“Mushcadine wine,” he said. “Made it m’self. Good shtuff.”
“I’ll bet.”
He turned in my direction and winked. “When you ain’t got looks or brains, you use what you got. Better’n Viagra, my mushcadine wine.”
Purdy, as it turned out, only had a sprain, but because of her age and frailty, the doctor put her in a walking cast and told her she had to have someone with her at all times.
“She lives at St. Agnes Nursing Home,” I told him. “She’ll be fine there. I’ll take her home and get her settled.”
“She ain’t goin’,” Hoot interrupted. “I got a spare room, and I’ll take care of her. She’s goin’ home with me.”
Purdy looked from Hoot to the doctor and back again. Then she fixed on me. “You tell Dell I want lunch brought in every day,” she said. It wasn’t a request; it was a command.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And I don’t want Dell coming, either. He can bring it to me.”
By he, I presumed her to mean Scratch. Hoot didn’t like this development one bit, but he kept his mouth shut.
“Baked chicken and creamed corn casserole,” she said. “Corn bread. Some of that apple pie, too.” She narrowed her eyes. “You gettin’ this?”
I tried to stifle a grin. “Yes, ma’am.”
Must have been the smile that did it. She fixed her gaze on my face for a full two minutes, then shook a knotted, gnarled finger in my face. “You’re that beauty queen—Soybean something or other. Long time ago, but I remember. You were blonde and skinny back then.”
“Yes, ma’am. I’m Peach Rondell.”
“Peach,” she repeated. “No, that ain’t right.”
“Priscilla,” I said. “Priscilla is my given name.”
“Stupid,” she muttered. “That mama of yours oughta have known better.” She gripped my hand with an arthritic claw. “You keep on being Peach, honey. It suits you.”
I loaded the two of them and the collapsible wheelchair into my Honda with considerable difficulty and drove the few blocks to Hoot’s house. Much to my surprise, the place was clean and neat, if a bit musty smelling. We installed Purdy in the spare room and hauled in Hoot’s recliner so he’d be able to sit with her.
I went out onto the porch and called Jane Lee Custer at St. Agnes. When I’d filled her in on Purdy’s condition and the fact that she was determined to let Hoot play nurse-maid, Jane Lee let out a long-suffering sigh. I could practically see her rolling her eyes.
“I presume she’s done this kind of thing before,” I said.
“Lord, yes,” Jane Lee said. “But we can’t stop her. I’ll send somebody over there with clothes and her medications, and we’ll check on her every day.”
“She wants Dell to bring her meals from the cafe.” This wasn’t exactly accurate, but I figured there was no point in dragging Scratch into the picture if I could keep from it.
“All right,” Jane Lee said. “Thanks for taking care of her.” She paused. “Did you say you were—?”
“Yeah. Peach Rondell. I used to live here.”
“We went to school together, didn’t we?”
“Yes, we did.” The truth was, Jane Lee Custer had been perfectly horrible to me during high school. She was destined to be a world-class brain surgeon and I was, in her words, nothing more than a breathing Barbie doll. I didn’t think it would be particularly productive to remind her of that, however, especially in light of the fact that the brain surgeon thing obviously hadn’t panned out so well.
“We ought to get together for lunch sometime,” she said.
“Yes, let’s do that.”
And with both of us knowing it would never happen, not even if hell froze over, I hung up and dialed the number for the Heartbreak Cafe.
17
The next few days made me believe—for the first time in months—that life just might be worth living. Overnight I went from observing to belonging.
Everyone wanted to hear the story of Hoot and Purdy and what happened at the emergency room. Dell and I planned Purdy’s menus, and Scratch and I had a long talk about Alzheimer’s and how dementia of any kind removed the filters that kept us from saying outrageous or offensive things to other people. Scratch spoke of her with such compassion and understanding that I went away revising my fictional characterization of him as an artist and painted him instead as a doctor or a counselor. Whatever he had been in his other life, he was more intelligent and more tender than any fry cook or busboy I had ever known.
