Some Bright Morning, I'll Fly Away

by Alice Anderson

  Norris screamed, “More! More!” like repeated encores at a theater of the ridiculous.

  “Why, Your Honor, I have no idea why anyone would even imply I’d be mixed up with that horrible, sin-soaked Mailer family and their wretched, woman-hating patriarch,” I whispered in mock fury, clad only in a tiny black nightie barely covering my naked ass, where I held an open copy of The Naked and the Dead I found on a shelf as camouflage to hide my nether regions.

  Norris stood up on the mattress, intoned in her best Southern patriarch judge voice, “Mrs. Dr. Liam Rivers, I now pronounce you divorced, and please may I see you in my chambers immediately.” She leered at me, taking a finger behind the left arm of her eyeglasses and making them bounce up and down on her face like a couple of “hubba hubba” eyebrows coming on to a talentless tart. She then put her hands on her heart and fell back onto the bed in a featherlight heap. I ran back into the closet, covering my behind, laughing hysterically, almost in tears.

  Finally, in a last-ditch effort to coax more of the music of her pure laughter, I put on one of Norman’s old suits and his spare pair of black Uggs up to my knees and tied one of his old wide ties around my neck in a big bow, and came into the room arms outstretched and bellowed, in reference to Norman’s daily Dove bar, “Somebody get me a Dove bar!”

  And there I found her—sound asleep, the sound of her wet breath like the gentle Provincetown tide coming in and out, her arms still resting on her heart. I sank down on the floor, the back of the bed at my back, in Norman’s pants both too short and too wide, with my face in my hands.

  The fear that drove me came over me then. What if I lose? What if the kids are ordered to live with Liam in Mississippi forever? What if I’m ordered to move back to Mississippi? What if I never get to live the life this summer had reminded me I wanted? What if I get nothing at all? What if the judge says I can never write about any of it? What if I lose custody altogether? What if I lose everything?

  As I sobbed silently, eyes behind my palms, I saw then in my mind’s eye the lines of Norris’s many e-mails. She wrote still me daily, even though I was in town. Besides stories of her life back in Atkins, Arkansas, and her early days with NM (as she always called him in correspondence), she talked to me of what-ifs I’d never allow anyone else to utter.

  How if I lost my children, I’d start a new life in New York.

  And if I lost my children, I’d write a bestseller, make loads of money, and hire the biggest shark attorney in the country.

  And if I lost my children, she would get me a job at The Paris Review.

  And if I lost my children, life would go on—tragic, lonely, glorious.

  It might be all lies, but it was something.

  Norris gave me the one thing I almost lost daily: hope.

  From Norris, I’d entertain the terrifying idea that whatever happened was meant to be. Besides, she’d always say, if I can hold on to Norman Mailer for thirty-odd years, surely you can hang on to your own damn children. And anyway, she reminded me, she was in need of extra grandchildren, and she was counting on my three. She already had a closet corner full of things for the sweet three, like our future set and ready at the waiting.

  I hung up all the dresses and frocks one by one, put Norman’s stuff back where I found it, and quietly slipped out of the room, climbing the strange ladders of the apartment to the upper perches, where I sat looking at the river, the passing barges slow as gators in the bayou back home, cutting swaths of wake into the silent, black water.

  Even though Norris made me feel safe and calm, like no matter what everything was going to be all right, that summer I existed in a near-constant state of terror. I knew anything could go wrong in Pascagoula, and when “go wrong” meant losing my children, that was a “go wrong” that inspired a torrent of frustrated tears. It’s difficult to live in fear among the Mailer clan, with their wide bravado and literary inclinations, where any confession turns into a story recollected, a literary reference called up, as if life itself were a chapter of a novel, unfurling in reason and interconnection.

  So I pulled up my unofficial Mailer bootstraps, climbed down the ladders, put on that white T-shirt dress and black motorcycle boots, smoothed on a gash of deep red lipstick, left Norris a note, texted Buffalo my apologies for not going with him to the Hamptons, and set out into the night.

  In the dark of East of Eighth, our pizzas arrived.

