by Lee Smith
Many of my favorite memories of Grundy take place in this dimestore. As a little girl, my job was “taking care of the dolls.” Not only did I comb their hair and fluff up their frocks, but I also made up long, complicated life stories for them, things that had happened to them before they came to the dimestore, things that would happen to them after they left my care. I gave each of them three-part names: Mary Elizabeth Satterfield, for instance, and Baby Betsy Black. Their lives were very dramatic.
Upstairs in my father’s office, I got to type on a typewriter, count money, and talk to Roberta Ratliff, pale, blonde, and pretty as a princess in a fairy-tale book. She would later become the manager. I spent hours and hours upstairs in that office, observing the whole floor of the dimestore through the one-way glass window and reveling in my own power—nobody can see me, but I can see everybody! I witnessed not only shoplifting, but fights and embraces as well. Thus I learned the position of the omniscient narrator, who sees and records everything, yet is never visible. It was the perfect early education for a fiction writer.
I always went down to check on the goldfish in their basement tank. And every spring I looked forward to the arrival of the pastel-colored Easter chickens. But my favorites were the little round turtles with roses painted on their shells. I used to wear these turtles to school on my sweaters, where they clung like brooches. I liked to visit with John Yuhasz, a very kind man, on my trips to the basement to “help” him put up stock. Clovis Owens, in charge of maintenance, could fix anything, and his wife made the best pound cake in the world. She always sent me a piece, wrapped in wax paper.
Up on the main floor, I chatted with the dimestore “girls” who had all been working there for as long as I could remember—sweet Ellen Clevinger in children’s wear; Viola, back in piece goods, who always hugged me; floor supervisor Ruth Edwards; and Ruby Sweeton, supposedly in toiletries, who seemed to be everywhere. With bright red spots of rouge on her cheeks, Mildred Shortridge presided over the popcorn machine and the candy counter at the front of the store, whispering the craziest things in my ear. She made me laugh and laugh. I always bought some of the jellied orange slices and the nonpareils, those flat chocolate discs covered with hard little white balls of sugar. My friends were surprised to find that I never got anything free at the dimestore; despite my protests, I had to save my allowance and pay just like everybody else.
I WAS ALLOWED TO RUN free all over town, which was filled with our relatives, not only Smiths, but Dennises and Belchers as well. Russell Belcher ran the Rexall drugstore. Uncle Curt Smith owned the Lynwood Theater and lived with his wife Lyde and her sister Nora Belcher in a shotgun apartment above it, reached by a long, dark staircase. I was fascinated by this apartment, where the rooms were all in a row and Lyde cooked a big hot lunch in the middle of every day. Uncle Vern Smith (longtime member of the Virginia State Legislature) and his son Harold had opened the first Ford Agency. Uncle Clyde Dennis ran the insurance agency. Uncle Percy Dennis, Sr., was the Superintendent of Schools, while Percy Dennis, Jr., operated the Mingo lumber yard across the river. My grandfather’s alcoholic brother, piano-playing Blind Bill Smith, often came over from West Virginia to play boogie-woogie piano for dances. My grandparents Chloe and Earl Smith lived across Slate Creek from town in a big old brick house reached by a scary swinging bridge that I crossed each time with my heart in my mouth.
I went to town every single day when school let out, across that swinging bridge and then the real bridge they built later on. First I went to the dimestore and got some candy from Mildred and did my homework upstairs in the office, or crossed the street to the old stone courthouse and did my homework in my grandaddy’s treasurer’s office, eavesdropping all the while. In the dimestore I learned who was pregnant, who was getting married, who had got saved, who had got churched for drinking, who was mean to her children or made the best red velvet cake. In the courthouse I’d hear a different kind of story—who was in jail, who had gone bankrupt or shot his brother or tried to short his employees, who was out of a job or had set his house on fire just to collect the insurance money. I also liked to go around the county politicking with Granddaddy on Sunday afternoons, sitting down to eat some Sunday dinner with everybody. I liked to stand out on the courthouse corner with him on Saturdays when he gave out dollar bills. Men would be smoking and shooting dice and “loafering around telling lies,” as Grandaddy said, on the courthouse bench, and boys would be shining shoes. Somebody would always be playing music, guitar and fiddle and maybe banjo, out on the sidewalk in front of the dimestore.
