Ugly Ways

by Tina McElroy Ansa

  He had no idea that each of his girls had had just that intention at one time or another. Not just as little girls or teenagers but also as grown women living in their own houses. They had all dreamed of it. Of standing up for their father, of being, if only briefly, daddy's little girl, daddy's child.

  But the same words resounded in all their heads at the very thought. All their lives they had heard Mudear say, "It's getting so in this house I can't say nothing 'out somebody going running back to him with it. Are you my child or are you his, make up your mind!"

  Or intimately, she would ask each of them separately, call them up to her bedroom while Poppa was at work. "If me and your poppa was to get a divorce, who would you go with? You can't run with the hares and hunt with the hounds in this life. Choose." What a question, they noted to each other later in life, to put to a little girl, a child. Choose! It was just like Mudear to put the burden on someone else.

  "Mudear." It was the only thing she had stood firm on, insisted on early in their marriage. "That's what I called my mother and that's what I want my children to call me. It's short for 'Mother dear.' No, baby, don't say 'Maa-maa,' say 'Mu-dear,' 'Mu-dear,'" she would instruct each of the girls from age one on until each said it with just the same lilting inflection on the dear that the originator used. At the time, Poppa had thought it was so sweet the way the little girls said it.

  It was even what he called her now. Mudear. And for a moment he had to stop and think to remember what her given name was. Esther. Such a beautiful name. Esther. Beautiful. Like she had been at one time. Maybe she still was. She certainly thought of herself that way.

  When he first met her, she had reminded him of the sparklers on a stick that children ran with on the Fourth of July. She had actually seemed to send off sparks. She had a firm little body and a laugh like a moving picture star, he thought.

  But he stopped himself. He couldn't allow himself to think she was beautiful. Even dead. If he did, then all would be lost.

  God! he thought as he sat on the side of the wide bed with his head in his long slim hands. It was so hard to stay strong.

  Especially when you were doing something against your will, it was so hard.

  "Mens needs to talk," he had heard a fellow worker say one day to a bunch of his buddies, effectively banishing a big old pushy woman from their circle at the bar. "Mens needs to talk." The fellowship of men, that was what he needed. He had that fellowship at work. And he had found it when he stopped downtown at The Place to take a little drink before heading home white and chalky from working in the kaolin mines among the other hard-working folks who frequented the popular bar and grill.

  But when he needed that fellowship most, at home with his wife and daughters, it wasn't there. Here at home was where he most needed that camaraderie. Didn't they understand that, like the man said, mens needs to talk?

  He hadn't given up right away. He had held sway over his home, his wife, his children, his household, his territory for too long to give up that tyranny, that position, that authority right away.

  When he had first felt his control slipping away, he had gathered his men friends around him. A few times, he had invited one or two of his friends over. One, a man who fixed televisions, he asked over on the pretext that the TV needed repairing. "Stop by and take a look at my TV, man, and we can have a litde drink, too, while you there."

  But the friend had had more than a litde drink sitting at the kitchen table with Poppa. He had had quite a few, seeming to want to drink the full fifth of Old Forester dry before he left. Then, in his drunken stupor, he had gotten up and, turning the wrong way, had wandered into the living room mistaking it for the bathroom, unzipped his pants, and peed on one of the low side tables next to the sofa. Annie Ruth, still almost a baby then, had discovered it and gone running to her mother yelling, "Tee-tee! Tee-tee!" His friend had been banished from the house by the women.

  Any time Emest dared to mention a friend or coworker in Mudear's hearing, she would say, "I hope he ain't gonna come into my house and pee on the floor."

  It was enough to keep him from ever again venturing into the realm of male bonding. He was in this alone.

  Emest looked down at his hands hanging between his legs and shook his head sadly at their condition. At one time, he had taken such pride in his hands. Even though he was now a supervisor near retirement at the mines and rarely had to even pick up a chunk of chalk, his hands still showed the signs of his years in the pits. The white powdery chalk still showed up starkly around and under his nails against his dark brown fingers.

  Even though it was one of the first things she stopped doing after the change, Ernest could still picture Mudear seated on a small stool by his chair in the living room, her knees scrunched up to her still firm breasts, one of his hands lounging carelessly in hers. His other hand resting in a small bowl of soapy Lux liquid water on the arm of his chair.

  For quite a long time, he relished the memory of that vision, Mudear manicuring his nails. He loved to remember her doing his nails. The filing, clipping, soaking, painting them with clear nail polish. She was so good at it, like everything she tried her hand at, doing his nails. The final step—buffing them to a pink healthy glow—was his favorite. As she zipped the soft pink padded instrument back and forth across his nails, her whole body shimmied to the rhythm of the buffer. It was almost as good as sex.

  At first, after she refused to ever as long as she lived and stayed black ever sit on that stool—whatever happened to that wicker stool, he wondered—and serve him like some slave or something, he tried to do his own nails.

  The only reason he did that was some of the guys at the downtown bar noticed what sad shape his nails were falling into around all that soft chalk at work. "Wife ain't taking care a' her job like she supposed to, huh, Ernest?" one of the guys asked two Saturdays in a row while he and his friends lounged over a couple of quarts of cold Pabst Blue Ribbon at The Place downtown.

