Because I am four years under eighteen, she can apply for government aid for minors. When the first check arrives, she looks at it incredulously. I can tell she’s concentrating hard from the way she works her bottom lip back and forth, as when she focuses on spreading hot peanut brittle fast across the porcelain-topped kitchen table. “Don’t do that with your lip,” I complain.
“Do what?”
“That sticking out your bottom lip. It looks stupid.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I do too.”
“You certainly do not. You think you know so much.”
I drop it with I know more than you on the brink of my sassy lips.
She lets the check float to the floor. “You can have these. They’re useless to me. Use them to buy clothes. Use them to light fires.” The sum is around two hundred dollars a month. At today’s value, a thousand dollars or more.
Out of instinct, I begin to call her Frankye instead of Mammy or Mother. I sense that the mother role is now in question. I open a checking account and buy anything I want. A nice pleated wool skirt costs fifteen dollars, a cashmere sweater about twenty-five. I collect Capezios, which, via an ad in Mademoiselle, I order all the way from New Rochelle, New York. Pink ballet flats, pointed-toe loafers in red alligator, blue sandals with ankle straps, suede pumps with kitten heels, fur-cuffed little boots—my closet floor is littered with shoes. Miss Leila, our neighbor, sews Capri pants in pink linen, a yellow dress with silver dollar—sized buttons down the front, a hydrangea-printed organdy formal dress, strapless and with a trailing purple ribbon at the waist.
Daddy Jack felt obliged to step in and pay the bills. Not only did he remember that bullet meant for him, he confessed that he had promised Garbert, and a promise is a promise. When I’ve heard someone say He’d take a bullet for me, I’ve known exactly what that means and, no, it’s not likely that someone would. But one had.
A local florist asked my mother to help him out a few days a week, since she was a founder of the Magnolia Garden Club and known for flower arrangements. She went to his greenhouse a few times then decided that she didn’t want to. The humidity made her hair sticky. Then there was something about the owner’s bad taste—red anthuriums and screaming red ribbons—and not being able to stand looking at his mossy teeth. She bought a typewriter and enrolled in an English course at a college thirty miles away. To get there, she had to get up at seven, even before Willie Bell arrived. She lasted a few weeks, and then gave the typewriter to me and I used it all through high school and college. I brightly suggested that we move to Atlanta, where my sister and her husband lived. Surely there was a job she’d like in Atlanta. “What do you expect me to do, clerk in a store?”
They’d always tipped the bottle. Now Frankye sometimes drank a bit in the daytime. After school, I’d find her at the kitchen table with a gin and tonic, not even looking at a magazine. What was she to do? She always wanted to go somewhere, anywhere. She had the vibrancy, the looks, the determined helplessness that made you step forth to take over, even if you were eight or nine years old. She had nowhere to go. I watched her energy start to fizzle. Neither my sisters, who were nowhere near, nor I knew depression; we knew bad mood. We didn’t know drinking as disease, but as character flaw. Weakness. We didn’t know “dysfunctional,” but we lived it. We knew that if you were miserable, you brought it on yourself. She taught us.
She gazes in the mirror of her dresser, with two side mirrors reflecting her three-quarter profile. She is multiplied, faceted, broken into aspects. I look at her with blame. When I mention a job, she stares at me as though I’d suggested she walk the streets. Work is not going to work out. She becomes interested in competitive bridge. Unlikely as it is, she’s an excellent bridge player and begins to accumulate masters’ points. When Daddy Jack says she can go on a duplicate bridge cruise in the Caribbean, she has several linen sundresses made, packs her bags, and leaves.
Bridge was the focus of the trip but I knew my mother hoped to meet someone exciting. She’d already surveyed Fitzgerald and found no one presentable. Or, instead, just found no one. During Daddy’s illness, when he still had the wherewithal to drink bourbon, gin, and vodka, I overheard him say, “You’ll be remarried before I’m cold in the grave.” She did not dispute that.
During the day while Frankye cruises, Willie Bell tends to the house and I get myself to school. I’d started driving when I was nine. By twelve, while they were away at the hospital in Atlanta, I’d back out of the driveway then speed back in, over and over. I still can back up as well as I can drive forward. By fifteen, I drive everywhere.
