"How could you?" Betty asked as she picked an angel-wing jasmine bloom from the vine crawling up the trellis over the bench and examined its long fragrant petals before throwing it over her shoulder into a tangle of sweet william and scented geraniums.
"But, Betty, it's so green. I don't think I ever remember it being so green back here."
"That's 'cause it rained last night," Betty said matter-of-facdy. "But this is how it usually looks 'cause Poppa put in an automatic watering system a few years ago."
Annie Ruth still just shook her head in awe at the show of garden glory. At her feet were tiny alyssum blooms and English thyme used as a ground cover that exuded the sweet smell of a kitchen when she walked over it. Behind her, a line of loblolly trees set in huge tubs guarded her back with their fragrant Cherokee-roselike flowers peeking out at the tips. Behind the loblollies, a cluster of tall magnolias with their thick shiny leaves blocked out all the other ranch-style houses on the next street. Mounds of hydrangea—Mudear had adjusted the pH of the soil with extra lime to make the blossoms white—ringed a section of the garden that made a private space filled with roses and a small maze of tea olive hedges. Lamb's ear sat like plump rabbits ready to munch on the exotic red and green and purple lettuces nearby that Annie Ruth had sent the seeds for from a California nursery.
Betty looked around the yard dispassionately. "You know what I noticed after I moved out of this house? Mudear grew a buffer around this house. The plants and the trees and flowers set us off from this whole neighborhood. Even when she let us visit around here or go to a basement party, we were still set off. As soon as a boy walked you back home, they could see from our house, we were strange and different."
The plants and trees continued on through another lot and up to the next street of the development because Poppa had bought the lot behind them when Mudear had looked at the plans for the house and announced, "You expect me to garden on that little piece of land back there?"
Betty had told the girls how proud Poppa was to have been able to secure another loan for the land behind their new house. She had heard him on the phone talking about it. But all the girls had heard Mudear tell Poppa any number of times, "I certainly hope you don't think I give a damn about this litde piece a' house out here on Pork n' Bean Row. It don't mean shit to me and my girls. I could make it anywhere with or without a house."
And the girls had believed her.
"All kinds of flowers, tropical flowers, grow in southern California," Annie Ruth said as she surveyed Mudear's garden. "Birds of paradise next to people's driveways, exotic palms in front of run-down apartment buildings. But even with that mild climate and all that water they pump out of neighboring states and use to water that dry desert land in L.A., you never see anything as naturally beautiful as this." Annie Ruth got up and walked to the side of the house to look at the last of the wildflowers growing in place of a lawn in front. Mudear hadn't even bothered to let the contractor lay sod. One night after the Lovejoy family moved into the new house, Mudear went out and strewed local and regional wildflower seed she had been collecting and exchanging with Georgia gardeners through the mail.
"God, I miss the South." Annie Ruth rubbed her hand over the velvety moss growing on the outside of a huge strawberry pot and smelled her palm. She sounded as if she might cry as she touched the tongue of a stone frog set among a bed of frilly ferns with the toe of her boot and came back to the swing and sat down.
Betty didn't even bother to ask anymore why, feeling the way she did about Los Angeles and the South, why Annie Ruth was there instead of here. She and Emily had been trying to get her back home for years. But Betty knew what it was like to try to put some space between herself and Mudear. She reached for Annie Ruth's cup, but her sister pulled it away.
"You don't want this," she said fingering the rim of the mug. "It's Poppa's Sanka."
Betty just chuckled.
Annie Ruth smiled, too.
"You don't know everything, Ms. Betty Jean Lovejoy. It's not because of the baby. It just seems that my bouts with PMS have been getting out of control lately. I read caffeine makes it worse."
"Oh, so now we've moved on to calling it 'the baby'?" Betty asked.
Annie Ruth just looked at her sister.
Betty kept talking. "Well, you won't have to worry with PMS, then. They say it gets worse as you get older, but better after you have a baby."
Annie Ruth sat tearing the ivory petals off a tiny iceberg rosebud.
