Chimes from a Cracked Southern Belle

by Reinhardt, Susan

  “You did good, kid,” he said. “We’ll start early in the mornings, before you go to your other job. Your show name is ‘Dr. Dee, minus the Ph.D.’ Shouldn’t take but a half hour since the show’s only fifteen minutes each morning during the 8:05 a.m. time slot. Prime driving time. I’m expecting it to be a hit because our research shows moms are our early morning audience.” He stood to lead me out the door and I shook his dry hand, smelling the cigarettes and Old Spice permeating his body.

  “Thank you. I appreciate this chance.”

  “Don’t blow it.”

  “No way. You’ll see.”

  ***

  This evening I was to meet Croc, after having not seen him since high school graduation in 1988. He’d left town, so had I, pursuing different colleges and different dreams. I stopped by Mom’s to pick up Miranda, and then had errands to run to prepare for my big date. I turned on the radio in my car, popped in Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” CD, and Miranda and I sang at the top of our lungs, all the way out of Mama’s driveway as she squawked and told me if I went out with Croc not to EVER call her again.

  “You’re being cheap,” she said. “Carla Tisdale cheap!”

  “I’m just having a steak dinner,” I said. “Maybe a baked potato, even though you won’t let up about the size of my ass.”

  “It’s fanny, Prudy. We don’t say ‘ass’ in our family. My point is, this Croc reject knows your needs.”

  “I don’t even know them.”

  “Wait, Prudy, turn down that music. Let me get you the proverbs I found—”

  “No thanks, and it’s Dee for the last time.” I waved and sang and listened as Gloria told me I was back, back on my feet, no longer petrified or terrified. Just back. And ready to go someplace.

  “Listen, Miranda,” I said. “We’ve got to get Jay in an hour. I need to shop for a special outfit, so if you’re good and don’t run off or hide under the racks and dressing rooms, Mommy will buy you a pack of gum.”

  “I want a Barbie,” she said. “I already had gum at Mama Millings’.”

  “I don’t have money for a Barbie.”

  “I do.” She reached in her pocket and handed me 28 cents.

  “Thanks, honey. We’ll see what we can do.”

  I looked at her in the rearview mirror. She was the prettiest child, and I’m not saying that because she’s my own. She didn’t inherit all the pointy and angular features like the Millings side of the family. Where we had high prominent cheekbones and beakish noses, thin heads and faces, Miranda had a gorgeous full-moon pie face. It wasn’t fat; it was round and perfect, Asian-like, her chocolate-drop eyes set in perfect proportion and dancing with sparkle and life. A lot of people with dark brown eyes don’t have the twinkle, their eyes lying flat in all that color, sort of overpowered by it. Miranda’s exploded with wonder and spunk. They reflected light and always took me by surprise in that they would change, like Bryce’s, but not from good to evil, as his had done.

  Miranda’s eyes would flip from dark to golden, a reflection of the purity one knows lies in her heart. Her hair, since the jet-black days of her birth, was now sandy brown, streaked liked Jay’s from the fingers of a sun that just had to touch the children, the way I did.

  At the stop sign I applied some lipstick and checked the balance in my account: $56.12. I had never been this poor except in college. While all right to be poor in school, it was not particularly respectable to endure this sort of financial imbalance when two children were involved, as well as rent, bills, food and the every day costs of sucking down this pre-breathed South Carolina air.

  Inhalations in this state felt like gulping the exhalations of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, Aunt Weepie always said.

  “Where we going, Mommy?” Miranda asked. I had her buckled in her car seat as tight as possible in the center of the backseat, not taking any chances on some quack hitting my car.

  “We’re running on over to the Junior League thrift store.”

  “Do they have Barbies?”

  “They have everything the rich ladies and their over-indulged children have gotten tired of.” I really didn’t want to shop at “A League of Their Own,” the second-hand clothing store operated by the doctors’ and lawyers’ wives of Spartanburg. I probably attended high school with half of them, and for those women to see me limping in and poking through their old discards, well, it was too humbling for words.

