Cybill Disobedience (4 page)
The custodial grandmother, Clara Shobe, was known as Ma-Maw. Every Sunday morning she chose the plumpest chicken in the yard, casually wringing its neck for dinner, and the storm cellar was lined with Mason jars of her bread-and-butter pickles and Prohibition “home brew.” My grandfather, the electronics wizard, made sure they had the first telephone in those parts and installed a gas range, but Ma-Maw preferred the old wooove and wouldn’t let him remove it. With their only son gone, the older couple adopted a series of orphans who helped satisfy my mother’s endless yearning for siblings. On summer nights, she caught lightning bugs in a canning jar and put their illuminated tails on the boys’ model planes.
Patty Shobe was not destined for animal husbandry but for husbandry of another kind. In 1943, she was engaged to an air force bombardier who was the scion of a prominent Memphis banking family. Like all the young ladies in the area, she dug a pretty dress out of the cedar closet and went to help entertain the servicemen at the Millington Naval Air Station, where her father was serving as head flight instructor. A handsome young cadet saw her swaying to Glenn Miller and asked her to dance. He was William Jennings Shepherd from Buckingham Courthouse, Virginia. (The town took the name of its most prestigious edifice, which was designed by Thomas Jefferson, but was so small that it reported only two surnames to the census: Spencer and Shepherd.)
“Do you know Cy Shobe?” Patty asked her dance partner. “He’s my father.”
“Oh, c’mon,” Shep answered. “I’ve had five girls tell me that tonight.” Apparently my grandfather’s name was invoked to ensure proper behavior from any man dancing with his “daughter.”
Bill Shepherd’s mother and grandmother had died on the same day, both from cervical cancer, surely evoking disturbing feelings about female fragility and creating a powerful urge for someone to ply the womanly arts in his life, to do the caretaking. He proposed to Patty on their third date, saying he urgently needed an answer before being assigned overseas. When she accepted, the two of them made an appointment to see her former fiancée’s father at the bank, carrying a Dear John letter to be forwarded. Her guilt at writing “I’m sorry I’ve fallen in love with someone else” was compounded when she was told the bombardier had just been shot down over Germany and was a prisoner of war. My father never did get shipped out; the POW returned a war hero and married a childhood friend of Mother’s. More than fifty years later, this woman sometimes encounters my mother in Memphis and sighs, “You know, Patty, he’s still in love with you.”
It was simply taken for granted that my father would go to work at Shobe, Inc. (his only experience had been on a high school football field and in the cockpit of a pilot trainer), but that opportunity dissolved into a classic scenario of the son-in-law who feels gotten for cheap. Dinnertime at my house was often punctuated by his tirades about Shobe stinginess, despite his ascension from warehouse stock boy to executive vice president. “Nobody’s told the son of a bitch that the slaves were freed a hundred years ago,” he railed. “How’s it fair that he lives so high on the hog while we eat chitlins?”
My parents must have been salivating when they went to Little Rock to help settle the estate of Da-Dee’s Aunt Diloma, one of the first women in Arkansas to work for the phone company. Jilted by her fiancée, she lived with Dickensian eccentricity: she continued in her job for half a century, a stylish woman in cinch waisted suits and a Gibson--girl pompadour (her fifty year employee pin is still hanging from my mother’s charm bracelet), but she talked to cows and secreted money in mattresses and walls. Da-Dee got most of the cash, plus a fortune in AT&T stock, hidden in burlap tobacco sacks, and my parents hoped some of the windfall might trickle down to them. The Shobes denied themselves little but acted as if gifts to their only child and grandchildren were debts to be grudgingly paid. Maybe they couldn’t forget that in Memphis, unless your money came from King Cotton, you weren’t rich, just nouveau. Maybe the Depression mentality endemic to their geration had ripened into a canon about the perversity of the universe, which holds that good luck is transient and bad times last forever. Maybe it was just a pissing contest between my father and grandfather. But the Shobes had little talent for sharing.
