Mississippi Sissy (13 page)

Early on, I coped with having the distinction of being the sissiest boy in Mississippi by befriending an imaginary black girl who had appeared at my side one Saturday afternoon in my grandparents' house, where Kim and Karole and I had recently taken refuge after our father had been killed in his car accident and my mother had begun to succumb to cancer. My mother had attempted, after my father's sudden death, to go back to school to get her teaching degree in English. She had only a diploma from a local business college and the thought of spending the rest of her days as a secretary who, as a beautiful widow, would be fair game for the wanton advances of a seersucker-wearing cracker boss in some Mississippi backwater, made her eyes brim with even more tears. “Just between us, Kevin, ‘shorthand' sounds to me more like a deformity from which some poor soul might
suffer, a physical affliction rather than a secretarial skill,” she said. I had asked her late one night why she was going back to college and she explained to me in her own way—amusing herself before she felt the need to amuse others—how much she loved language and how certain she was that the secretarial pool was not a place where her talents should be moored. “I always wanted to teach English but I had you children to raise and your daddy . . . well . . . he wouldn't . . . let's just say I had to raise him, too. Let's leave it at that.”

She was allowing me to stay up late with her that night while she wrote thank-you notes to all the people who had sent her sympathy cards and brought over casseroles after my father's funeral, her careful, inky cursive script filling her creamy stationery in an attempt, line by line, letter by letter, to shape her deepening sense of loss into something as indelible as that very ink, a legibility somehow lessening such loss, grief becoming but another of her duties to perform with a presumptive Southern grace. All that clandestine joy she once shared with me when my father wasn't around had vanished now that my father Was Not Around. All she was capable of sharing from then on was the grown-up sorrow she could not share with Kim and Karole. No show tunes had been sung since my father's car accident. None of her naughty laughter had made itself known in my vicinity. “Words should not be turned into squiggly little things like bugs to be squashed upon a page,” she continued, elaborating on her hatred of her secretarial skills when we stayed up whispering to each other that night as my brother and sister so easily slept. She stroked my face, my cheek an excuse for her to take a break from addressing the stack of envelopes she had to send to all her friends who still had husbands who were alive.

Her sadness, so sudden, so ferocious, was turning the welcome frivolity of her love of moviegoing, show biz gossip and rock-and-roll on the radio into something darker, richer, deepening it into the literary bent she'd always kept to herself but now hoped to render into
something that would help her pay the rent. It was a sadness that seemed to surpass even the loss she felt for my father and encompass what she was just beginning to sense: the loss of herself from encroaching disease. That night, even before the initial duties of her widowhood were completed, she was already letting go of being my mother and, while still in my presence, becoming my memory, a memory she sensed I would keep alive for my sleeping siblings, for my ever watchful self, for the curious strangers who would someday read the inky words that I too would carefully line up along a page, this very one, line by line, letter by letter, to tame my own loss into something indelible, legible, my own sense of duty finally fulfilled. “I've always lived my life as if I were taking down shorthand dictated by someone else,” she said. “Don't you dare do that. You be your own special word, Kevin. I know people call you a sissy. I know Daddy did a lot of the time, God rest his soul. Even I've called you that in my own way when I'm beside myself, and teasing the nearest person to me seems the only solution to the severity of one of my dark moods.” She stopped and almost cried again in my presence, but decided she had better not for I had witnessed too many of her tears in the preceding days. She stared instead right at me with her blue eyes. She handed me her pen and a piece of her stationery. “Write it down. Write down that word. S-I-S-S-Y.” I obeyed and wrote the letters as large as I could across the paper. “Now, whenever anybody calls you that again you remember how pretty that looks on there. Look at the muscles those S's have. Look at the arms on that Y. Look at the backbone that lone I has. What posture. What presence. See how proud that I is to stand there in front of you.” She paused, seeming no longer to ponder the letters on the page, but instead what her future might be. Would she really live long enough to become an English professor at some two-bit junior college, or would she die never knowing what would become of her children? Would we someday, like her, stay up late at night with our own sissy sons and try to explain away
the cruelty in the world to them? Her blue eyes fluttered as if a swoon were coming on, a look she got when her dark moods passed and she was about to be fun to be around once more. “The souls of words reside inside their sounds, Kevin. Always remember that. That's where the music is in language,” she said, sounding like her beloved Miranda in Katherine Anne Porter's
Pale Horse, Pale Rider,
her very favorite book. When Miranda encounters her old Cousin Eva on a train home to the South, she remarks that Eva, a Latin teacher, had told her not to bother about the sense of a Latin sentence when she was a girl, but to get the sound in her mind, trusting the music inherent in any language to lead her onward. “Even a word we think of as a mean one can be pretty if you listen to it in the right way,” my mother insisted. “Meaning has no meaning if you train your ear to listen to how lovely language is. It has its own scale. But don't ever scrutinize it,” she warned. “Feel it. Form it in your mouth.” She took a deep breath as if she were about to hit one of her high soprano notes in a secret lyric. “Sissysissysissysissysissysissy,” she instead incessantly whispered in my ear and began to tickle me. “Say it with Mommy. Sissysissysissysissy.” I did as I was told, gladdened to hear the hint of happiness hidden somewhere still inside her. “Sissysissysissysissy,” I called myself, our voices melding into a sibilant giggle we shared inside that strange and ugly little house into which we had just moved, without my father to threaten to hit us with his Big Black Belt or to hold us in his arms and say he was sorry or to fill the rooms with his butch-waxed smell, his fragmentary whistle, his loving, wary looks aimed our way.

