Take her to Waffle House and she’s an entirely different woman. Loose jointed and laughing, hee-hawing and even accepting toothpicks after the meal. God forbid.
Mama held her hands up, gazing at the manicured nails and rolled her head around, delivering her “Whatever are you going to do with your mama?” pose. She fluttered her fingers in a flirty goodbye wave, eased into the Town Car and slammed the door. I watched her fiddling with buttons and mirrors, rummaging around in the car’s interior. It seemed to take her forever to crank the shimmering Lincoln and steer out onto the road. She reminded me of those women who seem to enjoy wasting half a day exiting a parking place while others grew restless waiting a full five minutes just to be 15 feet closer to the store’s front doors.
***
Being on my own for the first time in so many years felt scary, and the last thing I needed to add to the mix right now was a man. Why is it some women seem to think a man is the best cure since the polio vaccine?
Women in my shoes, not that there are many, need friends, jobs and handlebars to the future. They need to rebuild, one small success at a time. They certainly don’t need to hear the line of b.s. my doctor loved to spew.
“You know, Prudy, if you pick poorly once, statistically you’ll do the same thing,“ my therapist was fond of saying repeatedly.
“I think that’s a load, if you’ll forgive my saying so,” I told her. “I’m just not gonna buy it. To think I can’t learn from a mistake is dooming me forever to live a life with no-goods and ne’er-do-wells.”
“That’s what’ll happen if you can’t or simply choose not to remember what you suffered on that awful day.”
She was as upset as the other three therapists I’d endured that I couldn’t piece together most of the details about the afternoon my ex tried to kill me with his church van and mini screwdrivers as he roared into the BI-LO parking lot like some kind of possessed Dale Earnhardt. But I see no point in reliving a death scene. None whatsoever, I told her, unless you’re one of those freaks who must wallow night and day in the drama. I was glad I didn’t remember everything. What I did remember was enough when combined with all that gruesome testimony, courtesy of on-the-scene BI-LO shoppers and gawkers.
“You need to remember what it feels like when death rings a doorbell,” the counselor had said the last time I sat in her office.
“Some of us don’t want to answer such a doorbell,” I said.
“You aren’t going to progress until you allow the full memories,” she warned in a somber tone, thumping at one of her huge front teeth, freshly capped and so white I couldn’t look at them.
“I’d rather find someone ten years my junior and take him to a pink motel for an afternoon,” I said, knowing this wasn’t nice. “Look, I know you mean well and I realize you’re a lot smarter when it comes to the mind than I am, though I do have a bachelor’s in psychology for what it’s worth. The truth is, my mama’s making me do this therapy stuff when I think shopping might help more.”
She shook her head and sucked at those teeth, making sounds like hungry seagulls. “That’s called temporary distraction.”
Her body tightened and she held her arms to keep them from reaching for those new teeth her lips had trouble stretching to cover. She was growing weary of hearing this. She did what she always did when I wore her down and she ran out of answers. She removed a book from her shelf, another self-help book, this one called Claim your Rage, which I took with a smile and would never touch except to return by mail.
“Don’t worry,” she said, pretending not to glance at one of her hidden clocks. She took out her receipt book. “It will happen for you when you’re ready. You’ve got a long way to go, Prudy. I’m really beginning to get worried about many things I’m seeing. Trouble’s coming if you can’t face that day. You can only bury something for so long, and then it will infect you and rattle your core.”
She stood, my cue to leave. How dare she stop the session with a cliffhanger: that she was beginning to worry about a lot of things? What kind of infection? What kind of rattling?
How little she really knew. Cliffhanger or not, I wasn’t going back in time. I could buy a nice tube of pink lipstick for my troubles or go sit in a cold movie theater and eat a giant tub of buttered popcorn, crunching all I wanted, feel my feet stick to the syrupy floor while enjoying two hours of mental relief. I wondered why more people didn’t do that instead of sitting on microfiber tan couches, lost souls trying to dog paddle their way across life’s great waves and riptides.
“Fleeting affairs are never the answer,” she said in parting.
That’s all I want, I felt like saying. String a few temporary distractions together and one could avoid her own slipping down state for quite a while. One could pretend she wasn’t growing older with no prospects, two fatherless kids, a bad leg, an ever-widening ass, a trashy apartment, a crazy mother, her nut-job older sister . . . and worse . . . no employment, not officially. But I had an idea.
Since moving into the pathetic apartment, I had a plan for work: two jobs, if only I could convince the people to hire me. One of them, I prayed to God, would be easy. The other was nothing but a bit of office work to supplement the bills. Being the wife of a preacher certainly teaches a girl to type—all those church updates and announcements—and smile sweetly.
Chapter Two
Wake up, Prudy, Dee, whoever you are. Here’s today’s bit of holy wisdom: Teach a child to choose the right path and when he is older he will remain upon it. Proverbs 22:6
Mama’s Moral: Ha! I believe I tried to show y’all the right path but only the dear Lord above knows why you decided to veer off and wander. Get back on it, sugar. It isn’t too late!
