Her Own Place

by Dori Sanders

  Mae Lee never came out and said it, but she didn’t really care too much for the overrated silver years of retirement. Yes, she was proud of her children, pleased that they had been well educated and held down good jobs. But there was an emptiness in her life. She wondered sometimes what it might have been like if Jeff Barnes hadn’t left her, what kind of life they might have had together. She had no doubt whatsoever that he would have loved his children and would have been pleased over how well they had turned out.

  Still, the decision to move to town had been a good one. So many of her old friends lived nearby now. The chairs on her front porch never remained empty for long. As soon as it was shaded from the summer’s hot sun, Mae Lee would leave the air-conditioned comfort of her living room and sit out there, her very presence an open invitation to the neighbors, her porch a welcome mat. Through idle conversation spiced with gossip they reviewed the events of the day, and the years that brushed their lives, exposing and hiding faults as if they were removing layers of paint from old furniture or doing a touch-up job on the town.

  “Poor Clairene’s troubled again, Mae Lee,” Ellabelle announced sadly one day even before she climbed the steps.

  “How come you say that Clairene’s troubled?” Mae Lee asked. She didn’t look up, just kept on shelling peas.

  “Can’t you hear her? She’s singing ‘Amazing Grace’ again.” Ellabelle climbed the steps. “Get me a bowl, and I’ll help you shell peas.” She pulled a handful from a big brown paper bag. “You must be having the preacher for supper tonight.”

  “No, just me.”

  “It’s enough for three families.”

  “I’ll put what’s left over in the freezer.”

  Ellabelle lifted her skirt to wedge a pot between her fat thighs.

  “For goodness’ sake, woman,” Mae Lee fussed, “pull your dress down! You might excite somebody. As if it were possible,” she added.

  Ellabelle grunted, “Huh, it’s possible all right, and that’s exactly what I want to do, or run ‘em crazy, one. Just might snare me an old nighthawk. He’ll be good for the night and can fly off in the morning. This old tired body could stand a little tune-up. My engine parts have been neglected too long.”

  “Hush up,” Mae Lee laughed. “You are going to mess around and start talking dirty. With the state of mind you’re in, it wouldn’t be safe for old man Sheets Cannon to walk by.”

  Ellabelle grunted. “I know you don’t mean Sheets. My body engine parts are not that much in need of repair. Poor Cannon was born troubled. His mama had to be also, to have a last name like Mills and then turn around and name her son Cannon. How could he escape being called Sheets? Especially the way he keeps his head tore up. Poor thing, he’s always three sheets in the wind.”

  Mae Lee laughed. “I guess it’s better than being called Pillow Case or Towels. They say he was fired last week from the textile mill where he was working.”

  “I thought he retired when he was sixty-five.”

  “He did, Ellabelle. He was just doing odd jobs part-time. They say when he got his walking papers he asked to speak to the head man to thank him for being able to work there for so many years. Well sir, they said, Sheets took off his cap and sort of bowed, ‘I want to thank you, sir, want to thank your kinfolk, but most of all I want to thank your mother for doing something nobody else has ever done, and that’s birth a SOB like you!’ Then the tipsy fool started singing, ‘What you gonna do, when the river go dry . . . sit on the bank and watch the catfish die . . .’ and then he truck-danced out of the office.”

  Ellabelle laughed until she cried, then she took off her glasses and lifted the edge of her wide skirt to wipe the tears from her eyes.

  “There you go again,” said Mae Lee. They laughed some more. She grew serious. “At least while he lives with his sister he won’t go hungry for something good to eat. Sheets’s sister is a good cook. Cooked for years for some of the richest people in Rising Ridge.”

  “Was a good cook,” Ellabelle corrected. “She’s getting old now. Last year she forgot to remove the plastic bag from the inside of her Thanksgiving turkey. Poor thing. She just wasn’t at herself that day. She’s a good woman.” She glanced at the early summer’s sky. “Before you-know it we will be hearing the honking Canadian geese streaking across the skies. My daddy said it was going to be a cold, cold winter if they formed letters when flying. For me they spell ‘almost turkey time.’”

