But in her office the books were put in haphazardly, casually, paperbacks next to leather-bound reference books. A biography of Madame C. J. Walker next to a grocery-store-purchased romance novel. Books on business management next to Blacks in the Military.
Sitting in the cool leather of the large desk chair made Betty pull her sweat suit tighter against her body. She got up and went to the thermostat on the opposite wall of her office. She turned up the heating dial and smiled as she felt the rush of warm air blow through the heating vents on the floor beneath her.
When she sat back in the wine-colored leather chair, she almost instinctively opened the drawer where she kept her personal family album. She smiled as she always did when she opened to the first photograph on the first page of the thin laminated book. It was a picture of the three Lovejoy sisters when they were girls dressed up for church. Standing by the passenger door of the family black car, shining in the bright sun of a long-ago late summer day in Mulberry. The three of them dressed in identical dresses in different colors. They all had printed skirts in muted colors with white short-sleeved tops and matching vests. The entire color picture had faded to an overall mellow yellow like a stain, but Betty could remember every detail about the dresses, the day, their lives.
She had been thirteen, Emily was nearly ten, and Annie Ruth was six. And Betty remembered that they were talking about Mudear like a dog among themselves just before their father snapped the picture. Later, they had examined the photograph for hours in search of telltale signs that they had just committed the unspeakable ... they had spoken.
The girls had not started out feeling so free to talk about Mudear the way they did now. Until Betty became a teenager, they were all afraid that anything they said about their mother would be magically telegraphed back to her and leave them open to some ghastly punishment. Anytime one of them began complaining about Mudear and how her ways infringed on everybody else in the household, the other two would shut her up.
"Don't be talking like that about Mudear," they would say in urgent tones. "Good God, she may hear."
They didn't trust themselves to talk about her in the house, out in the yard, at school, on the bus downtown to pay the bills or buy new shoes. Nowhere, they felt, was safe enough to be out of ear range or spirit range of Mudear.
But one summer day just weeks before Poppa had snapped the Sunday morning photograph, they made a discovery.
All three of them had been invited to a wiener roast in the backyard of one of Betty's schoolmates. And Mudear had agreed. The girls were so excited about going that they had done all their housework and their homework on Friday evening and early Saturday morning. Then, at the last minute, while Betty was ironing crisp cotton shorts for all of them to wear, Mudear decided she needed Betty to wash, straighten, curl, and style her hair for her. And that would take half the day. It shouldn't have taken half the day, but Mudear was so particular about her "personal appearance." She wore her hair then the same way she wore it when she died nearly thirty years later. She had Betty keep her coarse thick hair bobbed just at her earlobe. Betty curled it all over with small hot curlers and brushed it back from her face into a light froth of shiny black curls.
Mudear called it classic.
With Betty doing Mudear's hair, the two younger girls couldn't go across town on the bus without their big sister, so their plans for the wiener roast were off.
The girls were stunned with disappointment. But they knew better than to even raise the question of the wiener roast with Mudear. They never cried and pleaded for anything to Mudear. They had discovered early in life that those ploys, sincere or feigned, were useless with her after the change. She would tell them straight out, "Don't be coming bothering me with that little petty stuff. Fix it, forget it, figure it out, or get over it yourself." Even when a sudden thunderstorm came up and awakened the girls in the middle of the night, they knew better than to go crying to Mudear. She always slept right through the worst storms, with lightning and thunder cracking around the house, and could not stand to be disturbed. She had told them that sleeping through a storm was some of the best sleep you could get. The girls would just have to close their eyes, put their pillows over their heads, hug themselves in their little beds, and try to go back to sleep.
But they had wanted to go to the wiener roast so badly. The party giver had told Betty at recess that week that they planned to roast hot dogs on straightened-out coat hangers that each guest made and held herself over the open fire. She had told Betty that her father had already dug a big hole in the backyard and filled it with oak wood for the fire and that her mother was going to make chili to go over the hot dogs. Then, for dessert, each guest was going to use her coat hanger to roast marshmallows.
All week, the girls had hardly been able to contain themselves. They planned the route they would take to get to the party in Pleasant Hill. They discussed what they would wear and how many hot dogs they would eat. They made Betty ask if they should bring their own coat hangers.
And to have their raised litde spirits, their high little hopes, dashed so quickly, so casually was bitter enough to make them retch. They all felt that they were as powerless as insects.
It was so unfair. The girls really rarely asked to go anywhere. They had a lot to do in the house usually on weekends when the two younger girls helped Betty with the major cleaning, shopping, and cooking projects. There was litde time left over for outings. Once in a while on Saturdays, Poppa would drop them off at the Burghart Theatre to see a matinee while he did some household shopping or drank a couple of beers at The Place. But that was a rare treat.
And they seldom had company at their house. Anyone visiting the girls would have to stay outside in the yard to play because no other little girls were allowed to come into the house and disturb Mudear. The sisters had gotten used to these rules fairly easily, but not their friends. Their litde schoolmates thought the rules were strange and insulting—having to run home to the bathroom or for a drink of soda—and rarely came back. But the Lovejoy girls rarely felt deprived because they had found each other to be the best possible company.