  Only this upcoming date with Croc Godfrey unraveled my pride and pushed me right through the doors of the Junior League’s world. A recycled date. Might as well wear a recycled outfit.

  I needed to look good. I needed, in essence, to look sensational, which meant a sheer miracle due to my ever-expanding rear end. I should have gone on a diet three weeks ago. Oh, why had I forgotten? Why had I let Marilyn Monroe’s wrinkle theory wreck my rearview and the three funerals attended so far with Weepie turn me into a glutton? I was known in high school as the cheerleader with the nicest butt. Goodbye nice ass.

  Panic set in. Croc had not seen me in nearly 20 years. He’d be expecting little Miss Perky Firm, not big Ms. Dented and Dated. Then again, he sounded mature on the phone and didn’t indicate that youth and washboard abs were a priority. I’m certain having suffered a terrible loss, such as that of a wife, has given him depth. He sure had more than most high school boys, and as an extra bonus, an electric guitar slung across his shoulders and the best voice I’d ever heard. He was my own Jon Bon Jovi, my personal Steve Tyler.

  When a man’s in the spotlight, he can do no wrong in some women’s eyes. Stage, auditorium, TV camera . . . pulpit. Why couldn’t I be attracted to the calmer, more secure men who didn’t mind, even preferred, living in life’s shadows? Didn’t Mama send a proverb once about loving the meek?

  We got to the shop and immediately I spotted the dress I had to own. It was a Maggie London, cotton and casual, high enough on the neck to cover my scars and long enough to hide my bad leg. I held up the pale pink fabric, a smooth lightweight material that reminded me of comfort taken in my grandmother’s lap. This was my color.

  Once, I’d had my colors done, and the woman said I shouldn’t wear gray because it made my teeth look yellow. After that, when she tried to say pink “washed” me right out, I thanked her for her time and ended the Color Me Fabulous session right then and there. No one would desecrate pink, the happiest shade in the world. Not even the professional Color Woman.

  I glanced at the price on the dress, $35. How in the world could these rich women get away with charging this much at a consignment shop? I may as well go to Belks or Dillard’s. Dresses at the Goodwill, my usual haunt, were about $5.

  “Is there something I can help you with?” The voice came out of nowhere. I looked up and caught my breath. There before me, in blonde glory, Botoxed immobility, and an Angelina Jolie upper lip, thanks to a few jugs of collagen, stood Kippie Murray.

  Please, God, don’t let her recognize me. I’m fat. I’m not made up properly. My daughter has stains on her clothes, which she chose and don’t match. If you never answer another prayer, Lord, allow me mental exit from this woman’s memory. If you do, God, I’ll obey my mother more often, even though she’s an odd one. I’ll even press Play on the answering machine twice and hear her proverbs a second time each morning.

  Kippie scanned me and my daughter who was fondling all the dresses with her dirty fingers. She tried to frown, in concentration, but nothing on her face moved but those enormous lips.

  After a few moments, it registered. “I don’t believe it!” Kippie shouted. “It’s you. It’s Prudy Millings! Oh, my Gawd. Oh, hi-i-i-i-i. How are you-u-u-u?”

  Thanks, Lord. I owe you.

  “I’m doing fine, Kippie. What’s up with you?”

  “I’m doing my League work, running this shop, trying to give the poor a price break
on haute couture.” She giggled. She had the exact same figure she did senior year in high school when she performed a vocal solo on the football field, her rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” then ran offstage to whip off her graduation cap and gown, underneath which sparkled a high-cut leotard in red, white and blue. The principal of the school lit both ends of her fire batons and she tore down the football field like an exploding set of firecrackers, twirling and skedaddling across the field, flames and cheers rising around her in a most adoring fashion.

  “So what’s this I hear about you getting all beat up?”

  My daughter poked her face from the rack of clothing and stared at Kippie. I didn’t know what to say. I felt for a moment my very body being transported by the Spartanburg High memories and the catty likes of Kippie Murray. She used to burn me up, and here she smirked, same kind of girl, stuck in time, only with more money and the exact tiny mind and gerbil brain.