  Each time the door swung open, a wall of sound—taxi horns, footsteps in the metal stairs—filled the small room. The sound reminded me of the slow roar of a symphony warming up, then falling silent. Kate and I were sitting at the little ledge seating in the bar area, with our backs to the actual bar. In one of those silent moments, a voice bellowed, “West! Who’s your friend?”

  It was Stormé.

  We walked toward her, and I extended my hand and said, “Stormé, it’s such an honor to meet you.”

  “You brought Mississippi Coast trash to East of Eighth?” Like anyone who grew up on the Gulf Coast, Stormé could parse from my thick accent exactly where I was from. She leaned in and embraced me with strong arms, kissing me hard on the cheek. It was the first time she called me “Mississippi,” the first of thousands of times I’d hear her gravelly voice intone that word with love from that night to the end of her life.

  It was a slow-motion moment—an instant where fate arrives like a silent movie, showing you your shaky-framed future.

  I asked Jimmy for a new beer for Stormé, on me.

  “Nope, drinks for Stormé are on the house, indefinitely.”

  I tipped him twice the cost of a beer, and he set her a new full glass and a pizza down on the dark mahogany bar.

  She was wearing the fisherman’s hat, and the big army-green jacket with pockets everywhere, a ratty sweater over a worn denim snap-up shirt, baggy cargo trousers, and big black combat-style boots. Her face was lined the way my grandmother’s was—the wrinkles not revealing a lifetime of smiles or furrowed brow, but crossed over like scorched earth, lined with life entire. If she were sitting at a bar in Ocean Springs dressed as she was, not a soul would guess that under that garb was a woman.

  Kate had to work early, and so we all said our goodbyes and I sat back down next to Stormé.

  “What’s your trouble, missy?” she asked, looking me in the eye.

  “How can you tell I have trouble?” I asked.

  “Hey, I lived in pain most of my life; I know it when I see it. You got on that pristine white dress, but it might as well be smattered in blood, you’re bleeding so much pain, Mississippi.”

  I was taken aback. Tears sprang to my eyes.

  “Let me tell you something,” she added, tapping the edge of my wineglass and nodding at Jimmy, who topped me off. “I grew up in New Orleans, that whole Southern thing,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “Oh, you know?” she teased. “You know this how?” She laughed her classic cackle, shaking her head back and forth like I’d said something she couldn’t believe.

  “Um, I Googled you?”

  “Oh, you did, did you? What did you find?”

  “I know you grew up in New Orleans. That you’re mixed. That you were the only drag king touring with the Jewel Box Revue. I know you were a bouncer at several gay bars in the Village over the years, and I know you threw the first punch at Stonewall. And that you’ve lived at the Chelsea Hotel nearly forever.”

  “So, in other words, you don’t know jack shit.”

  “Come again?”

  “Let me tell you a few things, and you tell me if any of it sounds familiar, or if it—as they say—applies to whatever pain you’re carrying around now, yeah?”

  “Yeah,” I said, grateful already. Comfortable. I laid my head on Stormé’s shoulder for a moment there, and we just stayed like that, in a bar in Chelsea, while the world kept swirling and I found peace with a stranger at the end of a bar.

  THE MARK

  “Listen up, Mississippi.”

  Stormé
wasted no time.

  “When I was a little squirt in New Orleans, I had a daddy who wanted me with each damn ounce of his gin-soaked mean-as-a-snake being to be every perfect thing he thought a daughter of his shoulda been. He wanted me to be the upright Southern girl—pretty, polite, obedient, fuckin’ girlie!”

  She laughed and shook her head at the same time.

  “You ever have someone in your life who don’t see you? Don’t recognize you for who you really are?”

  “Oh yeah, sure ’nuff do.” I nodded.

  “And my daddy, the fact that he didn’t want me to be the tomboy scrapper that I was? The dapper dan? The lezzzzzbian? The sinner?” she intoned in the deep New Orleans drawl of an uptown preacher. “Well, you know he saw that as a damn solid reason to whoop my ass on the regular. Anyone ever beat you senseless, Mississippi? Beat you halfway to your funeral and back?”

  “Yeah.” I nodded, my eyes filling.

