Susan Gregg Gilmore
Page 20
While Mother was gone, Maizelle kept close to the stove, cooking chicken casseroles and pots of vegetable stew, even taking the time to can tomatoes and sweet cucumber pickles. I told her that the freezer was overflowing with plastic containers and Pyrex dishes and that Adelaide and I could never eat all the food waiting to be defrosted if we both lived to be a hundred. She ignored me and chatted nervously about a possible tornado or a nuclear war or some other unforeseen emergency that she needed to prepare for. She’d been reading the newspaper. It was only a matter of time, she said. But honestly, I think poor Maizelle was simply afraid that someday she’d be gone, too, and the poor little Grove girls would have nothing to eat.
Nathaniel waxed and buffed all the wood floors in the house and even repainted the outside of the barn. In the late afternoons, he spent his time sweeping the front porch, shaking the dust from the cushions, and watering the large concrete pots filled with more of Mother’s impatiens. When he was satisfied with his work, he went inside and polished the silver tea service as if Mother was standing over him telling him to be more careful with the family’s treasures. He said he wanted everything to look its best when Mrs. Grove finally came home. This time, he said, he had a feeling in his gut that things would be different.
He talked more and more about Samuel, mentioning him almost every day now. I loved that Nathaniel talked to me about his son, that he trusted me with this special information. Maybe he just felt, with Samuel so far away, not much harm could come from it. But his brows would lift and his eyes would brighten at just the mention of Samuel’s name. He kept telling me that he would be home soon, and after a while, I think Nathaniel actually started to believe it. He said he had finally quit reading the newspaper, that it was a little bit easier getting through the days not knowing what was going on in the world.
My sister knitted for a while longer. It made her sad to think of our mother at that hospital alone, and keeping her fingers busy seemed to help. Besides, she said, there would always be a new baby needing something warm for its feet. Sometimes when she got tired of making tiny pink and blue booties, she would pull out a bright colored yarn and knit Maizelle a scarf. Poor Maizelle wore each one tied neatly about her neck, even if it was ninety degrees outside and sweat was dripping down her back. Then one day Adelaide came to me and handed me her needles. She said she was finally tired of knitting and was ready to give her hands a rest.
“I don’t need to do this anymore, Bezellia,” she said and walked out of the room and called her friend Lucy. Funny, I thought, how Mother’s special vacation by the water seemed to have finally cured Adelaide too.
My sister went back to school in September, and this year she seemed to look forward to it. She spent more time primping in the mornings, sometimes asking me to braid her soft, curly hair, which now fell well beyond her shoulders, making her look more like a young movie star than a high school sophomore. Sometimes she would borrow a skirt or a pair of earrings from me, always wanting to make sure that she looked her best.
I drove her to school most days. Nathaniel himself had taught me to drive Mother’s Cadillac just a month or so before leaving for college. He said driving a car was an important part of any young woman’s education. But I’d never felt much of a need to do it until now, explaining to Nathaniel that sisters needed a little privacy to talk about boys and music and makeup. But more than anything else, we talked about Mother and Adelaide’s new friend, Lucy. Sometimes Lucy would come home with us after school. The two of them would run upstairs whispering and giggling, then slam the door and lock themselves in my sister’s room. Maizelle never stopped worrying, though, and always found an excuse to knock on Adelaide’s door, whether it was to bring the girls a fresh piece of pound cake or to ask if Lucy wanted to stay for supper.
Uncle Thad came by Grove Hill most every afternoon. He spent hours at Mother’s desk, tending to what was left of her money and talking to the bank on the telephone. With a few wise investments, he managed to repair my mother’s checkbook so she would be comfortable, he said, in the years to come.
He called the hospital at the end of the day and checked on Mother’s progress. The doctors remained hopeful that she would return to Grove Hill prepared to lead a healthy, sober life. And even though they believed she no longer blamed herself for her husband’s fatal fall, they suspected she was still holding on to a painful, deeply buried secret. Her drinking, they feared, would always be a problem until she was willing to confront her past.
