by Byrne, Leigh
Before long I heard Mama coming up the hallway. I could always recognize the cadence of her walk—soft, but fast and deliberate.
She’s coming to tell me she’s sorry.
She stopped in front of my bedroom. As she opened the door, the light from the hall surrounded her, marking the familiar curves of her silhouette. Without making a sound, she stood there in the doorway, her face shadowed by the dark room in front of her. For those few seconds, with the pure optimism only a child could have, my heart held on to the possibility that she hadn’t meant what she had said in the kitchen, that she had come to soothe my wounds.
“I’m sorry, Mama,” I said. “Can I get up now? I’m hungry.”
She pulled a towel from the linen closet in the hallway and tossed it to me. “Here, take this and clean your face,” she said.
“Please, Mama,” I cried out to her. “Please don’t be mad anymore. I love you!”
She turned and left, pulling the door to behind her. The darkness swallowed her up, along with all the light, all but one thin line that shone through the crack under the door. In the slice of light, I watched her shadow skim across the floor, until it was gone.
She and the boys settled in for the night in front of the television set in her bedroom. Crying, I listened to the distant drone of their voices, broken by occasional bursts of laughter, until I drifted off to sleep.
13
I awoke to the sound of the front door opening. My heart leaped. Daddy was home.
Nick and Jimmy D. met him as soon as he came in the house. Jimmy D. said in a low, urgent voice, “Tuesday did something bad again, and Mama spanked her really hard.”
I heard Daddy walking up the hallway, taking his usual long strides. The door to my bedroom opened. I kept my eyes shut, but I was aware of the light from the hall shining across my face. Through cracked eyelids, I watched him walk in and turn in the direction of my bed.
As he approached me, I pretended like I was asleep. I wanted to appear innocent, like a sleeping angel, not an evil killer. I wanted him to see the cut on my lip, and the bloody towel by my head, and to feel sorry for me. I wanted him to get mad at Mama for hurting me, plenty mad. Mad enough to jerk her up from bed and demand an explanation.
He knelt on the floor beside me. With his hand he brushed the hair away from my face. I winced when his thumb found a fresh knot on my forehead that I hadn’t been aware of. “Honey, you awake?” he whispered.
I couldn’t pretend any longer. I sprang up, wrapped my arms around his neck, and buried my face into his shoulder, inhaling the sweet, spicy scent of his cologne.
“Just wanted to say good night,” he said.
I told him what had happened earlier with Mama, and about what she had said.
He held me in his arms to comfort me. “Try not to pay much attention when your mama says crazy things like that,” he said. “She hasn’t been in her right mind since the accident.”
He held me a few minutes longer, and promised me he would have a talk with her.
“It’s late, honey; time to go to sleep,” he said, laying me down. “I’ll come back and see you in the morning.”
As he had said he would, he went to Mama about my injuries. He didn’t jerk her out of bed like I had hoped, but they did have an argument. I could hear curse words being thrown back and forth between them. I got up and tiptoed across the room to the door so I could better hear what they were saying.
“How did Tuesday get the big bump on her head?” Daddy asked.
“She defied me…and so I spanked her.” Mama said, like it was no big deal.
“And the cut on her lip?”
“I don’t know. She must have hit it on something. You’ve seen how she flinches and dodges me when I’m trying to discipline her.”
“What could she have cut it on?”
“What are you trying to insinuate? You have no idea what happened, because you weren’t here. You’re never here to help with the kids anymore, so stay out of it!”
“Why are you harder on her than the other kids?” Daddy fired back.
“I’m not harder on her!” she shouted. “I’m not going to sit here and let you accuse me of being a bad mother.”
I heard the mattress springs squeak, signaling that Mama was getting up, and then she came storming down the hall. I raced back to my bed before she got to my door. When she passed by, I shuddered because I was afraid she might attack me again. But more than anything else, I was afraid Daddy would one day find out what I had done, and turn against me too.
