Mississippi Sissy (21 page)

“How ‘bout a moon pie?” I heard Vena Mae ask Kim, who continued to wail. “You like moon pies? Think I got half of one in my purse here that your Uncle Doots didn't eat all of on our drive down when I wouldn't let him stop for lunch. He wasn't none too thrilled with me making him eat a moon pie, let me tell you.”

Karole, who was still in kindergarten, kept on playing at home during the subsequent days of Ott and Lee visits by everyone else. She continued her play during my mother's post-funeral wake, full of fried food and assorted pies crowned with golden-tipped meringue. Kim became even more of a big brother to her as she trailed him around and mimicked his butch demeanor after his tears had dried. When my grandparents sent me to my room for saying “fuck” one too many times as we sat beneath that backyard tree watching the flock of crows arrive that shoulder-chilling November afternoon, I shut the door and knew that the use of that one word (whatever “fuck” really meant) was the punctuation to my bedevilingly girlish bad-boy behavior. “Fuck,” I said once more, loving the percussive sound of such a word, the music of language already taking on a harder edge in my life. I turned to Miranda and read some Porter passages while my mother's voice was still so clear inside my head, the sound of it cutting through the hushed hubbub of the wake's stragglers in the dining room across the hall. I knew even then that my mother's voice—that soft, smart, and artful tone—would not always be inside me but would morph into my own voice someday, the one that now tells my story, that tells hers, as I transcribe it for others to decipher its fealty to the truth, to the facts, the former something
that is forged from the latter, a different object altogether, cleaner, purer, or, according to the talents of the forger, more ornate.

I shut
Pale Horse, Pale Rider
—shut it for many years to come—and hid the book in my closet next to Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent. I climbed onto my bed and felt the nub of one of my grandmother's prized chenille spreads that had been placed on it during the wake in case any of our company came in my room. I sat completely still. I kicked off my freshly polished Sunday-goin'-to-meetin' shoes, as my grandfather called them. My eight-year-old feet dangled down from the bed and rubbed those soft nubby raised lines of the chenille's pattern with the soles of my socks. In my stillness, I remembered the secret (I always had to be completely still to remember it) that I shared with my father. I bowed my legs a bit like they bowed around his neck that day. Our secret—like my mother's voice still being able to read to me inside my head—was a way to keep him alive. Finished steeping myself in my parents' presence—a kind of trance I could put myself in throughout my childhood to calm my nerves—I jumped down from the bed. I stood, not knowing what came next. What is the next thing you do when both your parents die? Do you comb your hair? Do you take a piss? Do you fly away with the crows outside? This is what I did: I opened the curtain on my bedroom's window and watched my grandparents, forevermore now Mom and Pop, holding hands as they walked slowly back toward the house, their heads hanging downward side by side, nothing left to say, the clouds behind them just as gray as they were. This is what I thought: Yes, I have to straighten up for a while and not be a burden to those two old folks out there; tomorrow I will start being good no matter what, no more tantrums, no more bad costume ideas, no more sissy nonsense, no more longing to be Arlene. Mom and Pop looked up and caught me studying them. They dropped each other's hand. I shut the curtain. I lay on my stomach atop the chenille. I listened haplessly for Epiphany. I held my breath, but breathed again when I could not kill myself that way.

________________

I got through the rest of the third grade without incident. My good-little-boy days were deemed a success by all those who were in a position to deem them as such. Teachers. Mom and Pop. Grace Speed. Even old Venomous Mae mentioned to Uncle Doots how much I'd changed. During my fourth-grade year, though, the good-boy act became a bit more difficult when I was the first to begin among my classmates to experience puberty. Pubic hair sprouted. My upper lip became shadowed. Hormones harrumphed inside me. An older cousin even taught me about the birds-and-bees by demonstrating on Karole's stripped-down Chatty Cathy doll, a difficult feat, as the only holes in her plastic body were arranged in a tiny square on her chest where the voice box was located, from which she spoke her limited number of sentences every time you pulled the string behind her neck. The cousin and I had locked ourselves in the back bathroom, which is what we all called the one located in the drafty wooden addition quickly added to my grandparents' brick home by Uncle Benny and his lackadaisical construction crew when Kim and Karole and I moved in. The addition consisted of a short hallway connected to my grandmother's sewing room. To one side of the hall was the large bedroom where bunk beds held Kim and me; to the other side was the smaller bedroom where a queen-size bed held Karole and Mom, who had moved out of Pop's room to hold my little sister during the night instead of her lonely, fuming husband who snored more loudly to spite us all in his now emptier bed down at the other end of the house, his sleepwear consisting of his tight white Hanes briefs pulled up as high as they would go on his old stomach and his wife-beater T-shirt tucked much too neatly into the briefs' elastic band.