At lunchtime I took Scratch to Hoot’s house to deliver Purdy’s meal—baked chicken, creamed corn casserole, and corn bread, just as she had ordered. Enough for two, plus half an apple-cranberry pie fresh out of the oven.
“You take direction real good,” she said when she peered under the aluminum foil covers. It was her way of thanking me; Hoot’s way was to slip me a pint of muscadine wine when he thought Scratch wasn’t looking.
In the afternoon Boone came in and sat with me for a long time, catching me up on everything he had done since high school. It wasn’t much, if truth be told—he had lived in Chulahatchie all his life except for the time he went to Ole Miss to get his master’s degree in library science. I felt a little sad for him; although he had a good job and good friends, he nevertheless seemed to labor under a kind of cosmic loneliness, as if he were a visitor to an alien planet, accepted by the natives but still the only one of his species.
Some people think a family is the collection of people you’re tied to by DNA. “Blood is thicker than water. Blood will tell. Ties of blood are the strongest of them all.”
But that’s not what being family means. Families are not the people who have to take you in, the way Mama reluctantly opened her door to me when I came back to Chulahatchie again. Families are the folks who make you feel good about yourself, who accept you as you are, who don’t expect you to be perfect, who listen when you talk and let you change your mind if you need to.
Boone talked about Dell, and Dell’s best friend Toni, and Scratch, and even Hoot and Purdy—as family. “Family of choice,” he called them. The people you get to pick for yourself. The people whose presence makes your life deeper and richer and more fulfilling.
Sad, isn’t it, that so often the people who ought to love us best, love us worst?
They don’t mean to, I guess. But it’s easy to take so-called real family for granted. Husbands and wives, children and parents, partners and lovers grow so familiar that they become part of the furniture of your life. You hardly think about them anymore. When you’re mad or sad or scared, you take it out on them because they’re there and always will be. The way you’d kick a table leg or throw a coffee cup against the wall.
God help me, I wonder if I did that with Robert—just became so accustomed to having him around that I didn’t really think about how he felt or what he wanted out of life. And all of a sudden here I am with people who until a few months ago were strangers, and now they feel more like family to me than my own husband. . . .
Or my own mother.
I stopped writing and looked down. The words on the page swam as if they were underwater, blurred by unexpected tears. That old white-haired fool of a therapist delighted in such moments, when an unanticipated epiphany would rise up and slap the living daylights out of me. Pain, he was fond of saying, was progress.
Maybe he was right. But I came away with my heart stinging from the blow, all the same.
My own mother. . . .
I stared at the words again, as if they were in a language I couldn’t comprehend. I waited, hoping they might sink into the page and vanish. It wasn’t the first time I wished I wrote my journal in pencil, so I could just erase unwelcome insights and pretend they never happened. But of course that’s not the way with therapy. You take the insights as they come and learn to recognize the important ones and follow them where they lead.
I skipped a few lines and started over:
Okay, I don’t suppose I can escape it, so I might as wel
l face it. The primal wound, the core issue. Mother.
I’m forty-five years old. Is it possible—even conceivable—that this is the first time in almost half a century I’ve considered whether my mother might have unfulfilled dreams, or fears I’ve never imagined, or pain I don’t see? Is it possible—even conceivable— that there might be a reason she treats me as she does, a reason beyond sheer meanness, beyond her basic disappointment in the person I turned out to be?
I need to remind myself, since the old fool isn’t here to do it for me, that a reason is not an excuse. I don’t have to excuse my mother for treating me the way she has all these years, even if I come to the place of understanding it. I don’t even have to forgive her.
If I’m going to be honest (and why shouldn’t I?—no one else is going to read this), something in me doesn’t want to forgive or even to understand it. If I understand it, I might have to change my perspective, let go of the anger I’ve held on to all these years, abandon my image of myself as the maligned daughter, suffering under the injustice of her mother’s mistreatment.
Yikes. When I put it that way, it sounds distinctly unattractive. It sounds as if I get some kind of perverse pleasure out of being misunderstood. I sound like a spoiled, selfish child who stamps her foot and throws a tantrum and in the same moment demands that she be taken seriously as a grown-up.
