Ugly Ways

by Tina McElroy Ansa

Some townspeople swore you could see it in the way Emily talked ... through clenched teeth. She also had, even as a child, the habit of unconsciously biting her bottom lip while she thought something over. These habits lent everything she said—even the most mundane statements—an intensity that she rarely wished to express.

  Some of her grammar school teachers grew to hate her for her wild eyes and lip biting. "Look at her back there, looking wise and otherwise," Miss Leslie, her second-grade teacher, had muttered to herself at least twice a week for one whole school year.

  Emily never went so far as to live up to her mother's epithet of a "raving, ranting maniac." But she came as close to it as she dared and still have enough of an edge to back off. In one of her recurring dreams, Betty saw Emily flitting on the precipice of craziness, an actual ravine. "What an unbelievably insane, foolish thing to do," she remembered saying in her dream. Even awake, when Emily talked, sometimes, Betty could see her just flouncing up to the fanged monster image of craziness and shimmying her shoulders at it. Then, jerking away at the last minute just as insanity reached out its claw for her. She flirted with it.

  It was Emily of the 4:00 A.M. long-distance calls. "Now, tell me, Betty, now tell me. Now, if a woman loves a man and she does all she can for him and she tries to make him happy, then, shouldn't that man love her back? Now, tell me, now, isn't that the way it should be?"

  Betty would be so sleepy. "Well, Em-Em," Betty would say, trying to speak as if it were noon straight up and she didn't have to rise in a few hours and open up her beauty shop and do some heads. "You know it doesn't always work out that way."

  "But if you love him, if he's married or not, it doesn't matter, does it? If you love him and you do all you can for him and you're there for him. Now, tell me, shouldn't that man love you back?"

  Betty would even fall into the soft, calm manner of speaking she had used with Emily since childhood, using the pet name for her middle sister, "Em-Em." Her use of it sometimes forced Emily into seeing that she was just talking to her sister Betty, not to her psychiatrist, Dr. Axelton, or to a palm reader or priestess who professed to have all the answers.

  It was Emily who drove around her neighborhood in Southwest Atlanta at various hours of the day and night, looking for all the world like a wolf clutching the steering wheel of her red Datsun, her eyes darting dangerously here and there, always in search of something. Atlanta was not so far away. The stories got back to Mulberry.

  But it wasn't Emily who went first. It was Annie Ruth. Two years before. Everyone called it a nervous breakdown. Mudear called it a heart attack.

  Annie Ruth, an anchor at a television station in Washington, D.C., at the time, checked into an expensive private clinic in Virginia for a rest. Then, when she checked out two weeks later, she took the anchor job at the Los Angeles station that had been trying to hire her for nearly a year.

  The word of Annie Ruth's breakdown spread quickly in Mulberry. Mudear went right to work. Over the phone she told Carrie, the one woman she still talked with in town and who still talked with her, "Cut, my baby done gone and had a heart attack. Working in that fast-paced northern city, all that stress and overtime and all that. You know, Carrie, all my girls are working women."

  Mudear couldn't help it. She went with the strength. That had been her life's philosophy, at least since her youngest was five, and she much preferred to think of her child falling victim to a heart attack, the disease of the hardworking, rather than letting herself become the plaything of the mind's whim. A nervous breakdown. Mudear couldn't even bring herself to say the words. A nervous breakdown.

  It was so weak sounding. A breakdown. "What she got to break down about?" Mudear had asked the walls of her sumptuous bedroom over and over. And then she had badgered her husband when he came home from work in the chalk mines with the same question. "What she got to break down about?"

  Even when Betty, considered the strongest of the girls, went through that period when she couldn't stop itching and scratching herself even after she went to the dermatologist and got a soothing lotion that didn't work, she showed up for work every day, helped put on the annual hair and beauty show like always, and made sure dinner was cooked for Mudear and Poppa.

  She was only doing what was expected of her. What Mudear expected of her. She could still hear Mudear say, "Save that crazy shit for your own time, now get up off that floor and go on to that cosmetology seminar, like you got some sense."

