The Book of Peach

by Penelope Stokes J.

  I tried to talk to my brother once, about the way Mama’s expectations made me feel about myself. His answer was, “Don’t let it bother you.” That was Harry’s answer to everything. He just abdicated from the family and went his own way.

  Melanie, on the other hand, had always been far too engaged with Mama, too intent on trying to please, to be the perfect daughter. She catered to Mama, but she adored Daddy, and when he died, something in her snapped. “She doesn’t care,” she said to me at the visitation. “Look at her; she hasn’t shed a single tear.”

  Melanie held herself together through the formalities of death, and then she shattered into a thousand pieces. Mama never said a word to me about my sister’s nervous breakdown or admitted that she had been hospitalized. If my mother didn’t acknowledge something, it didn’t exist. Such things didn’t happen to “our kind of people.”

  The week of Daddy’s funeral was the last time Melanie had set foot in Chulahatchie and, to my knowledge, the last time she had spoken to Mama.

  “It’s okay, Mama,” I said now. “It’s okay to miss him. It’s okay to cry.”

  “I’m not crying. I just think—well, since it will only be the two of us here, there’s no point in making a big production of decorating, is there?”

  “You know, Mama, if you want to talk about . . . things—”

  She jumped on this like white on rice. “What kind of things?”

  “I don’t know, just things. How you’ve been since Daddy’s gone. What’s going on in your mind and”—I hesitated—“in your heart.”

  Blurted out like that, it didn’t sound open or compassionate, just stupid. I should have thought this through more. Maybe I’d underestimated that old fool of a therapist. Maybe he knew more about what he was doing than I gave him credit for.

  I tried again. “You’ve never talked to me about Daddy’s death.”

  “You haven’t talked to me about what happened with Robert,” she countered.

  She was right. I hadn’t. I’d told Dell Haley and Boone Atkins more about the breakup of my marriage than I’d told my own mother. But then, I had more reason to expect Dell and Boone to be understanding and supportive.

  Still, pain is progress. I had to try.

  “I don’t know how to explain it. We had my birthday dinner—a nice, romantic evening with friends. Then the next thing I knew, he left a voice-mail message informing me he had met someone else and was leaving.” I pulled in a ragged breath and tried to suppress the waves of emotion that were threatening to surface. “A voice mail! He didn’t even have the guts to tell me face-to-face.”

  “What did you do?” Mama asked.

  “I didn’t know what to do. I was in shock. I—”

  She waved a hand in a dismissive gesture. “No, I mean, what did you do that would make him up and leave like that?”

  Of course she would think I was to blame. I must be at fault—I had never done anything in my life that earned the Donna Rondell seal of approval. I stared at her, flabbergasted, while Intermittent Hope cackled its evil, mocking laughter in the back of my mind.

  People who wax nostalgic and write songs about being “home for the holidays” never had a home like Belladonna or a holiday like one with Mama. Thanksgiving dinner took most of two days to prepare; eating it took about seventeen and a half minutes, not counting dessert and coffee.

  By the time I finished putting the food away and hand-washing the crystal and china, Mama had dragged decorations from the upstairs closet, arranged electric candles in all the windows, lined the parlor mantel with greenery and lights, and strung white icicle lights around the perimeter of the front porch railing.

  This was Mama’s idea of a minimal Christmas.

  “We’ll have to leave the rest until Monday,” she said, waving a hand vaguely in the direction of the corner where a settee had been moved to make way for the Christmas tree. The tree itself had already been delivered and was sitting in a bucket of water behind the carriage house. Tildy’s nephew Glover had been conscripted to come on Monday morning to bring it into the house and set it up.

  Glover played defensive end for the Alabama Crimson Tide, and he could probably bench-press the eight-foot fir tree, including the cast-iron base, with one hand. He was a sweet-natured, tenderhearted boy who smiled incessantly and hummed hymn tunes under his breath. Tomorrow he’d be facing an intimidating front line, crushing heads and snapping bones and grinning and humming the whole time.

