One early evening before we made our way home to Frankville, we stopped by the Delchamps in Jackson to pick up the requisite milk, bread, eggs, other necessities, and whatever Mama had decided we’d have for supper that night. “You Make My Dreams” by Hall and Oates came on over the grocery-store speakers and Mama started doing her little prissy dance behind the cart she was pushing, shifting her weight from one high-heel-shod foot to the other and keeping time with that little noise she’d make from the corner of her mouth when she’d lose herself in the rhythm of a song. She went along, picking up flour or cornmeal, or maybe a can of English peas or bag of white rice as she danced her little dance. She began to pass wind to the tempo of the song. It didn’t faze her and she kept right along with the business at hand, only giving herself away with a little chuckle as Sissy and I doubled over with laughter behind her at the sound of those tiny toots coming out to the beat of “What I want you’ve got and it might be hard to handle.” She was one of the funniest people I have ever known. God, I miss her. I even miss going on those trips with her to the grocery store that always seemed to take too long.
When I was four or five I thought that if you had checks in your checkbook, you had money. I would urge Mama to write a check at the grocery store instead of paying cash because I’d seen her not have enough and we’d had to put things back on the shelves enough times that I lived in fear of that embarrassment. She finally explained to me that just because you had checks in your checkbook didn’t mean you had the money in the bank to cover one, though I know she floated bad ones and hoped they wouldn’t hit the bank before payday. She was sort of a master at it, but I worried like an old woman, like it was my job. I used to watch the gas tank in the car. If it got to one-quarter of a tank I would urge Mama to stop and get some more, or at least remind her that we were running low. She and Sissy would laugh at me and were surprised I watched it like I did. When I got to be around twelve or thirteen, I started making budgets for myself—tallies of how much money I thought it would take to live on my own based on the numbers I’d heard thrown around and what kind of job I’d need to get to make it.
Some things have changed and some things haven’t. I grew from that little worried girl to a woman who has been all over the world—I’ve stayed in a palace in Gstaad, flown first-class to Rome, eaten in the finest restaurants one could ever patronize, had my photograph taken for the London Telegraph Magazine and countless others. But I never stop feeling like that redheaded, pale-skinned, short-legged, unworthy child from a poor family licking the grease from fried catfish off of her fingers at Bobby’s Fish Camp by the Tombigbee River. I’m still afraid I might have to put something back. I never stop thinking that I’ll be found out, that I’ll be labeled an imposter and have to go back to Frankville, Alabama. I don’t guess that’s so uncommon. That it isn’t gives it no fewer teeth.
Something messed up was always about to happen and that feeling has never left Sissy or me. I’m always preparing for the worst and I know she is too. You can leave your parents’ home, or they can leave you, but what is there to be done with the information that has taken up residence in your bones when you’re out in the world and have to live with people you haven’t known since birth—whose unpredictability you can’t predict?
How do you do it when you expect the bottom to fall out at any minute?
In honor of my mama, I’ve made a short list:
1. Grit the teeth a bit, jump in, fearfully hope for the best, but never fully commit because the cost would be too great if I did and then lost, again.
2. Withdraw and don’t even consider taking off the carefully crafted armor that hides me so well.
3. Try to get better.
I can only speak for myself. I won’t try to do it for Sissy. I think number three is the most difficult and least attractive option, unless I can see the light at the end of the dark, dank, hydra-filled tunnel I have to crawl through to do that sort of work. I try, and I think I can get through it, cutting the screaming, spewing heads off as I trudge through the tunnel of memories and look under the rocks. I’m surprised when two heads grow back in place of the one I’ve managed to slice off. It’s a losing battle, but trying to get better at least gives me a self-awareness the other two options don’t. I choose number three. At least I can learn something about who I am that way and maybe improve on it, instead of only knowing the version I had to become, or at least the one I had to present to survive in such a skewed schematic as my family of origin. At least if I work on getting better, I can keep discovering who I am.
