It was even one of the first things I taught Emily to say when she wasn't no more than a baby, "A man don't give a damn about you." Heh-heh, it sho' was funny hearing that cute little thing saying that. And that time when she went waddling over to her daddy laying in bed and made him lean down and said right in his ear, "Poppa, a man don't give a damn about you." I thought I'd die right then. I laughed so hard behind my hand, I nearly peed in my drawers. I knew that when he came in the house the next day after work smelling like liquor and put all us out to scout around for somewhere to stay for two days that that was what was behind it. But I comforted myself with the look on his face when he heard his own child tell him that a man don't give a damn about you.
CHAPTER 14
Gazing down at the rings the raindrops made on the murky surface of the Ocawatchee River, Emily hummed a few bars of a blues song she liked: "I'd rather drink muddy water. Sleep out in a hollow log."
Mudear had always reminded Emily of an old blues singer, someone like Alberta Hunter: tough, capable, and knowing, with beautiful skin and gold hoops in her ears. Seeing Emily tend her poor bruised teenaged face in the bathroom, Mudear had always told her that she must have gotten her sensitive skin from Poppa's side of the family.
"Even when I first started my period, I never had so much as a pimple," Mudear would say lightly from her seat on the toilet as poor Emily struggled in the mirror with Noxzema and tubes of Clearasil to cover and treat her blackheads and zits without crying. "I think that stuff just make it worse. Make your face look like a potato grater," Mudear would add as she wiped herself dry and walked out of the family bathroom without washing her hands. "That cream is lighter than your skin, daughter, now everybody can see just how bad your face looks. You look like a dough-face."
Mudear would not have let snatches of blues songs, her favorites, snatch her back from the jaws of death if it was her destiny. But Emily did. "I'd rather drink muddy water. Sleep out in a hollow log. Before I let you make a fool out of me."
The irony of the songs always struck some chord in Emily's life that made her chuckle and eventually head back home.
"Before I let you make a fool out of me." It sounded like something Mudear would say. "I'd rather drink muddy water. Sleep out in a hollow log."
"Daughter," Mudear instructed Emily one day after her abortive first marriage when she came upon her middle child sitting on the staircase in the new house hugging her knees to her breasts, sobbing over her predicament. "Don't cry over nothing that don't cry over you." Mudear literally said it in passing as she continued down the steps to lie on the chaise longue on the porch. At the time it had just made Emily cry all the more. But a few days later in school, she saw her seventeen-year-old ex-husband trying to rub up against a tall light-skinned freshman with a long red ponytail and realized he wasn't crying over her at all.
Emily had married the first boy who showed any interest in her. She made no bones about it. As she threw a few things in a suitcase at the age of fifteen to elope with the boy, she told her sisters, "I don't know about you, but I'm getting the hell out of here while the getting is good. I'm bailing out, sisters."
Then, as an afterthought she turned to Betty and Annie Ruth, who was standing watch at the bedroom door for her, and suggested, "Why don't ya'll come with me? You can leave, too."
But Betty didn't think it was such a good idea for Emily to be running off as it was, to say nothing of dragging her and the baby, a very developed twelve-year-old Annie Ruth, off with her and her new husky husband. Emily and the boy (even the bride had trouble now remembering his name) made it across the state line to South Carolina in a raggedy black and white Ford with a broken muffler and to a justice of the peace who didn't care about anything but the requisite twenty-five dollars they had to pay for the license. But when they came back to Mulberry the next day to move in with the boy's mother, Poppa was waiting on the boy's porch to take her home. The affair was cleared up quickly without Emily's prior knowledge or full participation. And the marriage wasn't mentioned except in sly comments from Mudear.
"Daughter, run over to the drugstore and get me a bottle of clear fingernail polish, that is, if you ain't got a fine young man and no immediate plans to run off and get married this afternoon."
Then, it would strike her that what had happened to her was worse than what she and her sisters said they feared and resented the most. She had played her own self for a fool.
