“Where’s my gawd-damned room?”
From the dimmed light of a hallway sconce beneath my door, I saw her feet just outside.
She repeated, “Where’s my gawd-damned room?”
I held my breath, hoping she wouldn’t stagger in, but with the turn of my knob, I pulled the covers over my head and peeked through the edge of my blanket. The light from the hallway cut through my room, and Miss Loretta came trespassing in. Closing the door behind her, my room was once again dark, except for a spying moon through my open window. Loretta’s silhouette tiptoed toward my bed. Attempting in vain to be quiet, she tripped on shadows.
She mumbled, “Poppy? Are you awake?”
I didn’t dare answer.
“Poppy?”
I knew with certainty that she was drunker than a skunk. Tripping on a lamp cord, she stumbled, knocking a picture of her and me off the wall. I watched on from beneath my covers as she went about the room blindly reaching, grabbing at nothing. I lay still as the dead while she felt about my room—the dresser, a chair, the floor lamp.
When she found the edge of the bed, I felt her touch on my toes.
Mumbling incoherently, she cursed aloud, “I ain’t sure why everyone has gotta be so gawd-damned quiet.”
Finding a folded patchwork blanket, she tossed it on the ground next to my bed and arranged the quilt with her bare feet, sculpting it on the hardwood planks. She lay herself down on the floor at my bedside.
I could hear her wrestling and restless breathing.
I whispered, “Miss Loretta you can come on up. There ain’t no need for you to sleep on the hard wood floor.”
Without a word, she came slipping beneath the covers, nestling behind me. She smelled of cigarette smoke and sweet perfume. Her knees bent with mine. My head fit into the nape of her neck, like the last piece of a puzzle.
She asked, “You awake, baby?”
Her breath was sour.
“Yessum.”
Lifting her head from the pillow, she spoke in the dark, “Poppy, don’t you listen to old Sook. If a sweet boy offers you a box of chocolates and a cordial smile, you accept them. You hear?”
“Yessum.”
“Baby, life is a hard, mean thing. When happy comes a knockin’, you open your door wide and invite it inside. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, Momma.”
I turned on the pillow to face her. She smiled with tired eyes, heavy with the wanting for sleep.
I asked, “Momma, when you’re gone, do you ever think about me?”
She snuggled nearer, her nose almost touching mine. “Yes, baby. Not a day passes…” She pulled the white cotton linens up to her chin.
I watched in the dark as sleep overtook my drunk momma - - her loose lashes fluttered, a slight yawn, a breathy sigh.
I inhaled her stale breath like it was my own. She was, indeed, a marvelously messy creature.
I watched over her slumber for the longest spell. With my momma resting near me, safe under the covers, a bedtime prayer seemed like folly.
Outside the window, the magnolias rustled in an autumn breeze. The house was quiet except for the sound of hoofs roaming the corridors.
In the moment before I surrendered to sleep, I leaned in close to my momma’s ear and whispered, “Stay.”
When I woke the next morning with the new light of dawn, Miss Loretta had snuck from the room. The blanket was neatly folded and laid across the foot of the bed. The lamp was sitting upright, and my dolls were all precisely lined along my window seat, their stitched grins smiling back at me. The black-and-white photograph of Loretta and me was placed back on the wall, and all of my allowance money was emptied from my piggy bank.
CHAPTER 15
Port Wentworth, Georgia
When no one was listening, Rodney Pendergast professed his undying love and devotion to his wife. When he’d caress her with his calloused fingertips, goosebumps traveled up her spine. If he had consumed a few beers, Rodney would whisper softly, “Baby, to the moon and back. That’s how much I love you. To the moon and back.”
Donita would tell her mom on the phone, “He wasn’t always a scoundrel. For a time, Rodney was a good, sweet man. It’s all the drugs that has turned him hard and mean.”
There was the smallest part of Donita that wanted to believe Rodney was still a kind, decent fella. The pages of photographs in their picture albums were a testament that at one time the newlyweds smiled at the sun and walked hand in hand. There were soft moments when Rodney’s hands folded over hers, and she felt his warm breath on her neck. It was during those times that Donita would convince herself that their mess of a marriage could be untangled. Those shining days when she could breathe fully—when he came home happy, with clear eyes and an obliging smile—were few and far between.
