Mormama

by Kit Reed

  I went to the site every day when I was in Jacksonville, and I brought her many photographs as the work progressed. Our encounters were reduced to discussion over which wallpaper, how much stained glass, what furniture in which rooms. She refused to come to Jacksonville to watch her new house grow. “When it’s perfect we’ll get married,” she promised. “Then I’ll come.”

  Never mind the rest of the decisions she made for me, or how long it took or how much it cost me to win her hand, in the end Manette’s new house was done and we were married.

  Finally, I thought, but with that woman, it never is.

  I hired the bridal suite and extravagant space in the hold of Mr. Plant’s finest steamboat to bring my new bride and all she held precious from Charleston to Jacksonville. We traveled with her extensive wardrobe and all her jewelry strewn around the suite and everything else stowed below. There were crates filled with the many paintings and bronzes and flossy ornaments Little Manette picked out for me to present to her when I came courting, each one, she told me, would make her “love”— that’s her word, not mine— her new home in the rough-and-ready city of Jacksonville, so unlike quiet, genteel Tradd Street on the Battery in Charleston, the city she had claimed as her own.

  “I think I’ll love it here,” she said to me as we docked in Jacksonville, but standing next to her on the foredeck, I felt Manette’s disappointment. Her whole body clenched, and I said what I had to as I drew her to the gangplank.

  “You will, dearest. When you’re in your new home.” Her new home. Hers. Never mine.

  I had a coachman waiting to take us from the dock to May Street. I ushered Little Manette through the wrought-iron gate and up the flagstone walk to 553, in many respects a replica of the Hopswee Plantation house, and I will admit that she gasped with approval. Delighted, I slipped my arm around my darling’s waist. This time she softened as I clamped her to me, and in that instant and only for that instant, I thought, Now.

  Then Vincent opened the great front doors for us; good man, he’d polished all the brass and cleaned every crystal prism in the chandelier. It cost the world to install, but we were among the first in the city to have gas lighting in the house, and Vincent had turned on the crystal chandelier. Our mahogany stairwell glistened in the light from Athena’s torch. I’d bought the statue at her request when she confided that she must have it for the newel post, and my lovely bride turned cold and rigid, a marble sculpture oddly configured to remain at my side.

  “Oh,” she said, and the spirit of this house rose up from the bowels and screamed at me, Be warned. This was the true beginning. My new wife struck. “That chandelier will have to go.”

  CHAPTER 33

  Lane

  Another day in the life of this ghastly house, and I’m not a half-inch closer to breaking out. Worse: yesterday I thought I saw daylight. Then the place yanked me back into its maw and slammed the front doors on us like giant teeth. As if this outrageous neo-Victorian trap swallowed Theo and me whole.

  Yesterday I had an actual job interview scheduled for 3 P.M. All I had to do was show up at the downtown branch of our bank—no more than a twenty-minute drive from here on a good day, worst-case, forty-five minutes tops. Hey, on the basis of the zillionth resume I’d printed out and snail-mailed, in hopes, the head of personnel had actually picked up an office phone and asked me to come in. By the time we got off the line, we were besties. Somebody in his office had died of a heart attack and they needed a replacement ASAP.

  I could be dressing for my first day at work right now. But Iris gored her foot on Ivy’s broken beer bottle. Like a fool I thought, walk-in clinic five minutes from here, no problem, I’ll get her patched up and back home in plenty of time, but I forgot. I’m trapped in this tight little world with not one but three sweet old ladies who eat time and spit out the bones. In the Ellis miniverse, nothing moves.

  It took out the rest of the day, and my interview? It was a write-off from the moment we got into the car. First there was the wedging both of them into the back. Iris insisted on it, even though the bleeding had stopped. “She has to keep pressure on this vein or I’ll bleed to death. Get in here, Rose!”

  They settled in behind me like twin Miss Daisys. I drove. “Not here,” Iris snapped as I pulled up in front of the clinic thinking, Get ‘em in there, pat them into their seats to wait, go to the desk and get her on the list and bail, you can do it. Leave them money for the cab home.

