Isle of Palms

by Dorothea Benton Frank

“I know just how you feel,” I heard Lucy say with a certain longing in her voice.

  “Now, now, ladies, I am sure y’all are appreciated much more than you know.”

  Checking the pot, all I could think was that the last thing Daddy would want would be for Lucy to stop giving. The water was rolling so I put the shrimp in and removed it from the burner, covering it, letting them cook on retained heat.

  I turned to Jim. “So?”

  “She’s a piece of work, Anna. I told her that I thought she was very rude and that she should apologize to you.”

  “And?”

  “She said that she didn’t need your shit, that she could’ve stayed in D.C. for the summer and lived with Frannie, who apparently is the one who helped her shop for her funereal wardrobe.”

  “Nice. Thanks, Frannie. And?”

  “I told her if she wanted to look like that, it was her business, but that nobody in San Francisco had dressed like that in years. I said, ‘So, look, honey, the whole goth thing is so passé and finito.’ That pissed her off in paisley. She said, What did I know? I told her I knew plenty and if she wanted to spend the summer fighting with everyone, fine. But, I thought she was so capable of making a better effort than to barge in here and start finding fault with everything.”

  “So?”

  “She’ll be out in a few minutes. I told her to put on something lighter. Hell! It’s hotter than two rats having sex in a wool sock! Rubber pants in June? Uck! What a sweaty misery!” Jim took a paper towel and wiped perspiration from his forehead. “This parenting thing is not exactly easy.”

  “It sure isn’t. Thanks, Jim. Rats in a wool sock?”

  “Yeah! Hey! Anytime! I’ll pour everyone some more wine, okay?” He took a bottle and a corkscrew to the living room, where everyone was talking as though life was perfect and no monster was locked in the bedroom. “Decent wine makes high-voltage drama so much easier to bear.”

  “I imagine it does,” I said.

  “We need some music!” I heard Lucy say.

  A minute or so later, I heard the Sunday Brunch CD I bought at Williams-Sonoma on King Street. Was I old or what? I’d arrived at the point in my life where I bought my music at Williams-Sonoma. Worse, I liked it.

  I drained the shrimp and arranged them on my largest platter with a bowl of cocktail sauce and lemon wedges.

  “Let’s eat,” I said.

  “What about Emily?” Daddy said.

  “I’m coming!” she called from her room.

  Honestly? The house was so small and the walls were so thin that you could probably hear someone change their mind.

  We gathered around my table, which just seated a tight six.

  “This looks absolutely da-vine!” Trixie said, adding, “Oh! Should Ah bring my glass?”

  No, the waiter will.

  “Please, yes,” I said. “Y’all just sit anywhere.”

  Daddy took the head of the table near the back wall. Lucy sat on his left and Trixie on his right. Jim sat to my left and we saved the seat on my right for Emily. I was about to propose a toast when she appeared. Thank God, she had on long drawstring pants and a long-sleeve dark cotton shirt. Her tattoos weren’t showing and her hair had been brushed up into a ponytail. It was still black, but at least it wasn’t hanging in stringy hostility.

  “Come sit, sweetheart,” I said.

  I wasn’t optimistic about that meal at all.

  “Hi, everybody,” she said.

  There was little to no enthusiasm in her voice.

  “What on God’s earth has happened to your hair?”

  “It’s a rinse, Granny. Don’t stress yourself.”

  Trixie bristled and shot me a look of outrage.

  Lucy introduced herself to Emily and Emily gave a slightly snide response: “Whoa!” It was more like she had said, Oh, great. Mom’s new friend is a stripper.

  “Emily? Please don’t address Trixie as Granny and don’t tell her how to handle her shock at your hair. It is black, after all.”

  “Fine. Sorry, Gram. I just get, like, really sick of people telling me what I’m supposed to look like. I mean, my hair is my business, isn’t it?”

  “Ah suppose,” Trixie said. “But your blond hair was so attractive. Ask your mother. People spend good money to be blond.”