  Neither Mama nor I much liked football, but we promised Tildy we’d watch the game on TV. Glover was supposed to wave to us from the sidelines.

  “That’s it for now, I suppose,” Mama said, sounding almost wistful at the prospect of having no more work to do.

  “It’s a pretty day,” I said. “I think I’ll go for a walk.”

  Before she could stop me or find something else that needed doing, I dashed upstairs, grabbed my journal, and flew out the front door, letting the screen slam behind me.

  The afternoon was warmish and sun-streaked, the streets of Chulahatchie uncommonly quiet. Here and there I heard a dog bark, or the sounds of cheering through an open screen door as the afternoon football game progressed. On the blacktop in the schoolyard, a couple of teenagers were playing one-on-one, and a little girl was riding a pink bicycle in a circle around the outside of the court.

  “Don’t get off the sidewalk,” one of the boys said, and the girl nodded. Big brother taking care of little sister, I surmised.

  Quite apart from conscious awareness, my steps took me past the schoolyard, past the square, all the way down East Main to Cypress Street and the wide, rolling lawns of the cemetery.

  There it was, up on a hill just to the left of the big mausoleum and the cypress circle. Daddy’s plot.

  I labored up the steep hill, feeling the strain in my calves, and came at last to the stone that said RONDELL in bold Gothic capitals. On one side, Daddy’s name and dates were engraved, and below, in script, words I had chosen against Mama’s will: The world is poorer without you.

  It was a fluke, really. Mama had ordered Loving Husband and Father, or some such meaningless tripe. I happened to answer the telephone when the engraver called to confirm the spelling of Daddy’s name, and I made the change without Mama ever knowing it.

  I wondered if she noticed. Wondered if she ever came out here to sit, to talk to Daddy, to mourn. I had no idea. Perhaps I’d never know.

  On the right was Mama’s name and birthdate, with the date of death left blank. I wondered idly what would be engraved on her side. The world is richer without you?

  More peaceful, anyway.

  I leaned against the shoulder of the headstone, above Mama’s name, and tested it to see if it would hold my weight. It didn’t move, so I propped my butt up on it and sat down. If I was going to be sacrilegious, or at the very least disrespectful, I figured I oughta do it on Mama’s side.

  “Well, Daddy,” I said, “I’m home. You always kept asking me why I didn’t come and telling me how much Mama missed me. I’m pretty sure you were the one who missed me, and not her. I missed you, too. But I expect you understand it more now, at least if what we were taught in Sunday school is even halfway true.”

  I paused and listened to the faint music of wind in the branches of the cypress trees. Why, I wondered, did people traditionally plant cypress trees in graveyards? Was it because they were evergreen and symbolic of eternal life? Or because they loomed like terrifying creatures of the night, waiting for the right moment to pick up their roots and walk?

  With some effort I dragged my eyes from the bowing cypress branches and fixed my attention on my father’s tombstone. “Being back in Chulahatchie is strange,” I said. “I don’t belong here, and yet . . .”

  I let the sentence slide, the thought unfinished. And yet what?

  And yet I don’t belong with Robert anymore, either.

  I don’t belong . . . anywhere. With anyone.

  It wasn’t entirely true; I knew it even
as the words formed themselves inside my skull. I had friends here, or at least the beginnings of friendships. I had Boone and Dell and all the folks at the Heartbreak Cafe.

  But I couldn’t get past the rejections: Charles Chase, Robert, my own mother.

  “What did I do wrong?” I whispered—to my daddy, to the wind, to the cypress trees. To God or fate or anyone who might listen and answer.

  No response, not even from the wind in the branches.

  I said it again, louder: “What did I do wrong?”

  And from behind me, a quiet voice replied, “Maybe nothing.”

  I jerked around. There stood Boone Atkins, not six feet behind me.

  “Dang, Boone!” I said. “I thought you were God.”

