Things like the Truth

by Ellen Gilchrist

  The best beauty tip I ever received was from a gorgeous aging model in Dallas. How do you do it? I had asked her. How do you stay so gorgeous, year after year? It’s all illusion, she said. Never forget that. Create an illusion and the rest will follow.

  An outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace? Of course. The illusion carries the light of the inspiration into the physical world. If your boyfriend is coming over at six o’clock and you think you aren’t pretty enough to make him love you, here is what you should do. Light candles, straighten up the house, put on music, put flowers on the table, roll up your hair and put on makeup and the prettiest, most colorful clothes that you have. Overdo it. Do every charming thing you can imagine. Not for the boyfriend and not even for yourself, really, but for the sake of beauty itself, the charming and illusory muse.

  I would like to end this story with an interview I conducted with the daughter of the most beautiful woman in the town where I live. This woman is so lovely I put her photograph on the cover of one of my books. “How does it feel to live with a woman as beautiful as your mother?” I asked her thirteen-year-old daughter, Annabelle.

  “Well, she’s always complaining that she’s fat.”

  “Right,” I said. “Go on.”

  “She’s always saying she’s getting wrinkled and old, but I don’t see any wrinkles. Of course she doesn’t dance anymore and I guess that makes her feel old.”

  “Go on. What else?”

  “Strange people come up to me and say, oh, you’re Gay’s daughter. It’s so weird. It’s like they don’t even know my name.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Well, she’s got more clothes than anyone I’ve ever seen, but she always says she doesn’t have anything to wear.”

  “You don’t have to be beautiful for that.”

  “It’s more like she doesn’t realize it. Like she doesn’t even care.”

  “Oh, Annabelle,” I answered. “Thank you for that. That’s the key, isn’t it? The thing that makes great beauties truly beautiful. I called up my mother yesterday and told her I was going to write an article about living in the shadow of a beautiful mother and you know what she said? She said, ‘Well, I don’t know who that could be.’ She really meant it. She really doesn’t know how much we love to look at her.”

  This is the woman who let me get a permanent wave when I was five years old. There was a girl in my kindergarten class whose mother owned a beauty parlor and she had a permanent wave. I was so jealous of her curly hair I could hardly sleep at night. I began to campaign, to beg, cry, whine, pout, plead, hide behind the sofa, cajole. My mother, who is a pushover in the child discipline department, caved in quickly and the next Saturday morning I was delivered to the beauty salon and set up underneath the permanent wave machine to get my curls. The beauty parlor was next door to my father’s office, in a wooden building with a boardwalk built up over the dirt street. This was 1940 and we were living in Mound City, Illinois, where my father was working for the Corps of Engineers building levees on the Mississippi River.

  My mother kissed me goodbye and went off to do errands. The beauty parlor operator gave me a Coke to drink and began to apply huge steel rollers to my hair. Operator had real meaning in those days, as the permanent wave machine was a huge apparatus that had to be constantly monitored so that it wouldn’t “frizz” the hair. The operator had rolled the left side of my head when I began to panic. All of a sudden I realized that I couldn’t move. I was caught, trapped, held, in the steel embrace. A dozen steel hands had me by the hair. I began to scream at the top of my lungs. I screamed louder and louder. “Take it off,” I was screaming. “Stop doing this to me. Let me go.”

  My father was next door in his office and heard my screams and came tearing through the screen doors to save me. “Get that child out of there,” he was screaming. “Who would do such a thing to a little girl?” Ten minutes later I was sitting in his lap in his big office chair, my head against his chest, my hand on his arm, and he was giving me sips of water from a little triangular-shaped paper cup. Best of all, he was mad at my mother. “Goddammit, Bodie,” he said, when she finally appeared and heard the story. “I can’t believe anyone could be that dumb. Spending hard-earned money to torture a little girl.” I smiled and turned my face deeper into his soft white shirt. “You are right,” my mother might have answered if she had known what I know now. “Distorting her sense of reality, not to mention half of her hair is permed and the other half is not.”

  Fifty years later the karma caught up with me. It was another Saturday morning and my daughter-in-law called me from the coast. “Guess what?” she said. “Your granddaughter talked me into letting her pierce her ears.”

  “Oh, no,” I answered. “I can’t stand it. She’s only six years old.”

  “She wore me down. She begged and begged. She drove me crazy.”

  “Why did you tell me this? This is more than I want to know.”

  “Guess what she had put in?”

  “I can’t imagine. Do I really have to know?”

  “Hearts with diamonds in the middle.”

  “You could have spared me that,” I answered. “I could have lived without that knowledge.”

  A Memory, The Drive-In Theatre

  I WAS THIRTEEN YEARS OLD WHEN THE FIRST DRIVE-IN THEATRE came to Harrisburg, Illinois, and, because I was the luckiest girl in the world, my best friend’s father owned it. Her name was Connie Beth Ingram and she was tall and had short blond hair and was the athletic type. I was redheaded and thick in the waist and had to get by on my personality and my ability to write book reports at a moment’s notice for anyone who needed one.

