Chimes from a Cracked Southern Belle

by Reinhardt, Susan

  The school also had a wonderful pre-kindergarten program, and Miranda was excited about going to “big-girl school.” She couldn’t wait to strap that giant Hannah Montana backpack on her tiny little shoulders (she’d finally decided granny purses were no longer fashionable) and carry peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in its matching lunch box.

  This morning I dropped Jay off and made sure he got to his room all right. I opened my arms and was surprised he let me hug him. His hair smelled like watermelon shampoo and he was wearing a new shirt from Old Navy that Croc had bought him. His feet looked huge in new shoes that were a size too large because I was afraid if I bought them to fit, I’d have to rush out and get another pair in a few months.

  Watching him disappear into a stranger’s care, I had to push back the tears so I wouldn’t embarrass him. I nodded to his teacher and waved goodbye. I had met her during orientation and liked her philosophy and the plans she had to nurture gifted children without making over them like freaks. She had been gracious and calm, not once prodding me for information about Jay’s past or how that might affect his learning. She had simply allowed us to enroll, eat the cookies and drink the punch, sign the forms and leave like ordinary people. Not people who’d entered and exited nightmares.

  With Miranda it was different. I’d never had her in a full-time program, only half days at Mama’s church. I wondered if this was too much. She was accustomed to family taking care of her, a mother who alternated between the great waves of energy and laughter and long stays in hospitals or the bed. The pre-K wing was a newer addition to the school, and I’d heard nothing but good feedback from the mothers who make it their mission to evaluate every school within a 20-mile radius. This was my new way to make friends, joining the PTA and chittering about children’s needs and issues, even though I was no longer getting paid to do so. Thank goodness the radio station dropped its charges after I’d made several trips there to apologize, going as far as offering to clean the toilets free for a week. Thanks, but no thanks, they’d said, which was fine by me.

  Though armed with this positive knowledge about the school, dropping Miranda off at the classroom and seeing the ABCs on the walls, the 1-2-3 choo-choo train racing across the borders, my heart felt as if it were an anchor about to sink what was left of me.

  Miranda shook herself free of my hand, which had held hers too tight. She marched as jauntily as Annie Sue in a pair of clunky tennis shoes, diva style, straight into her classroom and right up to her new teacher, a young woman of about 24 or 25. She never looked back. Not once.

  “Miranda,” I called out as children and mothers exchanged tears and goodbyes. “Miranda!” I couldn’t get her attention. She was giving it all away. I smiled at the back of her hair, gathered in a pink clip, my eyes lingering on her ankle-length ruffled skirt, the thick-soled shoes, the fringe blouse that had come back in style and was the big rage of my own grammar school days. I wanted to run and bury my face in her soft brown hair before I loaned her to the world. Instead, I turned and walked down the hall, through the doors of the elementary school and to my car where I sat and laid my head on the steering wheel and cried for 20 minutes.

  Afterward, I was fine. My personal motto is “Cry it out. Tears are God’s Valium.” A good cry drains a person of all stresses, leaves her limp and cleansed. I blew my nose, patted my face with powder and drove to Top of the Hill where I would begin my stint as a full-time worker with salary and benefits, enough money to pay the rent, put a few dollars in savings and have extra so that when Miranda wanted a Barbie I didn’t have to go to Goodwill to get it. Nor would I have to shop at the Junior League’s thrift store where women like Kippie Murray were always right around the next corner, flames dancing from tongues rather than the ends of batons.

  ***

  Kathy was making beds when I arrived. She needed help getting the residents in the shower for their weekly baths, the soothing spray of warm water massaging old arthritic bones and aching muscles. As soon as she saw me, she moved forward, reaching out her arms to hug me. She’d never shown me or anyone else affection since I’d known her. She said, “I’m glad you’re back.”