It was in that back bathroom where, also during my fourth-grade year, I began to masturbate. I didn't exactly know what masturbation
was at that point. I just knew I felt compelled to play with myself when I thought about Bobby Thompson, who was still the prettiest boy in my class. During my first ejaculation, I had no idea what had just happened. It wasn't until I was sitting at the school cafeteria table with Bobby and his best friend, Dave Marler, that I figured out what I had done and put a name to it. We were being served hamburgers and shared the hamburger-day-joke we always told each other before we choked down the leather-like patties: that the hair-netted, big-hipped cafeteria workers made the hamburgers by flattening the meat beneath their smelly armpits. Laughing yet again at how vulgar we could be, we passed around the condiments that were placed on the table in water glasses. “M-may I have the m-mayonnaise?” I asked, my stutter having worsened in the year since my mother's death.

When it was passed my way, Dave said, “Looks like jack-off. Kevin's eatin' jack-off.”

Bobby laughed. I loved him even more when he laughed. He had a tarnished silver crown on one of his front teeth and I longed to touch it with my tongue. I laughed too, anytime he laughed, but I had no idea what this newest joke was about. Bobby and Dave then proceeded to let me in on what the older boys from their neighborhood did in the woods behind Hillsboro Drive where they both lived, something called “jack-off contests.” They said that one older boy, whose father had John Birch Society signs stuck all over their front yard on Hillsboro, was the frequent winner and used a more succinct word that the older guys used for jack-off: cum. “He's got the biggest wiener,” said Bobby, utilizing the appropriate cafeteria lingo and making us all laugh even more. “And he's always got a heap'a jack-off at the ready. Cum. Whatever you call it.” Dave giggled with a mouthful of hamburger, sputtering bits of bun on the table.

“Cum, cum, cum,” I teased Bobby as I pushed the glass of mayonaise toward him and said the word for the first time, attempting to be one of the boys.

“More'n' that mayonnaise there comes outta him,” Bobby said and pushed the glass full of the stuff right back at me.

I spent the next few days fantasizing about being part of those contests and beating the John Bircher's son to the punch. I can't eat a hamburger today without thinking of those horny Hillsboro boys. The taste of Hellman's has had a hold on me ever since.

________________

This was also around the time that I picked my first cotton. Aunt Lola, Pop's sister who lived down the road, had been making one of her afternoon visits with Mom so they could gossip and go over what all they had cooked that day and planned to cook the next, as well as the latest news from their respective “growd-up kids.” As I hung on their every word, Aunt Lola asked if I might want to help “the niggers pick cotton this Saturday. Just may be what he needs to get some of the girl out of him,” she told Mom.

“Didn't do no good for Jim, now did it?” asked Mom, rather pointedly, mentioning Aunt Lola's younger son, on whom Lola doted. Jim had gone to art school in Florida and become an interior decorator in Los Angeles and Charlotte and Dallas, and always brought young men home with him who were just as prissy and preppy and well-creased as he. One Christmas, he gave Kim and me our first pairs of 501 Levis, and each subsequent December brought a new pair with him as he drove up in his Mercedes and unpacked his trunk full of presents, which always contained the biggest bottle of Chivas Regal he could smuggle into Mississippi—Scott County, where Forest was located, being one of the state's many dry counties. I loved making Jim laugh—a sound exactly like Lola's raspy chortle—by putting a lawn chair in our yard, and making him sit there as if he were an audience member while he watched me do my impersonation of Zsa Zsa Gabor, mincing about as the Derricks' cattle mooed in the background.
On one occasion, I showed him some poems I had written—one titled “A Mouth and Its Uses,” another that rhymed “Miranda” and “veranda”—and he, not knowing exactly who Miranda was, was nevertheless impressed enough to be the first person ever to tell me that I was a writer, a real one. “Seems to me, Benny had Jim up around them cotton bolls come pickin' time as much as he could, but Jim just ended up bein' Jim, which ain't nothin' bad, just something that's so,” Mom told Lola, then nodded over at me. “I tell you what, though—this'un's got more Jim in him than Jim does.”