Who I am without them. I have to find that person over and over. It almost feels like abandonment of them, and living with that guilt is another thing entirely. The whole thing is irresolvable at best, and crazy-making otherwise. That I cannot cancel my love and attachment to them is a testament to the bonds, good or bad, of blood. It’s fascinating to try to figure it out, though, and I have a hunger to do so. It’s medicine, a balm for the wounds still healing. I need a balm. Sorting through it makes me tired in the deepest part of myself. I sigh and shake my head like a person who has lived for a thousand years. Especially when I’m trying to keep the wonderful, which is always.
Corduroy knickers and saddle oxfords on credit
I was in fifth grade. Knickers had started to appear in all the fashion magazines. I loved the look and started asking Mama for a pair, which she promptly ran up for me in almost-navy-but-with-a-touch-of-cerulean wide-wale corduroy over a few nights at her sewing machine. It must have been fall for that to have been the fabric she chose. When she finished them, I wanted to debut them at school right away, but I didn’t have any shoes that would go with them. I only had tennis shoes and Mama and I both knew they wouldn’t do. Brown’s shoe store was in Jackson, so we drove over there from Chatom on a Thursday afternoon after school. Sissy and I sat in the car while Mama went in and picked out a pair of brown saddle oxfords for me, telling the owner that she would have to take them home for me to try on, and if they fit she’d be back in the next day with a check. Of course, the Browns knew Mama and they let her take the shoes on credit so my sartorial dreams could be realized. And they were. The shoes fit and went with my knickers and coordinating argyle socks perfectly. I wore the ensemble to school the next day and Mama went back to Brown’s with the money to pay for them. Friday was payday so there would’ve been a little money. She probably needed shoes of her own.
I HADN’T ASKED FOR A RADIO FOR CHRISTMAS IN 1983 BUT I got one anyway because that’s what Sissy had asked for. I might’ve been nonchalant about having something more sophisticated than a clock radio to listen to at first, but I quickly changed my tune and started taping songs off of the radio onto the cassette player that was in the jambox that I had received from Santa Claus.
The first time I heard “Every Breath You Take” by the Police it set me on fire.
“Oh can’t you see, you belong to me…”
There is a passing chord and a bass note that descends with it to create a slight dissonance that is at once beautiful and a little disturbing. Those things made everything in my musical world come together at once. Something clicked in me. I didn’t know what I would do about my connection to music like my sister did, but I knew then that it would always hold an important place in my life.
Truth be told, though, I’d shied away from performing by then. It wasn’t that I didn’t like getting up in front of people and singing. It had more to do with it being a link to my parents that I didn’t want. There was something untrustworthy about it—maybe it was because they were untrustworthy themselves. Performing was as unpredictable and scary as they were. I’ve heard so many stories about artists finding solace and sanctuary in what they made theirs alone—their identification with and pursuit of art—as a way of distancing themselves from a troubled family. I did the opposite. I turned my back on it to protect myself from the family that used it to bond.
Sissy would play and sing in any situation, and she knew that Daddy was
her closest conduit to being heard. She was also better suited to being like what I call “show people” than I was. She and Mama sang and dreamt about Sissy making it in Nashville or beyond all the time. Sissy and Daddy would sit around and play songs together, he trying to keep time with that often out-of-time foot of his that shook the floor of the house, and she knowing chords he couldn’t figure out.
We changed schools from Chatom to Jackson in 1983. After Daddy lost the Washington County circuit clerk race the previous fall I guess he and Mama were ready for another phase. He was looking for work, and she’d gotten a job working at Martha Odom’s jewelry store. Mama grew up with Martha in Jackson.
