Under Magnolia : A Southern Memoir (9780307885937)

by Mayes, Frances

  When I tell Willie Bell about the deserted island she says she’s heard from Kitty that ghosts are there, everyone knows it; everyone knows that many slaves waded into the surf at Ebo Landing and some flew back to Africa. Those who didn’t sprout wings washed up on Jekyll and haunt it forever. She is holding a curling rod. She combs jelly into her hair then pulls the hot rod through the long kinks. The hot smell sizzles in the muggy air. She pulls back her hair tight and knots it at the nape. I would like to live here all year and play on Jekyll and in the palmettos. Willie Bell could take care of me. I would never miss my parents.

  On the last night, my parents and I are taking the house keys back to the Cloister. My mother doesn’t want to go home. Suddenly my father slams the brakes. We see a red fox ahead on the road, stopped so still it looks as if it won’t move for the car to pass. “Let me out,” I beg my parents. I wanted to say something softly to the fox, not words, just sounds while I moved up slowly. The fox would know me, know I meant no harm, and it would let me brush the back of my hand across its tail. All three of us stare and the fox glares straight into the headlights then slips back into the black off the edge of the road. I watch for it, not sure the two glinting eyes I see looking back at me from the dark are not my own reflecting in the car window.

  As we drive by the turn to the secluded Spanish house, Mother reminds my father that they never met the interesting writer Eugene O’Neill. “You’ve got it all wrong,” he tells her. “They don’t even live on the island anymore. The bartender at the Cloister told me he was a miserable drunk and she was some Chiquita banana with a made-up name, who didn’t have the sense to come in out of the rain. He sat up there writing nonsense when it was so hot he had to sit on a bath towel and keep blotters under his hands so the ink didn’t run away in the sweat. Must have been a damn fool not to think of that when he bought the place. A damn fool Yankee.”

  Never one to allow the last word, she retorted, “Well he’s an important writer with a sense of family.”

  The low white wall pulls fast by my eyes like X-ray film pulled over a light.

  Noon burns the whole town into stillness. My house is dark against the heat, the heavy draperies closed. In the dining room the one air conditioner labors and sweats. I lie under it in my camp shorts and a stiff shirt printed with birds. I am home from camp, home from the island. What’s left but the burned-up end of summer? I’ve finished the books my sister brought me from Athens, where she goes to college, and I am half through the long row of worn-out orange books from the library. The librarian, Miss Peetrie, gives a star for every book I read and after every ten I may have a free ice-cream cone at the Central Pharmacy. I want to win the Best Reader Prize for the summer—ten tickets to the Grand Theatre. The Chinese Twins, The Mexican Twins, Anne of Avonlea, A Girl of the Limberlost. I sip Coca-Cola through the glass straw Grandmother Mayes used once when she was in the hospital. Mother has gone to bed with a splitting headache and my sisters, packing for college, stay in their room, too hot to talk, playing “How High the Moon” over and over on the record player. I keep one ear tuned in case they play the forbidden “Gloomy Sunday,” which causes sane, nice people to commit suicide and has been banned from WBHB.

  After I snap shut The Mexican Twins, I change into my bathing suit. The attic fan sucks in the hot air, lifting the organdy curtains with the illusion of coolness. Mother does not look up. She’s in her slip, propped up on pillows flicking through the pages of House and Garden. Her finger runs around her monogram on the turned-down sheet, FMD, thick as bird bones. On my way outside I see two women dressed like bats and my mother studying the caption under their picture.

  At first the water runs hot from the nozzle, then suddenly cold. I make it rain, waving the hose in arcs. With the fine spray I spray a doll-sized rainbow just above the grass. Then Daddy comes home. The deep idleness he slices into, turning into the driveway in the gray car big as a cloud. He steps out in his sharp white suit. I have to squint to look at him.

  Willie Bell knows just what he wants and comes right out with the gin on ice and the little saucer of mint and lime because he likes to choose between them. He walks slowly to his chair in the backyard.