  He chuckled. “No one’s ever made that mistake before.”

  “Well, okay, not God, exactly. But still, you scared the bejesus out of me.” I paused. “Or into me.”

  A light came on in his eyes, and he laughed out loud this time. “Peach, I was raised Catholic. We have a history of trying to frighten people into faith, and trust me, it doesn’t work very well.”

  “What are you doing here on Thanksgiving afternoon?” I asked.

  “Visiting.” He pointed down the way, toward the family plot I had passed on my way up the hill. “Mother died on November twenty-sixth,” he said. “I come every year.”

  “I’m sorry.” The words of consolation sounded hollow and empty, but I didn’t know what else to say.

  “Me, too.” He settled himself on the chilly grass and nodded in the direction of Daddy’s headstone. “You getting any answers?”

  “Not really.” I turned to him. “God, Boone, my life has been so awful the past year. The thing with Robert came totally out of the blue, and I didn’t know how to handle it. Then I came home—a huge mistake, but what other choice did I have? And then . . . well, you know. Another major blunder. It feels as if the universe is conspiring against me. Like I’ve got really, really bad karma. I repeat my question: What did I do wrong?”

  “And I repeat my answer: Maybe nothing.”

  I stared at him. “What do you mean?”

  “You seem to believe that you get back only what you put into life.”

  “Well, yes, don’t you? Isn’t it a principle, you reap what you sow?”

  “Technically,” he said. “But I think you’re missing the bigger picture. Just because life is difficult right now doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve done something horrible to deserve it. Maybe life moves in cycles—like the seasons, like the tides. Winter comes because it comes. And spring comes, too—maybe not as quickly as we’d like it to, but always right on time.”

  “You’re saying everything happens for a reason.”

  “No. Some things just happen. Take your relationship with Robert, for example. Maybe there were signs you could have seen, but even if you’d seen them, could you have prevented the ultimate outcome? If he was determined to move on, nothing you could have done would have stopped him. We don’t know the reasons things happen, and even if we did, we can’t necessarily change the rhythms of life. What we can do is find grace in the change, and find joy in the grace.”

  He got to his feet and laid a hand on my shoulder. “Don’t fight it so much,” he said. “Breathe. Float with the current for a while. Give yourself a break. You’ll figure it out in the end.”

  That night, after Mama went to bed, I took the phone, went out onto the back verandah, and called Melanie.

  “Can you believe it?” I said. “She lured me into talking about the breakup with Robert, and then she turned around and blamed me!”

  “What do you expect?” she said. “You know how she is.”

  “I know. I just thought—”

  “You just thought this time it would be different.” Melanie sounded curt and irritable. “But it’s not different, and it will never be different. This is our mother we’re talking about.”

  I felt something writhing in my gut—something old and familiar, like the memory of some cataclysm from childhood that my adult mind had blocked out but my body remembered.

  “She keeps putting up walls, Mel. I can’t get through to her.”

  “Well, if you can’t, nobody can,” Melanie said. “You were always her favorite. Nobody else ever existed.”

  The earth lurched, and I almost fell out of my chair. I was Mama’s favorite? No. That was Melanie’s role. Ladylike Melanie. Perfect Melanie. “What are you talking about?” I said. “My whole life I was held up to the standard you set—and I always came up lacking.”

  “Are you kidding?” she said. “You were Miss Ole Miss. First runner-up to Miss Mississippi.”

  “Second runner-up,” I corrected. “And she’s never let me forget it.”

  “Listen to me,” Melanie said. “You will never please that woman. Never. You will never live up to her standards of perfection. And if you try, you’ll drive yourself right into a nervous breakdown. Trust me. I know.”

  The way she said those four words made my blood run cold. Trust me. I know.

  “I know you do,” I whispered, half hoping she wouldn’t hear. “You’ve been there.”

  A long, long silence stretched between us—me in Chulahatchie, Melanie in California, as far away as she could get without dropping off the edge of the continent.