Next to the dimestore was the Rexall drugstore, where as a teenager I gossiped with my girlfriends, bought Maybelline makeup, ate mysterious “meat sandwiches,” and read Teen magazine with its articles like “How to Talk to Boys (Tip: Learn about Cars).” Then came Russell’s Men’s Store where I held Christmas jobs during high school; and finally, Uncle Curt’s Lynwood Theater which I attended virtually every time the movie changed during my entire life in Grundy.
Here, for the cost of a mere quarter, the big silver screen brought us the rest of the world. Here we formed our notions of bravery, of glamour, of danger and sophistication, of faraway places and people like no people we had ever seen. Western theme music swelled our hearts. Our ideal of heroism came from stoic John Wayne; of beauty, from Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe. Was anything ever as scary as Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte? Or as sad as Imitation of Life? We found Ma and Pa Kettle hilarious, and howled at the Three Stooges, the Marx Brothers, and later, Jerry Lewis. Our first dates took place at the Lynwood (“Nice girls do not sit in the balcony!” our mothers decreed) where we grimly held our dates’ hands in a kind of death grip throughout the whole show, afraid we’d hurt their feelings if we stopped for even one minute to wipe off our sweaty palms.
The movies taught me that place can be almost as important as personality, and that actions really do speak louder than words. Plot is all-important; beginning, middle, and end is the most natural and satisfying sequence of events. Most important of all: something has to happen. People in a movie do not just sit around thinking all the time, the way I did in real life—“mooning around,” my mother called it, disgustedly.
From Main Street, it was only a stone’s throw to our little Methodist Church. With its chiseled stone exterior and beautiful stained-glass windows, it looked totally different from every other church in town—much more holy, I felt! Its slightly damp, mildewy smell was a holy smell, too. At Christmas, each child received a paper bag containing an orange, an apple, some walnuts, and a Hershey bar. In the Christmas pageant, I was first an animal, then a wise man, and finally an angel, but never the Virgin Mary. The Virgin Mary could not have curly hair. On Mother’s Day, you wore a red carnation corsage to church if your mother was still alive and a white carnation if your mother was dead, something I could not imagine. Everybody wore a corsage on Easter Sunday. Summer’s Vacation Bible School featured Lorna Doone cookies and red Kool-Aid in paper cups. We made lanyards and sang, “Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight, Jesus loves the little children of the world,” though we had never seen any of those other ones. Later, at Youth Fellowship, we made pizza, which we called “pizza pie.” We had learned about it on our summer trip to Myrtle Beach. “Ju-ust as I a-am, without one plea,” we sang tremulously at revivals, where I always rededicated my life, to my mother’s embarrassment. “A nice girl does not rededicate her life at the drop of a hat,” she said. We ate three-bean salad and coconut cake at church suppers.
From church we crossed Slate Creek on the swinging bridge to my grandparents’ house. A low stone wall separated their front yard from the road in front of it. I remember the paw-paw trees by the gate, the pungent smell of the pods rotting on the ground. I remember looking up from the yard to watch a long, slow line of people carrying a casket up Hibbetts Hill for burial in the town cemetery. “Oh where is my dear brother? Oh where is my dear sister? Day is a-breaking in my soul,” they sang.
My grandmother’s flower garden, to the right as you faced the porch, was her pride and joy, perhaps the purest expression of herself—for she had an innate artistic bent, a love of beauty and poetry, that had nothing to do with her own biography: an isolated childhood up on Fletchers Ridge, marriage at sixteen, and a lack of formal education. But she never stopped learning. In her later years, she attended summer courses at Lake Junaluska, the Methodist version of Chautauqua. Their house was filled with books and catalogs that she had sent off for. She sent off for some of her plants, too, which bloomed in astonishing variety and profusion. Her garden was like an English garden, its flowers planted in clusters rather than rows. A clematis-covered white lattice arch shaded two benches and a table. In curlicue lettering, an iron placard proclaimed:
The kiss of the sun for pardon,
The song of the birds for mirth,
I am nearer God’s heart in a garden
Than anywhere else on earth.
