Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir (14 page)

“Well, it’s my little girl. I thought you were Hazel for a moment. Your hair is black as soot. And how was school today, darling?” She never used to notice me or any of the grandchildren, but since she’d been sick she acted like a real Red Riding Hood grandmother. She held out her hand, as she always did. It felt too soft, cool, and boneless to me. My hands were hardened by the trapeze rings in Jeannie Walters’s backyard. Mother Mayes’s veins stood out like blue needlepoint threads. I stared at her hands—just like mine. I was born with old hands, thin white skin you can see right through if I hold my fingers over a flashlight. She loved rings but she wore none now, not even the aquamarine I loved or the icy chunk of diamond set up on prongs like kitten’s teeth. Her fingers looked as though they were turning green. I remembered the ladyfinger pickles under the stairs.

“Did you know they have babies in jars out in the closet here?”

Mother Mayes’s lips thinned to a smile that could have been drawn on her face with pencil. “Babies?”

“Yes, I saw the two-headed babies up on the shelves in big jars in the broom closet.”

“Frances, that’s just your imagination. Why don’t you have a piece of candy?” Just my imagination. All my family said that. They always denied I saw what I said I saw if it inconvenienced them in any way. I learned early that only a slice of reality was considered real, even if what I saw should have been as plain as Stone Mountain to everyone.

“I did too! It had no toenails.” I opened the padded white
box and broke into one chocolate after another, rejecting the soft pink and yellow fillings.

Mother Mayes made a gurgling noise in her chest, the same low chortling sound a pigeon makes. I looked over the little balloon puff of her stomach, out the window, and down below where Mrs. Melton, my friend Marideane’s mother, was hoisting a bag of groceries from the backseat of her Studebaker. When I played there after school, Marideane and I saw rats bigger than kittens on the back porch of the hospital across the street, rats tumbling through the pails (of guts and gallbladders?) of garbage. We climbed in her fig tree and clapped, threw figs, shouted, but the rats never ran. I thought of Mother Mayes in the hospital late at night in the dark with the big brown rats running through the halls. One could jump on her white bed and run over her face. I told my parents about the rats but they said I must have been dreaming.

Mother Mayes wasn’t interested in the babies. I wondered if their eyelids looked like hers, shot with purple lines. “You may not believe me …” I found the exact piece I wanted wrapped in silver paper. Slowly I bit into the pure caramel. “But it’s true. I did see them.”

Mother Mayes’s face seemed to emerge from the pillow. “You must be thirsty after that long walk.” She always offered water so I could drink from the curved glass straw. Once I’d said I liked it. Adults always did that; say you like one thing and they’re forever forcing it on you afterward. I didn’t like the glass straw all that much. I turned up one of the glasses on the towel and poured a little. What I didn’t want Mother Mayes to know
was that I was afraid of catching whatever she had because she was going to die. I held my breath and sucked the clear water up the straw. I never catch things, I thought. They’d showed at school the picture of an iron lung at Warm Springs. They said if we went swimming after lunch we’d get it and have to go lie in an iron lung day after day, then get braces on our legs and never swim again. So some germs can live in water. But Mother Mayes didn’t have infantile paralysis; they said “eaten up.” I thought of red ants and let out my breath.

Mother Mayes chortled again and sank back into the pillows. I had another piece of candy, this time just to be busy until the bubbling sound went away. “I’ve got to be going.” A string of drool ran backward on her cheek, and her hand suddenly turned to a claw grabbing at the hem of the sheet. “I’ve got to do a report on the Belgian Congo.” She didn’t seem to hear. She rolled her head to the side and gave an ugly little grunt. I held on to the iron foot of the bed for a moment, my feet on the rung. I wanted to swing up my legs and see if I could go into a handstand, but I didn’t dare. Mother Mayes had her eyes closed and a frown on her face as though she were thinking hard about something. I slowly pulled the door shut behind me.

The closet door in the hall was still open. From the window opposite it, a slash of afternoon sun angled across the hall. I wanted to see the small jars better, especially the one with something in it no larger than a peach pit. A pumpkin-shaped jar on the end was so close I almost could reach it. If only the brine, or whatever it was, were not so scummy, like old goldfish water. I shinnied up the doorframe. Three, four, eight jars in all. “How’s she feeling, honey?” I dropped to the floor.

