I tapped my head to indicate I was losing it. All of us, it was clear, under strain.
Mother greeted them, then turned, as if overwhelmed by the proximity of all her remaining family. “Shall we go in?” she requested. “I believe we’re ready to serve.”
She had got the woman who sometimes cooked for her (she never called it catering) to make chicken crêpes and a lemon and raspberry mousse cake. She’d baked her own special sweet-milk biscuits and delegated the soft-scrambled eggs to Daddy. “Eggs are back,” he explained, quoting from one of his many health letters. “Butter, too. You see how they demolished oleo in the paper? Guys on low-fat diets get more strokes.” He took care, too, of the drinks: orange juice for everyone, coffee for the adults and Borden, green tea for Birdie and Bailey, a glass of white wine for Mother. He’d poured it for her, not asking (since she would have thought it proper to demur), saying a person ought to celebrate with a little spirits on her birthday.
The meal went all right; the food was delicious (certainly a treat for me), and Daddy did most of the talking, about how their good habits were responsible for Mother’s looking not even old enough to have grandchildren at seventy. And about how fortunate they were, however, to have all of theirs on hand for this milestone. How, by his eightieth, his grandsons might be thinking of starting families of their own. The boys rolled their eyes. Birdie giggled. “I guess you’ll have to be ninety before I’m ready, Granddaddy.”
Mostly everything went fine because Red was so wonderful with my parents. The way he’d always been. I remembered back to when he first started coming around, after he and Terrell had begun to go out occasionally. The whole structure of the law, or the Law, as Daddy spoke of it with awe, was based on precedent: what had the courts done in the past; how could that be interpreted, or cited, or stretched in the present case? It seemed natural for him to talk with my daddy about history, since precedence was just another name for the history of legal decisions. Daddy would expound until it made your ears ring and your eyes glaze over about the differences between British law and American law, between the cultures that created the different systems. And Red never got tired of that or ran out of questions. “Good boy you’ve got there,” my daddy began to tell Terrell. Or, “Where’s that young man of yours? We haven’t seen him lately.”
With Mother, Red had been equally engaging. His family had been around since the start of Texas, dirt farmers north and east of town in a little wide spot on the road called Pflugerville. His mom had been a vocational nurse (though he didn’t mention that she’d quit nursing by the time he met Terrell and was working in a dry cleaner’s shop). His dad, he said, was a builder. Which sounded better than saying that he got and lost at least a dozen jobs a year helping contractors put up their houses, lost them because everything he tried to do ended up undone. Any nail he drove, Red used to confide, went in crooked; any leak in the roof became two leaks when he tried to patch it. But, nonetheless, it wasn’t a lie to say that his family had been pioneers in Central Texas, the Halls. He’d mention that, then get Mother to talking about her kin in East Texas, the Adams clan, that was her maiden name, the Terrells, the Ellises, for whom my sister and I were named. How rich the farmland was there, how, yes, they’d had dairy farms just the same as Red’s great-grandparents, whose farm was not ten miles from the present Blue Bell Supreme creamery. How, yes, it did give you a feel for the land. Her very tone conjuring up the landed gentry of another century. “That nice young man called,” she began to say to Terrell. “Tell me his name again.”
Today, Red made a festive flattering production out of photographing Mother with her three grandchildren. Setting up his camera on a tripod, moving chairs out onto the sunporch, deciding there was too much glare, moving them back into the living room, careful not to have the high school photos of Terrell and me in the background, arranging the chairs in front of the framed paned birds. “Not easy to get you and all your flock in one shot,” he told her, reminding her of the many who were present. Not mentioning the one who was gone.
Still, it couldn’t have been easy for her, blowing out her seven yellow dripless tapers, smiling as everyone sang, touching Daddy’s hand as he toasted his bride of more than forty-five years. Any way you arranged it, this year was different.
