Southern Lady Code

by Helen Ellis

  Mama laughs. “Oh, Helen Michelle, there was a lot of pee-pee on our porch!”

  Papa’s side of the family does not have ghosts. Or, as he’s said, “They aren’t something we spoke about.”

  Like other families don’t admit to Darwin’s theory of evolution or diabetes.

  But Papa has never contradicted Mama. On any parenting choice. He supported her decision to raise my sister and me as tomboy artistic feminist hoots. And he let us be raised to believe in ghosts.

  Elizabeth and I grew up in a haunted house. In an otherwise happy home—where Alabama football was on the TV in the den and Little Debbie snack cakes were overstocked in the kitchen cupboards—there were two rooms that frightened us.

  Elizabeth says, “The living room was pure evil.”

  I say, “I still get the creeps when I see eighties pastels.”

  The living room was to the right of the front door. It had the good couch. It had my father’s four-piece stereo set. It’s where the Christmas tree went. It was the one room in the house that the neighbors could see free and clear from the street. And my parents were proud of it. So every morning, they opened the four sets of shutters. And every night, it was my sister’s or my job to shut them on the way up the stairs to our bedrooms.

  But by then it was dark. And the living room was even darker. And on the other side of the windows were things waiting to get in. Some people have outside cats, we had outside ghosts.

  Both my sister and I—for our entire adolescence and without discussing it with each other—shut the shutters with our eyes shut. Five steps in, knees on the couch, hands on the shutters. Shut, shut, shut, and shut. Get out. Once you see a face in a window, you don’t want to see it again.

  Directly above the living room was my sister’s room. She had three closets, and inside one of them was a tiny door. The tiny door looked like it had been cut out of the sheetrock with a chainsaw. Instead of a knob, it had a turn latch hammered in with a nail. The tiny door led to an attic. And something existed inside of that attic. When we heard it go bump in broad daylight, not once did we ever think possum or squirrel.

  On my sister’s twelfth birthday, it came out of the closet.

  She was having a sleepover and telling ghost stories. Her friends were on her bed, and Elizabeth was across the room in a rocking chair next to the closet with the tiny door. I don’t remember the ghost story, but the refrain is: Oh Mama, oh Mama, don’t care for me. Chop my head off, chop my head off! And as soon as Elizabeth said those words, she was whacked in the neck.

  No, nobody saw what hit her, but there are six living witnesses who saw my sister flinch, clutch her throat, and scream. And then everyone saw that the closet door and the tiny door were open. They had opened all by themselves.

  The girls ran down the stairs to our parents, hollering, “There’s a ghost in Elizabeth’s room!” Papa—once again, never one to ask questions—flew up the steps and found no one in my sister’s room. He checked the attic and found no one. He let the slumber party sleep in the den.

  My parents never followed up with a trip to a child psychologist or antianxiety medication. Elizabeth was not crying out for help or having some sort of episode. There was a ghost in her room.

  And she, like me as a baby, had to live with it.

  My family’s attitude toward ghosts is the same that we have toward hornets’ nests and noisy hotel neighbors: don’t bother them and they won’t bother you in a worse way than they are already bothering you. Ghosts are real. It’s the South. Our homes are built on battlegrounds and centuries-old horrors. Everybody’s house has some dead relative knocking around or rearranging the furniture. Got a ghost stomping across the hardwood floors and waking you up every night? Install wall-to-wall carpeting. You don’t move, you make do.

  * * *

  ————

  Megan, Dani, and I were two hours into our spooky owl puzzle and working on forest leaves. Half the puzzle was forest leaves—all orange or burnt orange—so we were laying out pieces according to shape. One knob and three holes, two knobs and two holes, four holes—you get the idea: this was the hard part. But puzzling women are patient. We’ll take the time to make sense out of something that’s broken.

  Megan said, “So, if you saw a ghost in this apartment, you’d ignore it?”

