Ugly Ways

by Tina McElroy Ansa

  "Miss Lovejoy, you told me to call and remind you that tomorrow is the day the health inspectors come to the shops."

  "Hey, baby, it's me again. You want me to pick up some fish for you to fry tonight?"

  Betty hit the stop button with her fist and turned back to Emily.

  "Good God," she said, shaking her head. "Mudear laying up there on a cooling board in Parkinson Funeral Home and this man expected me to fry fish for him. Mudear was right, a man don't give a damn about you."

  "Hello, Miss Love—I mean Betty. It's Cinque. I went by the shop to fix the light in the reception area and they told me about your mother. I'm sorry.... I'm sorry I missed you, too." There was a long pause, then, "If you feel like it, give me a call."

  Emily looked up at Betty smiling down at the tape machine. "If you feel like what?" Emily asked her sister and laughed, too.

  Betty hit the stop button again.

  "Em-Em, I know I don't have any business with this child. But, God, he's so gorgeous—how come boys we went to school with didn't know nothing 'bout lifting weights?—Lord knows he's at his sexual peak and since I tied him to my bed like Annie Ruth said—he nearly tore my brass bed down, too—he thinks I hung the moon."

  "Don't sound bad to me," Emily said, not even trying to hide her envy.

  "Hell, it's better than that. He told me the other day I was the smartest woman he ever met. Then, he thought awhile and said, 'No, you the smartest person I ever met.' This boy even think the few little gray pubic hairs I'm starting to get are cute and sexy. He calls my pussy 'slamming'!"

  Emily chuckled. "I guess the irony was lost on him?"

  "Irony!" Betty hooted. "Shoot, nineteen-year-old boys don't know nothing about no irony. And his music does give me a headache."

  "But he has other attributes, huh?" Emily said.

  "You got that right. But really I guess I know this is just a passing thing. I'm trying to help the boy get into some kind of school somewhere."

  "Uh-huh," Emily said with the emphasis on the second syllable heavy with sarcasm, like a character in a television sitcom.

  "No, really I am, and once that's done, I know that'll be it."

  "Why you say that?"

  "Oh, Emily, he's a sweet kid and fun, too, but I know he ain't nothing but a baby. Sometimes when I see him slumped down in a chair, his leg flung over the chair's arm, I want to reprimand him, 'Sit up, baby, sit up straight, you gonna ruin your back.' I have to stop myself from sounding like his mother.

  "I guess I'll probably end up with Stan or somebody like him. He's more my speed, I guess, my age and everything. You know...."

  She hit the message button again.

  "Hey, baby, it's me again. Never mind about the fish, I'm going to a game in Atlanta tonight. Talk to you tomorrow. Bye."

  Emily didn't even have to say anything. The look she gave Betty said, "Keep living, daughter."

  Shoot, this ain't no better than trying to cool Emily down about Annie Ruth and her baby, Betty thought as she hit the button to save the rest of the messages and turned back to face her sister. She was missing that evening glass of wine more and more.

  Emily was almost half undressed now. She stood in the middle of Betty's kitchen and continued to take off her wet clothes and drop them on the floor. She finally stood in the kitchen dressed in just tight red cotton bikini panties and a lacy pink plunging underwire bra. Betty smiled at her sister's voluptuous figure and her skimpy underwear.

  "You gonna need a knitting needle to take those panties off," Betty said with a chuckle and went over to the big restaurant-sized gas stove to put the teakettle on the burner.

  Emily looked down at her body as if in surprise to see it and, reaching a finger inside the rubber leg band of her panties, snapped the bikinis into a more comfortable position. Then, she just giggled and shrugged her shoulders as she left the kitchen in search of something to cover up with.

  Betty watched her bounce out of the room, her butt, breasts, and hair jiggling in rhythm with her pace, and thought, even with her extra weight, Em-Em is still as cute as she can be. Despite all the expense, effort, and time the three women all spent on their looks, their clothes, their hair, their makeup, their bodies, their skin, it still caught Betty by surprise sometimes to realize how attractive they all were. That was Mudear's doing, Betty thought as she turned back to the stove and cut the fire up under the kettle.

