Portion of the Sea (34 page)

“I think you ladies could use fresh air. Your faces are pale,” I said one afternoon. “How about we go outdoors and let the sun shine down upon us. I’ll bet you didn’t know that being outdoors is my favorite thing.”

“And why would we listen to anything you said?” Rose had the sharpest tongue.

And Violet’s words were like digesting a poisonous flower petal. “Men don’t like you and women say you’re heartless; so, I agree with Rose. Why should we emulate you in any way?”

“I’m not wanting you to emulate me. Be your own selves. Each of you
has your own uniqueness. Identifying and feeling comfortable with yourselves is what a true lady is all about.”

I walked outside and insisted that the three of them follow me. We walked alongside the house, and I knew that my father and their father were far out working in the field and wouldn’t be able to see us. I took hold of the handlebars of my bicycle that had been leaning against the house, and I hopped onto it and rode a short distance from the girls, then circled slowly around and returned. They and everyone had been whispering about the way I purchased the bicycle from a mail-order catalog and rode off on it every day.

When Stewart had returned from Key West, he had made only a little money off his cigar rolling, but he gave a lump of that money to me. I was free to do whatever I wanted with it; so, I bought a bicycle. No woman in our family had ever owned one before, and I viewed it as a means of personal freedom. I could ride off for hours on my own and travel farther and faster than by foot. I liked the independence that it brought me. And I often wondered what Jaden would think if he saw the tracks my bicycle was leaving behind.

“Here,” I said to Rose. “Your turn. Give it a try.”

“Bicycles were not made for women,” she said.

“Maybe not,” I admitted. “But women are adapting. I’m not the only woman in the world riding a bicycle, you know. They are becoming popular.”

“My father says it’s not healthy for delicate, fragile ladies to trust themselves on such a contraption,” little Violet mumbled. “And it takes up too much concentration.”

“And that it’s not safe. What if your dress gets caught in it?” added Lilly.

“Then you fall down,” I said. “And then you get back up again. It’s okay for women to do that, to fall down from time to time.”

I noticed a look in Rose’s eyes. It was the look a girl gets when she wants desperately to try a new thing but she is afraid she might fail and disappoint or embarrass herself in front of a laughing world or, worse, be judged by that same world. But then her hands reached out, and she took
hold of the handlebars and slowly, as I held the bike steady, she climbed on.

“Now take it slow,” I said. “I’ll hold on. I won’t let go.”

Together, with me briskly walking beside her, we went a good fifteen yards, and I was just about ready to shout a loud “hooray,” when she shouted louder, “Let go! I don’t need your help.”

“Dear,” I insisted. “I think you do. This takes practice.”

“Stop treating me like a little girl,” she said. “I don’t want your help!”

And so I let go, regrettably and two seconds later a heavy wind caught her skirt and wound it around her pedal, and her upper body dashed over the front end of the bike, sending her down into a puddle of muddy water, and a second later the bike landed on top of her.

I rushed down onto my hands and knees beside her in the puddle, pushing my bicycle to the side and then wiping the blood on her chin and nose with the sleeve of my own dress. “Rose,” I cried. “Are you okay?”

Her sisters were there too, and they were holding her hands and rubbing her cheeks. She was crying, and her face was full of mud, and when she opened her eyes and looked at me, I feared she was a demon-possessed pig ready to yank my soul out from me.

“Look what you’ve done!” she shouted. “My mama always told us you were unladylike, even as a little girl, and now I believe her. She was right.”

“Leave us alone,” cried Lilly, as she pulled her sister up from the mud, and together the three girls hobbled into the house.

I pulled my bike up and tried straightening the dented handlebars the best I could. The girls didn’t talk to me the rest of the evening, and their father scorned me for urging his daughter to try such a thing.

“Bicycle riding is a bad idea for women,” he said. “Don’t you ever let her try that again, do you understand?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

And that night, I felt guilt-stricken for having ruined her dress, so I stayed up all night long, turning sturdy, heavy, upholstered curtains into dresses for all three girls. I put a catalog I had gotten in the mail in front of me and tried to create the stylish hourglass silhouette by stitching stockings to the buttock, hip, bosom, and sleeve areas to exaggerate the
desired wasp-waisted effect. And as I worked, visions of the girls and me dressed like ladies danced in my head.