  I stared over Megan’s shoulder and whispered, “I’m ignoring one right now.”

  Dani looked up.

  “Just kidding!” I said. “But seriously, there are a lot of ghosts in the building. It’s a hundred years old. People die. There’ve been four suicides I know about: gunshot, bathtub, and two jumped out the windows. All the doormen have seen ghosts. And there’s a haunted baby carriage in the basement.”

  “Of course there is,” said Dani.

  I said, “It’s straight out of Rosemary’s Baby. It moves between storage bins when nobody’s watching. One day it’s by the laundry machines, the next day it’s by the boiler. The super doesn’t know who it belongs to, but refuses to throw it out. My husband says there was a ghost right here where we puzzle.”

  “What do you mean right here where we puzzle?” asked Dani.

  “I mean, like, right here. There’s always been a dining table in this spot, and before my husband was born, his brother Kip saw a woman in a ball gown standing next to it. She was blond and wore her hair up. She wore jewelry and opera gloves. Kip called her the Moon Lady.”

  “Did your husband ever see her?” asked Megan.

  “No.”

  “But he believes she was here?”

  “Of course he does,” said Dani.

  I hated to admit it: “No, he doesn’t.”

  * * *

  ————

  My sister went so far as to make her California husband swear to believe in ghosts in their wedding vows: Stefan, do you promise to love Elizabeth for who she is now and who she will become, to encourage her Southernness and to hold her hand, especially when things are scary? Do you promise to live in a big old house with cats and dogs and kids and secret passageways and to have a wraparound porch where you can sit and watch the thunderstorms? Do you promise to say “okay” and move out without question if she tells you the house is haunted?

  He did.

  When their daughter, Katy Belle (who was named after Great-aunt Belle), spoke to the People in the Fireplace at four years old, and then at six woke to see a man drink a grape soda in her bedroom, and then at seven asked my sister if ghosts are real and Elizabeth said, “Oh, yes, we are a family that likes ghosts!” Stefan didn’t contradict her. He is helping to raise a funny intelligent feminist glamazon.

  What I didn’t tell Megan and Dani is: I have seen a ghost in our apartment.

  The last ghost I saw was my husband’s brother, Kip.

  Kip died of a brain aneurism at twenty-nine. More than twenty years ago, I woke to find him sitting between us in bed. Kip was in Converse sneakers, 501 jeans, and a T-shirt. He was just sitting there. Looking straight ahead, with a hand on my husband and me.

  When I eventually told my husband that I had seen his brother, he didn’t ask questions. We haven’t moved. And he’s never asked if I’ve seen Kip again. He accepts my story. I think he likes that I believe. Like he likes that I do puzzles. While my husband doesn’t want to do either—see ghosts or work a jigsaw—he appreciates that I include him in both odd parts of my life.

  But for now, my ghosts are gone.

  And my one rule of puzzle night is: after my friends and I put together five hundred to one thousand parts of a picture, my husband gets to put in the last piece. My friends don’t object. Puzzling women are generous. We want everyone to share in our experiences.

  PARTY FOUL

  In 1983, my parents threw a Halloween birthday party for me and thirty other eighth graders in a one-room round house in the middle of a
park. The house was one story, one room, walled off, with no windows. It had a glass-door entrance and—as well as I or anyone else can remember—no back exit. Was it a safety hazard? Well, of course it was, but that was part of the fun. If a candle fell off my cake, we would go up like a trash can fire. It was dark outside, everyone’s parents had dropped them off, and the nearest civilization was a Taco Casa drive-thru miles and miles away.

  For costumes my friend Vicki and I dressed up as punk rockers, which to us meant side ponies and T-shirts with safety pins in the necks. My friend Liz came as the Grim Reaper in a black hooded robe with a four-foot-long sickle she’d crafted from Reynolds Wrap. My friend Ellen greased her short black hair and came as Ralph “Let’s do it for Johnny!” Macchio from The Outsiders. My friend Laura came as Trixie, a “lady of the night,” which meant she wore a feather boa. But none of the boys paid us any attention because of what the one early-developed girl wore.

