Chimes from a Cracked Southern Belle

by Reinhardt, Susan

  My mother’s the type to keep on talking and charming, filling up a room with her utter vivaciousness. She laughs and heads turn, people wanting to hear her stories, wanting to be near her, all but that Chihuahua of a mother-in-law I was inheriting. Lord, what was her deal?

  My mama is one of life’s subtle stars, not the kind who has to get noticed and steal all the attention, but the kind who snags it effortlessly. She hugs everyone she meets, finding a genuine compliment to give someone, even if she has to think on it for several days. There was a disfigured man at her church, scalded from a pot of greens when he was a baby, and the burns left him without much of a face. Mama walked up to him one Sunday morning and said, “Wayne Sutton, I’ve never in my life heard a man sing as beautifully as you. Now why don’t you join that choir up there? I imagine the choir members of heaven couldn’t sing any prettier.” After that he was a different person, wore himself the white and royal blue robes of the Pleasant Hill Missionary Baptist Church Choir, holding his burned head high, smiling as wide as those lips made from nipple and inner thigh would allow.

  She has that effect on people. She brings them up and out of whatever depression they’re swallowed by, and whatever is ailing them grows distant, like when you look at a pattern of lines or dots for so long you can’t even see them after a few minutes. They become a blur, absorbed with the rest of life’s patterns and problems. Mama spouts a potion of words and way of saying them and spins them so fast the healing comes much sooner than it would have had the world been left to putter at its own dinky pace.

  Daddy is her opposite, a quiet type who likes to knock back a couple of bourbons before dinner on an empty stomach so the glow and buzz will keep until dusk. When he’s in that state of Jim Beam grace he tells stories on Mama’s funnier stabs at compliments.

  “Ask her what she said to the gynecologist,” he said, from his green easy chair where he roosts at night and rules the world as he sips from a tall glass of life-easing nectar. “Go on, Lucy, tell them what you said.”

  “It’s Lucinda. You know better than to call me Lucy. Sounds like a woman who wants sex all the time.”

  “Well, don’t you sweet Luuuuuuuuucy?” Ah, the delicious daddy buzz that put a cherry on top of our childhood.

  “I’m not going to tell that story to my children.”

  “Tell them, sweetheart. They’re grown women.”

  She shook her head and pretended to be embarrassed, but we knew she wanted that story told.

  Without missing his cue, Daddy kicked back the easy chair to its farthest recline and took another sip of what my sister and I called his sandpaper, on account of how it smoothed life’s rough spots for him.

  “Your mama was at the gynecologist’s last week,” he said, holding his face as straight as possible. “After she’d gotten her feet unhooked and her clothes back on, the old fart called her into his office for the report.”

  Before Daddy could finish his story, Mama jumped right in, not wanting her thunder stolen. “He said, ‘Lucinda, I have to tell you that’s the cleanest, healthiest vagina I’ve ever seen on a woman your age. You ought to be right proud of that firm, youthful vagina. Won’t have to tack up your bladder or uterus.’” Mama was hee-hawing. Daddy got to laughing his wheezy sick-dog laugh and said, “Your mama walked right over to his desk and hugged him. Can you believe it? She was so happy to get a possum compliment at her age.”

  “The possum doesn’t age, Parker,” Mama said. Amber and I were the only children in South Carolina, perhaps the whole world for that matter, whose parents called the female privates a possum.

  On the day of my wedding, my mother must have thought for 48 hours straight—from the moment of the rehearsal dinner at the Steak and Ale, due to its special place in our hearts (Bryce and I met there when I was waiting tables)—to the time we all sat around eating buttermints and wishing for real food, trying to muster up a compliment to give Mrs. Pauline Jeter.

  In the meantime, Mama kept right on smiling at the woman, scaring her witless as she would suddenly appear with a fresh cup of punch or coffee or a story to tell.

  How could Bryce’s own mother, a “giblet,” according to my mother, who uses this original term for all of the world’s wimpy, sad-sack women, not have fallen directly and irretrievably under her spell? Heaven knows Mama was trying her hardest.

