Ugly Ways

by Tina McElroy Ansa

  She knew better than to press Mudear for a response to the photographs and the accomplishments they chronicled. Her response was always so demoralizing.

  No matter what the pictures showed—Betty in her high-school cap and gown, Betty at graduation from cosmetology school, Betty in front of her first beauty shop, Lovejoy's, at its grand opening—Mudear always managed to say just about the same thing. "God, daughter, your butt sho' look big in these pictures."

  Even when Essence magazine did a short profile of her after she opened her second beauty shop and when Ebony made note of the annual hair and beauty show she put on, Betty just left the magazines by Mudear's bed turned to the page with her picture circled. Mudear never did say she read the articles, but she did tell Betty later that she had enjoyed the short story in the issue of Essence.

  Still, Betty couldn't stop herself from bringing the pictures to Mudear and laying them before her like a burnt offering to Ye-maya, the Yoruba goddess of the womb. She told herself that was the least she owed her own mother. Even if her own mother reminded her of Medea.

  CHAPTER 16

  When Annie Ruth opened the door to the lavender bathroom, so much of Mudear came flooding out that she thought for sure she had opened Pandora's box. And for a moment she stood at the door, her hand over her mouth, and forgot that she had rushed to the bathroom to throw up.

  It was as if she were cocooned in a blanket of Mudear. It was as if over the years Mudear had been able to extract the essence, the spirit of herself and sprayed it cunningly placed throughout the house to catch some poor unsuspecting prowler, victim. It was more than the smell of candy cinnamon balls. It was even more than the subtle scent of lavender and rose petals that Mudear used as the basis for the potpourris she created from her herb garden and placed in the bathroom and throughout the house near spots where she lounged. Those smells were smaller, more understated in relationship to this refinement of the essence of the woman. Essence of Mudear. That's how Annie Ruth imagined what was left of her mother. Like a perfume, Essence of Mudear, in a fancy curved crystal bottle. Annie Ruth looked over at the long shallow dressing table with just a comb and brush, a bottle of witch hazel and a bottle of coconut oil, a jar of moisturizer and the small manicure set on it. The feeling of her mother was so strong in the bathroom that Annie Ruth could almost see Mudear floating around the room spraying her Essence of Mudear all over the place.

  Like a cat.

  The taste of bile coming up in her mouth again sent her racing for the lavender toilet. She knelt at the toilet for what seemed like minutes throwing up watery ginger ale and phlegm. Liquids were all she had been able to keep down for the last two days. But now she assumed she couldn't even drink a glass of ginger ale.

  Annie Ruth sat on the side of the tub to steady herself and got a sudden flash of splashing in the bathtub nestled in a ship of safety. Her childhood often came back to her that way, in flashes that she could not immediately connect with an actual remembered event. Then, she remembered when Betty had told her and Emily one night between their beds that all the girls at one time had bathed in the old house's bathtub between Mudear's legs.

  "It was a treat for Mudear to lift you into her bathwater after she had finished bathing. She'd say, 'Got some good sudsy water here for somebody who wants to get clean.' And it did feel good settling into her full tub of water with the Ivory soapsuds she had worked up to a lather still floating on the grayish water."

  By now Annie Ruth was sure she could clearly recall splashing in the water between her mother's legs. Many of her childhood memories were really born and nurtured in Betty's stories to the girls rather than in actual experience. But Betty told the stories so well that over the years, and especially in their childhood, the stories had usurped even what slim memories they carried of their lives, enriching the reality to the point past true recollection.

  Annie Ruth was just as sure she could taste the rolls Betty had told them about:

  "Mudear used to make these rolls, not biscuits, but dinner rolls. It seemed that it took days for her to make them. She'd mix up the batter with milk and flour and yeast in litde fat envelopes in this big brown bowl with a light blue ring around the top, then she'd cover it up on the stove with a plaid dish towel overnight for it to rise, then the next morning she'd punch it back down with her fists, real hard like a man beating up another man. Then, she'd put it back in the bowl and cover it again with the dish towel and let it rise again.

