Isle of Palms

by Dorothea Benton Frank

  The neighborhood kids I knew so well barely talked to me and were unusually awkward, not knowing quite what to say. I didn’t know what to say to them either. I had an overwhelming urge to pretend, to run and play and pretend nothing had happened. I couldn’t manage it because I knew it would be wrong. But wasn’t everything wrong? We were all standing around in our church clothes, humidity and heat having its way with shirttails and hair. Sparky Witte finally said, “You okay?” I said, “Yeah, I guess.” That was about it. It seemed to me that they all knew about the circumstances of my mother’s death and what she had been doing. I mean, it was bad enough to lose a parent, but were they supposed to be sympathetic in this case? So everyone acted uncomfortable, except Lillian, who knew I was deeply upset and tried to make me see the world wasn’t coming to an end.

  “That was the worst part, Anna. The funeral, I mean.”

  “No, that wasn’t the worst part. This is awful. Don’t you understand? My whole life has been stolen away from me.”

  “Yeah, but it’s not gone and you’ll be okay. I swear you will. My mom says time heals everything. Man! I’ve never been to a funeral before.”

  “I hope your mom’s right and I hope we don’t have to go to another funeral for a billion years,” I said. I wasn’t so sure about her mom’s wisdom. In addition, who was going to dispense advice to me? My grandmother? “Funerals suck.” My language was deteriorating.

  “You’re right. They sure do.”

  “My grandmother’s staying.”

  “Oh, no! Forever?”

  “Forever.”

  Lillian and I looked at each other and sighed like two old ladies.

  Grandmother Violet was in the kitchen the whole afternoon with Miss Angel and Miss Mavis, trying to record what had come from who and to keep the platters on the table full, so that as much food as possible would disappear.

  Making things disappear and go away seemed like a good idea even to a child of my age. I wanted to disappear too, but I was trapped. All afternoon the adults would stop talking whenever I approached and their intense whispering would immediately become overt condolences. I knew they were talking about Momma and what a big whore she was. I couldn’t have labeled it then, but I saw the pattern of their thinking. Momma was gone because she was bad. If I looked like Momma, that was bad. Something might be wrong with me because I was her child. Something bad would happen to me one day because I was bad.

  I wandered into the kitchen and found Angel. She was slicing a pot roast and wrapping it up in packages to freeze. I stood there for a little while before she noticed me.

  “You okay, sugar?”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  She ran her hand down the side of my face, smiling at me with the most loving and knowing expression I have ever encountered.

  “Grandmother’s staying,” I whispered to her.

  “That’s all right, baby. Let her love you.”

  “She doesn’t love anybody or anything.”

  Angel nodded and then shook her head. “This ain’t right. I said it before and I gwine say it again. This ain’t right.”

  Sometimes, when I would think of Angel, it was as though that moment and her simple gesture of touching my face coincided with my first acceptance of how things were. My life wasn’t over; Momma’s was. Mine had changed in unimaginable ways, but it wasn’t over.

  EVENTUALLY we began to inch along. Life was measured by test grades and a year-end report card—of which I was sternly reminded by old Violet that good grades were my duty and ineligible for reward. I had saved it for dinner, wanting Daddy to see it first. I was starving for some praise.

  “Anna, this is wonderful,” he said. “I’m very proud of you, honey.”

  “Douglas! You must never let Anna think you expect less! Let me see.”

  The way she stuck her raptor claw across the table, it was obvious she expected Daddy to turn it over to her without a word. He did.

  I had made an A in English, History, and Science, a B in Art, and a B- in Math.

  “What’s so wonderful about this? It’s average and believe me, your father knows average to be the same as mediocre. If you want live a life of mediocrity, that’s your business. But it’s nothing for celebration, believe you me. If your father was bringing a report card like this to his father, he would be getting a horse whipping. The whole problem with American childrens is that they don’t know what it takes for surviving. They’re weak.”