  Mudear had drummed it into their heads before any of them had gotten out of that ugly awkward preteen stage of life not to count on their looks in this world.

  "Pretty women, daughters, are a dime a dozen," she informed them over and over again. "My Mudear used to tell me, 'Pretty is as pretty does. Beauty is a gift from God.' But gift or no, pretty ain't gonna get you where smarts will."

  Mudear amended the truism for any locale and occasion. If one of the girls came in on a Sunday and told her that someone at church had commented on how cute all three of them looked in their outfits, Mudear would say, "Pretty girls in a southern country church are a dime a dozen, daughter."

  If she picked up the phone to listen in on a conversation and heard a boy sweet-talking Betty about her looks, she'd say right into the phone, "Pretty women in a southern country town are a dime a dozen, daughter."

  Even after Emily's skin had cleared up so nicely at Fort Valley State, Mudear was quick to tell her, "Pretty women are a dime a dozen at a litde country college, daughter." She repeated the warning to Annie Ruth when she wanted to run for Morehouse's homecoming queen, Miss Maroon and White. "Daughter, pretty women are a dime a dozen on Spelman College campus."

  Annie Ruth had told Betty and Emily that Mudear had even pulled the old saw out when she moved to L.A. "Pretty women sho' 'nough a dime a dozen out in Los Angeles, California, daughter," she had warned Annie Ruth over the phone when she called to give her and Poppa her new address and phone number.

  Betty poured hot water over the little straw holder of chamomile tea in Emily's favorite cup and tried to ignore the pile of wet clothes in the middle of the floor. She couldn't do it. She hated mess and disarray.

  Emily came back in the kitchen wrapping a cover, Betty's dark-blue velvet dressing gown, loosely around her.

  "You keep it so hot in this house that I don't really need to wear any clothes," Emily said as she headed for the refrigerator and searched through the contents until she found some antipasto, vegetable pasta salad, and one walnut brownie with fudge frosting that she brought back to the heavy oak table. She put her booty on the table beside her steaming cup of tea and plopped down on the smooth seat of a high-back oak chair.

  "Don't people bring food and stuff by the house anymore when folks die?" Emily asked.

  "Oh, somebody from the shop left a case of Cokes on the back porch. And some of my older customers came by first thing this morning and gave me little pieces of change. Five dollars, ten dollars. You know. But which one of Mudear's friends you think gon' come by with cakes and pies?"

  Emily just bit her lip and nodded her understanding.

  "Whew," she said, "it really is hot in here."

  "You know me, I will never sit up in a dark house and I will never sit up in a cold house," Betty said as she spread Emily's clothes out on the table in the laundry room to dry. I sure hope that suede jacket has been weatherproofed, she thought and returned to the kitchen. "Mulberry Gas and Electric will never turn off my services."

  "Mudear would tell you, 'Keep living, daughter,'" Emily said as she opened the container of pasta salad and took a bite of the brownie.

  Emily felt the same way Mudear did about never knowing what's going to happen in your life or what you'll do in any situation. Emily had come close many times to having her heat and electricity cut off and her telephone service was a month-to-month arrangement. She made so many calls to Southern Bell customer service to get an extension on paying her bill that she had formed a chatting relationship with the supervisor she usually talked with. If it had been a male supervisor, she would
have dated him by now. After sixteen years with the state government, she wasn't doing any worse than most working people. She just couldn't seem to hold on to any cash. She looked to Betty every few months to bail her out of penury. And Betty always came through cheerfully. She couldn't stand to see her sisters do without.

  My money's just running away from me, Emily would think as she pored over her confusing bank statements.

  Betty shivered and pulled her feet wrapped in knitted slippers up under her. "God, your mentioning Mudear gave me the all-overs just now. Like she touched me on the shoulder," she said.

  "Knowing Mudear, with Annie Ruth's mess and everything, where else would she be?" Emily asked. "She was never around unless you didn't want her to be."

  "I hope you didn't think any of this was gonna go smoothly," Betty said. "Mudear would probably feel she'd have to sit up in that white oak casket just to get things going if she thought for one minute that things were going to go smoothly."

