We had a lovely evening in that cabin talking and playing board games we found in the hall closet. Mama always brought a picnic basket of snacks for our road trips, so I scarfed down a nutritionally balanced meal of Little Debbie snacks and multiple cans of Dr. Pepper. I ran through the cabin like a sugar fiend, annoying everyone.
When it was time to turn in, Mrs. Murphy was forced to sleep alone at the opposite side of the cabin. We’d been on enough road trips with her to know that her snoring could wake the dead. Sleep was impossible in her presence. She understood, and we banished her to her sleeping quarters and told her to shut the door.
Mama and I piled into one bed, and Jessica slept in the bed next to ours. We spent a long time listening to the crickets chirping and bullfrogs croaking outside the cabin. Even Mama, the beach bum, commented on what a peaceful sound it was. We told stories and laughed and had an unusually lengthy conversation about Jessica’s crush on Scott Baio.
Only moments before we all drifted off to sleep, our hearts full of the day’s laughter, jokes, and joy, a loud noise jilted us all awake. It wasn’t Mrs. Murphy’s snoring, no; but it was a startling and somewhat disturbing sound just the same. It sounded like something was rummaging through the garbage outside. Then we heard a loud bang of the garbage can’s tin lid hitting the gravel.
Because I’d recently seen Harry and the Hendersons, my heart began to pound in my throat as I envisioned a Sasquatch trying to break into the cabin. Was this how it was going to end? My nine years were going to come to a halt in the clutches of a bloodthirsty Bigfoot that wasn’t nearly as nice as Harry?
I clung to my mother’s arm while she sat up in the bed and listened carefully. She whispered for Jessica and me to stay there, and she slowly crept over to the window.
“What is it, Mama?” I screeched through trembling lips.
“I see something moving out there,” she said.
Well, that didn’t ease my fears at all. In my best Vinton Harper (remember Mama’s Family?) voice, I mustered a, “Thanks a lot, Mama!” as Jessica snickered beneath her covers.
“I’ll go see what it is.” She headed toward the bedroom door. I sprung from the bed and clung to her hip, begging her not to leave me. Jessica joined us, and although she wasn’t quite as nervous as I was, it was evident she didn’t want to be left alone either.
The three of us, holding tightly to one another, shuffled through the dark cabin to the soundtrack of Mrs. Murphy’s thunderous booming in her bedroom. We reached the door and Mama flipped on the porch light and looked out the window. With my head buried in the back of Mama’s nightgown and Jessica’s head buried into the back of mine, Jessica said, “Mrs. Susan, what is it?”
“Oh! Sweet Lord!” Mama exclaimed.
“It’s a Sasquatch, isn’t it?” I tightly shut my eyes and waited for the beast to knock down the door and devour me as a midnight snack. I just knew I would taste like a Little Debbie Fudge Round.
“It’s worse,” Mama howled.
I peered around Mama’s nightgown and looked out the window to see a monstrous furry creature sitting on its hind legs on the picnic table. We eyed it for only a second, nothing between us and rabies but a thin plate of glass, as it used its humanlike hands to shove garbage into its mouth. And then it looked right at us, made some kind of aggressive chattering noise, and lurched toward the window.
We all let out bloodcurdling screams and sprinted back to our beds. Mama and I both hid under the blankets and latched on to each other.
“Sweet Jesus! It’s a ghastly oversized rat!” Mama panted. It was a known fact that my mother abhorred rodents and cats and birds. You don’t find many rodents or cats or birds at the beach—except for seagulls. But she’d take a seagull over a raccoon any day!
Once we’d calmed down and the sounds of the raccoon chattering and rustling through the garbage finally ceased, we began to laugh again. We laughed at my mother’s unnatural raccoon fear. We laughed because I had been certain it was Bigfoot. We laughed because Mrs. Murphy snored her way through the entire ordeal. We laughed because I thought Scott Baio had a funny last name. My fear subsided, and that giant dose of laughter certainly helped.
The next morning, as I cleaned the mess that the raccoon had left behind, Little Debbie wrappers and Dr. Pepper cans strewn all over the campsite, I heard Mrs. Murphy snickering and snorting uncontrollably inside.
