by Lee Smith
Right there on the sofa where you are now. By then it was really late and so she brought me that little .32 Johnny gave me for my protection. Oh no, she is not good, my little girl, she is willful and bad, but she takes good care of me, and I have to be taken care of. I do. Somebody has got to take care of me.
Well, when Johnny came in drunk and he was so mean, she—Hand me that string of little silver balls, won’t you—There. Oh yes. Now if you’ll plug the lights in, it’s right there behind you, behind the sofa. Oh yes. Yes. Yes. Now isn’t that beautiful? It’s exactly the way I dreamed it would be, just exactly.
5
Katie Cocker Tells It Like It Is
I got a double bed
In this double-wide,
And a double shot of gin,
But I’m a single girl
In a one-horse town,
Layin’ here alone again.
1
Mamma Rainette and the Raindrops
Aunt Virgie used to say, “Be good, girls, and if you can’t, be careful.” Then she’d give us a big sly wink and close the door behind her, real soft-like. And even if we didn’t know where she was going exactly, we had a pretty good idea of what she was going to do when she got there. We’d sit on the old iron bed in the boardinghouse in Richmond and giggle, me and Georgia, and not say out loud what we were thinking. Or at least I didn’t say out loud what I was thinking, and I know what I was thinking. I reckon I’ve always had a dirty mind, or at the very least a mind which is down-to-earth. I will call a spade a spade. I will tell it like it is. I can’t kid myself, or not for long, anyhow. Oh, I guess we all kid ourselves a little bit.
Actually, I’m not sure why I remember this so good, Virgie going out the door in Richmond and winking at us that way when she left. But I do. I remember her dark red lipstick and how she wore her hair pulled up in back with combs, like a Spanish dancer, those dyed black curls like bedsprings all around her face. Virgie still had a hard country Kewpie-doll prettiness about her at that time. Twenty more pounds and she would lose it, her cute little turned-up nose and pouty mouth squeezed in by those big old cheeks.
This must have been right when we first got to Richmond, me and Georgia, ready to hit the big time, fresh off the farm. But it wasn’t long before we were going out too, with our own boys. I hadn’t been much interested in the boys around home, to tell you the truth, or vice versa. I was related to most of them, and I believe I was just too big and definite for the rest. I spoke my mind a lot in school, maybe because I had to keep so buttoned up at home, for reasons which I’ll get to. But oh Lord, those Richmond boys! I hadn’t ever seen nothing like them. Slow-talking, big-spending rich boys in vanilla-ice-cream suits and open cars; fast-talking, chain-smoking young salesmen in plaid pants just on the verge of making it big; boys that worked in stores; boys whose families owned some of that flat rich black land right outside town, that land so different from where we’d grown up on Grassy Branch. I knew a rough boy from Oregon Hills that worked in the ironworks down by the river, I knew a pale sweet boy that was in school to be a lawyer, I knew a boy with a glass eye that shot pool for a living. I didn’t discriminate too much among them, to tell you the truth. I liked them all. There were more boys in Richmond than I had ever dreamed of, twiddling my thumbs up on Grassy Branch—this is one reason I jumped at the chance to go off with Virgie and be a Raindrop.
The other reason is that I was just dying to leave home. Even when I was a senior, Mamma wouldn’t hardly let me out of her sight, not that I had any particular feller to go off with, either. So I got this idea that if I could find me a husband in Richmond, I wouldn’t ever have to go back home. Doesn’t that sound crazy now? What a reason to want a husband! But that’s what we thought back then, us country girls, that’s the way we were raised. We thought we had to have a husband to do anything. This sounds especially crazy to me now, since I’ve had several. Oh Lord. If I could just know what I know now and feel like I used to feel! Anyhow, I was wild to leave home, I was wild to get me a husband—I guess I was wild in general, but ignorant as a post.
