She dumped her things on a delicate tapestry-covered chair in the hall and picked up her mail stacked next to a bowl of silk orchids on the tall piecrust table beside the front door. Although Emily's townhouse in Atlanta was spartan compared to Betty's elegant home and Annie Ruth's condo was stylishly messy compared to Betty's meticulously neat one, the three did share a few things in common. One was their decorating attitude toward flowers. Any plants or flowers in any of the girls' homes were always fake. None of them would abide a growing plant in their homes. The plants in the front of Betty's house and lining the driveway were taken care of quietly by a lawn care company.
And their hatred of plants was as strong as their love of books. All three women made spaces for their ever-growing collections of books all over their homes. Betty not only had a library with a sliding ladder to get to the top shelves, she had had bookshelves built in just about every sitting room and bedroom in her house. Emily, who still lived in the same pleasantly messy townhouse apartment she had moved into ten years before when her marriage to Ron ended, used every repository imaginable to store her books—wooden bookcases, étagères, filing cabinets, wine crates, utility racks. Her book arrangement formed the only decorating theme in her whole apartment. The rest was just comfortable sofas, chairs, and a bed.
When Annie Ruth had filled up the four beautiful ebony bookcases that a former boyfriend had built for her, she put her books anywhere around the house: in stacks on the floor, in huge Indian baskets she bought on Melrose, propped against walls, on tabletops. In Los Angeles, the fact that she had any books at all in her home was enough to make it a conversation opener at parties. "I know you know this face," hostesses would say introducing her. "Ruth's on TV, but you should see all the books she has in her house."
Betty's house, once home to old white southern Mulberry belles having afternoon teas prepared and served by women like Betty who had to wear black and white starched uniforms, had a sweeping staircase like something out of an old MGM movie set. Betty and her decorator had taken down the crystal chandelier that had hung there since the war and filled the top of the two-story foyer with a brightly stained wooden mobile by an artist who had gone to college with Annie Ruth. The artist had driven down from Atlanta personally to hang the piece and attend the reception Betty held for her.
Betty looked around and noted that the house had that special polish to it—the books and shelves in the library dusted, the hardwood floors waxed and buffed, the smell of lemon oil in the air, drapes shaken and pillows plumped—that it wore on the days Mrs. Andrews, the cleaning woman, came.
She made a note on a stack of yellow Post-Its on the table to tell this latest cleaning woman what a good job she was doing and give her a bonus. For a woman as busy as Betty, finding an independent, efficient cleaning woman she could count on was no small accomplishment. She had wasted more than a year going through six other women and one transvestite named Veronica, who was the best of the lot but who had the unsettling habit of disappearing for weeks at a time, looking for a black person who would clean her house as well as she cleaned for some white woman.
As she pictured the cleaning woman going about her work in a slow methodical way, Betty realized with a start that Mrs. Andrews, who wasn't that much younger than Mudear, looked like her, too.
Suddenly weakened by a bout of fatigue, Betty sank into the high-backed chair and let the mail drop in her lap. As a rule, Betty's days started so early and went so long that she was tired off and on all day long and kept getting her second wind over and over to keep going on. She had always kept herself just this busy, not always accomplishing as much as she should because she wasted a great deal of effort on unnecessary chores. Mudear would sit in her La-Z-Boy in the rec room and watch her in the kitchen washing off vegetables for dinner three and four times, reading the same page of a book over and over, and putting the clean clothes in the dryer all at the same time and say, "Ummph, ummph, ummph, look at her in there running around digging kitty holes and cat holes and not realizing all the time that one would do." Then, Mudear would laugh.
Gathering her strength, Betty picked up the mail and glanced through it. The thickest one was her phone bill, which wasn't surprising considering how much she and her sisters were on the phone to each other. She talked to both of them individually at least two times a week and then always held a midweek conference call for them all to get together and share their lives.
