by Cat Cora
To supplement our income, our dad, in addition to teaching full time, worked the high school football games, weekends at J. C. Penney, and delivered bouquets for a local florist. He especially loved the delivery job, because unlike his tenth-grade world history students, everyone was always glad to see him when he showed up with a floral arrangement. Sometimes he would even earn himself a kiss on the cheek from some extra-happy recipient.
I was equal parts scared and irritated about Mom going back to school. My parents were partners, but there was no doubt in anyone’s mind, including Dad’s, that Mom kept the locomotive that was Cora family life rolling forward. Without Mom, who would flip on my bedroom light at 6:00 a.m.? Who would make our dubious jelly and mayonnaise sandwiches? Who would buy the correct laundry soap that made our clothes smell clean and familiar? Who would come out onto the porch on Saturday evenings, just as it was getting dark, and blow a whistle to summon us home?
Then one day my mom and dad sat us down on the couch and shared the solution: Grandmom Alma was going to come to live with us and run the house and keep my brothers and me out of trouble.
Both Alma and her husband, my granddad Clyde, had served in the army, and met when they were stationed at the Fitzsimons Army Hospital in Aurora, Colorado. He was a medical doctor and a first lieutenant. She was a nurse and a captain, and outranked him, a fact that tickled my mom and also inspired her.
Alma was tough, but from the moment she laid eyes on me I had her under my spell. Our mom was a firm believer in the character-building value of chores, a set bedtime, and a strict schedule. By the time we hit junior high we were doing our own laundry. We all knew how to properly set the table, load and unload the dishwasher, and mow the lawn. Before we were allowed to get our driver’s licenses, we had to prove to her satisfaction that we were confident changing a flat tire. She created a trio of duties, categorized by location: kitchen helper, house helper, yard helper. It wasn’t gender specific and every Sunday night we rotated to the next assignment.
But when Grandmom Alma moved in during my freshman year of high school, she dispensed with all that. She delighted in taking care of us. She moved into the guest bedroom and did it up to her liking, complete with floral wallpaper and a dust ruffle on the bed. She spent her days producing a nonstop stream of classic egg salads and chicken salads, stupendous cheesecakes, and for our birthdays, her silky Italian cream cake with not-too-sweet cream cheese frosting. She did not belong to the church of Chores Build Character, and merrily washed and folded our clothes and deposited them in our drawers and in all other ways spoiled us.
As her only granddaughter I was her favorite. There is no sense pretending otherwise. I reveled in her presence. I appointed myself her assistant cheesecake maker. I assembled the ingredients, dusted the springform pan with sugar, and grated the lemon zest.
I loved her beyond measure, and one of my cherished early memories is of her feeding me. I’m sitting on the floor in front of a TV. Bright colors, a warm ocean breeze on my naked arms. Suddenly, a white bowl descends from above my head like a spaceship and lands in my lap. The feel of the plastic is smooth on my knees. I scoop up one of the cold, pale orange squares in the bowl and press it into my mouth with the flat of my hand. The juice squirts out over my bottom lip and down my chin. The taste is sweet, but light and slippery. Not cookie sweet, not rough and dry. Fresh. Grandmom has given me my first taste of cantaloupe, freshly cut and cubed. I am no older than three.
My close relationship with Alma complicated things with my brothers. Chris and I were thirteen months apart, and our personalities clashed. My closeness with Alma strained our relationship further, despite the truce we’d managed to achieve. We were just so different. He was a calm and collected boy of few words. Even though he was the younger one, he was like the old dog and I was like the puppy, always bouncing around with new enthusiasm. I’d always felt closer to Mike, and we developed a sort of coalition. Mom claimed it was because when she was in the hospital giving birth to Chris, Mike helped take care of me. The adults were consumed with the arrival of the new baby, who was three and a half weeks late (it wasn’t the fashion to induce in those days), but Mike saw to it that I got my bottle and changed my diapers, and would sit on the couch and hold me on his lap. He was only in kindergarten.