Two of my best friends, Dessie Hudson and Shirley Bell Cameron, had gotten married before we finished high school, and I’d never even had a real boyfriend. Dessie was the head majorette. She got married one week before the whole band went to Roanoke to compete in the Battle of the Bands, so then she had to drop out of school, and naturally the band didn’t win. Dessie Hudson was the best head majorette we ever had at Holly Springs High, but it didn’t stop her from getting married. We all thought it was romantic, of course. Dessie and her boyfriend, Jerry Lindsay, ran off to South Carolina in a school bus, because he was a school bus driver. The board of supervisors voted not to prosecute him, though. Then there was Shirley Bell Cameron, who was pregnant and dropped out to marry Roland Jolly, and then brought her little tiny baby girl to graduation. Only a few people in my class—mostly the town kids, like the doctors’ kids from Holly Springs and Cana—planned to go on to college, which really hadn’t even been mentioned in my case. I thought I would probably try to get a job working for the veterinarian in Holly Springs, since I’d always liked animals and I couldn’t think of anything else to do. Mamma had already said flat-out that there was no way she was going to ever consent to me trying to be a singer, which was what I really wanted to do. “They is enough singers in this family already,” Mamma had said absolutely. “Too many to please God,” she said, for she was convinced that most singing was a sin.
So I wasn’t doing much of anything except baby-sitting for people when Virgie called up and asked me to go off with her and Georgia, to be a star. A star! As soon as she said it, I jumped on it like a dog on a bone, for I wanted something more than what I had. I’ve always wanted something more than what I had, it seems like. This has been one of my big problems in life. Until Virgie said it, I didn’t know how bad I wanted it. But I loved to sing, better than anything, and always had.
When I was a little girl, my favorite times up on Grassy Branch were when all of us sat out on R.C. and Lucie’s porch singing while the moon came up, listening to the little babble of the creek in that sudden hush that fell sometimes at the end of a song, sneaking a burning sip of whiskey out of one of the grownups’ glasses, drunk already on the sweet-sweet smell of the honeysuckle vine. I’d stay up there all night, any night, if Mamma would let me. But no, here she’d come walking around the hill from our house to get me, wearing Daddy’s old green cardigan sweater with the holes in the elbows, which she always wore around the house. I hated that sweater. It made me so mad to see her wear that awful old sweater around, just like it made me so mad to hear her high wavery voice quaver out, “Katie? Katie? You come on home now, honey.” For a minute I’d just sit there, knowing she couldn’t see me in the dark, imagining what she’d do if she thought I’d run away from home and she’d never see me again. But then Little Virginia or somebody would say, “Katie, you go on home with your mamma now,” and I’d go. I wanted so desperately to live there in the big house with Rose Annie and not in my own house, where things went on that I knew I couldn’t mention, even young as I was then.
I had always loved to sing. I was crazy about the little gospel quartet we had for a while, me and Rose Annie and Georgia and Johnny, and when I won Miss Holly Springs High, I sang for my Talent even though I had lied and told Mamma I was going to use sewing as my Talent and model two outfits I’d made in home ec. (This is actually what Darlene Jewel did, who came in third. And I had made a really pretty red sheath dress with a matching jacket, and another dress with a circular skirt and cap sleeves that were awful to put in right.) But I didn’t model these outfits. Instead I wore an electric-blue strapless dress with a ballerina-length skirt loaned to me by Dessie Hudson (Mrs. Jerry Lindsay!) and sang “I Want to Be a Cowboy’s Sweetheart,” accompanying myself on my guitar. I belted it out, too, just like Patsy Montana on the radio.
The audience loved it. People all over the auditorium jumped up and whistled and clapped and
yelled when I finished. It went to my head, I guess. I felt hot and tingly all over, a feeling I still get, believe it or not, at the end of every show. And every time it’s just as exciting as it was that first time, honestly. It gets in your blood, you know. Finally you can’t live without it. I was probably born with it in my blood, but I didn’t know it until that night I was crowned Miss Holly Springs High.
Then when Helen Ann Breeding, who had been Miss Holly Springs High the year before, came forward with my tiara and put it on me, I just burst into tears—I couldn’t help it—and the crowd clapped and yelled even louder. They always love it if you cry. The applause echoed off the green tile walls of the auditorium.
I was hooked.
