Ugly Ways

by Tina McElroy Ansa

  But I was so full of myself then, he thought, so sure about how things should be, so sure about always being right, that I guess I was ... He stopped thinking for a while, struck by the weight of what he was about to say to himself.

  I guess, he thought slowly, I guess I was like Mudear.

  He had tried over the years to discern why he was the kind of man he was when he and Mudear had gotten married, when the girls were little and still able to love their daddy. For so long, he had found it impossible not to place all the blame for his behavior on the capable, culpable Mudear. How could he do anything else but blame her?

  If she hadn't been such a heartless bitch, he reasoned. If she hadn't turned the girls—his own children—against him. If she hadn't burned the okra every day. If she didn't always have to have her say. If she hadn't taken so long with the stew meat that time. If she hadn't had to clip articles out of the newspaper to prove he was wrong about something.

  Sure, he had slapped her a few times after they were married a couple of years. But that was how things was then, he thought. Then, a man controlled his household, his wife, his family. Wasn't even no big to-do about it. Just a couple of taps really just to shut her up and let her know who was who and what was what. Most mens did that every now and then at that time, he thought. That's how it was then, it was a way to rule your house. You said something and your woman did it. If she didn't, you showed her that she better. People understood that then.

  But he had finally, over the years, accepted that the more that Mudear had done for him, the more he figured she should do for him. And the more he feared all the things she knew how to do.

  Maybe it was seeing her so capable, so able to take care of everything that was thrown her way. She never seemed to buckle, but rather to steel herself and go forward. He had to admit, it had scared him. He remembered his twenty-year-old mind trying to take all of Esther in, even before the change, and being overwhelmed by this woman he had married.

  He knew that he was the first man she ever knew, ever to touch her in her private places. But she came to lovemaking that first time as if she had been made for it. She wasn't shy or modest about her body. She reveled in her strong little body—short big legs, a miniature hourglass figure—and the first time she saw him naked she had reveled in his, too. His was the first penis she felt and really looked at in the light. He could tell by the bemused, inquisitive expression she had on her face as if she were discovering maleness ... in him. He let her examine him, but he didn't like it. It was too much for him.

  He still remembered lying in their little newlywed bed while Mudear knelt by the bedside table lamp moving her face closer and closer to his penis, scanning him with her mouth hanging slightly open. Then, she lifted his dick up with her finger and gently blew on the underside.

  Even in his arousal, Ernest thought in panic, "Good God, she's gonna touch my johnson with her mouth!" And he rolled out of bed away from her and stood glowering down at her upturned smiling face. He stood there silently, his feet astride, his hands in fists hanging at his sides. He found he had no words to express his outrage at her behavior. So, finally, he stormed off to their bathroom, his turgid penis bobbing in front of him as he walked.

  Even the way she walked around their first rented room with no clothes on as if it were the most natural thing for a newly married woman to do. Like she had been doing it all her life. It made him uncomfortable.

  He would watch awhile, then throw her her old cotton robe he would find rolled up in a ball among their damp and sweaty bed linens to cover herself and she'd just catch it, a good solid catch, too, laugh, and throw it back at him with her naked self.

  She never did have no shame, he thought.

  His mind was spinning so fast going over and over his life with Mudear that he just about gave up on getting any sleep and thought about getting up and exploring the night the way Mudear had done for more than thirty years.

  He couldn't say why Mudear was never molested or attacked or disturbed as she gardened at night near the red dirt and asphalt streets of busy East Mulberry and then the narrow roads of the development called Sherwood Forest. It was just hard for him to say why.

  Mulberry could be a strange litde town like that. A rich old-name white Mulberry man hires two drifters to kill his wife in her bed in her mansion behind high gates with dogs prowling the property, to rip the diamond rings from her bloody fingers, to make it look like a brutal robbery. And an undistinguished black middle-aged woman gardens off the streets of Mulberry alone in the middle of the night unmolested, not even bothered or harassed by idling teenagers that her neighborhood, the development, had plenty of. Spoiled teenagers, teenagers with no thought of a job, teenagers with expensive cars, teenagers who whined for money, big money, to attend a music concert, from what he overheard in the driveways and doorways of his neighbors' homes.

  Not like our girls, he thought. Always got a job. Not asking for anything. Doing for themselves.

  Mudear would have laughed if she knew that her husband had ever considered her safety. It went against everything that Emest knew Mudear believed.

  "Shit," Mudear used to say. "A man no matter how much he love you will send you out to face the world alone, will sit by and watch your heart break, will let you work yourself into the grave taking care of him and then stand over the open hole and cry and cry and yell, 'Oh, baby, why you have to leave me? Why you have to go before me? Aww, baby, how you 'spect me to live 'out you?'

  "Yeah, but yet and still before you cold, he be walking around looking for another fool woman to take care of him while your ass be six feet under.

  "A man don't give a damn about you."

  Poppa had to laugh at the memory of what he had overheard Mudear tell the girls as she worked their asses to the bone.

  He had heard Mudear say so many times if anyone dared to mention dying, death, or age to her, "Hell, I'm gonna eat the duck that eats the grass off all ya'll's graves."