  I cool the welts on my legs and dance the water off the soles of my feet, which the bubbled tar on Lemon Street harden every summer. The woolly red suit, almost too little, crawls up beyond the suntan line on my legs.

  “Well, what did you do today?” he says as he passes me without stopping.

  “Nothing.”

  In the shade of the pecan tree, he sits in a sling chair reading the Atlanta Journal, avoiding the house. I swing the nozzle in figure eights, sprinkling the bachelor’s buttons, the short yellow flowers full of bugs, the larkspurs, my favorites, and the St. Augustine grass so dark green at the end of summer.

  “You’re spattering me,” he complains. Drops bead on his shoes. He looks up, as if waiting.

  I drive a leaf across the grass with the spray. As I hit the tree, little bullets of water pelt the back of his striped canvas chair.

  “Did you hear what I said?” He crumples the paper in his lap. When he’s mad he has no lips. “Go away,” he shouts. “You’re driving me crazy.”

  I stand still. The crystal drops hang for a long moment in the air. Then, as if from far in the future, some sure instinct pulls me. I turn on him the hard spurt.

  His hands spread in the air, paper dissolving on his chest. The glass falling. He leaps up, never taller. The bull eyes, the chair turning over.

  I drop the hose and it snakes back and forth between us, wild now with such a good idea. He lunges for my shoulder. I dangle from his hands like a puppet unstrung. I rattle and rattle.

  In my room I sit in the middle of the bed with the memory of his white knuckles. My legs are crisscrossed with more red switch marks. Willie Bell, quiet as a spider, brings in juice and a ham biscuit on a tray. “Oh, Miss Frances. Oh, Lord,” and she is gone.

  The screen door bangs and from my window I see Mother fresh in a pink sundress, crossing the lawn. Has Willie Bell told her? She walks among flickering green shadows. Between the trees comes the red sunset. From the back she looks young like my sisters, ready to go somewhere. But she starts the sprinkler, steps back, and watches it throw its slow fistfuls of water to the grass. She is small against the old gardenia bush with its untouchable flowers.

  My eyes scan my room. The yellow rows of mystery books, the conch shell I found in Fernandina, the walking doll brought from Atlanta, my private notebook, the long vine trailing down from the sweet potato in a glass of water. Slowly, I start the list of what’s mine.

  After school I walked to the hospital where Mother Mayes was about to die. Ever since the operation a month ago, when they’d taken a look and simply sewn her up, everyone kept telling her she was coming along fine but Mother and Aunt Mary Helen already had picked out the ash gray crepe dress she would wear in the coffin. My mother said at supper that Mother Mayes was “eaten up” and it was a miracle she still hung on. Too mean to die was her opinion. Mother Mayes had no intention of dying. She had reservations for the month of June at White Springs, Florida, down on the Suwannee River. The sulfur water always restored her. Every year she met my aunt Hazel there for several weeks. They sat on the long hotel porch in wicker rockers or on the round porch above the springs. Just breathing, apparently, was enough. They didn’t actually go in the water. I liked to dive there, deep into the bottomless, roiling black water. The sulfur smell drenched my skin, even when I dried off, and I felt I’d dived down close to hell.

  I was warned not to say anything to let Mother Mayes know. But how could she not know already? She was sixty-six years old, so old, and now she never wanted any of her favorite Russell Stover candies anymore.

  On my way up to see her, I stopped by the nursery on the first floor. As I came in the maternity hallway, the doors at the end swung open and I saw the delivery room: the orderly mopping the floor, the table with straps like reins hanging off the m
iddle and stirrups hooked onto the end. Horrible to think of my own mother straddled there when my sisters and I were born. Birth was sickening. I didn’t like the idea of being in someone’s stomach and of my two sisters having occupied the same territory before me. Disgusting that everyone came alive that way. No wonder someone thought up a stork. I stared at the wheeled table covered with a sheet outside the door. Through the nursery windows I saw Mrs. Sams in a straight chair reading Good Housekeeping. The six tiny beds of yellowed iron were made up without a wrinkle. No babies. It looked like photos of places farther south in the tropics where big-bellied children died of malaria. Which bed did I sleep in eleven years ago when I was born? My sisters were home polishing their patent leather shoes with Vaseline, trying on their Easter dresses, probably coming to terms with a new baby arriving home soon. When he heard the bad news that another girl had arrived, my father went on a three-day tear. He wanted a son to name for his brother and my mother’s father. MDM, for Mark Davis Mayes, was embroidered on the baby clothes I later discovered in the cedar chest.