"Don't say anything to Emily about it yet, okay?" Annie Ruth's voice sounded pleading. "About me planning to really keep this baby."
"I don't have to, sugar. She's already on the scent. We all know each other too well to try to keep secrets."
CHAPTER 25
Emily was waiting outside when Betty and Annie Ruth pulled up in the winding gravel driveway to get her. Emily, dressed in a bright red long-sleeved knit dress cinched at the waist with a wide black and red leather belt, climbed into the backseat, leaned forward, and kissed Annie Ruth on the cheek, leaving a slash of red lipstick there.
"Emily, you know you in that dress. And you look pretty in red," Betty said to her sister as she reached over and pulled out a tissue form the car's console and handed it to her. "But you got a booger in your nose."
Emily took the tissue and they all chuckled. "'Lovejoy women keep dirty noses,'" she recited, laughing again. "And as Mudear say, 'Just when you dressed up and think you looking cute, too.'"
Emily leaned forward again and checked her nose in the rearview mirror. She noticed Betty running her fingers through her hair. Whenever Betty was trying to figure something out, she ran her hand through her cropped, permed hair, really just over the top of it. It was hardly long enough to get her fingers through.
Betty's hair was barely longer than a boy's with practically nothing in the back, but she kept it straightened to within an inch of its life because she liked to have it grow down the back of her neck without forming nappy little balls of hair at the nape; Mudear called them "pepper pods." When the girls were teenagers and straightened and permed each other's hair in the kitchen and family bathroom, Mudear would look up at their French twists and upswept hairdos and point to a brush—not hers because she didn't like anybody using her personal things—and say, "Daughter, take that brush and crack them pepper pods in the back of your head." Mudear made it sound as if the girls had cooties or lice. She couldn't stand "pepper pods."
One time when Betty was a teenager, she got Emily to get Poppa's razor from where he "hid" it up over the bathroom doorjamb so the girls wouldn't use it to shave their legs and up under their arms and give her a "tape"—shaving the hair from the nape or "kitchen" of her neck. The idea was to give a smooth, clean edge to her hairdo. But Mudear protested.
Lovejoy women don't get no tapes, Mudear told her daughters, it makes you look common and hard, like wearing an anklet. Only whores and sluts got tapes and wore anklets, according to Mudear. But then, Mudear had a long litany of things Lovejoy women did and did not do.
• Lovejoy women love pretty clothes.
• Lovejoy women are strong as mules.
• But Lovejoy women go to nothing when they get a cold.
• Lovejoy women can cook.
• Lovejoy women keep dirty noses.
• Lovejoy women can arrange weeds.
• Lovejoy women don't get no tapes.
• Lovejoy women don't wear no anklets.
• Lovejoy women don't take no tea for the fever. (She had to explain that one. "It means you don't take no shit. You so bad you won't even take a soothing tea to break your fever.")
• Lovejoy women have shoulders like men.
• Lovejoy women are terrible liars.
• Lovejoy women don't wear no cheap clothes.
• Lovejoy women don't wear no Hoyt's cologne.
• Lovejoy women don't wear no costume jewelry.
Over the years, the list had grown into a type of mythology: "The Lovejoy Wom
en." Mudear would start and the girls would join in as if they were reciting a mantra.
Whenever Mudear caught the girls making light of "what Lovejoy women do and don't do," looking at each other out of the corners of their eyes when they didn't think Mudear was watching, she'd smirk and say, "Well, there must be something to it. 'Cause married or not, I notice all ya'll still go by 'Lovejoy.'"
As usual, the girls couldn't say anything, couldn't dispute her. It was true. After both of Emily's marriages and even while Betty had been married briefly, they still kept their maiden names. Even Betty's shops, Mudear would point out, were named Lovejoy's i and Lovejoy's 2.
But Mudear did that regularly with her girls, said something so true, so insightful that it would fairly take their breath away in its indisputability. Even when it cut to the quick.
