Nights after supper, she took the food left on the table and, instead of wrapping it for another meal, tossed it outside for the birds. “I don’t plan on eating one more sorry leftover ever again,” she told us. Raccoons took up residence beneath our back stoop. I expected Daddy to complain and talk about how money didn’t grow in a garden, but he didn’t say one word.
As if to make up for the reckless wastefulness of Mama, I hoarded things. Silver foil I’d peel off gum wrappers. Pieces of string. Elastic bands. Anything I could get my hands on. I would have saved the songs coming out of the radio if I could have figured a way to draw them from the air. I picked up soda cans in roadside ditches and biked over to the Cash Store to turn them in for the deposit. Every morning I counted the pile of change.
“What’re you saving for?” Mama asked me one day.
“Nothing,” I said. I was rolling nickels into a coin wrapper I’d picked up at First Federal. “Just saving.” She watched while I counted out fifty pennies and slid them into their paper cylinder.
“Oh, baby,” Mama said. “Forget saving. Use it up.” She flung her arms wide and tossed back her head. “Spend it. All of it. Squander it.”
Squander. The word gave me chills. I wanted to yell at my mama that one of us had to be responsible. I was a miser that summer, holding on to everything, not yet knowing that no matter how tight we held on to things, they’d still slip away and there was no way on God’s earth we could prevent it.
On Saturday, when I got to the shop, Raylene had Etta Bird under the dryer and was giving Miss Tilly Pettijohn a shampoo and a roll-up. On the house. Miss Tilly’s husband, Lloyd, died back in the ’50s, and except for a grown son who left town and never came back, she had no relatives. She and Raylene went way back, back to when Lloyd was alive and the Pettijohns had money. Now Miss Tilly went from month to month waiting for Mr. Rollins to deliver her Social Security check. According to Raylene, by the end of the month Miss Tilly reused tea bags so many times that if she asked you to sit and have a cup you had to figure out the date or you’d end up drinking tea so pale and watery it looked like pee.
Lenora was there. She had owned the shop before Raylene and was older than Moses, with fingers bent sideways from arthritis and eyes all filmy. Once or twice a month she liked to come in and do a few perms. “To keep my hand in,” she said, but Raylene said it was because she got lonely and needed to feel useful. “Every living soul needs to feel useful,” Raylene said.
Lenora was giving Pearl Summers a permanent, and the whole place stunk from the solution, one of the worst odors on God’s green earth. With all the dumb inventions people come up with, you’d think someone could figure out a way to make the permanent wave solution smell better. Cinnamon would be good.
The place was abuzz with the comforting hum of women’s voices. Usually I could pick up some information for my book. All I had to do was listen. Like the time Mary Lou Duval said a woman should never get hitched up with a man who wore more jewelry than she did, which made sense to me, so I copied it down. Cora Giles and Effie Bailey were talking about whether or not Bitty Weatherspoon was knocked up by her new boyfriend, but that was nothing I wanted to add to my notebook.
I got out the broom and swept up the clippings from Etta Bird’s cut. Etta was stuck under a dryer revealing her latest revelation to Miss Tilly. Etta was about ninety-two, but she was real peppy and still got around good. And she was always having a revelation of one kind or another. It could run from big things like Jesus appearing in a dream to minor stuff like rain on the way. I swept around the chairs and the edges of the rubber floor mat, taking care to get every gray snip from Etta’s cut so we wouldn’t be tracking them around all day. Then I used the excuse of straightening out the magazines to go out front by the Glamour Day photo. By now I knew every detail: the attractive way the blonde’s hair curled over one cheek and, on the other side, swept back behind an ear to reveal a crystal ear-ring; the way her lipstick matched the feather boa; the precise way in which she held her hand beneath her chin, fingers slightly curled, a pose I had perfected in front of my mirror. I knew every particular by heart. There was nothing about that blonde even Mama could have thought to improve on.
