“I want to be sure they’s okay to send to Miss Mavis’s chillrun,” she would say with a wink. “If y’all bad apples get sick, tell me quick so I can throw them out, ’eah?”
We would snicker and gobble them up like a pack of starving beagles, knowing she had really made them for us. She was a force to be reckoned with.
She wore her hair as she always had, pulled back tight in a neat bun. Her perfectly white shirt was a sharp contrast to her smooth complexion that had always reminded me of the color of light pecans. I figured her to be around forty, which was decrepit in my book. I was fascinated by the fact that she never wore and didn’t need a stitch of makeup. Probably because my mother wore so much. But Angel didn’t need a thing to improve her appearance. Her thick curly eyelashes framed her light hazel eyes like awnings and those crazy light eyes of hers held the wisdom of a thousand ages. I was about to get an unsolicited dose of it.
“Gone be all right,” she said, finally breaking the silence, “by and by. You’ll see. Now eat up.”
“I wish,” I said, “but it won’t.”
“’Cause the good Lawd take care of His own and you’re one of Gawd’s chillrun, ain’t you?”
“No offense, Miss Angel, but God ain’t sending my momma back. She’s dead, you know. Dead is dead.”
“Your momma was a beautiful woman, Miss Anna, and she was the finest gardener I ever knew. She’s up in heaven now, tending the Lawd’s flowers. Eat up that soup. Ain’t no good cold.”
“Ain’t no good hot,” I said and waited for her reaction to that one.
She looked hard at me and I thought she was going to tell me how ungrateful I was, but she changed her mind and sat down beside me instead.
She exhaled a long breath and slapped her hands on her thighs. “You know what?” she said.
“What.”
“This ain’t no good,” she said with another sigh, “it ain’t no good.”
“What? This soup?”
“No, chile, this day. It’s plain awful and that’s all she wrote.”
“Yeah, it sure is,” I said and let my spoon rest on the side of the bowl.
She looked at me for a few minutes and then she looked straight through me before she spoke, as though she saw something on the wall behind me.
“I’m a Gawd-loving Christian woman, Miss Anna, and I never miss Sunday church. My preacher, he say all kind of things about Gawd and how He got His plan and His mysteries and such. But I gone tell you this, and let the lightning strike me down righ’ chea in this kitchen, things happen in this world that ain’t the hand of Gawd. People do all kind of crazy things, the innocent get hurt. These thing just don’t make no sense. No sense, no how. This whole business never should have come to pass.”
“Yeah,” I said. My tears were streaming again and I wiped them away with the back of my hand. What was she saying? I couldn’t hold a thought in my head. I could barely sit. I felt faint but Angel just continued to talk as though I wanted to listen.
“Never should have come to pass,” she said again, handing me a tissue from her pocket. “I’m so, so sorry to see this day. You go on cry, baby. It’s okay.”
I put my head down on my arms on the counter and sobbed. What did she mean that it never should have happened? Did anybody know what had really happened? I wanted to get out of there and run. If I could just run and run, I would feel better. I wanted it to be day, not night. The dark seemed scary for some reason. It had never bothered me before. Now everything seemed wrong. I wanted to go home to my room, slam the door and lock it. I wanted my daddy. And, I wanted my momma.
Daddy was probably at our house. I suddenly realized I couldn’t go there, not even to get clothes. I had been told to stay put. On an ordinary day, I would have ignored that and taken the consequences. I realized I was afraid to move.
“I can’t go home,” I said. I looked at her and knew my face was all twisted because I could feel a hard pull in my jaw. I started to shake and burst out into tears one more time. “What am I supposed to do? Just sit here? Just sit here?”
My bewilderment must have sobered her, made her realize that what she took for granted that night had only begun to dawn on me. I was a sassy island brat, but I was still a little girl. And now I was a sassy island brat, little girl, with no mother, refused even the comfort of her own bed for some inexplicable reason, and with a daddy whose grieving would come with a price to pay.
