Southern Discomfort

by Tena Clark

  Daddy and Shirley had been living together for most of the several years since I had graduated from college, and she had been, much to my sisters’ and my revulsion, a near-constant, and I gotta say, somewhat smug presence on Daddy’s arm.

  “Well, why’d she leave?” I asked, thrilled that she had, but also alarmed at the anxiety her leaving had caused Daddy.

  “Said as a good Christian woman, she couldn’t go on livin’ together in sin, that I’d have to marry her. I tried to tell her I was done with g-g-g-gettin’ married but that I’d be sure to take care of her, and that’s when she s-s-s-stormed out. And now, she won’t even t-t-take my calls.” He looked at me, embarrassed that he’d repeated himself. “I need you to c-c-c-call her for me. Will ya do that, T-T-Tena Rix?”

  Now it was my turn to pace the floor. I was torn between elation that Shirley might finally be out of our lives and the grim reality that perhaps he needed her, and worse, even loved her. Like Mama, he too was afraid of living alone. Watching his utter despair as he sank deeper into the chair, I realized that as much as I would never warm to Shirley, he had.

  I picked up the phone and dialed the number he gave me.

  “Shirley, it’s Tena. Daddy’s here and he’s a wreck. He asks if you’ll just please give him another chance, he’s sure y’all can work it out. He doesn’t want to lose you.”

  Of course, she agreed to talk to him. She’d won. I handed the phone to Daddy and left the room. When I came back they were engaged, and within weeks they flew to Vegas and got married.

  That girl wasted no time. Besides, she knew the truth about Daddy and that his so-called aversion to marriage was pure talk. And she was right. Daddy had gone through two marriages since Mama, both of which ended in divorce. Then came wife number three, Carolyn. She was a piece of work, but a beautiful one, almost a cross between Connie Francis and Elizabeth Taylor. But she could also be batshit crazy, and after one too many wild rampages, the last involving waving a gun around the Waynesboro Country Club where Daddy was entertaining, he decided enough was enough. When Carolyn learned he was filing divorce papers, she stole his office key, got some of her brawny brothers, a furniture dolly, and a pickup truck and drove to Daddy’s office in the dead of night. Once in, she stole file cabinets full of his oil and gas leases, millions of dollars’ worth. She could be crazy but, damn, she was smart. She called Daddy in the morning, a few minutes after she knew he would have arrived at his office.

  “Well good morning, Lamar. I hear you’re missing something?”

  After he screamed and yelled and cursed, she continued, dead calm.

  “You write me a check for one hundred thousand dollars and I’ll bring them back. Otherwise, I have a cigarette lighter right here. Your choice. One hundred grand, or I torch them. All.”

  Because this was in the mid-1970s, before the days of digital files and computer storage, those paper leases were his only proof of ownership. Without them, he had nothing.

  He paid the $100,000, which in those days was real money (about $700,000 in today’s dollars).

  Shirley, having heard all the stories, knew Daddy would cave. And he did, and settled into his fourth and final marriage.

  Meanwhile, I remained decidedly single. Oh, sure, I dated a lot of women and even fell in love with a few of them, but I always moved on before they could. As usual, I made sure I was the one who decided when “it was over.”

  And then just as I hit my thirties in 1983, I met Dell, the woman I would marry. She was smart and sassy and we made each other laugh. And, she was from Mississippi. Within just a few months of dating I asked her to marry me, and she accepted.

  Telling Mama was another story. Dell and I drove to Waynesboro, and I wasn’t as nervous as I would have been back in her drinking days. At least now I didn’t have to fear that she’d pull a loaded .38 out of her purse. Still, I knew it wouldn’t be easy for her to hear.

  “Well, bless your hearts,” Mama said, looking stunned from where she sat in her recliner. She reached out and gave Dell’s knee a little pat pat pat. “Congratulations, of course,” she added. She was eerily calm.

  “Thanks, Mama, for being so supportive,” I said, unsure of what to make of her reaction.

  She smiled and refilled Dell’s glass with sweet tea from a pitcher on the coffee table. A horn honked outside. Daddy had come by to take me for one of his rides.