How many times had they talked about some other poor stupid girl they knew. "Girl, you know that litde knock-kneed, no-talking, tied-tongue boy played her, played her for a fool."
"Oooo," they would all say with a shudder, their eyes shut, their mouths tight and disapproving. To be played for a fool by a boy, a man, none of whom, Mudear had told them, knew shit from Shinola anyway, was the worst.
Mudear had made it so hard for her or any of the girls to love a man. For Emily, love was a serious thing, not something to be made light of or demeaned with casual pointed comments. Visiting Mudear some weekends, Emily would glance out the window at the field of wildflowers in the front and spy a pair of steel-blue dragonflies mating in midflight. It reminded her of her own love life. Of how difficult it was to find love on the wing.
Each time, she had been tempted to share her insight with Mudear—she knew that Mudear would appreciate the sight of the dragonflies, would even take credit for their being in the area because of her garden. But even Emily knew that Mudear didn't give a damn about her love life.
Emily had tried at different times to explain Mudear to her friends, men, and coworkers. At some time or other, all the girls had attempted to put Mudear in a neat, compact enough package to explain her. But Mudear could not be contained in their mere words. Especially since none of the girls felt free to tell the entire truth about Mudear to outsiders. They censored their thoughts any time they spoke to others, weeding out facts and descriptions of their mother and their upbringing in just the way they had learned to excise anything from their childhood chats with Mudear that they thought would bore her.
Even Emily's psychiatrist, a tall thin regal-looking white woman who used a cane and was trying to quit smoking, with whom Emily was unabashedly honest, gave the impression that she was having a hard time understanding Mudear, taking her all in. Emily would try again to explain Mudear.
As little girls, if we were having trouble doing something around the house and going at it the wrong way, Mudear would stroll into the room and say, "You cannot build a chimney from the top. You cannot drive a car from the rear." Or something like that. And I know it sounds crazy, but most times it would really help. She could be wise that way, sometimes. It made it hard sometimes to hate her. I mean, be mad at her, not hate her. I didn't mean that. Didn't mean to say that.
She could be mean, too, so mean she used to scare me just talking.
One day, she said to me out of the clear blue, "Your Poppa, one time when we was real low on money, he was sitting around feeling sorry for himself. So, I suggested that maybe it was time for me to buy me one of those gray and white maid's uniforms and do some day work. Hee-hee."
Somehow, that sounded cruel to me, her saying that to Poppa. I don't know why it sounded that way. But then, Mudear could make just about anything sound cruel.
The idea of anyone in our house cleaning up after white folks was not up for discussion. It was unthinkable. Mudear would say whenever the subject of maids came up:
"Humph, let them wash their own drawers. I wash my own. The world would be a better place if everyone, no matter how rich and no matter how many servants, if everyone had to wash their own drawers."
Religious? Hell, she isn't even superstitious. She doesn't believe in anything. And if she did, she wasn't afraid of anything. Black cats crossing her path, seeing the full moon between the branches of a tree, sweeping trash out the door after dark, nothing. She'd walk under a ladder just as quick as other people would step on a crack. Bad luck? She'd say, "Shit, you make your own luck in th
is world."
Growing up, I thought Mudear was the most powerful force on the face of the earth.
Mudear would begin any strenuous task, for her that was replanting a bush or fertilizing a patch of garden or taking a long hot bath with big white fragrant moonflowers floating on the water, with the exhortation "Well, Lord," as if she were asking the Lord for strength and guidance in completing this job. And she'd say it so intimately as if she and the Lord were on close, close terms. I told you, Dr. Axel ton, Mudear is the most sacrilegious person I know.
She has a habit oj quoting spirituals and the Bible and old hymns and such as if she really believed that stuff. Like her favorite one is you'd ask her how she was, you know, in just a conversational way. And she say, real sincerely, "I'm just standing on the battlefield holding hands with the Lord." And she say it with such fervor, such conviction. It would only be us girls who knew her and Poppa I guess who would know what a sacrilegious thing that was to come out of Mudear's mouth.