“You’re not going to worry about that just now,” she said. “You listen to me good, Miss Anna. Your daddy is a good man and you are a good girl. Dr. Douglas needs for you to hang on to yourself. Neither one of you deserve this kind of terrible thing, but here it comes anyhow. So now what? If you go off all half-cocked and crazy it’s just gone make a bad situation worse. So you need to tell yourself that you gone be the smart young woman Angel knows. Ain’t that right? And don’t you know your daddy’s gone need you to be strong? I’ll bet he feels pretty bad too.”
“Yeah.”
To tell you the truth, I didn’t care how anyone felt. I was so stunned that I couldn’t think about anything or anybody. I quit crying and, switching gears from that short blast of deep sorrow, I felt my fury grow. I couldn’t do anything with or about my anger, so I clenched my jaw and quit talking to her.
There were people out in the living room. The door had been opening and closing every ten minutes. Daddy was probably back, but why hadn’t he told me if he was? A car horn honked loudly, outside in the backyard.
Angel looked annoyed and opened the back door, calling out, “Hush! I’ll be along directly!” She took her purse from the closet, went back to the door and turned to me. “That’s my nephew. I promise to him I go see his new baby tonight. Shuh! Got him a man-child now and he ain’t got the brains Gawd give a garden pea, ’eah? There’s your dress all done up.”
She pointed to it hanging there on the wall. I had forgotten all about it.
“Thanks.” I looked at it and tried to control myself. “It looks great.”
“Glad I could do something. You all right now?”
“Yeah, I’m okay.”
“All right then. Miss Mavis and I gone help you and your daddy. Don’t you worry. You just ask Gawd to send you strength and He will. All right?”
“All right, Miss Angel, I will.”
She paused for a moment, gave me one of her loving half-smiles, and said, “All right.” Then she was gone.
I poured the cold soup down the drain and went into the living room, where there was a growing crowd of our neighbors. I went to Daddy’s side and he smoothed my hair, squeezed my shoulder and proceeded to ignore me. Nobody was acting normal. Miss Mavis and Daddy were talking all around my head, never once asking what I thought, so I wandered away from them. Daddy was in a corner chair, sometimes talking but sometimes with his head in his hands and his elbows dug into his knees. He was listening, nodding, and occasionally standing to shake someone’s hand. I saw that his eyes were all red and swollen, even behind his wire-rimmed glasses. It was very obvious that he had been crying. I had never seen my daddy cry and even now on this night when we should have been able to console each other, he had hidden his tears from me. It broke my heart to think about my daddy crying all alone. My mother had done this to him and to me. Why? What would happen to us now?
People were coming and going. My best friend, Lillian, and her momma came with a bunch of flowers for me. It made me feel worse instead of better. They handed me a bag from Belk’s. I opened it to find a new nightgown and some underpants. They must have known I wasn’t going home that night. They knew more than I did, which made me even angrier.
Everyone who came that night brought something for us—a bouquet of flowers, some Coca-Colas, a pie. I looked at all the things before me and it began to dawn on me that my life was changed forever. My breathing changed to something deep and rushing, as though I were going to hyperventilate. It scared Lillian. She hugged me hard, thinking she could calm me down. I jerked away, gaspi
ng and struggling to get a grip on myself.
“Quit!” I said.
“Come on, honey,” her momma said to her, moving her away from me. “Anna’s had an awful thing happen.” She turned to me, bending down and putting her hands on my shoulders, and said, “Sweetheart, we are so, so sorry for you and your daddy. But don’t you worry. The grown-ups will have this all figured out in no time at all.”
“Thanks,” I said.
At least I thought I had said thanks. I was working as hard as I could to control myself in front of everybody and I was about to lose it.
What Lillian’s mother had said was now the undisputed most stupid thing I had ever heard an adult utter in my whole life. The grown-ups would figure this out? Weren’t the grown-ups the ones who caused this in the first place? Didn’t they always start the trouble?
