Mississippi Sissy (10 page)

My father moved toward us both. “The hell he's not!” he screamed. “He's hurting me! He's hurting hisself with such nonsense! He's hurting this family!” He reached down and tore the skirt from my body.

“Howard!” my grandmother shouted.

“I warned you,” Aunt Vena Mae said from behind the screen. My
mother tried to grab the ripped skirt from my father's grasp and a tug of war ensued above my head. My father won and pushed all the women aside as he strode into the kitchen to get a box of matches. We all followed as he headed straight outside again to the backyard and the big oil drum that served as an incinerator for combustible garbage as well as raked-up leaves and unwanted pine straw. He threw the skirt into the drum and lifted me to his chest. He opened the box and handed me a match. “Light it,” he demanded. I looked toward my mother who had always told me not to play with matches. “Light it,” he said again. I did not know what to do. He grabbed the match from me and lit it himself and threw it down into the drum where its flame quickly extinguished itself. He tried another match but it too would not stay lit atop the discarded skirt. Marching into the storage room behind the garage with me still in his arms, he found a can of lighter fluid and returned to soak the skirt with squirts from the squeaky can. He plopped me on the ground for a minute and angrily lit one more match. He dropped it into the drum and flames rose suddenly from inside its rusty lip. He lifted me again and made me stare down into the fire. “See that? Take a good look,” he told me, shaking me extremely close to the sprouting inferno. “That's what happens when boys try to be girls. That's what happens.” My mother attempted to take me from him, but he would not let me go.

“Lyle's late coming home but he'll be back soon from taking inventory up at Dearman's today,” my grandmother said, mentioning the hardware store where my grandfather worked, as if his hapless return would somehow calm my father down. Aunt Vena Mae put her braceleted arm around her baby sister and stayed uncharacteristically quiet.

“Howard, stop it,” my mother pleaded. “Stop it. Don't blame him. Blame me.”

My father turned to her, his face distorted in the red glow from the fire. “I do blame you!” he screamed. “I blame you both. Don't team up
on me like this ever again,” he said, using that coaching term that would that very day begin to haunt my childhood. “You two are always
teamin up.”
The August afternoon temperature was in the nineties and standing by the fire my father and I both began to sweat with the awful heat he had added to it. My own little three-year-old face was flushed with anger and longing and something as close to hatred as I had ever felt. When I began to cry he handed me off finally to my mother. My grandmother cried also as Vena Mae, knowing her big-sister routine by heart after all these years, calmed her with rote expressions of concern. “Women!” my father said, spitting out the word while looking right at me. “Goddamn women!” He left us there by the dying fire. We heard him once more crank the car and spin out of the gravel drive.

“We've still got a maternity dress to finish,” said Vena Mae, patting my grandmother's shoulder. “Let's get back to the sewing machine,” she said, taking charge of the situation. “I'll make us all some ice tea. I hear Kim in there crying now. All this commotion must have woke him up from his nap.”

My grandmother dried her tears with the lone strip of fabric my mother had not used for the burned-up skirt. “We'll just keep all this from Lyle,” she said, dabbing at her eyes.

I climbed beneath the sewing machine when we got back in the room with the half-made maternity clothes. I pouted and watched my grandmother's old bare foot work the pedal, blue veins branching out toward her toes like an inky rendering of a gnarled oak tree ruined not by root rot but a palsied landscape artist's choosing to go out sketching once his brushes began to scare him. “Here,” said Aunt Vena Mae, “you want to play with this? Will this cheer you up?” she asked and bent down to pass her unclasped gold charm bracelet to me. She jingled it in front of my frowning face until I took it.

The women remained silent and drank their tea. “Kevin, come out from under there,” my mother finally said. I stayed put.

“He's fine,” said my grandmother, and let me push the pedal for her with my hand when her foot tired and she gave me the go-ahead. I tried on the bracelet but, slipping from my tiny wrist, it fell into my lap. I plopped it instead on my head like the crown that Mary Ann Mobley wore in all the local newspapers my grandmother kept in her clippings box when Mobley made it to the big time up in Atlantic City the year before. The gravel drive came to life again when my father pulled his speeding car to screeching halt out front. My grandmother sewed faster, pushing my hand away with her veiny foot and going to town on some final seams. “You better give me back that bracelet,” Vena Mae said, and reached down to snatch it from my head.