Most of my childhood was spent in a one-story brick house on Highland Park Place (you could stand at the front door and see straight through to the backyard) with a fake fireplace mantel, plastic violets in a vase, and a mechanical bird that sang in a cage (a gift from my grandmother). One of the few genuine furnishings was a leather top table that became a disaster of watermarks from cocktail glasses. My mother pasted S&H green stamps into books and redeemed them at the catalog store on Union Street for a prized lamp with a silk shade. I took a cold bath on nights when my sister’s rank as firstborn gave her priority and there wasn’t enough hot water to fill the tub a second time. Neither was there money for the piano lessons I wanted, much less the instrument itself. So I borrowed my grandmother’s old ukulele and songbook I found in her attic and taught myself everything from “In the Evening by the Moonlight” to “Ja Da.” Whenever my parents had guests, they insisted I entertain. When I finished my songs everyone always seemed slightly underwhelmed. This definitely eroded my confidence, but nothing, it seemed, would ever stop me from singing: It was something I just had to do, like walking or breathing.
My grandparents, by sharp contrast, had a piano and organ in each of their three homes (Memphis, Shoals Creek, and Fort Lauderdale, including one painted Moma’s favorite cherry red. (My mother detested the color, and after my grandmother’s death, I was given the red organ on the condition that I have it refinished. When I was ten, we got a tabletop keyboard with a fake wood veneer and a songbook showing how to push preset “chord buttons. The spine of the book was permanently opened to the two melodies that got played ten times a day: “On Top of Old Smokey” for Terry, “Liebenstraum” for me. (When I first saw the title of the song, I thought it was an ode to Liederkranz, the stinky cheese my mother loved but my father banned from the house.)
Less than a mile but light years away was my grandparents’ elegant three-story Tudor house on East Drive, with an S for Shobe on the awnings, harlequin print drapes at the windows, jewel-toned Oriental carpets, and crystal chandeliers. The silverware was gold- plated, and the furniture was made of rich woods, rather too grandly ornate and ostentatious for my tastes (then or now) but substantial in a way that represented money. Visiting was entry to Valhalla, seductive but tenuous. They financed what they considered good for business or social standing, like membership for my family at the Chickasaw Country Club, even though the monthly dues took food off our table. As a child, I gorged on several grilled cheese sandwiches a day at the poolside cafe and an astonishing tomato ice cream in the dining room, and I stood under the shower in the ladies’ locker room for an hour at a time, never running out of hot water as I did at home.
The family business being appliances, my grandparents bragged that they had a television in every room, even the bathroom (competing in entertainment value with a book called
Jokes for the John
that lived on top of the wicker hamper). My parents did achieve some permanent prestige on Highland Park Place with the first TV on our block (perpetually tuned to wrestling or
Dragnet)
and the first air conditioner (installed in my parents’ bedroom, where all of us gathered when the August heat sucked the breath out of our own rooms). We participated in the careless abundance of my grandparents’ lives, like the wondrous fruit ambrosia with marshmallows, coconut, and pecans, or the three kinds of turkey dressing and cavalcade of pies at Thanksgiving.
Perhapss only the disparity with my grandparents’ groaning table, but I never felt that there was enough to eat at home, with only rare trips to those exotic pleasure palaces: the Joy Young Chop Suey restaurant and Pappy’s Lobster Shack. What we never ran out of was pickles, pork rinds, and canned Vienna sausages, and we ate a lot of “falling off the stool” eggs (soft-boiled and mashed with butter), so named because my brother fell backward off the stool the first time Mother made them. About once a month my grandmother would take me to the “curb market,” where local farmers brought their produce to town. She’d buy a big bag of wild greens called “polk salad,” which she described as a spring tonic (the digestive equivalent of spring cleaning), and we got thinly sliced ham sandwiches slathered with mayonnaise from a large man with the improbable name of Mr. Ham.
My mother had a taste for sophisticated foods like artichokes that weren’t popular in the South, but these were so expensive that she examined our plates for microscopic edible morsels possibly overlooked. (‘You haven’t cleaned that leaf,” she’d say. “Do you know how much it cost?”) I scrounged food with the thrift and cunning of the Artful Dodger, stealing from my brother’s dish when he looked the other way and licking the pots and pans before washing them.