  I couldn’t stop looking at the Jeters—Dr. Peter Jeter with his wooden, unnatural looks, and the giblet mother, squirrel-like in her movements and the way she held her little hands when she ate. She could have been a ballerina in another more confident lifetime.

  I saw my reflection in the mirror near the refreshment line, my olive eyes brought up a notch by the stark white dress and my waist indented and of the sort June Cleaver might have had if she sipped an occasional beer or glass of wine. Looking back, I wondered how a normal, way-above-average-looking (at least on my wedding day) woman could agree to marry a man without first having met and road tested the future in-laws.

  I remember the quick, one-time introduction on a Sunday as he tried out for a position at one of the churches. I didn’t know I’d be marrying the man, so I hardly gave them much thought or attention.

  On my wedding day, from all I can recall, I was happy. I can remember basking in my husband’s fine physical glow, thinking I was the luckiest woman in the world despite his parents being the way they were. I could look at him for years, watching all 6-foot 3-inches of him and those Bible-toting hands running through his short but thick sandy brown hair that sported random blond streaks. He had the kind of hair that lasts on a man, like good carpeting. My sister’s filthy-rich, gay-but-doesn’t-know-it husband has two hairs to his name and combs them straight back like a long tongue and greases them down with something from Redken. With all that money inherited from the fried chicken franchise his family owns, I guess if he wanted some plugs and implants, he could most assuredly afford them. For the life of me, I can’t figure out why he never had an insurance policy until he met and hooked onto Amber’s Blue Cross/Blue Shield card.

  If I had to find flaw with Bryce, physically speaking, it would be the reverend’s square chin inherited from Dr. Peter Jeter, which on Bryce came off as a little harsh given the rest of the package. His other facial features were soft, skin like a young boy’s, and I believe he could go a day or two without shaving and no one would know the difference. He had a single dimple, only one. His mother timidly said the other disappeared a month after his eighth birthday and never returned. Maybe something had made him sad, maybe his joy had been kidnapped at that young age when boys smell like mud and small animals and scratch about with dirty hands and nails that are either chewed to pink pads or in need of a scrub and a trim.

  When I was 16, a junior in high school, my mama took in an unkempt boy in our neighborhood. He was 7, maybe 8, and his mother had died of breast cancer the year before. He’d ride his old bike over and sit in my mama’s easy company and beg her to put him over the shampoo bowl and run hot water through his grime-stiffened hair, the curls coarse and unruly. He’d let out a moan of sheer pleasure as all the dirt swirled down the drain and the smell of Twice As Nice shampoo filled his nose, Mama’s strong hands working his head into suds and softness.

  We’d dry him off and read him a story about the “Little Engine That Could” or “Stuart Little” and show him what a family could be like. He’d come over every day, every single day for two years, relishing in the very services most regular kids fuss about. A bath to him was glory. A supper with different colored foods on the plate, with milk in glasses and buttered biscuits peeping from cloth-covered baskets and the admonishments from my mother when he didn’t wash up, were words from heaven.

  Mama wanted to adopt him, as she had no boys, but the widowed man and his son moved away after a couple of years, and I don’t know whatever happened to them. I think his name was Landon. Tha
t was it. Landon, like the father in Little House on the Prairie. When Landon grinned he had milk-white teeth and two deep dimples. I wonder if he still has them both.

  Only the happiest people I’ve ever met have dimples, which makes me think my Aunt Weepie’s entire face should be dimpled, but it’s not, only scritch-scratched in smile lines.

  ***

  It was Bryce’s eyes that had drawn me in, caused me to go toward the marriage altar in an almost zombied state, having never been the sort of girl to jump into big decisions up until then. His eyes gave him a fourth dimension that transformed the mere skin and bones of the man and turned him within a blink to the otherworldly, a world I had thought was inhabited only by people like Moses and Abraham; and Jesus, Peter and Paul.

  His eyes, during most emotions, were an immobile swirl of blue, like a hot sky with no plans to break. Then they would switch like one of those trick cards, holograms from a bubble gum machine. Tilt the card, tilt his mood, and the image changes and Bryce’s eyes would flash to a cold, hard gray.

