The Wisdom of Hair (24 page)

She held me at arm’s length and looked at me with clear eyes like I was something precious.

“I ain’t Judy Garland,” she said laughing and crying at the same time.

“I know, Mama.”

“I can’t even sing.” She wiped away tears and stood up straight so that she was almost as tall as me. “Ain’t had a drink in almost seven weeks, and no men friends, either.”

“That’s real good, Mama.”

“I’m so glad you said I could come,” she said, wiping her eyes with her sleeve. “It took me hitting bottom, honey, but I’m here, I’m here with you now.”

I don’t know why I didn’t cry. Maybe it was because I wasn’t sure I could believe what I was seeing, Mama there all penitent, wanting to make things right between us. I put my arm around her slight frame and we walked up the stairs together side by side. She’d take one step and then another, looking at me like it was hard for her to believe, too.

“Oh, this is pretty,” she said like she had to say something nice. “You got your sitting area and kitchen, and then your little bed and bath. Yeah, this is right pretty,” she said, running her hand along my kitchen counter. She stopped when she got to the wine rack and two crystal glasses that sat next to it and looked at me and smiled.

“It’s not much, but it’s been nice to have this place so that I don’t have to work a second job and go to school. A lot of the girls have to do that. Two of them had to drop out,” I said, putting my jacket and purse on one of the hooks by the front door. “I’m going
to change out of this uniform, Mama, so just make yourself at home.”

She didn’t sit down. I heard her walking around my little place over and over again like she was afraid to settle in one spot. When I came out of the bedroom, she was pulling a good-size box out of her big shoulder bag and was trying to straighten out the bow that was mashed.

“Oh. You want your surprise now? I wrapped it. Go on, now. Open it.”

“Mama, I told you not to get me anything.”

I tore off the bow and took the tape off from one end of the box and then the other. It was just an old pasteboard thing that said McKerrin Drugs on the side, but when I opened it and pulled back the tissue paper, I was a little child again. “Where did you find her?” I pulled my rag doll out of the box and held her close.

She smelled earthy, like she had been in a cedar chest for a long time. Me and my daddy and her were best friends when I was little.

“You used to set her up by that old oak tree out back by the shed and have tea parties, didn’t you? What was her name? It was Myrna, that’s right, ain’t it? That’s what you called her, Myrna. Like Myrna Loy.”

“Where did you find her?”

Mama’s chin quivered and she looked away. “I’m trying to make amends, honey. It was bad for me to take and hide her right after your daddy passed. That was real bad of me and I’m sorry.”

She stood up and began to pace the room again. “And look at you drinking now. I reckon you’re past eighteen.” She ran her hand across the top of the wine rack like she could use a drink herself.
“Imagine that, and fancy wine, too. Maybe it’ll do more for you than it did for me, ’cause drinking never done me no good. Took me a while to figure that out, though. You got a man friend?”

She gave a little laugh when she saw me blush. “’Course you do. Pretty thing like you. By the time I was your age, you were five, going on six. Couldn’t have no more kids after you come along. Didn’t need none, though. Had you, and your daddy.”

I told her I needed to start dinner and explained a little about my arrangement with the owner of the apartment. She said she wanted to help and that she’d learned how to make biscuits since I left, that it took her two five-pound bags of flour to get them right, but now she could make them as good as Nana’s.

She rolled up her sleeves and got busy proving it while I fried some chicken and creamed some potatoes. After Mama finished up the biscuits, she took the strings off of some pole beans and talked about home. She didn’t say what she was doing now, she just went on and on about how pretty the fall had been and how the apples were gone but that it had been a good crop that year for the farmers.

“You thought about coming home?” She pulled biscuits out of the oven that looked like a picture. “You’ll be graduating soon. I know I’d like it if you was there with me.”

“I don’t know, Mama. I talked with a fella about a job here.”

“Is he your boyfriend?”

“No, Ronnie owns the nicest beauty shop in town. He’s real nice, and I have friends here now, too.”

“Oh, you always kept to yourself at home. Didn’t have many friends.”

My head snapped back like I’d been slapped; she didn’t have a
clue as to why I was embarrassed to bring people over to our house. “Are you still at the shirt factory?”

“Hell, no,” she said with that sideways grin I always loved to see whenever she teased my daddy. “I was supposed to get the next supervisor job that come up, and they passed me by and give it to that Mason girl. Berton Rollins took me in the back room because he seen I was all mad, crying. Said not to worry, that he could fix things for me with the higher-ups. Felt me up right there but never did what he said he was gonna do, so I quit there. I’m working for one of them rich ladies that used to come up the mountain during the summer, but she’s retired now. Stays on up there all year long.”

“What do you do for her?”

She put her hand over her mouth and with a sly look on her face, she told me that she cooked and cleaned for the woman, which was right funny for two reasons. One, Mama never cooked much of anything the whole time I lived at home, and she sure never cleaned.

“She’s from Chicago. Don’t have good sense. You should see how much she pays me for just one week, more than I ever made at the shirt factory, and in cash, too.”

She caught me up on everybody back home while we fixed our plates and didn’t take one bite until she saw the look on my face when I tried those biscuits. She was right. Nana would have been proud.

“I got to leave out before dark,” she said as she took the last bite from her plate. “This was real nice, wasn’t it? We’ll have to do it again real soon.” She looked at me, trying not to tear up. “You know I come to say something. Do you think we could let the kitchen sit for a while and just talk?”

We went over to my little couch and sat side by side. Mama sat on her hands and stared at the floor. Every so often, she looked at me and smiled like she was trying to get up the nerve to say whatever it was she needed to say. As much as I used to wish terrible things for her, it was hard to see her so uncomfortable. I picked up Myrna, straightened her yarn hair, and waited.