  Well, Esther, he thought again, it didn't work that way, did it?

  Then, he felt funny, sneaky for thinking that way about Mudear even though she wasn't still around to give him that look that said, "Negro, have you lost your mind talking to me that way? You got your womens confused.

  "You oversporting yourself."

  For a while he couldn't remember what he had been thinking or what he was about to do when his dead wife intruded on his thoughts. He had to rub his face with the dry palms of his hands to clear his head. My mind wanders so lately, he thought. Oh, yeah, I was thinking about getting up.

  But he realized he had no desire to go walking in the night. That was her thing, he thought.

  Poppa picked up the remote control on Mudear's bedside table and fingered it for a while. Mudear had said the remote control was one of the world's best inventions. He clicked on the television at the foot of the bed. It came on one of the home shopping networks. The television was a portable model but a wide-screen one. Mudear couldn't stand the small ones. Said she couldn't make out the screen. She needed glasses but insisted that her eyes were as good as always and better than most because she had night vision. And then, even if she did really need glasses, no optometrist was gonna come out to the house and pay a visit with all his equipment and lenses and frames and stuff in the backseat just for her. Although that's probably what she expected.

  She did get one of the girls to get her some of those drugstore reading glasses though. She didn't need 'em for much. 'Cause she wasn't much of a reader. All she ever did was leaf through a magazine or two to look at the pictures or peruse the stack of mail-order catalogs she kept all over the house, next to her bed and her La-Z-Boy and the phones. Mudear loved the pictures, moving or standing still. She called herself a TV baby. Like a baby boomer.

  She did love her TV. There were three television sets in the house. All large screens: the twenty-two-inch in the bedroom. The big projection television in the rec room and the thirty-seven-inch Sony in the living room. He had purc
hased the one in the living room just so he could get to see the baseball games and the boxing matches that he loved. Just watching those young strong bodies at the height of their form punching away at each other and taking it gave him some hope for himself and for all men. Many times he wondered if men, males, "man-kind" as Mudear called all men, were going to survive.

  Poppa turned up the sound and watched a few minutes of the woman on the screen selling dollhouses. Even while she was up here in this bed nearly dying, she was busy spending my money, Emest thought. But I got to admit she didn't waste no money on those little china dogs and doodads that they sold on TV. She went for the good stuff. Equipment and stuff for her garden, light bulbs that were guaranteed to bum for a hundred years, a speed videotape rewinder.

  And then, too, as she would remind him, her girls paid for and sent her just as much stuff as he did. More, really, 'cause they could afford it.

  He casually flicked through all the stations, sixty-four of them altogether, including all the movie channels and Playboy. Mudear insisted that she had to have all the stations that the cable company in Mulberry offered, so she'd know what was going on in the world. And he had to admit that she did make good use of them. Mudear was interested in everything that came on TV. She looked at nature shows, afternoon talk shows, music videos, Sunday morning discussion panels, feature films, documentaries, the Weather Channel, foreign films, Larry King, game shows, soap operas, cooking shows, fishing and hunting shows, concerts, CNN, CNBC, and C-Span. She never bothered with the copies of TV Guide that one of the girls got her a subscription to. She would just turn on the television and flick through the channels until she found something that caught her interest. And when her interest waned, she'd just find another channel.

  Cable television, Ernest thought, like catalogs and overnight delivery service, was just made for Mudear.

  CHAPTER 13

  I wonder how long it will take before Ernest is laying all the way across that bed. Enjoying the freedom of not having to share it with me. I never could understand why more men aren't found murdered in they beds. I heard on television that most murders are committed in the kitchen. I guess I can understand that, too. I guess I should be mad at the thought of him enjoying my big pretty canopy bed without me in it, but somehow right now I'm not. Actually, now that I'm not there anymore, I'm beginning not to care about that bed. Funny, too, since it used to be so important to me. When I first saw it in that fancy catalog that sold reproductions of antiques, I could just see myself laying up in it, propped up with some big down feather pillows covered with material that matched the dust ruffle and comforter. I never once envisioned that wide old-looking bed with anybody but me in it. Not 'til I walked back in the room right after it was delivered about dawn from my garden and found Ernest laying up there sleeping like he been hoeing rows a' cotton all day instead of just playing out there in the chalk mines.

  But that's one thing he refused to do, stop sleeping in my bed. And I sure as hell wasn't about to move from that bed.

  Everything about that bed was important to me. The little footstool with the tapestry cover I needed to step up to the height of the big hard mattress. The way the sheets felt, the kinds of patterns in the pillowcases and sheets and spreads, just the right kind of blankets that didn't irritate my sensitive skin, the red plaid and purple plaid flannel sheets that I had to have in wintertime that felt so cozy against my skin that the girls sent me in the big brown UPS truck. God, Ernest was right, that truck was made for me. I loved to see that big brown truck pull up in front of the house.

  I spent so much time up in that bed, I guess that's why it was so special to me. Lord, I guess I better start feeling the same way about this satin-lined casket. Although, in my heart of hearts, I can't really believe that this is where I'm gonna really spend eternity. Or else, if it is, then all that "she's gone to a better place" stuff that people love to say when somebody die don't mean shit.