In the past, every year for Mother’s birthday, the three of us posed for a formal portrait, Mother in the center, a daughter on each side. A ritual that had begun when I was a toddler, Terrell starting kindergarten. We did this annually until I ran off with Buddy and Terrell became engaged to Red. After that, because I seldom returned, not exactly welcome, and because we were grown and so one year looked a lot like the last, we began to take marker shots on Mother’s major birthdays: when she turned fifty, and I was still helping Buddy repo yachts and Terrell was helping R. Rufus Hall make partner; fifty-five, when Terrell had her boys, and I was pregnant with Birdie, no husband in sight, and so happy I hardly minded that no one wanted to see me; sixty, when we first got the three cousins together; sixty-five, when I, the sudden widow, was welcome once again. Photos showing Terrell and me growing taller, older, altering in various ways; photos showing Mother at the center, never changing.
Daddy had come up with the idea to begin afresh, this time with the grandchildren, who would one day be turning into adults, taking spouses, having young, providing them a wonderful certain increase in numbers.
“Are you ready, Agatha?” Red asked, when his gear was set up.
“Yes, certainly.” She straightened her yellow neckline, adjusted her pearls, smoothed the line between her eyes. “Whenever you are, Rufus.”
After trying a shot or two with everyone seated, Red moved the chairs away and tried them standing. He’d taken off his navy linen jacket, and worked in white shirtsleeves (though not rolled above the elbows, the way he had in the old days), his Canon camera now in his hand. When he leaned over, I could see scattered white in his well-cut dark hair. He first posed them as stairsteps: Borden, Bailey, Agatha, Birdie. Then, taking his time, he tried another grouping, this time with Mother and Birdie facing out at the center, a tall boy on either side, like bookends. Coaxing smiles, he said, “Say rain please.” He fidgeted with the focus. “Hmmm,” he said, “let’s try this.” He sat Mother in a chair and had the grandchildren cluster around her, each down on one knee, so no tall teen head rose above hers. So that everyone looked at her. “Say the queen’s knees,” he instructed. And at that my mother blushed a little and tugged at the hem of her yellow silk dress, then glanced up at him with a sudden flirty look, which the camera caught.
A fine first photo for a new album.
8
Red and I sat on the air-cooled porch, and even with the deep overhang of the roof, I was still aware of the baking midday sun. While my parents cleaned up the kitchen, in their own way, taking their time, and our children sprawled in the living room, getting reacquainted, I took a moment to lay my roses to rest in Mother’s yard. Removing the Belle Vue bouquet from its unwelcoming cut-glass vase, I spread the blooms to dry beneath an Indian-yellow rudbeckia. Closing the door against the heat on my return.
Red loosened his tie and shoes, emitting a deep sigh he more than likely wasn’t aware of, and stretched his legs in front of him. “Did you bring those?” he asked.
I pressed my hand to my chest bone because it still hurt, carrying them all this way, a gesture, having them treated like roadside weeds. “On the plane, for her birthday.” I didn’t need to say anything more.
He and I used to sit out here on the porch this way, easy together, talking, or not talking, mostly waiting. In those days, he’d be waiting for Terrell to come downstairs or to come in from class, or, sometimes, even from another date, if it had to do with a social function at the university. I mostly waited on Buddy to show up, for by that time he’d given up on her and started hanging around me, taking me out (when Mother thought I was going with friends), us doing most everything we could in the car, him letting me out at the corner to w
alk home, blue jeans rumpled, lipstick gone, hair a wild mess. Sometimes I’d be cooling off, sitting out here with Red, wondering how it was you ran away from home. In those days, Mother’s azalea beds stopped traffic in the spring. And, if it was late afternoon, we’d sit and hear cars braking, and see people getting out to take pictures.
“You want to get a hamburger?” Red would sometimes ask me, if it didn’t look like Terrell was coming back anytime soon, or if he was in low spirits about how she kept him guessing.
“Sure,” I always said. He probably didn’t have any money to be buying me burgers, but in those days I didn’t understand that. I thought every guy in his twenties came with a wallet, with money he somehow made, and that girls like me, still in high school, with parents who wanted them to concentrate on studying, came flat broke except for what their daddies gave them. How could I have been so dumb? Was that something families like ours did to keep their girls at home till they married? Here Birdie was already making spending money baby- and cat-sitting, counting the months till she could have an after-school job to buy herself a proper cello. At her age I hadn’t so much as rolled a burrito behind the counter at Taco Bell.
