Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir

by Jamie Brickhouse

  Even the bathtub faucet was a source of terror agua when Mama Jean washed my hair. In my early youth, she and I were on the same hair-washing plan: once a week and washed by someone else, hers by the black ladies at Town & Country Beauty Salon, mine by her. Mama Jean had to hold a bone-dry, royal-blue washrag—folded to precisely the right width—over my tightly shut eyes so that no water could seep in. She’d plunge my head under the faucet for the shortest amount of time. Every plunge was a tiny bit of hell.

  By three or four, I was able to get into a pool, but I’d only go as far as the steps. The built-in mesh underwear of my hula-boy swimsuit fascinated me to no end, but I was still miserable. I’d mask my misery—and utter boredom—with a façade of casual disinterest. I’d lounge with my elbows resting on the pool’s edge and gently pump my legs in the water as if to say, I’m fine right here, but you kids go on and have fun. My lounge act was always shattered when the other kids got too close. “Don’t splash me! Don’t splash me!” I’d get out with the bogus excuse of having to pee. I could have used a cocktail in those moments—something stronger than a Shirley Temple, please.

  My fear of water was temporarily replaced by a fear of something else: Mrs. Hammond. She taught me to swim when I was in kindergarten. She looked just like the Wicked Witch of the West’s Kansas version, Miss Gulch. Actually, in her yellow, one-piece bathing suit and white bathing cap, she looked like a bald Miss Gulch. She taught swimming in her long, rectangular pool behind her old, white-stucco, two-story house in the old part of Beaumont. The streets there were lined with brick, stucco, and clapboard houses like the ones on Leave It to Beaver or Father Knows Best, as opposed to The Brady Bunch–like houses in our neighborhood. You entered through a side gate, bypassing the house, which was too bad, because I wanted to see inside.

  As Mama Jean and I approached the gate, the other kids skittered past, hopping with glee, as if they were headed to a birthday party instead of certain death. Except for one girl. Her right arm was stretched to the limit as she no longer held, but pulled, her mother’s hand. She squatted in resistance like a puppy on a leash for the first time. She was wearing a one-piece swimsuit with gold, orange, and red oversize daisies. Cute suit. I knew exactly how she felt. I knew such behavior would never fly with Mama Jean, so I continued the march of death with a brave face.

  “Mary Alice, quit being such a pill and come on!” her mother said. She jerked her up and in the direction of the pool as she tossed her cigarette in the gutter.

  I filed away the phrase quit being such a pill for future overuse.

  Behind the gate was worse than I imagined. It wasn’t the setup. That was great: a pool surrounded by a redbrick patio with black, wrought-iron furniture, thick, yellow vinyl cushions, and a yellow table umbrella with a white fringe. Tall pine trees and an octopus of a live oak shaded the backyard. Nice. If only I didn’t have to get into that pool.

  The situation around the setup was the problem. Mrs. Hammond, a skeleton draped in a skin of wrinkled frowns, was all business. Not once did she ask me where I got my pretty red hair or even comment on how cute my Hawaiian swimsuit was. She sternly instructed the parents that they were to go no farther than the gate. The kids were hers from that point until exactly eleven o’clock, and not a minute later. Or sooner. Parents were strictly forbidden to observe the lessons. If they showed up early, they had to wait on that side. She pointed to the street side of the gate. I wanted to find Mary Alice and make a run for it.

  Mrs. Hammond’s method of teaching was trial by water. We clung to a metal rail that ran along the shallow end of the pool, where she had lined us up like bobbing ducklings. After a quick demonstration of, say, the dog paddle, she snagged a victim at random to “sink or swim” for the class. If the hapless example sank and cried, the child was sent back to the shallow end to watch someone else do it right. My turn came during one of the first classes.

  I was her assistant for the backstroke, which was lucky, because my face didn’t have to go under the water. However, it was hell on my ears. She pulled my white knuckles from the metal rail and laid me flat on the water. Before I could sink, she grabbed the tops of my ears and dragged me in a zigzag around the pool. I squelched an ouch and somehow stayed afloat. She congratulated me before sending me back to the shallow end. I wasn’t beaming the way I would have been after modeling a new outfit for Mama Jean. I was just relieved that the moment was over and my ears were out of her hands.