“We don’t like those dresses that you made for us. They look like curtains,” they said the next morning.

“Yes, they were curtains yesterday,” I said, sleep-deprived. “But today, they’re dresses. It’s my way of making amends for what happened to Rose’s dress yesterday.”

“They look like what a man would make if a man ever tried to sew.” Rose’s words always pricked me like thorns.

“That’s a generalized statement, and it’s not fair to men,” I said. “There are male fashion designers, you know.”

“We’re not going to wear ugly dresses that you’ve made out of curtains. Our mama could turn curtains into ball gowns. She was good at sewing, but these? They look like tarp we’d use to cover the turkeys during a freeze. Why’d you put stockings inside them?”

“To give you ladies the appearance, the illusion of hourglass silhouettes. The boys will go wild over you. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

At first, they looked disgusted, but then they started laughing, and soon we were all laughing, and I felt proud, for maybe they no longer viewed me as old and judgmental, and hopefully we were bonding. Two months went by before Rose started wearing the dress, and I suspected there might be a boy she was after.

And then one day my bicycle was missing for at least four hours, and so was she. I was horribly worried for her safety and ran through the town, searching for bike tracks and looking near every mud puddle out of fear she had fallen and drowned. I wanted desperately to tell my father and her father, but that would be disastrous. I would wind up being the tattletale, the one who allegedly thrives on getting Rose into trouble, rather than the one who was concerned with teaching her never to disappear like that again. Yes, everything I did was viewed as bad with regard to those girls, and it wasn’t fair that I was given the job of looking after them, yet I was given no authority or respect in terms of guiding, instructing, or disciplining them. It was too much to bear, and it was ruining the life I had envisioned for myself and the person I wanted to be.

I said nothing to Rose when she returned four hours later with my bicycle. I smiled at her, dumb as a happy rock. That’s what they wanted me to be, a happy rock they could hop over, stand on, and blame when they tripped and fell down.

“Why don’t the four of us go for a walk? There’s a full moon out and everything looks beautiful under a full moon,” I suggested one evening after dinner. The men had drunk beer and were already asleep for the night, and Dahlia too was asleep and snoring, and there was nothing I craved more than good nighttime air. “What are you all staring at me for?”

I asked. “Let’s go for a walk.”

They were giving me the same look I remember their mother, my aunt, once giving me when I was little and I started to cry as she cut into the Thanksgiving turkey one year. “I don’t want any turkey. I can’t possibly eat old Rickety Tickety Turkey,” I cried. “I liked him. He was the wisest of turkeys and good at giving speeches. He started them all with riddles. It’s why no one ever slept during his speeches.”

“You’re weird,” my Aunt Agatha said. “Abigail, you better watch Ava. She’s got a weird imagination. It’s ruining our feast today, but what’s it capable of next?”

“She views the world differently, that’s all,” my mama had said to her sister. “She’s a creative child. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

My mother was right. She understood me like that. And if she were around today, she’d know I had no interest in judging the girls or doing anything to make them hate me. She’d know my mind preferred other things, like standing out under the moon and thinking up stories I might write.

So as the girls and I stood alongside the dirty pond out back, I tried talking to them on a deeper level. “What dreams do you girls have for your lives?”

As I waited for them to answer, I noticed that even in a mud puddle one might catch a glimpse of the moon glistening across the water. “That my mama will come back,” Violet said a moment later.

I put my arm around her. “That’s a good wish,” I said. “And you will
get her back in heaven one day, but you need another dream, one you can focus on in the meantime, sweetie.”

I held my breath, fearful that tagging “sweetie” on to the end might be seen as belittling, rather than the term of endearment that I meant.

“Do you have a dream?” Lilly asked me.

“I do,” I said, although I hadn’t thought of my dream in some time.

“What is it?”

“To write,” I said. “I write all the time in my journal, but one day I’d like to write novels.”

