Under Magnolia : A Southern Memoir (9780307885937)

by Mayes, Frances

  Always when we arrive, she bakes a sheet pan full of delectable, light biscuits, soft inside, toasty outside. Mary sets out the ingredients and turns on the oven; Big Mama mixes them by feel. A crock of fresh butter, a jar of Mary’s blackberry jam, and a plate of those steamy, airy, crunchy biscuits: worth the trip. I help myself to four.

  Big Mama secretly can see, surely. Her staring green eyes look like marbles, and her lard-white forehead gleams. When I later saw the first photo of earth from space, I thought of her eyes.

  “Take those things back, Frankye. I don’t want them!” she grumbles, sliding off her lap the velvet robe and fuzzy shawl my mother brought in extravagantly wrapped gift boxes. She pronounces her name as though it’s an accusation. Frankye: I wonder if my mother substituted the “ye” for the plain “ie.” It seems unlikely that Big Mama would spell any name in a fanciful way.

  Named for her father, Mack Franklin Davis, Frankye must have been a disappointment. The firstborn a girl, slapped with a feminized version of her father’s name as small consolation. Her middle name was Catherine, mother of Big Mama. At least it wasn’t Almeda.

  “You could get me something useful,” she barks. “My eyes are on fire.” My mother brings a cold washrag with lemon juice squeezed on it and lays it over the bald eyes. Let’s go, she motions to me, tilting her head toward the door. I pretend to look in the glass-doored bookcase—my aunt Mary is a reader, too—but really I watch their distorted reflections in the foxed mirror above. They seem to move in a haze, as though from another time. “Come out from back there,” my mother snaps. She’s tense as wire hanging a picture frame. I wonder if she, too, thinks it impossible that Big Mama can’t see.

  After every exit from Mary’s house, my mother drives fast, lighting one cigarette with the other, burning up rubber all the way back to Fitz. When we turn into the driveway at home, bugs streak the windshield and the hood ticks.

  Apparently, she was just as poisonous before she went blind. On the other end of the seesaw, Mack Franklin Davis indulged Frankye endlessly while she was growing up. Frankye told me that when her mother said no to the pleated chiffon crystal-beaded dress in the window of a shop, her father brought it home in a box that night. She dove into the tissue paper and held it up, twirling in front of her mother. Maybe that night Big Mama’s eyes went stony for good.

  When her mother said college was a waste for a girl, her father ordered the application. If even half the stories of my mother’s conquests are true, she was a femme fatale, if for a very short period. She met my father at twenty. Not much time to break hearts. My father was considered quite a catch, and I don’t know how long it was before she realized that she was the one caught.

  My sister was born a year after they eloped. My other sister four years later, and I, “the baby of the family,” was born a long eight years after her. Obviously a mistake.

  My mother told me they were happy only for the first year. She said the Depression “destroyed our generation.” By their midthirties, they’d lived through World War I, the influenza epidemic, the Great Depression, and World War II. Daddy sat out the war. Since he was engaged in making cotton cloth, his staying in Fitzgerald was considered essential to our nation’s well-being. Perhaps if he had gone, his life would have been better. He would have been out of small-town patterns and cast against history instead. As in books, shouldn’t he have a quest? Then I could have discovered, as a friend did, a stash of photographs of stick-and-bone people and learned that my father was one of the liberators of Dachau. A handsome young Italian would have knocked at our door, searching for his birth father. I am from Anzio, where a Garbert Mayes met my mother, Costanza.… Or, he’d just been stationed, like his brother, in San Francisco on a gray battleship. He might have written to us: Sell the house; this could be home. If he’d come back from war to Georgia, he might have brought the luck to live.

  If he’d gone, perhaps she’d have developed some resilience and pluck. She would have stepped in and managed the mill in his absence, have all the millhouses painted yellow, and the swept dirt yards planted with butterfly bushes and azaleas. She could have opened a café out behind the mill where the workers could sip iced tea, play dominos, and listen to blues.

