Bed & Breakfast

by Lois Battle

  “Hey, Uncle Dozier . . .”

  “Just teasing you, Cam,” he said lightly. “Just pulling your pigtail like I did when you were little. It’s always fun to see you rise up. And you always do. Lord, girl, you must be a helluva caution to the men you go with.”

  Cam looked out the window, trying to remember something Sam had said about her need to win an argument. But wasn’t that the way men disarmed you? Telling you about your obsessive need to win when that was all they really cared about?

  “Whoa, you look like that scowling bust of Beethoven on my auntie’s piano,” Dozier told her. And when she didn’t smile, he teased her again. “I would’ve called old Walt a homo-sex-u-al,” he said, drawing in a breath, “but I didn’t know he was one.”

  “Well, he was,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest. Then, after a pause, as Dozier pulled her into the parking lot of the Azalealand Nursing Home, “Mama, I know I should’ve asked you if it was all right to invite Reba down, but you weren’t home, and she sounded so distressed and—”

  “Nothing to worry about, Cam.” Josie collected the presents and the Tupperware bowl with the custard she’d fixed for Mawmaw, and started to get out of the car. When she’d come in from visiting Peatsy, and Cam had told her that she’d invited her friend, Reba, to stay, her first thought had been, Oh, no, not another complication. But then she’d reminded herself of something Cam used to say in her teenage years—an expression that had irritated her no end, but upon reflection, didn’t seem to be unwise: Go with the flow. She would go with the flow. “It’ll be a full house tomorrow night, but I don’t suppose you’ll mind her bunking in with you.”

  “Of course not. And by the way . . . I don’t think it’s important, but Reba’s a lesbian.” She got out and closed the car door. “I wouldn’t want you to ask her why she isn’t married or anything.”

  Josie said, “I don’t think you need to teach us our manners with a guest, Cam.”

  “And you won’t mind sleeping with her?” Dozier asked with seeming nonchalance.

  “She’s a lesbian, not a rapist,” Cam said rather too loudly. Dozier looked past her, raised his hand in greeting, flashed a smile bright and wide as a searchlight, and said, “Merry Christmas, folks.” Cam turned her head to see a middle-aged couple, ears cocked, hands frozen on the half-opened doors of their black Cadillac.

  “And Happy New Year,” Cam added, striding off, expecting the sliding glass entrance doors to open automatically, being brought up short when they didn’t but refusing to break her stride. And, magically, the doors opened.

  Nine

  THE FOYER OF the Azalealand Nursing Home looked like a motel that had earned a two-star “very clean with modern fixtures” endorsement from the automobile club—pale blue walls, beige curtains with large flowers in unlikely shades of blues and burgundy, ersatz mahogany furniture. Sunlight streamed through the windows but the heat was turned up high. The air smelled of baking sugar cookies and pine disinfectant with a barely detectable trace of urine. A Christmas tree, decorated with red and green paper chains and tinfoil stars that must’ve come from a crafts class, had been placed next to a large TV. Two old women sat on the burgundy couch, holding hands and nodding off in front of a game show while a lump of a man hunched over his walker, muttering, “That’s not the right answer, you fool,” to a stumped contestant.

  A young woman stood in the reception area leaning over the desk, chin in one hand, pencil in the other, her rear end bouncing to an inaudible beat coming from the iPod hooked into the waistband of her polyester uniform. Her head, bent over her charts, showed an inch of dark roots fanning into a shock of brassy gold. “Tiffany,” Josie greeted her, “how are you, dear?” Tiffany raised her head and pulled out her headphones, causing her candy-cane earrings to jiggle. She had beautiful blue eyes and a tiny ring in her pug nose. A smile puffed her acne-scored cheeks. “Miz Tatternall and Mr. Robido. I figured you’d be in today.” She smiled at Cam, waiting for an introduction.

  “This is my daughter, Camilla, visiting from New York.”

  Cam shook Tiffany’s hand, noticed it had no wedding ring, said, “Pleased to meet you.” Tiffany’s face brought to mind trailer parks, scrubby toy-strewn yards, singles nights in country-western bars, Elvis painted on velvet. She might have been twenty-three or pushing forty. And she could see that Tiffany was making similar calculations, trying to guess her age, thinking something like, “Career bitch. Never had kids. Can afford facials and manicures and good clothes. Must be older than she looks.” Money was the thing that made the difference, Cam was sure they’d agree on that. Not, Cam thought, that she’d ever had a great deal of it, but what she’d had, apart from contributions to Planned Parenthood, literacy campaigns, arts organizations, and the like, she’d mostly spent on herself. How could she possibly go through a pregnancy, find a bigger apartment, hire a decent nanny to look after the baby when she went back to work? Assuming there was even a job to go back to. She couldn’t. And she wouldn’t.