  I breathed on the glass and with my finger wrote my initials in cursive, FEM, the first three letters of “female.”

  I took the stairs two at a time. Mother Mayes would ask the same things she asked every visit. How is school? Fine. How’s that cocker spaniel, what’s his name? Tish. Fine. Are you helping your mother? Yes, ma’am. I cheered myself by thinking of the chocolates, the boxes and boxes Mother Mayes’s Rook Club friends always brought, along with handfuls of cabbage roses wrapped in wet paper towels. I’d picked the candied almonds from all of them. Jordan almonds, she called them. I loved the colors, like chalk pastels, all tooth-cracking hard.

  I pulled at the heavy door at the top of the stairs. It always resisted as if it were sucked closed, then it suddenly popped open and a breeze of cotton and sharp vinegary smells rushed out. I raised myself on tiptoe at the desk. “Is Mother Mayes awake?” I asked Mrs. McNeill.

  “Well, here’s Frances Elizabeth. Now I know it’s Tuesday. Yes, she’s awake, honey. You just go right on down there. Your aunt Hazel’s already been and gone.” Mrs. McNeill shook her head. “Poor thing can’t stand to see her mother suffering so.”

  I walked down the green waxed hall carefully, avoiding the cracks between squares of linoleum. As I came near the closet in the middle of the long hall, I remembered Judy whispering to me in social studies, “That’s where they keep the babies with funny heads, the two-headed babies the mothers donated to the hospital.” I looked back. A woman in a pink apron pushed a cart of books into the next room, then the hall was empty. I opened the closet and stepped in among dusty brooms and mops in buckets of gray water. Yes, there were jars on the shelves, enormous jars with shapes in them like large pears. In three smaller jars something like seahorses curled up. I climbed over the pile of oily rags and stepped up on a box to get a closer look. The murky liquid was like that in some of the jars in the triangular room under the stairs where Mother Mayes kept the jellies, the pickled hog pears, and the green tomato pickles that sometimes turned the gray of swollen ticks. I backed out. Wasn’t that a wrinkled knee, a tiny foot like a doll’s on the bottom of the jar and little nickel-sized ears pressed against the glass? I looked back, just to be positive. I’d heard that someone in town “got rid of babies.” There was a word for it: aballshun, Willie Bell said. The process involved 7UP and knitting needles. The lady in pink rattled by with her cart of books. Looking down, pretending to be examining the squares on the floor, I began hop-scotching toward room fourteen. Piccalilli, piccalilli, one, two, three, I counted out.

  What if I found Mother Mayes dead? I opened the door slowly. No, there she was propped up on four pillows, her room white as an igloo except for all the flowers. More flowers! We always had roses at home. My father grew them along the cyclone fence at the mill, thousands of them, and brought them home several times a week. Someone had left Mother Mayes a corsage like the one my sister got for the Christmas dance, a purple orchid with veins of green deep in its throat. Barbara wore it on her wrist to the dance. Her arm suddenly became so beautiful balancing the dark flower on her wrist with the pale blue ribbons trailing. Mother Mayes’s flowers were mostly stiff pink glads and white mums sitting up in shiny green foil among the cards that said get well, get well, get well.