  But they were fated to the one-mile-square town, wearing out the streets with their heels and tires, wearing out their expectations, wearing out their love. When I read about an eighteenth-century table decoration in Naples—a live goldfinch in a cage of spun sugar—I thought of Frankye in her saffron silk slip, fluffing her hair and spritzing her pulses with Shalimar.

  I can get no real satisfaction with first causes, the reasons they wrangled constantly. Clearly, they were bored and created drama to give some high resolution to their days. Beyond that, there’s the mystery of other people’s lives. How do the early years shape you? Raising children, you think you’re forming their character. But one of them with a steely eye may be determined to be just what you are not. We’re fated to wonder, Of those so close beside me, which are you?

  FRANKYE AND GARBERT—A MATCH FOR 20 YEARS was printed in gold on the white matchbooks their friend Marteel gave them for the anniversary. I was seven and it might have been the first little double entendre I got. Ha! The matchbooks suggested many guests at a celebration, all smoking, dressed up, leaning to light one another’s Camels, the flaring lights isolating happy faces, the yard decorated with lanterns and the table set with my mother’s favorite Country Captain Chicken, tomato aspic, green beans with tarragon. My father in a white suit toasting his bride of twenty impeccable years. But I don’t really remember a party.

  I knew that you could strike one match and set the whole book on fire; my parents seemed, over and over, to do that, so I must have understood metaphor, or at least the limits of the literal. They were no match for each other. They smoked, so they always were looking for matches. “Light the candles,” my mother said. “I want to bloody see what I’m eating,” my father answered.

  For months the white matchbooks sat in crystal ashtrays rimmed with silver, prizes my mother won for flower arranging. I had my own supply for my playhouse in the front room of the barn, which I’d divided with trunks and suitcases into individual rooms, the kitchen being near the door where there were shelves for my tea set and the toy stove heated by a lightbulb. My dolls ranged along the discarded sofa cushions and their clothes hung on miniature hangers on nails. “Don’t you dare light any matches,” I was warned. “That barn could go up like a tinderbox.” But in a cigar box, I had many candle stubs and when my mother’s car backed out of the driveway, leaving me with Willie Bell, I lined them up on a box and struck one of the matches for twenty years and by candlelight fed my dolls gruel made of sand. I liked the sudden burst of blue flame, the sulfuric smell, how quickly the matchstick bent and charred toward my fingers. Frankye, I thought. Garbert. I had no way of knowing that matches, made in heaven or not, continue to flare, lighting up the mind as they burn the heart.

  Soon after Daddy died, I began dating juniors in high school. We were all football mad, then in the summers the bush league baseball teams came down from North Carolina and all my friends went to the field in the sweltering nights under the bug-hazed lights and the girls decided which players were cute. A few girls even went out with the gum-chewing boys but my mother said they probably were not from nice families and I was not to speak to them. She took a stand; usually, she didn’t notice what I did or when I came home.

  I loved high school and became part of every activity. I worked on the newspaper, acted in plays, decorated the Legion Hall for dances, joined the sub-debs and came down the ramp in the ethereal pink tulle I wore in my sister’s wedding. The only deb without a father, I held the arm of my brother-in-law Cleve. David, a year older, who’d been like a twin, and I fell in love. I swam in his green eyes, like reflections of pines in the stream. He was so handsome. I reveled in his jealousy when older boys paid attention to me. That was passion, I thought. We parked on the side of the house
after movies and kissed until the windows steamed. Frankye came out on the porch and shouted, “You are making a mistake you will live to regret.” David crouched down and we laughed, though it was mortifyingly not funny at all.

  I ignore Frankye as much as I can. I am in high school; she is in free fall. I zealously pour out all her gin when I find bottles hidden in the clothes hamper or the hedge. “Why do you do this?” I ask her. “You are ruining everything.”

  “You always exaggerate. I don’t drink more than anyone else. Look at … well, lots of people.” My sisters, out of the chaos but sometimes home for weekends, plead and she quits for the length of their visits, pouring a big glug as they back out of the driveway.

