Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir (22 page)

Soon after Daddy died, I began dating juniors in high school. We were all football mad, then in the summers the bush league baseball teams came down from North Carolina and all my friends went to the field in the sweltering nights under the bug-hazed lights and the girls decided which players were cute. A few girls even went out with the gum-chewing boys but my mother said they probably were not from nice families and I was not to speak to them. She took a stand; usually, she didn’t notice what I did or when I came home.

I loved high school and became part of every activity. I worked on the newspaper, acted in plays, decorated the Legion Hall for dances, joined the sub-debs and came down the ramp in the ethereal pink tulle I wore in my sister’s wedding. The only deb without a father, I held the arm of my brother-in-law Cleve. David, a year older, who’d been like a twin, and I fell in love. I swam in his green eyes, like reflections of pines in the stream.
He was so handsome. I reveled in his jealousy when older boys paid attention to me. That was passion, I thought. We parked on the side of the house after movies and kissed until the windows steamed. Frankye came out on the porch and shouted, “You are making a mistake you will live to regret.” David crouched down and we laughed, though it was mortifyingly not funny at all.

I ignore Frankye as much as I can. I am in high school; she is in free fall. I zealously pour out all her gin when I find bottles hidden in the clothes hamper or the hedge. “Why do you do this?” I ask her. “You are ruining everything.”

“You always exaggerate. I don’t drink more than anyone else. Look at … well, lots of people.” My sisters, out of the chaos but sometimes home for weekends, plead and she quits for the length of their visits, pouring a big glug as they back out of the driveway.

One morning I skip school and go over to The House to ask Hazel for help. Not only was Frankye drinking like crazy, Daddy Jack was, too. He ate every meal at our house. Though he mocked, he never overtly criticized Frankye, but with the pot roast, I had a big helping of his criticism. “You don’t know what you’re doing, wasting time with David.” He clatters his fork on the plate. “That two-by-four, the most common piece of wood in the stack.”

Hazel listens carefully, I think, then says, “Sugar, you always were an imaginative child but, really, this is the limit. Why,
Daddy sits in the same pew every Sunday and is just tireless in good work, a pillar of the community.” She adjusts the lace dickey around her neck and straightens her spine. “Now that Boofa is gone, he’s the one who gets the nigras out of jail. He sits on the bank board.” Her voice rises for her final pitch. “He’s the one who named Fitzgerald ‘the Colony City.’ ”

“Yes, but that’s not what I mean.…”

“As for Frankye,” she interrupts, “she’s your mother,
the only mother you’ve got
, and you should have more respect, even if Frankye didn’t come from here and I know nothing about her people.” She flips me over like a little hotcake on the griddle.

At night, Frankye stumbles to the door of my room and berates me for causing the “ruination” of her life. She’d always ranted a bit against Daddy, especially focusing on his adoration of Mother Mayes and Hazel.

Now it is my turn. She improvises fast as a jazz musician on my faults for an hour or more. “If it were not for you I would not be stuck in this hellhole,” she begins. Then she’s off and running, performing her riffs—
you keep your head in a book when you could be doing something, you drive everything into the ground, you just live in the woods, go to the woods, see if I care—
and listing her missed chances, Daddy’s licentiousness and transgressions. An apparition in a transparent nightgown, she seems to glow around the edges of her body. She’s weaving and slurring. I’ll end up sorry, sorry, sorry. I’ll make a bed I’ll have to lie in. I’m courting disaster, and will end up sorry, sorry.

I stay silent. I will myself into a long-stemmed rose, imagining the leaves sprouting off my shoulders, the thorns, my face a bloom where a bee might want to slumber. A rose cradled in
green tissue paper, and I must keep still so there is no crackle. If I respond, the sizzling fuse of her face explodes. I am unappreciative of everything she sacrifices, a smart aleck, and will waste my life with a local yo-ho. My Little Richard records particularly incite her. When I play “Rip It Up” and “Long Tall Sally,” my friends and I gyrate as we sing
whole lotta shakin’
and imitate what my mother calls his “jungle” cries.

“He’s nasty! He picked cotton at your boyfriend’s grandmother’s farm. Even the other nigras wouldn’t drink after him.” I would like to turn up the volume of “Rip It Up” to maximum decibels to drown her out. I would like to stand on my bed and belt out “Keep a-knockin’ but you can’t come in.” But she’s rockin’ it up, rippin’ it up on Saturday nights and all other nights, when she does not feel at all fine.

On some nights as she wavers in the doorway, I imagine that I am a skeleton with thin bones lying under the linen sheet. No sensation in my skin, just the slow growth of my hair and fingernails. I think of turning a fire hose on her, washing her down the hall, her blue nylon gown skidding. I must have laughed because she shrieks that I am the worst of her three children. As though we are all bad, when usually my sisters are held up as paragons who married well. She suddenly burns out like a lightbulb, turns to the dark house, and wanders off, finished with her mad and fearful lamentation.

