Charms for the Easy Life (4 page)

There existed no similar tracts for young girls, but my grandmother broadcast information anyway. On the girls’ birthday cards she would write the time and date she would arrive in person and tell them, literally, what was what. She took each of them a package marked “Moon-Time Things,” and inside were little muslin sacks marked “False Unicorn for Cramps”; “Evening Primrose Oil for Moodiness”; “Goldenseal for Itching”; “Horehound for Bloating.” She explained girls’ bodies to them, corrected ruinous impressions created by the Baptists, and always ended her discussions with the same message I was to hear more times than a few: “Kiss all you want to. Kissing’s fine, nothing more than uptown shopping on downtown business. But if you suffer him to put that ugly thing in you before you’re married, do not come to me to ask how to undo what you have so stupidly done.”

F
OR THREE DAYS in 1936, when I was twelve, I sprawled my body on our divan much in the manner of Oscar Wilde, who was still a favorite of my mother‘s, although his influence was considered no less corruptive than it had been during her years at Miss Nash’s School. I lay there refusing to budge until my father allowed me to attend the wake of my closest friend. Her name was Ida O’Shea, and she could, of all things, knit and crochet like a woman. She had been sick with a rampaging flu and had not been able to play with me all week. One Friday morning her alternately abusive and negligent mother had left her asleep at home with a spiking fever to go around and deliver the fine laundry she did weekly for town ladies, and when she returned she saw that the child had choked on her own vomit.

My parents argued about my demand continuously. Although my father’s only justification was, “It will not be good for her,” he said it with such vehemence that I started to wonder what he might know that my mother and I didn’t. This lasted only until my mother screamed that his chief problem in life was his inability to look anything in the face, and this trait would not be passed along to me. Then they fought over what exactly he couldn’t face, the answer being his unfaithfulness, the way he lived his life fidgeting to get out of the house and meet some woman somewhere. I knew the fight wasn’t so much over my demand to attend the wake as it was an opportunity for them to fight over which one loved the other less. My mother finally won by reminding him that she had let him do as he pleased for years, that she had borne the strain of a life without his love and respect, that she was appalled that he could pronounce on my emotional well-being when he couldn’t keep up with my birthday. He left with the promise that he’d be back when he pleased, and this meant two or three days. It always had. I know he spent at least part of his time complaining of our intransigence to his girlfriend, who no doubt impressed him with her ability to listen, a trait a wayward husband looks for in a woman. Even if the woman was a lonelyheart who would’ve listened to anything for any amount of time, I’m sure he was able to convince both himself and her that my mother was a shrew. People like him thrive on fantasy in the manner of children and criminals.

Once he was gone, my mother told me to bathe, and then dress in black. I remember feeling as if I had at last been given permission to go to the circus. If anything of the morbidity of what I was about to do passed through my mind, it was only that I was going to Ida’s house to play dead with her. My mother said that while I was dressing she would telephone my grandmother to see if she wanted to go. I became even more excited, knowing that my grandmother attended every wake within a twenty-mile radius of her house, having laid out most of the bodies herself. She called them big coffee-drinks. Grieving families were touched by her presence, never blaming her for deaths of loved ones; they understood that if their relatives could have been healed, she would have healed them.

It was dusk when we got to my grandmother’s. She was waiting by the road, wearing the same mourning garb her mother had worn from the time of Sherman’s march until she died, when it had to be taken off so she could be buried in her wedding dress, according to her wishes. And yes, it did look worse for wear, but if someone had asked my grandmother whom she most resembled standing on the side of the road rearranging this black cobwebby dress around her body, she would’ve responded: Queen Victoria.

Before the Depression, country deaths were the odor of camphor and chrysanthemums, yet in the worst of these times deaths were just the odor of camphor, flowers being too great an expense for mourners to bear. I could smell the camphor before we were in the door, and I sank down onto the bottom step of the child’s house. Terror and nausea struck together and held me down, for how long I cannot say. I remember holding my knees up to my chest, feeling the new rises in my black dress, and saying to my mother and grandmother through my tears, “Ida was so proud of her brassiere.” I looked up at my grandmother, and for the first time in my life this woman who doled out compassion in thimblefuls took my hands and pulled me up into her chest and said, “You’re my little bird. If we don’t go in, you’ll always wonder.”

I walked through the house sandwiched so tightly between my mother and grandmother that had I lifted my feet off the floor I would’ve been carried along. I clung to my grandmother’s dress so hard that later in the evening she asked my mother to repair the rip underneath her sleeve. She didn’t sew, or wouldn’t. We went directly to the coffee urn and then took our seats. My grandmother poured swallows of coffee into her saucer for me. I wasn’t the only child there. Three children from the community had been scrubbed raw and starched in gum arabic and were sitting bolt upright on the sofa. As I sat and stared at the brown spots on my grandmother’s hand, one of the children began to cough. She had what we called smothering sickness, and there with the room so stifling-thick with oil smoke and camphor, she struggled to breathe. Her mother snapped from across the room, “For Jesus’ sake, take a deep breath!” My grandmother told me to sit and be still, and she went over to the child and rubbed her back and told her how to breathe on slow counts of “one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi.” The child’s mother said, “Thank you, Charlie Kate. I hope I don’t owe you anything.” My grandmother didn’t react to this at all. She came back and sat beside me and said, “When you’re ready to go over by Ida, tell me. Otherwise, we’ll drink all their coffee and go home.”