“A rac—snort—coon, Susan! You were terrified of a rac—snort—coon!” she exclaimed as tears rolled down her face and left streaks in her plum blush.
“Rabies is nothing to play around with, Mrs. Murphy!” Mama exclaimed.
That raccoon wasn’t much of a threat, but it certainly terrified that overweight nine-year-old girl clinging to her mother’s nightgown. And even today, when I’m scared or anxious or downright afraid, I think back to that night in Arkansas so many years ago. I think back on the roaring laughter that made it all worthwhile.
Sweet, sweet laughter makes so many things worthwhile.
During my tenth summer, Mama agreed to care for her friend’s elderly mother while her regular caregiver was out of town. Her tasks would include giving Mrs. Brooks her medication, fixing her meals, and sleeping in her beautiful, antique-adorned guest bedroom in case Mrs. Brooks needed anything during the night.
Everyone in our small town knew Mrs. Brooks. She was a wealthy widow who lived in a big, beautiful home on a corner lot in the historic district. She was in her late eighties but was still a stunning woman. Her gorgeous silver hair was long and thick and always pinned into a neat bun. She wore a lot of jewelry and fuchsia blush and matching lipstick, and even though most of that lipstick ended up on her teeth, she still had a lovely smile. Mrs. Brooks was definitely the classiest and most stylish octogenarian I knew! (Granted, I didn’t know that many octogenarians.)
Mrs. Brooks was also half deaf. She asked everyone to repeat themselves a minimum of five times, although people yelled at her loudly enough for residents in the neighboring county to hear.
So, on the day my mother was to sit with Mrs. Brooks, we pulled into the driveway shaded with massive magnolia trees and climbed up the wide, painted porch steps. Mother rang the doorbell. And she rang it again.
And she rang it for nearly ten minutes.
I stood on the old wraparound porch while my mother peered through the tall windows and called Mrs. Brooks’s name. Bored, I swatted at flies and complained about the sweltering heat and the heavy humidity as sweat streamed down my back.
Finally, Mrs. Brooks heard the doorbell. Through the window on the front door, we saw her petite, frail body slowly making its way to let us in. I couldn’t wait for the cool, refreshing air inside her home to welcome me.
But when the precious little lady opened the door, my mother and I were pelted with a draft of thick, hot air. It wasn’t cooler inside the house. In fact, it felt about twenty degrees warmer.
She showed us to the bedroom where we would be sleeping. Two of the three windows were open, allowing the stagnant, sweltering air to suffocate the room.
“Mrs. Brooks, do you want me to close those windows and turn on the window unit?” Mama asked, beads of perspiration covering her forehead.
“What?” Mrs. Brooks asked.
And my mother repeated (read: screamed) the question five more times before Mrs. Brooks answered, “No, dear. Running the air costs too much.”
I couldn’t believe my warm, red ears. Mrs. Brooks was the wealthiest lady in town! How could she think crisp, cool air conditioning was too much of a splurge?
“It’s loud too,” she said as my mother and I exchanged a glance of confusion. It was hard to believe this woman could hear the AC unit when she couldn’t hear my mother yelling right in her face.
So we went about our day. We helped Mrs. Brooks chop vegetables in the kitchen and listened to tales about her family, all while Mama and I dripped with sweat. Mama fixed her a glass of cold iced tea and sat with her on the front porch to watch cars sail down
the sleepy street. I sat on the front steps, drenched to the bone and wishing I was in my cool house across town.
The sun went down, but the temperature did not. My mother helped Mrs. Brooks to bed and came into our bedroom, her blonde hair frizzing from the dense humidity.
“I can’t deal with this heat, Susannah! I’m going to die!”
I agreed as I dressed in cotton pajamas and Mama put on her nightgown and we both wiped the sweat from our faces. Our sticky backs touched each other as we lay in the small wrought-iron bed while crickets chirped outside the opened windows.
Mama sat up every few minutes to fan herself and get a drink of water from the bedside table. She shook the collar of her damp nightgown to create air flow, and she huffed and puffed before putting her head back on the pillow.
Finally, Mama couldn’t take it anymore. She got up and shut the windows and turned on the window unit. When it roared to life, I hopped out of the bed and Mama and I stood in front of the air conditioner. We smiled and basked in the chill. Sweet relief! It was heaven!