  “Maybe we should give up television until you’ve finished your summer reading,” Daddy said. “Your grandmother is right, actually.”

  Silence from me. Silence all around as a small but undeniable smile crossed my grandmother’s face. Another victory for the enemy.

  Between my grandmother’s negative thoughts and the blistering weather, I couldn’t find comfort or peace. That June and July were hot enough to make you swear the world was going to burst into flames, coming to an end. I tried to let my grandmother love me; God knows, I needed some affection. But her meager affection took the shape of worry.

  “You must not swim alone, Anna! It’s dangerous!”

  “Okay, don’t worry. I won’t go without my friends.”

  “How deep will you go? The ocean changes with every tide! Please be careful! Your father couldn’t stand it if anything happened to you!”

  For the first time I became cautious—about the ocean, where I went to play, how high I climbed, how much sun exposure I got—and I called if I would be late. She always knew where I was. These small concessions were the respect I tried to give, and her concerns were the only love she could show. It wasn’t wonderful, but it was tolerable.

  I was extra sweet to an all but unresponsive Daddy and prayed he would cheer up. I wondered if I had lost him too. I became less raucous and Daddy became more distant, probably hoping his mother would fill in the gaps. He was mourning Momma and I understood that but I didn’t like it. I would find him sleeping in the hammock or on the couch. He slept all the time. Dinner conversations were punctuated with periods of silence and deep sighs from Daddy and then from Grandmother. Part of me played their drama but my childish side was hungry for action.

  For the hell of it, I would run through my neighbor’s sprinklers, getting my clothes wet. After all, it was so hot, the dew in the early morning yard would rise like steam. My grandmother would make me stay on the porch until I dried, which suited me fine.

  One day when the temperature climbed over a hundred, Lillian and I fried eggs on the sidewalk, making a mess, not fried eggs, which put us on the receiving end of a lecture about the sins of the wastrel, from you know who. I finally figured out the way to get along with Violet was to just do what she wanted. When she barked an order I moved as fast as I could; otherwise, I tried to avoid her. That was how the new order and a semblance of peace were established. Grandmother Violet was a one-woman police department. Daddy was all but a zombie. I was reasonably well behaved.

  Life was almost acceptable until she announced that she felt very strongly that we should move to Mount Pleasant, which was to say that the decision had already been made. She felt slighted by the neighbors because of my scandalous mother. She didn’t like me running all over creation with so little supervision, even though I had attempted to comply with her demands for information about everything I was doing. She was very upset that my mother had never become a Catholic even though she had agreed to raise me as one and had not even come close to attending any church, except on Christmas and Easter.

  I was lying in bed one night in early August, holding my breath and listening to her dictate our future to my father.

  “I’m telling you, Douglas, I won’t be standing by and watching you raise this child to be a heathen! She’s going to be turning into a wanton I don’t know what unless we are doing something. She needs structure, discipline, a religious tradition, and a chance to leave this dirty, sordid past.”

  “Come on, now. I don’t know if it’s all that bad,” I heard Da
ddy say.

  “Well, fine then. If you don’t feel you need my advice, then . . .”

  “All right, Mother. Whatever you want to do is fine.”

  There was no soul in his voice. In just days, Grandmother Violet had sold our house, moved us to Mount Pleasant, and, by the sixteenth of August, I was a new student, at Christ Our King-Stella Maris School.

  All I wanted to do that first day was to spit. I began, instead, that long infamous road of self-preservation through denial. I became the near-perfect child in the presence of all figures of authority, having learned over the summer by living with Grandmother that it just didn’t pay to be yourself.

  First, I willingly embraced Roman Catholicism. The Sisters of Charity were entranced by the dark and mortal details of my background, which slid from the wagging tongues of every uncharitable housewife East of the Cooper. Maybe I was wrong, but I thought that everyone tried to use our trouble for entertainment.

