Mormama

by Kit Reed

  Bitching and protestation, what do you expect from these shriveled old wrecks, cranky from too much rain, convicted lifers doing hard time in the ancestral prison, doing a stretch unbroken only by our rush trip to the hospital before the unending drizzle segued into flood warnings and the storm.

  Ivy let out a sigh as I opened the front door, in effect, springing her. Yes, it’s a desperation move, it’s as dank out here as it is inside; 3 P.M. in December and it’s already getting dark but, hey, out here, we expand in the silence. The rain is so thick that I can’t see much past the porch rail so I fix on the mist created by the water coming down off the eaves as it smashes to bits on the front steps. Mmmm, I think. Hypnotic.

  Pretty much. Ivy sits there thinking whatever Ivy thinks while I segue into a mind-video of Barry and me at Niagara Falls back when I thought he loved me.

  The smoke, one of the old-timers said when I asked about the cloud of mist. From the sky, you can see it from miles around, he said, and this is making me uncomfortably nostalgic. I’m about to spill my guts to Ivy, the way you do in bad times, when she shifts Scooter a little bit, to get my attention. Then she just starts.

  “I think Mama almost loved me until I got disfigured, which is what she called it, and to this day I don’t know if she hated me most for that, or for killing Teddy, which she screamed on my worst day. Dakie says she had to have somebody to blame. All I know is that she shooed me out because she was all wrapped up in Everett, that’s what Papa calls how she is with him, and the last time he came home, Dakie said the same thing. He said it wasn’t my fault. Then he said, ‘But you know Mama. We’re all to blame.’”

  Don’t ask, Lane. Let it happen.

  “So Teddy was gone, and he was only the first. Dakie and Ran both got lost in the war and Teddy is in the grave, but Everett stayed and stayed. He was Mama’s sweet baby every day of his mortal life, and she didn’t care a fig about the rest of us. All my best brothers are gone but Everett lived to be eighty-seven years old.

  “Mama said we were just jealous, but we had him for too long! When the Hillman brothers finally carried him away, we were glad.

  “Everybody knew he was plenty old enough to be in the war, but Mama insisted that poor Everett had a Condition, so she kept him close to her, she said, Girls, don’t you bother him, and don’t you dare bother me. He stayed safe inside this house almost his whole life long, except for that one time…” She just trailed off and I didn’t mind.

  I sat there getting lost in the rain while Ivy went rummaging somewhere else inside her head and for the first time in my life I thought, This isn’t so bad.

  Then she started up again, and it was. “He wasn’t really sick. He was spoiled to death. Mama kept him close because he had pretty blond hair and cupid-bow lips and he looked like her, and, oh, she said, ‘He has a perfect nose,’ and, you know what? He was just like her. He only ever cared about himself. Oh dear!” Ivy covered her mouth like a bad little girl.

  “As for the rest of us, we couldn’t satisfy her, no matter what we did. We tried so hard, but we only made her mad. Randolph ran away and she was glad. Dakie got killed in the war, but she didn’t even cry. She had Evvie. She had the tailor make him a fresh white linen suit for the funeral, and she walked into church with Everett on her arm like her new beau. They went to every concert and afternoon party at the club. She doted on that boy!”

  Right. That gauzy watercolor in the floral nightmare they still call Mama’s Room, that’s Everett, posed like the Gainsborough Blue Boy, although he’s all in white and way too skinny to be real. The painter positioned him by the pier table in the sitting room, with his, I guess it was a Buster Brown haircut, neatly reflected in the mirror at his back. Snotty kid that you hate on sight.

  She sighs. “Everett was disagreeable. He whined because we took him out to play, and Mama was furious! She didn’t give a hoot for us, it was all Everett. Well, Everett was a great big sissy. Once she brought him down to the houseboat with the rest of us and Papa was so glad. We almost got him to play. Then Randolph put him in the water and he bawled to heaven. Ran had him by the pants so he was perfectly safe, but he hollered like a stuck pig, ‘Let go,’ so Randolph did. Ran pushed him at Dakie and Dakie grabbed him by the collar and pushed him back. Ran said, ‘Look, he’s swimming’ and everybody laughed. Mama was furious. She made Papa bend Randolph over his knee and whip him with his belt. She lined us up on deck to watch. Papa whipped Randolph in front of us all and everyone but Randolph cried.