  I sure do hope this is not it since I know ain't nobody gonna be coming in here every few days to change the cream-colored satin lining in this box the way one of those girls Betty hired or Ernest did at home.

  And seeing how the girls are acting already, I know they ain't gonna be making many pilgrimages back to Mulberry City Cemetery to visit my grave and plant some pretty Rowers, maybe some nice big hydrangea bushes around the back of my tombstone to set me off from the other dead folks—I wonder if all them dead folks make the soil acidy or alkaline?—and keep 'em up. They all claim they can't stand cemeteries. They think they so smart talking bad about graveyards like I don't know that they trying to pick at me on the sly just 'cause I sent them those few little times to the graveyard when they was little to get me a few cuttings from those lovely rosebushes growing all over the place.

  Best rosebush cuttings you can get ... from cemeteries. None of these new-time hybrids they try to sell you in mail-order books now that don't hold up to bugs or heat or diseases. But the old-fashioned kind of roses that smell so good, almost like lemons, you want to lick the velvety petals just for the taste.

  When I'd see in those magazines with all the lace and flowers and gardening shears on the front that the girls had sent to me every month about putting flower petals in salads and baking 'em in cookies, I'd just smile. 'Cause I knew just what they were talking about to do that. A garden of flowers is a luscious thing.

  It's hard for me to believe that at one time I had stopped getting any enjoyment out of food, all that delicious food I prepared in that dark cramped kitchen in the old house in East Mulberry. Uh, everything started tasting like wet cardboard in my mouth, even my cakes. Wet and papery with a bit of paste thrown in. But I found out afterwards that it wasn't my cooking, it was my life.

  At first, when I made up my mind it was gonna be different, I had thought about just walking away. Leaving that house and that kitchen and everything and walking away free and clear of it all. But then, I thought, why should I leave something that was mine? A nice comfortable house where I had three girls, two of them—and soon all of them—big enough to help with everything, the cooking and cleaning and sewing, and a man that I knew inside out who had a steady enough job. And the thought of leaving my garden at the old house—I bet I was the only one in Mulberry who had asparagus growing up 'gainst an old fence—made me well up with tears. Leave all that? Just to go off and to tackle the world by myself. Why?

  So, I decided to stay in body. But to leave in spirit and let my spirit free. So that's what I did. And never did regret it, either.

  Ernest thought that his messing around with those women downtown at The Place would bother me, hurt me, maybe even make me leave, so he could have the house and his entire paycheck to himself, but I told him right to his face one night when he come in smelling of whiskey and pussy and that cheap-ass Evening in Paris or that Hoyt's cologne that I didn't give a damn what he did as long as I could live my life the way I wanted to and not have to clean up that house or cook dinner myself or stop taking care of my flowers. And I didn't, either.

  I tried to tell the girls, tried my best to tell them: a man don't give a damn about you. No matter how much he claim to love you, even the ones who will eat your dirty drawers don't really give a damn about you, not really.

  I told 'em straight out. I never did talk down to my girls the way some grown-up folks do with children. I always talked to 'em the way I expected them to be, women. And they understood me, too. Never did come crying to me with some little silly stuff that they knew I didn't have no interest in. I never could stand a whole lot a' childish crying and whining.

  "This teacher don't like me, she look at me funny all day."

  "So-and-so say she ain't gonna play with me 'cause her mama won't let her."

  "I might not have enough credits to graduate."

  I tried to show them how freeing it is to discover that and really live your life by that... "That man don't give a damn 'bout me." ...To say that and know it ain't got nothing to do with you, that that's
just the way a man is. And when it don't hurt no more, then you free.

  Once you realize that about the person that you lay your head down next to every night, then you can move on to the other folk in this world who also don't give a shit about you.

  Ernest certainly didn't give a damn about me, not even when we first got married and I thought he was really in love with me. I was stupid or innocent enough to think that he just had to care about me, with my little cute self. Keep living, Esther. I feel like a fool just thinking about it now, but I used to write our names over and over on my school pad: Ernest Lovejoy, Mr. and Mrs. Ernest Lovejoy, the Lovejoys, Mrs. Ernest Lovejoy, Ernest and Esther Lovejoy, Mrs. Esther Lovejoy.

  It sound so foolish now, but I truly thought that Ernest and me, our getting married was like a wedding of two forces. We would be joining forces, taking the best of both of us, me a city girl and him a country boy, my strong points joined up with his strong points, his best traits and mine. We was gonna take life by storm. I really thought that at one time. That's how I thought it was with my Mudear and father.

  And it did hurt for a while when I realized he didn't give no more of a damn about me than the man in the moon. The things he did to me didn't hurt me half as much as realizing that he did 'em 'cause he didn't give a damn.

  That's what I was trying to save my girls from. From that time—and it eventually come to all women—when you all deep in what you think is love and you get slapped in the face with a rolled-up copy of the Mulberry Clarion newspaper or told what you think or what you think you are ain't shit. That you need to wear a bra all the time around the house 'cause your titties funny shaped. Or your rice is always gummy. If you already know that time is coming, then they can't touch you. Then, you ain't even got tears to shed when it happen.