Mike was a good-looking kid, gangly, with a wide smile and large brown eyes. He struggled with attention deficit disorder, for which there wasn’t any real treatment in Mississippi at the time, and had been held back in fifth grade. As he got older he turned into a charmer, a rogue with a special gift for getting himself into trouble. He was a good ol’ boy from the beginning, a type of male specific to Mississippi, and furthermore, as he grew up, knew he was that type and adopted a kind of Billy Bob Thornton Sling Blade persona he trotted out when he wanted to crack people up and endear himself to them.
His great love was fishing, and to get to the bream and bass, the great game fish for which our freshwater lakes are famous, he needed a boat. He could never afford to buy one, but after he got his driver’s license he hatched a scheme whereby he would find someone in the classifieds who was selling a boat, call them up, and say he was interested in buying it, but would, of course, need to test-drive it first. He’d leave his license with the owner as collateral, hook the boat up to the back of his truck, then go on a fishing trip. After a few days out on the lake, he’d return the boat, saying it wasn’t for him.
The owners would be justifiably enraged, which he acknowledged without exhibiting a trace of guilt. He’d just start talking fishing, and before too long they’d offer him a beer and start comparing stories, and soon they’d forget all about it. He was shameless. Once my mom was driving me home from some after-school activity and we passed him going in the opposite direction with a golf cart hitched to the back of his truck. Mom stopped, rolled down the window, and asked what he was doing. “Just checking it out! I might want one of these.”
He was a genial con man, even at a young age. Mike barely graduated high school, fell in with a bad crowd, got a little too heavily into pot, and started writing bad checks. After he got caught, no amount of charm could keep him from being sent to the penal farm, the Mississippi version of juvie.
I spent several Sundays in the car with my mom, driving up to visit him. We’d go after church, and I’d bring him some pecans I’d picked off the tree beside the parking lot. I’ve always been emotional, and I would cry as we went through security and as we sat in the waiting room, which was as big as the school cafeteria. My mom, normally chatty, was silent. It was grim, but Mike was always happy to see us, embarrassed by his predicament only a little.
My parents spent a lot of time and energy steeped in concern about him and his struggles, leaving Chris and me to fend for ourselves a bit. Chris stayed as far away from the Mike situation as possible, hiding beneath the covers on Sunday mornings, leaving the house to hang with his friends. I dealt with the relative lack of attention by daydreaming about what I would do when I was on my own, far from Jackson, in some exotic place doing something exciting, as yet unknown.
My grammar school days playing softball had awakened in me twin urges for competition and for being part of a team. I tried out for and made the Wingfield Follies, our school musical revue, every fall, which required long hours after school spent painting sets, making costumes, learning our lines and routines. I served on the student council, was secretary/treasurer of the Junior Classical League (a club for students taking Latin), and a member of MYGA, Mississippi Youth and Government, and continued to play softball every spring.
It’s unfashionable to look back fondly on high school, but I enjoyed myself. Wingfield had a precision drill team called the Genteels that every girl in the school who was even remotely coordinated tried out for. The Genteels were mostly juniors and seniors, but every year a few sophomores were chosen, and I was one of three who was tapped that year. It was very prestigious. I loved working out the complicated routines, and also the outfits: spa
rkly blue hot pants worn with a long, puffy-sleeved white blouse and a sparkly gold vest. The ensemble was completed with gloves and knee-high white leather boots with two-inch heels. I had a good haircut with feathered bangs. My mom has kept the documentation of these days, of my bad perms, amateur makeup application, and fifteen extra pounds in a photo album. She loves these pictures as only a mother can. I look back and marvel with amazement that I look and feel better at forty-seven than I did at eighteen.
The common wisdom holds that a chef’s life begins in a kitchen, and while there was no doubt my family loved food—whenever my mom was home on the weekend we cooked nonstop, dishes like kota kapama with noodles and boiled greens drizzled with olive oil and garlic, and my dad would often fire up the smoker and make some of his locally famous beef brisket—a lot of these high school extracurriculars, as silly as they may seem in retrospect, instilled in me a love of working hard with a team all focused on a single outcome. Without knowing it, I was developing the skills I would one day need to work in a professional kitchen.