She didn't bother to open the gas and electric bills. And she ignored the envelopes with reminders of subscription renewals for herself and Mudear. Some of the junk mail caught her eye, but she was too tired to wade through it. There were two envelopes from American Express: one for her charges and one for Mudear's charges. They were both fat. Mudear hadn't asked for her own card or even who was paying the bill. But Mudear rarely had to ask for anything. That was something else Betty admired about her mother after she changed.
Betty wasn't concerned about the amount on the credit-card bill. She knew it would be what most people considered exorbitant, but money was not a problem for her, had not been for years. Even she was sometimes surprised at how much money she made—without an education—from doing heads.
Even when she was just three or four years out of high school, she was earning enough money at her booth in Delores Beauty Shop, the first shop she worked in, to help Emily out with her extra expenses that her scholarship at Fort Valley State College didn't cover. And by the time Annie Ruth went to Spelman College, Betty was able to pay for all of her expenses even after she went wild her freshman year with all that relative freedom in Atlanta away from Mulberry and Mudear, stopped studying and attending classes regularly, and lost her scholarship. Betty was just twenty-six when Annie Ruth entered her sophomore year, but she had opened her own shop by then and, between her income and Emily's new income with the state, they saw to it that their baby sister had pastel-colored underwear by Vanity Fair, knee-high suede boots, and a bright orange melton jacket for Morehouse College's football games so she didn't look out of place next to the more affluent daughters of doctors and professors and lawyers at the school.
"I know Annie Ruth is as smart as any of those girls at Spelman," Betty would tell Emily as they wrapped up another big dress box of new frocks in brown paper to mail to their sister. "But I want to make sure she look as good as they do."
All her life, Betty had made sure that her sisters—smart girls to begin with—concentrated on their studies even though Mudear warned them that they were "all gonna wind up crossed-eyed from reading so much." It had been Betty who sat proudly in the audience at their graduations wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat so her sisters could spot her representing the Lovejoy family, took snapshots of them getting their diplomas, and took them and their girlfriends out to dinner later to celebrate.
Glancing around her home at the gallery of framed photographs of her family arranged on the entrance table, in the living room on the piano, on the desk in her home office, Betty regretted not sneaking up on Mudear sometime when she wasn't paying attention or was asleep and getting a good snapshot of her. Mudear wouldn't allow pictures of herself to be taken. She said her nose always looked so big in photographs, so, she wouldn't have anybody taking her picture. All Betty had of Mudear was an ancient black-and-white studio shot of Poppa and Mudear right after they were married that Betty had had copied, restored, and touched up by a local photographer.
Mudear hated that picture, too. So, Betty hadn't dared give it to Mr. Parkinson when he asked for a photograph of Mudear. She had had to tell him to print the funeral program without a picture of the deceased on the front.
Mudear never knew that Betty had sneaked the old photograph out of the house for a few days. How could she have known? Betty thought. Mudear never went looking through old letters or pictures or mementoes. She had little interest in the past, and especially a past that had so many painful reminders of how things used to be.
Betty remembered how it was before the change. She
was the only one of the girls who truly had memories of their father when he was an entirely different man. Bigger, it seemed, stronger, louder. At one time, she had almost thought that the man who now lived in their house was not the same man she had known before as Poppa.
But that's silly, she had told herself at age eleven as she looked up into the face of the man at the dinner table. But she wasn't sure. All the time that she pretended to listen to the conversation among her mother and sisters about school and plants and local gossip, going back to the stove to get seconds for her family, she examined the man. Starting with his hands and mentally going over his whole body right down to his beat-up old leather slippers. It seemed that not so much about him was changed as much as the things around him. He still placed his chalk-whitened muddy Wolverine work boots at the side of the back door each day, but now they stayed there from evening 'til morning without Mudear snatching them up to clean for the next day. Over time, the boots got caked thicker and thicker with white mud until she saw her father take them out in the backyard and hose them down. After that, he rinsed them off himself every night.