  One morning I skip school and go over to The House to ask Hazel for help. Not only was Frankye drinking like crazy, Daddy Jack was, too. He ate every meal at our house. Though he mocked, he never overtly criticized Frankye, but with the pot roast, I had a big helping of his criticism. “You don’t know what you’re doing, wasting time with David.” He clatters his fork on the plate. “That two-by-four, the most common piece of wood in the stack.”

  Hazel listens carefully, I think, then says, “Sugar, you always were an imaginative child but, really, this is the limit. Why, Daddy sits in the same pew every Sunday and is just tireless in good work, a pillar of the community.” She adjusts the lace dickey around her neck and straightens her spine. “Now that Boofa is gone, he’s the one who gets the nigras out of jail. He sits on the bank board.” Her voice rises for her final pitch. “He’s the one who named Fitzgerald ‘the Colony City.’ ”

  “Yes, but that’s not what I mean.…”

  “As for Frankye,” she interrupts, “she’s your mother, the only mother you’ve got, and you should have more respect, even if Frankye didn’t come from here and I know nothing about her people.” She flips me over like a little hotcake on the griddle.

  At night, Frankye stumbles to the door of my room and berates me for causing the “ruination” of her life. She’d always ranted a bit against Daddy, especially focusing on his adoration of Mother Mayes and Hazel.

  Now it is my turn. She improvises fast as a jazz musician on my faults for an hour or more. “If it were not for you I would not be stuck in this hellhole,” she begins. Then she’s off and running, performing her riffs—you keep your head in a book when you could be doing something, you drive everything into the ground, you just live in the woods, go to the woods, see if I care—and listing her missed chances, Daddy’s licentiousness and transgressions. An apparition in a transparent nightgown, she seems to glow around the edges of her body. She’s weaving and slurring. I’ll end up sorry, sorry, sorry. I’ll make a bed I’ll have to lie in. I’m courting disaster, and will end up sorry, sorry.

  I stay silent. I will myself into a long-stemmed rose, imagining the leaves sprouting off my shoulders, the thorns, my face a bloom where a bee might want to slumber. A rose cradled in green tissue paper, and I must keep still so there is no crackle. If I respond, the sizzling fuse of her face explodes. I am unappreciative of everything she sacrifices, a smart aleck, and will waste my life with a local yo-ho. My Little Richard records particularly incite her. When I play “Rip It Up” and “Long Tall Sally,” my friends and I gyrate as we sing whole lotta shakin’ and imitate what my mother calls his “jungle” cries.

  “He’s nasty! He picked cotton at your boyfriend’s grandmother’s farm. Even the other nigras wouldn’t drink after him.” I would like to turn up the volume of “Rip It Up” to maximum decibels to drown her out. I would like to stand on my bed and belt out “Keep a-knockin’ but you can’t come in.” But she’s rockin’ it up, rippin’ it up on Saturday nights and all other nights, when she does not feel at all fine.

  On some nights as she wavers in the doorway, I imagine that I am a skeleton with thin bones lying under the linen sheet. No sensation in my skin, just the slow growth of my hair and fingernails. I think of turning a fire hose on her, washing her down the hall, her blue nylon gown skidding. I must have laughed because she shrieks that I am the worst of her three children. As though we are all bad, when usually my sisters are held up as paragons who married well. She suddenly burns out like a lightbulb, turns to the dark house, and wanders off, finished with her mad and fearful lamentation.

  I have many normal friends. Normal lives exist. I spend as much time as possible with them. I am embarking on a quest to live a normal life. By day the raids against me never happened. Frankye spent sunny mornings with Willie Bell, making lists and accomplishing them. They baked caramel cakes, rearranged closets, and waxed what didn’t need waxing. Some days, though, she wouldn’t get out of bed and would still have on her robe when I came home for dinner at noon. On the kitchen windowsill, the weather forecasting house she brought me from Macon sent out a witch or a beautiful girl from a shingled Alpine doorway. The girl, though, often swung out when it was cloudy; the witch appeared on bright days.