His strong hands that had thrown a football for Savannah High were now the same fists stained with motor oil and black grime that beat her down. Rodney was no longer the high school golden boy. He was no longer the young man she’d fallen in love with while slow dancing to the Everly Brothers.
Like her recipe cards that she carefully stored in a small three-by-five tin box, Donita had begun collecting a record of his wrongs. She dated every incident and scribbled a note on pieces of paper:
October 28, 1965—Rodney punched me in the mouth; April 7, 1966—Rodney came home drunk. Threw a working boot and struck me in the head. June 17, 1967—Rodney slapped me; July 8, 1967—Rodney came home high, busted a chair, and broke my arm after a scuffle; November 2, 1967—Slugged my right cheek.
Donita kept the small folded pieces of paper in a little tin box high in the cupboard, above the fridge and behind her mason jars. She never could square why she treasured the records of Rodney’s brutality. In some peculiar way, the box even brought her an odd comfort. Maybe, the small tin box was a constant reminder, like little paper souvenirs, of where Donita had been and what she had survived. Maybe, she believed, with her eventual passing, Rodney Pendergast would be made to pay his debt for all the damage done.
When Rodney was out causing a ruckus with his buds, Donita fetched her stepping stool, pulled the metal box down from above the fridge, and sat on the porch alone.
She’d revisit each folded remembrance. Like traveling through the pages of her yellowing photographs in one of her picture albums, Donita sat with a glass of sweet tea and celebrated her survival of another passing season, another passing year. The bruises had healed, cuts had scarred over, and broken bones had mended. Donita was still alive.
At the end of another evening, Donita closed the small tin box and celebrated another passing day, another passing hour. She was proud to have weathered the pounding storms. Her little house out past the railroad tracks was still standing.
One afternoon at a Sunday social, over at the Veteran’s Park, she overheard her mother-in-law whisper to her son, “Rodney, something just ain’t right in that girl’s head. I swear to God, I believe Donita is losing her mind faster than she loses those precious babies.”
Rodney rebuked his mother, “That ain’t fair, Mom. That’s a hateful thing to say.”
“Son, I’m only truth telling. I ain’t sure Donita cared one wit about those sweet babies. I’ve never seen her shed a single tear.”
Donita never blamed the Pendergast matriarch for such unkind words. She couldn’t even bring herself to fault her mother-in-law for rearing a rotten, cruel man. It seemed Donita was too busy blaming herself for all the world’s woes.
She bore the blame for Rodney’s auto shop failure and for him stealing those cars in the dead of night. She found reason to blame herself for his brutal beatings and for their babies she couldn’t carry to term. Donita Pendergast blamed herself for cloudy days and falling stars.
However, Donita did take exception with her mother-in-law’s insertion that she hadn’t mourned her babies. The senior Mrs. Pendergast was sadly mistaken—wrong as rain.
In Donita’s quiet moments, she grieved each one of her
lost babies. With a sorrow that spilled from her eyes like stinging turpentine, Donita mourned every child. Whether it was sitting in the last row pew on Sundays, or standing alone in her kitchen at the Formica counter, or working at her sewing machine, the babies were always with her. As she kneaded the dough, forming the precise ruffle of a pie crust, Donita wept for the baby girl she’d lost on a clear April morning. Icing a red velvet cake, she cried for the little boy who arrived too early on a cold October day. While tending to her garden, she sang along to the radio, propped in the open window, and serenaded the memory of the tiny infant that she’d cradled in her arms just long enough to never forget the scent of her powdered skin.
Her grief remained in a sacred place where her abiding faith could not heal, somewhere in a silence that was too quiet for her mother-in-law to hear and too loud for Donita to bear.
CHAPTER 16
“A fine morning to you,” I greeted Mrs. Tucker with a broad smile. “How are you on this lovely day?”
Pearl’s momma shrugged her slight shoulders and muttered something. Turning from the door, she yelled, “Pearl, you got company!”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
Pearl hollered, “Poppy, come on back. I’m back in Nedra Sue’s room.”