I don’t like the direction this is going, and yet I have to follow. That’s one of the rules. No erasing, no blotting out of unwelcome thoughts, no abandonment of the path when the brambles get thick and begin to draw blood.
So. If I don’t like the image of myself as a spoiled brat, maybe it’s time for me to act like an adult. To view my mother from the perspective of an equal, a peer, rather than a shrunk-down five-year-old. To find a way to dig past the control and manipulation and criticism and get down to the person she really is on the inside.
Suddenly I’m scared. My gut is twisting, the way it used to when I had to get onstage and perform. Maybe I don’t want to be that honest with her, to put myself out there and take the risk of getting hurt again. Maybe I don’t want to hear what she would say if she decided to be honest with me.
Maybe instead I’ll run away and join the circus. Shoveling elephant crap isn’t the worst career move in the world. Sometimes it beats the heck out of being a daughter.
Or maybe it’s the same job, different title.
18
The day before Thanksgiving I didn’t go to the Heartbreak Cafe, even though it was the place I most wanted to be. Instead I stayed home and helped Tildy make pies and corn bread dressing and sweet potato soufflé.
Mama insisted on having Thanksgiving at Belladonna. We could have gone to the country club and let somebody else have the work and the mess, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She was going to “do it herself,” which meant that Tildy did most of the work, with me as her assistant. Mama just put the turkey in the oven and let it cook while we watched the Macy’s parade on television.
When the fake Santa Claus had come and gone and the news anchors were winding up their recap, I went upstairs to take a shower. For Mama’s sake, I dressed up—or as “up” as I could, considering that most of my belongings were in storage. I put on a nice pair of black slacks and a purple sequined sweater I had bought at the Near’bout New consignment shop. Mama’d have a cow if she found out I was buying secondhand clothes, but she’d also never set foot in such a place, so I figured what she didn’t know wouldn’t kill her.
“Nice sweater,” Mama said after a cursory glance. “Gladdie Dalrymple’s daughter used to have one exactly like that. You remember Gladdie, from the country club.”
She turned back to the task of wrestling the turkey out of the roaster onto a serving platter. An enormous tom turkey, twenty pounds or more. Big enough for a minor Latin American country, plus two weeks’ worth of leftovers.
Who did she think was going to eat all that? Daddy was gone. Melanie and Harry wouldn’t think of darkening Mama’s doorstep for any reason short of a funeral. It was just me and Mama.
Me and Mama and—apparently—Big Tom.
They say that recollection is most strongly tied to the sense of smell, that certain scents can raise long-buried memories to the surface. My mind flashed to Thanksgivings of my childhood—Daddy in the kitchen with a frilly bibbed apron over his white shirt, hefting the turkey onto its platter, carving with finesse and flourish, humming the old hymn “Come, Ye Thankful People, Come” under his breath.
Tears stung my eyes. What must Mama be feeling as she set out a Thanksgiving feast for a family that would never again sit at her table? Surely somewhere deep inside she had regrets, knew she could have done better, knew she had pushed us all away with her criticism, her perfectionism, her absolute insistence on being right. But no matter what kind of stoic facade she maintained, she still had to be in pain. She had to miss Daddy more than I missed him, more than I could even imagine missing him. She had to miss her absent children.
I came up behind her. “Here, let me help,” I said.
She turned and let go of the bird. It dropped with a splat back into the roaster and slung turkey drippings all over me—hair, face, and chest. I looked down to see a gob of fat lodged in the sequins and dripping down my front.
So much for dressing up.
“Look at you!” Mama said. She, of course, was still pristine and perfect, her starched white apron spotless, not a hair out of place.
I picked a bit of skin off my sleeve and popped it into my mouth. “Mmmm. Good. I think it’s done.”
Mama gaped at me for a full thirty seconds, and we both started to laugh. I laughed so hard I cried, and then I laughed so hard I peed—not much, just a little leak, but enough that I had to change the pants as well as the sweater.
Lord, I don’t ever remember laughing like that with my mother. Never.
