The Book of Peach

by Penelope Stokes J.

  My eyes drifted to his left hand. No wedding ring, but—

  He caught me looking and held it up for me to see. On the ring finger was the indentation, the echo of a band.

  “Divorced,” he said. “Or rather, in the process.”

  While he waited, I sidled back to the freezer section and replaced the Bunny Tracks and the deep-dish, double-cheese, super supreme pizza. No point in having spoiled Italian sausage, or getting melted chocolate and caramel all over my backseat, when I knew good and well I wasn’t going home anytime soon.

  I walked alone out to the parking lot of the Piggly Wiggly, got into my car, and followed his pickup to a truck stop out on the highway. He might have nice eyes and a funny little dimple and be able to juggle fruit, but I wasn’t stupid enough to get into a truck with a man I’d just met. Even if I didn’t think he was a serial killer, I’ve watched plenty of CSI in my time, and I wasn’t taking any chances.

  My single girlfriends had taught me the drill. Coffee first, in a public place.

  Since it was so close to noon, it actually turned out to be lunch. Reuben on rye, with fries and a Diet Coke. We ate and made small talk and then settled down to the “get to know you” stuff over coffee and pie.

  “Tell me about yourself,” he said with forced casual-ness.

  “There’s not much to tell.”

  He smiled. “Don’t be modest. I know Chulahatchie. You’re the most interesting thing to come along in years.”

  It was a line, and I knew it, but I felt myself flush like a high school freshman anyway. This town was a small pond, and I had once been a pretty big fish. Was it possible he didn’t know who I was?

  Then the ludicrousness of the situation struck me. Except for the occasional duty visit and my father’s funeral, I had been away for more than twenty years. I had left a beauty queen and returned a broken, middle-aged divorcée. I looked nothing remotely like Miss Ole Miss or second runner-up to Miss Mississippi.

  Besides that, I didn’t recognize him, either. Even if he’d been in Chulahatchie back in my glory days, he was older than I was, by ten years or more. When you’re a teenager, you don’t pay attention to people in their thirties and forties. They can live right next door, and if they don’t appear in your orbit of reality, they don’t exist.

  Maybe he didn’t know who I was or who I had once been. Maybe he did. It didn’t much matter to me. What mattered was that he treated me as if I were the most fascinating and attractive creature he had ever met, and he gazed at me as if I were astonishingly beautiful.

  If it was an act, it was a damn good one. Good enough to fool me. Good enough to make me not care if I was being fooled.

  At least good enough for now.

  In my own defense, my initial liaison with Charles Chase was a simple matter of heredity. It’s all in my genes. That’s g-e-n-e-s.

  “You are a Bell,” my mother has said to me on innumerable occasions throughout my childhood and adolescence—and well into my adulthood, if truth be told. “Remember your heritage; blood will tell.”

  As I wrote the words blood will tell, I felt an involuntary shudder course through me.

  I first heard this phrase as a little girl, and it conjured up images in my mind that were light-years distant from what my mother intended. I was, as I have said, a voracious reader, and even as a child I knew from books that you could always track the murderer from blood samples at a crime scene.

  That wasn’t, of course, what Mama meant at all.

  What she meant was that a girl’s bloodline was her hidden source of strength and power, the trump card in the game of social acceptability. One’s “people,” the stock one came from, determined one’s position on the social ladder. It was a Southern Lady’s responsibility not only to know and revere her forebears, but to invoke the Hallowed Name to maintain or advance her position.

  My grandmother GiGi, for example.

  GiGi lived in rather modest surroundings, thanks to Grandpa Chick’s drinking and gambling away the Barclay family fortune. But it never mattered that GiGi occupied a small white house filled with outdated furnishings. She was a lady. She was a Bell. She was the gravitational center of her own universe. And she never let anyone forget it.

  Especially me.