After school, my friends and I “ride around.” Up Lee, down Pine, out the ten-mile stretch where I floor the blue Buick and see how fast it speeds up to 110 mph. At night, I read The Foxes of Harrow and other Frank Yerby novels one after another, although the librarian had called my mother to report that I was reading “unsuitable” books. (Yerby was a mulatto.) Reading omnivorously across the library, I by fluke choose Jane Austen, Hamilton Basso, Willa Cather, Flaubert, Hemingway, Thoreau, Fitzgerald, Dreiser, Steinbeck, and Turgenev. (I know this because I still have the blue Reading Log I kept for fifteen years.) Propped in my white spool bed, a tin of cheese straws within reach, a stack of library books on the table, the house quiet, protective. I am perfectly happy. Imagine, writing a book. What else could you do with your life that could compare with that? I began to keep lists of good words and quotes, to underline sentences I liked, and write notes in margins. Carson McCullers, from right over in Columbus, how did she do it? “In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together.” You can begin a book like that, and, yes, the heart is a lonely hunter.
Every day Willie Bell leaves a pan of chicken and some deviled eggs, or a pot roast and a plate of icebox cookies. I spend some nights at friends’ houses, sometimes one of them stays with me, and once or twice I stay at Daddy Jack’s, but usually during the two weeks Frankye is gone, I am alone. No one seems to think this odd, so I don’t either. We never locked our doors. I read late, listening to LPs that I ordered from a record club. Often they sent the wrong choice so I ended up hearing Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, and Concierto de Aranjuez and Boléro. My favorite is a dramatic reading of John Brown’s Body by Stephen Vincent Benét. The spinning rhythms and haunting repetitions of the story of the War Between the States expressed my sense of the land I lived on. I underlined “the old wise dog with Autumn in his eyes,” and descriptions that named my feelings:
For, wherever the winds of Georgia run,
It smells of peaches long in the sun,
And the white wolf-winter, hungry and frore,
Can prowl the North by a frozen door
But here we have fed him on bacon-fat
And he sleeps by the stove like a lazy cat.
Here Christmas stops at everyone’s house
With a jug of molasses and green, young boughs,
And the little New Year, the weakling one,
Can lie outdoors in the noonday sun,
Blowing the fluff from a turkey-wing
At skies already haunted with Spring—
Oh Georgia … Georgia … the careless yield!
The watermelons ripe in the field!
The mist in the bottoms that tastes of fever
And the yellow river rolling forever …!
With the lights out in my room, I listen as the lively voice reads to me, imprinting the Old South myth. What if you could write something that sings? I know the breeze does not smell of warm peaches, but it seems as though it does. And the Lost Cause, that’s a subject still reverberating. It had occurred to me that there was another side to the whole story but at that time I was like the Mayas, who used the wheel in toys but never made the leap to chariots and carts.
A couple of postcards arrive. One day in Barbados, natives who shouted Yankee, go home pelted the cruise group with rotten fruit as they walked around the port buying straw bags. Th
e card, a view of the harbor, said how insulting to be called a Yankee when she was with Southerners and Canadians and that her turquoise linen dress was ruined.
When Frankye returned, she confessed that she’d been quite taken with a man from Vancouver. His name, Cliff, caused me to imagine my mother in the arms of Montgomery Clift, leaning into his kiss on the top deck of a ship sailing farther and farther south, as south as you could go. Cliff, slick black hair I saw in the snapshot, was not Montgomery Clift by any stretch. Instead, the word “swarthy” came to mind, and I hoped I never had to move to Canada (the moon) because of him. He escorted her on the day trips, she said, had been a grand dance partner, and my daddy would never dance. A few days later, I asked if she’d heard from Cliff. Then she admitted that she found on checking out the last morning that the bar tabs he’d signed for all the lovely rum drinks they’d shared while the moon rose over the water, he’d signed in her name and room number. He was off the boat by then. Was it then that she realized that her flamboyant college romance days were not going to reappear? That all the men who flattered her when she was married (sending Daddy into apoplexy) somehow had fast-faded into the background? John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave.…
Daddy Jack doles out money parsimoniously. We should be grateful, but we are not. I think If Daddy had not saved your life, maybe he … but I’m not sure how to end the speculation. Daddy Jack is rich and stingy, a bad combination, Frankye says. “Tight as Dick’s hatband,” she says with a laugh. “Who’s Dick?” I always ask. No one questions my “allowance,” as Mother calls it.