There were giggles and wiggles and whispers.

“Proper ladies don’t whisper,” I said, and then remembered I had given up trying to teach the girls anything. “What are you all whispering about?” I asked.

“I can’t see you ever writing anything significant,” declared Rose. She reminded me of the turkey that tried gobbling up all the other turkeys. It wasn’t that he was hungry, just empty, and eating took his mind off his emptiness. “Your journal was lying open on the floor in your dirty room one day, just waiting to be read, so I took a look, but there wasn’t anything good in it, so I closed it and slid it back under your bed where you keep it. Unless you go off to writing school, I can’t see it happening.”

It was the last time I tried reaching the girls on a deeper level like that, which was a shame, for I had in me the desire to make a difference, to coach them, not into becoming ladies, but into pursuing what they wanted in life, but they were going to fight me until the end. If I had been running for my second term as president of the unladylike club, they’d urge the men of our household not to vote for me, that’s for sure.

So from that day on, I started focusing on their most primary needs, cooking and cleaning and waiting on them, as well as Dahlia, Stewart, and my Uncle George. I waited on everyone hand and foot, and I felt as if I were aging rapidly.

One morning I went for a ride on my bicycle, looking toward every seed-bearing plant and every tree that has fruit with seed in it, anything that might tell me what season it was. I was gone so long I grew hungry and laughed at myself, a woman with better things to do than say farewell
to the spring of her life. When I reached the house, there was nothing I wanted more than to sit down and rest, but I couldn’t. There were too many chores to do.

And those never-ending chores allowed my mind no time for living on a deeper, more creative level, for they meant waking up two hours before sunrise every morning to get the girls fed and dressed and out the door to school. And once I had the quiet house to myself, I worked non-stop just to get their clothes cleaned for the next day and dinner on their plates at night. It all made me miss doing chores side-by-side with my mama.

As months went by, I noticed myself longing for solitary confinement, for then I’d have quiet time with nothing to do and I could fill that silence and time with writing. I guess life is bad when you start fantasizing about spending time in a prison cell.

My cravings for a getaway spooked me, so out of my own guilty conscious I started making the girls get down on their knees every night to pray for one solid hour. It was an activity no one could critique me for enforcing. But at first, the girls tried.

“Why do you make us do this every night?” asked Lilly.

“You’ve each got three treasures—a heart, a mind, and a soul,” I said.

“You’ve got to appreciate them. Don’t keep them locked up inside collecting dust. And your soul, it’s probably worth more than all the treasures put together. And your body is the chest that carries those treasures, so you want to keep that fit and looking good as well. And besides, without a body, you can’t ride a bicycle.”

“We don’t like riding bicycles, and you can’t make us pray.”

“Then, I feel sorry for you girls, having to spend eternities with the souls you neglected to care for while you had the chance.”

I suppose good and bad traits get carried down from one generation to the next and all the rudeness got wadded up and those three girls were the by-product of that wadded up rudeness. That had to be the case, I told myself when they pushed me over the edge.

“Your mother was insane. Are you?”

“Am I what?”

“Insane like her?”

“I hope,” I said. “Because I’d rather be insane like her than evil like you three. You think you got your evilness from your mother?”

“Our daddy says you might turn crazy one day.”

“Oh yeah? I think your daddy ought to instead be grateful he has me to care for you girls.”

“He says it won’t be for long. His cousin Mary is coming from Alabama, soon. She’s going to take over, I think.”

“Is that so?” I asked. “Then let us all pray for poor Mary.”

I dropped to my knees beside them and truly prayed. I believed the girls were evil and needed all the prayers they could get. I don’t believe evil is handed down throughout the generations. It’s a choice, and those girls needed my prayers.

I had been going through the motions of prayer alongside them but hadn’t actually prayed in some time. I felt bad for it, like something very important was missing from my life, and I felt ashamed, for my mama had done her best to instill in me the significance of constant, daily prayer. I felt distant from it and from all I once loved and who I was and where I was headed. I knew I couldn’t blame anyone but myself for distancing myself from God, for a relationship with Him isn’t inherited. It’s a personal choice.