  Near the end of one class I happened to look over at the fence. Mrs. Hammond had her back to it as she tortured Mary Alice with the backstroke. I saw Dad’s smiling face peeking over. I almost screamed. He didn’t know the rules. I shooed my hands at him and whispered, “Go away. Go away. You can’t watch. She doesn’t let the parents watch.” He giggled and dropped his head just as she turned around with a suspicious squint of her eyes. I ducked my head under the water. Never had submersion been so easy.

  During one lesson, while she was focused on teaching the budding Olympians the butterfly stroke, I got out of the pool and walked to the back door of her house.

  “Jamie! Where do you think you’re going?” Mrs. Hammond demanded from the pool, her hands clutching the ears of another floating victim.

  I stopped and turned around. “To tee-tee?” I asked rather than stated. I did have to pee, but I really wanted to get inside that big, old house, which I could see was filled with beautiful objects not meant to be touched by children. Through the scrim of the gray mesh screen door, I saw a silent room full of furniture made with dark wood that gleamed with a roseate sheen, porcelain figurines, chairs with wings on them. Before I could open the screen door, I felt the chlorinated raindrops of the Wicked Witch of the Wet on my head. She grabbed me by the shoulders and made a sharp left with my body.

  “No-one-in-the-house!” she said in a one-word bark. “If you need to tee-tee, tee-tee over here.”

  By the time she said “over here,” she had grabbed my left hand and was dragging me to a corner of the house by the wax-leaf japonica hedge. She stood over me waiting. I looked up at her for a sign that here was “over here.” She scowled and gestured to the spot on the ground. I focused on the carpet of rust-colored pine needles and waited for her to leave.

  Drip. Drop. Drip. Drop.

  She was still there.

  “Well, go on!” she said.

  Why won’t she leave? I lifted up the elastic waistband of my trunks and slid both hands down. I fumbled for my tally whacker, but it was tangled in that built-in mesh underwear. We were in the shade, but I was so hot from shame, my face must have been as red as my hair. I continued to fumble. Why won’t it come out? I saw her long, bony feet, the color of oyster shells, on either side of me, her body right behind me.

  “Here. Let me do it.”

  Before I could ask, Do what?—knowing what what was—her left hand had grabbed the left leg of my trunks, mesh underwear and all. Her right hand took advantage of the point of entry and jerked out my tally whacker. She pressed it with wrinkled thumb on top and wrinkled index finger on bottom and aimed it toward the pine needles. My hands were still down the front of my trunks.

  “Well, go on.”

  I didn’t think I could go on, but I did. I shut my eyes so hard they hurt and turned my head away as if avoiding the sight of a doctor’s needle. Instead of tears from my eyes, pee from my tally whacker flowed.

  I don’t remember the rest of the summer. It was my first blackout. Somehow I learned to swim, but how I don’t know. My guess is that fear was the key. I can’t recall any moments of aquatic triumph, say, diving for the first time and emerging from the water to the sound of Mrs. Hammond cheering, “Oh, Jamie, you did it! And all by yourself! Now, if we could just get you to pee with the same finesse.” No, after our pee session in the bushes, my memory went dark until the last day, graduation—a word that meant “it’s over.” That’s when the parents were invited poolside to see their precious angels reborn as water babies. I dove. I swam laps. I did
the backstroke. All by myself.

  “You’re a regular Esther Williams,” Mama Jean and Dad said with pride. I didn’t know who she was, didn’t know she was a swimming champion who dove to aquatic stardom in the forties and fifties in movies such as Neptune’s Daughter, Million Dollar Mermaid, and Dangerous When Wet. How could I? I was five. But I got it that Esther Williams and water equaled real good.

  The following summer my fear of Mrs. Hammond trumped Esther Williams. When it was time for aquatic fun in somebody’s backyard pool, I wouldn’t go farther than the steps. I was more afraid of the water than before because the fear was backed up with knowledge. And I had forgotten all the moves that Mrs. Hammond had taught me. Well, almost all of them.

  THREE

  Let Me Let You Go

  “Oh, I wish I could shrink you back to age five. That was the perfect age!” Mama Jean first said this to me just before I started elementary school, and she never stopped saying it. It was our first heart-to-heart. She told me this to prepare me—and, I now suspect, herself—for first grade.

