She looked so tiny. But I was the one who was shrinking. I could feel the regression: forty-five to thirty-five . . . twenty . . . fifteen . . . ten . . . five. The veiled oaks marched by and the years fell away. By the time I pulled the car to a stop at the curve that went around to the carriage house, I was a child again, and my mother, all five-foot-two of her, towered over me.
“Hello, dahlin’,” she called from the top step. “Thank goodness you’re here!”
I waited for the guilt and was not disappointed. “It’s been so long.” She surveyed me up and down with her icy blue eyes, taking in the jeans, the cotton sweater, the tennis shoes. “Well, I’m sure you’ve brought other clothes with you, haven’t you? Come on in. I expected you an hour ago; I’ve been beside myself.”
Hot damn, I thought. Now there’s two of you.
“Put your things away,” Mama said, “and I’ll meet you on the back verandah.”
The back verandah. A euphemism, to be sure.
Belladonna is one of those Southern plantation homes that has no back, but rather, two fronts: one facing the street and one facing the river. It’s a metaphor of life with Mama. God forbid we should fail to offer a presentable image, even to our own backsides.
Behind the house, past the brick kitchen where slave women once cooked greens and field peas and rutabaga and corn bread for the white residents of the Big House, the lawn sloped down through manicured beds of azalea bushes to the river bluff. The house sat up high, well above flood stage, with a clear view of the lazy brown waters of the Tombigbee.
Mama served lemonade and cookies on the back verandah, and we made small talk, commenting on how the azaleas were budding and would be in full bloom in a week or so and how the redbuds were already coming out. A weeping cherry tree trailed its branches across the lawn, shedding petals like pale pink snow. Along the walkway, in perfect symmetry, stood a line of bright forsythia nodding their yellow dreadlocks in the morning sun.
She didn’t say one word about Daddy. I didn’t say one word about Robert. At last she set down her glass and fixed her eyes on a point just to the left of my shoulder. “And how long, exactly, am I to have the pleasure of my daughter’s company?” she asked.
I wondered vaguely how she managed, in one brief question, to communicate guilt over my absence and annoyance at my presence all in the same breath. But I didn’t linger too long over the dilemma. “I don’t know,” I said. “Are you on a schedule?”
She gave me a chilly smile. “Of course not. I was just curious, that’s all. You know you’re always welcome here, whenever you need a place to stay. This is your home, after all.”
Belladonna hadn’t been my home in over two decades, but what purpose would it serve to point that out?
We lapsed into silence. A family of chittering squirrels chased each other up and down the big pecan tree, and out on the river two black men caught a fish and annoyed my mother by laughing too loudly.
They were anchored right off our bluff, with the prow of the little green boat pointing downstream. Mama didn’t say anything. The river was public, and she couldn’t control who drifted by, but she never had to say a word to express her displeasure. All she needed was the look.
I’d learned the look early in life and took pains to avoid it at all costs. Unsuccessfully, I might add. No matter what I did, no matter how hard I tried, I could never quite manage to do things right. To be right. Years ago I had thrown up my hands in despair and said the hell with it, but all the resolutions in kingdom come can’t begin to hold back the drowning tide of maternal disapproval.
Now I felt it again, that sensation of traveling back in time, regressing. I lurched backward forty years and saw the look in my mother’s eyes.
She reached out, plucked at the leg of my blue jeans, and sighed. Just a sigh. That was all. But that sigh, and the silence that followed, carried the reprimand of a lifetime: For God’s sake, Priscilla, learn to be a lady. I brought you up better than this.
Down on the river, the black men laughed again.
3
My mother’s primary goal in life was to “bring me up right.” To that end, she threw herself zealously into the task of molding my young clay into the form of Southern Lady-hood.
My earliest memory of the process of upbringing occurred when I was, perhaps, eighteen months old.
Psychologists—including the white-haired old fool who sent me home again—have repeatedly told me that a child that young is not capable of formulating coherent memories. But the image is seared in my mind, nevertheless. Therapists don’t know everything, and besides, I was a very bright child.
I paused, looked down at the journal, reread what I’d written, and smiled. So there. The old fool wanted me to explore my past, fine. He asked for it; he deserved whatever he got.
And so what if it came across just a tad egotistical? I was a very bright child. And I do have those memories, no matter what anyone else might argue.
My mother, a petite, perfectly dressed woman with no maternal instincts whatsoever, was attempting to feed me strained spinach from a Gerber jar. The silver spoon wavered for just an instant, and my tiny fist sent it flying, most of it into my mother’s hair, the rest with a resounding splat onto the wall behind her head. I pointed a fat baby finger and did the unthinkable: I laughed.
“Priscilla,” Mama reprimanded, trying to maintain her dignity with spinach all over her coiffure, “proper young ladies do not throw their food. They eat what is set before them, whether they like it or not.”
I responded, or so my father told me, by spitting up the remains of the spinach and using it as fingerpaint on the tray of my high chair. Even at that tender age I was given to the artistic.