It was my mama’s idea to name me Prudence, something she chose as extra insurance toward chastity and long-lived virginity. Pair Prudy with Jeter—Prudy Jeter—and you are left with an abomination of syllables, an alphabetic car wreck. Why couldn’t she have named me Judy or Heather? Well, at least now on this gorgeous morning I’d awakened legally as Ms. Dee Millings, leaving Prudy Jeter far behind and buried. Prudy Jeter made bad choices, but Dee Millings was brilliant in that department. She’d never stumble in the land mines of male charms. She’d look for substance or nothing at all. She’d secure employment and earn her own keep, get her children some dental coverage, maybe even try to connect with some other moms and play groups and who knows . . . dial up a few old friends from high school and see how life had treated them in the last 19 or so years. Surely they will have remembered her. She was Miss Spartanburg High School and the homecoming queen. She knew she got those awards because the blacks and rednecks liked her more than the inner, hard-to-penetrate circle of snoots, the super cool girls never won because the “in” clique was so limited.
It would be so nice to have a friend, someone to talk to other than Mama and Aunt Weepie, and yet where would we be without those two?
I waved as Mama prepared to drive away this morning, her second visit in as many days, she pretending to want coffee and conversation but the true reasons for dropping by nothing more than thinly disguised spy missions to see if I was out of bed, had drool on my tattered robe, witch hair and fuzzy teeth. She was searching for the paleness of a woman who won’t face sunlight or acknowledge her beating heart.
She rotated her hand through the window, imitating her old beauty-pageant wave, sure to leave behind a guilt trip and another assessment of my all-but-housing-project existence. “I’ll be home by three to take you all to the zoo,” she said.
“I really don’t have time to—”
“Prudy, you gotta show those children some pleasure and fun in life. Now, we’re going to the zoo and that’s all there is to it. They got four new monkeys according to the Herald-Journal. They were on some kiddie TV show ’bout ten years ago and I want to see them in person. I’m sure the kids do, t
oo.”
“I was going to see about a job today.”
“I told you to go on over to Dillard’s or Belk and get on with the makeup people. I could use a discount on my Estée Lauder and it wouldn’t hurt you to spruce up some either.”
With that she drove away, hand stuck out her window in a final salutation.
I once again trudged upstairs, sat alone in the kitchen, drank coffee and later, forced myself to eat a plate of chicken salad she’d delivered, chewing mechanically, not really tasting anything but swallowing because I was told it would keep me alive. Eating now because for almost a year, I couldn’t unless it was sweet, hence my extra weight.
I breathed in the smell of piled up decades, that mix of musty scents that stir and settle in buildings over 100 years old. The white plastic clock splattered with grease ticked annoyingly. The hands, the longer one broken at the tip, showed it was getting late and I needed to hurry and pick up the children from school. Maybe there was enough time to dial up an old friend or two. Could be they won’t be home, that maybe they have children to retrieve, and then I wouldn’t have to actually talk to them. I could leave a message, the ghost of me, which means investing nothing emotionally into life’s system of relating to others. I could be a caller who searches for friends when I know they won’t answer. I would leave my name and number and see if they called back; this way there wouldn’t be awkward conversations that made my heart beat all weird and my throat constrict. The possibility for rejection would be reduced by putting the ball in their court.
I searched an unpacked box for the old phone and address book I had pre-Bryce. Opening it, smelling the dust and age of something long forgotten, I wanted to kick myself for not getting in touch with these once good friends. I’d let them go, year by year the calls dropping off, until not even a Christmas card arrived in the mail anymore.
I had no one to blame but myself. Bryce and his world had swallowed my own. I’d turned into one of those women I couldn’t stand who live for their men and kids and never take a moment to remember who they were . . . still are.
I flipped through the book, sneezing, and the pages settled on my former best friend in the world. Claire Hopping, only the Hopping was crossed out and replaced by Boyle, the name of the frat boy she’d married our senior year in college.
I picked up the phone and dialed. What would I say? How long had it been? Four years? No, five? The ringing triggered a panic, and I slammed down the receiver. I’d try later. Maybe. Probably not.
“It’s a start,” I said to no one, grabbing my keys and purse and walking into a postcard-blue afternoon to pick up Miranda and Jay. Miranda at the upper-middle-class preschool paid for by my parents where the other mothers wore clothes from the Lands’ End catalog and flat leather shoes and spawned children they dressed in linen and oversized bows and who never got terribly dirty or mucusy. Junior League mothers. The wives of oral surgeons and corporate attorneys. Women who had their nails done on Fridays, their hair on Saturday mornings, and worked out each day the sun rose. How would I ever fit into this world?
If examining the situation in full honesty, I’d have to admit I didn’t want this world of pretense and soccer games and ballet lessons, a world of normalcy played just like the game of Life. I wanted the zigzagged roads of spontaneity, a carefree path that came with mismatched tags of joy and laughter. I knew exactly what I wanted—the very thing Bryce tried his best to stop me from ever having. Independence. Every breath-drawing creature on earth deserved it.