They wanted to explore some more aggressive treatments, treatments that left Uncle Thad feeling cautious and unsettled. He wouldn’t discuss them with me, only said that Mother had been a deeply depressed woman for a very long time and maybe it would take extraordinary measures to cure her once and for all. When I overheard him talking to the doctors about electricity and convulsions, I grew afraid that I had sent my mother away for good.
Uncle Thad also thought it was very important for Mother’s well-being that I continue my education; my sitting around Grove Hill was not doing anyone any good. He said he had called a few old friends at Vanderbilt—people who had always been more than willing to relieve his brother of another sizable donation—and inquired about the possibility of my continuing my education there. Not long after that, I was awarded the Bezellia Grove Scholarship for study in American history. Uncle Thad couldn’t help but laugh when he told me. Turned out, he said, that my father had finally found, thanks to cosmic fate or some sort of divine intervention, that young, bright academic who would surely see his family’s history from his own generous perspective.
I made a few new friends, a nice girl from Atlanta and one from Charleston. Neither had ever heard of Dorothy Pitman or Betty Friedan, but both were willing to sign my petitions as long as they didn’t have to dispose of any of their undergarments. In fact, Emily Louise Britain admitted that she desperately wanted to go to medical school. She had always dreamed of being a doctor like her father, but her mother was convinced that nursing would be a more suitable career for a young woman like herself. Patricia Davenport smiled and said that all sounded real exciting, but she preferred to marry a doctor and live in a big house on the Cooper River back home in Charleston.
Every once in a while, a wide-eyed fraternity boy would ask me if I had ever heard the song “Big City Girl,” obviously hoping that I would be willing to meet him under some big old tree on campus and make him feel all right. I’d look kind of confused and vague and walk away, leaving him wondering what kind of pleasure he had missed. Most days, I kept to myself, and that was okay too. I guess, like Adelaide, I wasn’t afraid of being on my own anymore, and before I knew it, life began to feel wonderfully predictable and normal, something I had always wanted.
Late one morning in early November, my grandmother telephoned the house. She said she had spent the past three days cleaning out my mother’s room, and now she had all of her old knickknacks packed and ready to go. She asked me to send Nathaniel after them right away. She had looked at them for most of her life and didn’t want them in her house one more day.
She said Elizabeth had called earlier in the week, demanding some kind of god-damned apology. She said her daughter was crazy if she thought she was going to apologize—for what? She hadn’t done anything wrong. She was tired of her daughter’s whining, and there was nothing more to talk about. She had her little girl’s memories, the last bit of evidence that my mother was in fact a Morgan, stuffed in a box and waiting by the bedroom door. I told her I’d give Nathaniel the message. But by the time I hung up the telephone, I was feeling a desperate need, maybe more of a calling really, to find my way to the water.
Nathaniel pulled the car out of the garage for me. He wanted to know why I was heading out to the lake so late in the day. It was already after lunch, and the days were short this time of year. He thought it best that I wait till tomorrow. He thought it best that I let him go instead. He said he didn’t feel comfortable with me driving on the interstate alone. He sai
d if my mother were here, she would never allow it. I stood there with my coat over my arm and my hand resting on the kitchen door, reminding him that my mother was not here. He reluctantly pulled the keys from his front pants pocket and placed them in my hand.
“Be careful, Miss Bezellia. Call me as soon as you get there. I won’t be leaving this house until I hear from you.” Nathaniel followed me to the car and stood there while I started the engine and let it warm itself in the cold fall air, seemingly afraid to walk away and let me go on my own. I wasn’t sure if he was scared of me driving on the interstate all by myself or of me heading straight into my grandmother’s temper. Either way, I was ready to go.
“Nathaniel,” I said, as I slipped the car into gear, suddenly feeling fearless behind the wheel of my mother’s Cadillac, “I’ll be okay. Don’t forget, my name’s Bezellia for a reason.” I smiled and revved the engine louder.
