Isle of Palms

by Dorothea Benton Frank

  I developed new ways to get her goat. Did you eat the pecan pie I made for your daddy’s supper? You selfish girl! Of course, Frannie, Jim—a new friend—and I had woofed it with a half gallon of two percent milk. Well, that’s just fine! The next time you are wanting something, don’t ask me, young lady! Fine, I don’t need anything from you anyway, I would think.

  I could never win with Grandmother Violet. I had come to accept that some people just didn’t like kids. There wasn’t anything to be done about that. How was it that with all the nice women out there in the world, the two I’d lived with were both so difficult? No matter how hard I tried, my slightest infraction of any of her rules was met with a heavy-handed derision. I’d talk to Lillian about it, but she had a new best friend and all she talked about was her. Eventually, we stopped calling each other. Once I even called Miss Angel, but Miss Mavis said she wasn’t there. I never called back. I don’t know why. I just felt funny about it. I just knew if my grandmother found out I was talking to Miss Angel, she’d be mad as hell.

  As time went on, I got used to her being there, in the same way I guess you got used to a leash if you were a dog. I was in the middle of the eighth grade, I had evolved to the status of an A student with an occasional B—partly from desire and partly from the unending efforts of the stalwart Sisters of Charity. They gave me books to read—Jane Austen, the Brontës—I loved them all and escaped through them to a nicer world. I was never flippant with them because even their most stringent demands paled next to my grandmother’s. In fact, I sort of liked the nuns and was curious about them. And I knew their happy quotas were limited by what one old bat was willing to do to help the other old bat. So sometimes I would even stick around after school and give them a hand. It was better than rushing home.

  I closed classroom windows, helped them load their cars, put away books in the library and cut flowers from the schoolyard for the chapel’s altar. I think they grew to sort of love me and I was glad of it too. My exemplary behavior caused no end of speculation among them as to whether or not I would make a good postulate for the convent. I just let them think it was possible, because why not?

  When parent/teacher conference time came, it was my grandmother who would come on behalf of Daddy. When the nuns told her how wonderful I was she informed them that they were being manipulated by a child. What about her grades, Mrs. Lutz? They’re very good! She’s won every spelling bee for the past two years! How are you knowing she’s not cheating? Come now, she’s a dear girl! You were not knowing her mother.

  You didn’t know her mother. This was her standard reply to anything which muddied her built-in poor opinion of me.

  The good Sisters, renowned tough nuts, were horrified by Granny’s polar chill, which only served to increase their concern for me. Granny’s spew made spandex of the arterial steel that pumped their sanctified blood. They clucked over me like a flock of Rhode Island reds. My friends—Frannie, Jim, Tommy, and Penny at the core—were never jealous of that attention. There was a sense of justice among us and from what they had learned about my domestic tyranny, they all figured I was entitled to something out of life. They would have preferred the streets of Calcutta to Life With Violet. Besides, the last thing they wanted was an old goat with Communion breath hugging on them. That was how it was. And at least I had learned that not all adult women were cold-hearted Nazis.

  As soon as I was old enough to get in a car with somebody’s sibling who had the Holy Grail—a driver’s license—I’d beg to go to the Isle of Palms. It became a joke. You got a boyfriend over there waiting for you in the sand dunes? Sure. Every guy in town was dying to date a bag of bones with glasses and bad skin. What’d you lose over there? The awful truth was that I had lost everything on the Isle of Palms.

  We would jam ourselves into somebody’s mother’s sedan and ride, windows down, radio blaring. In fact, riding around in someone’s car all but completely defined my teenage years, as it was a popular Lowcountry pastime.

  As soon as we would cross Breach Inlet, I’d hang my head out the window like a dog and cure myself with beach air. My friends wanted to cruise Burger King to see who was there. Not me. Just keep me out of Violet’s reach, long enough to allow me a dose of island breeze.