All right, maybe I don’t remember it—at least not the exact dialogue. I will say in my own defense that I have a vivid recollection of a green stain on the wall to the left of my high chair, at just about the height of my mother’s head. Besides, the story gives me pleasure, and so I tell it as truth.
Lord, that sounds just like something Daddy would have said. “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.”
Except I think it’s more accurate to say, “Never let reality get in the way of a good story.” Nothing tells the truth quite so precisely as good fiction. It’s reality that bogs down the process.
Maybe that’s a working principle for this journal of mine—not to get caught in the tangle of details, how this happened or what exact words were said. What’s important here is the insight I’m supposed to get from returning to the scene of the crime and revisiting those old memories and feelings and experiences. So I’ll just spin it out as it comes to me and see what gets caught in the web.
I learned fiction from my father—a storyteller of renown among our friends and relatives. Daddy called it entertaining. Mama called it by another name. I came to dread the expression on her face every time he launched into one of his elaborate tales. Clearly, she was not amused. Not one bit.
By the time I was four or five, Daddy was already being eased out of any involvement in my upbringing. To my mother, “bringing me up right” meant instilling in me the social graces, the values and priorities that accompanied the Bell name.
My basic nature did not cooperate with the agenda. At four I learned to read, teaching myself with my older brother’s first-grade primers and my collection of fairy tales and children’s poems. At four and a half, I determined that I wanted to be a writer. I was captivated by the magic and mystery of words, how little black squiggles on a white page could conjure up dream worlds and send the mind spinning through space.
At five, however, my books went into the toy box and my mother enrolled me in more worthwhile activities—piano lessons, voice lessons, ballet lessons, personal training in poise and femininity. At six I entered my first beauty pageant.
Never mind that I was short and chunky, totally devoid of balance, and tone-deaf. I also had a penchant for wearing my brother’s hand-me-downs and playing base
ball in the vacant lot with the boys, and Mother was determined to nip those habits in the bud. She decked me in itchy pink dresses with multiple petticoats, patent leather shoes, and little socks with pink bows on the turned-down sides. I dutifully attended voice and piano and dance classes and even tried to learn to walk with a book on my head—Shakespeare, I think it was. Or George Eliot.
By the time I was ready for first grade, I knew better than to even suggest wearing white shoes after Labor Day or before Easter. I knew how to use my limited feminine wiles to charm judges and make them forget that I couldn’t sing my way out of a Piggly Wiggly sack. I knew how to curtsy and how to smile when
I felt like spitting. I even knew how to flip my hair.
To all appearances, my mother’s regimen for conforming her daughter to the expectations of a Southern Lady seemed to be working.
Until I went to school.
Once I entered the rank and file of the great untutored multitudes, my mother’s Southern Lady refrain took on an altered tone. Now she had a different battle on her hands. Not only did she have to “bring me up right,” she had to undo all the improper habits I was picking up outside the nest from my vulgar peers.
One of the worst idiosyncrasies I acquired in first grade was an unaccountable predilection for making friends with the wrong people. People like Dorrie Meacham, a sweet, sensitive, shy girl who wore braces on her legs from a bout with polio. . . .
Good grief. That was almost forty years ago. Until this minute I’d forgotten all about Dorrie Meacham. What else was I going to find buried back there in my brain, covered with four decades of dust and cobwebs?
Dorrie, an early reader like myself, wanted to see my collection of books, so one day she came home with me on the bus. Mama met us at the door with that fixed, frozen smile that always spelled trouble and watched like a hawk as Dorrie clanked awkwardly through the front parlor and down the hall to my bedroom. Mother gave us exactly eighteen minutes of blissful privacy before she came and stood in the doorway.
“Priscilla, haven’t you forgotten something?”
I couldn’t for the life of me think of what I had forgotten, but I scrambled to my feet and stood at attention, praying like thunder that some divine revelation would disclose my shortcoming before Mama had a chance to tell me. “Huh?”
“Ladies do not say ‘huh,’ Priscilla.” She cleared her throat.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Now, wouldn’t you like to introduce me to your little friend?”
My mind groped for the proper wording. “Mother, I would like you to meet my friend Dorrie Meacham. Dorrie, my mother.”
“Nice to meet you, Mrs. Rondell,” Dorrie said politely, struggling to her feet and offering a pale, thin hand.
“You seem like a very well-brought-up young lady, Dorrie.”
My heart soared. Dorrie had passed the test. She had been polite, but not intrusive. Mother had declared her well brought up.
Or so I thought.
“Why don’t you girls come into the kitchen for lemonade and cookies, and then I think it’s time for Dorrie to go on home.”
We sat at the table at right angles, uncomfortable, the spell of our budding friendship severed by my mother’s palpable presence, the silence broken only by the tick-tick of the kitchen clock and the clunk-clunk of Dorrie’s braces as they swung against the legs of her chair. When the glasses were empty, my mother, with that same icy smile on her face, ushered Dorrie to the door and thanked her for coming. I watched through the window as my friend—my only friend, if truth be told—limped down the sidewalk to the end of the block and disappeared behind the neighbor’s house.