  “Everett was a great big sissy, and that’s that. They died and we had to take care of him,” she says. “I hated him.”

  I never met the old bastard, but I felt it. “Me too.”

  Ivy looks at me with her crumpled mouth set and her eyes on fire and asks, “Oh, Elena, is that a sin?”

  What could I say? “I don’t know, I don’t know!”

  “We had him all his life, except for one month after the war. Papa set him up with those new jewelers in Palatka, but it didn’t take. He was back on our doorstep in three weeks, and we had to take him in and keep care of him for the rest of his mortal life.”

  What to say, what to say? I manage. No inflection, I’m that done with this conversation, this eternity in the rain, deep in Ivy’s abiding sorrow. “I’m sorry.”

  Sweet Ivy goes tart. “We’re not.”

  Wow! “He was that big a pain in the ass.”

  Her voice shoots up. “Language!”

  “Oh Ivy. Oh, Ivy.” I can’t just leave her here. “Let’s go back inside.”

  “But of course Mama was gone by that time, she never would have let her precious Everett off the leash. Palatka. Indeed!”

  We observe a moment of silence— for Everett, I suppose.

  And then she says, “You know, after Leah died, Mama started getting bigger, and she brought up Leah’s baby Elena as her own.”

  Scary, this. This story, in our world of rain. “My great-great…”

  “Yes. She never spoke of it, but we knew. Whatever she had growing inside her didn’t go away like babies do, it just grew and grew until she took to her bed. My twin sisters had to carry her meals upstairs to her on silver trays that Christmas, not the maid. Mama insisted, and it was her last Christmas…”

  Stop.

  “And after Christmas dinner…”

  Don’t stop.

  “Now, I wasn’t there to see it, Rose and Iris had the honor of taking Mama’s turkey dinner up to her bed that day, but Rosemary swears, my sister Rose tells me, Rose tells me!!!”

  Don’t break whatever spell this is, Lane, don’t ask, don’t say, just let her talk until it’s over.

  “Iris saw a black cloud coming out of Mama along with her last breath and oh, Elena, it’s trapped somewhere in this house and sometimes it goes in and out of my sisters, I know it does! Child, I know I’ve almost seen it, but I can’t swear…”

  Then she stops. As though that’s more than enough.

  Oh God. Oh, God. “It’s getting dark, Aunt Ivy, let’s us go inside, OK?”

  “You go, sweetheart, I love being alone out here in the fresh air.” She reaches for my hand.

  “Are you sure it’s all right?”

  “Of course, dear.” Her fingers land on my wrist like a dying bird. “You can always come back for me later.”

  CHAPTER 41

  Iris Ellis and Rosemary Worzecka, Née Ellis

  The Ellis twins began their lives in their mother’s architectural monument within minutes of each other, stolid Rose and willful Iris fighting for supremacy, Iris and Rose, forever at loggerheads, when in fact, their mother still calls the shots.

  Little Manette wasn’t satisfied with any of her daughters, but she was enchanted by the idea of a matched set. She had her twins done up in identical organdie dresses, with taffeta sashes and matching hair bows to set off their bouncing finger curls. Iris always wore yellow, Rosemary, pink, so if she happened to speak to them, Mama could tell which was which.

  The
grande dame’s twin ornaments are a little dusty now, their porcelain surfaces crazed by time and their features sharpened by use. The old girls switch moods faster than they swapped sashes and hair ribbons as children, making sure that Mama never found out which one to blame. These days they come out of their rooms in different attitudes like rotating figures on a weather house, the witch for foul weather, the princess for fair. The sun/thundercloud indicators show up in Iris/Rosemary or Rosemary/Iris in no predictable order, depending on where the gray vapor in the house settles that day, and the hell of it is, you never know which is which.

  They disagree, but not in any way you could predict, so it’s a new ballgame every day, for as long as they don’t die. Bored? Fine. Do what people who have lived together too long usually do. Fight.