I wasn’t excited about starting a new school. I had gone to the same one in Chatom for six years, and I felt comfortable there. I didn’t put up a fight about changing to the school in Jackson—there was no need to put up a fight about much of anything that Mama and Daddy decided—but what I did do was fake sick a few days after school started. I was homesick for what I’d known. School had always been a safe place for me and I reveled in the order it provided. I knew what was going to happen, and when and how it was going to. I didn’t much like the Jackson school at first, so I just said I didn’t feel good and that my ears hurt—something I’d heard Sissy complain about back in the summer and that I thought would work, though my ears did no such thing unless I swallowed extra hard. Mama believed me at first but started questioning me about what was really going on and after my third day absent took me to see Dr. May, who’d nursed me through every childhood ailment and given me every shot I’d ever had. He looked into my ears and said he thought there was a little fluid in there with an almost imperceptible wink to me when Mama wasn’t looking. He gave me an antibiotic and sent us on our way. The jig was up and I had to go to school the next day. I eventually got over my anxiety and got used to my new environment and even made friends, but it took a while. I never admitted to Mama that I’d been faking. The truth was I kept a lot of things to myself. I’m not sure I was even born the trusting sort, but I was certainly becoming less so.
Sissy loved our new school. She made friends immediately and joined the school marching band. She’d started playing the saxophone in the band at our old school and wanted to continue. I think she chose the sax because Barbara Mandrell played it and she was at least a little obsessed with her.
Sissy needed a new horn. She had made do in Chatom with an old one that the band director had come up with for her that had been endlessly repaired so that it was playable, but it wasn’t nice. The band director at Jackson knew of a better-quality used one that a student who had recently graduated wanted to sell, and Sissy threw a fit over it. Of course we didn’t have the money to buy it, so Daddy talked Mammy and Dandy into doing so. Everyone knew that Sissy was focused solely on music. She was so excited and thankful for the new horn that she dressed up in her newly issued boiling-hot, purple-, gold-, and white-wool uniform complete with hat and some god-awful white shoes that everyone had to wear to finish off the look, and went down to Mammy and Dandy’s to show off the new horn to them after it was hers one afternoon that fall. Mammy thought it was all a hoot and had her play a few tunes in front of the fireplace in their living room.
Then, of course, the old, crappy sax was handed down to me, in expectation that I’d join the middle school band even though I had absolutely no interest in either playing it or being in the band. I could read music since I’d had so many years of piano lessons—Mama always scraped up the money to pay for them somehow and they took place during school hours—but what I really wanted to be was a cheerleader. I had started at my new school too late to try out for seventh grade, though, so I was pushed into the band, much to my chagrin. It was during last period every day.
The teacher hated me almost immediately because as soon as I learned my scales I was picking out tunes by ear. And because I could read music and didn’t have to pay attention to him teaching the basics to everyone else, I was extremely bored with the whole thing. The friends I’d made weren’t in band. My horn sat in the storage room at school every night—I never took it home because I didn’t want to practice it and didn’t think I needed to. Nothing pisses a teacher off more than a student who can but won’t.
I thought that if I had to learn another instrument—Daddy had already insisted I learn how to play the bass and once I’d done so, I played with everyone, sometimes at night when he was home but usually with a book at my feet as I had studying to do—I might like to learn the flute or clarinet, something that I thought was a little more feminine and definitely something that was not what my sister played and was forced on me. I didn’t want her hand-me-down horn. I didn’t want to have to be in the band just because she was. Such is life for a little sister, I suppose.
I set my jaw and determined I’d be trying out for cheerleading the next summer. I wanted that uniform, not the boiling-hot, purple-, gold-, and white-wool one with the ridiculous hat and ugly shoes. I wanted a cute uniform and the saddle oxfords that went with it. I wanted to be what I thought was cool. I was starting to separate myself. They wanted me to be like them but I had my own ideas.
A PERSON CAN BE PHYSICALLY VIOLENT WITHOUT EVER making actual contact with another. He can slam doors, snatch and throw things, hit inanimate objects, walk as though he’s trying to force his heels through the floor, loom over and intimidate, be generally abrupt and brusque. He can seethe and cast a pall over a room that no one in it quite understands but can’t wait to get away from.