  Mae Lee reached for more peas. “How can you think that far ahead? It’s after mid-October when they fly through.”

  “These peas are making me hungry, that’s how.”

  After they’d cooked and eaten a Sunday dinner on a weekday they returned to the front porch.

  Mae Lee took a long sip of iced tea. “I swear this is my last glass.” She swallowed hard. “We got to stop eating so much. We’re pushing our bodies way out of shape. Did you see Janet Dalton’s fancy picture in the paper today? She sure looked good.”

  “I would too,” Ellabelle pined, “if I had her money. She probably uses what my daughter said most of Them use nowadays, something I think she said called Night Repair. She works at the cosmetic counter in Dillard’s department store, you know. According to my daughter, a little bottle no bigger than my thumb is very expensive!”

  “If it’s the size of your thumb, honey, it’s a pretty good-sized bottle,” Mae Lee chuckled.

  “Look who’s talking, child, you must still be looking at your body in your high school mirror.”

  Mae Lee laughed. “It’s pitiful the way we’ve let ourselves go. Maybe we need some of that night cream.”

  “A lot of us widows need it, especially poor old Miss Austin who runs the jewelry store on Main Street. For all I know she might be using it. If the stuff does work, its repair job sure doesn’t last, because by daybreak it’s broken down and needs to be fixed all over again.” Ellabelle shook her head.

  “I almost hate to go in her store anymore,” Mae Lee said. “She is so anxious to find a friend, before she even waits on her customers she’ll ask, ‘Do you know of any good unmarried men around?’ I guess she’s teasing, though.”

  Ellabelle poured iced tea from a pitcher. “Like hell she is. I was in there to get a battery for my watch and with my own ears I heard her tell a customer that she’d heard that old Clay Lewis had started taking some high-powered pep pills, so she said, ‘I called up Mr. Clay Lewis one evening, and I said to him on the telephone, come on over. I’m a-sitting here all alone with nothing on but my TV.’”

  “Poor thing, she’s still searching for love. The likelihood of finding it, though, is about as good as a dry dandelion flower staying on its stem during a windstorm,” Mae Lee said sadly.

  Clairene’s singing was slicing through the still night air again, her voice clear and mournful: “. . . I once was lost, but now I’m found . . .”

  They listened, and from a distance quietly shared her sadness.

  Ellabelle wiped away tears. “Lord, Lord, Clairene can sing.”

  She’d hardly finished speaking when Clairene’s husband, Joshua, slowly drove by, his arm in the open car window. From a radio turned up too loud for a man his age, a mellow voice offered the blues. She watched him snapping his fingers to the beat.

  Mae Lee shook her head sadly. “Poor Clairene, I’ll bet her old man has gone and overbit too big a chew of tobacco again. She’s going to have to sing more than ‘Amazing Grace’ to hang on to that big new white Lincoln he’s tooling around in all over town.”

  “I don’t know how I even have time to fill my head with someone else’s problems,” Ellabelle said, “I’m up against so much. My children are putting me through right much now. You got good children, Mae Lee.” Ellabelle seemed really sad. “Guess it does no good to talk about it, though.”

  “Children always seem to offer some problems,” Mae Lee mused. “I heard my Taylor’s spoiled wife Bettina threatened to pack up and go back to her mother’s.” Mae Lee drew a deep breath. “I am ca
reful not to interfere with my daughter-in-law and my grandchildren. The only problem, to tell the truth, that I’d have with Bettina leaving is that she’d soon be running right back to my son. Taylor is not only a fine schoolteacher, he’s a fine husband!”

  Mae Lee softly fingered the pin on her dress. A découpage photo of a grinning little boy, her grandson, Dallace’s child, lay enshrined in a pseudoantique cameo pin wreathed in tiny plastic pearls. A printed nametag was never necessary for Mae Lee. The picture of her grandson was her identity, her reason for being. Mae Lee was the grandmother of Tread Wallace.