I have many normal friends. Normal lives exist. I spend as much time as possible with them. I am embarking on a quest
to live a normal life. By day the raids against me never happened. Frankye spent sunny mornings with Willie Bell, making lists and accomplishing them. They baked caramel cakes, rearranged closets, and waxed what didn’t need waxing. Some days, though, she wouldn’t get out of bed and would still have on her robe when I came home for dinner at noon. On the kitchen windowsill, the weather forecasting house she brought me from Macon sent out a witch or a beautiful girl from a shingled Alpine doorway. The girl, though, often swung out when it was cloudy; the witch appeared on bright days.

At school, I’m out from under. I’m elected “prettiest eyes,” “best personality,” “best dressed” (don’t tell Daddy Jack), and “most original.” I’m reading more than ever. I’ve started on the left wall of the Carnegie Library and plan to read my way around
the room. Frankye returns from a shopping trip to Macon and brings me
Anna Karenina
. Neither of us has heard of Tolstoy but she picked it out because it was thick and would take me a while to read. She gave me the first book that lifted me off my chair. Anna also raised a disquiet that formerly belonged only to Frankye. That train, coming round the bend.

I could remember Daddy telling me that I was smart enough to do anything I wanted to do, although he impractically used as examples that I could scale Mount Everest or juggle three oranges. I’m selected to edit the yearbook because the French teacher thinks I might have some writing talent. I can’t wait to meet my friends at night when we work at her house on the layout and photos. She’s a widow, terse and controlled. I glimpse into the guest bedroom with plain white curtains and bedspread, and wish that I could move in. She says I can name the theme of the annual and I call it
Spirit of Place
.

Our plays reach state competition, and I win an essay contest. Some reluctance keeps me from cheerleading, though I go to all the games to watch David, number thirty-five. The football team elects me their sponsor. I adore every moment of Fitz-Hi. Frankye occasionally tosses me a line, too. She’ll vary her accusations and shout, “Don’t do what I do, do what I say do.” “Don’t follow my footsteps.” “Fend for yourself. There’s no one to fend for you.”
Fend
, I thought. What a nice word. She bought a revolving bookcase from a law office and refinished the “garish” oak, so that it resembled walnut. My books, she said, deserved a good home. So finely spun, the threads to hang on.

Daddy’s brother Mark let us use his house at Daytona Beach, a two-story gray shingle, where the tough St. Augustine grass lawn met the dunes. We’ve never owned a dishwasher, and put in the wrong soap. We come back to find the whole kitchen engulfed with suds. We scoot around the kitchen, laughing like crazy. At the auction near the beach, Frankye bids on and wins a diamond watch. Her friend Gladys and her daughter Nancy come down to visit. Nancy buys a monkey at the dime store. He’s cute at first but turns nasty in Aunt Emmy’s immaculate house and swings around the room, dropping smelly turds. We play constant canasta and take long walks on the deserted beach.

I try to flirt with the lifeguards, but they have their own bronzed-breasted acolytes. Gladys and Nancy leave, and we are
alone. I read in the sunroom, which smells like moldy puzzles, while my mother paces outside, ice rattling in her fifth or sixth drink. On the beach every afternoon, I run my hands under the warm sand, feeling the big pulse of the ocean. She’s out in the water. I want her to wash in this primitive surf, turn clean as a scallop shell. The water clears around her ankles. She turns to me and says, “Cold.”

When I look at photographs of my mother at forty-eight, fifty, I see what I did not see then. Even in black-and-white, the intense blue of her eyes is beginning to fade. I would like to step into the frame, take her hand, and lead her away. If someone had, surely she might still have thrived. Fallible, fragile, she was saved by no one. Least of all by herself.

At this time, I began the dream that was to reoccur for twenty years. I am in water up to my chin. The current rises and falls, and I am only barely able to breathe. That I am above water at all is because my feet balance on the submerged shoulders of my mother.

I couldn’t wait to go to college. Daddy Jack walked into the dining room where I sat at the table reading catalogs. I wanted to go to Sophie Newcomb but knew nothing about it other than that it was in New Orleans. For years late at night, I’d listened to a black-Cajun radio station that somehow made it across the airwaves all the way to south Georgia. The music! I was pulled toward that raucous sound. The disc jockey advertised White Rose Petroleum Jelly night after night. I knew about ruined plantation houses with oak alleys, and I kept a record album propped on my bedside table so I could see the cover photo of the golden crescent of the Mississippi at sunset. I was interested in Vanderbilt because I heard that’s where poets went. I ordered catalogs from Pembroke (Brown) and Wellesley. Reading those two, I had visions of myself in a gored tweed skirt and starched white blouse editing the school news, a practical and serious person. The catalog from Randolph-Macon Woman’s College
came, too, sent by a very nice friend of mother who went there in the dark ages and told my mother it was the finest school for girls in the United States.