Going off in the car with Red—a law student—gave me a big charge. We’d always go to this ratty drive-up place near campus, supposed to have the best burgers at the lowest price. I’d always get a chiliburger with cheese, and he’d get the one with the special hickory sauce and onions. Sometimes he’d have a beer, but I always got a Coke, mostly because Daddy wouldn’t let us keep soft drinks at home (I guess he’d already, way back then, been reading up on health). Then I’d lean back against the passenger door of Red’s very used old Peugeot, and tuck my feet up, so we could really get down to talking. I loved those times. It felt like a date, almost, and I’d be wiping the chili off my face and feeling excited—because being alone with someone in a car was intimate, it just was—and then, every time, he’d lean close, the longneck beer bottle in his hand, all that dark curly hair falling over his forehead, hazel eyes looking through horn-rims and he’d ask me, “You think she’ll ever marry a mutt like me?”
That’s what I was for him, the kid sister. The one it didn’t matter what you talked to about. He’d go on about his dad, who was still alive and driving him crazy, because his mom was getting fed up with having to bail him out. Or he’d talk about his classes, which he loved, how one day he was going to use the law to fix a few things out there that needed fixing.
A couple of times I did the inviting. “You got time for a hamburger? In your car?” I’d ask. And then I would buy the burger, from my allowance, because I really needed his advice or just needed to let off steam, about how I meant to get away from here, somehow. Get away before my parents washed my brain the way they had my sister’s, though of course I didn’t say that to him. The last time we went out I had to ask him some legal advice. After making sure he knew I wasn’t pregnant. We were in his crammed-full car, with him leaning against the driver’s door, the seat pushed back so he could eat without the steering wheel in the way. “I’m going to run off and get married,” I told him. “This is between you and me, period; nobody else, especially not my sister, especially not my parents, is supposed to hear about this. When I’m gone, you didn’t know a thing about it. ‘Ella?’ you’re going to say, ‘I haven’t seen her in weeks.’ ‘Ella?’ you’re going to say, ‘how would I know?’ But you need to tell me what to do. We’re going to Louisiana. Buddy’s got a job, hot job, he says. He says he’s not going without me.”
The gist of Red’s advice was to get our license in Austin, wait our three days, get our blood tests, get a J.P., and then, when it was a done deal, head across the state line. He didn’t know Louisiana law, but it was different. It might be easy, even easier. He’d heard that in some state in the South, you could marry at fifteen, even cousins, but that was hearsay. I was in college, nineteen, Buddy was twenty-two. Here there’d be no problem. And that’s just what we did, what he said. By the time word got out, we were legal and eating fried catfish at a motel on the Vermilion River outside Lafayette.
I never thanked Red properly, since the next time I saw him was at his and Terrell’s wedding, to which I’d been invited because how could she not have her sister? And that didn’t seem the time, what with all that white satin and ribboned-off pews and sea of ushers in tuxedos.
“You think we’d get in trouble if we slipped out for a hamburger?” Red said now, wriggling his socked feet on Mother’s porch.
I had to laugh. “Deep trouble,” I said. I told him I’d been thinking about that myself, how we used to do that, back when we’d been free to go (although it hadn’t seemed like freedom at the time) whenever we wanted to.
“You always got the chiliburger,” he recalled.
“I could order a beer now. I’m of age.”
“You could have shared mine then.”
“Whoa,” I said. “I was in enough trouble in those days.” But I tried to imagine how that would have been, us passing that bottle back and forth, in the confines of his junky used foreign car, books and papers all over the backseat. Dangerous is how that would have been. But maybe that was a woman in her forties thinking that; the girl in her teens, that Ella, she had only Buddy on her mind.
“You helped me out a lot of times,” he said.
“Same here.” I let that sit a minute, feeling comfortable with him. Then I said, “I can’t believe you really still eat hamburgers. I almost fell out when I saw you scarfing Daddy’s best scrambled eggs in there. What happened to the big low-fat diet you were on last time we were here?”