Mamma wasn’t there, thank God. She had stayed home with Mamma Tampa, who’d come to live with us for good by that time. I just hated it, too. I felt like I was in a cage with the two of them there—Mamma Tampa talking out of her head all the time, and Mamma praying over everything. So there was that, that somehow, behind me that night as I sang, the knowledge of Mamma Tampa and Mamma back home in the kitchen sitting on those old straight chairs stringing beans, looking awful and acting creepy. It made me wild, I’ll tell you.
And also I could not quit thinking about Rose Annie, who was not in the audience but in a hospital someplace in Tennessee, having a nervous breakdown. Rose Annie was a whole lot prettier than me, and could sing better, too. I never would have won Miss Holly Springs High if she’d been in the contest. The thought of Rose Annie in the hospital filled me with a crazy sadness I could not contain, a feeling that I would burst somehow, and I think all this stuff found its way into how I sang that night. It always does, but I didn’t know that then. It made me want to dance and jump and strut my stuff all over the stage and sing louder and better than anybody else ever had. I wanted to pep up Mamma and Mamma Tampa. I wanted to give Rose Annie a voice, a body, a self in the world again.
So I won. I got a rhinestone tiara and a steam iron and a check for fifty dollars.
Mamma cried the next day when she heard it at the beauty shop, even though everybody told her how good I was. She didn’t care. All she wanted to do was marry me off as soon as possible, so she wouldn’t have to worry about me anymore. She acted like I was some big wild animal in the house, but at the same time she wouldn’t let me go out anywhere or do anything. “How do you think you’re going to marry me off,” I asked her one time point-blank, “if you won’t let me go out anyplace to meet anybody?”
This made Mamma’s weak chin quiver, and her pop eyes fill up with tears. “Oh, Katie,” she said, “you’ll understand when you’re older, honey. You will.” And because I knew how much Mamma loved me, and how hard her own life had been, I tried hard to do like she said, and be good and bide my time, trusting that things would work out somehow in the end.
For I had always been a good girl, always done what they said to, and I guess in a way I was as alarmed as Mamma was by this new personality that seemed to be trying to take me over right then, right about the time of the Miss Holly Springs High contest. Do you remember that movie The Three Faces of Eve? That’s what I felt like, like several girls in the same body, all of a sudden swept by the wildest desire for something I couldn’t even name. I wanted to be good, I wanted to be bad, I wanted to get a husband, I wanted to sing my heart out. I loved Mamma but I hated her, too, hated her whiny voice and lack of gumption, the way she’d make you say the blessing over everything, even a piece of pie and a glass of milk. We were driving each other crazy by the time Virgie came to get me, but even so, Mamma refused to let me go with her.
I went anyway.
I didn’t tell Mamma I was going until the very afternoon I left, a bright hot day in June. I didn’t figure there was any point in telling her any earlier and getting her all wrought up about it. I’d known I was going the very minute Virgie called up long-distance and asked me. “Yes,” I said immediately. I didn’t even have to think about it.
“And I’ll be just fine,” I said to Mamma when I told her. “Georgia’s going too.” Mamma thought a lot of Georgia, who was responsible to a fault, not a thing like her mamma.
“Honey, you don’t know what’s out there,” my mamma said, her chin quivering as she followed me around while I packed my clothes. “You don’t have a clue.”
“I don’t know what you mean, ‘what’s out there.’ Out where?” I said just to devil her. I couldn’t help it.
“Out in the world,” Mamma said. “You just don’t know, honey, what all a girl can get into. It’s mean people out there, it’s not like here.”
Not like here where your own husband ran around the county drinking until he died of it and beat you up whenever he felt like it, I didn’t say. It’s so damn nice here, I didn’t say. I understood that Mamma wanted to keep me here because she couldn’t think of what else to do with me. She couldn’t imagine any other kind of life, or any other place to live.
But I could, throwing clothes into my cardboard suitcase that I hadn’t used since 4-H camp. I packed my jeans, my church clothes, my winter coat. I didn’t plan to come back for a while. Then I looked out the window and there was Virgie’s car, the long white Oldsmobile. She was right on time, and Georgia was with her. They didn’t get out of the car. I put the rest of my clothes in my suitcase and sat on it to get it shut.