  Every summer we spent a couple of weeks at Grandma GiGi’s house. I remember one of those long, steamy Southern afternoons in particular. I must have been five, or maybe almost six. It was before I went to school, at any rate. GiGi came and got me out of a nap, sat me down in the parlor, and, with wind from the electric fan ruffling the pages of history, took me on an extended tour through the Bell family album. Five generations of Bell women—six, if you included me. One hundred seventy years of Bellness.

  Alberta Bell, my great-great-great-grandmother, was the matriarch of the Bell Plantation. In shadowy sepia images, she peered out from the family photographs as if examining me to see if I was worthy of the name.

  “Alberta married well when she caught Adolphus Bell.” My grandmother repeated this rhyming couplet like a mantra, like a magical incantation that would empower me to do the same. Dolph, as everyone called him, was the wealthiest boy in five counties, the only child of Langford Bell, from the Chesapeake Bay area of Virginia. Alberta was—well, I never really found out who Alberta was or where she came from. Her history, as far as GiGi was concerned, seemed to begin with her marriage to Dolph. I suspect she might have been a poor girl from the wrong side of the tracks.

  Poor, but smart. As young Dolph was preparing to come west, to use his daddy’s money to make even more money growing cotton in Tennessee, Alberta convinced him that he should marry her by giving him to know that she was carrying his child.

  A dozen other young lovelies around Chesapeake Bay might have made the same claim, my grandmother told me without a hint of disapproval, but Alberta made the most convincing case. She was not pregnant, of course—by Dolph or any other man, for that matter. But the ploy worked, and by the time he found out different, the hapless Dolph was hooked, reeled in, stuffed, and mounted over Alberta’s fireplace.

  What amazed me about Alberta’s story was not that it involved sex, but that my own grandmother would tell me this tale with such obvious pride, as if Alberta had won the Nobel Prize for Manipulation by coercing Adolphus Bell into marriage under false pretenses.

  GiGi made it clear, of course, that she didn’t recommend this particular tactic, but in Alberta’s case it worked, and apparently the end justifies the means if the outcome succeeds. Here she stood, straight and proud at the center of the Happy Family: Alberta and Dolph with their seven offspring, three boys and four girls. The boys, GiGi told me, bought land of their own adjacent to their father’s and greatly expanded the holdings of the Bell Plantation. The girls married the eligible sons of their father’s colleagues, and the extended family created sort of a feudal territory, a fiefdom ruled by the power of the Bell blood.

  I wanted to ask my grandmother why the Bell name became the significant marker of our family’s heritage rather than Alberta’s maiden name, and whether or not there were other Bell descendants running around the Tennessee countryside—perhaps with darker hair and skin than the original blond, blue-eyed Bell clan. Given Adolphus Bell’s obvious way with the ladies, I suspected there might be another side of my Bell heritage that nobody talked about.

  But I didn’t bring it up. That wasn’t the point, anyway. The point was that Bell women, beginning with Alberta, married well, no matter how crooked the path that brought them to their nuptials. Alberta deserved Dolph. She got what she wanted, and then she brought her own daughters up to choose wisely, as she had. The Bell clan flourished, at least until the Yankees pillaged and plundered their way through the South. But even after the plantation house had been stripped to the bare walls and left like an empty skull amid the ruined cotton fields, the Bells still held on to their dignity, their place in society, and their name.

  If blood will tell, it seems I got a disproportionate amount of
Great-great-great-grandmother Alberta’s DNA.

  But I won’t let Mama in on that little secret. I’ll just let her think I took a long, long time picking out a cantaloupe at the Piggly Wiggly.

  6

  I had promised my fool of a therapist that I’d call once a week and report on my progress. I told him about my journaling and the insights I was gaining about my family of origin, and I told him about my time with Mama and all the negative emotion that interaction called up in me. It was mostly psychiatric bull puckey, which he probably figured out in a nanosecond if he was even half awake, but it made us both feel better to go through the motions. Besides, he was getting eighty bucks an hour to pretend to listen, so I made sure he got my money’s worth.

  What I didn’t tell him was that I was lying to my mother about going to the library when I was really meeting and mating Charles Chase at a secluded little fishing cabin on the banks of the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway.