  "Betty, going smoothly is one thing. But a true disaster is another. I know I can't tell Annie Ruth nothing, never could. But she'll listen to you."

  "Emily, you know as well as I do that Annie Ruth doesn't hardly listen to anybody when she's decided something. And I know it's hard for you to accept, but I think Annie Ruth's decided to keep this baby."

  Emily dropped her fork back into her salad. "Why do you say that? Did she tell you that? Did she?"

  Betty reached over and patted her sister's arm. "No, Em-Em, she didn't say a word to me. But that's the feeling I get."

  "And that's okay with you?" Emily was incredulous.

  "Emily, if that's what Annie Ruth decides, then it's going to have to be okay with me. It's going to have to be okay with all of us. Right?"

  Emily was quiet for a while playing with her brownie.

  "It's just that, Betty, I'm so afraid for Annie Ruth. Pregnant!

  "Either way she go, I'm afraid for her. I know you don't think so, but I know what she's facing and I know how she feels."

  Betty didn't know that much about Emily's experience of her abortion. Emily just couldn't bring herself to talk to Betty about it at the time and the more time passed the easier it was to just let it rest. Annie Ruth had told Betty about it, but Emily had never said a word.

  "Ron must have some mighty strong sperm," Annie Ruth had said to Betty. "'Cause Lovejoy women take their birth control very seriously."

  It was strange the things Emily could share with Betty and the experiences she was too ashamed of even to talk about. But it had been Betty who Emily had called when a man she dated had started an argument in a restaurant, grabbed up her bag and pushed her out the door, and then slapped her a few times in the car outside.

  She had finally managed to get back to her apartment with a cut lip and the beginnings of a blue line along her cheekbone. She put some ice on her face and tracked Betty down on the phone in Mulberry and sobbed out what had happened.

  "He just slapped me around a couple of times," she tried to say after calming down.

  "Anytime a man hit you, Emily, and he bigger or stronger or anything that makes it so you can't protect yourself, then, he kicked your ass," Betty insisted, trying hard to control the anger she felt at Emily for being in this situation and the anger she felt at herself for judging her sister. "We just got to find a way to make sure you safe from that happening again."

  Emily finished off the brownie and continued:

  "When I got pregnant before Ron and I broke up and Annie Ruth came down, came down on the plane, from Washington, to be with me here for it and afterwards. Lord, Betty, I thought I was gonna have to be there for her myself. She nearly passed out at the clinic waiting for me. Then, when she brought me back home to the apartment, she became so unglued, dropping dishes and walking around in front of Ron in her underwear, that I told her I was better than I was and she could go back to D.C."

  "Well," Betty said, "maybe that just goes to show you that Annie Ruth shouldn't consider doing what you did. That for her having her baby is the right thing."

  "How can you say that any of us having children could be the right thing? Good God, Betty, she could turn out to be like Mudear!"

  It was a sobering thought that left them both sitting silent sipping their tea.

  "You know, I drove past our old house in East Mulberry tonight before I came here," Emily said after a while. "I go by there every now and then just to see what it look like."

  "Em-Em, what in the world you want to do that for?"

  "Oh, you know, I just like to see things," she said. "You don't ever drive by there when you go to the shop?"

  "Naw," Betty said, getting up to pour herself more hot water. "Never."

  "Well, you ought to sometimes. Mudear's old garden is all grown up and the house is empty right now. But there are still flowers peeking through the weeds in back."

  Betty got up and rinsed both their cups out at the sink. She didn't respond.

  "You know, Betty, that yard was where we swore to each other that we would never have any children."

  "I know," Betty said wearily, her back still to Emily.

  "And I stuck by my promise," Emily said in a strong voice.

  Betty stood at the sink looking out on the wet shiny leaves of a magnolia in the backyard and combed the hair down on the back of her neck with her fingers. "I know," she said. "But we burying Mudear in two days. Maybe it's time we turn that promise a-loose."