Half a mile away, in the home of my best friend Jane Howard, there was a ubiquitous earthenware crock of homemade pimento cheese, and okra stewed with tomatoes, and endless rashers of bacon for breakfast--only part of the salvation she provided in my life. Jane and I bonded in the fifth grade when, as teacher’s pet, she was given the honored responsibility of collecting the girls’ purses after lunch, to be stowed in a closet during recess--a pile of child-size pastel plastics and black patent leather. She needed an assistant and chose me. Very soon we discovered our mutual passion for reading everything from the Nancy Drew mysteries to Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights.
Jane and I defied the carefully delineated description for southern female adolescence. “Those girls have too much fun,” a neighbor observed to my mother. (Jane continued this pattern with my children, whom she taught to burp on cue, her theory being that there are some things in life you just need to know.) I was awed by her ability to shoplift licorice by stuffing a huge wad of it in her mouth, and when she failed to grasp the concept of grapefruit segmenting in home ec., she glued her botched slices back together, to the outrage of Mrs. Kernodel. We played soldiers in the musty third-floor attic of my grandparents’ house with German military memorabilia--some of the men who trained under Da-Dee have brought the souvenirs back at the end of the war. We joined the Brownies, thinking that we were going to whittle and tie knots and light campfires, but the troop leader thought it more valuable to learn proper place settings, and her idea of an interesting craft project was waterproofing paper bags from the Piggly-Wiggly grocery with shellac so we could sit on the ground without sullying our uniforms.
I got admonished and ousted by parents and teachers for a lot of Jane-inspired misconduct (the only time I got sent to the principal’s office was after Jane double-dog-dared me to slide down the school banister), but she often got away clean and had an enviable ability to defy grown-up rules and without seeming insolent. My mother once tried to enlist her in clearing the detritus of an evening at home--the empty bottles of Wild ‘Turkey left like deflowered vases on the windowsill, the stale stubs of cigarettes heaped so high in ceramic ashtrays that they’d spill on the way to the trash can. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Shepherd,” Jane said, “but I didn’t make this mess and I’m not cleaning it up.”
At eleven o’clock every day, ed vases r had a Coca-Cola, which I sometimes prepared to her specifications: the ice-cold soda had to be poured like beer down the side of a tall glass to preserve every bit of carbonation. There were slightly different regulations for cocktails: I was taught to select the highball glass (squat but not too squat), measure out a jigger of Scotch and fill the glass with ice, leaving just a little room for water. I never saw Mother drink a beer, but once when I knocked someone else’s beer off a tray, my mother said, “That’s the best thing you can spill because the smell doesn’t stay in the carpet.” (I still say that but have no idea if it’s true.)
In my family, the happy hour began before noon on weekends with Bloody Marys, by sundown on the average weekday. Drinking was a subject of unabashed levity, without menacing undercurrents. There was a gag clock at the lake house bearing the epigram NO DRINKS BEFORE 5, the punch line being fives at every point on the dial, and cocktail napkins imprinted with whimsical instructions on “How to Recover from a Hangover.” Da-Dee had a full bar in the room back behind his office, a dimly lit tabernacle to the manly creeds of liquor and cocksmanship, with a plaque praising “men who come together and find contentment before capacity.” I liked to sneak up onto the tall bar stools and touch the beer mugs that had naked ladies as handles.
Da-Dee’s drinking followed a predictable and not very alarming pattern, winding down to sullen solitude. Moma just tried to keep up with him. One night at the lake house when I awakened to hear virulent cursing, my sister informed me it was a bogeyman from the bottom of the lake (she had recently been impressed by readings about the Loch Ness monster). But the disturbance was just Moma, roaring drunk and attempting to move a sofa upstairs by herself. She gave up drinking for twenty years, then started taking “just a sip” of wine, ending up with a twelve-ounce tumbler and turning the basement into a wine cellar, the ceiling covered with clusters of plastic grapes and stocked solely with her favorite Blue Nun.
It was said, in a jocular tone, that my father could find his way driving home by feeling for the curb with his foot. One Thanksgiving he passed out in the front vestibule, the door wedged open by his inert body until a chilly draft alerted the household. My brother grabbed his arms, my sister and I his ankles, dragging him far enough inside to close the door, then we turned out the lights and ignored the phone, pretending that no one was home. During their parties I huddled in bed under an inadequate bunting of protection provided by my nubby white chenille spread. With cotton balls stuffed in my ears, I sang to drown out the raucous laughter from downstairs.