by Bev Marshall
I looked back to where Mama stood laughing with Dean Tucker on the church steps. Wallace was nearby shaking hands and accepting the compliments that rained down on him like manna. “Well, at least she didn’t wear that blue dress,” I said.“She looked like a Christian.”As we sat in the car waiting for Mama and Wallace, I wondered what Grandma would say if she knew I was a fake Christian, too. At least Mama hadn’t run down the aisle and pretended to be saved like I had. I wasn’t sure who the Lord would choose as the worst sinner, me or Mama.
Chapter 4
ON THE FIRST SATURDAY IN NOVEMBER, MAMA AND WALLACE got married at the courthouse in Zebulon and drove off in Mama’s Volkswagen for their honeymoon on the Gulf Coast. I was the maid of honor and Brother Thompson stood in as best man for Wallace. Grandma didn’t attend. I thought about how her mother hadn’t shown up at her and Papaw’s wedding and wondered if she were starting a tradition in our family that meant that Mama wouldn’t be around to see me say my vows when the time came.
Grandma had good reason for being mad. After revival was over on the Sunday following Mama’s debacle in church, she and Wallace didn’t come home until the next day. When they came slipping in the back door at six a.m., Grandma was whipping up pancake batter and said she smelled whiskey on Wallace’s breath.
Wallace left that afternoon as he was leading another revival in Tupelo, so I moved back into my room thinking Mama’s little fling was now just another page in Mama’s History of Lost Men book.Was I ever wrong! The next Sunday Wallace jumped off the 2:30 train back into Mama’s arms, and whatever happened that night caused him to cancel his next revival in Greenwood, a town of far more sinners than we had in Zebulon.
Grandma blamed Mama.To hear her tell it, her daughter was a sorceress, capable of casting a spell over God Himself. If someone as holy as Wallace could be enchanted by Mama, no one was safe. Papaw got a big kick out of it all. “Bullshit!” he said. “Frieda didn’t have to cajole that apple off the tree; he was dying to fall.The man’s a fake; I recognized his colors first night I met him. Frieda ain’t got no more magic in her than Sam.” Sam was our mule that ate up all our butter bean vines when he wiggled underneath the garden fence. I didn’t believe Mama held any magical powers either unless you counted the power her size 36D bra had over men.
Whatever the reason, Mama had finally gotten herself a man who was willing to move us out of Grandma’s house. After the wedding and before they left for the coast, Mama and Wallace drove me home. Mama was still mad at Grandma and refused to get out of the car, but Wallace escorted me into the living room where Grandma was sitting on the couch with an open Bible on her lap.Wallace knelt down and took her hands. “Zadie, I love your daughter and I love Layla Jay. I longed to have a daughter, prayed for the good Lord to send me a wife and child, and now He has answered my prayers.” Wallace may have guessed that Grandma is one of those people who can talk themselves into believing just about anything if they want it badly enough.When her sister forged Grandma’s signature on a check and told her she had no memory of doing it, that it was automatic writing from the spirit world, Grandma believed her. And didn’t she believe I was genuinely saved? Although she still had reservations about the whiskey-drinking episode and fornication that she figured had most likely occurred, she was going to convince herself that Wallace was speaking the truth. He smiled and said, “I’ve taken the position of choir director at Centenary Methodist and I’ll supplement the small salary by selling shoes at Vest’s Shoe Store.” He said that he and Mama had rented a little blue house on Fourth Street in Zebulon. Mama and Wallace would drive to work together every morning. I was to catch the school bus on the corner of Fifth and Sycamore. “We’ll make a good home for Layla Jay,” he said. Grandma accepted Wallace’s peck on her cheek, and after he and Mama drove away, she put her arm around me.“You’ll have a good daddy who will take care of you and your mama,” she said.
“Bullshit,” I whispered as I walked away from her to my room.