“Well, I guess I told you more than once I hadn’t had a drink in a long time. I got to thank getting let go from the shirt factory for that,” she said, looking up at me to see if I remembered she said she’d quit. “I didn’t drink none when I was growing up and not much at all when your daddy was living. Then Heyward come along and…Leon, and I was as much of a sot as they were. Looking back, I know I stayed that way because they sure looked better when I was drinking, especially Heyward. Sometimes I just shake my head and wonder if there’s anything up there when I think of laying with that man.”

“He was a sorry-ass drunk,” I laughed. “But he was a nice sorry-ass drunk. I remember thinking you’d be upset when he died.”

“Hell, no. I made you get one end of that old couch he pissed all over, I got the other, and we put it on the trash pile out back. It made a right good fire, remember?”

“And we bought a new one the very next day.” I wiped a tear away.

“And Leon, well…” Neither of us was laughing anymore. “But what I come here to say—about your daddy—”

I felt the color drain out of my face. A wave of nausea shot through me. I was nine again, sitting on the little bench in our backyard listening to Mama and Daddy fighting. I couldn’t make out what they were saying because their words were jumbled up
together in all the shouting. When they stopped, dead silence filled the whole mountain. Not so much as a cicada uttered a sound.

Daddy stormed off. I ran after him. He stopped and scooped me up in his arms. He held me so tight I could hardly breathe. Then he put me back down and told me to mind him and stay put. The dry grass from the drought crunched under his feet. His shoulders jerked up and down as he walked away. He was crying hard.

“Nothing’s been right in my life since your daddy died, nothing. Now, I used to think it’s because I keep picking the wrong man. I thought I was trying to fill that big hole your daddy left inside of me when he passed, but that ain’t so.” She was crying hard. “I loved my Boyd, oh how I loved your daddy, Boyd.”

I broke down and held her while she sobbed from the pain of trying to right the past. I stroked her hair like Nana would have and kept hoping what was happening between us would suddenly feel right but it never did. I was still mothering for both of us.

“Anyhow, I come to set things right. To say what I done and make my ’mends.”

There was a hole inside me worn deep from trying to decipher the horrible argument I’d overhead. I always thought if I understood what really happened that last time I saw my daddy, then somehow his dying would be easier to take. But as I looked into my mother’s eyes, suddenly I didn’t want to know what really happened that day when, as one of the boys I went to school with put it, my daddy hugged a train. I shook my head, but the words wouldn’t come out.
Stop. Don’t say it. Let it lay
.

“He could never pay me enough attention, nobody could. I was
mad at him. I told him you wasn’t his. That I’d laid with his cousin, but it wasn’t true. He didn’t have to do what he did, he could have looked in your eyes and known it wasn’t true.

“I ain’t lying no more.” She shook her head violently and took a tissue out of the box. She blew her nose and tried to smile. “I think you always knew he done it because of me. I know I’ve always been such a mess because I couldn’t admit that, but I’m better now. I come to say I’m sorry for all the bad things I done. And I’m sorry for being so weak, for never taking care of you any better than I did.” She touched my hand and I jerked away from her like a hot stove.

“Thanksgiving’s in a couple of weeks. Come on home and we’ll cook up a storm.” Her voice sounded warm and soft like a kindergarten teacher’s on the first day of school. “I’ll take you into town and help you find a job fixing hair. If that don’t work out, I know they’re hiring at the shirt factory.”

As much as I hated Mama, somewhere inside me there was still a powerful yearning for her to be the way a mother ought to be. I thought that feeling had died a long time ago, but there it was doing battle with the awful truth she’d just spoken. Then I thought about Winston and how going home might not be such a bad idea. If I left, he might straighten up and fly right just like Mama did.

“I’ll think about it,” I said, and she nearly knocked me over hugging me. When she finally let go, she said that she really needed to get on back because she didn’t like to be on those mountain roads late at night. That was news to me, but it was good news. She went in the bathroom to freshen up, and I started clearing the table.

I heard the car door slam and Winston hurrying up the stairs. He threw his briefcase down by the door, came over to the kitchen counter, and poured himself a full glass of Scotch.

“Your friend here?” he asked after draining the glass.

“No. It’s my mother. Are you all right?”

He didn’t seem to notice I’d been crying. He let the last few drops of his drink drain onto his tongue and poured himself another.

“What’s wrong?”

“John fucking Ridgeway,” he said, like I knew who he was talking about, “almighty head of the English department. He’s always on my case.”

I was smart enough to know that we had so little in common, if Winston and I ever started talking, the illusion of what we had together would be gone. He knew this, too, but was too upset to play our game. Early on, if I forgot the rules, he’d press his fingers against my lips and look at me with those deep blue eyes that hypnotized me into thinking we didn’t need words. So I went to him, put my arms around his middle, and nuzzled his neck.

“He likes to pick out a student every semester to pick on—no, to fail. This time, he picked a student I had last year. Bright girl. He failed her every test. Gave the tests back for the kids to look at in class and then took them up for good so that nobody could compare answers. She tried talking to him. That didn’t work, so she came to me.” His glass was empty again. He wrapped his arms around me. His breathing was slower now; the Scotch had begun to kick in. He looked at me, suddenly remembered the rules, and kissed me until he heard Mama fumbling with the lock on the bathroom door.

I guess she must have heard Winston’s voice and knew there was a man about. She came out of the bathroom with her hair down. She’d either pinched her cheeks or used some of my blush in the medicine cabinet. The collar of her blouse was flipped up and it was unbuttoned real low, and she had tied her shirttail tight around her flat, milky white belly.

She introduced herself to Winston, eyeing him so that I was too embarrassed to look at either one of them. She flashed him a smile, gave me a little peck on the cheek, and said good-bye without another word about Thanksgiving.