  "It just went on and on. These preparations. Then, when she'd roll out the dough—beautiful white tender-looking dough—she'd take this little juice glass—she only used it for the rolls, never to drink juice out of—and punch out small round pieces about the size of your palm, Em-Em," taking her sister's little hand and holding it up for Annie Ruth to see the size she was talking about. "Sweet small little pieces. And she'd lay 'em on a big ungreased cookie sheet and fold them over one time so they looked like they had little lips. She'd let 'em sit again for a while. Then, just before she put 'em in the hot hot oven, she drizzle melted butter, not margarine, not oleo, but real butter, over each one of them.

  "Oh, Em-Em. Oh, Annie Ruth. When those things came out the oven, girl. You never smelled or tasted anything like 'em. They really were sweet. No, not like sweet rolls and honey buns. It was like they were naturally sweet. I don't know. Like a cantaloupe is sweet. Like a warm peach off a tree is sweet. Not with sugar you put in but sugar that's just there.

  "You know how people say something melt in your mouth?

  "Yeah, Annie Ruth, like M&M's. Well, these rolls just melt in your mouth. You didn't even have to chew 'em.

  "You put them in your mouth and they just seemed to melt and just float away to your stomach.

  "Yeah, Annie Ruth, like heaven."

  Betty told them stories all the time. When Annie Ruth was eight and Emily eleven, Betty even told them the story of their impending menstrual periods. She went out and bought a box of Kotex and a box of Tampax and safe in the family bathroom of the old house, with Annie Ruth and Emily sitting on the floor watching, Betty demonstrated how to use both. Then, she gave her sisters the choice of which one to use when their time came. "If you use the Tampax, you can still go swimming when you're on your period," she told her attentive audience. They both nodded, but none of them ever learned how to swim. Mudear would never allow them to go to the old segregated pool set in the middle of a red dusty parking lot and after 1964 Mulberry closed both the black and the white pools rather than integrate them both. Betty's talk was a mixture of what she had learned from her own period, from junior-high hygiene class, and from what her friends at school had told her.

  "Having your period is called 'the curse,' 'on the rag,' 'a visit from your cousin,' or 'having cramps,'" Betty informed them. "In the books, it says it means you are now a woman, you can have a baby. They keep telling us at school that it's something you're supposed to be proud of and happy about. But I don't know anybody who is.

  "At school, the women teachers and the gym teacher keep saying over and over how a 'young lady' have to be especially careful to keep herself clean and good smelling when she has her period. And that is the truth. Nothing smell worse than old dried menstrual blood. That's another reason to use the Tampax instead of the Kotex.

  "From what the older girls at school say, getting your period also means you're a woman 'cause then you can have sex, you know, Annie Ruth, do nasty. If you do, you called 'fast.' If you don't, you called 'bitch' or 'tease.'

  "One girl at school, Velma, say once you start, you can't stop. So, I guess it must feel mighty good."

  Annie Ruth couldn't look at a mirrored medicine cabinet without seeing herself and her sisters as girls at the family bathroom sink, elbowing each other, jockeying for a place directly under the light to pluck their eyebrows or put on makeup or curl their hair.

  Mudear, awakened by their quarreling on school mornings over space at the mirror, would yell down the hall, "Daughters! Pipe down there and take t
urns. Everybody got to suck at the trough." Of course, it was easy for her to say. She had a bathroom all to herself. Before the house was constructed, she made sure there was going to be a bathroom built off her bedroom in the new house. For someone who claimed to take no interest in the plans for the new house, the girls noted to each other, Mudear had a great deal of input into the house's details. Although Mudear used whatever bathroom was most convenient for her at the time, no one was allowed to use her lavender bathroom, even in an emergency. There was another door to Mudear's bathroom off the hall, but Annie Ruth couldn't recall one time when folks other than Mudear used it.