I followed her voice down the narrow hall.
Mrs. Tucker reminded us from the kitchen, “There will be holy hell to pay if you kids make a mess in this house.”
“OK, Momma,” Pearl replied.
Inside the tiny bedroom, Nedra Sue sat crossed-legged on the floor. Janis Joplin blared through the speakers. Thousands of colorful tiny beads were scattered about Nedra on a patchwork blanket. Nedra was focused on stringing the plastic beads on a long strand of twine.
“Hey, Poppy,” Pearl grinned. “Nedra is making her some jewelry to sell at the street fair.”
Nedra Sue glanced up just long enough to flash a wide smile. “What are you two chicks up to this afternoon?”
“Poppy fancies her a beau, and we’re fixin’ to catch him.”
Nedra scrunched up her nose like she was downwind of one of old Sook’s farts. “Why in tarnation do you want a boyfriend?”
“Nedra is a feminist,” Pearl stated. “She believes in the women’s liberation movement.”
“Menfolk have held us women down since time began,” Nedra explained, “We girls have to stand up, unified against our subjugation. Poppy, take as many beaus as you want, but only on your own terms.” She continued threading the tiny beads onto the twine.
“Poppy fancies Jackson Taylor,” Pearl remarked. “And it looks promising, cuz Jackson bought her a box of milk-chocolate peanut clusters.”
“I suppose the Taylor kid is a nice enough boy. Easy on the eyes.” She winked my direction. “But Poppy, don’t you ever kowtow to no man. They ain’t worth it. It always starts with a box of chocolates from the Piggly Wiggly and a bouquet of some silly wildflowers, and then, they got you! You’re locked up in chains. Men think we’re their rightful property, like livestock or a favorite baseball cap.”
Confused, I looked over to Pearl. “Uh?”
“Nedra Sue says that men believe the Holy Bible gives ’em the notion that us girls are theirs for the taking.”
“Yessum,” Nedra agreed. “It started as far back as Adam and Eve. Bible scripture perpetuates this great injustice.”
I asked, “You don’t believe in the Bible?”
Nedra shrugged her slight shoulders, concentrating on her beads.
“But how about the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost?”
Nedra Sue declared, “Poppy, they ain’t real. Those are only hallucinations conjured up by men to keep us women in shackles. God don’t exist.”
“Ain’t true,” I said. “He does, too.”
“No, Poppy. God’s an illusion created by man to subjugate women.”
“That ain’t true, Nedra. My grandma Lainey spoke to the Holy Ghost every single night,” I insisted. “When she was stricken with a deadly bout of pneumonia, my grandma swore the Lord Jesus himself came right into her room and took him a seat on the edge of her deathbed. The Lord sat near her side and sang my grandma to sleep. Grandma Lainey told me Jesus had long, silky white hair and the bluest, clearest eyes, but she confessed the almighty couldn’t sing to save his own life,” I said. “But he sure saved my grandma Lainey’s life that night.”
Puzzled, Pearl asked me. “Really? The Lord can’t sing?”
“Nope. Grandma told me that he can’t carry a tune in a bucket.”
Pearl scratched her mass of ringlets. “Huh. I would’ve imagined that the Almighty had a real pretty singing voice.”
“Are you two numbskulls even listenin’ to me?” Nedra Sue remarked. “Jesus of Nazareth wasn’t no savior. He’s bein’ used as part of the conspiracy to keep us gals barefoot and pregnant. Now, I’m not suggestin’ that Jesus wasn’t a fine man. A real cool cat, maybe, the very first hippy ever. If he were alive today, I suspect he’d be on the front lines with Hoffman, Ginsberg and the minister from Montgomery, Martin Luther King. Yessum, Jesus was a cool cat, but no savior. The church has twisted his words to keep us women all in a straight line.” Nedra looked at both of us sitting at her bare feet. “Do you understand?”
“Yessum,” Pearl replied. “But I would’ve thought that Jesus had himself a real purdy singing voice. Like one of them singing parakeets.”
Exasperated, Nedra Sue threw up her arms, sending the hundreds of tiny beads scattering around her like psychedelic confetti. “I give up!”