If I craned my neck, I could see the coffin well enough from where I sat. I forced myself to do this once. Ida had always been such a slip of a thing, with pale gray eyes and a tiny uplifted nose, both of which she despised and yearned to trade for what my mother had always termed my aggressive features. Because of the way she was propped, I could see only the ruffles on her favorite dress, and her beautiful nose. She seemed to be sniffing the air above her, which curdled with the camphor and the corned beef and cabbage her mother boiled perpetually. I couldn’t see this from where I sat, but I assumed that her leftover medicine was beside her, brown bottles of tonic my grandmother had prescribed for dehydration. Camphor rags soaked in two tin buckets on the floor at either end of the coffin, and at one point her wailing mother hobbled up and freshened the rags in full view of us all. I had seen this same mother beat Ida and her brother with an old corset stay. I remember pulling my legs up into my seat and nudging my head up underneath my grandmother’s arm like a cat. She smelled of Mavis powder and mothballs. My mother was on the other side of me with one hand gripping my thigh. She smelled of her lavender bath. I asked my grandmother if I could go home with her. She nodded that I could. My mother whispered, “Can I go, too?” She nodded again.

That night I fell asleep in my grandmother’s feather bed to dream not at all. The next morning I found a valerian root underneath my pillow and was brought clover tea to drink. I convalesced at her house for four days, wearing her ancient nightgown and her ancient pantaloons, watching my mother read, looking up at my grandmother every now and then, asking without asking how she could ever return to her sad house, asking if there might be some measure of virtue in retreat. I wonder whether my grandmother had been asking herself that since she left Pasquotank County and Camelia’s memory and all the Roosevelt letters she buried by her grave. I was strong enough to go home, but that in no way meant I wanted to. My grief had been plain and unpoetic, and the hole in my heart would’ve grown wide enough and deep enough to consume me had my mother and grandmother not kept me with them, and still. My grandmother put me to sleep those afternoons and evenings by reading to me from
The New England Journal
of
Medicine,The Old Farmer’s Almanac,
and
The Atlanta Constitution.
I became fascinated with her mind, enamored of her muscular soul.

My father came home late on the evening my mother and I returned home. He made no excuses, offered no apologies. He passed the table where my mother and I sat playing Chinese checkers, and went to bed. My mother slept with me. The next day was Saturday, Maveen’s day off, a day I had always associated with eating a roast beef platter at the Sir Walter Hotel, but that day my mother and I ate at home because she couldn’t work the swelling out of her face. She had cried so long and so hard that her face was puffed into one large, pink welt. This is what had happened to her: She had gone into the bedroom early in the morning and picked my father’s clothes up off the floor. Cleaning out his pockets, she found his wedding band. She shook him awake and asked him why it was there and not on his finger. He mumbled, “It hurts her feelings.” Then he rolled over and went back to sleep. He slept until noon.

In the meantime, we went to my grandmother’s. She was sitting at her white metal table pressing pills. My mother told her the story, making large motions with her arms. When she finished, she said, “I want you to do something about him, not kill him, but make him sick. I’ve had enough.”

My grandmother said she could not do it. “I can make them well,” she said, “but I will not make them sick.”

My mother tried to change her mind, but it didn’t work. My grandmother finally cut her off by saying, “Don’t worry yourself. I’ve seen him out and about places. He’s due for a stroke of paralysis or something nastier. His facial capillaries are exploding daily, even the ones on his ears, a true sign of something ugly to come. But even if that weren’t the case, I wouldn’t make him sick. You know I never do that.”

She had a certain integrity in that regard. She refused to cross over the line from natural medicine into black magic, although in many cases, if she had not combined useless folk remedies with treatments she judged to be therapeutic, her uneducated and overly superstitious patients would not have trusted her. But still, she had to remind people of what she would and would not do for them. I had heard her tell patients many times, “I do not perform voodoo. I do not even dabble.” Once I watched her throw a young man out of her house because he would not accept her refusal to conjure his wife. He wanted to hire my grandmother at an inflated rate to toss a bag of cemetery dirt into his yard at midnight. His wife had been unfaithful, and this particular hex, he believed, would keep the woman in a constant state of disappointment. My grandmother said, “If she’s living with you, she’s that way already. Get out of here and never come back.” She wouldn’t deal in the psyche, unless a broken heart, for example, had played on the nerves and thrown a body off kilter. This was the case the day I watched her wrap a piece of valerian root in bleached muslin for a young woman who had ground all the enamel off her back teeth. She had been thrown over for, I was sure, a prettier and smarter girl. She wasn’t so smart and pretty. She asked my grandmother what she should do if sleeping with the valerian root underneath her pillow for the prescribed seven nights did not work. My grandmother looked up from the seven-knotted string she was tying around the muslin and said: “Get over him.”

My father was dead in two months. My first monthly started the week he died. This is what may have happened to him: One evening my mother called God to the house, and He came. People look for God their entire lives, but all my mother had to do was whisper, “I need you. Hurry.” He no doubt knocked Himself out getting to her, as she was such a trophy among his creations. My mother was sitting up in bed, working on her cuticles. He asked her what He could do for her, what she most desired. She looked over at my father sleeping and breathing in his gurgling, vulgar way, and He knew. He must have told my mother to go to sleep. He promised her a dream, something lush she would enjoy.

She wouldn’t notice the sudden quiet after all the years of my father’s sleeping racket.

That morning she came and sat on the edge of my bed the way she had a thousand times before in my life. She gave me the news as if she had just come from a hospital deathwatch, as if my father had been ill and in pain and was now finally released from his misery. She whispered, “He’s gone. Go start the coffee. I’m going to call Mother.”