Saturdays were always busy, and I got to shampoo Effie and Cora, which meant the possibility of two more tips to add to the two dollars and thirty-five cents I had managed to hide in Mama’s silver syrup pitcher. The pitcher once belonged to Goody, and before that to her mama. It was real silver and used to be just about my mama’s favorite thing. She’d polished it every Saturday night and showed me how to use a toothbrush to get the engraved part clean. When Mama made us griddle cakes on Sundays, she’d set it out like we were eating in some fancy dining room instead of on a picnic table in the kitchen. Sometimes she used it to hide the money my Uncle Grayson sent her, which was where I got the idea to stash my Glamour Day money there. Two dollars and thirty-five cents. Seventeen and change to go. With luck, Cora would tip me fifty cents. Effie wasn’t any sure bet. She was the kind of demanding customer who drove us crazy and didn’t pay for the privilege.
“I want it big,” she’d tell Raylene during the comb out. “Make it look big.”
“I ain’t no magician,” Raylene complained about Effie. “That woman ain’t got but three hairs on her head and two of them is damaged.”
I rinsed Cora and worked in another dab of shampoo. (Wash, rinse, wash, rinse, then conditioner was how we did it.) I was lost in the pleasure of shampooing and half dreaming— thinking about Spy Reynolds was what I was doing—when Cora interrupted my thoughts.
“Tallie,” she said. “Call Lenora over here. I need her to take a look.”
I sighed, thinking, This is all I need.
The peculiar thing about Lenora was that she knew how to read soap bubbles. She said her mama had done it, too, that the gift ran in her family. Sometimes she’d be shampooing a head of hair and chatting on about how her son, Earl, was thinking of buying a place down at Virginia Beach or about how Earl’s wife, Sophine, a woman Lenora couldn’t abide, had aspirations beyond her place, or about how young Earl was doing up in Charlottesville, where he worked maintenance for the University and fathered such a brood of kids a person’d think they were Catholic, and she would pause right in the middle of a sentence and get this vague look on her face. Her hands would freeze and she’d fix her filmy old eyes on a patch of soap foam in the sink, like she was seeing it and not seeing it at the same time. “You’re having a visitor this weekend,” she’d announce to the woman tilted back under the faucet, who would say why, yes, that was right, she was expecting a second cousin from Richmond.
Lenora saw a whole world in those suds. Women with moles on their faces. Someone crying. People who walked with a limp. Weddings and funerals and money being spent too freely. Once she saw a rabbit in Mrs. Harewood’s soap and told her to slow down, she was taking on too much. “Can’t,” Mrs. Harewood said. “Got too much to do.” And then the next week she’d had a heart attack, which had slowed her down for good.
“Surprised I didn’t see a dove,” Lenora said when she heard the news. Death usually came in the shape of a dove, unless it was violent or tragic and then it was a horse. A heart meant a new friend. Or a bride. Flowers could mean a funeral or wedding; but usually they signified a celebration. Lenora said everyone had the gift—especially women—you just had to be open to it, to pay attention.
“Lenora,” Cora yelled. “Come over here.”
Lenora left off the permanent wave rollers she was putting in Pearl’s hair and walked her arthritic shuffle over to the sink. Just watching her made your knees ache.
“My ruby ring,” Cora said, “the one that belonged to Boyce’s mama. It’s lost.”
Lenora sunk her hands into the helmet of suds and wrung up a handful that she flung into the basin. She stared at it like she was watching TV. I looked, too, but no matter what Lenora said about everyone having the ability, the gift, I just saw ordinary soapsuds.
&n
bsp; “It’s on the bedside table in your spare bedroom,” Lenora declared after a minute.
“I remember now,” Cora said. “I left it there when I was washing windows.”
As if she’d done nothing more amazing than read the lunch menu at Wayland’s Diner, Lenora dried off her hands and went back to rolling Pearl’s hair. I never let Lenora shampoo me. Anything she could see in my hair, I wasn’t wanting to know. It was better not to know. People liked to think it would help, but it wouldn’t. I already knew the past, and there was no preparing for the future. For sure it wouldn’t have made one bit of difference to me if I’d known back during that summer what was waiting ahead for Mama.