  “And how’re Kayla and Lance?” Josie asked. Tiffany laughed, showing a gap between her molars on the right side. “Oh, they’re marking off the calendar to Christmas just like convicts in those ol’ prison movies marked off the days till they were gonna be sprung. Kuntry Kids is closed for the holidays so my neighbor’s taking care of ’em, so she’s markin’ off the days too.” She leaned, confidential, across the desk. “Your mother’s been a lot better since she’s had that new medication, Miz Tatternall. ’Member how she used to get all anxious when it started to get dark? Start worrying herself ’bout whether her kids would come home from school or if her husband had been killed in an auto accident? She’s a lot calmer toward nightfall since she’s on this new medication. Dr. Levinson’s on vacation in the Bahamas this week, but I’m sure he’ll tell you all about it when he gets back.”

  “Thank you, Tiffany. And in case I don’t see you on the way out”—Josie took a tin box and a smaller package from her shopping bag—“here’s a little something. The bourbon balls and coconut cookies are for the entire staff, but the little one’s for you.”

  “Well, aren’t you just the sweetest thing! Your mother is just the sweetest thing,” Tiffany told Cam, as though she had to convince her. “Y’all go on back. She’s in her room. Miz Aiken’s been reading to her from the Bible.”

  Josie nodded her thanks and they moved into the corridor. Fluorescent lights caught the whorls the electric polisher had made on the speckled linoleum. Wreaths with crepe-paper bows and plastic berries (further products of the crafts class, Cam presumed) decorated the doors, most of which were open, droning more TV. “I know Tiffany looks . . .” Josie began (Cam nodded, knowing the words “white trash” would never cross her mother’s lips), “but she’s really a very sweet girl. Her husband ran off and left her when she’d just weaned one and was pregnant with another and she’s had an awful time of it. Oh, there’s Beatrice.” An Amazonian black woman with cheekbones like Nefertiti was moving toward them, cooing encouragement to the old man who leaned on her arm. She acknowledged Josie with her eyes but kept on with her “Fine. You’re doing just fine,” and shuffled him past.

  “I suppose you brought something for Mrs. Aiken too?” Dozier asked.

  “Found a tape of gospel quartets I thought she’d like.”

  “Wonder if she’s still droning through Deuteronomy. Lord, I hope I never get so old I get religious.”

  “I always thought you were a believer,” Cam said. “You used to go to church. You even sang in the choir at St. Helena’s, so I assumed . . .”

  “Dozier always had a beautiful baritone,” Josie said, cutting Cam off from further prying into Dozier’s religious beliefs. “Here’s Mawmaw’s room.”

  Josie knocked, peeked around the door, then entered, motioning for them to follow. Dozier gave Cam a thumbs-up sign and went in but Cam hesitated, afraid of what she was going to see. Had she ever met anyone who’d survived to ninety-three? In her eyes Mawmaw had always been o
ld—though, she realized, the Mawmaw of her earliest memory had been considerably younger than she was now. At that time, a middle-aged Mawmaw had had heavy-lidded eyes with crinkles around them and cheeks that puffed up like little pillows when she smiled, which wasn’t very often. Her hair had been long and pretty, chestnut streaked with gray. Most times she wore it pulled back in a bun, but on special occasions she’d pile it onto the top of her head and pad it out into a fat roll with something she called a rat. Mawmaw wasn’t much for smooching, in fact she didn’t like to be touched, but she’d let Cam brush her hair before they went to bed. There’d been a photograph on Mawmaw’s piano that Mawmaw claimed was her when she was young, but Cam couldn’t imagine how that vivacious girl with arched, penciled brows, bee-stung lips, and spit curls had turned into her grandmother.

  After her hair turned white, Mawmaw had cut it short—ear length, with Mamie Eisenhower bangs to help disguise the new wrinkles in her forehead. The last time Cam had seen her she’d succumbed to a permanent—a white puff-ball that had made her large head seem more so. Over the years Mawmaw had gained, then lost, flesh. Her dewlap had sagged, her elbows had puckered, her hands had gone veiny. But her bosom had never seemed to change. It was a heavy bosom and she wore it corseted but low-slung, like Eleanor Roosevelt. This had caused Cam no end of embarrassment, and when she was in high school she’d bought Mawmaw an underwire bra for Christmas. Mawmaw had said, “If I pushed them up that high they’d be like a shelf to rest my chin on. It’s real pretty, but I just can’t wear it.” And she never had. Cam crossed her arms over her own breasts, felt the navy blue bra Sam had given her last Valentine’s day, and stepped into the room.