14
Mama’s anger toward me continued to increase with each passing day. Her sudden verbal and physical attacks became more frequent and severe, and more unpredictable, bursting upon her from out of nowhere, for no apparent reason.
Whenever she lost it with me, she always said the same things she had said that first time in the kitchen—that it was my fault Audrey was dead, and she hated me because I’d been born, and because I’d been born ugly.
Up until that point in my life, I had never given much thought to how I looked. Daddy had always told me I was beautiful, and so had Mama before she got mad at me. But now, after hearing her say over and over that I was ugly, I was beginning to get the message that the way she saw me had changed, and to realize my looks were something important, if not essential, to her loving me.
She valued beauty above all else because in her life, beauty had brought her many good things. “I was the prettiest and most popular girl in my school,” she boasted. “I was homecoming queen and head cheerleader at the same time. I had my pick of boys!”
Still even after I had figured out I needed to be beautiful to gain her love and acceptance, I didn’t have the slightest clue how to make it happen. Whenever I got the chance, I examined my face in the mirror, and compared my features to those of my siblings. I couldn’t understand how it was that I was ugly and they were not when we so closely resembled one another. Why Mama thought they were cute, but not me. These thoughts burdened both my mind and my heart.
One afternoon I was standing in my usual place in the hall when Mama came up and dangled an old dishcloth in front of me. “Put this over your face,” she said.
At first I went blank. Then I remembered she had made my brothers and me wear similar masks over our faces when we had the flu to shield Audrey from germs. But I wasn’t sick. Why did she want me to wear a mask now?
She explained how she was tired of “looking at my ugly face,” and that she was certain Daddy and the boys were too.
Baffled, I looked at her, then at the mask, then at her again.
“Here, I’ll do it for you.” She folded the cloth into a triangle, wrapped it around my face, and tied it in a tight knot at the base of my head. “Now, that’s better,” she said, stepping back.
She told me I was to put the mask on as soon as I got in from school every day, wear it while I did my chores, and to take it off only when I went to school.
To make my life easier, I always did whatever she said, no matter how crazy. So I put the mask on every afternoon right after school, and on the weekends I wore it all day.
I hated the mask. It was hot and uncomfortable, and it smashed my nose flat, which sometimes gave me a panicky feeling, like I was smothering. It was also embarrassing and degrading when I wore it around Daddy and my brothers.
But after having it on every day for about a month, I got used to it; and then an odd thing happened. I became attached to it. Dependent on it, in the same way a baby is dependent on a security blanket. I took comfort in the distinct, heady odor it had acquired, and the protective shield it put between Mama’s critical eyes and the imperfections of my face. Without it I felt vulnerable and exposed.
15
“Hon, run and get us a bottle of Southern Comfort from the liquor store,” Mama said to Daddy in her most seductive voice. “After we get the kids to sleep, we’ll have a few drinks and play cards in our room tonight.”
Daddy eagerly responded
to her invitation with a mischievous grin, and just like that he was out the door headed for the liquor store.
According to Mama, it was not “Southern proper” for a lady to be seen at a liquor store, so whenever she was in the mood for alcohol, she had no choice but to ask Daddy to buy it for her. You could always tell when she wanted some, because she would suddenly sweeten up to him, and start talking sexy.
Daddy openly proclaimed his attraction to Mama. He had a favorite black and white photograph he kept in his wallet of the two of them when they first started dating. He liked to pull it out whenever he reminisced about their first days together. In it Mama had on a tea-length, bustier dress, classic pumps, and a single string of pearls. Daddy, almost a foot taller, stood behind her with his hands wrapped around her tiny waist he loved so much. He was wearing an ill-fitting suit and an I-just-won-the-big-prize grin on his face. He had the same dazed look he always had whenever he was around her, like he was anesthetized by her potent pheromones, causing everything around him to be fuzzy, unclear.