  As the years passed, my single obsession was to go back to the Isle of Palms and make things clear in my mind. I had suppressed too many things for too long. Maybe I thought that if I could begin again on the Isle of Palms, I could wipe away the pain of my childhood and teenage years.

  I finally arrived at the moment to face my past. There we were on moving day, Daddy and I, unloading the truck together. I was sure he was thinking about Momma, the day she had died and how we had left this place. I was thinking about her too. I had many things on my mind.

  I sat down on the truck’s back bumper for a moment. Retracing the events leading up to our move to Mount Pleasant and my return here, I couldn’t help but think of all the years I had worked and saved to make this purchase of poor Mr. Simmons’s house become reality. It was a huge coincidence that my new house was next door to where Miss Mavis and Miss Angel had lived when I was a kid. I wondered if they were still kicking. If they remembered me . . .

  Four

  Miss Mavis Says, There Goes the Neighborhood

  2002

  “ANGEL? Angel? Where are you? Come quick!” She was ignoring me and I knew it. It made me plenty hopping mad when she did that, I can tell you. Whoever on God’s earth named her Angel didn’t know what the hell they were doing too, ’eah? I pay her good money. She should at least have the decency to answer me.

  There I was, just like any other Thursday. I was just going about my business, as I normally do, fixing to get ready to go on and water my African violets. They’re my babies—besides Blanche and Stanley, my kitties.

  I heard the hullabaloo outside and peeked through my living room curtains. Some wiggling tart was moving in that awful little house with a man old enough to be her father. I nearly sucked in my tonsils and had a stroke of paralysis from the sight. If I hadn’t realized that a fall could damage my hand-painted watering can that I created myself in craft class last February, I might have just let myself collapse.

  “Angel? Answer me!” I passed through my living room and dining area and swung open the kitchen door so hard it hit the wall and I did not care one iota. “Well?”

  There she stood right in front of the sink, polishing my copper pots as though the world wasn’t coming to a complete standstill.

  “Well, what?” she said, just as sassy as she could. “Just look at this pot! You can see your pretty self in it clear as day!”

  I poured myself a glass of water, scooting her big old lanky self over a little. “You want to see something, you come with me! Why didn’t you answer me?”

  “’Cause I didn’t hear you. Did you call me?”

  She was lying like I don’t know what. She always did.

  “Just dry your hands and come with me this instant. You know you hate to miss anything.”

  She came behind me muttering about Lincoln freeing her people and Dr. King and all kinds of liberation speeches but her jaw flopped like a crocodile’s when she looked down at the yard next door. There was Exhibit A—young woman in shorts with old goat in long trousers.

  “Um-um,” she said, staring right out the window so the entire planet could see her. “I had a dream last night about flowers blooming all over that house.”

  “What?”

  “I said, Last night I dream that house was covered in flowers! You are so deaf!”

  “I am not! And there’s nothing in that yard except stickers and dollar weed! Move back, you old buzzard, they’re gonna see you!”

  She stopped and turned to me with that look of hers, that laser of ice only Angel can deliver. It gave me the chills.

  “Who you calling old? If I is an old buzzard then you is one too! Tell me, what got you all rattled up? That woman down there ain’t no floozy! She’s a schoolteacher or somet
hing!”

  “And just how do you know that?” I leaned over her shoulder to have another look. There wasn’t a single indication for my money that she was a teacher.

  “Her shoes. She’s wearing them awful Birkenstocks that my granddaughter wears. All her friends too.” Then she narrowed her eyes at the scene below and added, “She’s a little long in the tooth for ’em, too, ’eah?”

  “Humph! Even so! It’s because of women like her that I never remarried.”

  It had always been a particular point of sadness for me that another man never came along for my comfort after my Percy died and went to hell. Angel and I had discussed it many times.

  “Iffin you say so,” she said and went back toward the kitchen.

  Now what was that supposed to mean? I just shook my head and followed her, deciding to ignore her double entendre for the moment.

  “Where are you going?” I said.