  At school, I’m out from under. I’m elected “prettiest eyes,” “best personality,” “best dressed” (don’t tell Daddy Jack), and “most original.” I’m reading more than ever. I’ve started on the left wall of the Carnegie Library and plan to read my way around the room. Frankye returns from a shopping trip to Macon and brings me Anna Karenina. Neither of us has heard of Tolstoy but she picked it out because it was thick and would take me a while to read. She gave me the first book that lifted me off my chair. Anna also raised a disquiet that formerly belonged only to Frankye. That train, coming round the bend.

  I could remember Daddy telling me that I was smart enough to do anything I wanted to do, although he impractically used as examples that I could scale Mount Everest or juggle three oranges. I’m selected to edit the yearbook because the French teacher thinks I might have some writing talent. I can’t wait to meet my friends at night when we work at her house on the layout and photos. She’s a widow, terse and controlled. I glimpse into the guest bedroom with plain white curtains and bedspread, and wish that I could move in. She says I can name the theme of the annual and I call it Spirit of Place.

  Our plays reach state competition, and I win an essay contest. Some reluctance keeps me from cheerleading, though I go to all the games to watch David, number thirty-five. The football team elects me their sponsor. I adore every moment of Fitz-Hi. Frankye occasionally tosses me a line, too. She’ll vary her accusations and shout, “Don’t do what I do, do what I say do.” “Don’t follow my footsteps.” “Fend for yourself. There’s no one to fend for you.” Fend, I thought. What a nice word. She bought a revolving bookcase from a law office and refinished the “garish” oak, so that it resembled walnut. My books, she said, deserved a good home. So finely spun, the threads to hang on.

  Daddy’s brother Mark let us use his house at Daytona Beach, a two-story gray shingle, where the tough St. Augustine grass lawn met the dunes. We’ve never owned a dishwasher, and put in the wrong soap. We come back to find the whole kitchen engulfed with suds. We scoot around the kitchen, laughing like crazy. At the auction near the beach, Frankye bids on and wins a diamond watch. Her friend Gladys and her daughter Nancy come down to visit. Nancy buys a monkey at the dime store. He’s cute at first but turns nasty in Aunt Emmy’s immaculate house and swings around the room, dropping smelly turds. We play constant canasta and take long walks on the deserted beach.

  I try to flirt with the lifeguards, but they have their own bronzed-breasted acolytes. Gladys and Nancy leave, and we are alone. I read in the sunroom, which smells like moldy puzzles, while my mother paces outside, ice rattling in her fifth or sixth drink. On the beach every afternoon, I run my hands under the warm sand, feeling the big pulse of the ocean. She’s out in the water. I want her to wash in this primitive surf, turn clean as a scallop shell. The water clears around her ankles. She turns to me and says, “Cold.”

  When I look at photographs of my mother at forty-eight, fifty, I see what I did not see then. Even in black-and-white, the intense blue of her eyes is beginning
to fade. I would like to step into the frame, take her hand, and lead her away. If someone had, surely she might still have thrived. Fallible, fragile, she was saved by no one. Least of all by herself.

  At this time, I began the dream that was to reoccur for twenty years. I am in water up to my chin. The current rises and falls, and I am only barely able to breathe. That I am above water at all is because my feet balance on the submerged shoulders of my mother.

  I couldn’t wait to go to college. Daddy Jack walked into the dining room where I sat at the table reading catalogs. I wanted to go to Sophie Newcomb but knew nothing about it other than that it was in New Orleans. For years late at night, I’d listened to a black-Cajun radio station that somehow made it across the airwaves all the way to south Georgia. The music! I was pulled toward that raucous sound. The disc jockey advertised White Rose Petroleum Jelly night after night. I knew about ruined plantation houses with oak alleys, and I kept a record album propped on my bedside table so I could see the cover photo of the golden crescent of the Mississippi at sunset. I was interested in Vanderbilt because I heard that’s where poets went. I ordered catalogs from Pembroke (Brown) and Wellesley. Reading those two, I had visions of myself in a gored tweed skirt and starched white blouse editing the school news, a practical and serious person. The catalog from Randolph-Macon Woman’s College came, too, sent by a very nice friend of mother who went there in the dark ages and told my mother it was the finest school for girls in the United States.