She crinkled her coral nose at the long curving line and shouted to the curious audience: “I ought to have brought my dinner with me. We’re having chicken pot pie today at the old folks home, and from the sight of things, I’m gonna be missing out. Where’s the buffet line?” A few people snickered, even the sour-pussed DMV officials knew they were in for a treat and began loosening their efficiency-stiffened bodies.
“Looky here,” she said to me as I stood next to her like a private-duty nurse or a devoted granddaughter. “If you walk me to where we’re supposed to go, I’ll just follow your big old large rump.” If anyone else had said it, I might have been miffed, but coming from her it fared more tolerably.
The whole place was cracking up or on the verge of hysterics. Annie Sue broke in line, making no apologies whatsoever, and no one dared or even wanted to stop her. They didn’t want to miss a thing.
“Here I am, madam of the highways, now let’s get on with it,” she said to a woman in a uniform and pair of horn-rims, the latest in nerd fashions. “Before we start, I’d like to say a few things for the record.” The woman lowered her glasses and waited. “I want you people to take notes. Get out your pad. I want it in my permanent record that I’ve been driving for near about 90 years and I haven’t run over anybody yet nor have I got myself run over, you hear?”
The entire line cracked up and even the people taking their tests couldn’t stop themselves.
“I just want you to know that no matter how I do on this vision test, all that I just done told you ought to count for something. Write all that down, hear?”
The DMV woman, non-plussed, told Miss Annie Sue where to stand and where to peer.
“I’ll be using these to help out a tad,” she said, taking out of her old handbag an enormous magnifying glass, which she held up to her thick glasses that she now pressed against the viewfinder. “I don’t see no signs. Where are them signs you want me to talk about?”
“Miss Higgins, if you would relax, the testing will soon begin. Please, when you see one of the signs, take a moment, collect your thoughts and then say aloud the names of the signs you see. Is this understood?”
“I’m ready,” she said, turning back to wink at her new fans, then leaning in and studying, rocking back and forth in her cross-trainers, both knee-highs now falling from her pantyhose. She let out a yelp of recognition once her brain clicked into gear. “Lord, I know that sign. That’s a deer in the road. I’ve never hit one of them, if you’d like to go ahead and put that down in my permanent record. Never hit a deer in the road. That oughta count for something, you reckon?”
She continued with the test, stealing precious lunch hour time, though no one seemed to mind in the least.
“Side road, divided highway, two-way traffic, crooked road,” she announced. “I’m always coming across crooked roads over ’round Boiling Springs as you near the mountains,” she said, adding commentary to her signs test. “It’s a nice drive if you—”
“Miss Higgins, continue with the testing, please,” the woman with the horn-rims said.
“Speed Limit . . . I’ve never broken the speed limit, or if I have, I ain’t never been caught and have no plans to tell you all about it.” She turned again and faced her devoted fans. She let that mouth pop open in a Phyllis Diller sort of way and returned to the signs. “I’m not sure the official name of this sign but I know it means traffic’s a’comin’ thataway,” she said, throwing her long thin arm out to the left and hitting the nearby man waiting on his documents.
“All right, Miss Higgins, if you’ll let me know what that last sign is you see in the window, please.”
“Lord, God almighty, I haven’t the foggiest,” she said, more to herself than the tester. “Shoot. I’ve seen it hundreds of times. Let’s see it’s the . . . the . . . ain’t that the little old cripple person logo?” she asked, and everyone broke into laughter, even the DVM officials.
“What’s it called?” the tester asked, giggling, losing all professional pretense. She began fanning herself as Miss Annie struggled with the Handicapped Parking sign.
“Poor little bent-ups,” she said. “I ain’t never had a problem with my bones and joints. Looky here, I don’t know what they call that sign, but I sure as Christmas know that if I saw one of them little crippled up people I’d give them a lift. I’d put ’em in my car and take ’em where they wanted to go. I’d give them a coupla dollars if I had it on me.”