So regular visits weren't even considered. But this one time they had really wanted to go.
Of course, Mudear hadn't cared about that. She didn't even seem to notice that they wanted to go to the wiener roast so badly.
With all their work and Mudear's hair done, they had spent the late Saturday afternoon just roaming around their own backyard, being careful to avoid stepping on Mudear's plants.
In their boredom and anger, their talking about Mudear seemed as natural as listlessly drawing circles in the dirt with a stick.
"She so mean and low-down," Emily said first.
"Yeah," Betty agreed. "She don't care nothing 'bout nothing but her own self. Now, she upstairs in that house just looking at herself in the mirror with nice clean hair."
"She think she so cute," Annie Ruth offered and was gratified that her little input was greeted with amens from her older sisters. It emboldened her.
"Wearing those old funny-looking flowered pastel robes all the time," she added.
"Yeah, like she sick all the time," Emily said. "She make me sick."
And they all giggled at Emily's little joke.
They were just getting revved up. There in Mudear's garden, next to the marigolds and tomato plants, they talked about her lovelessness, her heartlessness, her lack of motherliness.
"Yeah," Emily said. "She's the reason we don't get invited anywhere hardly as it is. They think we as funny acting as she is. And nobody want to come visit us if they can't even go to the bathroom."
All of a sudden they knew something was amiss. It seemed that the very breeze had suddenly stopped blowing in the yard. They all looked up to the house's back porch at the same instant and saw her standing at the screen door dressed in a fresh flowered pastel housecoat, listening.
They nearly fell to their knees right on the spot, waiting for the bolt of lightning called up by
their mother to strike them all dead. Emily even brought her hands together in a plaintive gesture of supplication. And Annie Ruth started whimpering in fear.
But Mudear just looked out at the girls and her garden around them and went on back in the house. Neither Betty nor Emily could remember vividly the last time Mudear had switched their legs with a stripped branch of a forsythia bush from outside. And Annie Ruth had never been stung with the switch. But they began to prepare themselves for the beating of their lives.
"Oh, God," Betty whispered. "She going to get a strap!"
She wished with all her heart that she had not encouraged her sisters to do so much reading. Now, all the scenes of punishment they had ever read or heard about came back to them in vivid Technicolor pictures.
And all three of them did actually fall to their knees together and start praying. They just knew that anyone as powerful as Mudear, a woman able to re-create herself overnight, able to change the patterns of her household without a fight, able to boss their big strong father around without even lifting her voice, would mete out the kind of punishment they only had read about in the Bible at Sunday school. So, they prayed to God, the towering white-bearded God they had seen in pictures, to help them, to protect them, to save them from their mother.
They must have stayed that way, with their knees to the ground, their hands clasped, their eyes closed in prayer, for some time. When they next heard Mudear's voice, they opened their eyes to find that the sun was setting and a summer dusk had fallen on the backyard of their house.
"It's nearly dark out there, daughters," Mudear yelled from the window over the kitchen sink. "Don't be stepping on none of my plants in the dark."
It was all she said. Then, she dropped the pink and white checkered curtains back over the window.
When the girls tried to get to their feet, they found they could barely stand, their knees were dirty and achy, their legs wobbly and cramped, their nerves raw and frayed. They held onto each other as they made their unsteady way to the house. Bolstered by prayer and the support of each other, they were ready to meet their fate. But Mudear didn't say a word to them about their overheard conversation discussing her.
"Ya'll didn't notice any worms on my collard greens, did you?" Mudear asked from her tall wooden stool by the sink as Betty automatically started taking out pots from the refrigerator and began warming up food for their dinner.
Emily stopped taking the plates down from the cabinet and looked to Betty. Annie Ruth, brushing crumbs from the checkered kitchen tablecloth, looking to Betty, too. All three were sure Mudear must be hearing their hearts pounding.
"I—I didn't see any, Mudear," was all Betty could manage to sputter as she put on water to boil to make a fresh pitcher of iced tea for dinner.
The girls felt as if they were merely going through the motions. But they accomplished a table set for dinner as well as eating the prepared meal. After dinner, Poppa went upstairs and lay across the bed with his clothes on. Mudear tied up her fresh hairdo with a flowered chiffon scarf and stretched out on the sofa to look at television.
The girls washed up the dishes in silence. But they hurried through the chore. They couldn't wait to get up to their room to talk. But when they finally closed the door to their bedroom, no one wanted to say it first. They sat on their beds facing each other.
Finally, Betty spoke. "I don't think Mudear care whether we talk about her or not."
They sat there awhile, sly smiles on their faces, considering the possibility of their luck. Looking at the windup clock on their chest of drawers, Betty said, "Time to get ready for bed." Then, Betty got up and started running water for their baths. The other girls laid out their underwear and socks for Sunday school the next morning and got in the tub. While Emily and Annie Ruth bathed, Betty ironed their new matching dresses she had bought at Davison's downtown.