  Taking care of responsibilities, duties, business was always the first priority. If the three girls expected to live out their lives in Mudear's good graces, then they had to produce.

  "There's nothing worse than a trifling, slouchy woman. It's okay for a man, what more can you expect? That don't have nothing to do with my girls. Being a trifling man. You know what I expect and you know why I expect it.

  "Women who don't care nothing about themselves," Mudear would mutter to herself as she sat by the kitchen window looking out over her yard and overseeing dinner preparation in a flowered housecoat with a flounce at the neckline. "Don't even take baths. Be smelling like the city docks." And her daughters would immediately stop their cleaning or cooking or chopping or washing or frying and begin scrutinizing each other for signs of triflingness, smelling the air around each other. They never felt they could assume that their mother was referring to some event or person far removed from them. They couldn't take that chance.

  It was what Betty finally said to Annie Ruth at the airport to get her to walk back to where the car was parked under her own steam.

  "Don't be so trifling, Annie Ruth," Betty whispered to her baby sister as Emily showed the skycap the way to the car. "Buck up."

  The girls never even considered saying what they all had thought at one time or another when Mudear went into one of her tirades about triflingness: that Mudear was probably the most trifling woman they had ever seen. A woman who spent most of her days lying in her throne of a bed or in a reclining chair or lounging on a chaise longue dressed in pretty nightclothes or a pastel housecoat. Doing nothing with her time but looking at television, directing the running of her household, making sure her girls did all the work to her specifications. Then, if she felt like it, some gardening at night.

  She did nothing else. Nothing, that is, but wash out her own drawers each night after everyone else had gone to bed.

  CHAPTER 3

  When the three Lovejoy sisters walked into the foyer of their parents' split-level house, they were not even aware of it, but they dropped the bags they were carrying and reached for each other, their fingertips barely brushing. All three of them felt the absence within the house, a house that even still smelled faintly like Mudear, like red spicy cinnamon balls. The girls all caught the scent of the fiery candy at the same time and almost looked around for Mudear to appear.

  They had been nearly silent on the car trip from the airport. Annie Ruth, back in the bosom of her sisters, had just about regained her composure as she lay across the backseat of the car listening to Sade sing of faith, trust, and love. Pulling herself together was what each of the Lovejoy girls did best. But there in the hall, its bare cream-colored walls reminding them that Mudear hated pictures of any kind on the wall, the living room furniture lived-in and free of what she called "Sherwood Forest plastic," it hit them all that their mother, who had ruled this modern brick split-level ranch house for nearly thirty years, had ruled it in the same way she had commanded their old two-story wooden house in East Mulberry before, was truly dead. They fell into each other's arms weeping and moaning like the surviving village elders at the funeral of a child.

  They felt again as they had for a good time after Mudear changed when they were young children. Like survivors of a war. Like Vietnamese boat people, soldiers, young boys turned men on the battlefield, bloodied, gimp-legged, hobbling on to the promise of peacetime. Stepping over the dead bodies, the ones who didn't make it, who didn't survive.

  For a long while they didn't even notice that their f
ather was standing there next to them by the door, his long strong arms dangling uselessly at his side, waiting to greet Annie Ruth, his youngest. They were too taken with themselves to notice him. Too taken with their own personal sorrow. They didn't mean to exclude him. They never did. They were just too busy with themselves to think of him.

  These girls always did belong to Mudear, he thought. He silently waited his turn.

  They were hardly girls. Betty had just turned forty-two, Emily was thirty-eight, and Annie Ruth, the baby, was still thirty-five, although she told people she was thirty-two. A woman with two days' makeup on she had met one night taking a whore's bath in the sink of an L.A. nightclub ladies' room had instructed Annie Ruth with a wink, "You look young, hon. Play younger."

  The sisters, still dressed in their outerwear, smelling of designer perfume and cigarette smoke, wept in the hallway until their sobs faded into moans and then trailed off into muffled hiccups. It wasn't that they mourned for Mudear as much as they feared the absence of her, the lacuna they knew her absence would leave in their lives.