  “Okay, then. Dell, do you mind sittin’ with Mama while I take a little ride with Daddy?”

  I knew Dell wanted a chance to get to know my mother a bit, so she readily agreed and off I went, elated. At least one roadblock had been passed, actually cleared with flying colors. But when I walked back into the house an hour later, Dell looked pale and shaken.

  When Dell and I were alone in the car driving to Georgia’s for dinner, I asked her what the hell had happened.

  “Your mother told me to run.”

  “She said what?” I asked, pulling the car to the side of the road so I wouldn’t drive us into a ditch.

  “She pretty much talked nonstop from the minute you walked out the door until you returned. She told me that you were just like your daddy. I believe the words she used were ‘the spittin’ image of Lamar Clark, and she’s gonna screw around on you the way her daddy done to me.’ ”

  “You gotta be shittin’ me,” I muttered. “My own mama?”

  “Oh, I’m not done,” Dell said.

  Uh-oh. I kept my eyes straight ahead, my hands clutching the steering wheel. Dell continued.

  “She said, and I quote, ‘You’d be better off taking that ring off right now and runnin’ in the opposite direction.’ ”

  I confronted my mother the next day. But if I had thought I’d get an apology out of her, I was wrong.

  “Baby, I was just tellin’ that poor woman the truth,” she said, sitting in her recliner, her feet crossed at the ankles, her poodle Bubba perched between her shins, and her eyes on her crossword puzzle.

  “Mama! How can you say such a thing?”

  She looked up at me then, her eyebrows arched ever so slightly above her glasses.

  “You are just like your daddy. You change girlfriends like you do your drawers.”

  “Mama!”

  “Listen, baby, I really, really like your Dell, she seems sweet. I don’t want to see her hurt,” she said matter-of-factly, filling in a word on the puzzle.

  “That’s a terrible thing to say! I’ve never been married. How do you know I’m not ready to settle down?”

  She looked at me with her sly smile, all too wise for my liking, and said, “Yeah, well, we’ll see.” Then she went back to her puzzle.

  “My Lord, Mama. Someday I’m going to have to write a book about all this insanity. But I don’t think anyone will believe that my own mama told my fiancée to hightail it down the road she came in on!”

  She looked up at me, dead serious.

  “That’s fine, you write that book, but just wait until I’m dead. You promise?”

  I promised. Then we both laughed and hugged goodbye. “I’m gonna prove you wrong, Mama,” I said.

  “Aloha, baby,” she said.

  Next up was introducing Dell to my sisters, all of whom gave her hugs and little pats on the back and “Bless your heart”s, while shocked that I’d actually put a ring on someone’s finger, never mind another woman’s. Finally, I took her to meet Virgie.

  “She’s my second mama” was all I really needed to tell Dell.

  Virgie gave her one of her wraparound hugs and rare smiles.

  “Now, yo take care of my baby girl, ya hear?” she said to Dell, who promised she would.

  “You’ll come out to visit us in California, won’t you, Virgie?” I asked, hoping I’d be able to show her the Pacific Ocean when Dell and I moved to the West Coast in the coming weeks.

  Virgie just laughed.

  “Uh-uh, no I’s ain’t! I’s ain’t going out there where that ground’s gonna open up and suck me in. I’s gonna stay right her
e where my feets be on the ground!”

  And that’s exactly what she did, never once getting onto an airplane in her entire life, and never going much farther from Waynesboro than her trips with me to Mobile. The one exception she made to her overall travel ban was driving with Mama to my new apartments during my nomadic early years in order to help “set me up.” Mama, true to form back then, would pull up to the curb in front of my building in a squeal of tires, often jumping the curb before fully stopping the car. And as she had on so many mornings driving to work with Beulah Mae, Virgie would stumble out, scared to death, having once again been forced to ride shotgun with a drunk.

  While Virgie had continued to work for Mama that one day a week, Daddy had fired Virgie a couple of years earlier, soon after he married Shirley. From the day they had married, Shirley tried to wipe everything from Daddy’s life that even suggested a connection to the first Mrs. Lamar Clark. Starting with Virgie.

  When I had learned of it I was horrified.

  “Well, Shirley s-s-says she stole some j-j-j-jewelry,” Daddy said.