“She’s fine, I guess.”

Mrs. McNeill pushed my hair off my forehead. “You’ve got your daddy’s head of hair. Where’d you get those eyes? Must be your mother’s people.” My mother came from Vidalia, over an hour and a half away.

On Friday, Nancy Stone came into Mrs. Bailey’s class with a note while we were hearing Nancy Drew aloud. We’d started the series last year with Miss Pope, who hated every student in the fifth grade, especially on Friday, and so read Nancy Drew endlessly. We’d all become addicted. Mrs. Bailey had had a particularly bad day because Gill C. brought in a package of rubbers and tried to throw them on the girls. When Mrs. Bailey secured one she held it up and shouted at the class, “Every last one of you will sit there until I find out who brought this nasty thing in.” Just at that instant the door opened and Miss Hattaway, the principal, stopped in her tracks. The wild class froze for a moment until Gill C. blew up another rubber in the back row and let the air out suddenly in a loud farting noise. When this much happened by ten o’clock, we knew we could count on an hour of
The Message in the Hollow Oak
before lunch.

Mrs. Bailey slammed down the book when Miss Hattaway’s best seventh-grade student came tiptoeing in with the note. Mrs. Bailey frowned and nodded as she unfolded it. She looked up at me and I knew without being told to run home because Mother Mayes had died.

“No,” Aunt Hazel said, “it won’t be scary. She looks just like she’s sleeping.” She slid into the creamy Lincoln parked on
the side of Daddy Jack and Mother Mayes’s. It was rude if you didn’t call on people in the coffin, even if they’d never know. “Your mother’s in there now. I’ll just drop you off while I run down to buy something dark for the funeral. Living in Florida, I don’t really have any dark dresses.”

I wasn’t really afraid at all. I’d seen Willie Bell’s aunt dead and Carlyle McDonald, whose belly stuck up over the edge of the coffin, and Miss Florence Petrick, the high school voice teacher. They didn’t show Tom and Janet Langhorn’s mother, who’d blown off the top of her head, pulled the trigger on herself with her own big toe. They couldn’t make heads or tails of her. I could just imagine Mother Mayes lying there, the coffin tufted and soft like a doll bed. Hazel said she would be wearing a lilac dress, her favorite color, not the gray one Mother and Mary Helen picked out, which was too dreary for words, and would look peaceful the way she did on Sundays when she would lie down on the sofa and pull the afghan up over her feet before Fanny called us in to dinner.

I loved Hazel’s car and her soft fawn-colored clothes that seemed to go with the deep leather seats and the music drifting from the backseat speakers as soon as Hazel turned the key.

“Aren’t you going, Aunt Hazel … I mean, Hazel?” I remembered she didn’t want to be called “Aunt” anymore.

“I’ll go later, when there aren’t so many people. This is a calling hour right now. You know, Mama and I were so close. I want to say good-bye to her all alone.” Hazel glanced in the rearview mirror and smoothed her eyebrow with her little finger. The lattice
fence around the backyard receded as she accelerated down Lemon Street. “You know, when Mama last came down to visit me this winter she was saying how she felt closer to me than anyone in the world. There’s nothing like the love of a mother and the only daughter. Not that she didn’t love your daddy and your uncle Jack and uncle Mark.” Hazel’s voice broke off as she reached into her handbag and fished out a handkerchief. I stared out the window at the palm trees racing by the car window. I didn’t know what to say, so I leaned forward and tapped my chin with my forefinger.

On Sundays before dinner, Aunt Mary Helen and Mother and Aunt Emmy sat in the upstairs guest room and said how selfish Hazel was and how she never thought of a soul on God’s green earth but herself. They said she came swanning home from Miami and expected to be waited on hand and foot. I didn’t know if that was true or not. I liked it when Hazel drove up with the backseat full of dresses and Fanny baked all the things Hazel had liked when she was a girl, Marshmallow Fudge Cake and icebox cookies and Lane Cake, if it were at Christmas. And Hazel teased Daddy and my uncles. Sundays were better when she was there. Usually, when we waited for dinner, I played the wind-up player my daddy had when he was young, half listening to the conversation in the guest room. They said Hazel’s husband, Wilfred, had a girlfriend in Richmond where he went on business. Lonnie Tyler saw them together in a hotel lobby when she went up for the national meeting of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. I thought that was unlikely because Wilfred was
so ugly, who would have him? I played the thick records over and over. “Come, Josephine, in my flying machine” a faraway voice tinkled. I had to keep winding the Victrola or the voice would slow down to a long moan. When Hazel was at home, all the women except Mother Mayes, who rested, waited for dinner in Hazel’s old room and talked about gloves and patterns and linens and parties. Hazel was always asking Mother for recipes even though she never had made a piece of toast and even had breakfast out. They tried on Hazel’s new hats and admired all her dresses, pale and delicate as Miami sunrises. Later, Mary Helen would say how tacky they were and Lord, if Hazel could see herself from the rear. If Hazel saw a dress she really liked, she bought it in every color it came in. Mother said she had a warehouse in Miami just for all the things she’d bought in triplicate.