I might have still been a kid but I wasn’t a daughter of the South for nothing. The Civil War and Civil Rights had been hammered into my brain from the day I was born. War and suffering followed by more war and suffering. Even with all the great minds and hundreds of years, the world still had war and suffering. What adult was going to solve this? I had no mother. And, it was obvious, even to me, that this wasn’t an ordinary death or else the police wouldn’t have taken that man away to jail. My house was probably still crawling with the police. I didn’t know because nobody was telling me anything. I was afraid to ask.
No. This couldn’t be fixed. Was there anyone on this earth who could possibly have the nerve to believe they could make things right for me and for my daddy? As a matter of fact, it seemed that yes, there was. Daddy’s mother, that’s who. Just when I thought they were shutting me out completely, Daddy said, “My mother is coming tomorrow.”
Grandmother Violet, who preferred to be called Grandmother—not Nana, not Grandmomma or Mama or Grandma, but Grandmother—had been called in Estill and given the news. She was coming in the morning. Great, I thought, just when it didn’t seem possible that my situation could get worse.
My grandmother was the most unpleasant woman I ever knew. She found fault with everyone and everything. She had never liked my mother either, calling her a gold-digging nobody whenever she was out of earshot. Adults thought kids didn’t know what was going on, but they did. I heard every single thing she said in our house because she had this unbelievable haunted house voice. When she got upset or laughed too loud, the dogs outside would howl. I’m not kidding either. They did. It wasn’t that I wanted to eavesdrop, it was that the noise she made was near impossible to avoid. Maybe my momma wasn’t from some stuck-up self-made American Dream family like Grandmother’s, but she was a former beauty queen and spoke like a normal person. Besides, if there was any gold around to dig for, I never saw it.
Maybe, just maybe, Momma being dead would be big and horrible enough to make Grandmother be nice. Inside, I doubted it. I really did.
All night long, I heard the grown-ups talking about funeral plans. I was brushing my teeth in the hall bathroom with a new toothbrush that was too big for my mouth. I had decided the best thing for me to do was stay out of the crowd, but the door was ajar and I could hear them.
Our pastor’s wife said our church was going to put together a reception for us. Somebody else was going to make phone calls for Daddy. Daddy’s best friend, another doctor, came in with a brown bag of booze for him and a Barbie for me. He didn’t know what to do for me, he said, but he figured a Barbie might be welcomed by a little girl. Eventually they got around to talking about me and who would take care of me in the afternoons after school.
A voice drifted from the living room, saying, “Well, you could send her to boarding school.”
I couldn’t believe my ears. I was standing there wearing my new nightgown and all at once, ranting and raving gushed out of my mouth like I was the Hoover Dam with a drastic leak. I screamed at all of them.
“Just what’s going on here? What’s going on? Don’t y’all know I’m sick? I threw up tonight! I don’t want to go to boarding school! I have a school and I have to go tomorrow! I didn’t even do my homework!”
They all stopped and stared down at me, realizing the disaster was too much for me to absorb. I would never forget their faces—embarrassed that they had overlooked me that horrible night. And it was all made worse by the fact that they knew I had seen my momma dead, being carried out from my house. Miss Mavis had been right. I had not needed to be a witness to my mother’s body being put in a bag. I wanted all those people gone from the house that minute.
There I stood, barefoot, with my toothbrush dripping and hair shot in every which way, looking up at them, them looking down at me. I was as mad as every demon in all of hell. They were pushing Daddy into all kinds of decisions. I wanted to wait and discuss these things with my daddy by myself, the same way we always had. Then, as though someone said Action!, they all began talking again, to each other and to me.
Honey, as a practical matter, certain things have to be done at once. Plans have to be made, right, Doc? Sweetie, we know you love this island. All the children love this island. Don’t worry. You won’t go off to a boarding school. Oh! Look at you! Of course, you’ve had a terrible, terrible loss! This is too much for her, Doc! She needs to be in bed, Doc. It’s past ten o’clock, Doc.