I don’t know how often he actually laid a violent hand on Mama. I always suspected it was more regular than we knew, and now I wonder if she didn’t have the boundaries to know what was violent and what was not, what crossed the line and what didn’t. I don’t think she knew that if it felt bad, it was wrong. If she did, she pushed the feelings back because she was too scared to do anything about them. She might’ve known at one time in her life, but abuse makes us forget where the lines are and things we think we won’t accept become normal. When the trailer in Irvington was cleaned out after she and Daddy died, a cache of objects she had collected to protect herself from his foul pawing was discovered in between the wall and her side of the bed, evidence that she’d had to fight back quite a lot. A wooden candlestick about the length of a grown man’s tibia and the diameter of the large end of a baseball bat that she had made herself was among them.
He hit her right in the face one Thursday night during the summer of 1984. I had just turned twelve. That seemed to be a crossing of some sort of boundary for her. It didn’t seem to matter that he treated her like a piece of garbage most of the time, but hitting her where people could tell that he had was too much.
I’d stayed at Nanny and PawPaw’s that night. Larry and his daughter, Lacy, had come to visit from Texas, so Mama told me I could stay. Mama and Sissy arrived the next morning before Mama had to be at work. Clothes and shoes had been thrown in up to the ceiling of the backseat of her brown Ford LTD. The trunk was filled to its lid as well. They came into Nanny’s kitchen announcing that Mama was finally leaving Daddy. She was starting to bruise around her temple and the side of her forehead. I couldn’t get any real answers out of them about what had happened but I think he got mad that I hadn’t come home. I honestly didn’t ask many questions. I was not exactly thrown off by this development.
Mama and Sissy talked about the three of us leaving and going somewhere Daddy couldn’t find us, changing our names, getting another car, getting a new place to live, and Mama finding a new and better job. They talked about the three of us finding a new and better life. Nanny was mostly silent, but since Larry was there he got involved and was rightly livid, daring Franklin Moorer to show his hide there. In a strange bid for some sort of control or just to take action of some kind, he got Mama to sign over her car to him on a makeshift title, him paying her the sum of one dollar for it, so he could go sell it and get her another one so we could better hide from Daddy. People do crazy shit that amounts to noth
ing so they can feel like they’re doing something, anything at all, to affect some sort of change. Cars and other possessions had little to do with the issue at hand. He would’ve found us if we’d hidden in an armored truck.
I watched and listened as Mama and Sissy made plans and told myself that a new life might be great. All the while the car was unloaded and the things they brought with them were put in the bedroom where Lacy and I had slept the night before. The bedroom Mama had once shared with her sister, Jane. Nanny said little but I wonder now what she thought about this disruption to her life—her adult child unloading her mess into her house, literally. Meanwhile, I couldn’t figure out how we would pull it off. Would we just disappear? Did they really think Daddy wouldn’t try to find us? And they hadn’t loaded much of my stuff into the car. So much for spending the night away from home. You never know what might happen in your absence.
Daddy did, of course, turn up at Nanny and PawPaw’s house that afternoon. He slowly, sheepishly swung his long legs onto the porch and knocked on the door. We’d been watching for him. When he called Mama’s work and she wasn’t there he knew something was up. Larry met him at the door. He walked with Daddy out to the empty side of the carport where PawPaw parked his truck. PawPaw was at work. We watched through the window as they talked, though we tried not to let Daddy see us. I wanted, all at the same time, for Larry to beat hell out of Daddy and for him not to touch him. There’s nothing so pitiful and sympathy-inspiring as a man in shame. Daddy always appealed to the softness in me, even though I knew good and well what he put us through. A part of me always felt so sad and sorry for him. I couldn’t stay mad at him until later. And I wasn’t very good at it even then; even after he’d crossed so many lines for so long that they became smudged charcoal. Thanks to Mama and Daddy, it would take me a long time to decide where the lines should be in my adult life.
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