  Their father stood to the side watching the whole scene of his daughters' weeping like an atheist watching a Passion play. At one time he, too, had worshiped at the altar of Mudear, weeping, bowing, pleasing. First, out of awe. Then, out of competition. Then, out of fear, he worshiped.

  "Betty Jean?" he finally said softly to his eldest daughter. She turned wiping the tears dripping from her high cheekbones.

  Betty heaved a sigh and said, "We okay, Poppa. It was just coming in the house and knowing she's not here. That's all. We okay. You want something to eat?" and she began taking off her shawl as she headed for the kitchen.

  While Emily struggled to push the luggage out of the entranceway, Annie Ruth turned to her father.

  "Hi, Poppa," she said and walked over to get her hello hug. He hugged the way many men did: stiffly, like a stick figure inside his long-sleeved plaid shirt and worn brown work pants with his arms and body at angles to her. He didn't embrace her. Rather, he let her lean against him, let her brush her cheek against his as he patted her on the back sharply two times.

  Annie Ruth steeled herself for the brush of his beard stubble against her cheek, but she was not at all prepared for the doughy feel of his face. Her father's face felt to Annie Ruth like her grandfather's had the few times they had visited him in the country when she was a child. Poppa can't be that old, she thought.

  Their father was just sixty-eight, a year away from retirement at the kaolin mines outside of town where he had worked since he was nineteen. He still had the slowly weakening strong slim body of a man who had spent his youth and most of his middle years digging and hauling chunks and boulders of the soft white stone. He had always taken pride in the way he looked—his tall strong body, his large head, his big feet, his slender hands—being careful not to take on a paunch and soft sagging breasts when the company was hit with a class action discrimination suit and he moved from laborer to lower management. He almost welcomed the sweat-producing work that Mudear had delegated to him in her garden for keeping him in some kind of shape.

  "A man never know when he gon' be called on to take care of himself," he'd mutter to himself as he struggled—sweaty and out of breath—to dig a hole at the edge of Mudear's garden big enough to accommodate another of her new nearly full-sized trees.

  The kitchen looked to all of them as it always did. Clean, scrupulously clean. Mudear, even though she didn't use it, wouldn't stand for anything other than a strictly clean kitchen.

  "A person can tell what kind of woman you are by checking to see how clean you keep around the burners on your stove" was one of Mudear's favorite dictums.

  The kitchen was a smaller room than would have been expected in a house the size of theirs, with three bedrooms. But Mudear had insisted on taking some of the space planned for the kitchen and putting it into the screened porch she planned. The first time she had shown some interest in the construction of the new structure was when she had discovered that her husband planned for the kitchen to be one of the largest rooms in the house. "You know good and well I don't spend no time in no kitchen," she had told Poppa.

  Their father hardly touched the vegetables and cornbread the girls fixed for him, even though Betty had made a special swing by the new enclosed farmers' market out by the Mulberry Mall to buy his favorites—okra and rutabagas. The four of them sat around the dining room table in near silence looking down at their plates and trying to think of something to say to each other that didn't involve Mudear. But Mudear's presence, as always, was too strong.

  "You know we holding off the funeral 'til them relatives of Mudear's up north can get off work and get down here," Poppa said to the table in general.

  The girls just made agreeing sounds over their plates.

  "All those folks do up there is work. They ought to have plenty money."

  Again, the girls just agreed. "Uh-uh," they said.

  "So, I was thinking, I wanted all you girls to be here before I said anything." He paused as if getting up his nerve.

  "'Bout what, Poppa?" Betty asked.

  "I was thinking we should just move that funeral service, it's not like it's gonna be in a church or anything, just a memorial service in the Parkinson Funeral Home chapel, just move it up to tomorrow or the day after. Shoot, I don't know what I'm holding this funeral out for. I was thinking 'bout it and it just don't make no sense not to go ahead and put your mother in the ground instead of leaving her out there at Parkinson Funeral Home waiting for some unreliable no-good northern Negroes to go hat in hand to some northern white folks to ask for a couple of days off so they can go back 'down south' to bury some backwards country relative.