I could tell by the things I had heard Mama say to Daddy when they argued that she thought he was just this side of ugly. Like any young girl, I thought my daddy was the handsomest man in the world. He was well-groomed and dressed neatly, and he wore his dark-blonde hair in a clean flattop. He was a big man, tall and broad, and square-framed, and as is the case with many men of significant size, his features were large, almost giant-like. His face was also badly scarred with deep pockmarks from the severe acne he had in his youth. Sometimes when she was mad, Mama called him pit face, and I felt sorry for him.
Once I heard her tell him had she not been a divorcee with a crippled daughter, she would have landed a better man, one who could have provided her with all that she desired, and deserved. Instead she had to “settle,” as she put it, for Daddy, a high school teacher with a meager income. If you looked close at Daddy’s favorite picture of the two of them, you could see her smile was plastic, like the smile on a doll’s face, and she had a mad-at-the-world look deep in her eyes. She was mad because she ended up with the goofy giant instead of the wealthy prince.
Daddy made it back from the liquor store in record time. Mama took her Southern Comfort into the bedroom, and he joined her, shutting the door behind them.
More times than not, when they went into their room to “play cards,” Mama got drunk on her alcohol and became angry about something that went on in the bedroom, and came bolting out. When this happened, they typically argued all night long, ruining any chance for Daddy to get lucky. Other nights the door would remain shut and the “card game” would go on as planned. It was the slim possibility and titillating uncertainty that kept him falling for the same routine, time after time.
On this night I heard them arguing for a while before Mama came out, stomping down the hallway, Daddy right behind her. I watched from my bed as she went into the bathroom and dug through the dirty laundry basket until she found one of his shirts he’d worn to work.
While he was at the liquor store, I’d seen her put some of her lipstick on the same shirt, and had wondered why she was doing it.
“This time I have proof you’re screwing around,” she said, holding the tainted shirt in front of his face.
Since her accident she had convinced herself Daddy was having an affair, and interrogated him about it practically every day. Her paranoia had progressed to the point where she had him strip off all his clothes as soon as he walked in the door from work. Then she spent hours in the bathroom, sniffing every inch of them—even the crotches of his underwear—for traces of perfume, and inspecting them, thread by thread, for makeup. She failed to find anything incriminating on his clothing, and this became a great source of frustration for her, because she was sure he was sleeping with someone.
“What the hell are you talking about, Rose?” Daddy asked, genuinely bewildered.
“Take a look for yourself, you bastard, and you tell me.” She pushed the shirt with the “evidence” on it closer to his eyes. “There’s lipstick all over your collar. Don’t you think I know lipstick when I see it?”
Daddy took the shirt from her, and examined it closely. He was becoming more and more confused by the minute; you could see it in his face. “I don’t know how this—whatever it is—got on my shirt, but I am not having an affair.”
“Who is she, Nick?”
“There is no one!” Daddy shouted, as he walked away.
Mama followed behind him, pounding at his back with both her fists. “Don’t you walk away from me, you son of a bitch!”
“Damn it, Rose, get off me! Leave me alone!”
“How dare you? How dare you cheat on me? Any man would kill to have me—any man!”
16
The months passed with every sunrise bringing the possibility that Mama wouldn’t be mad at me anymore, but every evening the sun set on her rage and hateful words. Until she got better, all I had was Daddy. He had become the center of my existence, my only hope.
In the morning, before he left for work, and I for school, he always came to my bed and held me close. He told me how pretty he thought I was, how special. It was for these snippets of his affection that I now lived.
On the weekends, after he had given me my morning kiss, he sometimes prepared a big Southern-style breakfast for the family: fried or scrambled eggs, sausage patties, biscuits and gravy, and either grits or hash browns, sometimes both.