  “OK,” I said, but nobody moved.

  Rosemary made her voice quaver to let me know that she hated this even more than I did. I’m just following orders. “Elena, this will not do.”

  Iris leaned forward and tapped me on the shoulder. “St. Luke’s Hospital,” she snapped, as if she’d just stepped into a taxi.

  Rosemary explained. “We were born there. The family name alone.”

  You bet I was pissed. “Really?”

  “No waiting for the Ellis family, Papa built a wing.”

  “Just ask for Dr. Woods. Rosemary, direct the child. It’s right around the corner, dear.” Dear, I suppose, to make up for trashing my day.

  Don’t ask me why she insisted on being treated in their ostensible wayback machine. Back in their day, they claim as I drive on, socially prominent women like Mama never went to the hospital. They pooped out their babies at home. In what era?

  When it was time, Ivy told us during our first long, terrible dinner in this house, a very great lady took to her bed at home, with her doctor and the midwife in attendance and a wet nurse standing by to serve, in case. Theo, cover your ears! She said of course “Mama” did the way all true ladies do. In the family bed, where nobody but her doctor and the midwife had to see her (mumble mumble), in surroundings appropriate to her social standing, and I’m thinking, fuck, that can’t be true.

  Theo was mystified.

  It depressed the hell out of me. In spite of everything that’s happened since, these obscenely old ladies swallowed the Ellis book of family mythology whole; they devoured the sugar coated past, and because Theo and I are trapped here and beholden, they expect the same of me.

  Right, the old St. Luke’s was only a few blocks away from 553. Note that I said old St. Luke’s. One look at the columns along the façade, and my heart went to hell and back. “Iris…”

  “Oh,” she said as we pulled up in front, and I swear to God she was happy and excited. “This is where Dr. Woods took out my tonsils, I was ten, and scared to death. Child, just ask for Dr. Woods, he’ll know what to do.”

  By that time I was studying my phone. Ugly scene when I told Iris it was just a museum now. Never mind what she said to me as I pissed and sweated my way through bridge traffic to the real St. Luke’s Hospital over on the south side, Siri is not the greatest. Crazy, but I actually thought I could get this ER thing started and take off. Barring a wreck on the highway, I could do this and still make it in time for my interview.

  They’d see the bloody towels wrapped around her foot and send for a wheelchair, right? I could leave the injured twin and the hysterical one off at the entrance, no problem. As soon as they wheeled her away, I’d mutter something-something-parking-garage, and bail. Given the nature of emergency rooms in big-city hospitals, I could do all that and get back here before they called her name. Let the aunts duke it out in the waiting room; let Iris order Rosemary up to the desk a dozen times to ask whether she’s next; they’ll take care of you, lady, these things take time, and me?

  I was going to drive like hell and park illegally in front of the bank, no matter what the cost. If I wrote my opening speech en route and did makeup before I turned off the motor, maybe nobody would notice. I’d cut and run inside before the cops caught me in the act. So what if they tag the car? Cheap at the price. Hey, if I did well with the guy from Personnel and actually got the job, I wouldn’t care if they towed it away. I could always cab back to the hospital with plenty of time to grab Iris some get-well candy in the gift shop and make it down to the ER. I’d probably
sit there with them for at least another hour before they took her in. This wasn’t an urgent-care situation; the sick and the dying come first, ladies. They’d still be sitting there, waiting to be called.

  As it turns out, so was I.

  Bridge traffic. Congestion around the hospital. The trail of cars lined up at the ER entrance waiting to get their much-worse-off person into the building. Some went in on gurneys, others in wheelchairs. One was bleeding from the ears. By the time the orderlies came for Iris, I was toast. I sat there while the old ladies fumed. I listened as they wrangled, nonstop.

  First it was bad. Then it got worse. Then it was over.