Mama had a husband, but I knew that God hadn’t sent me a father. I tried to be happy for Mama. I wanted to believe that I was a gift God had given to Wallace. I wasn’t sure what a daddy was supposed to do with a thirteen-year-old daughter, but I tried to imagine the two of us watching television together, sitting at the table doing homework, him tucking me into bed at night. But I couldn’t forget those discrepancies in Wallace’s conversion story.Wouldn’t a person remember the exact details of an experience that changed his life? I would have known what Mary cooked for me, which piece of jewelry she offered me. Ever since Mama had entered Wallace’s life, he hadn’t shown the slightest interest in anything I said or did.Would a piece of paper that said he and Mama were husband and wife make Wallace love me? I doubted it. I suspected that maybe Wallace had prayed for Mama’s breasts, but he hadn’t asked for the child who had suckled them.
As the autumn wind stripped the trees of their leaves, I tore away the pieces of my life and stood naked in spirit and heart in the room where I had slept since birth. As I laid my old dolls and stuffed bears into cardboard boxes, I mourned each of them as if I were viewing them in a collective coffin.The life I had known had ended, and my trash can held the miscellany of my former self: a paper plate mask on which I had drawn Papaw’s face with a big smile above the Popsicle stick I had glued on for a handle, starred Sunday school papers, folded notes passed in school, a red leather leash for Ginger, my collie who had been hit by a car. As I folded the afghan Grandma had knitted for me, I held it to my face and breathed in the scent of her talcum that clung to the yarn. I packed the photograph of Daddy, the framed picture of me in a sun-suit sitting on Papaw’s new tractor, a map of the state of Mississippi, and the prayer of St. Francis printed in red on parchment paper. The nail holes and white spaces on my bedroom walls would attest to my former presence, and before I packed my cologne in my train case, I sprayed it on the curtains, hoping my scent would linger for a long time after I was gone. I had nearly forgotten to pack the box of memorabilia on the top shelf of my closet, and when I opened it, I found all of my ribbons with crosses on them that I had been awarded for recitation of Bible verses, “For God so loved the world,” “In my Father’s house there are many mansions.” Grandma and Papaw’s old farmhouse wasn’t a mansion, but on the day I sealed the last box that held my life, it seemed like one.
Grandma told me nothing could change our love for each other; I wouldn’t be far away, only a few miles, and we’d see each other often. But I saw the sadness in her eyes before she looked away. Although she would never admit it, I think Grandma mourned Mama’s leaving, too, because I caught her sitting on the bed in Mama’s room, looking around at Mama’s possessions as if she were trying to memorize her daughter’s life.
If Mama had regrets about moving, she hid them well. On the day when she and Wallace returned from their honeymoon, she packed up her entire room in one afternoon, and we spent that night in our new two-bedroom home.
We ate a celebration dinner of boiled shrimp and potato salad, which Mama had brought back from Biloxi, on the old dining table Papaw had brought down from the attic where Mama had stored her furniture so long ago. I had expected Mama to shed a tear or two when she saw all of the things that she and Daddy had shared, but she laughed when Wallace carried in the mattress from her and Daddy’s old bed and fell down on it with a leer on his face. I was standing in the doorway, and when he looked up and grinned at me, I turned and fled down the hall to my own room.
I liked my bedroom. It was at the back of the house, lighted by a bank of four windows that looked out onto the backyard, where I spotted a squirrel’s nest in the branches of an oak tree.The owners had left a bird feeder on a metal pole, and I imagined watching the orioles, sparrows, cardinals, and blue jays flying gracefully across the yard to partake of the seed I would pour into the feeder. On the two side walls of my bedroom I hung my map, the prayer of St. Francis, and my framed pictures, adding a new photo of
me in my band uniform that Grandma had given me the day before we moved. In this snapshot a tall white hat shades my forehead, but you can see my narrow nose and my dishwater blond hair hanging down my back. My lips are open, ready to blow on the silver flute that I am lifting with elbows tilted out from my side. My bedroom set—bed, double dresser, desk and chair—belonged to Grandma, but she gave all of them to me, saying she thought it would help me adjust to my new home. I had still been sleeping in a crib when Daddy died, and after Papaw brought it down from the attic, Mama said to put it back as she didn’t plan on having any more kids. Which was a relief to me. I hadn’t thought of this being a possibility, but Papaw winked at me and said he’d keep it near the pull-down stairs just in case a little brother or sister turned up someday. I hoped he was wrong; I wanted that crib to stay in the attic. I didn’t want any siblings, and something in my gut told me that Wallace and I were in agreement on this.