Pearl and I went about gathering up her colorful beads. “Nedra, can you help Poppy snag Jackson?”
“So, you really want the Jackson kid?” She asked me. “It’s easy as pie.”
Pearl and I both leaned in.
“Well, menfolk are simpletons,” Nedra said. “They’re easily pleased. You gotta act coy and sugary sweet. Boys like the chase. They fancy mousy, soft-spoken Barbie-doll types. You gotta swoon at their muscles and agree with all their foolishness. Converse in words with no more than two syllables. Don’t trip ’em up. Keep it simple with words like honey, baby, darling, and yummy. Menfolk like a woman to have supple curves and giggle at their corny jokes.”
“Like these?”
Pearl had taken two wads of Nedra’s socks and stuck them down the front of her blouse. She smiled seductively and blinked her lashes.
Modeling her new enhanced figure, Pearl strolled in front of Nedra and me, rubbing her hands up along her hips and her enhanced chest. “Poppy, you need to get yourself a pair of these!” Pearl’s eyes reflected mischief, and she moved in to stuff a pair of socks down the front of my dress.
“No, no. I’ll do it!” I insisted. “Let me do it myself.” I disappeared into the small closet and positioned the padding inside my trainer.
“Hurry up, slow poke!” Pearl called to me.
“I’m comin’. Hold your horses.”
“Let’s see!”
“OK. Here I come.”
I walked from the closet, and Nedra and Pearl burst into laughter.
“Oh, my Lord, they’re way too high,” Nedra Sue advised. “We gotta shift those titties.” She went about rearranging my stuffing.
“Look at me,” Pearl chuckled. “I’m Marilyn Monroe.” She had wrapped a blanket around her shoulders like a fur coat and struck a silly pose. “Poppy, you look just like Miss Loretta!” Pearl fell onto the bed, chortling, rolling, and holding her tummy.
“There ya go, Poppy!” Nedra stepped back with a satisfied smile.
I stood admiring my new curves in the mirror’s reflection. “Golly, I just don’t know. Don’t feel right, advertising merchandise that ain’t mine to sell.”
“Aww. Ever since time began, folks have been lyin’ to get what they desire,” Nedra Sue replied. “Now, you straighten your spine, walk proud, and go get yourself Mr. Jackson Taylor.”
“My aunt Sook says that menfolk are nursed from their mommas’ teats every day, and later they spend every wa
king hour searching out another obliging pair.”
Pearl grabbed a pink pillow from Nedra’s bed, smothering her giggles.
I considered my padded profile “I just ain’t sure it’s right.”
“Just consider them a little upholstery work,” Nedra Sue replied. “You’re the sofa, and we’re complimenting you with a couple soft, fluffy pillows for Jackson to rest his head.”
I walked an imaginary runway, hands on my hips, strutting like a Paris model, showing off my new curves. “Pearl, do I look like the chickadee who your pa ran off with?”
“What in tarnation is all of this?” Mrs. Tucker barged through the door.
Our laughter fell to silence.
“What the hell is goin’ on here?”
“Nothin’, momma. The girls are just playin’ dress up.”
Pearl frantically scrambled, pulling the socks from beneath her blouse.
“What are saying about your pa?” Mrs. Tucker grabbed a tight hold of Pearl’s forearm. “What have I told you? You shut your ungrateful gawd-damned mouth about your daddy!” She raised a single hand ready to strike.
Pearl swallowed hard. “I swear, I didn’t say nothin’ about Pops!”
“I’ll slap you up the side of your ignorant head if you go speakin’ about that son of a bitch!” Mrs. Tucker’s angry eyes burned a hole clean through little Pearl. “I swear to God, I’ll beat your ass if you’re talkin’ to folks about that worthless bastard!”
“Momma, stop it!” Nedra shouted. “Stop it!”
“Mind your own business, Nedra Sue,” she warned. “This ain’t your concern.”
“The hell it’s not! Let squirt go.”
“If this child has been told once, she’s been told a million times to keep her gawd-damned mouth shut about her pa. And the same goes for you!”
“They were just having some fun,” Nedra stated. “She ain’t said nothin’ about Daddy.”
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