  The first time we went to the river camp, it was afternoon. Charles drove and I followed in my car without paying much attention, so I had a hard time finding the place by myself in the dark. In the end I had to call him on his cell phone three times and arrived frustrated and frazzled and feeling like a helpless airhead.

  Charles didn’t seem to notice. He met me at the car, took my hand, and escorted me up the steps to a porch that looked out over the river. I felt, however briefly, like Cinderella at the ball.

  I had seen the cabin in daylight and knew it was rustic, but tonight it looked like a fairyland, with candles burning on every horizontal surface.

  With his hand at the small of my back, he ushered me in, settled me on the sagging couch, and pressed a glass of white wine into my hand. “I made dinner,” he said.

  I concealed a smile and pretended not to notice the rotisserie chicken box from Piggly Wiggly on the kitchen counter.

  He sat beside me with his arm thrown casually across the back of the couch, his thumb grazing my shoulder blade like an accidental touch. The contact galvanized all my senses from the neck down and left my brain groping in a fog.

  We drank the wine, opened a second bottle, and took it out onto the screened porch where a single rose graced a table set for two. Night wrapped around us like a piece-work quilt, dark and warm and heavy. Beyond the screen I could see shards of moonlight floating on the surface of the water.

  It should have been romantic. It was planned to be romantic, right down to the last detail.

  Something was missing. But I’d had too much wine to be able to figure what it was or why making love with Charles Chase left me feeling sad and empty.

  Maybe Great-great-great-grandmother Alberta’s genes had not been diluted enough by the time they reached my twisted strands of DNA, but whether it was ancestry, destiny, or pure rebellion, I didn’t much care.

  He is irresistible. Or, to be more precise, the whole thing is irresistible. The sneaking around. The forbiddenness of it. The adrenaline rush. The giddiness. He makes me feel like a sexy, attractive, desirable woman, and I gravitate toward him like a hummingbird to sugar water.

  Correction: He made me feel like a girl.

  Just as I reverted to childhood the moment I started down the driveway toward Belladonna, now I rewound to a teenager at the merest thought of Charles Chase. Whenever he was close, all my nerves stood at attention, and when he wasn’t around, I thought about him constantly. Replayed conversations in my mind. Imagined his voice and his eyes and his smile. Wrote his name in the back of my journal, then tore the pages into confetti and threw them away. Daydreamed about him in the morning and fantasized about him at night.

  It was idiotic. Even in the midst of it, I knew I wasn’t in love. And when the emptiness and loneliness flooded over me in the backwash of our secret trysts, I had to push those feelings aside to keep from crying.

  I had broken the first and only commandment of effective journaling: I wasn’t telling the truth. I was writing what I wanted to feel, what I wanted to be true. Writing words that gave me an emotional fix in the moment, a fiction, a smoke screen, even as I knew that reality lurked just around the corner, waiting for me to acknowledge it.

  But after Robert’s rejection and the resulting meltdown of my self-esteem, lust seemed an acceptable substitute for love, and being the object of someone else’s lust felt even better. Especially for a washed-out, aging beauty queen whose entire self-worth was built on the shifting sand of external appearance.

  I had eyes; I could see what Robert saw, what Charles was seeing now. I wasn’t blind to the crow’s-feet and turkey wattle, the hip bulges and laugh lines. Maybe Charles was using me to bolster his own sagging ego, but if I was going to be absolutely candid, I was probably using him, too. The flat-out truth of it didn’t make me feel particularly noble, but at least it was honest.

  More honest than Great-great-great-grandmother Alberta.

  More honest even than my own grandmother GiGi.

  In June after my first year in school, Mama packed us up and took us to GiGi’s house for the entire summer. We always went for a week or two, but this was different. There was a sense of urgency about it, a mission.

  Everybody pretended this extended visit was designed to “give Mama a break,” but I knew better. Ever since the ballet fiasco, it was crystal clear that Mama needed help if she intended to mold a recalcitrant child like me into the perfect little Southern Lady. There was only one viable alternative to utter despair: She called in reinforcements.