When I got back to the kitchen, Mother was on her knees beside the chair where Dorrie had sat, rubbing scratch cover into the wooden legs. She finished the task, put away the rag, and pointed to the chair. “Sit down, Priscilla.”
I sat, dreading the tone in Mama’s voice and the expectation of what was to come.
“What do you know about Dorrie Meacham, Priscilla?”
I squirmed. “Not much, I guess. She’s in my class at school, and she likes to read, and she’s real smart and funny—”
“Stop fidgeting, Priscilla. Ladies do not fidget.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I took a deep breath and clasped my hands on the table in what I hoped looked like a semblance of composure.
“And where does she live?”
“Three blocks over, on Duncan Street. Her father is—”
“Howard Meacham, the pharmacist. I know. And her mother is Elsie, who runs the cash register at the drugstore.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Mama shook her head and narrowed her eyes. “Priscilla, I’m sure you feel sorry for Dorrie and were trying to help her. But you need to look for friends who are more—well, our kind of people.”
I wasn’t sure what that meant, didn’t dare ask, and was pretty certain I didn’t want to know anyway. To my six-year-old mind, Dorrie was my kind of people. She loved books, she was almost better at reading than I was, and she made me laugh. She was my first friend. My best friend.
“No doubt the Meachams are a very nice family, in their own way,” my mother was saying. “But a Southern Lady can’t be too careful who she socializes with. Your father and I have invited Dr. Thornton and his wife for dinner this Friday. Dr. Thornton is an important client of your father’s. Their little girl Sarah is just about your age, and she’s such a lovely child. Do try to get along with her, won’t you, Priscilla? For my sake, if not for your own.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I gave the required response, but my heart wasn’t in it. I knew Sarah Thornton, and she was just about the snobbiest, nastiest kid in school. She strutted around with her nose in the air, flouncing her blonde curls and looking down on everybody, including me. Just the day before, on the playground, she had bullied her way through a game of dodgeball, hitting Dorrie so hard she fell down and then making fun of her for not being fast enough to get out of the way. I wanted to snatch those curls right out of Sarah Thornton’s scalp, to bloody that turned-up nose and teach her not to mess with my friend. But I didn’t. I just helped Dorrie up and walked away with Sarah’s high-pitched taunts ringing in my ears.
“Remember, Priscilla,” my mother said as she got up from the table, “pity is no basis for friendship.”
That night, as I lay in bed dreading Friday evening, when I would have to endure the company of Sarah Thornton and her parents—who were, according to Mama, “our kind of people”—I overheard a conversation between Mother and Daddy about Dorrie Meacham.
“The Meachams are working people with no name, no connections,” Mama said, her voice rising. “I just don’t think that’s the kind of socializing we should encourage. In the long run, Priscilla will be so much better off if she learns early in life to choose more suitable companions.”
Daddy’s feeble protest reached me through the wall. “Donna, she’s only a child. What difference does it make?”
“It makes a world of difference,” Mother responded. “That little Dorrie is so pathetic. She obviously needs a friend, but—”
Mama lowered her voice and I couldn’t hear any more. But I suspected that it wasn’t only Dorrie Meacham’s name and background that made the difference.
It was also because Dorrie was a cripple.
Dorrie never came to the house again, and even at school we gradually stopped talking and went our separate ways. That night I went to sleep crying because the first friend I had ever chosen for myself wasn’t good enough.
It made me sick inside, sick with frustration and longing and confusion. It made me wonder if I could ever manage to be what Mama wanted me to be—a proper Southern Lady with proper values. After all, I had picked Dorrie as my friend. My mother had cast Sarah Thornton for the role.
But I was a Bell, of the Clarksville Bells, and the burden of responsibility fell upon me to make my mother proud. My mother, and all those generations of Bell women whose names were uttered at
our christenings and cotillions. A Southern Lady could never just throw caution to the winds and follow her own heart. She did what was expected, at least if she was brought up right.
It was my first conscious glimpse of what being “brought up right” might do to my soul.
4
The morning after my reluctant return to Chulahatchie, Mama went out to meet “the girls” for brunch at the country club. I was not invited.
Instead I took a Prozac, installed myself on the verandah with my journal, and reread what I had written the night before. I normally don’t hear voices inside my head, at least not on a regular basis. But I couldn’t silence my therapist’s exhortation, echoing against the inside of my skull, nagging at me to continue exploring the nuances of my relationship with my mother.
Lovely.
I turned to a fresh page and wrote the first words that came to my mind:
Shit. Double shit. Holy shit.
Quite apart from the profanity issue, Mama would say that “holy shit” is an inaccurate metaphor, an oxymoron. A woefully imprecise analogy, like “cold as hell.”
With all due respect, she’s wrong. I’ve seen plenty of holy shit in my time. And a lot of holier-than-thou shit, too. Well-brought-up people dump it in your path every single day, like oblivious elephants lumbering along in the circus parade. And the rest of us spend our lives following behind with scoops and shovels.
The Book of Peach Page 2