birthday. After that date the license expired. Everyone but me was against her taking the test, especially her driving her Skylark to the DMV four miles down the road, but I thought it was an excellent idea, a way for her to grab a touch of hope from a life that was way past its expectancy. She was in many ways like a car that manages to go 60 more miles on an empty tank of gas.

  “I’ll take her,” I’d said to Theresa. “I’ll ride with her.”

  Her power of attorney, an only son 80 years old and with all warmth either aged out or never within him, signed a paper allowing this to transpire. He didn’t think she’d pass the test. He had full confidence that after today, he’d never have to worry about her cranking that Skylark and taking off from the nursing home again. He had tried everything he knew to get her out of that car, but it was what the woman lived for—midnight trips to Wal-Mart when she could swing it, escaping like a 14 year old from her bedroom window. The staff got smart enough to take Annie Sue’s keys and give them to her only when they could supervise and restrict her driving to the back lot behind the rest home.

  What could be the harm in that as long as she remained in the designated place to practice her parallel parking and 180-degree turns? I believe Annie Sue just loved the feel of the keys as she inserted them into the ignition. She loved hearing the ancient car roar to life. It’s not that she needed to drive to Wal-Mart or Piece Goods for swatches of material or yarn. She just wanted to be able to sit in her car, adjust her mirrors and legally drive to the post office to mail a woman who’d been dead 20 years a birthday card.

  “You okay?” Kathy asked, finishing her lunch.

  “Yeah. It’s just the letters. I can’t figure out how he got our address and why the prison officials won’t stop them. I’ve called them twice and get nothing but the run-around.”

  I asked Kathy, more rhetorically than expecting an answer. “How do you think Bryce found us? We have new names, a new location.”

  “Don’t think about it, Dee,” Kathy said, tuna on her chin. “He wants you to think about it. It’s his way of still controlling and abusing you. Most of them do this from prison. I promise if you don’t write back, it’ll stop. Mine did, like I said. And he’s up for parole in two years. Serving five is all the bastard got.”

  “My God. Shot you and is serving five years. Maybe I’ll call my lawyer about the letters.”

  “Couldn’t hurt. But it’s a waste of time and money. He’ll stop when he discovers it’s hopeless.”

  “Bryce is smart. If he pores over law books in the prison library the way he studied his Bible, he’ll find that loophole he’s searching for, some way out of serving his time.”

  Kathy fished around her empty lunch bag, forgetting she’d finished her lunch. Sometimes, she just trailed off, forgot what we were talking about, her short-term memory stolen by that bullet.

  It was the routine, the sameness, that kept her sane. Tuna, Ru
ffles, the east wing of the manor, a schedule that never changed. The occupational therapist had told her to try a few changes, modifications that would stimulate her brain, but she wasn’t up for that. We aren’t the types who can take all the suggestions therapists throw at us. It’s enough to even step into their offices, see all the smiling, bruiseless women on the shiny magazine covers in the waiting lounges, a room palpable with others’ problems.

  “He ain’t going anywhere,” she said. “I’m prepared. I got a license to carry a gun, so if mine gets out and tries to pull something. I’ve got a trigger I plan on pulling.”

  Annie Sue peered into the break room.

  “I’ll be right with you, sweetie,” I said to the old woman, her wig on sideways, her lipstick smeared to her nose. “Listen, Kathy. I’ll be back in a couple of hours to help you with the baths and showers. Don’t do too much, okay?”

  “No, I won’t,” she said and stood to leave. “I just want you to know one thing. Not all men are bad. I have a new boyfriend who treats me like a princess. We just picked bad the first go-round. There’s hope, honey. Just lay low and take it easy and quit worrying.”

  “I’m going to take your advice,” I said. “I’ll forget about those dumb letters.”

  “What letters?” she asked. “Was that what we were talking about? Oh, heavens. My memory. I pray every night it will quit blinking on and off like a firefly.”

  “It’ll be all right, Kathy. We’ll talk later,” I said and nodded toward Annie Sue. I gave Kathy no indication the letters was a topic she and I had been discussing just moments ago. She got upset when someone pointed out she’d forgotten the past five minutes of her life.

  “I’m all ready and cute as teenager,” Annie Sue announced with a head tilt that nearly toppled her wig and a wide-open pop of the mouth, as if she’d been suddenly surprised. “You like these earbobs, or should I wear my red-white’n-blue flags on account of all this here patriotism since the world turned nasty on us?”

  I feasted on the sight before me, the tall Annie Sue Higgins, not a bent bone in her upright body, 104 years of fitness and calcium-rich living. She could high-kick like a Rockette and often did, parading down the halls like some ancient majorette. She led the exercise classes three days a week in the activities room, taking the breath of even the staff who were a fraction her age. She’d march and strut down the Top of the Hill’s hallways in her polyester pants that yielded enough to allow her sudden and limber movements.

  She jogged a turtle-paced mile every morning, those stick legs looking like pencils wrapped in wrinkled tissue paper. They were streaked orange from her repeated massacres with Banana Boat’s Deepest Darkest self-tanner. She even wore a jogging bra, though I’m not sure why because, from the looks of things in her nightgowns, whatever she had going had hit the knees half a century earlier.

  “I’ve studied all them signs,” she said, opening a stained beige purse at least 50 years old and smelling stale and old-ladyish as she rummaged for her glasses. I was thinking Miranda would adore that purse. “I just hope the good Lord will allow me a speck of vision. You know that’s why I failed them other two times. I couldn’t see a lick. If Big Foot stepped in that department of cars, I wouldn’t have seen him either.”