  She made sure even then, in the early sixties when Poppa had it built, that everything in the room was lavender, her favorite and, she said, most flattering color. Then, she sent Betty and the girls downtown to the local Belk's store to purchase towels, toilet seat covers, and rugs in shades of rose and pink and lilac and purple to coordinate.

  For years, the girls speculated on what Mudear did in there by herself for what seemed like hours. They came up with the idea of bizarre voodoo rituals complete with three little girl dolls that she tortured with pins and thorns—"She probably stick thorns in my face just to keep it looking like a potato grater," Emily said throughout her teenaged years—and fire, suffocating them with towels and holding their little bodies underwater for long stretches. But as they got older and after years of fighting for time and space in the one family bathroom they had to share with Poppa as well as each other, it finally dawned on them that she was just in there luxuriating in the privacy, leisure, and convenience of her own bathroom.

  With nothing left in her stomach, Annie Ruth felt better now. She stood and stared down at the clean smooth surface of the deep lavender tub. Then, she reached down quickly, so she wouldn't have time to change her mind, flipped the drain closed, and turned on the hot water full blast. Remembering, she raced over to her parents' bedroom door and rapped on it sharply.

  "It's just me, Poppa," she said through the door. "Taking a bath."

  Poppa just grunted in acknowledgment, but Annie Ruth knew the sound coming from Mudear's bathroom must have given him a start. Hearing his voice on the other side of the door made her think of the times she and her sisters had heard him screaming and cursing them out when they were teenagers. She could just see him emerging from the family bathroom, blood running down the side of his face from a deep nick he took from shaving with his dull razor that one of them had used to shave her legs or under her arms and then replaced in Poppa's "hiding place" over the jamb of the door.

  "God, these girls trying to kill me!" he'd yell to the house. "How many times I got to ask you girls to leave my razor alone!"

  Then, he'd stomp back into the bathroom dripping rich red blood down the front of his white undershirt. It had reminded Betty of the old Poppa, but it didn't last. He might mutter a bit to himself, but he never really confronted any of them about it.

  Annie Ruth took off her underwear and robe and dropped them in a pile on the floor by the door. She took off her earrings, squiggles of gold shaped like two melted question marks, and laid them on the edge of the sink. She lifted the top off a pink china rose—Emily had sent it to Mudear as a birthday gift—on the shelf above the sink and took out two black hair pins. With them, she secured her copperish curls on top of her head. Turning back to the tub, she saw the apothecary jar full of sprigs of lavender sitting on the back of the tub and dropped a few of them into her steamy water. Reaching for a washcloth and big fluffy lilac towel from the rack by the sink, she caught a glimpse of her behind in the full-length mirror on the back of the door.

  She turned around and, looking over her shoulder, she stood in the mirror and got a good long look at herself. Umph, she thought, that butt is ... She had to pause a moment to recall just how old she actually was. That butt is thirty-five years old. She turned to the side and took another look. Not bad, she thought. From the side, she looked down at her stomach.

  Looking at her image in the mirror, Annie Ruth tried to imagine her tight, toned, exercised golden-brown body pregnant, really pregnant. Her stomach extended, her hips curved and widened, her breasts full and hanging. It was hard for her to picture. She had never thought of being pregnant. Never been around pregnant women. Now that she thought about it, she may have even avoided her friends and coworkers when they were pregnant, hoping not to be reminded of the teenaged vow she had made with her sisters.

  She patted her stomach tenderly and reached over to add cold water to her bath. She had read a story on the air recently about the dangers of hot tubs and saunas to mother and unborn child.

  "Don't worry," she said to her stomach. "I'll take care of you." She laughed out loud because it sounded so corny coming from her, but she could feel herself get "full" in the chest like an old woman at a family reunion at the thought of taking care of her child.

  She dipped one foot into the water then, eased into the tepid water, and settled in a tub that, as far as she knew, only Mudear's butt had ever touched. She leaned back and tried to imagine how she had felt as a litde girl sitting between a young Mudear's short legs, propped up against her stomach, the back of her head nesded between her mother's breasts. Annie Ruth could almost picture it, but she kept losing the picture.