While in high school I also got myself a boyfriend, Johnny.
He was tall and thin, brown haired with wide-set brown eyes, and ears a little too large for his head. Johnny was serious for his age. He had a wretched home life; his alcoholic father was in and out of the picture, and even in tenth grade, Johnny had an after-school job as a stock boy at a local department store to help support his family. We were an item for the duration of high school. One year we shook things up at the junior prom by wearing matching formal wear. Black trousers, white notched tailcoat, red bow tie. He bought me a red carnation corsage for my lapel. This was seriously daring for Jackson, Mississippi, in the early 1980s, and damn if I didn’t look better in my tux than in a gold taffeta gown.
When Johnny and I met I was already sure I preferred girls, but equally certain that it hardly mattered, because like every good southern girl, I would grow up, find the best man I could, marry him, and have a passel of kids. I didn’t even fantasize about being truly, deeply in love with a girlfriend because I knew I could never have it. It would be like a straight chick hoping to marry a rock star or the Prince of Wales. Even though my family was nice enough to Dalton and Millard, the gay couple across the street, I knew that people like me had to keep what was in their hearts secret.
I’ve no doubt that part of my urge to overload my schedule was tied up in coping with my sexuality, in channeling all that hormonal confusion. I also stayed busy because otherwise I would fall into a funk. Day after day, all over my high school, I would see girls with their boyfriends, holding hands, stealing a kiss between classes. It was no secret how attracted they were to each other, how happy they were. I had not one complaint with Johnny, but I could never cajole myself into feeling anything other than fondness. Even when we were making out I would be thinking about my next day’s to-do list.
To make some spending money I got a job working part-time as counter help at the Peanut Shack, a kiosk in the Metrocenter Mall in south Jackson that sold candy, caramel popcorn balls, and chocolate chip cookies the size of your head. At home, I augmented Alma’s perfect cheesecakes with junk food from my job.
My mom may have been gone during the week and consumed with her studies, but she could take one look at me and know something was wrong, even though she couldn’t imagine what it might be. On her weekends home she’d watch me, taking note of my despondent expressions, my inclination to lock myself in my room for long stretches of time. She was ahead of her time, sang the praises of endorphins, and suggested my mood might perk right up with a jog around the block. When that didn’t work she suggested Prozac.
I didn’t like her suggestion. I was outraged in the way that judgy teenagers tend to be. Prozac? Was I truly that messed up? Was she suggesting I get a lobotomy, too? I hadn’t reached a point where I could formulate a rebuttal, even in my own mind. I was nowhere close to being able to say to myself or anyone else that if I could just be free to pursue girls I wouldn’t be forced to tamp down my true feelings with beer and chocolate.
Then, when I was seventeen, Jordan happened.
four
The summer between my junior and senior year I worked as a lifeguard at the YMCA pool. The Bryan Adams song “Summer of ’69” was big on Jackson radio around that time, and it was the perfect anthem. I remember that summer was hot, but not so humid and buggy. In the mornings I’d sit high up in my lifeguard chair, feel the sun on my legs, holler at the occasional kid to quit messing around, inhale the warm smell of newly mown lawns.
I bought a used car with my savings from the Peanut Shack, a red Fiat X1/9. My normally easygoing dad had come out firmly against it. “Don’t do it. Don’t buy it. That car will spend its life in the shop.” I revered my dad’s levelheadedness and patience. I knew he never offered his opinion if he wasn’t pretty sure he was right. But I ignored him regarding the car. I was a lifeguard, and it was a hot little red convertible. There was no convincing me.