She rests in the afternoons, reading fashion magazines or condensed books, or she lowers the slant-top desk, pulls out her blue note cards, and writes to my sisters while I browse in her fabric cupboard. The convex mirror above the desk enlarges her forehead and magnifies her eyes when she looks up.
She collects bolts of cotton polka dots, stripes, flower prints, good linen in solid colors, folds of copper or herringbone wool—enough to make a skirt—sheer dimity, seersucker stripes, gossamer voile. A few remnants remained of prints—cowboys, sailboats, and big cherries—left over from my camp shirts. On the bottom shelf are yards of flowery blue and white chintz, raspberry toile, and a green and brown deco design she’d once chosen for my room. When I’d said I hated it, she explained, “Your sisters had the pink. You can’t do the Degas dancers twice,” so what were my choices?
Some of the fabrics came from the mill, where I’d seen the barefoot women at the looms that looked strung with light in the long room of oiled black machines and bins of cotton. Strong armed, they pulled the warp (weft?) beam across the harp strings of white threads, interweaving heavier threads for texture. I liked the muffled bump with each pull. All the thin women worked in faded cotton shifts they’d run up on their treadle machines. Their lank brown hair swung with each thrust, their eyes, paler blue than my mother’s, smiled at me as I followed Daddy down the aisles.
Wedged among the white fabric for linings, Frankye keeps a box of buttons, which I loved from babyhood—gold blazer buttons with anchors, horn toggles, shirt buttons, mottled tortoiseshell, red and yellow Bakelite that seemed very old, jet-black sparklers, diamond-shaped faceted rhinestones, gold baubles, leather-covered knobs, square metal ones beginning to rust, teardrop pearls, and cloth ones to cover with whatever fabric you chose. “When you see nice buttons, buy them,” she advises. “By themselves, they can inspire a dress.”
If I had become a Coco Chanel or a Diane von Furstenberg, the origins could be traced to these afternoons in my mother’s bedroom, with me spreading out the fabric at the foot of her big canopied bed where Daddy died, drawing a sundress or a bathing suit cover-up or a lavender wool coat with mother-of-pearl buttons. My mother is propped up on pillows in her slip, offering her opinion. “Not that. The coral linen would make a cuter shirtwaist dress,” and “You can’t wear that muddy green. It makes you look like a piece of rat cheese. Look at that eau de Nil instead.” Water of the Nile. The name set me dreaming, though I looked like rat cheese in it, too.
“So,” the biography would go, “she developed her heightened sense of texture and line from her mother, whose incisive taste forever influenced her designs.” But I did not become a designer, nor did my sisters. They are better dressed than I, despite my rigorous indoctrination. But always, we are examining the seams, the hem, the quality of the fabric. But, Frankye, there, polishing her toenails with Fire and Ice. I imagine her with parents—experts, say, in the Etruscans—who’d told her as a child about the printed scrap of cloth around a mummy that provided a key to the lost language. Told her that the under-thread in the weave is the “subtle.” (Sub-tela, under the fabric.) They might have taken her to the Cairo museum to see the Coptic cloth or to the wing at the Pitti Palace where the lush brocade dresses of the Renaissance are displayed. They would have explained the relationship between text and textile. Texere, to weave, as I’m weaving this memory. Texture: bumpy dotted Swiss, papery watered silk, stiff khaki (from the Urdu/Hindustan word meaning dust colored).
For you, Frankye, a context and a place to go forward. Yes, that’s my mother’s atelier. Just ring the bell and her assistant, Hortensia, will show you the collection. But, she has her closet of bolts. Daughters to dress. The afternoon is sweltering and her silk slip clings to her breasts that look saggy when she’s lying back on pillows.