The pickup line bustled with shiny hair and the slick paint of Mercedes and BMW SUVs. Most mommies wore their gym clothes and happy faces, many getting there early to secure the best spot in line. Some read books, but none that I could tell ever had the music going. Nobody waved, but then again, I didn’t wave either. It seemed as if each life was perfect from the perspective reflected through my windshield. They probably went home to husbands who adored them, or at worst, absolute worst, ignored them. I’ll bet none of them had displaced children staying at grandma’s while their mother struggled for life in the intensive care unit, flat-lining twice.
These women in the car line were nice girls with shining bobs and straight white teeth—girls who didn’t have that sort of life. That was the kind of life reserved for people like me—the bad choosers. The women, according to my therapist, “who don’t love themselves enough to choose better.”
How could she keep saying that? Every time she did I felt enraged and began to sweat. I love myself. My parents love me. God loves me, so the Bible says.
Why haven’t I ever felt like I fit in this world? How hard could it be? Maybe these women who were all alike on the outside, were in fact, completely different inside and wore and said and did conforming things because that was the only way they could comfortably live.
Maybe I should follow their rules and pretend to enjoy domestic bliss and it would come. Pretend life is smooth and unmessy and thus it shall be. Maybe I could drive past the line, park the car and get out one day. I could walk without my cane and try my hardest not to limp as I picked Miranda up early and waved to the other mothers in line. Then they’d see me. They might ask for our number and Miranda could have a play date. She would stop whining every day and telling me she had no friends. The women would see I was clean and normal looking (from a distance) and wouldn’t notice the scars if I wore the right clothes. They might even invite Miranda to Chuck E. Cheese for birthday parties and prize tokens. How hard could it be?
One day I would do this, but today I didn’t care whether they waved or stared ahead at nothing. I inhaled deeply and unwrapped a few Hershey’s kisses for Miranda, placing them on a paper plate along with two carrots. If she ate the baby carrots, she could have the chocolate. Bribing works so well with kids.
I couldn’t take the quiet of this line because that’s when all the noises could really get in and mess with a person’s head. I flipped on the CD player and cranked up the Dixie Chick’s singing “Goodbye, Earl,” a therapeutic tune for all survivors of the planet’s most misogynistic men. Miss Capped Teeth therapist says it’s not good for me to keep playing “Goodbye Earl,” and I said to her, “But you’re the one telling me to get mad or I won’t get well.” And to that she says, “Getting mad directly is what I’m after. Not your living out anger through a bunch of song lyrics.”
One would certainly think if she married a man of the cloth, her husband could have at least asked for some divine intervention before following his wife in the church van, burning rubber and scratching his sorry self into that parking lot to mow her down in broad daylight, for God’s sake.
Aunt Weepie says most preachers are fine people but every now and then there’s one who’s a worse sinner than regular folks.
“They go into the business ’cause they got something bad to hide or chase off,” she said. “Remember that Jerry Falwell? That Jim Bakker? That’s why I married a mechanic. I know if he comes home with his hands clean, he’s had them up some hussy’s skirt. A man would wash himself of Castrol before caressing a young slut’s thigh.”
My mama, who takes every commandment as seriously as if God were living in her back bedroom and keeping a constant eye out, has wanted to attack the Rev. Jeter every day since the tragedy. She used to visit the prison, drive all the way to Charlotte, N.C., with her 9mm loaded in the glove box, bumping up against the New Testament and her road maps. She was willing to forgive just about every sin on earth except what her son-in-law had done to her daughter. No guard ever let her inside. They had seen her marching about near the entrance, shouting her plans of revenge and how she had a new Town Car with its engines revving and ready to roll the reverend flatter than a highway possum.
A restraining order from Bryce’s lawyers plus a year’s supply of Zoloft had toned her down a hair, with the exception of the regular letters she sends festooned with the horned and pitch-for
ked presidents, Democrats if she can locate them.
The anger she emits has been beneficial. Every time she expresses rage she absorbs it in her very bones, releasing and almost bleeding my own pain so I can concentrate on healing, on getting out of bed to eat a sandwich. So I can read a bedtime story to the kids and not collapse in tears when I get to the Happily-Ever-After part.
So that I can drive a car down the road and honor the hands of a clock, the days on a calendar, basic ticks and squares of life I once couldn’t follow.
For many months they ran together, a melted pudding of hours and days. The segments and increments were parceled and meaningful for others, for those who could get out of bed and eat their Grape Nuts and wheat toast, check a watch and obey the sun and the light. Normal people who went to bed at eleven, fell asleep during the news. People whose alarm clocks buzzed at seven. Not people who writhed in damp sheets and stale pain, people who couldn’t tell one day from the next.
***
The Dixie Chicks had finished up with Earl and his wrongdoings and were now singing about the Sin Wagon. I must say those girls were helping me much more than therapy and were right on the money with their word choices. They understand a woman’s pain, you can just tell by the way they sing.
Chimes from a Cracked Southern Belle Page 3