  Heaven knows, there was nothing the Sisters coveted more dearly than to snatch a compromised child from the clutches of Satan, save her immortal soul, and earn their rightful throne in heaven within proximity of the Blessed Virgin Mary herself. Their work began with a fevered pitch.

  “You look so nice in your new uniform,” Sister Rosaire said to me my first day.

  “Thanks,” I said, feeling like an alien.

  “Anna? The children of Stella Maris say, ‘Thank you, Sister.’ ”

  Desperate to make a good impression, I replied, “Thank you, Sister.”

  In my mind I silently added, Where the hell am I? And, You sure do look weird in that getup. Almost immediately I knew that the goal should be minimal trouble with the Sisters of Propriety. That, coupled with a running internal dialogue, would keep my true spirit safely in hibernation. Someday, I would escape the madness. The only place I could think of that could have been worse than Christ Our King-Stella Maris School would have been a Jesuit military boarding school.

  Being a smart-ass in the environs of Stella Maris wasn’t worth the torrents of hell that rained on the morons who tripped the visceral alarm system of the NUN IN CHARGE (the “NIC”) at any given moment. On my third day, I got a sample of the efficiency and style with which smart-asses were handled.

  “May I have your attention, please?”

  The voice of Sister Whoever crackled through the static of the public address system. We stopped work, placed our pencils in the groove at the top of our desks, and stared at the speaker above the large blackboard as though she could see us right through the dust-encrusted brown linen cover.

  “Everyone please stand.”

  Everyone stood and I fumbled to my feet as well.

  “Proceed quietly and in order to the halls. Do not block the doors of other classrooms. Stand in silence by the walls.”

  My history teacher, Sister Immaculata, took a breath and said in a whisper, “Let’s go, children. Let’s go.” Her arms scooped the air like a conductor directing her orchestra, bringing the symphony to a crescendo. In turn, we hustled our little plaid jumpers out into the hall to bear witness to the actual deliverance of corporal punishment.

  The dumb-ass of the day was Sally Denofrio, who was nicknamed from Salvatore, no doubt the reason for his trouble. In Bubba Territory, if you are stupid enough to name a boy Sally, that child will pave his childhood with bricks of sweaty mortification, bloody noses, and the paddle of the NIC—in this case, Sister Gonna Show You Where the Bear Went in the Buckwheat—a.k.a. Sister St. Pious.

  Sally Denofrio, a transfer student from Albany, New York (Yankee—making him all the more hopelessly clueless about what was acceptable), stood trembling in the center of our cross-shaped hallways while a fifteen-year-old eighth grade boy—massive jock, not brain, bound for Clemson’s football team—brought out Sister St. Pious’s heavy wooden chair and placed it at a particular vantage point for the reluctant audience.

  The late August air was thick with the odor of perspiration and the egg salad breath of one hundred and fifty-seven uniformed sympathizers. We waited, anxious for it to start and end. I knew at this point that a) I was about to see something I had heard about and never believed to be true and b) No one would have ratted on Sally except Theodore McGee, the school’s aspiring cleric, who was widely ostracized because he was a suck-up of long-standing repute. I had heard about Theodore McGee the minute I enrolled.

  “I saw old Pious take McGee in her office and close the door,” Frannie said on my first day.

  We were sharing brown bag lunches with Penny Wilkins and some boy named Tommy Proctor under the persimmon trees in the schoolyard. A cool breeze saved us from the sweltering heat, but the news was so interesting I didn’t care about the weather. I had already heard from my new friend, Frannie Gianaris, that Sally had emptied all the soap in the boys’ bathroom and stuffed the toilets with paper towels, causing a flood.

  “Who’s Theodore McGee?” I said, dying to know everything.

  “He’s a huge hairy asshole,” Tommy said.

  “Euuuuuuuu!” we girls said in unison.

  “Tommy!” Penny said, horrified. “Anna’s gonna think we’re just like public school kids! He’s the skinny little nasty geek with the big glasses, a runny nose, and he wears elastic-back pants.”