  CHAPTER 23

  When Betty awoke the next morning and realized she not only had to take Annie Ruth and Emily to the funeral home to view Mudear's body, she also had to be at the old shop sometime before noon to oversee the plans for the annual hair show that her businesses were cosponsoring and get back to the funeral home to do Mudear's hair and makeup now that Poppa was moving up the funeral, she wanted to turn over and sleep forever. She felt like the elderly woman she had seen sitting in the foyer of the mortuary the night Mudear died toying with her checkbook and pen.

  "Lord have mercy," the older woman had said to Betty as she raced through the door frantically looking for one of the Parkinsons. Betty had just come home from Stan's house around midnight when she had checked her answering machine and heard Poppa's message of Mudear's death. "Why don't folks ever die when it's convenient?"

  She knew just what the harried mourner had meant. This was such a bad time for Mudear to die. Like Mudear ever gave a damn about whether her actions were convenient or not to anyone else, Betty thought as she kicked off the covers and stretched out as far as she could in her big brass antique four-poster bed. She was glad to see that the sun was streaming through the pale shirred drapes at the window. The dramatic aspects of tromping around Mulberry preparing for her mother's funeral in the rain were a bit more than she thought even she could handle.

  Okay, she thought, trying to organize her day. But all in the world she wanted to do was pull the covers back up over her head and let somebody else take care of it, take care of it all.

  But she immediately heard Mudear's admonition each time she tried to cut a comer, do for herself instead of her family. "Well, daughter," Mudear would say, "if your conscience doesn't condemn you, why should I?" Mudear had said it when Betty was about to open her second shop and finally got up the nerve to tell Mudear that in the future she was going to have to pay someone to come by their house a few days a week to clean and make sure she and Poppa had meals prepared instead of doing it herself every day.

  "Well, daughter, if your conscience doesn't condemn you, why should I?" Mudear had said, then she hung up the phone in Betty's face. Betty, standing with the dead phone in her hand, could just imagine Mudear turning back to the wide-screen television and with the remote control turning the sound back up, ending the audience. It was one of the two ways she had dealt with her children for at least the last thirty years: either she drifted off to her own thoughts while they talked or she cut them off dead.

  It was one of the reasons that Annie Ruth said she called Mud
ear so seldom. Annie Ruth said it infuriated her to have Mudear just hang up in her face whenever she was tired of talking. "It just makes me want to go through the phone and rip her throat out," she would hiss into the phone to one of her sisters. She always had to call one of them after talking with Mudear just to calm herself down. "First, you got to hope that Poppa's there to answer the phone, 'cause you know she won't. Then, you got to practically beg Poppa to beg Mudear to even come to the damn phone so you can hear to see if she still alive. Then, right in the middle of a sentence, if she sees a pretty bird in the yard or if something interesting flits across the TV screen, she just hangs up right in your face."

  While I'm thinking about it, I better put a pair of hot curlers and some makeup that'll suit Mudear's complexion in my bag, Betty thought as she jumped up and went to her dressing table. The table looked like a cosmetics counter in Bloomingdale's. She picked out some foundation a shade or two lighter than her own skin and some pale cheek color and lipstick.

  Mudear never did use much makeup. As far back as Betty could remember, she couldn't recall Mudear in anything more than a brush of rouge from a flat round fifty-cent-piece-sized compact and red lipstick. But this was back in the days when Mudear came out the house from time to time like other mothers. Then, after the change, she didn't bother to put anything on her face. When Poppa had ruled, Betty had heard the arguments that he and Mudear had over any ornamentation Mudear tried to add to herself. Once, she had heard Mudear try to laugh off her husband's protestations that she looked like a whore going out the house with her two daughters downtown with makeup on. His own mother never wore it, he had shouted at Mudear as she stood at the mirror in the tiny bathroom of their old house and rubbed the red stains from her cheeks and lips.

  As she put the electric hot curlers in her work bag, Betty thought about all the times she had done Mudear's hair in her life, standing on a little stool at the kitchen stove to reach Mudear's head in the old house, at the kitchen table, in her bedroom, in her La-Z-Boy in the rec room, wherever it was convenient for Mudear with enough light for Betty to see to do a good job.