In the battle that had been their marriage, Esther had finally won. Not at first, but finally. Betty remembered a time when her mother acquiesced publicly to her father in all matters—money, the children, choices for dinner, or how to line the kitchen trash can in the most efficient way. At that time, it was only in private with her daughters that Esther dared to express her views, how they differed from her husband's and how he was a stupid and underhanded bastard for holding those views and imposing them on her.
Her mother didn't even call this new Poppa "Mr. Bastard" on the phone to her friend Carrie the way she used to. So Betty knew something or someone had changed. Mudear's calling Poppa "Mr. Bastard" had been a game that drew the attention and the life's breath of the entire household. On the phone to Carrie, Mudear would say, "Naw, he ain't here, Mr. Bastard's gone to work," or "Mr. Bastard raised hell 'cause I didn't have his favorite white shirt pressed this morning," or "Here come Mr. Bastard now, I gotta go." Betty couldn't remember her mother calling him anything other than "Mr. Bastard" when he wasn't around until she was eleven years old. The girl would marvel at her mother's ability to use the name selectively. Betty would sit holding her breath sometimes, afraid her mother would slip up and call him that to his face when he threw a clean khaki work shirt, stiff with starch and ironed stiffer, on the floor and said to her, "Wash this shirt again. You call that clean?"
She couldn't even imagine the kind of fight that would ensue in that case. But she never once heard her mother slip up and use the nickname at the wrong time.
Then, when her mother started spending longer and longer periods lounging in bed in her nightclothes, she noticed that Mudear no longer called her father "Mr. Bastard" at any time. At the same time, Betty began to sense a shift in the tension that used to ring the house like the moons of a planet and seemed somehow to keep the family together. Sometimes, she would walk past her parents' room and feel the floor almost tilt with the sudden contradiction her mother would throw out at the man.
"Naw, man, don't fold the paper back that way. That's stupid!"
Betty would grab onto the wall waiting for the explosion of her father's temper to rock the house. But there was no explosion. Instead of feeling relief, the child Betty would feel only confusion and fearful anticipation of the next time it happened. "My God, next time he's gonna kill her." Betty was sure. But it happened again and again and again with no bloody aftermath. Betty finally had to accept that this man who only occasionally railed at his wife out of her earshot and stomped through the narrow halls of their wooden home was truly her father. But he was a changed man.
It all added to Mudear's mystique that she could know just when she could safely change.
It didn't happen as magically as Betty had envisioned it. Esther had waited for this time. From the first year of her marriage, since he made her take a mayonnaise jar along on a car trip for her to pee in so they wouldn't have to stop along the road, her anger at him had been growing, like the tangle of gourd vines that grew from fat black seeds she had dropped in the fertile loamy soil back of her house.
"You just gonna stoop down by the side of the car or go off in the woods like a man to pee?" Ernest had asked her with scorn and amazement as he shoved the large jar in her hands.
By the time their second daughter was born, he was no longer ordering her and her life around with sharp rough words, he was making her do what he wanted with just a gesture. A rude gesture. When he wanted her to do his nails, a ritual she had initiated out of caring and self-preservation because she couldn't bear the thought of him going up in her with those filthy chalk-lined nails, he just glanced at his hands and drummed his nails on the nearest hard surface. She was expected to jump up, go get the manicure kit and her stool, and come do his nails. And she did.
When he wanted more mashed potatoes at the dinner table, he just rapped the empty spot on his plate where the potatoes had been with the tips of the tines of his fork and that was the signal for Mudear to run get the pot of potatoes and replenish his plate. And she did.
Ever since she had discovered that her vision of life with Ernest was sculpted in fool's gold, she felt more and more like a fool for having ever believed in him.
Whenever Poppa drove up in the driveway from work or an errand, one of the girls or Mudear would yell, "Fire in the hole," to warn the household that Poppa was on the premises. The girls didn't know at the time that the yell had been used originally as a warning in dynamite jobs, but when they each discovered its original meaning they had to chuckle.