  Connie and I were devoted to each other. We never plotted behind each other’s backs or got jealous of each other. We were friends and we lived in a small town at a time when the United States was recovering from a war and beginning to make its way back into fullblown democratic capitalism. For most of the years of my and Connie’s lives our families had lived careful, rational lives with not much stuff or money. Now, like many families in the years after the war, our fathers were beginning to “make money.” It was an exciting time. People in the United States hadn’t started spending money yet. They were just getting back to work making it.

  Mr. Ingram’s construction of a drive-in theatre on his farmland was just such a project. It was built on a long, sloping hill with a huge raised screen at the bottom where a line of trees bordered a small creek. Spread out around the screen like a Greek amphitheatre were the parking places for cars and trucks. Beside each place was a tall metal post with a speaker waiting to be lifted out and attached to the driver’s-side window. There was a gravel road leading from the highway past an admissions booth and on up to a concrete building that housed the projector and the concession stand.

  The theatre opened just as summer began. Because I was Connie’s friend, at least twice a week I was invited to spend the night and help with the drive-in. I would walk the two miles to her house outside of town. When I got there we would go with her mother to open the concession stand. For the first months of that summer Mr. and Mrs. Ingram were still “getting the kinks out” of the business and there was plenty to do. Usually Mr. Ingram ran the projector and Mrs. Ingram ran the concession stand but sometimes there would be problems with the speakers or a fight would start or people would be caught trying to sneak in and then Mrs. Ingram would take over the projector while Mr. Ingram solved the problem. When that happened Connie Beth was put in charge of the concession stand. Only thirteen years old and already she was the capable businesswoman she would later become.

  I got to help! I got to fill sacks with popcorn and hand over candy bars and open Cokes and make change. I liked working in the concession stand more than I liked watching the movies. I liked it a lot better than sitting in a car with other people having to be quiet while the movie was on. I was not the type to sit quietly in a car while all around me the hot summer night was full of mystery and exc
iting people. If I was working in the concession stand I got to see everyone who came to the movie. I got to talk all I wanted and eat handfuls of popcorn when there was a lull and be the one who squirted hot butter onto the already luscious popcorn. I still like to make popcorn for people and I still make it in a pan and melt real butter to pour over it.

  Mr. Ingram tried to pay me for working but I would never take his money. How could anyone need to be paid for being out in a field at night with the air full of the sounds of Warner Brothers or Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and the sounds of pickup trucks bringing good-looking high school boys to buy buttered popcorn and Hershey bars and Coca-Colas? How could anyone want to be paid for being able to stand outside the concession stand and watch the stream of light coming out of the projector and running down the hill like a river to the edge of the woods where it became Lana Turner or Clark Gable or Elizabeth Taylor or Van Johnson or Henry Fonda?

  Above us the stars were brilliant in a clear, black summer sky. On the screen human stars twinkled in their Hollywood perfection. In the cars and pickups high school kids kissed and ate popcorn. In the backs of pickups little kids sat with their grandmothers on lawn chairs and ate cookies they brought from home.

  I stood beside the concession stand and watched it all. I was the luckiest girl in the world, I decided, to live in the modern world and be best friends with the daughter of the man who brought drive-in theatre to Harrisburg, Illinois. I was right.

  Summer, A Memory

  THE GREATEST SUMMERS OF MY LIFE WERE THE ONES I SPENT with my widowed grandmothers. One of them was soft and sweet and lived in the Mississippi delta. I pretty much had my way with her as she was recently widowed and was too worried and too busy running the plantation to overpower me physically or psychologically.

  At least once every visit she would decide to spank me with her hairbrush but in the first place she couldn’t catch me and in the second place she was so small and her inability to be mean so deep that if I decided to let her catch me and put me across her knees all she did was administer a few small taps to my derriere, breathing heavily and sighing the whole time. It was nice to be close to her and smell her bath powder but it did little to alter my behavior or improve my manners.

  I called this grandmother Dan-Dan. I loved her dearly and named all my dogs after her for years. They were a series of fox terriers that came by train from her plantation to where I lived. I would name them Danny, overfeed them terribly and weep uncontrollably when they were run over by cars, as they all eventually were since it is against my nature to keep animals penned up behind fences.

  My other grandmother was another matter. Her grandfather had been the governor of Mississippi and she had been sent to college at a time when almost no women were educated. She refused to marry until she was twenty-six, an unheard-of thing in those days. She met my grandfather at a house party in Natchez and married him the next week in a historic house called Dunleith.

  Then she left Mississippi and went to live with him in Courtland, Alabama, a town his Scots family had built in north Alabama in the seventeen hundreds. It was barely a town. It was seven plantations that circled a square with a drugstore, a jail, a buggy store, and a picture show.