  Mae Lee offered no apology for singling out her grandson for extra praise. He was the firstborn male of her grandchildren, not to mention being very special besides. She thought of the times when, as a youngster, he would beg and cry to come stay with her, beg and cry to not have to leave. She loved his little sister Shella, too, but disapproved of the way she was being raised. She was a spoiled brat. “She is a precocious little girl,” her daughter Dallace had tried to explain. Her daughter may have had a lot of learning to be able to become Dr. Wallace, Mae Lee thought, but she sure raised a rotten kid in the process.

  Unlike Ellabelle, Mae Lee had not used her tears for Clairene’s singing. She needed them now. “My grandson,” she moaned softly, cupping her hand over his picture, “my fine baby boy. He’s got an earring in his ear. An earring. And you know something, his mama is to blame. Yes, my daughter Dallace is at fault.”

  “For heaven’s sake, Mae Lee, the boy is almost fourteen years old. You know how these teenagers go out for these stylish fads,” said Ellabelle.

  “Style? You know deep down in your heart what people think.”

  “People don’t think nothing if it’s in their left ear.”

  “All I know is for the first and only time in my entire life, I’m not sorry that my mama is dead. I never believed I would or could ever say this, but I know if my mama wasn’t dead, this would kill her. Would kill her for sure.”

  “Mae Lee, I’m gonna tell you like they do on TV—‘You can see what it’s doing to someone else, but you can’t see what it’s doing to you.’ Let it go. Listen to me, somebody who knows.”

  Mae Lee looked at her friend. She believed Ellabelle remembered everything she’d seen and heard on TV. But she couldn’t always put too much stock in some things she had to say. How could she? There is not much there for a woman who answers when asked if she has a middle initial, “I don’t know whether I have one or not. I have a middle name, though. Maybe you could use it instead.” It seemed Ellabelle’s chest of knowledge was filled entirely with what she’d learned from watching television shows.

  For a few moments, Mae Lee was lost in thought. Indeed, she was a little disturbed that she could blame her daughter, with all the unhappiness she was going through. Dallace was struggling under a load of problems too heavy for her to face alone at her age. She knew all too well how much Dallace needed her counsel—far and beyond what she even realized. It didn’t matter that Dallace was over forty now; in the mothering department there are no age limits.

  She had been startled, but not overly saddened, by her daughter’s decision to divorce her husband. When Dallace told her about the child’s picture she’d accidentally found in her husband’s wallet, Mae Lee wished she’d been more understanding, more so than her mama, Vergie, had been with her. But she’d been angry, angry that her daughter in all her years of marriage had considered herself too proper and high-class to look through her husband’s wallet every now and then. That was just one more form of the night work a wife had to perform. All she had to do was not have a headache, and she would be sure of a free chance to search his pockets and wallet when he fell asleep. Her mama had taught her all those kind of things long ago. But back then, daughters listened to their mamas.

  Even if she had told her, Mae Lee didn’t believe her daughter would have listened. Her guarded daughter was, after all, Dr. Dallace Wallace, a professional person who claimed she always respected a person’s privacy. So she’d found the picture only when her husband asked her to hand him his wallet and it fell out, a picture of a little boy whose Asian heritage could not be denied, nor could it disguise the genes of her husband.

  When she confronted him, he readily admitted that, yes, that was his son. Mae Lee thought of her grandchildren, the mental image of the missing-tooth smile of her pretty, ponytailed granddaughter, Shella, and the impish grin of her little Tread, with his second-growth of buckteeth, flashed before her.

  Lately Mae Lee’s daughters had always been reminding her that her thinking was not on the “same page” as theirs. Well, in that case she wanted to tell her daughters that on her “page,” and on the same for her friends, the child was a “you-know-what.” In her eyes the father was no longer married to her daughter. As far as she was concerned, her daughter’s marriage had ended when her husband slept outside his marriage bed. This is the eighties, she wanted to say; be a smart young woman.

  She wanted personally to hurt her son-in-law for what he’d said to her daughter Dallace about the braces that were so badly needed for his son Tread’s teeth. He had said that the money spent on the outside son was better served. After all, he didn’t want to alter their son’s looks; “He’s a spitting image of his old man,” he had laughed, adding with a roguish wink, “hell have some pretty young thing as wild over him as you are over me.”