Why were we fabric obsessed? Were we like Adam and Eve, running out of the garden, inventing fabric to cover ourselves? (Probably they grabbed some flax and started weaving.) Who’s to say our designing and dreaming of beauty was not important? Was this how we entertained ourselves? Was it visionary, creative, with the underlying possibility of transformation? Where would we wear these creations? (Everywhere.) Not that she could piece together a pattern.
Our horizon widened. Soon after Nancy married, she and her husband settled into his first and only navy post in French Morocco. She began to write about shopping trips to Gibraltar, a duty-free port she could pop over to on a warship. (Surely this kind of thing is no longer allowed.) She began to send us tweed coats and cashmere twinsets in pearl pink, camel, and cobalt blue. How did she afford this? The question never has been on the lips of my family members. Money is to spend. The coats were English and made me think of hounds and foxes and crumpets. The sweaters were triple ply, lush and voluptuous. And so exotic. Oh, thank you. I got it from the rock of Gibraltar.
Frankye was burned with a powerful cultural lens. Her father doted on her; her mother constantly criticized her and every other living being within her walls.
My maternal grandmother, blind Big Mama, was referred to by my father as “that snake.” Because she lived seventy-six miles away and my father’s mother lived only two blocks down the road, my Vidalia grandmother was referred to as “your other grandmother.” I suppose I heard my mother call her “Mother,” but I thought of her as “Other.”
When Mother and I make an obligatory visit, Big Mama always rocks in the breezeway. As soon as the car doors slam, she begins her complaint, her dirge, indignation, grievance against the world. She rocks faster, keeping time with her faultfinding. My mother has heard this caterwaul too many times. She leans casually against the porch rail with her arms crossed, smoking and staring out at the corn fields. She’s bright as a quetzal, impatient but silent. Still she frowns down at me, smiles, and shakes her head no as I cross my eyes, pull out my lips, and wag my tongue at my blind grandmother. Big Mama rails on against every ungrateful member of the family, then catalogs her ailments, which I count on my fingers until I run out. A little froth of spit gathers at the corners of her mouth. Jesus and the Lord are hauled out frequently to boost her charges.
She was always feeling my arms, as when Gretel held out sticks to the witch so she wouldn’t be eaten. She asked what I had learned in Sunday school and I always said, “Jesus wept.” I didn’t want to go into my feelings about a God who put a father to a test to see if he’d kill his own son like a la
mb to roast, and then sent his only child to be nailed onto a cross and fed vinegar. Like Big Mama, the Sunday school God was just mean.
While she only insinuated that I was misbehaving and that Jesus had his eye on me, she openly castigated my mother for her profligate ways, for driving my father to drink, for not obeying the commandments. My mother was shiny metal for her raspy voice to scrape. Garbert Mayes was blameless. Generous. He sent her checks. My mother was lucky to have married into money. What had she done with that luck? If she had the sense God gave a polecat she’d get right with her Master.
Big Mama lived with my aunt Mary, who mostly escaped the holy wrath because Big Mama was canny enough not to bite the hand that fed her lavishly. Only Mary walked free. Mother referred to her as The Saint. As the youngest, she’d been stuck since she graduated from high school with the care of her mother. Frankye and the other two siblings (both died in their forties of heart trouble, magnified by drink) had already struck out from there, never looking back.
No one mentioned Big Daddy, dead for a decade. Big Mama had inherited a good hunk of south Georgia land from her mother, iron-face Catherine Phillips Williamson, but Big Daddy, a jolly drinking man, had gambled it away over the years. All that I had of him—no memory at all—was a pine chest he made for my mother’s doll clothes when she was small. Big Mama, whose given name was Almeda, had her crosses to bear, for sure, and she bore them quite badly and with as many grudges as she could remember. She had hands so small I had the urge to squeeze hard and hear the fine bones crush. Her vitreous white skin revealed no wrinkle (no worries when you’re always in the right). Her feet made me want to say “prim.” She kept them together like a good girl at church. Her black hair, thinning, never turned gray, except for a few stray streaks. She kept it in a knot at the back of her neck, arranged over a horrid net doughnut she called a “rat.” Biscuits were her redeeming talent.
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