All that first month after Mama came back to us, I was edgy. I’d wake up at two or three in the morning, the heat of summer mixing in with the heft of waiting and soaking me through. Some nights I’d go out on the porch, hoping to catch a breeze. I’d open my shirt and let the air bathe me. Like Mama’d noticed, I had grown out. In the past few months I’d developed distinct breasts, and I was starting to have feelings about my body. I’d wrap the night around me and stare into the darkness while some unknown thing hung in the air like a promise, as real as the fireflies that danced and sparked above the grass. I’d never seen a firefly in daylight, but I pictured them like miniature dragonflies. Delicate and nearly transparent.
One morning when she’d been back about three weeks, Mama and I sat on the porch, drinking iced tea and playing gin rummy. A pair of beetles settled on the railing, rear ends hitched. “They’re mating,” Mama said.
“For real?” I said. I must have seen them hitched up like that a hundred times, but I’d never known what they were up to. “What are they?”
“Fireflies.”
Well, that stopped me in my tracks. I couldn’t have been more surprised if she’d told me they were buffalo. It didn’t seem possible that those ordinary brown bugs were what produced the flickering light or that something so common, so utilitarian was capable of producing magic. Mama said we see what we want to see and that most beauty was an illusion anyway. She’d been staring at the beetles when she told me this. “Change,” she said suddenly. “Fireflies signify change.”
I didn’t like the sound of that one bit. “They do?”
“Absolutely. Beetles signify change.” Mama knew all kinds of things like that. Way back, there was Indian blood in Goody’s side of the family and whenever Mama wanted to get Goody’s goat, she’d bring that up. I was hoping this time she’d mistaken the sign. I’d had about as much change as I could handle. But even when I was given a clear indication of what lay ahead, I turned my gaze and looked the other way. Back then I believed it was possible to erase something if you pretended hard enough that it wasn’t happening. In that way, Mama and I were alike.
Some days, Martha Lee came with Mama and me to the creek. While I swam, they’d spread out a blanket and play two-handed canasta and drink gin tonics from a Thermos. The mix of their laughter and cigarette smoke and Coppertone would float out to me.
When I finished swimming, I’d flop on a towel near them and pretend to be asleep, hoping they would forget I was there. I liked to eavesdrop, especially when they talked about men and sex. They’d argue about who was good-looking. Although Martha Lee thought he was overrated, Mama plain adored Elvis. She said that she’d let him put his boots under her bed anytime. Martha Lee said when she found a man whose boots were bigger than hers, then she’d let him stow them under her bed. Goody would have had a heart attack if she could have heard them carrying on. Between them they knew the secrets of womanhood, everything a girl could want to know. Mama knew how to dance, dress pretty, and flirt without looking foolish, and how to stuff a chicken and make biscuits, how to put on makeup and make everyone fall in love with her. Martha Lee knew practical stuff, like how to raise vegetables, drive a stick shift, and care for sick people. I wanted to learn it all.
One afternoon, after I’d practiced the crawl until my legs were limp, I spread my towel near them and fought not to drift off to sleep. The buzz of their words circled me. “ . . . come so close . . . the punishing weight of secrets . . . only regret I didn’t get to see Natalie’s grave . . . thought there’d be plenty of time.” Just before I fell asleep, I heard my name.
Some time later, I woke to their conversation. I kept my breathing steady, feigning sleep.
“ . . . going to tell them?” Martha Lee was saying.
Mama was quiet.
“They’ll have to know sooner or later.”
Mama gave a thin, wispy sigh. “They’ll find out soon enough.”
I forgot how to breathe. They’ll find out soon enough. Find out what? Then I realized it must mean that Mama was going to leave us again. I must have made a noise, because they stopped talking.
After that, I kept watch for the first sign betraying Mama’s intent to leave. I stopped hanging out with the Bettis twins and stayed right at her side. I checked to make sure the gray suitcase stayed empty. Most nights, when everyone was sleeping, I continued to sit on the porch watching homely brown beetles night-altered into something special. Change, they flickered in the dark. Change. I’d concentrate on erasing their message and pray for things to stay the same.