  Which the twins do, wrangling over which lipstick, which breakfast cereal, whose turn it is to change Ivy’s unmentionable or deliver her morning Pop-Tart. These days they fight over everything. Except matters pertaining to their sainted mother. In the matter of the late Manette Ware Robichaux Ellis, they think as one. It won’t matter which of them speaks first, moodily sitting out the rain on the second-floor screen porch that juts out over the front porch roof. They pass the time doing what custodians do, for they are indeed custodians of this creaking tribute to Manette Ware Robichaux Ellis and her vanity: worrying.

  The house is so big! Mama’s works of art and costly artifacts are so many! They’re responsible for too many things! It’s been this way since they were six, when Mama presented them with little feather dusters and two bits of chamois bordered in pink and yellow respectively. “Now girls,” she said, “you are Mama’s very special housekeepers. You follow Emma around and wipe up after her, maids just don’t do like real ladies do. After all, they’re just maids! Now, it’s up to you to make sure those colored girls take care of everything, I want you to pick up anything Emma misses, and check all the surfaces to make sure that Mattie wipes them clean.”

  Later, and later went on all their lives until Mama took to her bed, there would be regular white-glove inspections, with reprimands if they overlooked anything, spankings if any of her cherished Staffordshire figurines showed so much as a chip, and if anything broke on their watch … Well.

  The responsibility was tremendous. Even more so after Little Manette called them to her bedside and swore them to the task. “And you, my precious beauties. When I am gone, all this…” She tried for a sweeping gesture but failed. Her hands drifted to the peacock quilt like butterflies, quivering in place. With her next-to-last breath, she finished, “… is yours,” which should have been enough, but Mama was as driven as she was commanding. She finished, “To take care of until the death.”

  Only Iris heard what she said next because Rose was scurrying to fetch a priest, and only Rose has ever repeated it, as she did to Little Elena on the waterfront because even she recognized it as ugly, ugly! Leah was a tramp.

  When Leah died, the twins did what one does in these circumstances, they grieved for her, even as their hearts expanded like balloons about to pop. Ours. All this will be ours.

  That was before. Love came and went: Mama looked down her nose at Stanislaus Worzecka when he first came to the house: NOCD, she declared. The marriage didn’t last long, and poor Alan Deering perished after a week of married bliss. When Poor Elena died a timely death, they worried. Who would take over her chores?

  The twins’ excitement waned as their responsibilities grew. Today, the task is staggering. All this rain. All that stuff!

  What will we do if the river rises so high that it lifts our grand house off its foundation in the impending flood? What if the currents carry us downriver to God knows where?

  Even on stormy days like this one, when the house beneath them shifts in new, alarming ways, Iris and Rosemary think ahead. They have to. Always did. Always will. Who knew how long the house and all Mama’s treasures would endure in a flood?

  Who knew that Mama was dooming them to live so long?

  If the current lifts beloved 553 right up off its lot on May Street, how can they best protect and preserve dear Mama’s precious things? If the water breaks up the fabric of the house: studs, beams, lath and plaster, disconnecting all the planks and the clapboards of 553 and it floats away, pieces of their past scattered and landing in new and unexpected places, what then?

  Fretful, anxious— no, terrified!— the old girls chatter, shoring up their ruins with words.

  “I was her favorite, she put her Tiffany flower brooch in my sash when we were eleven and she said, ‘With power comes responsibility.’”

  “No, I was her favorite, when she gave me the diamond pendant she said, ‘Rose, we are the custodians,’ and she meant me!”

  “She gave me her silver-backed hairbrush, Rose.”

  “That doesn’t mean you are her favorite.”

  “It does too! I’m the oldest, and I come first. She gave me the silver-backed hand mirror and the silver comb.”

  “Oh, Iris. How are we going to take care of all her beautiful things?”

  “Well, we are the custodians.”

  “And her favorites.”

  “Yes, we were always her favorites.”

  “No. Everett.”

  “Oh, Everett, Everett! That ninny. He doesn’t count.”