“Tell us the name of the sign, please,” the woman said, having a fit of laughter, halfway rolling out of her chair.
“Shuuuuuuuut up,” Annie Sue said, slapping that thigh, mouth popping open again, wig whirling, crowd going wild. “I just can’t accommodate you there. Let’s move on to the next one.”
“That’s all there is, Miss Higgins,” the DMV tester said, trying like mad to compose herself.
“How’d I do? Did I pass?”
“More or less,” the woman said and the folks lined up at the DMV burst into applause. When it came to the written portion of the testing, Annie Sue wasn’t so lucky and continuously pounded her fist in frustration. She knew her eyes were bad, but her short-term memory much worse, as bad as Kathy’s. She was licked. It was over. Poor Miss Annie Sue fell into a desperation that was hard to witness.
“You’ll need to study up on this some more,” the testing administrator said kindly. “Perhaps you could use some new glasses.”
“He done gave me the strongest on the market. Look, I know these signs when I see them out yonder on the roads, but when I see them on paper they fly out of my head. Can’t you just pass me?”
“You can try again,” she said, not realizing Annie Sue’s son said this was her last chance.
“I know what I’ll do,” she said directly to the DMV official. “I’m just not going to let them catch me. I’ll wait till after dark then go out and do my business.” The crowd hee-hawed. “I know them signs plain as mud, and you people know I know. Go look up my record. I have never in my life hit a cow or a person. I once hit a possum, but it didn’t die, and we took it home and nursed it back to good health so something else could run over it later. Surely you people will let that count for something. Put that in my permanent record, too.”
As Annie Sue and I left the building, the crowd followed us to the parking lot. They wanted to see first-hand the 104-year-woman who drove herself to the Department of Motor Vehicles. As she ground the gear into reverse, she was growing angrier by the minute and muttering up a storm.
She rolled down her window as she backed out and nearly hit three cars. She beat the brakes, losing her wig once and for all, and offered her wildly excited fans a hearty wave.
They cheered as if watching a parade.
We came to the first traffic light and Annie Sue put the car in park and handed me the keys.
“Take the wheel,” she said. “I could use a beer.”
“A beer? But you don’t drink.”
“I do now.”
“Why?”
“I made it a rule all my life. Never drink and drive. Now I can’t drive. So let’s go drink.”
I called Theresa Jolly on my cell phone, compliments of my father who said I should never be without one, that I should have had one the day Bryce did his business at BI-LO, not that a phone could have prevented any of it.
“She didn’t make it,” I said, and I could hear relief right through the blanks in the connection.
“Praise the Lord,” Theresa said.
“She wants to go have drinks,” I said.
“Drinks? Alcohol? Annie Sue’s never touched the stuff.”
“Well, she wants to now,” I said.
“I’ll have to call her next of kin and get back with you. I mean, we believe in making our people happy, but this is slightly unconventional. ’Course Annie S
ue’s not of the normal variety either.”
Theresa rang me right back.
“He says, and I quote, ‘Tank her up. As long as she can’t drive, I don’t care what she does.’ Y’all call me if you need a ride home,” Theresa said, giggling like a high school girl. “Dee, you are on the clock. I don’t know about your drinking habits, but you best abstain in this situation. Not that I think you’d do otherwise.”
I drove the Skylark into an Applebee’s. Annie Sue gave me an odd look.
“I want to go to a bar,” she said. “A real bar with men who have tattoos and ride motorcycles. This is a priss parlor. I can eat Thai chicken or I can drink beer, and I done told you which I was in the mood for.”
Oh, Sweet Jesus, help us all. I got back on the highway and drove her straight to Bubba’s Hideaway, the roughest place I knew. We entered the dark hole of a tavern, a haven from the blinding oven of a mid afternoon that was cloudless and pure mean. Nothing but a cruel afternoon with no rain in the forecast for days.