  “I mean, damn,” she continued, “I wasn’t ever going to be a sweet, Southern, pretty girl. I mean, I coulda. I could play any part anyone wants me to. But I couldn’t be that on the one hand and be true to myself on the other, and I ain’t got a third hand. And I sure as shit wasn’t going to grow up and get me a husband. If he wasn’t so good at connecting his fist to my face, I’d say my daddy saw me as a ghost. Invisible. Y’ever feel like that?”

  “Erased, that’s how I feel,” I confessed. “Like the real me is wiped away and some unreasonable facsimile is standing in my place. I’m not a poet, I’m not a writer, not a person who loves people, knows how to sing, loves to laugh. To dance. That girl got pinned up to a board in the shed a long-ass time ago. In her place? A maid, a wife, a mama, a fuckin’ ghost without a past. And really, without a future. He told me every day, ‘You’re fat. You’re stupid. You’re ugly.’”

  “It’s like a waking death, ain’t it?” Stormé said, placing her gnarled hand on my knee.

  “It is,” I squeaked out.

  “How’d he hurt you?”

  “It was just the one night,” I whispered through tears I willed not to fall.

  “One night’s enough.”

  “That’s true. I left the next day, for good.”

  “Good on you, Mississippi. But it’s never just one night—I bet you had half an eternity of leading on to just the once. But you left? Bet that chapped his pussy hide! So why are you still so scared? I could smell your fear across the room.”

  “I have to go to court next week—the final date of my long-ass, dragged-out Mississippi divorce trial.” I sighed, resigned.

  We had fallen into conversation the way two people from the same somewhere else plunked down in a foreign city are likely to do.

  “In Mississippi?” she bellowed.

  I nodded.

  “Well, fuck! No wonder you scared, girl!”

  “They used my book against me, my poems. They said I had a ‘lifelong consensual sexual relationship’ with my own now-dead Papa. They’re trying to take my kids away.”

  “Awwww, hell no! We ain’t gonna let that happen, Mississippi. Ain’t no backwoods, backward, religious-ruled court going to steal your own damn children out from under you.”

  “The judge used to be a Baptist minister.”

  “Nope.”

  “My ex has a nasty attorney who calls me ‘the Black Widow’ and says my ex never laid a finger on me.”

  “Nope.”

  “That I left a choker of hand-shaped bruises around my own neck.”

  “Nope.”

  “That I threw myself down the stairs.”

  “Nope.”

  “That I took the butcher knife in hand and scraped and punctured my own chest.”

  “Holy fucking nope!” Stormé slammed her fist down on the bar then, hard. “We’re getting you out, Mississippi. I’m going to help you, and you’re going to win.”

  “You are?” I asked. “You barely know me. Why would you help me?”

  “Because you and I? We’re the same breed, we got the mark. We recognize our own kind, and we don’t let each other slip through the damn tragedy cracks of life.”

  I sat there nodding, big fat tears rolling down my cheeks. Jimmy topped my glass, and Stormé fished out and handed me an old-fashioned hankie from one of her pockets.

  “When’s court?”

  “Next week.”

  “You ready?”

  “I guess so, I mean, mostly.”

  “How’re you not ready? You got an attorney, right?”

  “It’s not that. It’s actually sort of stupid.”

  “Just tell me; I’ll help you.”

  “I don’t know what to wear.”

  “That’s not stupid; that’s wardrobe, baby.”

  “And I’ve been in New York all summer being the real me, and I’m not sure I can go back and play Sunday School teacher, perfect, June Cleaver mom again. I mean, look at me! I am the scandalous girl they said I am. I write sexy poems, I’m engaged to a man the court would not approve of. Honestly, I don’t know why I’m even engaged to a man.”

  “Yeah, I was going to … but that’s another story for another day, girl.”

  “Fucking Mississippi.”

  “I know. But I’m all the bad things they say I am. I’m not allowed both. I can’t have my sweet three and and have this wild, literary life, too. I can’t be me. Nobody gets both. Or at least not me.”

  That was it: that was the truth of all the self-hatred that had been stored up in me for the last nine years.

  “Oh, hush that nonsense, Mississippi. You can worry about all the rest later. For now? Here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to get the perfect outfit.”