  "It just don't make no sense. All this waiting and not knowing when those folks gonna really show up. If they can't get away from their jobs, they'll just wait 'til the last minute and call with some big high-flown excuse.

  "I was just thinking, just move this funeral on up. All this waiting is just too hard on the family, on you girls especially."

  Then, Poppa was silent. He had said that all in a rush. He felt like a young boy, the young awkward "Shag" that he had been, saying his Easter speech in front of his old bare-board country church's congregation, nervous, uncertain, afraid of overstepping his bounds. His suggestion was more than the girls had heard him say unsolicited and at one time in years. Annie Ruth didn't think she had ever heard him say so much. The girls just cut their eyes at each other.

  "If that's what you want, Poppa, that's what we'll do," Betty said. "Why don't you go on up to bed and try to get some rest. You look wore out."

  And he did, the other girls noticed with surprise.

  "You're not eating anything, anyway."

  Her father just nodded, almost with relief, and sort of patted the tabletop near his plate before pulling his long frame wearily up from his chair and heading out of the dining room for the stairs.

  The patting gesture reminded the girls of something they hadn't seen for a long time but couldn't quite put their finger on. It made them feel helpless watching him leave with a slow unsteady gait.

  Betty wanted to leave the dishes on the table for a little while, but Emily jumped up as soon as they heard their father's bedroom door close and began running soapy dishwater in the sink.

  She smiled and shrugged as she cleared the dishes from in front of her sisters. "Force of habit," she said, scraping the uneaten food into the tall plastic trash can by the door and silendy slipping the plates into the sudsy water before placing them in the dishwasher.

  By the time the three women had finished the few dishes and pans, Betty was nearly pacing the floor.

  "I can't stand this one more minute," she said. "I need a cigarette."

  As badly as she wanted a cigarette, the idea of smoking inside Mudear's house never crossed her mind. As always, she felt like a little girl sneaking a smoke of rabbit tobacco or an unfiltered Camel pilfered from her grandfather's pack left in the breast
pocket of his sweaty farmer's shirt.

  "Annie Ruth, fix us something to drink. I got to go out on the porch for a smoke," Betty said as she rummaged through her purse for her pack of Benson & Hedges Menthol Lights and headed out the sliding glass door that connected the screened porch to the back of the house.

  Annie Ruth settled on bourbon and ginger ale because that was all that was in the house except for some Scotch. None of them could abide the smell of Scotch. Even though Mudear did not drink, the bottle was hers. At some time, Mudear had heard from Carrie, her only friend in town, that people thought she stayed in the house all day drinking, that the reason no one ever saw her emerge was because she was in there drunk. Immediately, Mudear had stopped drinking any alcohol, even the fancy wine and champagne that the girls sometimes sent for presents.

  "Ya'll know I don't give a damn what people say about me, but I be damn if I'll give 'em ammunition to wag they tongues."

  Even Betty, who had promised herself three months before that she would stop racing toward that drink at the end of the day and who drank only Evian water with a twist when she went out, had the bourbon. It was what their father drank and kept on the bar in the rec room.

  Without conferring, Annie Ruth decided to use the good small old-fashioned glasses, the frosted ones that Mudear had never let them use. She tried to pretend it was no big deal to use them, but her hands shook slightly as she took them out of the glass breakfront and placed them on the bar. For a moment, she feared she would be swept with another wave of nausea.

  When she saw Emily watching her quivering hands, she smiled and said, "I guess I'm not as steady yet as I thought." And her sister stood behind her a few seconds and massaged the muscles in the back of her neck with her still-damp hands.

  Annie Ruth remembered as a girl standing in front of the cabinet gazing at the glasses the way a child looks at a snow-filled paperweight globe. She believed for years that it was indeed freezing inside the breakfront as she believed it was inside the paperweight. But she was always too frightened of getting caught to open up the cabinet and investigate. Or even to press her fingers to the glass.