  I had, indeed, spied the traitor earlier that morning. But before I could defend my prior life in public school, Frannie jumped in.

  “I don’t know about the hair on the butt of Theodore McGee, but he’d sell his mother to get any one of us in trouble. Everyone hates his guts. He is an asshole. Tommy is right.”

  Asshole was a useful and popular pejorative in the vocabulary of my new friends at Christ Our King-Stella Maris School. I, being the perfect child, had never uttered it aloud on school property; I merely thought it. But by not chastising them for saying it, I was on the road to becoming a benign confidante.

  In any case, at two-thirty that afternoon, right before dismissal, we lined up for the public paddling of Sally Denofrio. Sister St. Pious appeared from the bowels of her office, paddle in hand and spoke to Sally to be sure he understood why he was the object of this assembly and punishment.

  “Salvatore? Do you understand that destroying public property is a crime and a sin?”

  “Yes, Sister. I’m so sorry. I don’t know what made me do it.” He was crying and frightened.

  “Perhaps the paddle will help you remember not to do it again. Lean over my lap.”

  When he failed to do so in the time she deemed appropriate, she grabbed him by the arm. I felt like I was going to barf. Whack! I opened my eyes to see if Sally was alive. Whack!

  “Jesus Christ! You’re killing me!” Sally screamed.

  We all bit our lips and then Frannie whispered to me, “Think he’s stupid? He’s breaking the Commandments in the middle of a whipping!”

  “You take the Lord’s name in vain?” Sister St. Pious said. She was incredulous. Sally scrambled away from her and ran out of the door and down the street toward Highway 17, where he lived. He was screaming at the top of his lungs.

  “Police! Help! Police!”

  Sister St. Pious did not flinch despite the echoing lament of Salvatore Denofrio. She rose from her chair and looked up and down our lines to see if anyone had giggled.

  “I’m calling the Bishop,” she said and turned, her jaw squared to the front door. Then, she gave us the once over again with her sparrow eyes and then said, “Go back to your classrooms and get your things. School is dismissed.”

  That was my orientation to Catholic school education. Sally Denofrio was expelled and transferred to public school. I knew right then that it was best to buy into the politics of the ruling class and double-bolt my big mouth.

  I refused to let anyone taunt me. I heard how your momma died, Anna. That came from the intermural basketball team’s head cheerleader. Yeah, my dad and I would appreciate your prayers, I said. Shoot, I could play this game, I thought.

  But sometimes, I got caught off guard in the
girls’ bathroom.

  “My momma said your daddy is screwing his nurse,” Denise McAffrey said to me while we washed our hands in the same sink.

  I was stunned, believing for the moment that she knew something I didn’t. Then a stall door opened and out came Frannie.

  “Go to hell, zit face, and leave Anna alone. Your momma doesn’t know shit.”

  Frannie was very helpful in my adjustment period.

  When spring came, I made May altars in my room at home to honor the Blessed Mother and prayed the rosary on my knees at night with my grandmother’s supervision.

  “Now ask God for your special intention,” Grandmother Violet would say.

  Please make my grandmother drop dead, God. God, if you love me at all, please, if you won’t kill her at least send her back to Estill.

  I said enough rosaries and novenas that first year to liberate the entire citizenry of Purgatory, Limbo, and the outer fringes of Hell’s gates. But not to rid my life of my grandmother.

  God was either busy with another call or not interested in my problems. He was probably trying to unravel a bigger disaster than mine.

  Then there was still the problem of Daddy. As if having a wife who died in the arms of another man wasn’t enough to reconcile, my daddy was still emotionally detached. I knew we would never be the same again. All the while, Grandmother blustered about every single thing.

  Did you make your bed, Anna? No television if your room isn’t clean, Anna. Did you clean bathroom? That means toilet too! Did you rake up the yard? Do you think I am this family’s slave? Before God, you are looking more like Mary Beth every day!