Jordan lived not far from the pool, and she came over most mornings for a swim. She was stunning, with wavy blond hair, a turned-up nose, and pageant queen smile. Perched in my lifeguard chair, I’d watch her gleaming body glide through the water from behind my Ray-Bans. After she did a few laps she would lie out on the pool deck and we would talk aimlessly about school. She was a cheerleader and I was on the drill team, so we had that in common. Every morning as she walked through the gate, my palms got sweaty. Every afternoon when I got off work, I fantasized about her all the way home, my tape deck blasting the Tears for Fears hit “Shout.” My car smelled like sweat and coconut oil, and I sang at the top of my lungs, “Shout, shout, let it all out . . .”
That year break dancing had arrived in Jackson. The year before, Flashdance had been in the local theaters, and Michael Jackson moonwalking was all the rage. One day I was telling Jordan about a break-dancing group I’d joined, and she asked if I could come over to her house after I got off work and show her some moves.
I can’t remember where her parents were, but they must have been at work. She put in a cassette tape from the movie Breakin’, and I taught her what I knew and then, like in the movies, a slow song came on, and there was that awkward moment when you either pretended you were finished dancing or else you went for it and draped yourself all over the other person. It was Jordan’s idea. I wouldn’t have dared. We danced for a while. Even though a box air-conditioner whirred in one of the windows, we were still sweaty and overheated from dancing.
I don’t remember who went after whom, but suddenly, just like that, we started kissing. In a minute, we were a tangle of arms, hair, mouth, and tongue. We started grinding to the music. Her taste was Crest toothpaste, her smell Coppertone. Her hair was heavy in my hands.
I felt like a human sparkler, every inch of me bright and crackling. My ears rang, the room spun. I thought kissing Jordan just might kill me. This was what it was supposed to be like. This was what all the love songs were about.
The rest of the summer we were inseparable. To the world it looked as if we’d just struck up one of those intense friendships teenage girls are famous for. No one questioned that I wanted to be with her every spare moment. I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. Every song on the radio described our desperate love.
Johnny hadn’t been around much anyhow. He’d graduated from Wingfield the year before and started working for Lowe’s Home Improvement. I broke up with him, offering the usual lame it’s-me-not-you, I-think-we-should-see-other-people nonsense, but it was to be with Jordan.
Jordan and I cruised up and down McDowell Boulevard in my Fiat with the top down, radio blaring, hair snarling in the wind. We’d stop at Pizza Hut to fix ourselves in the mirror, hang out in the air-conditioning, and nurse Diet Dr Peppers. We’d go on what I thought of as proper dates, mostly to the movies, but of course there was no hand holding in public, even in the dark.
My brother Mike, who’d served his time at the penal farm, was living in a trailer on the outskirts of t
own. I told him Jordan and I were double dating and needed a place to make out with our guys. A lie, of course.
When we drove up to the empty trailer I was sweating every place a person can sweat. It was easy to blame the nonstop sauna that is a Mississippi summer, but the truth was that I was nervous. Jordan chattered away, hiding her nerves with bright banter. I’d never made love to a woman and neither had she. Now, the thing we had been waiting for seemed all but impossible to accomplish. As I imagined going down on her, I kept thinking about a conversation between Mike and his friends, about how bad their hands smelled after they’d finger-fucked their girlfriends. I could not get that thought out of my mind. What if this thing I’d been waiting for seemingly forever was funky and gross? What if, when I got down there, I actually gagged?
My hands shook a little as I threaded Mike’s key into the lock. He had thoughtfully left some windows open, but there was no air-conditioning and the metal siding creaked in the heat. The trailer was like a very large tin can roasting in the sun. I looked at Jordan and she took a deep breath and reached over for my hand. It was clear that this would be our only shot in the foreseeable future. A little heat was nothing.
We fumbled around, me trying to unhook her bra, her grabbing my ass. Somehow we got our clothes off. Jordan’s taste was the opposite of funky and gross. She was a little salty and musky. It reminded me of oysters. I’d tried my first one when I was ten years old, at Felix’s Restaurant and Oyster Bar in New Orleans. I’d resisted at first, then was surprised with joy at its slick, briny goodness.
I just about gave myself heatstroke trying to satisfy Jordan, but eventually we both came. Finally I knew what it was to make love.