  “Mama didn’t get beat up,” Miranda said, tugging a silk dress. “She got runned over.”

  “Oh, how cute, ‘runned over,’” Kippie said. “Don’t you just love it? Bad grammar starts early in certain Southern families, I guess. How precious is that?”

  “You haven’t changed a bit,” I said, deciding the dress wasn’t going to work, that $35 would buy nice groceries for my babies, new books or the sandals Jay’s been wanting.

  “Guess not,” Kippie cooed. “What with all the running, you know I do marathons, and Lem—I married him and now he’s a psychiatrist at the children’s center—he keeps me so busy in his office, all those kids needing therapy and medications at such a young age. It’s pitiful. Ooops. I’m sorry. Listen at me, putting my foot in my mouth, yours might have gone too.”

  “My kids didn’t need to go,” I lied. “I chose not to screw them up worse, no offense, of course. Here.” I handed her the dress. “I was going to get this for a homeless woman I know, but it’s not good enough for her. The odor . . . I can’t place it.” I let loose my fakest smile. “You have yourself a good day.”

  We opened the door, leaving Kippie Murray standing in a pool of light flaunting that sorority girl expression of “Well, I never!” that she could have patented herself. Even so, she did the Southern-girl thing and shouted, “Call me sometime. Maybe we can do lunch at that new French place and catch up.”

  “Sure. That’d be grand.”

  “Oh, gosh. It’s expensive. I forgot about the prices for French food. I know if you’re shopping here your finances must be—”

  The bell on the door jingled as I left, saying no more and thinking I’d just wear some jeans and my lavender tunic. It would cover my butt, and accentuate my still-slender legs, and maybe, just maybe, I could take two Advil and get away with higher heels. I don’t think I’d feel very sexy in a pair of the old air cushions the doctors kept pushing my way. Lesbian shoes, my mother calls them.

  When I got home, I took a nice hot bath in my clawfoot tub, pouring in scented oils, lighting candles and letting the water cook me to medium-well, my face as pink as the tile in the floor. The candles bathed the room in a glow I certainly wasn’t getting from within. Not after today’s run-in with Kippie Murray.

  Miranda sang in her room and Jay played video games, which made me happy because his nose was usually planted in a book.

  Aunt Weepie had promised to babysit because Mama had refused, saying, “I’ll be no part of excavating the old and festering grave of that eyesore Croc Godfrey. You need to start fresh, not straight back to the very beginning. Be sure and bring him a Pamper in case he has to pee somewhere on your date. Wouldn’t want to see your name in the paper associated with his lewd acts on lawns.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Hi there, Prudy. By the way, I’ve decided to refuse calling you Dee. I realize it’s not 7 in the morning but closer to 7 at night but you just HAVE to hear this proverb I just now read: As a dog returns to his vomit, so a fool repeats his folly. Proverbs 26:11

  Mama’s Moral: Do not repeat the mistakes of your past. You have vomited enough. Move forward, not backward.

  Aunt Weepie stood in my room and watched as I continued to apply final touches for the tenth time for my date with Croc. I felt nervous, had to go to the bathroom every five minutes, my bladder in a state of freakish elimination, my mouth dry and hands a mess. I took a long look at the erratic shape of my nails, which reflected various stages of nervous gnawing. Might as well bite the rest of them off.

  I spit the remnants at the mirror, aiming for the image reflecting my carved-out chest. I had wanted to hide the marks but Aunt Weepie said it was too hot outside for turtlenecks and that if I was planning on some “action,” I’d better let a few of the scars show now, “so as not to send him in ‘Total Recoil’ when all the clothes come off.” She was proud she’d coined the phrase “Total Recoil” and all the time threw it around.

  “He’s going to have enough to absorb as it is,” she said, not mincing words.

  “Who says I’m going to sleep with him?” I asked, my heart thumping irregularly, skipping beats altogether, a condition the doctor detected after the Murderous Rampage, calling the erratic beats PVCs—benign premature ventricular contractions brought on by stress.