  “I already tried that.”

  “Not with my help you didn’t.”

  “You’re going to help me get the perfect outfit?” I asked, skeptical.

  “Damn straight I am! You’re going to pick me up at the hotel first thing tomorrow morning, and we going shopping, girl.”

  “Okay.” I wiped my tears from my cheeks with her hankie.

  “And you’re going to wear whatever I tell you, and then you’re going to behave exactly the way I tell you in court.”

  I laughed. “Here I thought I was done with people telling me what to do.”

  “Here’s the thing, Mississippi. I ain’t trying to boss ya. I’m tryna help ya. And I ain’t going to let you lose everything you hold dear. You’re going to go into that final trial date in drag.”

  “Drag?” I blurted out, too loud. Every head in the place turned to look at the loudmouthed Southern girl, assuming all the wrong things. For a moment, I thought Stormé was either drunk or out of her damn mind.

  “Yes, girl, drag. Like you said, I was the only drag king with the Jewel Box, right?”

  “Right?” I said, still not getting it.

  “Well, you gonna go into court next week in another kind of drag. You gonna go as the most upright, pretty, perfectly Southern Republican mama they ever fuckin’ seen. And you gonna play that part like you know how to play it, the best you’ve ever played it.”

  Suddenly, it made sense. I could do that. I could dress the part and play the part. And I could fucking win. I knew it like I knew my own heart. Stormé walked me out, and we walked arm in arm to the door of the Chelsea, and she gave me a big, dry smack right on the kisser.

  I went to the curb and hailed a cab. When we were crossing the Brooklyn Bridge, I texted Buffalo.

  i’m on the bridge, be home soon. met and kissed the most badass girl in nyc tonight. how was your party?

  Buffalo texted back.

  wtf? i hope you’re kidding! you know i don’t share. party was boring.

  When I got home to Carroll Gardens, he buzzed me in, and we stayed up half the night talking about his party and my night with Stormé.

  Buffalo said, “You gotta write her story someday. How do I not even know her name?”

  I loved how whenever I told a story, Buffalo told me I should write a book ab
out it, like I had a lifetime of books to write in my future. I fell asleep in his arms, thinking about that book, about Stormé, feeling less like a wounded animal and more like the luckiest girl on the planet.

  The next morning, I took the subway back into town, met Stormé in the lobby of the Chelsea, and we walked arm and arm all the way down to the Banana Republic in Soho.

  “Banana Republic? You sure?” I asked.

  “Girl, you gotta look right, not rich. You gotta look perfectly middle of the damn road. Like you went to the mall in Metairie.”

  When we got there, she bossed me to get in the dressing room and get undressed. Five minutes later, she passed a cream-colored taffeta suit with a straight, over-the-knee skirt and a three-quarter puffed-sleeve matching jacket, along with a little pure white silk shell. It fit, and made me feel like a blond Jackie O, with a Southern lady going to Easter early service twist.

  I came out and stood in the three-way mirror with Stormé behind me, smiling.

  “What’d I tell ya, Mississippi? The magic of drag.”

  We walked all the way back up to Chelsea arm and arm, reminiscing about New Orleans the way only two Southerners in New York can. Stormé told me about her days as a girl in the Quarter. She asked, “There must have been some good times over there for you, too, huh?”

  “After the storm, we’d go over to the Quarter just to get away from all the destruction, you know?”

  “Yeah, I do; it was pretty untouched. Still had some musicians and restaurants, too.”

  “Exactly. Of course, Liam would abandon us to get drunk, but me and the kids had some sweet times.”

  There was a ragtag Tremé pickup band that would play in Jackson Square in the Quarter every weekend, busking tips from tourists. One weekend, one of the hundreds we spent living our new good life with babies in tow, the band started to play my favorite song, and I—with big girl Avery on my hip—commenced to sing along.

  “C’mon up here, darlin’, and sing!” called the trumpet player.

  I didn’t need to be asked twice.

  I stepped up to the mic and sang with every ounce of my wounded soul, “Some bright morning when this life is over, I’ll fly away. To that home on God’s celestial shore, I’ll fly away.”