  Ernest had almost balled his fists up in shame. Damn her, he thought. Damn her, damn her. When he came in from work, she had the nerve to be sitting up there in bed polishing her own nails a creamy shell pink. Like she the Queen of Sheba, he had thought. That night he had dreamed that he drove both of his balled-up fists into her smug regal face and made her, made her, do his nails again. Made her do 'em right there in bed where she was painting hers.

  But when he had awakened the next morning, he had looked over at his wife sleeping peacefully beside him with her muddy garden shoes still on and remembered immediately that he could no longer make Mudear do anything he wanted her to do. And he felt like weeping in frustration. Instead, he got up, steeled his back, and went downstairs to the breakfast Betty had made for the family.

  He didn't know why he could never completely and finally hate her. Now that she was dead, he had to admit that he even admired some things about her after the change. Near morning, when she climbed back into their bed following her midnight wanderings and began immediately to snore softly, he would lie in the wide king-sized bed beside her and think, She really free. She don't have to get up at any set time in the morning. One of the girls will serve her a light breakfast in bed if that's what she wants. Or if she wakes up hungry, really ravenous like some hungry wild animal, she can stroll downstairs and one of 'em ul fix her pancakes and bacon with lots of butter and Alaga syrup and milk.

  He stood and began undressing for bed.

  And if the milk and pancakes tear up her stomach, that was okay 'cause she would be at home and could go to the bathroom, her own lavender bathroom, whenever she wanted. And stay in there as long as she liked.

  I guess I'm gonna have to die to be that free myself, he thought with a resigned sigh.

  Poppa didn't know what he was going to do now that Mudear was dead and, he assumed, out of his life. He didn't think he was ever going to be able to really get her out of his life. He didn't even know if that was what he really wanted ... Mudear out of his life. Perhaps, now that she was truly
gone, he would be able to find someone else, maybe somebody like his drinking buddy Patrice, someone who was not so heartless, so evil, so lacking in what he called a little human kindness.

  Sometimes he feared that Mudear either was not human or didn't possess any kind of kindness and living with her all these years, forty-five altogether, had somehow contaminated him. And he feared even more that his girls, Mudear's daughters, would turn out the same way. He shivered slightly as if someone had walked across his grave at the very thought.

  When he heard the sound of automobile doors closing, he went over to the side window of the bedroom and saw his two oldest daughters get in their cars. After Emily pulled off in her little red car, he stood there watching Betty sitting in hers parked in the driveway. As he watched, he smiled at the trail of cigarette smoke drifting out her car window. Betty was the only one of his girls who smoked like he did. Mudear had been a heavy smoker at one time, smoked Kool filters. Used to smoke in bed, too. But she told him one night when he came in from work late that she had heard on a medical talk show that smoking gave you wrinkles, so she stopped immediately. It seemed to him that Mudear could do anything she wanted to when she put her mind to it.

  And, of course, when Mudear stopped smoking, all smoking in the house had to cease.

  Looking down at Betty's cigarette smoke, he felt ashamed that he took pride in the fact that one of his girls smoked like him. As if sucking on these cancer sticks is something to be proud of, he thought. But he couldn't help it. There was so little he could claim in his own children.

  CHAPTER 7

  Betty sat in her car for a few minutes smoking a cigarette and looking out over the garden and the field of wildflowers around her parents' house before starting the engine. The moon, nearly full, shone through a break in the clouds and flooded the field with a soft white light that made the colors of the late-blooming wildflowers—goldenrod and blue sage and some black-eyed susans—stand out as in an eerie night painting. And the white blooming flowers and plants of the formal white garden her mother had grown especially to stand out at night—the moonflowers, the stalks of ginger lily spreading in waves against the house, the caladiums and hostas with their pale green and white stripes, the climbing peace roses and the iceberg roses grown as standards—looked like spirits dancing in the autumn wind. The town marveled that Mudear's plants kept blooming so profusely and so late in the season.

  Some folks said she had bodies buried back there.

  If Mudear were to come back, that's where she would come, Betty thought. She was like some strange exotic mixed-up plant herself.

  During the day lounging around in her freshly laundered gowns and robes and pajamas giving off noxious fumes like carbon dioxide as she made everyone's life miserable in the house. Then, at night blossoming and exuding oxygen, coming to life and giving off life in her garden outside. She was like a strange jungle plant that had reversed the natural order of the plant world. Betty had even seen her stoop down and take a bit of her garden dirt in her mouth one night.

  Betty could see her mother now as she had seen her innumerable nights wandering around in the field of flowers in her nightclothes, barefoot in the summertime and heavy boots in cooler weather, as if gardening were the most natural thing in the world to be doing in the middle of the night.