Where Betty's hair was thick and coarse, Annie Ruth's was just the opposite. Mudear called it "little t'in 't'in hair," then she laughed. It was baby fine and thin. Annie Ruth had done just about everything imaginable to her hair to thicken it up: henna rinses, falls, conditioners that claimed to leave a coating on each strand of hair, teasing, setting it with beer, body-building haircuts. Betty, who always loved to play in folks' hair even as a child and did all the Lovejoy women's hair from the time she was ten or so, started experimenting with her baby sister's hair when they were girls and she had never stopped. Lately, she and Annie Ruth had settled on a fluffy brown mass of short curls—some hers, some fake—that framed her face and complemented its oval shape. With her hair styled in curls, she looked younger than her already fake age, like a moppet. But in her harried condition before her plane trip back to Mulberry, Annie Ruth had forgotten her small hairpiece and had to make do with just her own thin hair. She knew that Betty could have picked up a hairpiece for her from one of her shops, but Annie Ruth felt Betty had enough to do without worrying about her hair.
Emily's hair style changed nearly every week. She had what Mudear called fast-growing hair. "Like dead folks," she said. Emily's hair and fingernails did seem to grow overnight. The manicurist at Lovejoy's i told her, "Miss Lady, I've seen lots of hands in my time, but I ain't never seen nails grow as fast as yours."
Every Saturday morning when she drove the two hours down to Mulberry for her standing eight-fifteen hair and nail appointment, she had no idea what she was going to look like when she drove back by noon. She liked that. It made her feel like the mutant she was. She changed to accommodate the men she dated, to appease her coworkers, to fit into her family.
Even more than her sisters, Emily was the family chameleon, changing with what was expected of her. She tried so hard to be whatever was asked of her that she routinely lost track of what she felt was the real Emily. Betty felt this was why her sister acted so crazy sometimes, it was what people expected of her. And her older sister had to routinely tell her, "Okay, Em-Em, come on now, come on back now."
But Emily had no intention of "coming back." She liked it out there on the edge of the ravine, the chasm between sanity and insanity. Even as she signed the checks for her regular appointments with her psychiatrist, she knew that she would allow herself to be helped to normalcy only so much. She felt at home down by the river at night smoking a joint and thinking about life and Mudear and how she was going to get this man, whoever he happened to be at the time, to marry her.
What I got to "come on back" to reality for? she'd ask herself. Even the edge of insanity felt safe to her compared to the chaos and loneliness she saw in her own life. Her reality was a steady government job, a garden apartment, a hair and manicure appointment every Saturday morning, and twenty extra pounds on her ass that she had to get rid of.
Actually, what she was seeking was a little peace, a little connection, and even though everything in her life—her upbringing, her family experiences, her own marriages, her sisters' lives, her mother—told her that in the arms of a man was the last place she would find it, she couldn't stop searching. Even her sisters said that Emily was looking for a man harder than anyone they knew.
"Girl, Emily looking for a man with a flashlight," Annie Ruth would say, even in front of Emily, with a sad chuckle.
Emily didn't take any chances. She never put a hat on her bed because she knew that meant a man would never sleep there. On New Year's Day, she made sure that the first person to walk in the house was a man for good luck. She always threw kisses at every red bird she saw so she would be assured of seeing her lover that day.
During the Gulf War she had even sent dozens of letters with her picture inside addressed to "An Officer and a Gentleman" to the front hoping to find a man in what she herself called a weakened state of war. She packed up care boxes with sunglasses, Girl Scout cookies, disposable razors, soap, suede work gloves, writing paper, and extra stamps and sent them off to Saudi Arabia with her hopes packed up in there, too. Her sisters were surprised when she got back a number of responses from the front. Most with photographs of healthy-looking young soldiers, black and white, so happy to have someone back home care about them as they faced death on the sandy battlefield. But after the conflict died down and the "boys" returned home, she never heard from any of them again.
Of the three girls, Emily was the most scarred by her quest to find happiness with a man. But she also had insight about relationships that seemed to evade her sisters.