  “Gone make our new neighbors a pound cake, that’s what.”

  “What?”

  “I said, I gwine make a cake! Catch more flies with sugar? Where are your manners, Miss Mavis?”

  Now. You may tell me all manner of things and I won’t get upset, but don’t anyone tell me I have lost my manners or I’d send them from here to Kalamazoo! However, when it came to Angel, I just let her run her mouth. We’d been sharing a roof for so long, I had already heard every thought of hers a thousand times anyway.

  When my Percy was alive, he bought me this house thinking it would only be temporary. We had a nice couple living downstairs and we lived upstairs. Both apartments were very acceptable. Our apartment had three bedrooms and two bathrooms and a lovely view of the Atlantic Ocean. The downstairs had two small bedrooms, a living room combination dining room and a tiny kitchen. It was smaller, to make room for our carport and utility room, and it was a little dark, but still could be very cozy in the right hands.

  When our little Thurmond was born, Angel came in to help me. She helped me raise Merilee too. Then when Percy drank himself to death and when the couple downstairs got divorced and moved out, Angel moved in. I imagine she has been here almost a hundred years. Now my Thurmond’s changed his name to Fritz and he’s off in California with his third wife, Karyn with a y, thank you. Merilee is still married to that banker in Atlanta. I never saw either one of them unless I was at death’s door. It’s just Life With Angel, and an orchestrated visit to death’s door every five years.

  All right, I’d admit it. I liked a little drama now and then. Kept my blood sugar down and my spirits up. Still. My new neighbor? I knew her type, all right. Home-wrecking man chasers! Humph!

  It made me sad, it truly did. I picked up my watering can and began to give the babies a drink, watching through the windows, sighing all the while that Blanche walked in between and around my legs. Stanley just laid up there, happy in the front window as though a fish was going to fly through the air and land in his mouth.

  Cats are nasty things, licking everything and then licking you too, but they were company for a single lady like me. If I found a nice man for me but he was allergic to cats, I’d throw them right out the door and they knew it too. As a result of their ESP, they were extremely well behaved.

  I sat down in my pink La-Z-Boy recliner and turned on Oprah. I wondered what she would have to say about this May-December nonsense next door. Maybe I would write her a letter. I must have dozed off because the next thing I remembered was Angel turning down the air conditioner and putting my afghan over my legs. Bless her heart, I thought, and drifted back to sleep. I was dreaming about something . . . what was it? Ah, yes, Anthony Hopkins was asking me to dance. Why, I’d love to . . .

  Five

  Loose Screws

  I CONTINUED to unload the van while Daddy was inside with his toolbox fixing a stubborn sliding door. I could hear him cussing up a blue streak. The thermometer was over ninety and his mood was foul. It was perfectly understandable that he was out of sorts. We had become used to each other, in the same way you sprain an ankle and wonder what you’d do without crutches. We did so many small things for each other and now there would be no one to anticipate his needs. My leaving cut a hole right in the middle of his daily routines and meant that he’d have to clip his own coupons and grocery shop, take in his dry cleaning and pick it up, and all the rest of my share of chores.

  To make it worse, ever since I had announced my move, he had second-guessed every decision I made, leaving me with some serious insecurity over my abilities to handle a house on my own. Perhaps the day would arrive when I would decide to live in a condominium at Wild Dunes, where maintenance crews took care of everything. Until that day arrived, I was determined to have my own yard, my own property, and real land.

  “Who are you going to call if the roof leaks?”

  “You.”

  “Where are you going to go if there’s a hurricane?”

  “You.”

  “Then what’s the point of moving? Wouldn’t you rather travel every year for the same money? See the world? Stay in nice hotels? A mortgage isn’t anything but a rope around your neck!”

  “No, that’s not true, Daddy. This house is an investment. If I spend the money on travel, it’s gone. Poof! I have nothing for my future!”

  “If you traveled, maybe you’d meet a nice man for your future.”