  For Mudear it was. She had possessed night vision. Extraordinary night vision, as far as Betty could tell. Her night vision extended to seeing at dusk and all the shadings in between when most folks with night vision said it was more difficult to see. Even more unusual, Mudear could not only see in pitch dark as most blessed with the sight could, but she could see just as clearly as day. Mudear could not only make out shapes and figures in the dark, she could see the ants crawling over her vines, the aphids on her roses, the blossoms on her eggplant, the drooping falls on her beard iris. She could see to turn her compost pile and where she left the garden fork she needed for the job leaning against the side of the aluminum storehouse.

  She had had Poppa find an old stone park bench with flowers and vines chiseled into its legs, sides, and back and set it down in the middle of where one of the paths of her garden crossed the other. When she was a teenager, Betty would get up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and stop to gaze out the window at Mudear sitting on one of her benches brushing the side of her thigh lazily with a huge sprig of lavender and be so mesmerized by her mother's movements that she would forget to go back to bed and would fall asleep at the windowsill.

  But Mudear had a knack for doing the strangest things and making them appear, at least for the moment, perfectly natural. Betty thought it was part of her charm, part of her beauty. Not that Mudear could be called a traditional beauty. She was nothing special really, just a little brown-skinned woman past middle age. She was never as pretty as any of her daughters, but she had a way about her, a confidence, a sureness in the way she moved, in the way she squatted down in the dirt next to a plant with real tenderness, a tenderness she never showed her family, that was downright seductive. And she could throw back her little pea head and laugh with such a robustness and a sense of abandon and irony that her daughters learned to talk about people in Mulberry and on television and in the news with a cutting wickedness just to hear her roar.

  Mudear's actions just seemed normal. Betty didn't notice right away, for instance, that Mudear never came out of the house like her little classmates' mothers did until her teachers at school began making sly comments in class about mothers who didn't seem to care enough about their daughters to make the effort to show up at parent-teacher meetings. At first, Betty didn't realize they were referring to Mudear. But when the comments became so pointed that she couldn't misinterpret or overlook them, she began to watch her mother in the way that Mudear had quietly taught her to watch other people, then come home and tell her what the girl had observed.

  Mudear always talked to her girls as if they were already women. They had conversations, never just silly meaningless small talk. They all understood that Mudear didn't take time for such trivialities as chitchat.

  They had never, even before the change, had conversations about school, dates, homework, skinned knees, and such, but rather about feelings and impressions and conjectures and opinions. When they talked of their grade school, it was a discussion of their friends and teachers and other people and their families and their clothes and their personal habits and their personal histories.

  If a teacher were cranky with the students, the girls would tell Mudear about it as they cleaned the house when they came home from school. Then, they would discuss the possibilities of the source of her displeasure. Finally, Mudear would make the call.

  "Mrs. Johnson's husband probably had hell in him last night and got drunk. Ya'll said she drinks, too, huh? Maybe he didn't pay some bill. I'd be mad, too." Or, "Didn't you tell me Mrs. Johnson's brother and wife just moved in with them with a new baby? Probably kept them all up last night."

  Then, on to the next topic.

  They would come home offering up their news, perceptions, observations like royal honey for the queen bee. It was what was expected of them. Their ears perked up like little cats' ears when they overheard something outside the house that they thought might pique her interest. Sometimes, her girls brought her the outside world without even realizing it. If Mudear let them visit a friend's house, when they returned they reported to Mudear.

  The conversation would begin with a few comments on what was done, what was seen, what was eaten and then it would slide easily into an examination of the adults and the intricacies of the household: gained weight, lost weight, new clothes, new anything, music playing, other visitors, nervous habits, mother and father touch, speak, fight. Were your little friends unusually quiet today? she would ask.

  Anything that would add texture, perspective, feeling to the picture the girls painted for Mudear. Mudear would keep these images in order but overlapping like a plate drawing in a biology book of the human body and a
ll its organs that has many overlays. With all the transparent colored pages in place, the picture took on a three-dimensional appearance that left the girls amazed that Mudear instinctively knew so much without leaving the house.

  It added to their mythical image of her.

  They never voiced their awareness that Mudear would have no connection with her community if they didn't bring the world to her.

  Betty's thoughts seemed to drift out the car window like the cigarette smoke that trailed from her nostrils. She thought again about going back in the house to try and convince Annie Ruth to come stay with her and Emily at her house for the night. But she knew that the three of them could not stay under one roof that night. With the day she had had and the one that loomed ahead, she wouldn't have the strength to keep Emily from interrogating Annie Ruth about her plans. She felt Annie Ruth couldn't take it. Even though her sister looked a lot better now, Betty couldn't stop picturing her as she had been at the airport.

  Then, all of a sudden she remembered Matthew, her first boyfriend in high school. Thinking about her sisters always put her in mind of her men. She smiled to herself thinking how he had asked her the first time they met, "You ever been shanghaied?" then proceeded to do it. Taking her to one of the new houses under construction in Sherwood Forest after all the workmen had left for the day, giving her a boost through one of the windows, spreading a tarpaulin splattered with rose-colored paint on the bare floor for them.

  If he showed up right now, she thought, I bet he would make love to me. No matter if he's married and got children and a house somewhere with a big mortgage on it that he needs his wife's income to pay for. Right now, he would want to love me.