  “Thank God,” I said. I was determined to get the show on the road and not spend the day speculating with Trixie on what had become of Emily’s appearance and personality. “Anyway, I want to propose a little toast. I want to thank Daddy for all his help in helping me move. And Lucy for her generous help in my new business. . . .”

  “Whut?” Trixie said.

  “She’s opening her own salon on Monday!” Lucy blurted. “Isn’t that wonderful?”

  “And I want to thank Jim for being just about the best friend in the entire world and doing more for me than I could even think of to ask for myself. . . .”

  “Aw, shucks,” Jim said.

  “Your own salon?” Trixie said. “How on earth—Ah mean, where did you find . . . ?”

  Lucy pulled a business card from her pocket and handed it to Trixie for inspection. “I made them on my laptop.”

  “Clever,” Emily said in a flat voice and reached across the table for the basket of cornbread in front of Daddy.

  It was unfortunate in the extreme that the shirtsleeve of her reaching arm receded enough to reveal an intricate design on her wrist that resembled some of the more complicated wrought-iron gates in the historic parts of Charleston. Daddy gasped, Trixie screamed, and I jumped up from the table.

  “All right,” I said, completely unsure of what I would say next until I looked at Emily’s face.

  Emily was smirking. If there was one thing I despised it was to see my only daughter smirk. Don’t smirk at me, the mirror, or another person. No smirking allowed. Did she think she had won some contest to horrify her family?

  “Emily! Come with me!”

  “Whaaat?” she said. She didn’t budge. She made that noise that sounds like twick and rolled her eyes.

  Everyone stopped eating and all eyes were on Emily as they waited for her to get up out of her chair. Finally, she put down her napkin, left the table, and followed me to the backyard. I stopped by the shed and turned to face her. She stopped, crossed her arms, and tilted her head to one side.

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  “Nothing!”

  “Emily. Let me tell you something. I am prepared to be reasonable. You are not reasonable. I understand you’re coming from dormitory life, where you have a lot of freedom. Our home is not a dormitory. I know our house is little and I can see now why you don’t like your sheets. You have changed.”

  All the while I spoke to her she looked out past Miss Mavis’s house toward the beach, realizing how close it was. She couldn’t help but soften a little. “Yes, I have. I’m practically an adult. I’ve been living on my own now for a year and I do what I want.”

  “Oh? Are you paying all your bills?”

  Her head spun around like a demon from a movie about possession.

  “Noooo! You know I’m not!”

  “Lower your voice!” I lowered my voice as well. I had a fleeting vision of the Snoop Sisters and all my company with their ears plastered against the windows trying to listen. “If you’re not paying your bills, you ain’t on your own. That’s just one small part of being an adult. The rest is basically how you conduct yourself.”

  “Can I go now?”

  “No, you may not! You cannot go until you tell me what is the matter with you! Why are you so angry?”

  “I’m not angry!”

  “Okay. I’m going to attribute your pissy attitude to being tired from your trip. I’m tired too. I went out last night and probably partied too much.” My head was pounding again.

  “You went out? You partied?”

  “Yeah,” I said and noted the expression of disbelief on her face. “I went out and partied, well, had dinner actually, with Jim and
saw this guy I had met before and I actually have a sort of date tomorrow.”

  “Holy shit! That’s great! I just get home from school and you’re not even gonna be here! Why did I even come home?”

  “What?” What did she mean by that?

  “I mean, I could’ve stayed in Washington. I could’ve, like, worked at the Gap. I could have lived with Frannie and had a very excellent summer. But, no! I start thinking about you and that you’re probably lonely and that you probably totally need me. I get here, the house is crawling with all these people, you’ve got your plans. Know what? I should have kept mine!”

  Suddenly I was struck by the fact that she thought I was all shriveled up like a crone and that I had no life. Was she saying that she was cutting me some slack by coming home at all for the summer? Well, we’ll have none of this, I thought.