  I took my sweet time going to the labyrinthine parking garage and bringing the car around. The nurse who stowed Rosemary and the aluminum crutches in the back helped Iris into the shotgun seat with a fixed, professional smile, but I knew. On the way home I ordered takeout for five at the MacDonald’s drive-through window, starting with a towering McFlurry with M&M’s in it for Ivy. Then I added big Mac-Whatevers for five. Plus sides, heavy on Theo’s favorites. I made Iris pay. Easy enough, now that she was sitting in the front. I could extract three twenties from her patent-leather purse and pay up before she noticed, and started flapping at me.

  Then I plopped the carton, heavy with food and melting frozen custard and loaded with resentment, on the cranky patient’s lap and warned her to be very damn careful or the sauce would tip over and ruin her fancy skirt.

  So that was yesterday, and the desperately boring entry-level job that I would have taken, rejoicing, even though I hated it?

  The job that I would have given my all to filling for as long as it took to get Theo and me out of here? That job was gone before I phoned in with my lame explanation. As for where I stood in this shitty game that fate and warped genetics rolled out for me, it was back to square one. Plus rain. While we weren’t looking, it started to rain.

  I took the Mac-carton off Iris’s bony knees and left Rosemary to wrangle her evil twin out of the car and up the front steps. At the top I took that deep breath you take before you swim the length of the pool underwater because like it or not, you’ll surface inside this house. In the front hall I tried to make my voice sound, I dunno, happy. Had to. Theo, you know.

  “Theo? Aunt Ivy? We’re back. I brought dinner.”

  I don’t remember anybody but Ivy thanking me. Poor Theo sat there looking betrayed. He and his shriveled great-aunt were sitting at the kitchen table in front of congealing bowls of hominy grits, and the look my son gave me then was an odd mixture of excitement and, I think, guilt.

  I was too wiped to sit down with him and work on the what or the why behind that expression, and I’m sorry, but I couldn’t sit down at that table with them, Theo or no. Not tonight.

  Where this miserable house and everybody in it are concerned, I am well and totally done. I gave my boy the best smile I could manage before I fled with, “I’m sorry, T. I have to work.”

  Then I separated my paper sack full of rapidly cooling dinner from theirs and came back upstairs to check out my rapidly cooling job prospects and plunge back into the search, exhausting the possibilities, one by one by one, until I heard somebody behind me in the room.

  “Mom?”

  “Theo!”

  “You didn’t eat your Macshitburger.”

  “I will, I promise.” Careful pause. “So, what happened here today?”

  “Nothing. You?”

  “The usual.”

  “How was it?”

  I couldn’t bring myself to start. I said, “Fine.”

  “It’s all good and everything’s fine, right, Mom?” His voice cracks in the middle and breaks.

  “T., are you OK?”

  “I’m fine, Mom! OK?”

  “Sure you are. What really happened?”

  “I have to go.”

  “Oh, T.!”

  Where we are right now in our lives in this house, that was all we had to say to each other just then. I got up and put my arms around my boy and hugged him hard and he hugged me back, all anxious mother and miserable son, fresh out of words. By the end we were rocking and thumping each other on the back. It was all we had left and I’m sorry, it just was.

  Tomorrow, I’ll find something tomorrow, and even if I can’t, I have to get us out. We’ll just disassemble this workstation and jam all our stuff in the car and leave before Rose comes down to start the coffee, no recriminations, no farewells, the hell with them. If nothing changes I’m taking whatever cash I have and my two credit cards, on which I’ve been paying $10(ten)dollars a month just to stay eligible to charge gas, food, whatever it takes.

  My man T. and I will hit the road with no resources and without a plan and we’ll make it to wherever we have to go because we have to.

  I’m done.

  CHAPTER 34

  Ivy

  I managed to have an argument with Iris again tonight; when she’s really angry, she pretends to forget that it’s her turn to put me to bed. Then she and Rosemary have to saw back and forth over whose turn it is because I am— what was it Little Elena calls it? Labor-intensive. I am labor-intensive because on a certain night when I was young, I threw myself on Dakin’s horse bareback and rode off into the dark. Yes it was reckless, racing down May Street at a dead gallop. Given Mama’s ultimatum, I would have done anything to get away.