  It pained her that in recent years her precious daughter had been hanging on to such worthless trash. Changing to crazy hairstyles, spreading layers of makeup on her face, as if she were competing with a seven-layer pineapple cake, and of course there were the miniskirts. A wife trying to force a chaser of miniskirted females to turn around and chase her. Dallace’s saving grace was her legs; she had great legs, legs like her mama’s.

  Poor Dallace. It didn’t matter that she had “doctor” before her name, or “Ph.D.” after it, or wherever they put it. She was a pitiful woman. Dallace had been stricken with a “mother’s affliction,” thorns in a mother’s side. Mae Lee wanted so desperately to gather her child and grandchildren to her side, and give them the down-home grandma comforts, sunshine-fresh ironed sheets that smelled of the fragrant lilac talcum powder she always sprinkled on mattress covers; her home cooking; long hours on the front porch.

  Ellabelle offered more advice. “Remember, when we were coming along we did plenty, plenty of stuff that would have worried our parents to death, but we turned out all right.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Mae Lee retorted. But then she relented. “It’s true,” she finally agreed. “But for the most part they didn’t know about it. I wonder which is better, to know or not to know? I think not knowing keeps your hair black longer.”

  “Or else, not allow a gray hair in the county and do like you’re doing, buying out the drugstore to cover the gray,” laughed Ellabelle. She slapped her arm; a whining mosquito raised itself. “These mean old boogers are starting to act nasty. They say only the females bite. That figures. Guess I’ll head home and turn in. Oh, Lordy,” she groaned, “I can tell I’m getting old. I’m starting to get pains where I didn’t even know I had a place.”

  “You’re going to end up on a kidney machine if you don’t start drinking more water. The only liquid you get comes from a can.”

  “How do you know that all I drink is soft drinks?”

  “It’s all I ever see you drink. I don’t believe you can swallow water. You even take your blood pressure pills with Pepsi.”

  “Well,” Ellabelle said, “you won’t have to worry about it no more. I’ll never bring my cans of soda again. Not as long as I live on the face of this earth. You are sitting here talking behind my back. I can’t stand that.”

  “Ellabelle, we are face to face,” Mae Lee reminded her.

  When they finished laughing, Ellabelle said, “I’ve been aiming to tell you I saw Fred Rivers’s widow the other day. She’s nothing but skin and bones. Going down fast, she’s going to worry herself to death over.
. . .” Her voice trailed off. “I know where we all need to take our problems. I know exactly where I’m taking mine.”

  Mae Lee grunted, thinking, if you’re planning on taking them to the Lord tonight, be prepared to wait a spell for help. Because with just the calls coming in from Rising Ridge alone, I don’t think he could handle them, even with “call waiting.”

  Part IV

  : 11 :

  One spring afternoon in 1987, Mae Lee’s son, Taylor, made her aware that there was a world beyond her front porch.

  Having suffered a badly wounded knee and leg during the war, he was eternally grateful for hospital volunteers, and now he urged her to make the decision to volunteer down at the hospital.

  “Mama,” he coaxed, “you need to get out and do things. You’re too intelligent to sit around all day and do nothing worthwhile. If you aren’t careful, you are going to front-porch yourself to death.”

  “Strange, my girls don’t feel I’m all that intelligent.”

  “What do they know?”

  “They know I wouldn’t fit in with all the white ladies down there. That’s what they know.”

  Mae Lee thought of the countless hours when she did nothing but while away the afternoons on her front porch, the hours of meaningless talk with Ellabelle that all too often turned to mean gossiping. Maybe that was why she was beginning to think her mind was slipping away. Maybe since she wasn’t using it, the old mind may have thought she didn’t need it anymore. Maybe she did have too much free time to think and worry. She’d always known that a person should keep busy.

  She smoothed a few strands of hair back from her forehead and fanned her face a little. “I’ve never done anything like that before, son. Besides, I don’t know any of the ladies down at the hospital,” she said.

  “That’s the least that should hold you back, Mama. You’ve never met a stranger in your life,” Taylor said.

  Mae Lee shook her head. “I don’t know if it would work for me. It would sort of be like moving next door to Mrs. Grant, in that rich neighborhood she lives in.”