  Her own mother, after all, had succeeded with her. And two heads were better than one.

  My brother, Harry, came, too, but only by default. Melanie was nineteen and spending the summer at the lake with some college friends. Daddy had his law practice to tend to, and Harry, who was only nine although he seemed to think he was eighteen, couldn’t very well stay at home alone during the day.

  Harry, being a boy and therefore not a suitable candidate for my mother’s training program, was pretty much left to his own devices. My grandparents lived in Waterford, a small, clean, segregated town in northern Mississippi. Waterford boasted a brand-new swimming pool, a fishing dock on the river, and a town square with a movie theater and an ice cream parlor, so Harry might as well have died and gone straight to heaven. For two months he lived out his dream of masculine freedom, walking wherever his fancy took him and gloating over the independence granted to him solely on the basis of his genitals.

  The cynic in me thinks some things never change.

  All that summer Harry made new friends on the baseball diamond and at the pool, went fishing with them, watched movies like Butch Cassidy and The Love Bug and slurped down milk shakes with abandon. I, on the other hand, lived as a prisoner, trapped in a never-ending circle of social correction with Mama on one side and my grandmother on the other.

  I was nearing my seventh birthday—too young, most people would think, to be subjected to such rigors, too immature to understand the principles imposed upon me. But people often underestimate a child’s ability to comprehend. Besides, my mother lived by the philosophy that it was never too soon to shape my sensitive soul into the model of Southern Lady- hood. The fresher the clay, the easier the molding.

  Although I did not, at that young age, have the vocabulary to articulate all I learned that summer, my eager, questioning mind absorbed everything—a lot more, if truth be told, than my mother and grandmother could have known. In later years, when my analytical self began to sift through the accumulated layers of childhood experience, truths came to light that were far different from what my maternal forebears intended to teach me.

  The memories overtook me. They poured out like reservoir water through a broken dam, drowning me, leaving me exhausted and gasping for breath.

  It was a turning point. That summer of my sixth year changed forever the way I saw my mother, my grandmother, and myself.

  My grandmother, Georgia Bell Posner Barclay—called GiGi by her grandchildren—was my mother’s polar opposite. GiGi was as
submissive as Mama was dominant. As a child I adored GiGi and my grandfather, called Chick, precisely because they were unlike the parents I lived with on a daily basis. But that summer I began to understand that, where Mother controlled overtly, by exerting her will, GiGi controlled covertly, through sheer sweet passivity.

  I wasn’t the only one who loved GiGi. The whole town of Waterford adored her, worshipped at her shrine, held her up as the example of the perfect Southern Lady. Georgia Bell Posner Barclay wasn’t a woman, she was an institution.

  GiGi and Chick didn’t have money to speak of—not by that time, anyway. In years past, according to family legend, Grandpa Chick had a fortune laid at his feet. His father, whom everyone including Chick called Uncle Bark, had somehow managed to survive the Depression with his lumber business intact. He had pulled strings with some senator and landed a contract to provide materials to the WPA for work projects, so when the Depression lifted, he still had his silk shirts and a tidy little bank account, to boot. And he only had one child—Clayton Barclay, my grandfather. When Uncle Bark keeled over at age fifty-two from a heart attack, Chick inherited everything—a financial legacy that should have kept him and my grandmother in style for the rest of their lives.

  But Chick had unique gifts. If my grandmother GiGi was known in Waterford as the saint, Chick was the sinner. In less than a decade he had managed to fritter away his fortune through stupid investments, general irresponsibility, and more than a few trips to the greyhound track in West Memphis.

  By the time Harry and I came along, GiGi and Chick lived in a modest little white house on the corner of Third and Elm. Chick always made a show of being the man of the house—the ruler of the castle and the protector of the Little Woman. But now he worked as a distribution clerk in the lumber mill that still bore his family’s name, and he hadn’t owned a silk shirt in twenty-five years.