by Mary Morony
Apron Strings
Mary Morony
Copyright © 2011 Mary Morony
All rights reserved.
No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form whatsoever without the written permission of the publisher.
ISBN: 0615951791
ISBN 13: 9780615951799
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank each and every one of you for all of your help.
Hilary Jackson
Ralph Morony
Melissa Parrish
Susannah Shepherd
Sarah McCollum
Annie Morony
Katherine Kane
Ross Howell
John McAllister
Colin Dougherty
Sara Sgarlet
Alison Abel
CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
EPILOGUE
Chapter 1
Sallee
Change; not even the quarter, nickel, or dime type was appreciated in our house. I don’t remember ever seeing a spare coin atop a table or amid the dross in the back hall drawer where everything that didn’t have a place ended up. No jar sequestered on a corner of a bureau collected dust and pennies. The thin dimes the tooth fairy brought, once discovered and delighted over, were promptly deposited in our sterling silver piggy banks; each with initials engraved in script. It was as if change didn’t exist. I wonder if coins in a pocket would have been eschewed if they had been called anything else.
My mother, Virginia Stuart Mackey, understood her biological duty was to nurture us children. She found the job difficult. Tall, angular, pale, and blonde, my mother spit my brother, sisters, and me out in her image, and then proceeded to whirl about our lives like an icy comet in an orbit rarely intersecting our own.
Our maid, Ethel, would puff up with pride whenever she said, “Miz Ginny done made a good-looking bunch of chil’ren.” I guess she was right. Each of us had our mother’s hair and blue eyes, although in varying shades. Not one of us had exactly the same color hair or eyes; but there was no question who our mother was. We each, in our own way, had something of her looks.
Soft and round, Ethel was the color of coffee with cream, with big freckles dotting her broad nose. Her wide set eyes were light brown, and her lips were thin. Short, just over five feet tall; she weighed well over two hundred pounds.
I grew up thinking that Ethel and my mother were as close as any two friends could be despite the fact that it was 1957. Even to a child that seemed unbelievable considering they were so different in color, shape, and attitude. Friendship had to be next to impossible: in Virginia it was against the law for a colored person to drink from the same water fountain as a white. Yet, for as long as I could remember, thirteen hours a day, six and a half days a week, my mother and Ethel shared their lives. Well, that’s not quite true. My mother shared her life. Ethel listened and edited her own life. And despite their disparate worlds, their views were remarkably similar; their thoughts intertwined like neglected perennials in an old flower bed.
Each of us children was named for somebody else. My sister Stuart was the oldest and the prettiest, she’d just turned fourteen. She hated her name, though I don’t know if that was because it sounded like a boy’s name or because it was my mother’s maiden name. Next oldest to Stuart was my brother, Gordy, just nine at the time. Gordy was named after my mother’s brother, Gordon Stuart. Then there was me, Sallee; seven and named after Daddy’s father, Sallee. It was an unusual and unfortunate name for a man as far as I was concerned. I was happy to be a girl. Helen, at just four and a half, was the baby of the family and was named for my father’s mother who died days before Helen was born. It was lucky that Helen was a girl; I think my parents would’ve gone right ahead with the name even if the baby had been a boy. I can’t imagine a boy on earth who would have been able to tolerate Helen as a name.
The house we lived in was big like a mansion of the old South: butter-colored stucco with enormous fluted columns and dark green almost black shutters on the floor-to-ceiling windows in the front. It sat in one of the treelined neighborhoods that rimmed the University of Virginia where my father had gone to law school. It was the prettiest house on the street. My mother said that if it hadn’t been she would never have allowed Daddy to buy it because of the tacky houses that ran down one side of the property line.