I guess she'd disagree with us, argue with us really, because at times she saw herself as a very fervent, spiritual person. But actually she's the most carnal person we ever knew. Dr. Axelton, this is a woman who eats collard greens with her fingers. With these four fingers, the thumb and the first three fingers meeting to grasp the shredded leaves of the collards, wet, greasy, ham hocky, juicy the way Betty makes them, and bring them slowly, exquisitely to her mouth. She'd say, "'Scuse me, I have to eat collards with my hands. This my fork." And she could make it look good, too.
"Standing on the battlefield holding hands with the Lord." What a thing to say and not really believe it. How do I know she didn't believe it? Mudear doesn't feel she has to hold hands with anybody for strength or anything else for that matter, that's why.
Besides, she never went to church and she hasn't looked at a Bible since she went to Sunday school. I think she used to go to church a lot when she was a girl. But you can tell by the half-assed mean way she quotes scripture that she wasn't paying any attention.
If she hear me and Annie Ruth and Betty bitching about her 'round the house, she'd call us into where she was laying up in her bed or on her La-Z-Boy and tell us, "Daughters, when your mother and father abandon you, then the Lord will take you up." Then, she'd go back to doing what she had been doing before just like we weren't in the room.
And she certainly doesn't live her life according to any Christian tenets. Nobody would call her religious. Religious, actually, that's Funny. Mudear doesn't study any religion except the religion of Mudear. That's what she believes in.
The rest of us? Yeah, we went to church, we girls did. When we were little, Poppa would drive us. We were cute all three of us dressed in matching outfits. Annie Ruth in violet, Betty in blue, and me in pink. Mudear knew about people's colors long before anybody came up with paying however many dollars to some newly divorced, gone-back-to-work suburban matron to "do" your colors. You know that autumn, summer, winter, spring stiff.
Mudear knows a lot. Too much, probably.
But religious? Holding hands with the Lord? Mudear? No, not Mudear. She used to make fun of people who believed. You know, really believed in God and a Supreme Being and a higher purpose other than themselves.
She used to say, "Shit, niggas eat fish off the Bible." Mudear made selfishness into a religion.
After a few weeks of listening to Emily fill her fifty minutes with talk of Mudear, Dr. Axelton had suggested that perhaps the best thing for her was to put some distance between herself and Mudear. She made the suggestion to Emily very gently, gingerly, the way she always talked with her, as if she knew just how fragile Emily was. Besides her sisters, her psychiatrist seemed to be the only person sometimes who realized just how fragile Emily was.
"Sometimes," Dr. Axelton said in her soft flat southern accent, "when we can't change a situation that is painful, a situation that is harming us, then we need to stay away from that situation."
She must have read Emily's feelings through her face because she added, "Yes, Emily, even if the situation you need to stay away from is your own mother."
But Dr. Axelton could tell by her patient's face that Emily was not ready to hear that.
Dr. Axelton was just one in a string of healers Emily had sought out to bring some peace and solace to her life. She went to her in just the way she still consulted a personal psychic routinely and a tarot reader and a telephone psychic periodically for advice, guidance, and support. Her job with the state didn't carry the excitement of television broadcasting like Annie Ruth's or of power and entrepreneurship like Betty's, but the insurance offered government employees made it possible for her to visit a psychiatrist with no set time limit. And after her first visit, she was hooked, looking forward all week to her Monday late-morning appointment. She'd drive out to the perimeter interstate surrounding the city and Dr. Axelton's office seemingly brimming over with talk of Mudear and her own life and her dreams and questions. She could hardly hold herself together until she sat on Dr. Axelton's tweed nubby pile sofa.
She detested the process of sitting at the desk of some young hardly educated white girl in the state government personnel office and discussing her analysis in order to keep her insurance payments coming.
"And so you're telling me that you're compulsive-obsessionate, that's what it says on your doctor's report, and your sessions should be continued?" the chubby woman with splotchy skin would ask Emily in a loud voice after every three-month interval.