The living room was too dark and too formal for me as a child, with its flowered carpet, velvet armchairs with fancy lace antimacassars on their backs and armrests, the hissing radiator behind them, and the piecrust table with its tiers of dainty knickknacks that I was just dying to break, particularly that white china lady from Japan. My grandmother would sit in a wine velvet wingchair, all dressed up in some kind of filmy voile dress with matching brooch and earrings. She seemed to have hundreds of these sets. When she died, I was astonished to learn that they were all fake. Grandmother—for this is what we were instructed to call her at all times—received a steady stream of visitors. Years later, I learned that my own mother had first developed serious colitis “about the time I realized that I was expected to visit your grandmother every day.”
Still, Mama and my Aunt Lois often brought me and my cousins Randy and Melissa over there in the summertime: in my memory, the mothers are always sitting on the porch sewing or stringing beans, watching to see who’ll come up the road or stop in for a glass of iced tea. We loved the big swing and the comfortable wicker furniture. The whole family came over on Sunday afternoons. Most of the men were in politics, yellow-dog Democrats always running somebody for office or politicking and agitating about something. They were all big talkers. They’d drink some whiskey out behind the house and after a while they would bet good money on just about anything, even which bird would fly first off the telephone wire, and then everybody would stay out on the porch talking and telling stories until it got dark and we could all see the fairy lights of the Morgan Theater’s marquee over in town. I usually fell asleep on somebody’s lap, looking at those lights and hearing those stories, told by somebody that loved me, so that my sense of a story is still very personal. Even today, when I’m writing, stories usually come to me in a human voice; often it is the voice of a character, but sometimes it is the voice of the story itself.
My sweet granddaddy, a kind man with a Humpty Dumpty figure in later years, always wore a suit and a hat to town. He loved children, often serving as ringmaster for our circuses in the yard. He also loved the Cincinnati Reds, listening avidly to their games on his giant Philco radio upstairs in the bedroom by the side window.
Grandmother, too, spent many hours before her own side window right below, sitting on the blue tufted sofa with all those little covered buttons. The view from their respective windows symbolized the changes that were taking place in Grundy: originally, my grandparents looked out upon their own vegetable garden, the barn and various outbuildings, the chickens and the cow, the woods and the mountains. Later they could see the narrow-gauge railroad headed for West Virginia, and the growing town just down at the mouth of Slate. In their final years, this view was cut off by the first modern supermarket in Grundy, Jack Smith’s Piggly Wiggly, which he built right next to my grandparents’ house on the biggest piece of unoccupied flat land in the downtown area, where land was suddenly at a premium. “Progress” triumphs over nature every time, and Grundy was no exception. The late sixties and early seventies were boom times for coal and expansion years for business in Grundy. In those years, of course, nobody even considered the effects of unregulated growth upon the environment.
I went to school right on the other side of my grandparents’ house, in the stately old school building that is now the Appalachian School of Law. Here I encountered the terrifying Miss Nellie Hart, with her bright white hair, foghorn voice, and beautiful skin, who could diagram any sentence, even sentences so complex that their diagrams on the board looked like blueprints for a cathedral. It was an ability I aspired to. I loved English, flunked math, and admired my gorgeous and sophisticated French teacher, Anita Cummings, who wore her hair appropriately in a French twist, and gave us quiche lorraine to eat in class. Astonishingly, she was married to the football coach. I liked funny Mrs. Garber, in whose class I made a spectacularly ugly yellow blouse with darts that went the wrong way. I approached my job as football cheerleader with utmost seriousness, practicing endlessly at home, though I never knew the first thing about the game. I could do a cartwheel and land in a split, however. I remember the yellow-tiled cafeteria where I surreptitiously picked up all the Peppermint Pattie wrappers ever touched by the football player I had a crush on, then saved them at home in little silver stacks in my dresser drawer. My girlfriends and I decorated that cafeteria with endless rolls of crepe paper for dances where I slow-danced with the Peppermint Pattie boy to “The Twelfth of Never,” our song.