Lola chortled in her raspy way. “You got a point there, Jake. But like I told Lyle when he was a'likenin' y'all's troubles with this'un to mine and Benny's with Jim—all you can humanly do is love your young'uns. You can't cut ‘em out like a McCall's pattern you picked special ‘cause you like the way it looks on you,” she said and took a sip of coffee. She brushed some pie crust crumbs from one of the softly flowered beltless housedresses she always wore on her big-boned body, the lone McCall's pattern she seemed to allow herself. “Benny don't see it, but Jim's just as ornery as he is. Jim just goes about it another way.” The two women fell quiet and contemplated the rest of the pie on their plates. They sipped at their coffee. I looked over at Lola. She never once put a rinse in her hair, as Mom and Aunt Vena Mae and all the other old gray-haired women who surrounded me in my childhood did, turning their permanents into preferred shades of periwinkle. Lola's pageboy bob retained its natural color, a tawny combination of grays and browns and saffrons that decades of the Mississippi sun had woven together. It was something Jim insisted on. “He don't never want me to put nothing out of a Clairol box on my hair,” she once said when Mom had suggested she might want to try such a thing. “Don't know why he's got such a bee in his bonnet about it. But when he calls up he makes a point of asking me about it each and ever' time. One Christmas, he even talked me into lettin' him cut off some of it with my pinkin' shears. Said he
wanted a swatch of it. That's one of them words he's always a'usin'—swatch. Said he was tryin' to find a carpet with just that blend in it for some fancy woman who wanted him to make her house pretty like only he can. You ever hear tell of nothin' like that?”

“Can't say I ever did,” said Mom. She studied her plate. “Honest now, Lola, you think I'm a'losin' my pie crust touch? This'un don't seem near ‘bout flaky enough. I'm faultin' the Crisco. I think they're makin' it different. Ever'thing else is changin' in this world, don't know why Crisco should be no different.”

“I don't know,” said Lola, pricking the crust on her own plate with her fork. “I figure Crisco's one of the last things we can count on. This pie crust is just fine, Jake. Don't be so hard on yourself. Long as Lyle and these kids ain't complainin', you shouldn't neither. If I could make a crust like this I'd be right satisfied. A'course I was never no Betty Crocker like you,” said Lola, who knew when to lavish my grandmother with just enough praise to keep her content. She'd been doing it since they were teenagers, when her little brother had first started courting the high-strung girl who starred in so many of their agricultural high school's musical revues.

My grandmother's favorite memory from those times was her solo of “Alice Blue Gown,” a song written for President Teddy Roosevelt's young daughter, she had once explained to me. When I'd wash the dishes with her—just the two of us alone in the kitchen—she'd often sing the song softly to herself, each word of the lyric still as fresh for her as when she was a girl. Her face would gladden as she sang the song, once remarking when she had finished its refrain yet again that “your Pop first fell in love with me when he saw me in that little blue dress I wore for that number. It was as pretty as I've ever been in my life. He'd been cast as my dance partner. We did a little waltz durin' the musical interlude. We were the hit of the show. Ever'body for the rest of the school year called me Alice Blue Gown as a nickname. I loved it. Really loved it. Alice Blue Gown,” she quietly
said the name, almost singing it again, summoning above the dying suds in the dishpan an image of herself as someone who was once young and hopeful. “It was the first time Pop ever held me in his arms. Lord, that was another life altogether. Lyle was a looker back then. We both were. To this day, when I wear somethin' blue I can see by the way he cuts his eyes at me he's rememberin' the first time he ever touched me around my waist and held me to him and how I looked when folks kept a'braggin' on me sayin' I had the sweetest soprano ever in Scott County where we all had to board back then if we wanted any book learning.”