He leaned his elbows on his knees, looking at his feet. “I guess I’ve sort of reverted to type, cooking for myself.”
Ouch. Without meaning to, I’d brought us back to my sister. Reminded him he was running a household alone. “Sorry,” I said.
“That’s okay. I have to deal with it.”
When my daughter’s voice reached us from the living room, we smiled at one another, in relief that we could get our minds on another generation.
“So, congratulations, Borden,” Birdie blared. “That’s neat, you going to Yale. I mean, if you care about college and everything.”
“Thanks, yeah,” my older nephew responded, his voice deeper than Red’s. After a pause, adding, “You in a religious group, or something?”
“Me, why?” she asked.
“I mean, how you look and all—” He cleared his throat.
“You mean my not shaving my legs? I don’t have to,” my daughter told him. “Anyway, nobody notices.”
“Sure they do. I did. People notice everything.”
“They notice you, you mean. You’re going to Yale.”
Borden sounded patient but determined. “They notice every little thing about everybody. That’s what they talk about. They’re asking at your school, ‘Why doesn’t Birdie Hopkins shave her legs?’ ”
She giggled.
Bailey spoke up, his voice younger, uncertain. “Gnat-brain means you could look good if you wanted to, Birdie.”
Birdie sounded angry. “You mean I don’t, is what you’re saying.”
“You could look like some of the girls in West Lake Hills,” Bailey told her. “Where, you know, we used to live. They, ummm, fix up? Like spend a lot of time? I mean, it isn’t that, ummm, jumper-thing you’ve got on.”
“Are they big, like me?”
“You, big?” Borden laughed a grown man’s laugh. “You’re a half-pint, half the size of me. You mean heavy? You’re not heavy, you’re just not—just not developed yet.”
Birdie’s voice rose fortissimo. “I got my period two years ago. I am so developed.”
I shut my eyes. Mother would have to be deaf not to have heard that, even two rooms away.
Red laughed. “She’s something.”
Sure enough, the kitchen door opened and my daddy joined the party. “Well, now, Miss Birdie, I didn’t mean to leave you alone with these hoodlums. But what can you expect
? One of them named for a cheese and the other for an Irish whiskey? In my day, boys got proper Bible names. Take my brother and me, Judah and Reuben. If I’d had sons, I’d have named them Samuel and Amos, strong names. I recall I might have mentioned those very names to their mother on more than one occasion when she was carrying—” He stopped, making a croaking sound. He must have said that same thing so often he hardly heard himself anymore, but now he made a sort of moan. “Forgive an old man, boys.”
Red moved his chair closer to mine. He put a hand on my arm, getting my attention, then dropped it. I thought how hard it must be for him, everyone reminding him, not meaning to, about my sister. Feeling sad about that, and still feeling close to him, relaxed, it caught me off guard when he said, “The visit with you last summer meant a lot to Terrell, Ella. She spoke of it often.”
I felt the way I’d used to in his old car with him, when we’d be talking around, and then he’d ask, “Do you think she’ll ever marry a mutt like me?” Reminded that the point was about her, not about me. Earlier, I’d been a wreck because I knew everybody would bring up her supposed trip to see me, and I’d have to lie again. But then I’d forgotten; my mind, naturally, on my mother from the minute I walked in the door. “Yes,” I told him, in what was partly the truth, “we really talked a lot. We’d been out of touch, well, you know that. Then, when—it all happened—I was glad we’d had that time.”
“She mentioned you had a very attractive place, with a garden, as I recall?”
“A garden, yes. I do. Not like Mother’s used to be. Our problem there is too much rain, the opposite of here.”
“She said you drove her around the area?” He took off his tie and folded it across his knee, his eyes on me.
“I did. It was—hot. Not like this, but the way it is on the Gulf Coast, like stepping outside into a shower bath. We went to Belle Vue, that’s an antebellum showplace.” I went over the reunion trip I’d so carefully constructed a year ago. “We—ate in a French place, on an old brick street, a favorite of mine, the—Pink Cafe.”
Ella in Bloom Page 5