  My body went cold as rage flooded through me. I couldn’t be sure whether Shirley had somehow convinced herself that Virgie would steal, but I was furious that Daddy had.

  “Shirley’s wanted to get rid of Virgie since the day you married, you know that! Daddy, you look at me and tell me you believe Virgie could steal something.”

  He couldn’t. Fumbling to light a cigarette as he avoided my eyes, he said, “Well, now, you know you can’t t-t-trust anybody. I been t-t-telling you that your whole life.”

  “You know Virgie wouldn’t steal the peel off an orange!”

  “Well, people change” was all he would say.

  “Shame on you, Daddy. To accuse Virgie of something like this, as long as she’s been with us, and taken care of me, and you? Shame on you!”

  But he wouldn’t budge. While he assured me he wouldn’t let Virgie starve, he nonetheless wouldn’t keep her on. Shirley was in charge, and Virgie never worked for him again. It’s a sin I never quite forgave Shirley for.

  * * *

  Soon after we returned from our “tell the family” trip to Waynesboro, Dell and I were married in the Methodist Church by perhaps Nashville’s only progressive minister. Although gay marriage was still not legal in the eyes of the government, it was just fine in the eyes of the Methodist Church, at least this one in Nashville.

  We then packed up our house in Nashville and drove two thousand miles to Los Angeles, taking our time and treating ourselves to a little vacation.

  Along with knowing I wanted to marry Dell, I also knew I wanted to have a child with her. But it was 1984 and artificial insemination, for a gay couple no less, was unheard of. In fact, we were told by a list of specialists and attorneys that it wasn’t possible, physically or legally. Once again, not willing to take anyone else’s “No, it can’t be done” for an answer, I persisted. It took two years to find our donor, and Dell’s and my daughter, Cody, was born in 1986, on our first try.

  It would not be an exaggeration to say Cody is the purest gift of my life, but then again, perhaps every mother has that reaction to her child. Every mother should. While my mama was the bravest person I’d ever known, and Virgie was the kindest, and Georgia was the steadiest, Cody was the purest. She came without any conditions, complications, or strings. When she was handed to me in the delivery room, wrapped tight in the blue-and-pink-striped blanket, I realized finally and forever that God did exist, because how else was I able to feel such immediate, unconditional love? It was unearthly and yet solid and real. It was—and is—as eternal as the wind and the stars and the sun.

  I thrived as a mother, but not so much as a partner. While Mama was wrong about my not being able to be faithful to Dell while I was with her, when the relationship eventually soured and we parted, I already had my eyes on somebody else. Just like my daddy, I thought.

  Chapter Thirty

  * * *

  While my personal life struggled to find its moorings, my professional life soared. I was never without writing and production work, and over the years I collaborated with a dream list of artists, from writer Maya Angelou to recording stars Aretha Franklin, Patti LaBelle, Gladys Knight, Natalie Cole, Chaka Khan, and Dionne Warwick, with whom I had my first hit, Reservations for Two.

  Through the years and my successes and failures in work and love, I constantly checked in on my family back in Waynesboro, and flew home as often as possible—to eat hush puppies and fried chicken and coleslaw with my sisters, ride shotgun with Daddy, who still loved to take me on his errands around town, help Mama with her crossword puzzles, and sip sweet tea on Virgie’s front porch. And I took Cody on just about every trip with me. I wanted her to know this essential part of who I was and, by extension, who she was.

  When Cody was about a year old, I flew home and took her over to meet Virgie. As she always had with babies, any baby, Virgie took my daughter and cradled her close to her bosom, as if absorbing her soul through the layers of clothes and skin. She sat down on the porch swing and hummed one of her soft hymns while Cody looked up at her with alert, wondering eyes.

  “Virgie, aren’t you going to ask me how I got Cody?” I asked.

  Virgie smiled down at her, taking a wisp of Cody’s fine, curly hair and twisting it loosely around her arthritic finger.

  “Nope. Don’t matter to me how you gots yo’ baby. Only thing that matters is she yo’s.”

  And that was all she ever said about it.