Suddenly we heard Mrs. Brooks call from her bedroom at the back of the house, “Girls! That air conditioner isn’t on, is it?”
As if we were two children in trouble, my mother quickly switched it off and threw the windows back open. We jumped into the sticky bed, our hearts pounding, and we lay there in the dark, without so much as a breeze blowing through the opened windows.
Hot. Stagnant. Suffocating. Torture.
And then my mama started laughing. She laughed so hard that she had to sit up in the bed to catch her breath. Like a little kid, my mother couldn’t stop cackling.
“Mama, what’s wrong with you?”
“How did she possibly hear the air conditioner? She couldn’t hear a train hitting a power plant!”
And then I started laughing too. And before long, we were both guffawing at our situation—being stuck in the broiling home of a wealthy widow who wouldn’t splurge on air conditioning. We laughed, without fear of Mrs. Brooks hearing us, and we worked up even more of a sweat. Tears of laughter streamed down my mother’s face and mixed with the perspiration. The louder we laughed, the louder the crickets chirped.
We didn’t sleep a wink that hot summer night.
But we sweated.
And we laughed.
When I was a chubby little checker, we lived in a beautiful country house surrounded by ten acres of rolling land. Cattle grazed in the fields and defecated by the picturesque pond. It was truly a gorgeous place to live, and I was blessed to have spent several years, ages six through ten, calling that my home.
I really loved the dozens of hiding places on that property, my favorite being the huge satellite dish nestled in the corner of the yard. Do you know what a man hated to hear back in 1989? “Honey, there’s static on the Quasar. Will you go outside and adjust the satellite before Knot’s Landing comes on?”
Anyway, one day I crawled into the bowl of the gigantic dish that resembled something produced by NASA, and I saw my white mutt, Buttermilk, walking along the fence at the back of the property, about a hundred yards away. Yes, the dog’s name was Buttermilk. He was a creamy white kind of color. You know? Like buttermilk.
“Buttermilk!” I called to him from the dish, eager to play with him and pick the cockleburs and fat, blood-filled ticks that resembled kidney beans from his ears.
“Buttermilk, come here!”
And then Buttermilk suddenly appeared, from the opposite side of the house. The white creature walking along the barbed-wire fence wasn’t my mutt.
I watched the animal closely, and I realized that it wasn’t a dog at all. It was a huge animal with a long white tail dragging the ground. In fact, it looked like a cat. It was a ginormous cat with the longest and weirdest tail I’d ever seen.
“Hey,” I yelled to the creature. “Hey, cat!”
And the cat looked at me.
And it screamed like a woman.
Stunned, I ran as fast as my short little legs would take me, making sure that Buttermilk and his cockleburs and ticks were following me.
“Mama!” I screamed.
I called for my mother, and I found her watching the critically acclaimed makeup-tip video by Donna Mills, The Eyes Have It, on the VCR in her bedroom. Mama’s eyes were covered in blue eyeliner as she studied the television screen.
“What?” Mama asked, checking herself in the bedroom mirror and applying a dollop of pink eyeshadow.
“Some kind of animal screamed at me. It screamed, Mama! It screamed like a woman!”
Mother shot over to her bedroom window and looked to the backyard. She saw the animal, now only thirty or forty yards away, and she gasped.
“Sweet Jesus, Susannah! That’s some kind of panther!”
Panthers aren’t native to West Tennessee, all right?
Mama sprinted to the huge cordless phone, pulled up the three-foot-long antennae, and dialed animal control. We personally knew the animal-control guy, Catfish (yes, Skeeter’s stepson). He’d been to our house on several occasions to remove opossums from the crawl space and woodchucks from the front porch.
When Catfish showed up, the animal was gone. As Mama and I frantically described what we’d seen, he let out a hearty laugh of disbelief.
My daddy came home a while later. As Mama and I frantically described what we’d seen, he let out a hearty laugh too.
My mother called twenty-three friends that afternoon. As she frantically described what we’d seen, they all let out hearty laughs.
I called one friend that afternoon. She wasn’t home.
Weeks later, a news report surfaced about a fellow in a neighboring town who was arrested for keeping exotic animals caged on his farm. An emu went missing. And some kind of weird lizard. And a panther. An albino panther.