  “That’s a cheap shot, Daddy. I’d rather be responsible for myself than marry somebody for financial security.” This made him mad because that was what he thought my mother had done. “Why don’t you travel? Maybe you’d meet a nice woman.”

  “Don’t tell me what to do, okay? All you feminists! You’re all crazy as hell! You ruined it for the nice girls who just want families!”

  “Sure. The feminists ruined it for the nice girls. That’s what you always say when you know I’m right.”

  “Go ahead! You’re gonna do what you want anyway! You always have!”

  “So do you and I’m your daughter! Where in the hell do you think I learned to be such a mule?”

  The quiet would swallow us until we’d come to the same realization again—that it just wasn’t mentally healthy for either of us to lean on each other like we did. It caused stagnation. Although parents and children we had known forever lived out their days together unless one or the other married—and sometimes you just moved the spouse in and life went on—we knew it wasn’t an optimum situation.

  We had traded those same remarks one hundred times in the past weeks. If it wasn’t travel he suggested, he would bring up furthering my education. He was completely riled over the purchase of my house. I ignored him to the extent it was possible. Despite my nightmares over Daddy’s doubts and general unhappiness and my nerves over my great leap forward, I was still irrepressible.

  He finally came around last night with a new angle to justify my leaving to himself. I was hanging clothes in a wardrobe box when he came into my room.

  “You know, Anna, I’ve been thinking.”

  Was he going to try again to change my mind?

  “Yeah? About what?” I turned and smiled at him, thinking that if he could see my happiness, it would deter the appeal.

  “Well, it’s about your mother. You want a glass of tea?”

  “Sure,” I said and stopped, followed him to the kitchen and stood by the counter as he poured me a glass. “Thanks. What’s bothering you?”

  “Your mother’s parents were closer to my age than I was to her age when I married her, you know.”

  I squeezed a wedge of lemon into my glass and let him continue.

  “I realize now, looking back, that she married me because I offered her a way to get away from living at poverty level.”

  “That’s not the worst thing, Daddy. Her parents were ancient and she was working as a checkout girl at the grocery store. I mean, it wasn’t such a grand life for a beautiful young woman. People marry for a lot of reasons.”

  “Yeah, they do. You want a sandwich?”

  “No, thanks,” I sai
d. “Open the new salami—the other package is past the expiration date.”

  We had a little issue about throwing away food and I knew he would eat anything without fur. I made a mental note to come over and clean out the refrigerator every so often.

  “Right,” he said, and pulled out the cutting board. “People do marry for a lot of reasons and even though you and Jim couldn’t make it last forever, that boy always loved you and Emily.”

  “I think he always will too.”

  “Yeah, but your mother’s motive wasn’t exactly pure. She jumped at the first chance for a respectable life that came along, you know?”

  “Look, Daddy, I love you to death. You know that. I’m tired of pee-peeing on Momma’s grave. I think she was young and stupid. That’s all.”

  “Baby, listen to me. That’s not what I’m saying here. I’m saying that she didn’t give herself the chance to be on her own for a while and then marry. She never gave herself a chance to find out what she wanted. So this is a good thing for you to do, in that way. Just don’t jump at some foolish guy who promises you the world. If it’s not working out, for whatever reason, talk to me, okay?”

  “First of all, I’m not leaving you to find a husband. And, there isn’t a landslide of men around here to date anyway, Daddy. They’re all married or screwed up or losers. And marriage isn’t for everyone, you know. I mean, this is about me living where I have always wanted to live and having a place for Emily and me that’s ours. I’m not exactly the romantic type anyway. And the last thing I’d do is dive into a marriage without considering your opinion and Jim’s and Frannie’s and Emily’s. Right? Come on! You know me better.”

  “I do know you better, but I also remember how easy it was for me to convince myself that Mary Beth really loved me. That’s all.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll keep you posted, okay? Now, finish your sandwich and help me unpack!”