  “Plan to stay that way, too,” I said, helping her lift a heavy, immobile woman into the shower chair and trying to remember as I rolled this 220 pounds of patient in the center of the bathroom that she was once someone’s mother and grandmother. She’d had a life and people who loved her. They’d just forgotten about her, put her here and rarely, if ever, returned for visits. I sprayed the warm water on her bare skin and she moaned with pleasure. You never knew what the elderly could feel or hear.

  Beginnings and Endings.

  Those are the places I could make a difference. The middles were too difficult.

  As we lathered the patient and the shampoo bubbled in her hair, the door burst open and in clacked Aunt Weepie, off-kilter in a pair of super-high heels and a magenta suit, white silk blouse trailing a wet stain from neck to second button. She was buried in enough Beautiful to sicken a farm animal. Her face twisted itself with angst, white as paper except for two drawn-on circles of pink blush splotched unevenly on her cheeks.

  “I have done a horrible, awful thing, Prudy,” she wailed, and the semi-catatonic woman in the shower chair turned around and stared with fright in her otherwise blank eyes. “I will never balance this sin. I’ll never live it down. You’re going to hate me forever.”

  “What, Aunt Weepie?” I said, massaging the shoulders of the old woman under the water, drops of hot water splashing my face and arms. “It can’t be that bad.”

  “It’s so bad you’re going to have to let me wipe a lot of wrinkly butts today,” she said. “Give me all the Depends to change. Every ass to wash.”

  “Aunt Weepie!”

  “Oh, Prudy, no one in the family’s going to ever speak to me again. Your mother will nail the final screw in the coffin she’s been custom building for me in her mind for years. Lord, I’m a horrible, wretched woman. Give me an old butt. Give me a dirty man to bathe!”

  “Excuse me, Kathy,” I said. “Could you finish up here? I need to escort my foul-mouthed aunt to the break room for a few minutes.”

  “I can handle it,” she said, looking my aunt up and down with her right eye.

  We walked down the hall, me holding Aunt Weepie up as she clicked and swayed, martini-breathed and bumped into several of the residents who were parked in the Geri Chairs, strapped into safety and their own worlds, cruising the halls with God knew what going on in their minds. Aunt Weepie’s sporadic obscenities blended in with the outcries of the residents, men and women who never swore in their early lives but had morphed into viragoes with the mouths of drunken sailors as soon as age tightened its grip, squeezing out their censors and memories. It was common to hear M.F. and G.D. and an assortment of vulgarities one typically expects only from Eddie Murphy or Howard Stern. Aunt Weepie’s talk of dirty behinds went unnoticed by everyone but me.

  As we proceeded toward the break room, she made faces when the odors I was accustomed to hit her. She fanned the space in front of her nose. “Shoo, Prudy. How can you come to work here every day? Smells like the bathroom after one of Tony’s furball meals.”

  “I need them. They need me.”

  “They need the Estée Lauder counter and a potty trainer. Seems to me if you can train dogs and children, you could at least get them to ring a bell before the shit starts flying.”

  “Lucky for them, the potty trainer is here today. Wearing hot pink and silk. I’ll show you where you can start when you’re ready.”

  “What? You’re serious? In this outfit?”

  “It already has a stain.”

  “You aren’t even going to say, ‘Oh, it can’t be that bad.’ Or, ‘Tell me, Aunt Weepie, what in the world could you have done to give yourself over to diaper duty?’”

  Aunt Weepie slumped
in a chair and threw her head into her arms on the Formica table where Kathy ate her tuna salad sandwiches and Ruffles, carrots and pickles. My aunt convulsed with tears and hiccups of agony. I patted her back.

  “I’m ruined. It’s over. Even your Mama will never speak to me again, and we’d finally patched things up enough that I could go over there and she’d mix me a martini. When she finds out about this, I’ll have to drink forever up under my bed. I shouldn’t have come out. I should have stayed under there, but Tony said since we had company I needed to crawl on out and do some chores.”

  “What company?”

  She wailed louder and louder. “I can’t tell you. You’ll hate me.”

  “I’ll be madder if you don’t tell me what in the world you’re talking about.”