But when they got into their beds, they didn't sleep. The girls stayed up all night talking about Mudear.
CHAPTER 22
Betty was still sitting up watching CNN on the small red portable television in the kitchen and sipping hot tea in her thick cotton sweat suit and slippers when Emily finally let herself in the back door with the key from under the heavy straw doormat.
"Mulberry must be the only place left on the face of the earth where people still feel they can leave their own house key under the doormat," Emily muttered to herself as she walked into the kitchen and threw her wet suede coat across a chair. "You got three hundred thousand dollars' worth of stuff in here and you still leave your back door unlocked for all practical purposes. Humph, and Mudear say I'm supposed to be the crazy one."
Betty pretended not to notice drops of muddy water dripping off the sleeve of the coat onto the heavy oak antique table she used in the kitchen. She knew Emily hated for any of her sisters to imply that they disapproved of something she had done.
She must be hanging out down by the riverbed again, Betty thought, and said a silent prayer that they would never find her dismembered, decomposed body rotting down there. She may still leave her own house key under the doormat, but she knew that a woman alone wasn't safe walking down by the river after dark.
"Want some tea, Em-Em?"
"Betty, you know as well as I do what a disaster it would be if Annie Ruth actually had a child to raise!" Emily didn't even bother to sit down. "You saw what kind of shape she was in when she got off that plane. That's a mother?"
Betty thought that they would at least have a decent period of chitchat first, but Emily wanted to get right to it.
Emily never did know how to make small talk, Betty thought as Emily plunged into all the reasons Annie Ruth shouldn't even think about having the child she was pregnant with. Emily's inability to chitchat when she had something burning on her mind made people uncomfortable, always had, but then, Betty thought, most of what Emily did made people uncomfortable. She gets that from Mudear.
"Now, Betty, you know as well as I do that Annie Ruth don't have no business with a baby," Emily was saying over and over as she began to take off her wet boots.
"You remember how she used to just throw her old dolls away when she got bored with them," she continued. "Hell, that's how she treats people sometimes. Look at all the men—good men, men other women would have died for—she's just had and thrown away. Good God, Betty, Annie Ruth use men like she uses new improved maxi pads. She even rates 'em like that. Are they comfortable? Are they dependable? Are they easily disposed of? When you're with one, can your mind be free to think of other things? What are they worth?
"Just what do you think she's gonna do with a child, an infant completely dependent on her? Just throw it away when she's tired of it? A child ain't a maxi pad."
Betty started to respond, but she didn't feel like this conversation now. She knew she was tired and the hour was late because she could feel giddiness sneaking up on her. Everything Emily was saying was starting to make her giggle.
"Remember that real nice guy named Tommy, the editor at the newspaper in Washington we met when we visited Annie Ruth that weekend? You notice how he disappeared all of a sudden?"
"Oh, yeah, Tommy, he was nice. I forgot about him," Betty said, remembering the husky young country man who had moved to the big-city newspaper from a small North Carolina town. "What did happen to him?"
"Annie Ruth told me it was over giving head," Emily said with a didn't-I-tell-you smirk. "Annie Ruth told me he was sort of fumbling and hesitant about it. So, she asked him if he had ever done this before and he said, noooo, but he'd try to see what he could do.
"Then, Annie Ruth told him, 'Well, don't be coming up in through here if try is the best you can do.'"
"And that's why he disappeared so suddenly?" Betty asked, laughing. She laughed so hard she got choked on her tea and had to bring her feet off the table and sit up. "She actually told him, 'Don't be coming up in through here'?"
"And you think this is funny, Betty?" Emily was indignant and hurt. "I was just telling you t
hat to show how she is."
Betty couldn't catch her breath from laughing to reply. She just held up one hand and rested her face in the other. When she was able to speak, she asked, "And that was the end of his cute husky country ass?"
This time Emily had to laugh, too. "You know it," she said and chuckled with Betty over their baby sister. "Sister girl made him get up, put on his clothes, and get his no-pussy-eating self out of her apartment immediately."
The sisters laughed together so comfortably it sounded as if they were singing in harmony. They all three had felt at one time or another that the sound of them laughing together was their only line to sanity and safety. When all three of them laughed, in a department store or restaurant, the entire room turned to look for the source of the melodic merriment.
Betty decided to take advantage of the lull in the afterglow of their laughter.
"Oh, I didn't even check my answering machine," she said, pretending to remember with a glance over at the flashing red light. She got up, turned her back to Emily, who continued to take off her wet clothes, and pressed the blinking button. Even though she knew it was inevitable that Emily would return to Annie Ruth's situation, she thought she could at least postpone it for a while.
"Hey, baby," the first message went. "It's me, Stan. I heard about your mama. I shore am sorry. Am I gonna see you tonight? Call me at school. Bye."
"Betty, it's Helen. I need your okay on the latest changes for the show. And I need to know the new regulation heights for hair styles. Please call me when you get a chance. Bye."
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