  Something else about Bryce caught me besides the magic eyes. It was that body. He was—and I can say this in all honesty—the only man I’d ever slept with who had a shape like a carved piece of modern art. He could have been a naked statue and it would not have been obscene, but breathtaking.

  I’ve found most men either have handsome faces or nice bodies and very few have both. The best bodies have faces that look as if they’ve grunted too long under a bench press, those hard I’m-about-to-explode-in-a-minute faces. The best looking men were the softer types, whose physiques, while not neglected, didn’t seem to be a priority other than the occasional, better-get-in-a-quick-jog-this-afternoon thought.

  My mind was on that body when the wedding harp and piano had begun playing and the hour was upon us. Eleven bells chimed and I linked arms with my daddy and he walked me down the aisle, whispering with a faint scent of bourbon on his breath that he loved me and that I was radiant and deserved the dream chest. He would tell me stories when I was a child, not about lost treasures, vast fortunes under the sea and ground, but of wishes that lay in wait in the dream chests.

  Everyone had one, he said. “All you have to do is find it, one dream at a time, like the magician who pulls out one silk scarf after the other from his sleeves.” Scarves that never seemed to end.

  “I hope,” he said. “You’ve found your first dream. The dream chest is mighty deep. As deep as your desires, sweetheart.”

  I leaned into him closer and stepped, one-two, one-two to the altar, right up next to my soon-to-be husband in his black tuxedo. Our eyes met and he burned a hole through my veil with his gaze. He didn’t look happy; nor did he appear sad. He seemed more matter-of-fact, almost in a hurry to get on with things. I imagined he was anticipating our wedding night, the walk on the beach we’d take once we drove to Kiawah Island, only five hours away from the spot on which we stood. He was probably thinking about my body beneath the outfit I’d chosen for my going-away dress, a flowing sheer swirl of fabric of the sort worn by models pictured outracing the sea in magazine spreads. My long legs, toned and aerobicized, would belong, in the name of God, to him and the passion I felt that made me dizzy and drunk.

  I needed to know this man, in the truest Biblical sense. We had kissed a few times during our formal courtship, our “dates” to different churches. He’d surprised me with his heat and his groans and the hardness I felt against my skin. I once tried to take his hand and place it on my breast, but he recoiled, saying, “Don’t try doing this to me now, Prudy, my lusty bride-to-be.” I could see the erection swelling in his khakis. “We have a lifetime for this.” He seemed so pure, so different from the other men who were eager to do it all before we even knew each other’s favorite ice cream or middle names. It was refreshing not to have a guy think a seafood dinner bought on MasterCard entitled him to, in the very least, a blow job. I’d rather pay for my own damned fish, I told a boy in college who’d bought me stuffed flounder and then all but shoved my head in his lap while he drove down Main Street, straining in his too-tight Levi’s.

  Bryce had class. He would never do that. He would be gentle; I just knew it from the way he kissed. He would be the kind of lover every woman wanted, the kind to treat love-making like a meal, starting with a warm-up of kisses that would build within themselves and lead down the body toward the places where women burned. He would find my emptiness and fill it. He would go slow, then faster, always adjusting the speed to the preference of his passenger. And he would take me, I knew it, to a place where women were meant to discover the hottest pleasures. On my wedding night, I thought, I would have all of this.

  I held Bryce’s hand for a moment, could feel his pulse in the thick veins of his hands, and I listened to the minister hired to unite us, a friend of his from school, as he spoke clearly from his Bible, reading the traditional words and then asking us to repeat after him.

  It all went smoothly, followed by the dry kiss and an hour of posing for pictures and then a dull reception of mixed nuts, finger sandwiches and the usual foods people eat when they’re teetotallers, people my father has always distrusted.

  Bryce never touched the stuff. My family wouldn’t have minded an open bar or, in the very least, a speck of wine or even a weak champagne punch to toast the newlyweds into their new lives.