  “Early-developed” is Southern Lady Code for brace face and B cups. This girl wore a flesh-colored leotard and wrapped a nine-foot-long stuffed carnival snake around her body like a roller-coaster tattoo.

  “Her mother escorted her in, carrying the tail,” Mama remembers. “And what could we say? We were in the Bible Belt after all, why wouldn’t she come as Eve?”

  My parents had threatened to dress up as Tweedledee and Tweedledum, topped off with propeller beanies. They’d thought this would be hilarious. I’d thought it would be mortifying. So they wore jeans, as did a twenty-three-year-old female classmate of Mama’s. Mama was in her forties but had just entered law school. Nothing embarrassed her.

  One of Mama’s parenting mantras was: “Oh, Helen Michelle, I have yet to begin to embarrass you.”

  I have no memory of what we did for the first half of my birthday party. I remember eating pizza at cafeteria-style tables with the stools attached when Papa turned off the lights.

  He rolled out a cart with a TV the size of a convection oven. The electrical cord dangled off the back, the prongs barely scraping the floor. So, the TV went where the wall outlet was. One group of kids collectively stood and scooted their table closer for a better view.

  Papa slipped a tape into the VCR and announced that we’d be watching a scary movie. “Cat People starring Nastassja Kinksi,” he said as if the Tuscaloosa Blockbuster rivaled Cannes in the South of France.

  I have no memory of how far we made it into that movie. I couldn’t tell you who else was in it or if any of them actually turned into cats. All I remember is that the movie was black and white, and at some point my friend Laurie, dressed like Coco from Fame in legwarmers and a ballet skirt, reached over to the TV knob and switched it off.

  Something was happening to our left, just inside the round house by the glass door.

  A man was yelling at Mama’s classmate. He was a stranger. He was bearded. He held a wallet. It was not his wallet. It was another man’s wallet. He shouted that he’d found the wallet, another man’s wallet, under their bed. So, this man was married to Mama’s friend and she had cheated on him.

  And he was furious.

  How furious?

  He shouted, “If I can’t have you, nobody can!”

  And then he pulled out a gun.

  It was a handgun, which he didn’t hold over his head like a warning. He pointed that gun straight at his wife, who backed toward Mama.

  She said, “No, no. Please. No, please, no no no, don’t do it.”

  Mama, I will never forget, looked the gunman straight in the face, put her hands on her hips, and said, “You are ruining my daughter’s party!”

  Talk about rude. Threatening to murder your wife in public was a far worse social offense than dropping an unwrapped Baby Ruth bar into a punch bowl.

  “I’m gonna kill you!” the man roared at his wife. “I’m gonna kill you!”

  But none of us Alabama eighth graders ran.

  We melted off our stools and slid under the tables. A few years later in high school a kid would pull a gun at lunch and we would again melt under the same kind of tables in exactly the same way.

  Laurie remembers being the last one standing at my party. She emailed me recently, “I was staring at the dude with the gun and watching the whole thing, wondering what happened to him that he got to this point? Like from a thirteen-year-old’s perspective, so basically: WHY ARE YOU SO MESSED UP? And then I also remember someone tugging on me to get DOWN. Was it you, Helen?”

  It was me. Because cower is what you did when you saw a man with a weapon.

  Every man we knew carried a weapon.

  Our principals patrolled the halls with wooden paddles. Some drilled holes in the inch-thick wood in shop class so the paddles whistled when they swung. One vice principal never sat because he kept a yardstick down the inside back leg of his pants. We’d all been threatened or spanked at school or hit at home with a switch or a belt.

  And everyone’s parents had guns.

  To this day, there’s a semiautomatic, double-stack 9mm Beretta in Papa’s nightstand and .380 Sig Sauer in his car. Not to mention the revolvers and pistols he purchased or inherited from his father that he will pass on to my sister and me. What I will do with them when I get them I do not know. “It’s an heirloom” is Southern Lady Code for cold steel and ammunition.