  The past, the past, their past is longer than any future the rest of us running around in the world will ever have. If the house that contains and supports them is rocking in the wind, they are too preoccupied with the past to realize, or comprehend the threat.

  “But he was her favorite.”

  “It isn’t fair!”

  “He couldn’t take care of himself!”

  “Everett left his special bear from Uncle Johnny out in the rain, and it had real panda fur.”

  “His electric tricycle rusted to death.”

  “Were there electric tricycles back then?”

  “Who cares? He left it out back and when it got ruined, Mama made Vincent whip Randolph for not bringing it in.”

  “That was a pretend whipping. Vincent wouldn’t hurt anyone.”

  “But he had to pretend. He had to pretend it was his fault that Teddy…”

  “Never mind.”

  “She had to blame somebody, didn’t she?”

  “And it couldn’t be Everett.”

  “And Dakie was too old to blame.”

  “She blamed Randolph for everything.”

  “Poor Ran. No wonder he ran away.”

  “The war.”

  “He never came back.”

  “Poor us! I still miss him.”

  “Me too. He was our Unknown Soldier.”

  “It’s sad.”

  They are hunched in their braided cane rockers, weighed down by responsibility. Their porch is like the wheelhouse of a giant ship, and when it’s raining this hard, the twins always come out here to keep watch. The eaves are steep, but the screen picks up refracted spray. It’s damp out here, but they can see all the way up and down May Street and it gives them the comforting sense of control. From here, they watch for enemies approaching, calmly waiting for the rain to stop and the waters to recede.

  Ivy is downstairs somewhere, she can’t do anything, so she won’t go far; Little Elena will have parked her somewhere safe, and the irresponsible girl had better make that brat of hers watch his aunt while she goes back to her endless busywork on her expensive computer thing.

  All right then, that’s taken care of, and if those fool children get hungry they can certainly feed themselves, although it wouldn’t occur to them to check on their poor old aunties, sitting out here in the dark, heroically standing watch or whatever men do out there at sea on their great big ships.

  Thoughtless brats. They won’t starve. Didn’t that uppity girl cook a great big breakfast for her precious Little Teddy at 11:30, positively ruining their appetite for lunch? She spoils that child!

  Why, the two of them up and walked out on Rose’s fine cooking with petty ex
cuses. God knows where the boy went. Only God cares. Then Little Elena turned on poor Ivy’s motor and they motored out of the kitchen, leaving the two of us to worry all alone, deserting us in this terrible time when frankly, we could use a little help!

  We bear all the responsibility. Rose and Iris, Iris and Rose. Well, we truly are Mama’s favorites, not counting Everett. At least Everett’s dead, what a load off our minds!

  With power comes responsibility. We try, we try!

  When all the tumult and the shouting die, we will be here in 553 May Street, taking care of everything that Mama entrusted to us. Together, we take care of Mama’s house and all Mama’s precious things, and we do it all by ourselves because these days you can’t get decent help. They cost the world! So not counting Ivy, who isn’t fit to look after a potted violet, we carry all this on our backs.

  And Mama’s house contains such treasures! How could Little Elena push all dear Mama’s chinoiserie into a corner like that, how could she deface it with that hideous cardboard desk? She’s turned Sister’s beautiful room into a garbage heap, so whatever happens, it serves her right. We won’t go in there to check for leaks tomorrow after the rain dies, we won’t go in even after the sun comes out and every drop of flood water evaporates. We don’t want to see our Leah’s room defaced. The file cabinet. That ugly desk! It’s like finding a hoptoad in the heart of a rose.

  It’s sad, what happened to Leah though. Everett was Mama’s favorite, he was even more favorite than us, that nasty little dirty word, and we tried so hard! She rebuffed Dakie, and our handsome big brother tried even harder than us, and Leah was the one that broke the camel’s back. The more Mama turned against the others, the more she took to us.

  She was nice to Ivy before she ran off and got hurt, which, frankly, ruined her looks. When that poor thing came home from the hospital, Mama fixed her up with rouge and pink Max Factor so she wouldn’t look so pale, and when time passed and Papa brought in the wheelchair, she wailed with grief.