They never found that albino panther.
And nobody let out a hearty laugh.
During my seventeenth summer, I worked at Ward’s Dry Cleaners in my hometown. It was the worst job ever. They didn’t even allow me a calculator to figure out the tax. Who did I look like? Good Will Hunting?
One afternoon, a guy walked in and casually said, “Hi, I dropped off some pants this morning. I left some marijuana in the pocket.”
Stunned and looking for candid cameras, I muttered, “Um, what?”
“I left a small bag of marijuana in my pants pocket. Would you get it for me?” He smiled.
“Do you just want the pants back?” I asked, confusion covering my face.
“No, just the bag of weed will be fine. Here is my ticket.” He handed the receipt to me.
I hesitantly nodded and walked to the back of the building, the temperature at 345 degrees, and began rummaging through a pile of dirty laundry. I found the pants with instructions to be laundered and heavily starched, and sure enough there was a small bag of dope in the pocket. Looking around for witnesses, I retrieved the drugs and quickly walked back to the front of the store.
The pothead was gone, but standing in his place was a local police officer. I let out a sound that resembled lungs collapsing, and I threw my back against the wall, gripping the bag of marijuana in my hand as the cop and the older lady I worked with looked at me.
“Everything okay, Susannah?” Dry Cleaner Lady asked.
“Sh-sh-sure.” I gulped, contraband hidden in my innocent seventeen-year-old hands.
“That young man said he would be back later,” she replied as she tagged the police officer’s uniform. “Said he left something in his pocket? Did you find it?”
“Uh, yes, ma’am. I got it,” I mumbled as perspiration dripped from my forehead.
“What was it?” Dry Cleaner Lady asked as I locked eyes with the police officer and tightly squeezed the Ziploc bag of drugs.
“Uh . . .” My eyes darted around the room while I tried to conjure up a lie. “Paper. It’s just a note or something. I’ve got it.”
“You can put it back in the office in the lost-and-found pile,” she said, quickly figur
ing the math for the officer’s items.
I was expected to put a bag of weed in the lost-and-found pile?
My boss was in the office reading a newspaper. I shoved the drugs deep into my pocket without him noticing, and I scribbled some lines on a sheet of paper, folded it, and threw it in the small lost-and-found pile of sunglasses and keychains.
Hours later, Pusherman returned.
“Did you find it?” he asked, calm, cool, casual.
“You’ve no idea what I’ve been through! I don’t appreciate it!” I exclaimed as I reached into my pocket and threw the stash of marijuana at him.
He nodded, tucked his drugs in his pocket, and walked out the front door.
I can look back and laugh on it now, but for three hours, at the age of seventeen, I was laundering more than laundry.
I was a dry cleaner drug dealer.
And right about now, my hundred-year-old body will finally get up from my metal lawn chair, walk inside, curl up in a cozy recliner, and take a nap.
Thanks for sitting a spell.
CHAPTER 16
Cancel Your Guilt Trip
I swiped a grape from my hometown grocery store’s produce department when I was about eight or nine. Before the dirty purple sphere made it down my throat, I knew I was destined to burn in hell for stealing. The guilt was so unbearable I would never again go grocery shopping with my mother without remembering my sin. That was the first and last time I ate fruit that couldn’t be validated with a receipt.
I’ve always had a guilty spirit. I felt guilty for big things like lying to my mother about my whereabouts and coming home after curfew. And little things like shoving stuff under my bed instead of putting it in its proper place.
Guilt followed me right into adulthood like a rabid monkey on my back. Every hangover consisted of excessive dry mouth, nausea, and a heaping side of guilt. On the way home from a shopping trip, I would look over at the clutch in my passenger seat that cost more than a ruby-studded suitcase and be overwhelmed with guilt. I felt guilty for bashing my husband in the head with the stainless-steel trashcan when he forgot to take out the garbage. I felt guilty for making Natalie Ann eat cafeteria gopher intestines with her choice of brown or white gravy instead of making her lunch. I felt guilty for making Bennett give up his favorite stuffed animal as punishment for being a Grade-A turd. I felt guilty for feeding my children junk food that contained more chemicals than an aerosol can of body spray. I was no better than Joan Crawford with a closet full of wire hangers.
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