The year before at Thanksgiving when all three of them had been together in Mulberry the last time, Emily had seemed especially down.
"Em-Em, what's the matter?" Betty asked as she pulled the giblets from the twenty-pound turkey and turned off the water that was running over the thirty pounds of chitterlings in the sink.
Emily shared her news.
"James Patrick got a man? James Patrick got a man?" Betty was dumbfounded.
"Not only does he have a man ... he married him."
"James Patrick got married?" Betty couldn't believe it.
"Not only did he get married. But the man left his wife to marry James."
"Left his wife?"
"Left his wife of thirteen years to marry James Patrick."
"Left his wife of thirteen years?"
"Left his wife to marry James in a church ceremony."
"Shit, did he wear white?"
Emily just silently handed over the Polaroid.
"Damn," Annie Ruth said. "He look good, too."
"You know," Emily said finally, taking the photograph back and dropping it in her purse, "maybe we can leam something from gay men."
"Like...?" Betty wanted to know.
"Well, I haven't completely figured that out yet, but knowing James has made me see it's more than one man just wanting another man. You know, I've been working with James for five or six years and I've been watching him."
"Hell, that shows what a sad state black women have come to in this world that now we got to watch gay men to get pointers in getting men," Betty said shaking her head.
"Well, like Mudear say, 'Keep living, daughter,'" Annie Ruth reminded her.
"Anyway, I would see him at work every day and he would have men coming 'round all the time to see him and ask after him."
"That just goes to show you how few straight men there are out there for us to have," Betty said.
"Yeah, that, too. But it's something else."
"Like what?" they both wanted to know.
"Well, I think it's the way he lives his life that attracts men rather than how he has sex. I mean if it all had to do with how good you are at sucking dick, then none of us would have any problem. James Patrick has a real joy in his life, in the way he lives it, in knowing who he is and what he is and not just accepting it. But reveling in it. I mean, how many women do you know who live their lives like that?
"God, James Patrick can make his lunch break into an event, an intriguing interlude. He'll run to the bank at lunchtime and come back smiling. And I'll say, 'James, what you smiling about?' And he'll say, 'Oh, I just met this guy.' And I'll say, 'In the last fifteen minutes?' An
d he'll lay the whole thing out for me.
"'Well, I was in a real hurry, you know, 'cause I only had a few minutes, so I cut through the MARTA train station at the corner to save time and I passed this guy in this real nice-looking suit, and after I passed him, I turned around to look at him and he was turned around looking at me and I said, "Don't I know you?" and he said, "Don't I know you?" So, he walked to the bank with me and we had a nice conversation.'
"Then, James Patrick just looked at me and smiled. Annie Ruth, Betty, he was just glowing!"
"Oh, Emily, you talking crazy. You know as well as I do that in this world we live in it's close to suicide to just strike up a conversation with some strange man on the street. In the first place, most of them don't want a pleasant exchange, they just want to say something mean and degrading to a black woman. And second, you don't know what kind of psycho you might pick up, to say nothing of what else you might pick up in the process. Hell, that's what got James Patrick and his friends dying all over the place now," Betty said.
"Well, Betty, you know gay men ain't the only ones dying from AIDS, we black women right behind 'em. But you are right about the ugliness that black men always greet black women with," Annie Ruth said.
"Now, I don't know who James fucking, other than his 'husband' now, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm just talking about a pleasant unplanned encounter in the middle of the day. Seeing a good-looking good-smelling man and smiling at him and having him smile at you..."
"Come on back, Em-Em," Betty said chuckling. "Now, you know as well as I do that that ain't even the way black men and women deal with each other. I mean when's the last time you had one of those spontaneous sweet meetings in the street?"
"I know, that's just what I mean. When did we let it get that way between us, when did we let it get that way? That we so angry and hateful with each other that we can't even speak on the street anymore? What made us let it get that way between black men and women? Isn't that something we ought to be thinking about?"
Ugly Ways Page 19