“Not charming like slave quarters,” she’d say to most any visitor. “Just tacky post–First World War housing.” I didn’t know why she thought slave quarters were so charming. The ones I’d seen had been nothing but old, rotting, weed choked, falling down sheds. She definitely wouldn’t have wanted those right next door. I think the thing she hated most about those houses was their proximity. When our kitchen door was open, you could hear the neighbors talking; the houses were that close. So unless it felt like it was a million degrees inside, she always insisted that our kitchen door stay closed.
A few weeks after her birthday, Stuart decided to have her hair cut short, almost like a boy’s. She made the appointment herself, convincing the barber that our mother knew all about it. When we pulled up in the car to pick her up, my mother took one look at my sister’s head and started screaming. She left the car idling with us inside while she stalked into the barbershop to give the barber a lecture. Clear out in the car we heard her demand in her most offended tone, “How dare you ruin my little girl’s looks?” Still fuming when she got back into the car, she slammed the door and said, to no one in particular, “Cutting girls’ hair without their mothers’ approval. How dare he?” Stuart sat mute in the front seat. She had been acting pretty smug up until then, but I could see she was trying not to cry. As for me, I squirmed with humiliation.
Stuart, especially as she got older, looked more and more like my mother. Adults loved to compliment her on the resemblance; Stuart loathed it. Anything that had to do with my mother was like poison to Stuart, it seemed. She and my mother got along about as well as beets and mashed potatoes. You had to keep them on opposite sides of the plate if you didn’t want to create a big pink mess.
My mother was a beautiful woman and we all knew it; my mother most of all. She wore her long golden hair up in a loose bun, or in a braid wrapped around her head for parties. Her features were delicate. She always wore jewelry that shimmered and jingled when she moved. We were lucky to have such an attractive mother, people said. It boded well for how we would turn out. Sometimes I would look in the mirror and study my face, searching for signs of my mother in it. But I’d ended up with my father’s square face and round nose; features that suited him just fine, but made me look boyish in spite of my long hair.
That long hair was a Mackey girl trademark, as far as my mother was concerned. She took pride in it, delighting in the variations among us, even running her fingers through Helen’s soft curls sometimes. I think that’s why she was heartbroken when Stuart lopped her’s off.
When we got home from the barber, my mother announced that Stuart was grounded for a month. No longer fighting back her tears, Stuart ran up to her bedroom, passing a stunned Ethel on the stairs.
“Lord a mercy, whaddidya do to yo’ head, chile?” Ethel asked.
There was another change my mother was none too happy with. My father had started wearing blue jeans and work boots on weekdays. For years Daddy had been a lawyer,
leaving and coming home from work in nice gray suits and handsome wingtip shoes. But he quit his job at the law firm to start building a shopping center. “The way of the future,” he called it. My mother called it an ugly atrocity, at least when she was speaking with her friends. I think Ethel was inclined to agree with her. More than anything though, I think my mother missed the suits. Thing is, I’m not sure my father even needed the jeans and work boots. They stayed nice and clean. And he still wore his suits some days when he had meetings. The way Ethel told it, my father worked on the “business” side of the project. I could see he liked his new clothes, but I wasn’t sure the jeans and boots were worth all the fuss.
Whenever my mother complained about Daddy’s attire, Ethel would reassure her. “Miz Ginny, ya know good as me he’ll be back in dem suits afore too long,” she’d say. But he never was. I think that was why Ethel never said anything to my mother about Stuart’s haircut. Ethel seemed to have a sixth sense about what could be said and what was best left unsaid.
I know it can’t really be so, but looking back, I believe the events of that morning when Stuart had her hair lopped off marked a tipping point. Things had never been perfect in our house, and at the age of seven I was just beginning to consider the possibility that other families might have it better or worse. Until then, things were simply the way they were, and they didn’t seem likely to ever change—boy, was I wrong about that. I see now that thinking that way gave me a sense of security, like the way a recipe arms you with the notion that a dish will turn out the same every time you make it. As the winter of 1957 gave way to spring, it seemed that the Mackey household was about to have a whole new menu.