We didn’t agree on much else. I had thought we would be reading the Bible nightly, saying grace every meal, spending hours on our knees praying for God’s blessings, but Wallace rarely opened the big black Bible on our coffee table, and his hands reached for the platters of food on our kitchen table before I could bow my head. I couldn’t figure it out. Across from me sat a man who had spent many years among the heathens, risking life and limb to save their souls. He had preached so hard to save sinners all over the South and yet he seemed unperturbed that Mama was still saying goddamnit every time she messed up her fingernail polish. And he drank more bourbon than she did.Three or four nights a week they would pour bourbon and Coke into the tall clear glasses Mama had gotten with S&H Green Stamps, and after a couple of hours, they didn’t bother with the Coke anymore. Mama was a happy drunk, laughing and dancing to Bobby Rydell’s record “The Cha-Cha-Cha,” but when she’d had too much bourbon and couldn’t do the steps correctly, she would set down her glass and go to bed.When I complained about the loud music that sometimes lasted far into the night, Mama yelled at me with the same defiant tone of voice she had used with Grandma, and I would miss her and Papaw so much my chest would hurt with the effort of taking a breath. I didn’t see them often like Grandma had said I would. Grandma sat alone on our pew at Pisgah Methodist after we switched to Centenary Methodist, which I hated nearly as much as I detested every person in my new Sunday school class.
Lyn Parks was the president of the MYF, the Methodist Youth Fellowship, and she ran our meetings like a dictator in a room filled with ignorant peasants. She was pretty, had those real pearls she’d worn the first day of school, and a wardrobe Edith Head would have envied. Every boy sitting on a folding chair in our Sunday school classroom was in love with her, and they didn’t give a flip whether we had a car wash for a fund-raiser or sold brownies at the bazaar. Lyn’s best friend, Sarah Jane Patterson, was her slave. She laughed at every stupid little joke Lyn made, jumped out of her chair to get a pen or whatever Lyn needed at any moment, and actually worked up a tear when Lyn said she wasn’t going to run for homecoming queen because she didn’t think she was pretty enough. Of course, Sarah Jane talked her into running, and Lyn was crowned just before the game with Tylertown, which we lost.
I told myself I didn’t care that I wasn’t ever going to be a homecoming queen, or even a maid in the court. It didn’t matter that Jehu was in love with Lyn and not me. And why should I care if those snotty kids didn’t like me? I also tried to convince myself that Wallace would become a good father in time, and that Mama’s happiness was worth the misery I was feeling every night as I sat in my room listening to her laughter. I tried, but in my sick heart there was a cancer of hatred growing faster than Mama’s feet could cha-cha-cha.
Before Mama and Wallace got married, I had been an A student, but now I never studied for tests or did my homework or paid attention to my teachers, who no longer called on me for the correct answers.With one exception. Miss Schultz, my Spanish teacher, who had come to America from Panama when she was in her twenties, loved my sullen self, and kept on treating me like her prized pupil. When I failed the translation exercise taken from Don Quixote, she called me up to her desk after class and said she knew I could have made an A, so something must be wrong in my life and what could she do to help. I nearly gave in, wanting desperately to pour out gallons of unshed tears on her pristine desk, but the shame I felt over my unpopularity and my booze-soaked life contained them. I held my breath until I was dizzy, and clutching my Spanish I book against my chest, I said, “Nothing’s wrong with me, and if there was, it’s none of your business. Can I go now?”
Grandma tried to help me, too. Mama dropped me off for a visit one Saturday and when Grandma hugged me, she said she could feel my bones. How much weight had I lost? What was Frieda cooking for supper? Had I been sick? She put me on the bathroom scale.“Ninety-five!” she yelled. “A strong wind would blow you away, Layla Jay.” I told her Twiggy probably didn’t weigh as much as me, and the whole world thought she was perfect. Grandma didn’t know who Twiggy was, but she said she didn’t care if she was Jackie Kennedy, I was her granddaughter and I needed to get some meat on my bones.