  She lifted her head, face a mess, eyes blackened with Maybelline Great Lash and puffy from crying. “Pauline’s here,” she said, sobbing and grabbing her chest, as if she were Fred Sanford and the ‘big one’ was about to strike her dead.

  “Pauline who?”

  “How many do you know?”

  It hit me. I knew only one. Pauline Jeter, the giblet who jumped around like a subservient squirrel, that nervous little thing springing around at the wedding. The woman who joined in when everyone thought I’d birthed a Mexican, who’d sat in the back row at her son’s trial, away from her husband and boy, but not uttering a peep.

  When I testified I watched her; I took the stand and focused on her because I couldn’t bear to place my eyes on Bryce or his daddy or my chin-jutting mother or my Aunt Weepie who’d cry like a banshee. I honed in on Pauline Jeter as I told of the van speeding toward me and the few details I could remember. To add to the horror, the district attorney suggested I wear a scoop neck so the jurors could gawk at the purple-red scars and zigzagged, Frankenstein-like stitches.

  “I don’t understand, Aunt Weepie. Why is Pauline Jeter at your house?”

  “She heard about your episode, the hospitalization. She was coming down to bring the children a bunch of stuff for back-to-school, and when she couldn’t reach your mama, she called me and I’d had a few martinis and she starts boo-hooing about Bryce dying of a brain tumor, and before I knew what I was saying . . . oh, I felt so sorry for her I asked her to come on down, but to wait a week or so until you got better. She showed up today. I’d forgotten all about inviting her. I must have a drinking problem. Is there rehab in this facility?”

  “No. You have a thinking problem. Why didn’t you tell me about the brain tumor?”

  “I was planning to. I’ve been writing to her on and off because she loves those grandkids, and I just thought it was the Christian thing to do. Anyway, I thought for sure she’d drink the coffee I poured her, eat one of Tony’s cement cakes, then hightail it to a Sheraton somewhere down the road. But noooo! She put her bags down and said, ‘Which room is mine?’ And I could have died right then and there. I was about to call Tony in, and I guess she sensed I was panicking about her being there so she started telling me all about those letters and something about you marching down to Charlotte to see the murderer in person, only she didn’t call him a murderer, of course, she calls him, ‘my poor baby.’ You never told me about the letters, Prudy.”

  “What did she say about them?” Shock was too mild a word for all I was hearing.

  My aunt ignored my question entirely. “She’s left him. She’s shed herself of her husband who she said would rather bed down the young women coming in for braces than sleep with her. She said he’d cheated on her their whole marriage, had treated her like dirt so it was no wonder Bryce was screwed up. She told me her husband said she had, and I quote, an ‘unfixable, ugly-ass overbite.’ This is what she said last night after she got to our place. Said that mean man point-blank told her she had the bite and bone structure of a chimp. Bless her heart. Tony fixed her a plate of food and the woman gulped it down like a starved dog. It was one of his uglier meals, too.”

  “Aunt Weepie, how long is she staying?”

  My aunt wouldn’t face me. She rummaged through her purse for lipstick and her fake Chanel compact.

  “How long?”

  “She’s moved in.”

  “She’s what?!”

  “Prudy, you need to listen before you go getting all upset,” Aunt Weepie said.

  “Those letters you thought Bryce and the attorney were sending . . . they weren’t from him. Pauline told me. She found out old Peter Jeter was typing and mailing the letters to you ’cause he didn’t think you were suffering nearly as much as his baby boy. Pauline’s on your side, hon. She said Bryce was out of it in prison, diagnosed with a vicious tumor. She said he’s so medicated he doesn’t know what he’s done or who he’s done it to.”

  “Oh, my God, please!”

  “That husband of hers is the villain this time, Prudy. She ain’t going back. What could I do?”

  I tried to digest all this new information. Dr. Jeter sending the letters, at least the violence-oriented batches that had been typed. Pauline the giblet, just another Jeter victim.