  “Emily? From time to time you need to show up for inspection. You are not an adult yet. It is still my job to see that you haven’t become a drug addict or an alcoholic and that your general health is good. And to discuss your course of study. What do I see? My beautiful daughter has gone to hell in a handbasket and looks like something from Pit and the Pendulum. You’ve got godawful dyed-black hair, and don’t forget I am qualified to judge this.”

  “I like it.”

  “I don’t! You’ve got four holes in each ear, one in your eyebrow, and God knows how many in other places. I don’t much like that at all, but I do care about these tattoos. They creep me out, like you’re fond to say. And what are you going to do about them when you’re fifty? Don’t you think tattooed women at fifty are pretty disgusting?”

  “Henna.”

  “What?”

  “They’re henna paintings. They wear off in a couple of weeks. Everyone does it.”

  “Everyone at Gram’s yacht club does not have henna tattoos; I can just about guarantee it.”

  “Yeah, well, they’re all near death anyway. Boor-ing!”

  I agreed with her about that but wasn’t about to admit it. The yacht club was famous for its old codgers and its unwritten rule book. The members had so many rules about who could join and what to wear and who could eat in what dining room on what days—shoot, even if I had Donald Trump and Bill Gates’s money combined, and I owned a huge boat, I wouldn’t want to be bothered with all that nonsense. I had always believed that usually people formed private clubs to keep others out. Sometimes, that wasn’t true. At that moment, I didn’t really care about the yacht club. I was thinking about her dissatisfaction in a general way.

  “Do you really hate the house?”

  “It’s dinky, Mom, but I guess it’s okay. It’s just that my room looks like it’s for some little twit. I mean, look, I’m sorry, okay? I was just so pent up about coming back to a place I’d never seen and it was supposed to all of a sudden be home and I just didn’t know. I just didn’t know.”

  “If it would be?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We can repaint your room.”

  “Okay.”

  “I mean, one of the reasons I bought this house was so that we could paint a room purple if we wanted to.”

  “A small feature.”

  “Puce. Paint your room puce for all I care.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, puce and purple. Have a ball. And do you know that now we can walk around in our underwear? Think about it. Do you know I’ve never done that? I’ve been fully dressed for over thirty years!”

  “Thirty-seven and counting. We run around half naked in the dorm all the time!”

  I could smell peace sneaking up behind us. We stood there in the warm afternoon air, the stingy breeze, and wound up talking and temporarily putting our anger aside. At least we had a starting place.

  “Look, Emily, I did my best. And, we gotta live together. Just be nice, okay?”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “Someday, when my ship rolls in, I’m gonna add on to the house. Another bedroom and a big bathroom and a study upstairs with porches all around, upstairs and downstairs too. Maybe a deck. I don’t know. I’m dreaming, I guess.”

  Emily stared at the house, looking long and hard, trying to see the possibilities that I saw. She sort of smiled and turned to me. “It could work.”

  “Let’s go back inside and make nice, okay?”

  “Okay, I guess. Jeez, Mom, Gram is a such a phony, isn’t she?”

  “Honey, she’s a nice lady, really. I mean, she’s a little stiff, but she means well.”

  “I’ll never be like her.”

  “Me either,” I said and looped my arm around Emily’s shoulder. We walked back inside together.

  It was pretty obvious by their all-at-once chatter that they had been talking about Emily and how I would handle her smart-ass mouth. I gave them nothing, which was probably a disappointment to them. I just sat down and so did Emily and we started peeling shrimp.

  “You girls okay now?” Daddy said.

  “Yeah, we’re fine,” I said. “What did we miss?”

  What we had missed was Trixie’s sermon.

  “Well! For one thing, Ah cannot believe that you weren’t out here to greet us! So rude! And, the way you look, Emily! It’s . . . it’s horrible! You simply must do something! You cannot parade yourself around Charleston like this! And those tattoos . . . forgive me for saying so, dear, are without any taste or class!”

  Emily lost it. She slammed her fist on the table and looked at Trixie and said, “Why can’t you just keep your opinions to yourself ? Why is that such a problem for you?”

  Needless to say, everyone became silent.

  “I’m sorry, Gram, but it’s true,” Emily said in a strangely quiet voice.