  She had three sons, the oldest of whom was my father, and she liked boys better than she liked girls and was quick to say so. I treated her accordingly. “I like going to Mississippi to see Dan-Dan better than I like coming to see you,” I told her many times. Grannie Gilchrist and I did not mince words or pretend to like each other more than we did.

  Still, there were reasons for visiting her that made me want to keep returning. To tell the truth I could not stay away from the woman. The fact that you had to earn her love was a magnet, and, at least once each summer, I would pack my bags and go and visit her. We always visited Grannie one child at a time. She did not want a house full of rowdy children as my grandmother in Mississippi did. She wanted to do her duty by letting us visit when our parents needed to get rid of one of us, and I’m sure she welcomed the opportunity to correct some of the child-rearing faults her disapproved-of daughters-in-law were committing, but, especially where little girls were concerned, she wanted one child at a time and on her own terms.

  I was always glad to leave, but I was always eager to go again the next summer. For one thing she had the most books of any person I had ever known. Every room in her house was full of books. Almost every wall had bookshelves from floor to ceiling filled with wonderful books. I was an inveterate reader. I read four or five library books every week, but Grannie’s house was better than a library. For one thing, there was no adult section. Anything that was there you could read, because if a book was in that house, she had read it and if there was anything in it that could corrupt a child or lead them into evil she had thrown it away and written the publisher to complain.

  Meals were easy at Grannie’s house. She subsisted on toasted biscuits, pound cake and tea, and if I wanted to I could live on that too. If I wanted poached eggs or chicken I could have it but she didn’t force food on me or ever try to make me eat vegetables. She ate to live. Food was way down on the scale of things that interested her. That was right in my line of thinking. All I ever wanted from food was enough sugar to keep on reading.

  We read all day, on daybeds made up with sparkling white bedspreads, on sofas covered with muslin slipcovers, on porch swings and in rockers and lying on the floor on handmade rugs she bought from people who made them for a living. Grannie almost never bought anything unless by doing so she was helping the salesperson. She was as far from a materialist as it is possible to be. Stuff did not interest her. Bauhaus would have loved her closet, which contained six shirtwaist dresses, three for summer and three for winter, two pairs of high-topped shoes, several cardigan sweaters, and a wool coat.

  The rooms in her house were airy and plain and cool. There was a wide porch across the front of the house and in the front yard a massive live oak tree with an incredible treehouse. When I was six years old her sons had given her money to have her bathrooms modernized. She had not asked for the money and tried to refuse it but when they insisted and put it in her bank account she accepted it and thanked them. Then she called a carpenter and had him build her a copy of a treehouse she had played in as a child. It was in the front yard of Jefferson Davis’s house in Biloxi, Mississippi. “I have always wanted one of those treehouses,” she told my father and his brothers. “And I like my bathrooms as they are.”

  So, by the time I was visiting her, there was this magnificent tree-house with a staircase worthy of a mansion. The stairs led to a circular porch with a beautiful white railing. There was a bench around the center of the tree and a table and chairs to match the railing.

  Grannie and her closest friends would go up there in the afternoons and have tea. Grannie would fix the tea herself, put it on a silver tray and carry it up the stairs. Aunt Mamie would be behind her carrying a second tray with cups and saucers and linen napkins. Carey Hotchkiss and Mrs. Tweedy would already be in the tree setting the table and putting out cookies and beaten biscuits. Ellen Martin was already having trouble with her hip when the treehouse was new so I don’t remember her ever carrying anything heavier than a tin of cheese straws.

  The ladies would settle down in their chairs. Grannie would pour the tea. Conversation would begin. Civilization was being served.

  Most of Grannie’s friends dressed in versions of the shirtwaist dresses she favored but Grannie’s were always solid colors or small pale stripes. Some of the other ladies were bolder and wore flowered prints or lace-trimmed blouses and dark skirts. They wore sensible shoes, black for fall and winter, white for spring and summer. They talked of books and weddings and sermons, of trips their progeny were taking or had just returned from taking. They shared letters from distant cousins or people who had moved away. They did not say mean things about other people and they did not dwell on bad news. If there was bad news from somewhere they delivered it quickly and moved on to better topics. A
person who gossiped or said mean things would not have been welcome in that treehouse.

  By the time I was nine or ten Ellen Martin’s hip problems had progressed to the point where she could no longer climb the stairs. When this happened the ladies moved the tea parties to the front porch. They would not have dreamed of flaunting their superior mobility by going up the stairs when their friend could not.

  Mrs. Martin was one of the two women for whom I am named. Her name was Ellen Gilchrist Martin and she was the mother of my father’s favorite cousin. My father swore I was named for this woman but my mother said I was named for her great-grandmother, Ellen Connell Martin Biggs Taylor (she outlived three husbands and died at ninety-eight), who lived until I was four years old and whom I can remember. I have always sided with my mother in this controversy as I would rather be named for my great-great-grandmother than for a cousin.