  “Now, Jamie, all of your teachers may not love you or even like you as much as I do,” Mama Jean told me as she sat on her king-size bed with me perched on her lap. The preamble was something about entering a world of new people, strangers who might not be as big a fan of mine as she was. She was talking about teachers in particular. I was so addicted to Mama Jean’s unconditional adoration that I sought the same attention from other women, often over the company of children. She had placed me on a pedestal and I loved being there.

  “Well, why not?” was my guileless response.

  This made her hug me and laugh.

  In the “perfect age” era of my childhood, before I started elementary school and before she went to work, I was her constant companion. Those halcyon days were filled with sewing, shopping, movies, and hairdoing.

  Before she was dressed, still in her nightgown and slippers, she would unfold yards of fabric on the long, black dining table next to her sewing nook in the back den. I’d gaze up at her from the floor as she cut, threaded, and then drove her Singer with her gold slipper on the pedal while singing and humming to the music of Burt Bacharach—“The Look of Love,” “I Say a Little Prayer,” “Walk on By”—that wafted through the gold threads of the hi-fi’s speaker.

  She copied the latest fashions for herself, such as a kelly-green knockoff of the Halston caftan dress made famous by Elizabeth Taylor and Liza Minnelli. The wide, dramatic drape of the dress from her neck to the bat-wing sleeves and down to the floor—the silhouette of a stingray—gave her the look of a goddess who could make anything happen. My favorite outfit that she made for me was a navy-blue, one-piece sailor suit worn with white tights to pose in for my Jane Butler portrait. We’re not talking Olan Mills, that low-rent chain of portrait-photography studios. Jane Butler was the sought-after Beaumont society photographer. We weren’t rich, but Mama Jean’s “precious baby” deserved the star treatment. I was posed on the grounds of an old mansion—under a magnolia tree, gazing into a koi pond or popping out of a blooming azalea bush like a giant blossom.

  When the sewing was done and before we left for our shopping adventures, she’d get ready. She never left the house without putting on her face.

  “Where’s my precious baby?” she’d call from her bathroom. I’d jump up from the floor in my room and run to her. She towered before her bathroom-sink mirror in her white bra and panties, an array of makeup laid out on the vanity of powder-blue ceramic tile. Staring intensely into the mirror—her work face on (lips curled over teeth)—she’d continue rubbing her face with a round sponge that made her skin tanner with each circular motion. She’d cut her eyes in my direction and ask my reflection, “Where have you been, Lord Randall, my son? You weren’t pressing, were you?”

  “Playing.” I’d smile bashfully. I didn’t question why she called me Lord Randall, which is what she always called me whenever I had been out of her orbit for a time. I never questioned Mama Jean.

  I’d watch in awe as she applied the liquid base, drew on her eyebrows, lined her eyes, and squeezed her eyelashes with a weird metal clamp. My favorite part was the lipstick application. She’d open her mouth wide, stretch her lips, paint them a vibrant red, pucker, and POP!

  With abrupt, backward flicks of her wrist, she’d “run a rake”—a Pepto-Bismol-pink-handled comb that had about six needle-thin prongs widely spaced—through her hair to tease it out and cover any holes. Then she’d pull a pair of white panties over her fixed hair until they covered her fixed face, turning her into the headless horseman’s wife or a figure in a Magritte painting.

  “Why do you put underwear on your head?” I asked.

  “So my dress doesn’t mess up my hair,” she answered, as if I had asked, Why does our house have a roof? and she’d said, So we don’t get wet.

  Then came the finale. She’d pull her dress over her decapitated head, wiggling her body with her arms straight up in a hallelujah gesture to let it fall into place. With both hands, she’d slowly peel away her big-girl panties. When they were at the back of her head, out of the danger zone, she’d fling them off to reveal her unscathed do and the masterpiece of her perfectly fixed face. Showtime!

  In her white Mercury Marquis, a cake on wheels, we’d glide across town hermetically sealed in our own world with the AC on full blast and the radio set to KQXY, “The Beautiful Q,” a station of instrumental versions of faded pop tunes. We’d shop for patterns at Ye Olde Sewing Shoppe, lunch at the counter of Sommer’s Rexall Drugs, and drive through the automatic car wash on Calder on the exact lot where her childhood house had been. The house, an arts-and-crafts bungalow on stilts, hadn’t been torn down. It had been moved across town. Every time we passed it and I pointed it out—never getting over that an entire house had been moved—she’d say, “God, I hate that house! And it keeps following me.”