  More silence. Jim didn’t tell Emily to apologize. Neither did Daddy or I. Lucy was still processing what had happened. Trixie, flushed and angry, blustered and then gained control of herself. She quietly put her napkin on the table and rose.

  “Thank you for lunch, Anna. It was nice to see you again. Douglas? Lucy? Nice to see y’all too.”

  No one moved. Jim left the table to see his mother to her car. Emily sank into her chair. Daddy, Lucy, and I picked at a few more shrimp in an uncomfortable silence.

  Jim and Trixie were outside for a few minutes longer than I thought Jim should have to suffer alone. I went outside to join them.

  “She’s a daggum witch,” Lucy said, whispering. “Go save Jim.”

  “Good luck,” Daddy said.

  Trixie had finally shown her obnoxious self as I knew her to be, and everyone else agreed with that. Trixie was in the driver’s seat of her new convertible Jaguar. She was crying and Jim was standing back with his arms folded, shaking his head and talking to her.

  “Mother? You just don’t come into Anna’s house and call her daughter low rent! Why is that so hard for you to see? Emily is merely doing this to make some statement about her independence.”

  “Henna,” I said to them.

  What? What?

  “The tattoos are henna paint and they wear off in a couple of weeks.”

  “But her hair?” Trixie said. “And the way she spoke to me? In all mah life . . .”

  “Trixie? You blasted her hard and then expected her not to defend herself. That’s really not fair, you know.”

  Trixie started her engine and looked at me.

  “You have gone too far, Anna.”

  “Whatever you say, Trixie.” I said in the most unemotional voice I could find.

  “And don’t expect mah support of your salon either!”

  “I don’t expect anything, Trixie. See you later.”

  I turned around and went back toward my house. Surprisingly, I felt pretty good about what had happened and knew it was proof of why I was right to buy my own damn house. Distance.

  Eighteen

  Rare and Well Done

  “SO am I grounded for the rest of my life? Because if I am, it’s not fair!”

  Jim and I looked at each other. I thought she would have been p
acking to run away from home but she was in the midst of helping Daddy and Lucy clear the table. Actually, she was holding a stack of dirty plates and standing by the door waiting for us to come back inside. And, given the moment, she was properly terrified. Daddy and Lucy were in the kitchen. If I knew anything about my father it was that he was already up to his elbows in suds and listening to every word.

  “Not at all,” Jim said, “that is, if I still have any influence around here. Mother can be intolerable and it is understandable for you to be upset by what she said.”

  “On the other hand, I can see it’s past time for you to have a brush up in Grace and Poise. Let’s start with Rule One in dealing with our elders.”

  “Come on, Mom. Is this serious?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mom!”

  “Listen to your mother,” Jim said.

  “Rule One: When older women have already proven themselves to be wicked old biddies, we do not attack them. It is unnecessary, as no one with half a brain listens to them anyway.”

  “Look, I know that’s true, all right? But it’s such bull!” She took a deep breath. “Okay. I know you’re totally and completely correct, but I get so mad!”

  “Verbally attacking old biddies is pretty rude,” Jim said. “Your mom’s right.”

  “I just don’t understand how you can sit there and let her say whatever she wants and you just take it. This whole world is just taking whatever is flung at it!”

  “You’ll understand when you’re an adult,” I said. “Knowing which battles to fight is part of maturity.”

  “No! Okay! Maybe this is from living in D.C. on red alert! I know that, but at that moment, I just lost it!”

  “Yeah, we all lose it, but you know you’re going to have to apologize, Emily. You just can’t treat Trixie like that. She’s been pretty good to you all your life. Right?”

  “Okay. Fine. Shit. Fine.”

  “Now.”

  “Can’t I do it tomorrow? I’m pretty beat and I don’t feel like going through it again.”

  “Call my mother now, Emily, before she gets home and leave a message on her machine.” Jim smiled at Emily and me. “God, am I smart or what?”

  “A certifiable genius, baby boy. Come on, let’s get that kitchen.”