Opening the door was like falling into a black gopher hole, but it was cool from the blasting of four or five of those frigid window units. The place smelled like misplaced dreams and early drunks. A song by Sheryl Crow, “All I Wanna Do Is Have Some Fun,” played on the jukebox, and I found myself getting into the spirit of things.
Annie Sue grinned at every redneck and boozer in the joint, moseyed straight up to the bar and ordered a draft.
“Wanna see some I.D.?” she asked, opening that mouth, slapping her license on the counter which showed her to be hours away from her 104th year.
Bubba raised a shot of tequila to toast her as he poured the foam off her beer. She downed it in three or four swallows, then asked for two more before I led her wobbling out the door and back into the stifling heat.
“I’d rather drink than drive any day,” she said, falling into the Skylark, wig thrown to the floorboard. I managed to get her partially buckled in, but before we got to Top of the Hill, she was snoring as loud as those old men back at the home.
“We’re here,” I said as we drove into her parking spot, cutting life from the Skylark, maybe for the last time. Maybe not. I looked at Annie Sue. No, probably not.
It took three of us to get her inside and into bed, her carrying on about a conspiracy against old folks at the DVM and a son who never loved her because she had him out of wedlock during the days when that was a mortal sin worthy of a woman’s public stoning. All her secrets were pouring out like the draft from the tap at Bubba’s.
“He ought to be more grateful,” she slurred. “Where’s my chicken pot pie? I need me some dinner, Dee. Hell, I guess that’s not as bad as what you need,” she said and tilted her skinny face right up at mine, her teeth showing and her breath smelling of wet bread and bars.
“What might that be, Miss Annie Sue?” I said, easing her agile body into bed.
“You need a man, sister. A capital M, capital A, capital N. MAN.”
“That’s what my Mama says. I say women don’t need a thing but self confidence, good friends, family and a pint of happiness.”
“You listen to your Mama. Now run get me a gin and tonic and we’ll say our goodbyes out on the veranda.” Oh, my, she was slipping into a fog of dementia brought on by yeast and hops, heat and Harleys.
She did have a point. With my pitiful wages and lack of prospects, my age inching toward the Uglying Up Decade, what Aunt Weepie calls the “Falling Forties” for a girl, I’d better get busy. All right, tomorrow I’d begin my search, not so much for me but for the children. I’d even date half-wits as long as they were too stupid for violence. My children wouldn’t go another year without decent male influence. If I couldn’t have the inner city surgeon with Labrador eyes, I’d date anything with health insurance, half his teeth and a fine attitude. I’d do a criminal check and then a body search. Hmmm.
“The way Jay is,” Mama would say, “all those brains. Well, his kind can go either way. You need an influence for him, hon. Someone with lots of testosterone. Remember Amber’s husband and take note of his lack thereof.”
“I need someone without all those rage-inducing male hormones, Mother. Remember?”
“Well don’t go bringing an effeminate man into our lives. I mean, I love them and they certainly are good decorators and dance partners, but let’s not haul another one in the family. Your sister’s ‘beloved’ hasn’t taught her eldest the first thing about baseball or basketball. For all I know they just play with that Pomeranian he brought home and rearrange the furniture every few days.” She rattled on about my lack of prospects and I listened, knowing it was useless to argue.
“Prudy, I have waited two years before pushing. Fact is, I thought for a while I was going to be the one to raise Jay and Miranda. Then one day the good Lord listened to my prayers and rose up a half-dead woman for a reason. Now go find him.”
“Soon, Mama.” I knew she meant well. “I’m really capable of handling things and taking care of myself.”
“No, you aren’t. That’s all I’m going to say because I have a headache and don’t want to fight with you.”
It’s such an effort getting to know a person from scratch. I’d rather have a just-add-water type. A meal-in-a-box.