  Papa raised us with the knowledge: “If you find a gun, it’s loaded.”

  Guns are not toys. You don’t play with guns. If you point a gun at someone, you’ve already fired it. If someone pulls a gun on you, you don’t turn your back and run and make yourself a target.

  Kids were crying under the tables.

  Laurie says, “I remember somebody really crying. Like hard, hard, hard.”

  Me, I remember doing the math: A gun has six bullets, there are thirty-three of us. I remember my judgment: if Mama’s friend wasn’t such a slut, this wouldn’t be happening. And I remember looking to Papa: How are you going to save us?

  Laura remembers, “The guy pointed the gun at your dad.”

  And Papa said, “Let’s take it outside.”

  He opened the glass door and the man followed him out.

  Only Mama and the young woman were at a vantage point to see through the glass door. The rest of us crouched in darkness.

  And then there was quiet.

  And then there were gunshots.

  And then Mama screamed. She pointed at what she saw through the glass door and screamed so loud and so long that I swear, decades later, my ears are still ringing.

  And I thought: My father is dead.

  And then, there he was: Papa bounding into the round house with the gunman. The gunman was smiling. His wife and my parents were smiling. Papa said, “Okay, listen up, kids! We’re gonna break you into teams of five and see who can remember the most about what just happened!”

  Mama passed out legal pads and pens.

  It had all been a joke. Papa had hired two actors from the University of Alabama for twenty-five dollars apiece and staged the whole thing.

  And now we kids were crawling out from under the tables, wiping our faces, and scribbling furiously.

  Laura remembers, “It was a game to test our observation skills. We were supposed to see how good we would be as a ‘witness’ if it had been an actual crime. One boy on my team acted like he knew it was a game all along, he said the guy had once come to one of our acting classes, so he knew it was fake. But I didn’t remember the guy or think it was a game.”

  Me, I don’t remember who was on my team or what first place was. I don’t remember prize-winning details like the gunman’s eye color or whether his wife’s jeans were Jordache or Gloria Vanderbilt.

  But I do remember Liz, aka the Grim Reaper, said, “Mr. Ellis, you’re going to pay for my therapy.”

  But her parents never made an appointment for her with a shrink.


  And nobody’s parents sued us, the cops weren’t called, and the gun was real.

  Papa remembers, “The gun was one of mine. It was loaded with blank cartridges. In other words, it could only make a loud noise and not hurt someone even if pointed right at them. Real bullets would have been too dangerous.”

  Hey, some fathers take their girls to daddy-daughter dances or buy them puppies; my father faked his own death for my birthday.

  For my sixteenth birthday, Papa convinced me I was seventeen. He said, “Helen Michelle, have you ever seen your birth certificate?”

  For my seventeenth birthday, he rented a white Econoline van, the trademark of a serial killer. I don’t remember which serial killer, but I remember that if you saw a white van idling at your curb like an ice cream truck, you were supposed to run away like it was doling out double scoops of Mint Chocolate Razor Blades. Anyhoo, my parents drove that white van and “kidnapped” my friends to come celebrate with me.

  Mama says, “Oh, Helen Michelle, there was a lot of kicking and screaming going on in some driveways!”

  Mama finally quit finding Papa’s practical jokes funny when he called her from an airport pay phone to say that my little sister was missing. He said, “Don’t panic. But I’ve lost her.”

  And then he had my sister call from a pay phone right beside him and cry, “Mama, heeeelp!”

  On the drive home from my thirteenth birthday party, I was mortified, but Papa laughed off my teenage despair as if the prank he’d pulled was no more embarrassing than a whoopee cushion or dribble glass. He thought I should be thanking him. He had my best interest at heart.

  He said, “Next year, when you start high school, everyone’s going to know who you are.”