Nathaniel shut the car door and took two steps back. “Now don’t go pushing that gas pedal too hard. There’s three hundred and forty-five horses under this hood, remember, and they’d love to take you for a wild ride,” he cautioned, allowing a slight smile to cross his face.
I eased the car around the driveway and headed for the road, my heart beating faster with every passing mile. Not much more than an hour later, I pulled off the interstate onto Route 171. I rolled the car window down like I always did when I came to this stop, and even though it was fall and what leaves were left on the trees were golden and orange, I found the air here feeling oddly thick and stale. Everything else looked pretty much the same as it always had. The gas station on the far corner of the intersection still looked abandoned. And the old man dressed in his blue coveralls was still sitting in an old wooden chair and leaning against the building’s dirty white wall. His triangle-shaped display of Quaker State motor oil still looked perfect; not a single can was missing.
The sun was lingering fairly high in the afternoon sky by the time I pulled into my grandparents’ drive. Pop’s old pickup was parked next to his John Deere, neither one looking like it had been moved in days. I pulled Mother’s Cadillac alongside her father’s truck. Surely my grandmother was standing watch in the kitchen window and would come running from the house any minute now with her hair falling loose behind her head. Surely supper was already waiting on the table.
But my grandparents’ house looked dark, even lonely. The curtains were tucked shut, not a tiny sliver of light making its way through the windowpanes. Nobody was hurrying across the drive to greet me. I stepped closer to the house and heard muffled voices on the back porch. Nana and Pop, both of them bundled in heavy old sweaters, were there, sitting in their folding chairs. Their eyes were fixed on the water, which was still and glassy. The sun’s soft reflection and a perfect mirrored image of the trees bordering the water rested on top of the lake’s surface.
Neither one of my grandparents appeared surprised to see me. They didn’t even bother taking their eyes off the water. Nana sat particularly still, almost as if she was frozen, her ratty chenille robe wrapped loosely over her sweater and her hair set in tight curls, held firmly against her head with a collection of bobby pins and old barrettes.
“Hello, Bezellia,” she said, finally acknowledging my arrival.
“Hi there,” I answered her cautiously, and then stood and waited for an explanation for their odd indifference. After a while, I knew I wasn’t going to get one. “You two don’t seem too surprised to see me,” I added, begging for some sort of answer. “I figured you’d be expecting Nathaniel, not me.”
“He called to tell us you was coming,” my grandmother finally answered, still not taking her eyes off the water. “He was worried about you driving that big car of your mama’s way out here. Would have appreciated it, dear, if you had given us a little notice.”
“I didn’t think I needed to ask permission to come and see you.”
“Well, sweetie, company’s company.” My grandmother sat motionless in her folding chair, only pursing her lips and swatting at a slow-moving fly that had somehow managed to survive the first frost. Pop seemed too afraid to do any differently, so he just sat there too, staring at the lake and occasionally taking a puff on his Dutch Masters cigar. I pushed my way against their feet and stood directly in front of them both, resting my body against the black metal railing behind me.
“Is something bothering you, Nana? Are you mad at me for coming out here?”
“Why would I be mad at you, Bezellia? What have you done?”
“I haven’t done anything. But it sure seems like you think I have.”
My grandmother kept her eyes on the lake, and my grandfather just turned his head and looked away. I realized in that moment that Pop was no braver than my very own father.
“I guess sending my daughter off to some loony bin has me a bit bothered, if you must know the truth of it,” she finally snipped as she sat firmly planted in her favorite folding chair.
“First of all, it’s not a loony bin. It’s a hospital. And she is doing much better. Thank you for asking.”
“Oh, I know. Those crazy doctors called here. Wanted your grandfather and me to drive over there and talk to Elizabeth, said she was on the verge of some kind of breakthrough. Listen here, Bezellia, we went through hell with that girl when she was not much younger than you are now. Why do you think your grandfather has a bad heart? She wore him out. I can’t get into her troubles no more. It’d damn near kill him, maybe me too.”