My father slammed the back door. His footsteps headed our way. He stopped at the door of the bedroom and took in the scene. No one spoke. He reached for the
Better Homes and Gardens
that was now sitting on the white chest of drawers. He rolled up the magazine in his fist then told me to follow him into the living room. “Haven't you done enough, Howard?” my mother asked him, but pushed me toward him nonetheless. “Must you spank him?”

My father said nothing. He picked me up and took me to the living room's sofa and sat down next to me. He put his arm around me and unrolled the magazine. We sat looking at the pictures of the beautiful homes and lovely yards and he asked me which ones I liked best, which colors I preferred, which pieces of furniture looked the most comfortable. “Someday we're going to live in a house like one of these,” he said and held me tightly to him. “I promise you that, Kevinator,” he said. He kissed me on top of my head. “Your mama deserves a house like these. You deserve it.” We flipped the pages and pointed to something when it pleased us. He quietly sang a verse of
Johnny Horton's “Battle of New Orleans,” his favorite song that summer. He let me hum along. I've never felt as safe.

________________

“Go on. Tell her I love her. Tell her I'm sorry,” my father kept up his commands while I stood my ground on the bed that morning as our own battle was joined. “Do it and I promise-cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die I'll never call you a girl again,” he said, sounding not like a father at all with that cross-my-heart silliness.

I remained completely still, completely silent until he began to shake me again, this time much more violently. “No! Stop!” I shouted. “You're hurting me!”

My mother flipped over at the sound of my distress. “Are you proud of yourself now?” she asked with an exaggerated sob. “You've hurt us both.”

My father let me go and fell to his knees. “Please, Nan. Please. I'm sorry. I love you,” he said, his voice cracking. He reached for her but she jumped at his touch, scurrying to the other side of the as yet unmade bed.

“Don't hurt her!” I yelled, and tried to slap him across his face like he had slapped her earlier. He swung his arm up in self-defense but I dived for the floor before he could land a blow.

“Howard! Stop it! Howard!” my mother screamed.

My father rose and grabbed the Big Black Belt from his closet. “That's it,” he said, raising it toward me. “I've had enough of this.” I ran from the room as my mother reached across and slammed the door shut behind me. The bottom half of the leather strap, which he had swung for the first time my way, caught in the slammed door and lay in the hallway at my feet. The door then cracked open for a second and the Big Black Belt was slurped back inside like the tongue of a panting chow. I put my little ear up to the suddenly locked door and
heard my own parents' own panting now behind it, the sound of the belt's buckle falling to the floor, my father's muffled voice softening from “sorry” to “shh-shh-shh” to “shit, Nan, oh, shit . . . Nan . . . Nan . . . shit . . . oh, shit . . .”

________________

I watched Nan—as I often referred to my mother in my thoughts when my father wasn't around—return from that bedroom of theirs after my urine-soaked adventure in the deserted dugout. She had taken off her bathing suit and was parading around the house now in her bra and panties as she, humming to herself, straightened pillows and dusted surfaces and ran water over an ice tray and poured three glasses of her overly sweetened tea—one for her, one for the football coach's wife who was about to arrive any minute, and one for me. Kim and Karole insisted on cherry Kool-Aid. She asked me to stand up on the couch and help her fashion about her whippet-thin body the toga she had made from an old bedsheet as she prepared herself for the final rehearsal she and Coach Kirby's wife were going to have before the big talent show. “Remember now. This is our little secret,” she said when the doorbell rang and Miz Kirby—a Donna Reed look-alike—came giggling inside, the two women giddy with their plans, pleased with themselves for having found this diversion from the boredom that dulled so many of their days. They weren't much more than girls, barely past thirty and stuck in a small Mississippi town with husbands that hadn't taken them out to eat on a Friday night since the men had put the word Coach in front of their names and the two women had to live their lives feigning interest while seated on the backless bleachers of muddy ball fields and half-filled gymnasiums. Like my mother, Miz Kirby quickly stripped down to her bra and panties. She pulled her own toga out of a Jitney Jungle grocery sack.