I looked around my room good before I left, at the pictures of Gene Autry I’d taped over the fading wallpaper with its repeated pattern of little lattice squares and curlicues and violets—oh Lord, how many afternoons, how many hot nights had I laid on my bed and stared at that wallpaper and waited for something to happen! Well, it was happening now. All my yearbooks stood in a stack on the floor, my dolls filled the top of the closet, my blue-and-gold cheerleader pom-poms hung on either side of my mirror. All around the inside of the mirror frame I’d stuck school pictures of all my friends, each one across from the boy she liked. I looked out my window and saw Aunt Virgie out there smoking a cigarette in the car. But for some reason, I still took the time to make up my narrow bed, something Mamma usually had to force me to do, and smoothed my pink chenille spread over the pillow carefully. Then I unplugged my radio, which Mamma had bought me with Green Stamps. Lord knows how many nights I had stayed up until one or two o’clock in the morning, listening to Randy’s Record Shop out of Gallatin, Tennessee, singing along.
I carried my radio in one hand and my suitcase in the other when I went back in the kitchen to kiss Mamma Tampa good-bye. She sat at the table where Mamma had put her, stringing beans. She loved to string beans, it calmed her down. Mamma Tampa’s white hair stood up straight all over her head, like a crew cut growing way out. Her dress was buttoned up wrong. This was the kind of thing I just couldn’t stand to see, for I could still remember when she dressed to kill, and took so much pride in her looks. “Bye-bye, Mamma Tampa,” I said, hugging her from behind.
“Durwood Bailey was born during a thunderstorm,” she said. “His mother ran off with a midget.” Mamma Tampa was always telling some kind of a big story.
“Now Mamma, you know that’s not true,” my mamma said.
“Bye-bye, I love you,” I said. At this point I couldn’t even tell if that was true or not, I was so dead set on leaving. I dragged my bag down the hall—it was a little dog-trot house we lived in, around the side of the hill from R.C. and Lucie’s—and pushed open the screen door and went down the steps and out the walk, blinded by the sunshine. Bees were buzzing around, a little soft breeze was blowing. I felt like I’d come out of a cave and into the world. Mamma followed me down the walk twisting a handkerchief in her hands and blinking at the light like some kind of underground animal flushed from cover.
“Honey,” she said, twisting her handkerchief, “honey, I just want what is best for you.”
“I know it, Mamma,” I said. I realized this was true.
But then she had to say, “I just pray that God is looking over your shoulder as you make this decision, honey,” and I could h
ear Mr. Erwin Bledsoe, our preacher, in the tone of her voice. Personally I didn’t like Erwin Bledsoe, because he always stood too close to me when he was talking, and touched me too much. He did this to all the girls. I need a lot of room.
But I went back and bent down and hugged Mamma good before I got in Virgie’s car, and as I hugged her, all of a sudden, a little movie of Mamma went running through my mind—Mamma sewing tiny little stitches to make the smocking on my Easter dress when I was nine; Mamma taking all her saved-up money out of the old sock when I was twelve, to pay the doctor bills; Mamma down on her knees with a ruler, her mouth bristling with a line of straight pins, hemming up our cheerleader skirts for us while we drank Coca-Colas and talked silly and acted for all the world like Mamma was some kind of hired help; Mamma nailing the oilcloth over my window and reading out loud to me so my eyes wouldn’t get ruined when I had the measles; Mamma trying her best to explain it away when Daddy would get so bad, and telling me he had a good heart really, and that he never meant to hurt anybody and he never would again, she was sure of it, but that life is full of trouble, and I’d understand when I got older. . . .
All these pictures of Mamma ran through my mind when I told her good-bye, and right then I wanted desperately to be everything she wanted me to be, and more—better than she ever dreamed, for this is the awful curse which is naturally laid on an only child, you have to go forth in the world bowed down by all your parents’ hopes and dreams as well as your own.
“Don’t worry about me, Mamma,” I said, hugging her. “I’ll be just fine.” But I was crying my heart out by then. Mamma felt as little as a grasshopper when I wrapped her up in my arms and held her tight, I could feel her little fast-beating heart. I watched her turn and stumble a little as she went back up the walk. She did not turn, nor wave. I knew she was crying. Then I got in the car with Georgia and Virgie.