I knelt down directly in front of my grandmother so she had no choice but to finally look at me. And even though my heart was racing, my voice sounded calm and insistent. “Why’d she leave, Nana?” I asked.
“Just let it be, Bezellia.”
But I stayed very still and waited for a better answer. The sun had drifted quickly down toward the horizon, turning a bright, brilliant orange as it fell. Apparently the world was trying to tell me to proceed with caution.
“I just can’t do that, Nana. I can’t leave it be.”
My grandmother shook her head and gripped the arms of her folding chair a little tighter, looking resigned at last to telling me something she felt certain I wouldn’t want to hear. She kept her eyes focused on the water. I guess she figured that, if she searched hard and long enough, she would eventually find some kind of comfort out there. Then in a flat, distant tone, she began to share my mother’s story, feeding it to me as if I was a little baby, one small bite at a time.
Apparently my mother was no more than sixteen when she fell “all crazy in love” with a boy who lived on the other side of Old Lebanon Dirt Road. His family didn’t have much of anything, not hardly a pot to piss in, according to my grandmother.
“But that didn’t seem to matter much to your mama back then. She just thought that boy hung the moon, even if his pockets were always empty.
“One night your mama and this boy done come into the kitchen and sat down and announced they were gonna have a baby.” Nana stopped at this point and let out another long, steady sigh. “I told her no way in hell was my only daughter gonna have an illegitimate baby and ruin this family’s good reputation.
“Turned out the boy wanted to marry her, try to make things right. But his family said what they had done had been a sin. Said their boy had been led astray and that he could never see your mama again. They as much as called her a tramp.” Even all these years later, my grandmother’s voice was loud and offended.
“That boy was man enough to get her pregnant, but he wasn’t man enough to stand up to his parents and do the right thing. He never called her again, and before long he left town to join the Army. Came back and everybody around here slapped him on the back and told him he was a great American. A couple weeks later, he up and married some poor white trash, and now it looks like their son is gonna be some famous country music singer. Isn’t that something, Bezellia? His daddy gets my daughter pregnant, and then his son fools around with you and turns it into a hit song. Looks like you and your mama are just t
wo peas in a pod after all.”
My skin was hot to the touch, and my head was already crammed full of so many hateful thoughts I wanted to slap my grandmother’s mouth just to make her hush. But I had come a long way, so had my mother, and we both needed to hear everything she had to say. So I just sat there and bit my tongue, bit it hard till it bled.
“I threw your mama in the car the day that boy enlisted and drove her over to the next county. There was a doctor there who had a reputation for taking care of girls who done been thinking with the wrong part of their body. And he did just that. He took care of your mama’s little problem right there on his kitchen table. She put up a fight at first, but it was for her own good. I told her that was the end of that, and we weren’t to ever talk about it again.
“Elizabeth never was the same. I’ll admit that much. She was angry and mad at everything and everybody. Never once thanked me for making things right. She took off not six months later, leaving us nothing but a piece of paper taped to her bedroom door and a shoe box filled with a bunch of love letters from that good-for-nothing boy.” Nana stopped talking for a minute. She quickly wiped a tear from her eye and crossed her arms against her chest.
“Lord, all I was ever trying to do was protect that girl’s reputation. And look what you’ve gone and done. Locked her up in some mental institution. No telling what people are gonna think about us now.”
The crickets started humming, their pitch picking up strength. The sound of my grandmother’s voice had thankfully been swallowed in theirs. But I could hear my mother, loud and clear, screaming to keep her baby as they forced her onto that kitchen table and spread her legs apart. I needed the crickets to sing even louder. I needed to quiet that sound forever.
Nana finally tapped my thigh with the palm of her hand, signaling that she had shared all she intended to. Then she motioned for me to follow her into the house. On the floor, right outside my mother’s bedroom door, was a large cardboard box. Her room was stripped bare. Every photo and keepsake was gone. Even the plaque with Jesus’ picture on it, the one Mother had made in Vacation Bible School, was apparently now stuffed inside this box.