“Tell you what,” I said when we’d both regained our composure. “I’ll put the turkey on the platter and slice it, and then I’ll go change clothes. Can you handle the gravy?”
Mama gave me a disdainful look. “I’ve been making gravy since before you were born,” she said.
And always lumpy, I thought. But I didn’t say so. No point in ruining a tender moment with the truth.
In all the years I lived at home, Thanksgiving at Belladonna was never like Thanksgiving at anyone else’s house. While other folks were having second helpings of pie and cheering their team to victory, or sleeping off their excesses, or gathering on the porch swing to escape the heat of the kitchen, at Mama’s house we were all working.
Thanksgiving Day was the day the Christmas decorations went up, and in a house as big as Belladonna, that meant a bloody blue million lights. Lights inside, in every room, on every mantelpiece. Lights outside in every bush and tree. A fairyland of lights—white ones outside, multicolored ones inside. Tasteful, tiny lights, thousands of them. Greenery everywhere. Two enormous trees, one in the front parlor and one in the den. Mama’s house at Christmas was like a spread out of Southern Living.
I hadn’t done it for years, of course, but I remembered, and I was dreading it. Not just the actual hard work of decorating, but the ache of doing it without Daddy.
About halfway through the turkey and dressing, however, Mama set down her fork and gave me the look that meant I’d better come to attention. “I’ve made a decision,” she said.
I held my breath.
“It just doesn’t seem reasonable to put up all those decorations this year.” She shrugged, as if this was a casual statement, but the sidelong glance told me it was freighted with a significance she didn’t want to admit. “I thought maybe we could just do the tree in the front parlor and then electric candles in the windows. Understated. Elegant.”
“Less is more?” I said.
“Exactly.” Mama looked at me with relief. “You’re not disappointed?”
“Lord, no, I’m relieved,” I blurted out.
Mama narrowed her eyes.
&nb
sp; “Well, you know,” I hedged, “with Daddy not here—”
“Yes,” she said, too brightly. “Your father always loved Christmas at Belladonna, all the lights and decorations. The people. The parties.”
One of my mother’s innate gifts was her ability to mold the truth to suit herself. In reality, Daddy hated the way Mama made Christmas into such an extravaganza, hated the constant coming and going of the country club crowd, hated the open houses and the late nights and the frenetic activity of getting ready beforehand and cleaning up after. He would have loved a quiet Christmas with family and a few friends, a yule log in the fireplace, hot chocolate or hot toddies, stories around the tree.
Daddy was Norman Rockwell. Mama was Neiman Marcus.
She picked at a slice of turkey and made circles in the gravy with the tines of her fork.
“Mama,” I said, “how are you doing with Daddy gone?”
“I’m fine,” she said, but to me her voice didn’t sound normal.
It was the briefest of glimpses at the real Donna Rondell, the human one, the one who wasn’t perfectly in control every moment of every day. She turned away from me, but I caught it nevertheless—the tears welling up in her eyes, the lump in her throat she couldn’t quite swallow down.
She hadn’t cried the day of the funeral. She’d been too busy marshaling the troops—making sure my sister set up the reception room just right, making sure my brother had on the right suit and tie for the occasion. Never mind that Melanie was fifty-something and quite capable of centering a vase of flowers. Never mind that Harry had been dressing himself for more than forty years. Never mind that all of us were devastated by the suddenness of Daddy’s death. Diagnosed with leukemia, dead in ten days. We hadn’t even had a chance to get there to say good-bye.
The week of the funeral was the last straw for both Harry and Melanie. For years Harry had been—in the words of my therapist—emotionally absent and disconnected from the rest of the family. He always had a way of letting Mama’s criticisms roll off him like water off a duck. I envied his ability to remain unaffected by her nagging, even though it meant he was shut off from all of us. He simply refused to engage, and that disengagement meant that none of us ever saw beyond the surface image that Harry wanted to present. Maybe Daddy knew more than the rest of us, but if so, any understanding of the inner Harry died with him.
The Book of Peach Page 11