“These don't look right for ancient Rome,” said my mother between sips of tea and snapping her brassiere straps with her fingers, then snapping Miz Kirby's. “Tell you what, I'm not going to wear a bra,” she claimed, her eyes widening at what she heard herself saying. She began to lower her straps. “Dare I?” she asked, issuing that low inquisitive whisper I often heard her use when she was in one of her excitable moods. “Dare I?” I sat down on the sofa and petted Coco, trying to calm her trembling. My mother still had not put her out in her pen, which was dangerous in and of itself, as my father forebade the dog in the house. Coco and I watched as my mother and Miz Kirby unsnapped each other's bras. They positioned their breasts inside their makeshift togas while my mother explained how I had mysteriously disappeared earlier in the day with “that little eight-year-old Huck Finn hussy who lives across the street. Came back smelling like a toilet.” She tried not to, but couldn't help it: that for-my-father-alone laughter burst forth from her. Coco's ears pricked up and trembled right along with the rest of her short-haired, stubby four-legged torso.

“Maybe he's not such a sissy after all,” Miz Kirby managed to say between her own hoots of derision, a sound not Donna Reed-like at all.

“Now, honey, don't talk like that,” my mother said, but could not stop laughing. She laid a hand on her short blond hair and smoothed it to her scalp in an attempt to calm herself. “Look how sweet he is pettin' on that Chihuahua. He might be a sissy but he's my sissy,” she cooed right at me as she bent down, giving Coco and me a good look at her breasts, small nests of flesh, which almost spilled right in our faces from where she had tucked the tiny things in her strangely wrapped sheet. She kissed me on the cheek and tickled our family's Chihuahua under its proffered chin. I took a gulp of tea, then offered some to Coco, who lapped it right up. “No, honey, don't do that. That's nasty. I've got to get that dog back outside in a minute,” she reminded herself. “Really, now, Kevin, don't do that,” she continued,
pushing Coco's face away from the iced tea and taking the glass from me. “I swear to you, don't you tell your daddy anything about all this.” She put my tea back in the kitchen and returned to the living room chewing the ice from my glass. “We're going to surprise your daddy and Coach Kirby when we open up the March of Dimes charity talent show this weekend up at the gym. They're the judges and this'll give ‘em a shock. They'll get a kick out of it. At least we hope so. The cheerleaders have convinced us they will. It's already printed in the program that the cheerleaders are supposed to open the show singing ‘Sad Movies (Make Me Cry)' by the Lennon Sisters. But we're gonna come out instead. Your daddy's going to get a surprise going-away party at the end of the night, too,” she said, happy to confirm yet again for me that our days in this hick burg were numbered since my father had accepted a new job at a junior college in another county where the bleachers were at least nicer and her Friday nights would be free of high school sports.

“Any news about that Peeping Tom business over at the Simpsons?” asked Miz Kirby. “That's plumb creepy. You'd think in a place like this, stuff like that wouldn't happen.”

“Nothing yet,” my mother said. “But that policeman they sent out to question everybody up and down the street could make Barney Fife look like Tab Hunter. Poor boy. They'll never catch that Peeping Tom if that little skinny thing is all they've got out looking for him.”

I watched the Kool-Aid-lipped Kim and Karole, herded together over in the corner, playing in their private world of tiny toys. My mother and her friend ignored the three of us as they put on silly frizzy wigs, painted freckles on their faces, and blacked out a couple of teeth in each of their mouths. They looked like Lucy and Ethel about to get into another fix, a game of dress-up that my mother and I often played when we were bored, my role, even for my taste way back then, too often that of Ethel. I tried to quiet Coco who was yapping now at their costumes as they kept talking about the Peeping
Tom and trying to guess who it possibly could be. I stared, happily shocked, at my mother's antics as she and Miz Kirby began their awkward dance routine, verbally stumbling through the lyrics of “Comedy Tonight” from A
Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,
which had opened on Broadway that month according to Ed Sullivan when he had introduced the number on his show. There was no cast album yet so they had made up some of the words from memory and kept laughing at their rudimentary rhymes that would have made Stephen Sondheim's own hair frizz. I applauded wildly when she and her friend finished their routine. Coco yapped louder. “Oh, God. Kevin, honey, do your mama a favor and take that dog back out yonder to her pen,” my mother told me. “We'll wait to do our encore until you get back. Skedaddle,” she said as she brushed some of Coco's short black hair from the couch with her hand. I looked over my shoulder as I headed outside and saw her trying to help Miz Kirby coordinate her dance steps to the song's jaunty rhythm.