  There were twin beds with pale blue coverlets, twin chests of drawers, twin night tables cluttered with Kleenex, dry skin lotion in pump bottles, Vicks, an orange plastic water jug, and Styrofoam cups. A standard-issue print—sunset over the marshes—hung near the window where Mrs. Aiken, dressed in gravy colors appropriate to her dumpling shape, sat in an easy chair with an open Bible in her lap. She looked at Cam through thick glasses, showing neither surprise nor curiosity. “So nice of you to come,” she said, as though Cam were a regular visitor. Cam nodded and smiled, smiled and nodded, because, from the corner of her eye she could see Josie bending over a small, near-bald figure curled like a shrimp in the other easy chair, and she didn’t want to look there.

  Dozier stood, hands behind his back, staring out the window. “Now where was I?” Mrs. Aiken asked as though it were a real question. She found her place and quoted: “ ‘Now the lot of the tribe of the children of Benjamin came up according to their families, and the territory of their lot came out between the children of Judah and the children of Joseph. Their border on the north side began at the Jordan and the border went up to the side of Jericho on the north . . .’”

  Dozier winked at Cam. “Real-estate hassles way back when.”

  “It’s Joshua, chapter eighteen, verse eleven,” Mrs. Aiken informed him, hoping to evoke further interest. Finding none, she smoothed the ribbon marker onto the page, closed her Bible, braced herself on the arms of the chair, and creaked to her feet. “So nice of you to come,” she repeated, shuffling to the door. “I’ll just leave you all to visit. If she gets pesky and you need me I’ll be in the rec room.”

  Josie said, “Mama, look who’s come to visit you,” and moved aside, kneading the old lady’s shoulder as though it were dough. Mawmaw jerked up, mouth open, eyes blank, like a four-year-old who’d been interrupted from watching cartoons on a Saturday morning. She looked from Cam to Dozier, then lowered her head and stared at her hands, curled like dead bird claws in her lap. “Sometimes she comes ’round after I’ve been here for a little while,” Josie said without conviction, taking a Tupperware bowl, napkin, and spoon from the shopping bag. “Mama, it’s custard,” she explained, showing her. “You always liked custard.” She held it out, coaxing. She got no response but spooned it into the old lady’s mouth, wiping off the dribble with the napkin. Mawmaw accepted another mouthful, seemed to be enjoying it, said, “I like this restaurant.” Josie said, “Good,” smiled, and dipped into the bowl again. Cam felt she couldn’t breathe, found herself counting—one, two, three—mouthmls. On the fourth, Mawmaw wrenched her head to the side and batted at the spoon. Josie waited, saw Mawmaw’s mouth clench into a lipless line and the eyes, sunken under the brows, turn malevolent. Josie sighed, recapped the bowl, burped it, and wiped off the spoon. “I’ll just give it to Beatrice. She’s used to having Beatrice feed her. Maybe she’ll eat it later.”

  Dozier sat in Mrs. Aiken’s chair and took up her Bible. Cam, suddenly feeling very tired, sat down on Mrs. Aiken’s bed. Mawmaw tilted her head and studied her. Cam smiled hopefully, but the glimmer she’d hoped might grow into recognition only flared into suspicion. “She’s trouble,” Mawmaw said darkly. “Always was. Always will be.” Cam swallowed, furtively looked at her watch, raised her eyes to the window.

  Josie took a manicure set out of her shopping bag, went into the bathroom and returned with a plastic bowl full of warm suds. “The staff . . .” She waved her free hand back and forth, not wanting to put a name to it. “They’re really very kind but . . .”

  “We’d hoped”—Dozier waved his hand, mirroring Josie’s gesture—“ but I guess the old saying is true. You can’t buy kindness, at least not for two thousand a month.”

  “Two thousand a month!” Cam was incredulous.

  “She has some savings,” Josie was quick to put in, “and we just add to that. Mostly, Dozier adds to that. It’s the best place we could find. The staff, for the most part, really are kind, but they simply don’t have the time for the little niceties of grooming. Remember how important it was to Mama to be well groomed?”