  She led me to her Skylark, which was parked in the hot sun, broiling like a foil-wrapped Idaho potato on Bake 450. She entered the old clunker, reached over to unlock my door and then stuck her key in without making the complete rotation to start the ignition.

  Annie Sue sat there, windows tighter than a coffin’s seal, chatting about the various questions that might be on the test. I sat, patiently at first, but grew woozy from the heat. She checked her makeup and wig position in the rearview mirror. She wiped off a few streaks of Coty coral lipstick that had bled on her nose, which too many years on this earth had caused to sag and sort of fall toward her top lip. She didn’t seem to mind or care unless she was in the car, which produced in her a Pavlovian response, signaling her into primp mode.

  “You got any rouge?” she asked, twisting her wig around in the other direction, not an improvement, but satisfactory to her just the same.

  “Yes, I’m sure I do, Miss Annie.”

  “Well dig it out, would ya? I look like I died six months ago.”

  Several minutes of intense, idle heat had built in the car when I gave up and said to her, “I’ll hand it over as soon as you crank the engine and run the AC, all right?” I didn’t talk to her in the same voice we used for many of the residents, the baby talk that seems to soothe the demented but must be irritating to those who possess their faculties. I talked to Annie Sue as if she were a contemporary. We all did. She wouldn’t have it any other way.

  She started the engine and it sputtered, the initial misgivings of old cars whose mechanisms coughed and finally caught. Annie Sue yanked the gear into reverse and turned in the tiny space allotted her, a place far removed from the other cars and pedestrian crossings. She pounded and slapped the manual steering as if it were a horse, finally getting it turned around the right way as she aimed the car’s broken and hanging hood ornament toward the road, hugging the left lane as she drove. I could hear the car eating bushes and leaves, could feel the tug of the plants she beheaded, deflowered, scalped and shredded.

  She did not take notice and proceeded to the end of the parking lot where the area widened until it opened onto the highway. Not until we were in the middle of the road, cars coming in both directions, did she remember the stop sign 10 yards back.

  Car horns blared and tires screeched. I was wearing a lap belt, the only kind made back in 1971 when her Skylark came off a Detroit assembly line. The force of the stop hurled me forward into the scorching dashboard, my head thrown like a rag doll’s from her slamming on the brakes.

  “What’s the matter with these drivers?” she shouted. “Ought’n a one of them should have a license. Call the law, Dee. Call 911 on your cell phone, you hear?”

  “Settle down, Miss Annie. Come on and inch over here to this side of the road and we should be fine till we get to the light up ahead.”

  “What light? I don’t see no light!”

  This must be a death wish, a secret subliminal way to end my life since these letters came from Bryce. This wasn’t the right moment to give Bryce a thought in my head, not when I needed to concentrate on keeping Annie from getting us killed before we could get her to the DMV. She made it to the traffic light, but didn’t consider applying her brakes. I bit my lip and gripped the aqua vinyl seat that was cracked and sprouting yellowed foam.

  She raised her giant size-10 foot in its Reebok cross-trainer, the only evidence of a modern world on her presence, and pounded the brake as we came within half an inch of hitting a Subaru in front of us.

  “Shit,” I yelled without thinking.

  Annie slapped her long skinny thigh, her skirt inching up to reveal a set of beige knee highs she’d worn on top of her pantyhose. “See there, girlie,” she hooted, a bit of gold flashing in her otherwise solid, century-old teeth, not a single tooth absent. “I missed it, didn’t I? I didn’t hit one car, honey pie.”

  We continued the risky journey, Annie’s blinkers going left, then right, though we had no plans to turn for at least a mile and a half. The blinkers ticked louder than a grandfather clock, and she bobbed her head to the beat, as if it were music coming from her radio that hasn’t made a sound other than static since 1985. She worked the steering wheel and floorboard pedals like a church organist in the midst of inspiration. She’d start, then stop, our heads wobbling and other cars flipping the poor lady off and cursing from behind tinted windows. After 10 minutes of mobile hell, we turned into the DMV, and Annie squinted from behind her two-inch thick glasses and eased into a parking space, about two feet over one of the white stripes and spilling into the empty space next to her.

  After we got out
of the car, I inspected the vehicle for damage and began an inventory. It did not look good. The car was scraped and dented, and metal parts sprung out as a result of her evening drives in Top of the Hill’s back region. The hedge clipping earlier hadn’t helped matters. The rear bumper and trim along the car’s side resembled a healthy plant, flowing with vines and blooms, greenery that had been snatched out of the earth this very afternoon as we left the nursing home grounds.

  “We need to remove all this before we go in, or when you take the driving test, it’s not going to go in your favor,” I suggested. “It looks as if you’ve been driving in a jungle.”

  “I have no apologies to make,” she said, applying a third coat of coral to her lips. “I do the best I can, and that’s all a girl can do.”

  It was still lunchtime for many people in town and the DMV was packed as usual. Annie Sue patted her wig and entered the building, talking loud, on account of her hearing loss and her nature in general. One of her knee-highs had given up and hung loose around her scrawny ankle, and despite her efforts, her wig was slipping, revealing a swath of white silvery hair matted to her skull.

  Soon, every dour face in the building had perked up and focused its attention on Miss Annie Sue Higgins, turning 104 tomorrow.