A few weeks after Stuart cut her hair, I almost died. At least I thought I was dying. The Saturday morning started off like any other. Ethel arrived for work, and the kitchen filled with her clean, earthy scent, which was alive with wood smoke, farmyard animals, hay, and grain. She lived on a farm with her husband, and finished chores there while I lay dreaming in my warm bed. She hummed spirituals as she set about fixing breakfast. Coffee perked on the stove. Bacon fried in the big black skillet. She softly sang, “Gwine to chatter with the angels, Sooner in the mornin’, O Lord have mercy on me.” Halved oranges waited on the counter, ready for squeezing as soon as my mother’s footfall was heard at the top of the stairs. Then she would help Gordy, Helen, and me get dressed.
Ethel stopped singing and started squeezing orange halves when she heard my mother start down the stairs. I always thought it was strange that my mother hated singing so much. If you wanted to really get under her skin, all you had to do was sing along with Ethel. “Dem Bones, dem bones, dem dry bones,” we’d shout along.
“Gordy, Sallee!” she’d snap at us. “Stop that this instant.” Then she’d look at Ethel and shake her head. “Please, Ethel, those songs are just too sad.”
“The past is the past,” Ethel would reply, looking my mother dead in the eye.
On Saturdays Ethel often brought Gordy, Helen, and me Three Musketeers candy bars in a too-dressy-for-everyday worn black purse that she parked on the counter behind the kitchen door in front of the folded paper bags. One particular Saturday she arrived with no such offering. Gordy and Helen didn’t seem to notice, but I felt a pang of dismay when she didn’t mention the candy. I decided to check her purse, just in case she’d forgotten.
I lingered in the kitchen after we’d finished breakfast. My mother left to run errands. Ethel went upstairs to make beds. I tiptoed to the bottom of the stairs and listened. When my mother was away from the house, Ethel would start belting it out. “Leaning, leaning, on the everlasting arms,” thundered down the steps. That morning Ethel was in full voice.
I crept back into the kitchen to the back door. I clicked open the beaded, silver catch of the purse and peered inside. There was a single dollar bill folded over three times and a black change purse that had long lost its luster. A gold ball clip was missing from the latch, but the hinge still held. Inside the change purse were a few pennies, a couple of nickels, and another carefully folded square dollar bill. I replaced the change purse, and then pushed aside a wadded up tissue and two scraps of paper covered with Ethel’s distinctive cursive to get a better look.
Reaching into a little zippered pocket on the side, I found a small glass bottle half full of what looked like water. I unscrewed the cap and smelled it. Phew, was that some awful stuff! I screwed the cap back on and zipped it into the pouch. There were no candy bars to be found, but at the very bottom of the purse was a thin turquoise box labeled “Ex-Lax” in red letters. Inside were tiny, precise rectangles that smelled and looked like chocolate. They didn’t taste as sweet or as chocolaty as I had hoped, but because of the clandestine nature of my search, I was in no position to be choosey. I ate only two or three; not because I was worried I might be depriving Ethel of her treats, but because I thought such a small theft might pass unnoticed. Later, Ethel found me in the bathroom hunched over with stomach cramps.
“Honey don’ ya’ll know ya’ll shouldna be goin’ into other peoples’ thangs wit’out askin’?” she asked with a chuckle.
“My stomach hurts. I think I’m dying,” I groaned.
“Ya ain’t dyin’. Ya just ate somethin’ you shouldna, and Lord now you a mess. C’mon, let’s gitcha cleaned up.” I guess she’d taken inventory of her purse and knew why I was in such distress. Mercifully, she didn’t tell on me to my mother.
Anything my mother deemed valuable she kept under lock and key. Not jewelry, furs, or money, mind you, but food and drink; mostly sweets and liquor. Getting caught taking something that my mother would lock away was a mistake you only made once.