My mother abruptly stopped her part of our giggle. I quieted mine in turn. We sat in silence as she stared down at her unfinished thank-you notes. She handed me a new roll of stamps to start licking for her, trusting me to put them on the envelopes just like she had instructed me. “And, God knows, Kevin,” she said, turning again to the matter-of-factness of our task, of all the tasks that now faced her. “If I'm ever going
to put more than another opened can of Chef Boy-ar-dee spaghetti and meatballs on the table for you children, I'm going to need a better diploma than the one I've got. That is, if I make it that far. Let's pray what I'm feeling inside is just the final throes of heartbreak and not something more horrible.” She stopped, touching her throat with a different kind of tenderness than that with which she had just touched my cheek, her fingers more tentative, less certain of their mission as they sought not to soothe but to search out something they could not yet quite decipher. Turning her gaze from mine, she then looked out the window across the moonlit field where the Hinds Junior College Hi-Steppers, a precision dance team of preening freshman and sophomore coeds, practiced their halftime routines in the afternoon sunshine five days a week next to our dank little house on that shaded and spooky cul-de-sac. My umbrageous memory of the place—furnished not only by the gigantic oak that hovered over us for the few months we lived there, but also by the unremitting mourning that spread out from my mother and covered us all—was relieved from time to time by sitting at that same window and watching those Hi-Steppers practice in their sequined outfits glistening in the afternoon sun. The oak rustled against the roof that night as I sat watching her contemplate the moonlight where it fell on the now empty field she had forbidden us to play on when those sequined coeds were out there kicking and carrying on. I waited for her to speak. It was the first time she put a word—one I could not understand except to know that it must be as horrifying as it sounded—to the fear that was forming along with the tumor inside her, a fear that was more threatening to me at that point than any tumor, for it was obviously, unlike the tumor, contagious. I had caught it. “I wonder, Kevin. Mommy really does wonder: Can heartbreak
metasta-size?.”
she asked, then returned to writing her thank-you notes.

________________

Hinds Junior College in Raymond, Mississippi, where my father had been a track coach and Physical Education teacher for only a couple of semesters at the time of his death, not only had given my mother a full scholarship, but also that old run-down, badly shingled, abandoned faculty house for us to live in. This was after the school had forced us to move out of one of the newer brick versions where my parents, in the last happy months of their lives, had spent so many of their nights playing Scrabble with other faculty couples. Scrabble was my father's favorite board game because of the glee he felt when forcing the other players to accept the dirty words he liked to come up with when he'd link his letters to the ones already on the board, the merriment he caused now only a memory for us in the ugly house's eerie silence, the only sound in that moment the scratchy resumption of my mother's cursive writing against the blank pieces of stationery, a tiny echo of the oak scratching at the roof overhead. I watched her write until her hand began to cramp and she led me to her bedroom where she had me pull shut for her once more the forest green and azure drapery my grandmother had made as a housewarming present, the deeply hued fabric lending the room an algae-filled, undersea quality, especially when the only light allowed in it was the oft switched-on reading lamp by her bed. Understandably, my mother was having trouble sleeping after the suddenness of my father's death and found that if she held me to her, spooning with me atop her blue bedspread, she could drift off for a while, giving me the option of staying there with her through the night or making my way back to my own room like the little man she was insisting I become. “You're the
man
of the house, now, Kevin, being the oldest and all,” she would reiterate for me when I insisted on being only seven, not sure that I wanted to be what was being demanded of me within the family structure left us. When holding me too tightly to her did not induce the sleep she so needed, she found that if she read aloud to us her own form of bedtime stories both our eyes would maybe tire. She
much preferred adult fare to fairy tales and began to pass on to me during those “bedtime story” nights her love of literature, even of the lighter variety. She kept a copy of Helen Gurley Brown's
Sex and the Single Girl
under her Bible, now greatly ignored because of her anger at God. She would dip into Brown's how-to manual from time to time during those lamp-lit nights when she found that current bestseller the pick-me-up (a few recipes, some racy advice, a randy comment here and there, which she'd try to explain to me) that she needed in her new single state, before her moroseness would settle in once more and she turned for comfort to her most cherished of writers, Katherine Anne Porter.
Ship of Fools
was the author's first big hit. It had just come out that year, around the time of my father's death, and the thought of Porter having her own bestseller on her hands seemed the one thing other than Helen Gurley Brown's sexual bromides that cheered my mother up a bit. She loved reading aloud to me from
Ship of Fools,
her favorite scene concerning how one of the characters had died trying to save a drowning bulldog.

She also kept her dog-eared copy of
Pale Horse, Pale Rider
at the ready and pointed out that Miranda, the main character of the book, was eight years old, just like I was about to be, when she introduced me to her in the first section of the initial novella in the collection,
Old Mortality.
I can still hear my mother reading to me over and over those very last words in the story in her soft Southern accent during the hours when sleep was refusing all entreaty. It is a passage in which Porter lets us know the very essence of Miranda's developing character, the passage that has always served as a kind of outline for me to follow when looking back over the years and attempting to crack my mother's own complicated personality. “What is the truth, she asked herself as intently as if the question had never been asked, the truth, even about the smallest, the least important of all things I must find out? and where shall I begin to look for it?” Miranda finally muses in
Old Mortality
as she looks around at her life in Louisiana, just as I look
now at mine in Mississippi. “Her mind closed stubbornly against remembering,” Porter writes of Miranda, “not the past but the legend of the past, other people's memory of the past, at which she had spent her life peering in wonder like a child at a magic-lantern show. Ah, but there is my own life to come yet, she thought, my own life now and beyond. I don't want any promises. I won't have false hopes, I won't be romantic about myself. I can't live in this world any longer, she told herself, listening to the voices back of her. Let them tell their stories to each other. Let them go on explaining how things happened. I don't care. At least I can know the truth about what happens to me, she assured herself silently, making a promise to herself, in her hopefulness, her ignorance.”