He loved big breakfasts and being in the kitchen early in the morning when the sunlight sifted through the oak tree by the window, casting lacy shadows on the walls that danced around the room when the wind blew. Even under dour circumstances, he managed to find some small reason to be joyful when he got up, to inspire him to whistle merrily as he rolled out the biscuit dough and scrambled up the eggs, the coffee percolating in the background. Like when I was six, and an unexpected early spring snow spread a glistening white blanket over the backyard. He was so excited he woke everyone in the family to see it.
He wanted to share his breakfasts with Mama and the boys, but they were late risers, and grumpy upon awakening, and without appetite. Even though he tried, he sometimes couldn’t get them out of bed at all to eat what he had prepared. On these mornings he would sit at the kitchen table in silence and eat his breakfast all alone. My heart sank for him then, and I often wondered what he was thinking. His life couldn’t have been the one he had imagined for himself, growing up as he did in a loving, nurturing family that began each day with hugs, gleeful chatter, and a hearty breakfast together.
In bed, alone and hungry, there were many mornings when I listened to his movements in the kitchen, his whistling, and wished he would come get me and ask me to eat with him, but he never did.
On a chilly February morning, I squirmed around in my bed, listening to him as he got ready for work. I could hardly wait for him to finish and come to see me. I had monitored his morning routine so many times I had his every movement memorized. First I listened to him step out onto the front porch to get the paper, and then retreat into the bathroom to read it while he sat on the toilet. Then he took his shower. Afterward, he opened the door to let the steam out, and a warm, soapy smell drifted down the hall and into my room.
When I heard him filling the sink, I knew it meant he was getting ready to shave. I could hear the splashing of water as he dipped the razor in, and then the tap, tap, tap of it on the side of the sink. When he finished, he slapped his face with aftershave, and then headed for the bedroom to get dressed. As soon as I heard him pick up his keys and loose change from the nightstand, I became eager, because I knew what was next.
Finally he came to my bed, sat on the edge, and said in his hushed, morning voice, “Hold on a little longer, honey.” Then he bent over me, touched his lips to my cheek, and told me he loved me. “I’ll make her stop, I promise,” he said. “Give me some more time.”
Even at my young age, I had already learned how to read him through the many expressions of his face. When he
was happy, his eyes twinkled. When he was angry or worried, he furrowed his brow. That morning, as the sun cast a hazy light across his face, his eyes drooped with sadness, and there were dark circles of worry around them.
“Okay, Daddy,” I said, because I believed him. He was all I had to believe in.
He picked up one of my arms and began rubbing it, smoothing out the scraggly blonde hairs. “I’m sorry your mama is always mad at you.”
“Why is she mad at me?” I asked, pretending like I didn’t know. “What did I do?”
“You didn’t do anything, honey.” He stopped rubbing my arm and turned his head away from me, as if to collect his thoughts. “It’s just that she’s still upset about Audrey.”
Then he changed the subject, and with it, the timbre of his voice. “How would you like to go to Nashville to visit Grandma Storm for a while this summer?”
I loved Grandma Storm, and I hardly ever got to see her. “Stay at her house all night?” I asked, barely able to contain myself.
“Sure, maybe for several nights.”
I threw my arms around his neck. His cheeks were smooth, clean of the scratchy whiskers he often had at night.
Then a thought quelled my excitement. I pulled away from his embrace and eyed him in disbelief. “Mama won’t let me go.”
“Yes, she will. I might have to work on her, but she’ll let you.”
“Please, Daddy,” I begged. “Please take me to Grandma’s house right now!”
He chuckled. “No, you have to finish out the school year first. And I’ll have to talk it over with Grandma Storm to make sure it’s okay.”
He gave me my morning kiss good-bye and left for work. I savored the smell of his spicy cologne for as long as I could after he was gone.
17
In June, as he had promised, Daddy made the arrangements for me to visit Grandma Storm at her house in Nashville. He got me out of bed early one Saturday morning before anyone else in the family awoke, threw my clothes in a brown paper bag, and drove me there.