  “Hate me all you want, Prudy, but I need to clean the elderly and get on with my business. Me and Pauline’s going to a funeral at 2.”

  “A funeral?” I could not believe a thing I was hearing.

  “I told her she could cry it out there, all her pain about her husband and no-account-but-sick-and-dying son—of course she still loves him but we agreed to disagree on that one and not bring it up. I figure with her crying and carrying on . . . I can’t cry twice in a day and I’ve already cried all morning. It’ll be up to her to get us invited to the covered dish. I told her when she set her Louis Vuittons in my guest bedroom, ‘A meal around this place is something one works for and plans carefully. It ain’t always easy, Pauline.’ Then I explained to her what to do at funerals and where the pots and pans and cookbooks were located in my kitchen. ‘The louder you yell like a scalded animal, the better our chances for the post-burial spread,’ I told her. So see, I’m putting her to work, Prudy.”

  “And I’m also putting you to work. You run along and find Kathy,” I ordered. “Tell her I said to show you where Mr. Walsh is, and you can go and change him and give him a nice bed bath. Clean out from beneath his toenails. Clip his nose and ear hair. He might even show you the new trick he can do with his privates since you seem on to that subject today. After that, Mrs. Holcombe needs changing, too. She also could use an enema if you know how to give one.”

  My aunt stood to leave, tucking her white silk blouse back into her magenta skirt.

  “I’m only trying to help, Prudy. Trying to be a decent person in this world. That pitiful giblet shouldn’t suffer and miss out on seeing her grandchildren because she married a senior ass and gave birth to a junior ass.”

  “You find her a place to live. I’m not saying a word to her. She never sent me but one card following what her ‘baby boy’ did to me. I remember the card well. Had a woman, one of those cartoon-drawings on the front, with her leg up in traction, then the words, ‘Sorry to hear you’re back at the factory.’ You open up the inside and it said, ‘Must have made you on a Monday,’ only she crossed out Monday and put Sunday, the day of my near demise.”

  “Prudy, she was trying to be funny or else she was confused and not thinking right. A lot of people don’t know how to be funny, the subtleties of classy humor.”

  “Aunt Weepie, how in the world could she send such a card? ‘Must of made you on a Monday?’ You realize the card is referring to the general and overall defectiveness of products made by hung-over workers on Mondays? You realize the jackass that sprang from her giblet loins tried to kill me on a Sunday and that’s why she scratched out Monday and added the Sunday part? So, I’d say she was in her right mind to know the exact day of the week. I wrote to the card company and gave them a piece of my mind for putting out such trash
. They sent me a free assortment box for my ‘troubles.’”

  “Wasn’t that nice?” Aunt Weepie said, checking over her face in a compact. “If you don’t mind, I could use one to send to a friend if there’s a Happy Anniversary card in the—”

  “Aunt Weepie!”

  “I’m in a hurry and need to—”

  “You go down to room 104 then 116 and get busy. Kathy’s probably still in the shower room and will give you a pair of gloves, unless you prefer to get it all over your pretty hands.”

  “Prudy, I swear you can be a carbon copy of your mama when you take a notion to it.”

  “You tell that jumpy squirrel at your house that this little town isn’t big enough for both of us.”

  “She’s flush with cash, Prudy. Loaded. Ready to spend, and it’s all flying from her authentic Chanel bag like loose birds. Said the courts gave her everything but Peter Jeter’s underpants when they learned he couldn’t keep his paws off the patients. He’s lucky he still has a license. She got everything, drives the most darling Lexus you ever laid your eyes on. Said she’s going to be the best grandmother in the world and wants to meet with you to go over a few things.”

  I could not believe what I was hearing. “Go over a few things?”

  ***

  I left Top of the Hill in a state of disbelief. Pauline Jeter has moved to town. Not only to town but into the guest room at Aunt Weepie’s. What next? Lord, could you please move along to another sinner? Surely there’s a hussy or drug addict you could focus on for a while, tilt the world back a smidgen in our favor, shove the black clouds farther to the north or south of us. Please.