  For a while I sat in front of the mirror, turning my head this way and that, hoping for forgiving light, angles that reflected the youth that had once been mine. Kippie Murray couldn’t stand it when I was voted homecoming queen and “Most Likeable Senior,” and she was cast aside and merely a member of my court. She also was miffed that her superlative wasn’t “Most Beautiful,” and instead the letters beneath her senior yearbook portrait read: “Most Likely to Succeed at All Costs.”

  I pinched my cheeks and wondered where all that firm skin I took for granted in 1988 had gone. I was sliding each year into the “attractive” category, to be followed by the “handsome woman” category, to be followed by “cute old lady” category. Aunt Weepie and I are of the utmost and solid opinion that the older you get, the crazier you must act in order to offset all the wrinkles and aging factors.

  Everyone, she said, loves a wacky old woman. Annie Sue, case in point. My mother, on the other hand, said she would grow old with class and dignity. In other words, Mama would be a wrinkled old bore if she didn’t change her tune, and no one would want to sit next to her during senior Bingo nights.

  The mirror, scratched and dimmed by the years, showed my dull-green eyes with the flat stare of a dead woman. Olive-green, lifeless-woman eyes. Maybe blush would help. More lipstick. God, if he didn’t hurry up, I was going to drown in layers of Clinique, leftover from my other life, and Cover Girl, the only brand I could afford in my new life.

  Croc used to call me “Purdy.” He transposed the letters U and R and gave me a whole new feeling about myself. In his skewed and hormone-induced view, I was pretty, not prudy—the hot little cheerleader with the long tanned legs, the slightly bucked teeth and a fanny that back then was the perfect size, firm beneath my short blue and gold cheering outfits.

  “Come on, Purdy,” he’d say. “Let’s go take the boat out. Purdy, I love you. Purdy, you’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me. Purdy, don’t run from me. Purdy, will you marry me? Oh, Purdy, why can’t we always be like this?”

  I had loved this man with everything I had. Hot teen love. To commemorate my eighteenth birthday, we decided to park his VW Rabbit close to the eighteenth hole at the Hillbrook Country Club for what had become a nightly routine of progressive exploration, lustful discoveries that before I would apply the brakes, took us right to the precipice of lost virginity. On that night of my celebrating, after one too many beers and Peter Frampton’s “Baby I Love Your Way” luring me into directions my mother feared, I yielded to the yearnings of body and heart, despite a brain telling me to wait.

  I lost my virginity on the eighteenth hole, half my body on the f
ringe of the green, the other half in the cold silk of moon and sand. It had hurt, a burning tearing pain, and I’d cried for two hours afterward—partly because I loved him so much, but mostly because I’d just lost a huge piece of myself and didn’t even have a teensy diamond to at least assuage the guilt.

  “You’re beautiful,” Croc had said, stroking my hair and brushing away the tears with the tail of his shirt. “I love you more tonight than ever, sweet girl.”

  I went to church that Sunday morning and promised the good Lord I was sorry as I could be and would never do it again until I was married. I told Croc, “We just can’t be doing this anymore until we’re at least engaged.”

  The next night we were on hole five and before the summer ended and we were to go off to separate colleges, we managed to par every single immaculately manicured hole of the Hillbrook Country Club with our love.

  All this reminiscing screeched to a halt when I heard a few weak knocks on the door. In the old days when Croc came to our house, he’d pound out a rock tune on the windowpanes, driving Mama nuts. Tonight, his knock was unsure and timid. I touched my face, and it was as hot as if I’d had the flu. The room spun. My heart skittered, stopped, paused, then tried to beat its way out of my skin.

  “Aunt Weepie, I’m going to pass out.”

  “Before you do, I need to let your past in the door. I can tell by his knock that if I don’t hurry he’ll go on home. If I remember correctly, he ran quite a few times from your mama and daddy when y’all was in high school.”

  Her footsteps flew down the stairs, and I heard the door open with the groan of ancient wood. I wondered how many people before me had let old boyfriends through that once-white door now the prettiest shade of pink a girl could ever lay eyes on.