A month or so after the Ex-Lax incident, I was playing dolls with Helen when the doorbell rang. Ethel answered the door. A Girl Scout dropped off six boxes of chocolate mint cookies, my personal favorite. Ethel put them on the shelf in the pantry. When my mother got home, she would lock them in her “cabinet.” Helen and I decided with the impeccable logic of a four- and a seven-year-old that if we took an entire box, no one would miss it. My mother not only missed the box, she asked everyone in the house where it was. We answered her query with puzzled looks, not anticipating that the empty Girl Scout cookie box under the bed in our shared room would convict us.
“What kind of children have I raised?” my mother shrieked. She loomed over us with a wooden, boar bristle brush in her hand, her eyes cruel and hooded. “I’ll teach you to steal and lie to me about it.” She grabbed Helen by the armpit. Holding her up off the floor, my mother swatted my terrified sister as if the force would knock the larceny right out of her dishonest little heart.
Helen wailed, “Mama, please don’t hit me.” Her light curls plastered to her tear-stained face.
I scrambled to the safety of our closet. My mother followed, grabbing my hair and yanking me out into the bedroom. Twice the brush stung my thigh, creating angry red welts. “I’ll teach you to run away from me, you little brat. Were those your cookies?”
“No…I don’t know…” I howled as I thrashed about, scrambling to the back of the closet. She lunged at me again.
“Don’t hit me! Please don’t hit me!” I shrieked. I held my hands up to protect my head and to keep my hair from being pulled again. Helen, discarded like a worn sock, cowered in a corner, wedged in tightly for protection from my mother’s fury. Then, like ash in the wind, our mother was gone; leaving both of us gasping and weeping.
One spring evening, after what seemed like a very long winter for the Mackey household, Gordy, Helen, and I were playing outside. Ethel stood on the back porch and hollered, “Come on in, now, chil’run. I need to get ya’ll cleaned up ‘fore yo’ momma get home. Come on, now!”
Gordy and Helen went right in. Since I had just learned to skip rope, I decided to test my growing agility by continuing to play.
“Salleeee, git on in he’ah,” Ethel bellowed. Ethel’s temper had a fuse longer than my mother’s, but she kept a switch behind the kit
chen door that could make you dance..
“I’m coming. Hold your horses,” I said as I skipped rope to where Ethel stood. The next thing I knew, she was bearing down on me with her switch at the ready. I dropped the rope and started to run. She chased me around the rose garden and through the back gate.
“Ethel, stop!” I shouted. “I didn’t mean anything.”
My favorite climbing tree was by the kitchen door—one of two hemlocks that stood like sentinels on either side of the driveway. Gordy and I had each claimed a tree as our own. We’d climb up the trees and call back and forth like crows for hours. I climbed my tree as fast as I could.
Ethel circled the trunk, her chest heaving for breath. She glared up at me. From a branch just out of her reach, I tried to reason with Ethel. She was having none of it.
“You better get down off that tree righ’ now,” she said.
“Ethel, I was coming,” I pleaded. But I wasn’t making any headway. Ethel circled the tree for a good ten minutes, puffing and muttering; whipping her switch in the air.
“Yo’ momma gon’ have my hide if dinner ain’t on the table on time. If you don’ get down here right now I’m gon’ come up there after ya.”
I knew that was impossible, but I climbed a little higher just to be safe; higher than I had ever climbed. I wedged myself into a crook of the tree. Finally, Ethel went into the house. I heard her calling my brother.
“Gordy, climb up dat tree ‘n brang yo’ sister down,” she said.
Gordy appeared at the base of the tree and started climbing. With Ethel in the house, it seemed safe to descend. I turned my body to shimmy down, but my foot was caught. I couldn’t turn around or look down. I couldn’t quite reach a branch below me with my free foot. I was stuck. A cold wind picked up pulling strands of hair from my long braids, sending hair into my eyes and mouth along with bits of bark from the tree trunk. As I was too afraid to let go of the tree to wipe my hair out of my eyes, I crouched in the crook of the tree, choking back tears.