Betty knew firsthand how her Poppa was, what a hellcat he was, as Mudear had instructed her and as she had seen with her own eyes. She was the only one old enough or cognizant enough to remember the cold nights when Poppa would come home, fight with Mudear, and issue the order, "Get out!" And Mudear would have to pack up the girls and herself and get out in the street and find somewhere to spend the night. Sometimes, it was at her parents' house. Sometimes, at a cousin's who ran a liquor house and had folks coming in all times of the day or night anyway. Then, the next day, Mudear would have to come back to Poppa and apologize for whatever Poppa felt she had done to displease him. Once, she even had to instruct Betty to apologize, too, to get them all back under one roof. "I'm sorry, Poppa," little Betty had said, unsure of what she was sorry for.
The closest Mudear had ever come to defying her husband openly was in the dinner preparation. Each day, she managed to burn the okra for dinner. It was a family joke, if something as pathetic and tenacious and meaningful as a ritualistic burning could be called funny. But without fail, each day Mudear washed off the okra, snipping off the horned end of each tight khaki-green pod, then cut the pods into popcorn-sized pieces. She covered the couple cups of sliced vegetable with cold water, added salt and pepper, and put it on to boil.
Then, she left the kitchen. Betty had watched her so she knew how it went. Mudear would put on the pot over a high flame and go pick up the phone to call her friend Carrie. Or she would take a magazine and go into the bathroom for twenty or so minutes. Just long enough for the water in the pot to boil into a slimy concoction and long enough again for the slick water to boil out, leaving a sticky residue.
No matter that Betty or one of the other girls would come running to Mudear warning that the okra was about to burn or was already smoking up the kitchen. It still burned. Mudear would always say the same thing, from the phone, from the other side of the bathroom door, from outside in the garden: "Don't ya'll girls dare touch that hot pot. It's already burning. I'll take care of it."
But Mudear never came to see about the pan, Betty noticed, until it was an okra holocaust.
That memory was probably key to Betty's understanding of Mudear and Mudear's stand in the house to never be put in the position of having to "get out!" It probably, now that she thought of it, was the reason she herself had started her own business (Mudear had s
anctioned her choice: "Colored women gonna always get their hair done") and ran it so smoothly, efficiently, economically. She never as long as she lived and stayed black, as Mudear used to say, wanted to be told to "get out" and have to do it. Any move for her was a wrenching experience. She winced when she drove past someone's possessions sitting on the side of the street and sometimes drove around the block two or three times in hopes of coming on the evicted family to offer help. Even Annie Ruth's profession's peripatetic life-style of big money, quick moves, and whimsical audiences made Betty nervous for her.
Mudear just assumed that none of her girls remembered. But Betty remembered.
While burning the okra, while renaming her husband "Mr. Bastard," while putting aside a few pennies, a nickel, a quarter, Mudear had waited for this time, this contradictory, kiss-my-ass time. She had bided her time and waited.
If she had been a praying woman, she would have prayed for that time to come. But since she wasn't, she had just trusted in the irony of life and waited.
Betty heaved herself up from the fragile chair and began the climb up her curving staircase to get out of her clothes. Although she was exhausted, she had no intention of going to bed before Emily came in.
Looking down at the first floor of her exquisitely decorated home, she wished that Mudear could have at least seen it one time before she died. Betty had used up packs of Polaroid film taking stacks of pictures when she first bought the house and then again at holidays—pictures of the Christmas tree decorated and lit, pictures of the broad front lawn decorated with red, white, and blue bunting and an American flag and a red, black and green National Freedom flag on Independence Day, pictures of the dining room table set for a formal dinner—and given them to Mudear. But after glancing at a couple of photos, Mudear always tossed the stack aside without a comment. Later, Betty would find the photographs on the floor by Mudear's favorite La-Z-Boy chair in the rec room or strewn wet and bent on the screen porch sofa or tangled up in the bedclothes and comforter at the foot of her bed.
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