Emily wanted to reach across the desk and ball up the report along with the other papers on her desk and jam them all down her fat throat, but she just answered in a voice she hoped was as loud and strong as the interrogator's, "Yes."
The psychic she went to, a caramel-colored fleshy woman who wore her long thick sandy hair in braids and who lived, conveniently enough, outside of Atlanta on the way to Mulberry, assured her in her very first reading it was predestined that she would have to suffer some indignities before she was recognized for the fully evolved spirit that she was. So, Emily just figured this was part of the plan for her life.
Emily shifted her butt again on the hard ground of the riverbank. She could feel the beginning of a tiny itch between her legs and knew that all the stress and worry of the funeral and life had given her what the girls called "the itch." And the tight jeans she was wearing weren't helping any, either.
She knew that all she had to do was think about the itch to get it. Sort of like herpes, she guessed. But none of her other friends at work or elsewhere ever said that the itch was as suggestive as it seemed with her. She said a silent prayer of thanksgiving to the river god as she imagined her—long-legged and big-butt astride the water—for the sale of Monistat 7 over the counter at the local drugstore and shifted her butt on the shale of the riverbank.
If she were at home in Atlanta, she would go to her own bathroom and fix a refreshing douche to flush herself out with. Mudear had taught her that. Well, she had told her about it. "When I was a young woman and got the itch, I always put a couple tablespoons of baking soda in a douche bag with warm, not hot, warm water, and half a cup of white vinegar. Urn, I can still feel those fizzling bubbles just eating up that 'itch.'"
Emily couldn't remember Mudear ever really teaching any of them anything directly. The girls just had to be swift enough to listen to her criticisms and pick up suggestions she dropped in conversation.
The girls rarely told anyone the truth about Mudear. They had discovered early on in grammar school that people judged them by what they thought of Mudear. Besides, it seemed that folks always had trouble understanding how any of the girls could continue to have any type of relationship with a woman like Mudear whom some would have considered such a monster. The very idea that a grown woman would choose to sit down and visit with a woman who for all practical purposes had abandoned her for the better part of her life was incomprehensible to folks who didn't know Mudear.
The girls found it difficult to capture the entirety of Mudear in conve
rsations away from the woman with folks outside the family. Of course, Mudear did some horrible things to them when they were growing up. But it never was personal, the girls firmly believed. Mudear had made it clear over the years that she didn't do anything, not since she had so easily gotten the upper hand with Poppa, because of somebody. She was just doing what the hell she wanted to do. If somebody got in the way, well, that was life.
And the girls didn't know how else to put it to strangers, but nobody was really allowed to hate Mudear. It wasn't a matter of what she did or did not deserve. Deserving did not enter into it. She lived and played by her own set of rules or lack of them. She made you feel that you couldn't judge her by your piddling standards even if those standards were held by most of the world.
Emily felt she could sum up her and her sisters' relationship to Mudear best by quoting a scene from a movie she had seen on TV about a former Air Force pilot, a survivor of a Vietcong POW camp. He told how his captors used a torture device that tied him up with his hands bound behind him and suspended him from a rope that intensified the excruciating pain in his arms the longer he hung from the ceiling. As he demonstrated a replica of the device he kept in his garage, he was asked how does one survive that kind of daily torture. The former Vietnam POW replied, "You leam to love the rope."
It was how she and the girls felt about Mudear.
Regardless of her abdication of responsibility as mother, Mudear was, as she reminded them from time to time, still their mother. Some respect was due her, Mudear felt, for not throwing herself down a flight of steps when she was pregnant with each one of them.
CHAPTER 15
The automatic timer switch had already turned on the lights throughout Betty's large colonial-style house. The lights timer was as much for Betty's mental health as it was for security. Betty refused to come home to a dark house especially when the days began to get shorter in the late fall and early winter. And tonight with the fine misty rain falling, she was even more grateful for the lights in her empty house.
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