  Several months later, when I once again flew home and drove over to see Virgie, my heart almost stopped in my chest. Mama had warned me that Virgie wasn’t feeling well, but I wasn’t prepared when I saw the shrunken version of the woman I loved so much, bent in half and oddly pale underneath her dark skin. She told me she had “the cancer” in one of her breasts, but that the doctors said there was nothing to be done. And besides, even if there was, they couldn’t afford it.

  “Ain’t no reason to pay for all that,” she said, “just let it be. The Lord must be ready for me, and I’s just fine.”

  After tucking Cody under a blanket on the couch for a nap, I followed Cindy to the front porch.

  “Tumor’s the size of a grapefruit, pokes right out of her breast like a stalk of cauliflower,” Cindy said, her hand rising to her own breast. “Doctors say even if they took it out, there’s no cure. And even with Medicare, the treatments would cost well into the thousands.” She shook her head miserably. “We just don’t got it.”

  “Well, I do,” I said.

  For years I had tried to buy Virgie the most basic of modern comforts—a full-size refrigerator, an air conditioner, indoor plumbing—and she had always refused. “I’s just fine,” she’d always say. “Don’t be needin’ nothin’.” But this time, finally, she agreed to let me pay for something. We all hoped that something would be her life.

  Cindy believed that it was the years Virgie spent bent over buckets of chemicals and poisons keeping white people’s houses clean that had filled her body with toxins. She said there was one time Virgie had been so determined to clean a fireplace chimney, she mixed bleach and ammonia, and had had to run for her life out of the house, gasping and choking for air.

  Within a few days of my making the arrangements, Virgie had a radical mastectomy, removing the entire breast, several lymph nodes, and a huge swath of surrounding skin and tissue in her armpit and upper arm.

  As was her nature, as soon as her chest drains were pulled and the deepest of the incisions were healed, she went straight back to work. As much as I pleaded with her to slow down, not to worry for a second about the money because I would never accept a penny even if she tried, she wouldn’t listen. Besides her family, work was the only thing she felt she had any control over, the only thing that had ever given her a measure of security and purpose. She wasn’t about to let it go now. So back to work she went, only to relapse within a few short months. Because she’d so recently gone through chemotherapy after t
he mastectomy, the only treatment option was radiation, and it took what was left of her lifeblood, burning her from the inside out.

  As if all of that were not enough to kill her, she lost her beloved Jack. She was still weak from the radiation when he went in for surgery on his leg, and he died on the operating table. The doctors said that once they cut into him, they realized they had opened a Pandora’s box of various undetected and undiagnosed infections and tumors harbored in poor old Jack’s body. Cindy says as bad as the cancer was, losing Jack was what finally took Virgie’s will to live.

  In September of 1989, I returned to Waynesboro to spend what time I could with Virgie. When I got to her house, she was wearing a new wig, a crown of little white curls. Even her children, Cindy in particular, ribbed her about it.

  “Mama, you’s look just like a little ole white woman in that thang!”

  Virgie’s answer was typical: “It be juss fine fo’ me. Y’all leaves me alone, now, heah?”

  When I joined the chorus, she finally gave in and let Mama and me drive her to Laurel to buy a proper wig. The three of us spent the day laughing and gossiping; we even persuaded Virgie to let us take her to lunch. After our disastrous experience at Petty’s, which seemed like a lifetime ago, I rarely suggested going out for lunch together. But the incident at Petty’s was over twenty years earlier, and even Virgie could see that the world was changing, even in Mississippi.

  When we dropped her back in Hiwannee, Cindy came out to the car to help her mother into the house.

  “Well there now, you’s be lookin’ like my mama again,” she said, giving Virgie a big hug, “not some ole white lady from Jackson!”

  I thought I saw a little smile on Virgie’s face as she shuffled through the front door. “Y’all leave me alone, now.”

  Before I returned to Los Angeles, I went over to Virgie’s house and found her watching TV on the couch, its ripped black Naugahyde held together with duct tape, tinfoil wrapped around the rabbit ears on the black-and-white TV, and a noisy fan clanking in the window. I took her hand, the hand that had made me feel safe and comforted through all those years, and asked if there was anything she needed, anything I could get her. She said, no, she was “Juss fine.”