  Dr. Peter Jeter slipped Bryce an envelope. His mother gave him a cold hug that could have been delivered by a propped-up corpse. She barely let her stiff arms touch him and quickly moved away, ducking toward the food to collect a napkinful of buttermints. I hated such receptions. The buttermint kind. The icy mother-of-the-groom-sneering-at-the floor-and-bride kind.

  I wanted a jazz band and good beer, flowing champagne, hot chicken wings and mini quiches, and scallops wrapped in bacon, spinach-and-cheese-stuffed mushrooms, crab dip and crackers, boiled jumbo shrimp, snow crab legs and raw oysters so the men could get rowdy and feel a hint of control at these estrogen-ruled affairs. This one came across as staid and churchy as a reception ever got. It was a shotgun wedding without the baby. Hurried, inexpensive and thrown together.

  Only my dress saved the affair. The dress cost exactly half the entire wedding, but Mama wanted to spare no expense. Bryce was the one putting the controls on her spending, saying he didn’t want to appear flashy in the eyes of his congregants. Mama and I decided a cheap dress wouldn’t do. Not at all. While a woman could semi-forget her other wedding trimmings and details, she’d never forget the dress.

  “We’ll go with this,” Mama had said to the haughty saleswoman at Once in a Lifetime, a boutique of gowns by up-and-coming designers.

  I scanned the church fellowship hall while posing with Bryce for those horrible clichéd wedding pictures where we cut the cake and feed it to each other. Trying to be funny, I put a piece on his head and my daddy howled and the flashbulbs popped and Dr. and Mrs. Jeter gave each other a glance I recognized as the “what-are-we-in-for” kind. They thought Bryce had married beneath himself. Beneath him? I had a college degree. My father had one, too, and Amber had herself a gay, rich man with two private planes and all the chicken a girl could ever eat in a lifetime. My mother had two associate’s degrees, and most of my kin, thank you very much, had inground pools with cabanas for shade.

  We had been abroad, on riverboats through Europe, on Mediterranean dinner cruises, and had taken snorkeling trips in St. Croix and the Yucatan of Mexico. We didn’t need the hoity-toity festering mouth surgeon and his skittish wife snooting down at us. We didn’t need this giblet woman and her giblet ways. If she’d been a bird, she’d have definitely been a finch, a small, unsteady frailty that falls off its perch and dies with the first taste of misfortune.

  My family, we were Pterodactyls, big-nosed and swooping, sturdy creatures, roaming the planet in full force and with life beating through our wide-open wings.

  Anyone in h
er right mind would have looked to the left and then to the right, and seen the finches on one side, the Pterodactyls on the other and, right in the center of all this shotgun fare, a three-tiered wedding cake holding up a trace of hope with eggs, Crisco and sugar.

  The cake soon became the focus after the photographer had done his appropriate hackneyed shots. Before anyone had time to notice, Aunt Weepie had removed the bride and groom and replaced them with a naked couple—a plastic hooker bride with giant boobs, plastic groom with a huge and very erect penis sporting everything but the pubic hair.

  My daddy laughed so hard he had to leave the room. Weepie was falling over in fits, tinkling in her Control tops. Mama said it was on the naughty side and behind her hidden smile she helped poor Mrs. Jittery Jeter replace it with the original. But not before my photographer friend returned for a couple of wonderful close ups.

  I was so happy that day, I wanted to cry but didn’t. A woman 30 marrying someone as handsome and moral as Bryce Jeter did not count her misfortunes. She counted her blessings. She imagined how wonderful such a person would be as a father and husband. How he would never raise his voice or be the type to cheat or break any commandments. A minister was far preferential to a doctor. He wouldn’t have to go out in the night and deliver babies, stare at other women’s possums, feel their supple breasts for lumps. He would work a calm job and smile at old ladies with inheritances and delicious offerings, both for the silver collection plate and casseroles weighing down their dining room tables.

  We would live in that lovely white Cape Cod, provided by this very church, these very people who didn’t really know us but certainly bestowed as many blessings as a plastered grin could hold.