When Raylene closed up at five, I had another dollar to add to my savings. Effie hadn’t tipped me a penny, but Cora was so happy knowing where to find her ring, she slipped me four quarters.
On the way home, I stopped by Simpson’s Cash Store and picked up a couple of pork chops. My plan was to get supper ready, to make something really good. I figured maybe it’d get Daddy back on track. Although I generally stayed away from Halley’s Mill, I even considered riding out to tell him I’d be fixing something special.
The mill was older than any person in town, built back before the Civil War, and it was one of only three working water-powered mills in all of Virginia, a fact my daddy liked to repeat with pride, as if he owned it instead of just working there. When I was younger, I’d go out back in the warehouse and play hide-and-seek between the rows of full sacks, stacked nearly to the ceiling. Or I’d make out the letters on the blackboard that swung overhead by the cash register, listing the things available: laying mash and hog meal. Barley and oats. Cottonseed and peanut hulls. All kinds of flour: corn and wheat and bran. I’d stand on one of the big iron scales—the one with raised letters declaring July 3, 1894, Moydyke & Marmon Co., Indianapolis— until someone came along to weigh me. I loved the sound of the mill, all the whirling of the belts and pulleys and elevators and the chatter of corn falling in the hopper. I liked the way every bit of wood in that place was worn smooth and how you could leave reverse footprints in the flour dust. Sometimes I’d climb up to the second story and stand at the window by the steel waterwheel, listening to the hollow sound of water coming through the run and then the soft, liquid splish, splish, splish of it hitting the cups. And I’d stare at the sparkle of water flicking off in the air like real rhinestones.
Just like Mama knew everything about Natalie Wood and movie-making, my daddy knew everything about that mill. He said milling by water was becoming a lost art. He showed me how to tell which grain was being milled just by the feel of it. Wheat grain was small and smooth. Corn was flat and round and bigger than wheat. Barley was easy: coarse husk. Buckwheat was a three-sided grain. Oats was a husk type. I’d try and try, eyes squeezed tight with concentration while I rolled the meal between my fingers, but no matter how I tried, I could never tell them all apart. My daddy, he’d just rub his thumb over a few grains and tell you right off, never missing.
Used to be I couldn’t get enough of the mill, but about the time I turned twelve and Mama was off chasing her dream, my feelings changed. Once, one of the farmers from out of town found me in the back feeding one of the mill cats and, quicker than you can imagine, he opened the front of his overalls and exposed his pale, wrinkled thing that made me want to puke-puke-puke. Sure wasn’t nothing to be so proud of, is what I wished I’d told him. And a fe
w days after that, I saw a rat as big as a small-sized dog. After that I stopped spending time at the mill. And Daddy began spending more time at CC’s.
For a long time, when Mama first came back from L.A., he stayed clear of CC’s and I had hopes this good habit would stick, but after she left us, he started up again. At first I felt alone, like a real orphan. The only thing worse would have been to live with Goody in Florida. After my granddaddy died, Goody sold the house that had been in her family for three generations, moved south, and took up golf. She announced to anyone who’d listen that she lived in a “gated community,” like this was a place to be proud of instead of sounding like some sort of prison. And wouldn’t you know, the year Mama left us for good, Goody started her campaign to have me move there with her.
“We can’t have Natasha staying here with you,” I heard her tell my daddy. “She’ll be running wild in no time and turn up pregnant.” She said this like she was privy to special knowledge, like one of Etta Bird’s revelations, but the only thing it proved was how little she knew about me.
My daddy stood right up to her and said I’d be staying with him right where I belonged thank you anyway. He made it sound like we were a team. Even if it didn’t exactly work out that way, staying with him was better than any gated community in Florida with Goody, who played golf and wore gardening gloves all the time to protect her hands and spent the rest of her time warning people not to be getting too big for their britches or go getting a swelled head, which pretty much took care of both ends.
Leaving Eden Page 5