  If it was Tuesday, we’d spend a good two hours at Town & Country Beauty Salon, because that was the day of her once-a-week hair appointment. (She’d have a comb-out in between weekly appointments during busy social weeks.) The beauty parlor—no one called it a salon—was a magic world, intoxicating to all of my senses: floral-scented shampoo, gaseous nail polish and hair dye, chattering women in a carousel of chairs on pedestals that went up and down in front of oval mirrors, all held together by a haze of hair spray. The ladies looked like characters out of a Dr. Seuss storybook. They were armless under black nylon smocks, and their hairdo-in-the-works hair was better than any cartoonist could conjure: antennae of silver foil, Vienna sausages of pink and blue plastic curlers, fireworks of hair teased all the way up to God. Their voices rose and fell along with the chairs that the beauty operators controlled with a giant foot pump. Certain words—the ones I listened hardest to—were spoken sotto voce (cancer, divorce, silver plate).

  Visits to her friends where she could show me off and I could pretend to be an adult were my favorite parts of those days. Her friends all had children of their own, but I never heard about them when they were around me. They couldn’t possibly favor their kids over me, the way they raved about my pretty red hair and sweet disposition.

  “Oh, Jean, he’s just precious!”

  She’d gaze down at me in pride as she answered, “I know it. And he’s so good. He never leaves my side. They broke the mold when they made him.”

  But I didn’t just sit there like a China doll on Mama Jean’s lap. I knew how to talk to her friends. I asked them about their hair, complimented their outfits, noticed the cars they drove. I was genuinely interested in what they had to say. It was much more intriguing than what was going on outside with the neighborhood boys.

  Genevieve was an older friend of Mama Jean’s we sometimes visited in the afternoon. She had a fixed, strawberry-blond do and freckly complexion. She’d greet us with a placid smile, a crystal glass attached to her hand. She lived in a big, two-story, brick house painted white, with live oaks in front and a swimming pool in back. The living r
oom seemed bigger than our entire mini–White House. “I’d love to have a house like that someday,” Mama Jean would say. I just wanted a two-story house. (All of her friends seemed to live in bigger houses than we did.) I dutifully sat on Mama Jean’s lap or at her feet, but I ached to explore the entire house. All of the windows had wood shutters with louvers that Genevieve seemed to constantly adjust to either fill a room with light or keep it dark. I remember the living room as being mostly in shadow.

  Then we stopped visiting. We hadn’t seen her in a while, and when we drove past her house one day, I asked Mama Jean why. She didn’t answer me until we got home. I asked her again. She stared straight ahead with her hands still on the wheel. “She killed herself. With a gun.” She shook her head as if she were trying to shake errant pollen from her hair and dabbed her eyes. “I just can’t imagine doing that to yourself. Nothing’s ever that bad.” She turned to me before opening her door. “She was an alcoholic. A bad alcoholic.” That was the first time I heard that word. I was still the perfect age. I was five.

  * * *

  Mama Jean had been wrong during that come-to-Jesus talk before first grade about how everyone might not love me. My teacher, Mrs. Chambers, was smitten with me, and the feeling was mutual. She had a big personality like Mama Jean and even looked a little bit like her—dark bubble of hair, bright makeup. While Mama Jean favored jungle-red lipstick, Mrs. Chambers sealed her lips with frosted pink. Thrice daily she’d fumigate herself with perfume from an amethyst glass atomizer that sat on her desk.

  Mrs. Chambers wasn’t like the other teachers. She drove a navy-blue Mercedes. None of the others could afford to drive such a car. I knew from overhearing Mama Jean and Dad talking that Mrs. Chambers didn’t need to work because she was married to a lawyer and they lived in a mansion out in the woods of Evadale. Before that they had lived in a big house on Thomas Road, what Dad called “the Flamingo Road of Beaumont” (where all the rich people lived). I lucked out by landing in Mrs. Chambers’s class because I got the kind of attention to which I’d grown accustomed. She and I also had the same birthday, which sealed our bond.