  We ran into the dark, Blaze and I, and God was waiting. I woke up in St. Luke’s after it happened, I had lost the use of my legs, although on certain nights I feel them stirring and I think, perhaps, so alas for me. I will never forgive you, Mama, but it relieved one ache in my brain— the fear. When push comes to shove, I’d rather be this than marry the lascivious toad that you picked out for me. You had him waiting for me in the parlor the night I fled. “Such a sweet boy,” you told me as we came down to the landing outside Tillie’s room. Then you gave me a little push. I peeked. He was fifty years old! Of course I ran.

  Then, when Dr. Woods threw up his hands because they’d done all they could, on the day the hospital was done with me, I came back into your clutches, didn’t I? Papa rode in the ambulance with me, while Vincent followed with the car. He said, “Honey, your mother.” The unspoken words hovered between us; you had not seen me since that night when I ran out of the house. Papa muttered and rumbled and stopped because in the face of our mother, he is hopeless. I think he said, Be warned. Of course. When you saw what I had become then and forever, you covered your face and cried to the heavens, “Ivy, what have you done? Now nobody will marry you!”

  Now it’s as if I have always been like this. At bedtime I need certain things, and one of my sisters must help. She will supply wet washcloths for the nightly sponge bath, I do not remember the last time I bathed in the tub. Certainly not since Tillie died. Then, she and Vincent saw to it.

  Now I depend on the twins. One of them must help with the sponge bath, the salves, the lambskin booties for my useless feet. These things undo themselves every single day and must be done at bedtime on every single night. When my sister takes away the comb and drops my toothbrush back into its glass, she lets out a sigh big enough for both of us. Almost done. Then if life is flowing smoothly, she must slip on my nightshirt one arm at a time and transfer me from Scooter to the bed. Next she will pat me in place and shut the door on me with her eternal “Night night. Sleep tight.” Rose says it sweetly. Iris snarls.

  Not tonight.

  It’s been three days since my wonderful young man and I collided in the back hall, three days of yearning for him to return. I waited all afternoon! Three days almost to the hour, and that boy still hasn’t been. I know he makes his way into the house unseen and vanishes with the night, and this time, I intend to park Scooter in the back hall, and if necessary, I will wait for him ‘til the sun comes up.

  I will confess that I bait my sisters and I do it often, now that my handsome young friend and I have met here inside my mother’s house. When Rose and Iris fight, they forget to perform their nig
htly duties, and I spend the night in this chair— a stroke of luck! After Teddy Two left the supper table tonight, the girls fell into their endless argument over whose turn it was, and although it really is her turn, willful Iris reminded Rose that the new doctor at St. Luke’s put eight stitches in the ball of her foot and the last thing you want, Rosemary, is for my wound to open up all over again!

  Then Rose told Iris that she personally lost a whole day to that tiny cut and medical incompetence inside our dreadful new hospital, so it was time for Iris to carry some of the load. She meant me, and didn’t the lid come off their cauldron of stored slights and indignities then!

  While they were arguing over obligation(Rose)versus common charity(Iris), I wheeled out of the kitchen silent as a millipede, and parked in the shadows to await my new man. Naturally, I kept the attic stairway at my back. If either of them thinks of me at all, if one comes out in the hall to ask, I’m on my way into the lavatory, one of the few things I can, in fact, do without help. Tonight my spiny twin sisters are too deep in their recital of fancied slights and real indignities to notice or care what became of me, and I thank them for that.

  “Let Little Elena do it,” Iris shouts. “It’s her turn.”

  Now, I know Little Elena and the new Teddy are decent children— she brought ice cream, my favorite kind! And, in spite of my sisters’ expectations, I know that they are transients in this house. I know, without betraying any confidences, that they are contriving to leave and I wish them Godspeed, although Iris, Rosemary and I, the last three Ellis children of our generation, keep the keys.

  We three.

  We three. Even Everett died a few years back, I forget when and I don’t know how he managed it, but I do remember thinking, Why not me? Rose and Iris don’t care about me, not one whit. I am an inconvenience. No one does. Except, perhaps, the handsome stranger who is so kind.

  Oh Lord, please, please dear Lord. Let him come again tonight!