I ate the entire day. Tea cakes, chocolate drops, mashed potatoes with brown gravy for lunch, a ham slice, whole milk, greens cooked in bacon grease, and lemon meringue pie. My stomach was stretched to its capacity and I shook my head “no” over and over as Grandma pressed me to drink the glass of buttermilk she held out to me.When she had run out of fattening foods to offer, she sat beside me on the couch and took my hand in hers. “Layla Jay, are you happy out in town? Is the marriage not working out? How are things between them?”
I looked over at the piano running my eyes over the yellowed ivories. Middle C, D, E, F. If I told Grandma the truth all the wrong notes would be played. Mama would be mad at me, and only the Lord knew what would happen when Wallace found out that I had ratted on him. I looked into Grandma’s pale blue eyes filled with worry and knew I couldn’t speak the truth. “Everything’s fine, Grandma. We’re all doing just great.” I knew she didn’t believe me, but she sighed, dropped my hand, and said she hoped Mama wasn’t going to ruin this chance she had for a good life with a good man.
I knew Wallace wasn’t a good man though. I knew that I couldn’t trust him. My knowledge came from the way he stared at the pointy ends of the padded bra I wore beneath the new white sweater Grandma had given me for an early birthday present. And I came to fear him on the day when I caught him in my room opening the drawer to my dresser that held my panties and double-A-cup bras.When he looked up and saw me standing in the doorway, he said he was looking for some notebook paper and thought I kept a spare pack there.Wordlessly, I went to my desk and handed him the pack that lay beside my algebra book. When he took the paper, touching my hand with his, I looked above his head to the round white light globe overhead, and after he turned and left my room, I locked the door and sat on my bed staring out at the once beautiful trees that had lost their leaves.
Chapter 5
I WORRIED THAT GOD WAS STILL MAD AT ME ABOUT COUNTERFEITING salvation, that maybe He had sent Wallace over to Zebulon as my punishment. But I remembered Grandma saying that God’s business was forgiving all the folks nobody would excuse. So with hope in my heart, I kept on praying. I asked for a motorcycle for Wallace, a tornado to whip down Fourth Street, a thousand pimples on Lyn’s face. And breasts. I thought that if Mama had gotten a man with hers, then there was the possibility I could win Jehu’s love with a set of C cups.
I knew that the chances of God granting any of my requests were slim, but I hoped that He would have a modicum of pity when He looked down and saw how things were going at our house.The day after I had caught Wallace in my room, I said with the sweetest smile I could muster, that the next time he wanted to borrow something of mine he should ask Mama for it first. “Mama keeps track of everything in this house,” I said. “It’s real hard to keep a secret from her.” And Wallace had understood my threat because that night
at supper he kept his eyes on Mama even though I was wearing my new sweater.
God chose Grandma to deliver the one blessing He bestowed on me. She had gotten chummy with the Albrights after they joined Pisgah Methodist, and so she had found out that Jehu’s family lived on Third Street, one block over from my new house. After thanking God for helping me along with one of my prayer requests, I strolled around the corner every chance I got to spy on Jehu. He was hardly ever home because, besides football practice, he worked as a stock boy at the Piggly Wiggly on Saturdays, but occasionally I would see him sitting at his kitchen table eating a sandwich or I would spot him in the backyard tossing a football with Red Pittman, his best friend. I dreaded seeing Lyn through his living room window someday, and imagined them on the green velvet couch cuddled together watching a television show. But God was merciful enough to spare me that sight; Lyn never made it even to the front steps of the Albright house. And I have Mama to thank for that.
My birthday is November 19, and on November 9, Mama announced that she was throwing me a party.This was a bad idea. After the few votes I had gotten for cheerleader, I was afraid that no one would come. Even though I had moved to town, I would always be one of the country kids at school, and none of us were ever invited to the town kids’ parties, so I couldn’t imagine that they would show up at mine. But Mama wanted to show off her new den furniture: an aqua plastic couch and two matching chairs with black wrought-iron legs, and a coffee table that was carved in the shape of the state of Mississippi. She also wanted to use her punch bowl, a present from her first wedding that she had never filled with ginger ale. I begged Mama to return the thirty-five invitations she had bought at Zebulon Stationery. “Nonsense,” she said. “Layla Jay, you’ve never had a party. How do you know you won’t have a good time?”