Maybe I could recycle like the old days. That’s an idea. Let’s see. Memory lane time. I could go to the library, since I was too chicken to do Match.com at this particular stage in my redevelopment, and do a search on the good old Google engine. I’d pretty much already tested the idea in my head and narrowed it down to six retreads, but the one I really loved like crazy is iffy because he tinkled on our lawn, and my mother may not tolerate giving him another go-round in our lives. There were others she wouldn’t tolerate either.
Nobody I’ve ever brought home was good enough in her eyes.
Oddly, Bryce was.
Chapter Nine
Hey Dee: A murderer’s conscience will drive him to hell. Don’t stop him. Proverbs 28:17
Mama’s Moral: Allow him to lay in the bed he has made. A bed of hot coals.
Lately, I’ve been wondering what caused me to marry Bryce Jeter, as if I’m searching for a flaw in my psyche that led me to a potential murderer.
Most people who knew Bryce would have never thought him capable of what he’d done, but thought him quite the catch, actually. He gave no indication during the “courtship” leading to our marriage, which occurred just two months from the day I got the enormous pear-shaped ring pressed between Psalms in the King James Bible. Note to self: never again marry a man who offers the pear-shaped diamond. Something about its odd shape could be ominous.
The wedding was in his church, a small ceremony with my family and his, weirdoes from Virginia who never looked people in the eye, the mother’s interest held somewhere in the floor area, the father’s fixated on every woman’s breasts and buttocks who walked in his line of vision. He had a rectangular head with wedged and hinged features that were a blend of cartoonish and perverted, almost like a ventriloquist’s dummy. And he was shifty. He all but swallowed my sister Amber whole, taking her in from her teased blond bangs to red-painted toes, salivating over every attribute and hardly saying two words to me, the bride. He did seem rather appreciative of my 36-Cs, which prior to nursing babies, I kept elevated in good bras.
Dr. Peter Jeter, yes, that’s his real name, so everyone was required to call him Pete or Doc Jeter, is an oral surgeon. This made my mother extremely happy. She figured if her daughter couldn’t have married a doctor, at least her father-in-law was one. It was a thing with my mama and her friends, all upper-middle-class suburban housewives who’d grown up in mill villages and podunk towns and wanted a higher rung on the social ladder for their own children.
They’d just as soon put ads in the paper in desperate efforts to marry their girls off to doctors. Many were quite successful
, their pretty young belles walking down the aisles with some of the ugliest, most boring medical men this planet had ever coughed up.
“Bryce is working on his Ph.D.,” I had told Mama during the frenzied four weeks in which we shopped for a wedding dress, mailed out invitations, ordered flowers, a caterer and a harpist for the reception, which to my bourbon-loving daddy’s disappointment, included nothing harder than 7-Up and sherbet punch.
I walked down the yellow-gold carpet of Beaver Creek Baptist Church and nodded as I passed each pew, festooned in silk magnolias and loads of white velvet bows. I carried real magnolia blossoms in my bouquet along with daisies and baby’s breath. To have spritzed perfume would have been useless and a waste considering the way that Baptist church smelled on my wedding day. Not even the loudest perfume, which in my opinion is a tossup between Beautiful and Red Door, could break through the natural barrier of all the flowers Mama and Aunt Weepie had managed to squeeze into the church.
I felt like a princess in my $1,200 form-fitting dress with a short train, my veil a pearled and netted work of art. Vera Wang couldn’t have done better.
Bryce’s mother never said a word, only grimaced in my direction and redirected her gaze back toward the floor, which had some sort of hold on the woman. She trembled. She cowered. She was a timid, shaking creature with the palest blond hair and features, almost as if fear had bleached her, or was it regret or the fatigue of giving up on life before its second act? She got her doctor, why wasn’t she happy?
My mama, effervescent and more bubbly than a case of champagne, tried her best to engage the woman but never got beyond a semi-paralytic smile, an uh-huh, and once, when the woman didn’t think my mama was looking, my new monster-in-law cast an evil eye that would have sheared the wool off a sheep. I saw it but felt no need to mention it.
Chimes from a Cracked Southern Belle Page 14