  She rested a hand on her warm wet stomach, she was sure she could see a curve to it now, and thought about Emily.

  Annie Ruth routinely lost track of chunks of her life, but she knew she would never forget the time she had come from D.C. to Atlanta to accompany Emily to get her abortion. Each moment of the trip seemed etched so deeply in her memory that there seemed no way to carve it out. She had had to fly down because her sister had waited so long to tell her about her plans that she had no time to make the train trip the way she usually traveled. She could tell from Emily's voice on the phone that if she didn't get there and get there fast, there was no telling what Emily would do.

  All her years as a television reporter had come back to haunt her with vivid flashbacks of pictures she had seen of pretty young girls and overweight and overworked middle-aged women lying in pools of their own blood with twisted coat hangers still nearby or bottles of household disinfectant drunk at the last minute in desperation. Even she, while still a freshman at Spelman on her scholarship, when her period was late one time, had considered throwing herself down the flight of steps from the top of the third story of the old brick ivy-covered dormitory the way her roommate had and then rolling over three times on the landing to reach the next flight of stairs to tumble down. But instead, she had gone up to the beautiful historic campus chapel before classes and prayed so hard that her period had miraculously started.

  Sitting outside the clean antiseptic-smelling clinic waiting for her sister, she had been unable to meet the pleasant businesslike gazes of any of the women working behind the desks. She swore over and over to herself as she took her sister's arm and led her to the waiting taxi and back to her apartment, "I'll never take my birth control lightly, I'll never take my birth control lightly."

  Other than her late periods, she had never been pregnant as far as she knew and she had vowed that she never would get that way. Annie Ruth knew, as surely as she knew Emily could not have gone to term with her pregnancy, that she could never go through an abortion. But she felt she had been strong for Emily. She took her home and warmed up some Campbell's tomato soup with half-and-half and dried basil the way Emily liked it. She held her sister in her arms when she wept and she lied to Emily's husband that she was in town on business when he returned home from the garage. Then, she helped Emily concoct the falling down the outside steps story to tell Ron. She even bandaged up Emily's right ankle to further buttress her fall story.

  She didn't let Emily do a thing for the entire weekend that she stayed there with her. She was as strong as she had ever remembered being, but on the train trip back to D.C. she couldn't stop sobbing. She just leaned her head against the cold air-conditioned window of the train and wept all t
he way up the eastern seaboard.

  She and Emily and Betty had all made a vow when Annie Ruth had joined them as women on her periods that they would never get pregnant and have children just to abandon them the way Mudear had done with them.

  "Let's just never have any children," Annie Ruth suggested. "Then, we know we won't be like Mudear." And it sounded like a good idea to the other two.

  "Okay," they agreed, clasping hands and squeezing tight to seal the vow.

  "I swear."

  "I swear."

  "I swear."

  Annie Ruth lay back in the tub, closed her eyes, and just inhaled deeply the scent of lavender rising from the water. Mudear would have a fit if she knew I was luxuriating in her personal tub surrounded by her personal herbs, Annie Ruth thought with a satisfied sigh as she sank lower into the water. Through the bedroom door, she could hear Poppa slowly clicking through the channels of Mudear's television. Annie Ruth wondered if Mudear had ever seen her on television. When she had worked in Washington, she had sent a few videotapes home of herself covering big breaking national and international stories. But only because one of the female technicians at the station had gone to the trouble to make copies for her and put them on her desk with mailing cases, labels, and the smiling suggestion, "I know you'll want to send these home to your mama."

  The last tape she remembered sending to the Sherwood Forest address had been more than three years before when she interviewed CNN's Bernard Shaw—Mudear's favorite newsman—after his return from the Persian Gulf. Mudear kept one of her televisions tuned to CNN all the time. And so did her daughters.