  “She was of the ’cleanliness is next to godliness’ school,” Dozier put in, without looking up from Mrs. Aiken’s Bible.

  “Long as you could keep things clean you were keeping your head above water, that’s the way she thought. I s’pose that was because you had to take over your mother’s house when you were so young, wasn’t it?” Josie asked her, spreading a towel on the nightstand, setting out her manicure set. “Mawmaw was only thirteen when her mama went off her head and, being the eldest girl, she had to take over.”

  “Oh,” Cam laughed. “Now you confirm my suspicion: there really was insanity in the family. I never knew Great-grandma actually went off her head. Was she actually institutionalized?”

  “They didn’t do that so much in those days,” Josie said calmly, putting Mawmaw’s fingers into the dish of suds. “Great-grandma was pregnant every two years from the time she got married to the time she went through the change. A lot of her pregnancies ended in miscarriages and I guess she just snapped.”

  “Nobody ever told me that. I edited a book on women’s reproductive history, so I know that, at the turn of the century, the average sexually active woman could expect at least six pregnancies.”

  Dozier chuckled. “ ‘Sexually active’? Just as well Mawmaw can’t understand what you’re saying. She’d slap you from here to next Sunday.”

  “She wasn’t that shy about sex. She told me about sex before Mama did.”

  Josie’s head jerked up. “Well, she certainly never said much to me and I didn’t know she’d ever said anything to you.”

  “There was an ad in Vogue or one of her fashion magazines . . .” Cam could still see it: a full-page photograph of a woman beautifully poised, dressed in a blue satin ballgown, leaning against a grand piano, and a demurely cryptic caption that said “MODESS, because . . .” She’d asked Mawmaw what it meant and that had led to a hushed explanation of “monthlies,” followed by stern warnings about the dangers of leading boys on, and seemingly contradictory advice that if a woman wanted to stay married she must never say no to her husband about that. Cam laughed. “I don’t mean that she talked about sex the way kids are instructed today.”

  “No. Surely not the way kids are instructed today,” Dozier
grunted. “State-sponsored textbooks telling ten-year-olds about buggery.”

  Cam said, “Oh, Uncle Dozier!” then asked Josie, “When did Mawmaw first start to lose it?”

  “Lose it? Oh, you mean, when did her mind go. Oh, years and years ago,” Josie told her, pushing back Mawmaw’s cuticles with gentle nudges of an orange stick. “Strange, but it was your father who noticed it first. Remember how we used to go to Mawmaw’s for Sunday dinner?”

  “How could I forget?” Sunday dinners at Mawmaw’s—a tribal ritual you’d have to die to escape. Josie and Mawmaw bustling in the kitchen, Lila and Evie setting the table, she escaping to read a book, Bear antsy, pacing the porch with hands stuffed into his pockets until the heavy afternoon meal was set on the table, then wolfing down the mashed potatoes, corn, squash casserole, fried chicken, pickled beets, biscuits, home-churned butter, peach cobbler—content while he was eating but even more antsy after he’d finished, tossing the smeared linen napkin aside, eyes searching the room for an exit. And Josie, surveying the wreckage, stoic but a bit disappointed that hours of preparation had been wiped out in twenty minutes. As soon as Mawmaw and Josie started to clear the table, Cam would pick up her book again and escape to the bathroom, since that was the only room that had a door that locked. She would lie on the cool titles reading, ignoring the call of her name but one ear tuned to the scraping and scrubbing so she knew when it was safe to come out. Bear was usually gone by then, pleading work at the base, an obligation to wash the car, sometimes just wandering off, saying he’d be back by nightfall to pick up Josie and the children.

  While Josie put away the dishes, Mawmaw and the girls retired to Mawmaw’s porch, Evie and Lila sharing the glider, Cam sitting on the steps, Mawmaw in her rocker, massaging almond oil into her cuticles and telling improbable but utterly fascinating stories about her youth—how cousin Joe had drowned, how the hurricane had ripped the roof off the house just like it was a doll’s house, how Mildred had run off, how Agnes had died of grief. (“Did Agnes get spots before she died?” Evie asked one night after she’d had a bout of measles. Mawmaw had been derisive—as she often was with Evie: “Have some sense, child. Grief isn’t like the measles. It’s a disease of the heart.” Lila had butted in with, “I don’t think you can die of grief. My science teacher says—” and Mawmaw had snapped, “I don’t care what your science teacher says. Grief is a disease of the heart and you can die from it.”)