Daddy moved through the crowd, picking me up.
“Come on, my beautiful string bean,” he said in a weary voice, “Daddy’s gonna tuck in your bony bahunkus and tell you a story. No school tomorrow.”
I let him tell me one of the same old well-worn yarns to make him feel better, but that night I knew I was too old for any more bedtime tuck-ins. I felt tiny and weak but for all the world, I didn’t want him to know it. He rubbed my back and finally said a few things to me that I needed to hear.
“We’ll go home in the morning. I love you, baby, and I don’t want you to worry.”
“I’ll help you, Daddy,” I said. “I’m almost eleven and there’s a lot of stuff I can do. I can cook scrambled eggs, you know.”
I could see him smiling in the dim light of Merilee’s bedroom.
“I know, honey. You’re growing up fast but you’ll always, always, always be my baby. Don’t ever forget that.” He got up and walked to the window.
“Daddy?” He didn’t answer. “Daddy?”
“What, sweetheart?”
He turned to face me. Maybe it was the blue light and shadows of night that cast his face in such a way that he looked completely spent. And old.
“What happened? I mean, how did all this happen?”
“I don’t know.” After a moment or two he said, “I really don’t know. Try to get some sleep, okay?”
He kissed me on my forehead and left the room, without closing the door all the way. If I needed him, I would call him, the same way I had when I was really little and had nightmares. It was always Daddy who came to make my world right. After all, Daddy was a pediatrician and he understood children. Most people, except me, called him Doc. The nickname alone implied that he was the one who could make things better.
But no sleep would come to me that night. And Daddy never came to check on me. I called for him a couple of times, but he never came. Despite the late hour, the front door of Miss Mavis’s house continued to open and close with people offering sympathy and help. While it was really nice of Miss Mavis to let us stay with her, I wished all the loud voices would be quiet. And why wasn’t Daddy at least looking in on me?
Then I heard Officer Jackson, the Chief of Police, say, “I’m sorry, Dr. Lutz. They were in bed. We’re holding the fellow over in Charleston. Apparently he was giving her a controlled substance—amyl nitrite—and her heart just stopped. He’s going to lose his pharmacist’s license and . . .”
They had been in bed? My momma had been in bed with that man! The man drugged her? Even though I was a kid, just a Geechee brat from the Isle of Palms, I knew what that meant my momma was. My momma was a whore. From that moment, and for the rest of my life, I was sure I would des
pise her. I was so ashamed I wanted to die. And, worst of all, where was my daddy to tell me that everything would be all right?
Two
Split Ends
May 2002
BETWEEN the time Momma died in 1975 and now, enough stuff happened to me to make your hair stand
up just like it would if you stuck your tongue in a football stadium light socket. I ain’t lying. I got married, had a baby, got divorced, moved back in with Daddy, went to beauty school, became a stylist, raised my daughter, Emily, and learned so much it makes my head spin like a globe in the hands of a third grade boy.
I pride myself on the fact that I can garden like nobody’s business and, honey chile, I can cook, doing my voodoo on chicken and pork chops in a most excellent and reasonable, down-home fashion. Now, I have no intention of dragging you through every blessed detail of my life. I just want to give you some highlights. Highlights? Get it? Salon humor. God, I just crack myself up sometimes. Sorry. Occupational hazard.
Where were we? Ah, yes. The present situation. Here’s something nobody knows except me and the South Carolina Federal Bank. I have seventy-four thousand eight hundred and eighty-three dollars in my interest-bearing account, not that interest is anything to brag about these days. But, I have no debt. I never thought I’d see the day, but here it is. But there was this monumental problem blocking the path of my beach house spending adventure.
Daddy.
I knew it was time for me to leave because he had been completely driving me out of my cotton-picking mind. But I was afraid to go because, somewhere along the line, I had forgotten to get a life for myself.
Isle of Palms Page 4