Hazel swung the big car around the palm island in the middle of the broad street and came to a stop in front of Paulk’s Funeral Home, the prettiest house in town. I jumped out and before I could slam the door, Hazel pulled away.

As it turned out, Hazel was “too upset” to go to the funeral. It was because she was the only daughter, Daddy explained. Mother had another idea. “She’s never even been to the funeral home. I looked at the guest book. Believe you me, she’s up to something.” Daddy always took Hazel’s part and it made Mother furious. Hazel still called him “Boofa”—she’d tried “Beautiful” when he was born and “Boofa” ended up stuck to
him all his life. Hazel was taking it badly. Just before the cars pulled up to drive us to the church, I saw her in the kitchen. She was wearing a long rose-colored robe edged with swags of crochet. I’d never seen her hair out of its chignon and it hung thin and scraggly. Everyone else, even Mary Helen, who was always late, was waiting on the porch. Wilfred kept blotting his bald head with his handkerchief. The house was too hot. I was sent back to the back porch to tell my grandparents’ maid Fanny that our yardman Drew was on his way to get her. As I ran through the kitchen, Hazel was lifting a knife over the luscious chocolate cake Mother Mayes’s Missionary Circle had brought over. It was the best-looking cake I ever saw. Fanny was waiting right out back. She had on her black uniform and she was leaning on the lattice wall of the back porch, a checkerboard pattern of sunlight behind her. Her face was hidden in her hands and her shoulders shook. I stopped, holding open the screen door. Fanny looked up. “This is the saddest day, sugar. You don’t know how sad this day is.” She didn’t even tell me to close the door so the flies couldn’t get in.

“Drew’s coming in the truck. Mother says to get Willie Bell at our house.” I jumped down the back steps, ran once through the yard, touching all four trees as I passed, and back to the front porch where Daddy Jack and the others waited. My funeral dress, dark blue moiré with a wide lace collar, weighed a ton. I just hoped none of my friends saw me wearing the ugly thing.

As soon as the slow cars pulled off, Hazel, as I now imagine that day, lifts her long robe and runs up the stairs to her mother’s room. Just this morning Fanny aired it out and opened the heavy winter draperies. No one else had been in since Mama died. Hazel stops for an instant then pushes open the door as though someone were calling her in. Mama! Mama on the mantel in her wedding dress with Dad proud as a little god beside her. Mama’s clock, stopped at two on the organdy scarf, and there on the dresser all the bottles of White Shoulders, Boofa’s favorite perfume, and the silver brushes with the cherubs riding the waves. Hazel opens the drawer of the dressing table. Pins. A box of powder with a puff in it. Dusty rose nail polish and the familiar manicure set made of tortoiseshell. Instinctively, Hazel inspects her shell-pink crescent moons, takes the small scissors, snips off a tiny edge of her thumbnail cuticle, and brushes it to the floor. Two boxes of pills and a blue tassel bookmark. Hazel slides the drawer closed and opens the small one on the left. “Oh!” she says aloud. She reaches for the blue velvet box. The aquamarine ring. Hazel had wanted it since childhood. She slips it on her middle finger and holds her hand up to the light. For a moment, she remembers Thanksgiving when I sat on the footstool next to Mother Mayes before dinner. Mother Mayes rested with her feet up. Her corns are now as big as crocus bulbs on her little toes and her feet hurt. I was trying on her rings. I heard Mother Mayes saying “Of course, after I’m gone, you’re my namesake so you can choose whatever you want except the silver. That goes to the oldest son.”