  “Well, it’s my little girl. I thought you were Hazel for a moment. Your hair is black as soot. And how was school today, darling?” She never used to notice me or any of the grandchildren, but since she’d been sick she acted like a real Red Riding Hood grandmother. She held out her hand, as she always did. It felt too soft, cool, and boneless to me. My hands were hardened by the trapeze rings in Jeannie Walters’s backyard. Mother Mayes’s veins stood out like blue needlepoint threads. I stared at her hands—just like mine. I was born with old hands, thin white skin you can see right through if I hold my fingers over a flashlight. She loved rings but she wore none now, not even the aquamarine I loved or the icy chunk of diamond set up on prongs like kitten’s teeth. Her fingers looked as though they were turning green. I remembered the ladyfinger pickles under the stairs.

  “Did you know they have babies in jars out in the closet here?”

  Mother Mayes’s lips thinned to a smile that could have been drawn on her face with pencil. “Babies?”

  “Yes, I saw the two-headed babies up on the shelves in big jars in the broom closet.”

  “Frances, that’s just your imagination. Why don’t you have a piece of candy?” Just my imagination. All my family said that. They always denied I saw what I said I saw if it inconvenienced them in any way. I learned early that only a slice of reality was considered real, even if what I saw should have been as plain as Stone Mountain to everyone.

  “I did too! It had no toenails.” I opened the padded white box and broke into one chocolate after another, rejecting the soft pink and yellow fillings.

  Mother Mayes made a gurgling noise in her chest, the same low chortling sound a pigeon makes. I looked over the little balloon puff of her stomach, out the window, and down below where Mrs. Melton, my friend Marideane’s mother, was hoisting a bag of groceries from the backseat of her Studebaker. When I played there after school, Marideane and I saw rats bigger than kittens on the back porch of the hospital across the street, rats tumbling through the pails (of guts and gallbladders?) of garbage. We climbed in her fig tree and clapped, threw figs, shouted, but the rats never ran. I thought of Mother Mayes in the hospital late at night in the dark with the big brown rats running through the halls. One could jump on her white bed and run over her face. I told my parents about the rats but they said I must have been dreaming.

  Mother Mayes wasn’t interested in the babies. I wondered if their eyelids looked like hers, shot with purple lines. “You may not believe me …” I found the exact piece I wanted wrapped in silver paper. Slowly I bit into the pure caramel. “But it’s true. I did see them.”

  Mother Mayes’s face seemed to emerge from the pillow. “You must be thirsty after that long walk.” She always offered water so I could drink from the curved glass straw. Once I’d said I liked it. Adults always did that; say you like one thing and they’re forever forcing it on you afterward. I didn’t like the glass straw all that much. I turned up one of the glasses on the towel and poured a little. What I didn’t want Mother Mayes to know was that I was afraid of catching whatever she had because she was going to die. I held my breath and sucked the clear water up the straw. I never catch things, I thought. They’d showed at school the picture of an iron lung at Warm Springs. They said if we went swimming after lunch we’d get it and have to go lie in an iron lung day after day, then get braces on our legs and never swim again. So some germs can live in water. But Mother Mayes didn’t have infantile paralysis; they said “eaten up.” I thought of red ants and let out my breath.

  Mother Mayes chortled again and sank back into the pillows. I had another piece of candy, this time just to be busy until the bubbling sound went away. “I’ve
got to be going.” A string of drool ran backward on her cheek, and her hand suddenly turned to a claw grabbing at the hem of the sheet. “I’ve got to do a report on the Belgian Congo.” She didn’t seem to hear. She rolled her head to the side and gave an ugly little grunt. I held on to the iron foot of the bed for a moment, my feet on the rung. I wanted to swing up my legs and see if I could go into a handstand, but I didn’t dare. Mother Mayes had her eyes closed and a frown on her face as though she were thinking hard about something. I slowly pulled the door shut behind me.

  The closet door in the hall was still open. From the window opposite it, a slash of afternoon sun angled across the hall. I wanted to see the small jars better, especially the one with something in it no larger than a peach pit. A pumpkin-shaped jar on the end was so close I almost could reach it. If only the brine, or whatever it was, were not so scummy, like old goldfish water. I shinnied up the doorframe. Three, four, eight jars in all. “How’s she feeling, honey?” I dropped to the floor.