  “Happy Thanksgiving, kiddo,” she said. “Take care of yourself.”

  And then she was gone.

  19

  A week isn’t a very long time unless you’re waiting for something to happen, and then it feels like forever.

  Dell had closed the Heartbreak Cafe and gone off somewhere, so I didn’t have any place to get away to and ended up being stuck in the house with Mama. For a solid week I kept to my room (with breaks now and then for leftover turkey and dressing and pumpkin pie, when Mama wasn’t around to criticize). I sat at my desk, journaling. I sat at the window, staring.

  Pacing. Writing. Thinking. Trying not to think.

  I couldn’t get out of my mind what Mama had said about the meltdown of my marriage. The implication that I was at fault, somehow. That I had done something heinous to bring it on myself.

  It’s all in my journal—the pain, the self-loathing, the shame and blame. What could I have done differently to make him love me? How could I have changed, reinvented myself, become the person he wanted me to be? How could I, at forty-five, become younger, sexier, more attractive, more . . . interesting?

  And the other side of the seesaw, the pure white rage and indignation. How dare he leave me? How could he have done it—been so fickle and shortsighted and downright stupid to think that his life would be better without me, when I had been the good and faithful wife all these years?

  Reality, of course, lay somewhere in between, in that grainy marital netherworld, the bleak and colorless space where the words We grew apart had meaning beyond some limping, lame excuse.

  At last, I wrote myself into a modicum of balance and reason:In truth, I do not believe that Robert is an evil person or that he deliberately set out to hurt me.

  What I do believe is that he is the kind of man who needs constant affirmation, and the bottom line is, I knew him too well. There comes a point in any marriage where you’re no longer awed by your spouse’s impressive intellect or willing to worship at the shrine of his superiority. And Robert always needed to be venerated. Needed someone to polish his pedestal and gaze lovingly up at him and turn a blind eye to his humanity.

  On the other hand, I expect I was pretty dull company. Most of the jobs I held over the course of our marriage were low-risk secretarial or administrative positions, not at all what I envisioned as a career when I was in college. Not interesting enough to talk about over dinner and certainly no competition for profound philosophies.

  I never shared with Robert my desire to write or attempted to follow that dream. For one thing, he held the role of designated thinker, designated writer, designated idea person. Publishing obtuse articles in obscure phil
osophical journals made him the expert—and something of a literary snob. He never had patience for what he called (with a curl of the lip) “commercial writing”—which was anything, fiction or nonfiction, that brought in a living wage or could be understood by a moderately educated person.

  Besides that, he didn’t want me to have dreams—or to do much of anything except facilitate his climb up the academic ladder. By the time he made chair of the philosophy department, he was ready for me to quit working. He wanted me to be available at a moment’s notice to pull together a faculty dinner or host his grad students, who ate us out of house and home and sat up until midnight and beyond drinking cheap wine and discussing incomprehensible philosophical constructs.

  Now Robert is well on his way to provost and, eventually, perhaps even chancellor. He needs, if not a trophy wife, at least a spouse who adores him, and whose claim to fame lies in accomplishments more erudite than being Miss Ole Miss and second runner-up to Miss Mississippi.

  When I look back on my life with Robert, I can’t help but wonder: How much of myself did I abandon to his ambitions? How much of my soul did I abdicate? I didn’t care about university politics. He didn’t care about anything else.

  I’ve thought a lot about what Boone said to me—how life has its rhythms, like the seasons or the tides, and although we can’t control the changes, we can find the grace and the joy.

  I think at last I know what the grace is.

  I’m holding it in my hands.

  When the phone finally rang on Sunday afternoon, my heart leaped to hear Boone Atkins’s voice on the other end.

  And then it sank.

  “Robbed?” I yelled into the receiver, and Boone’s voice came back to me, soft, shaken. Yes, Dell’s cafe had been broken into and robbed. And Scratch—dear, sweet, gentle, compassionate Scratch—was accused of the crime.