I remember the auditorium where study hall was held and where to everyone’s shock I was once crowned Miss Grundy High in spite of my amazingly awful outfit: a red velvet ribbon tied around my neck like a noose; a white strapless dress with about two hundred rows of tacky little net ruffles marching all the way down its ballerina-length hoop skirt to my red high heels. This outfit was my own concept entirely. I won a rhinestone tiara, a glittery banner proclaiming MISS GRUNDY HIGH, an armful of real red roses, a steam iron, and a set of white Samsonite luggage, which my cousins had to lug home because my date wouldn’t give me a ride. Now, he said, I’d “get too stuck up.” I cried all the way home. My parents were out playing bridge with the Beinhorns, and missed the whole thing. “A nice girl should not win a beauty contest” was my mother’s opinion.
When I think of Mama, she is always at home, holding forth in her kitchen, and somebody is always there visiting. Most often it’s Ava McClanahan, who helped her for years, or one of her many friends or neighbors: Stella Burke, Margaret Pritchard, June Bevins, or Dot Trivett, for instance. The kitchen is filled with cigarette smoke, the smell of coffee perking, and whatever’s baking in the oven; often it is Mama’s famous loaf bread. The women lean forward, over their coffee cups, and lower their voices. Writing or drawing at my own little table in the corner, I perk right up. Now they are going to really talk, about somebody who “has just never been quite right, bless her heart,” or somebody who is “kindly nervous,” or somebody else who’s “been having trouble down there.” Down there is a secret place, a foreign country, like Mexico or Nicaragua. I keep on drawing, and don’t miss a word. Mama takes the loaf bread out of the oven and gives us all a piece, crusty on the outside and soft on the inside, with butter melting into it. It is the best thing in the world. Country music plays softly on the countertop radio, tuned to our brand-new station, WNRG; in my mind it’s always Johnny Cash, singing “Ring of Fire.” The Levisa River flows out back, with the railroad on the other side, carrying Norfolk & Western trains loaded with coal.
How I loved the mournful whistle of those trains as they roared past several times a day! Often I ran out and stood there on the riverbank watching them pass, wondering where they were going. On the edge of the riverbank sat the little “writing house” that my daddy built for me and then had to build back again after every flood.
My mother had been raised at Chincoteague Island, on Virginia’s far Eastern Shore; she had just graduated from Madison State Teachers College when she met my father at a family wedding; her older sister,
Marion, married his uncle John Dennis, creating some kind of complicated cousins I never could figure out. As a girl, Mama was beautiful and light-hearted—silly, even. She loved to dance. Daddy fell hard. With both the time and the inclination for courting, he would not be put off, arriving in Chincoteague ten days later, only to learn that she had to leave immediately for Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, her first teaching job. She’d scarcely been there a week when—to her surprise—Ernest Smith showed up. He took a room at a local boardinghouse near her own rented quarters, then appeared bright and early each morning to drive her to school, and at the end of every school day, he’d be waiting by the gate with a bunch of roadside flowers and a big grin on his face. This went on for months. The whole town took a fancy to it. By Thanksgiving, he had worn her down; at Christmas vacation, they eloped.
Thus Mama came to Grundy, where she taught home economics, quitting after many years to “raise me.” When I was little, she read aloud to me constantly; I believe it is for this reason that I came to love reading so much, for I always heard her voice in my head as I read the words on the page. She never got used to the lack of a horizontal horizon or the fact that the sun couldn’t reach our yard before 11 a.m., not enough sun to really grow roses, though her roses looked okay to me. Still, she loved Grundy almost as much as Daddy did, despite the floods that twice destroyed her house and yard. They built it all back each time. My mother loved that house, as she loved her roses and her crafts. My own North Carolina home today is filled with quilts and afghans she made, furniture she refinished, and pictures she decoupaged. ”Hell, Gig will decoupage anything—she’ll decoupage a chair while you’re sitting on it!” neighbor Dr. Burkes was heard to say.