Ugly Ways (15 page)

Then, she left the kitchen. Betty had watched her so she knew how it went. Mudear would put on the pot over a high flame and go pick up the phone to call her friend Carrie. Or she would take a magazine and go into the bathroom for twenty or so minutes. Just long enough for the water in the pot to boil into a slimy concoction and long enough again for the slick water to boil out, leaving a sticky residue.

No matter that Betty or one of the other girls would come running to Mudear warning that the okra was about to burn or was already smoking up the kitchen. It still burned. Mudear would always say the same thing, from the phone, from the other side of the bathroom door, from outside in the garden: "Don't ya'll girls dare touch that hot pot. It's already burning. I'll take care of it."

But Mudear never came to see about the pan, Betty noticed, until it was an okra holocaust.

That memory was probably key to Betty's understanding of Mudear and Mudear's stand in the house to never be put in the position of having to "get out!" It probably, now that she thought of it, was the reason she herself had started her own business (Mudear had sanctioned her choice: "Colored women gonna
always
get their hair done") and ran it so smoothly, efficiently, economically. She never as long as she lived and stayed black, as Mudear used to say, wanted to be told to "get out" and have to do it. Any move for her was a wrenching experience. She winced when she drove past someone's possessions sitting on the side of the street and sometimes drove around the block two or three times in hopes of coming on the evicted family to offer help. Even Annie Ruth's profession's peripatetic life-style of big money, quick moves, and whimsical audiences made Betty nervous for her.

Mudear just assumed that none of her girls remembered. But Betty remembered.

While burning the okra, while renaming her husband "Mr. Bastard," while putting aside a few pennies, a nickel, a quarter, Mudear had waited for this time, this contradictory, kiss-my-ass time. She had bided her time and waited.

If she had been a praying woman, she would have prayed for that time to come. But since she wasn't, she had just trusted in the irony of life and waited.

Betty heaved herself up from the fragile chair and began the climb up her curving staircase to get out of her clothes. Although she was exhausted, she had no intention of going to bed before Emily came in.

Looking down at the first floor of her exquisitely decorated home, she wished that Mudear could have at least seen it one time before she died. Betty had used up packs of Polaroid film taking stacks of pictures when she first bought the house and then again at holidays—pictures of the Christmas tree decorated and lit, pictures of the broad front lawn decorated with red, white, and blue bunting and an American flag and a red, black and green National Freedom flag on Independence Day, pictures of the dining room table set for a formal dinner—and given them to Mudear. But after glancing at a couple of photos, Mudear always tossed the stack aside without a comment. Later, Betty would find the photographs on the floor by Mudear's favorite La-Z-Boy chair in the rec room or strewn wet and bent on the screen porch sofa or tangled up in the bedclothes and comforter at the foot of her bed.

She knew better than to press Mudear for a response to the photographs and the accomplishments they chronicled. Her response was always so demoralizing.

No matter what the pictures showed—Betty in her high-school cap and gown, Betty at graduation from cosmetology school, Betty in front of her first beauty shop, Lovejoy's, at its grand opening—Mudear always managed to say just about the same thing. "God, daughter, your butt sho' look big in these pictures."

Even when
Essence
magazine did a short profile of her after she opened her second beauty shop and when
Ebony
made note of the annual hair and beauty show she put on, Betty just left the magazines by Mudear's bed turned to the page with her picture circled. Mudear never did say she read the articles, but she did tell Betty later that she had enjoyed the short story in the issue of
Essence.

Still, Betty couldn't stop herself from bringing the pictures to Mudear and laying them before her like a burnt offering to Ye-maya, the Yoruba goddess of the womb. She told herself that was the least she owed her own mother. Even if her own mother reminded her of Medea.

When Annie Ruth opened the door to the lavender bathroom, so much of Mudear came flooding out that she thought for sure she had opened Pandora's box. And for a moment she stood at the door, her hand over her mouth, and forgot that she had rushed to the bathroom to throw up.

It was as if she were cocooned in a blanket of Mudear. It was as if over the years Mudear had been able to extract the essence, the spirit of herself and sprayed it cunningly placed throughout the house to catch some poor unsuspecting prowler, victim. It was more than the smell of candy cinnamon balls. It was even more than the subtle scent of lavender and rose petals that Mudear used as the basis for the potpourris she created from her herb garden and placed in the bathroom and throughout the house near spots where she lounged. Those smells were smaller, more understated in relationship to this refinement of the essence of the woman. Essence of Mudear. That's how Annie Ruth imagined what was left of her mother. Like a perfume, Essence of Mudear, in a fancy curved crystal bottle. Annie Ruth looked over at the long shallow dressing table with just a comb and brush, a bottle of witch hazel and a bottle of coconut oil, a jar of moisturizer and the small manicure set on it. The feeling of her mother was so strong in the bathroom that Annie Ruth could almost see Mudear floating around the room spraying her Essence of Mudear all over the place.

Like a cat.

The taste of bile coming up in her mouth again sent her racing for the lavender toilet. She knelt at the toilet for what seemed like minutes throwing up watery ginger ale and phlegm. Liquids were all she had been able to keep down for the last two days. But now she assumed she couldn't even drink a glass of ginger ale.

Annie Ruth sat on the side of the tub to steady herself and got a sudden flash of splashing in the bathtub nestled in a ship of safety. Her childhood often came back to her that way, in flashes that she could not immediately connect with an actual remembered event. Then, she remembered when Betty had told her and Emily one night between their beds that all the girls at one time had bathed in the old house's bathtub between Mudear's legs.

"It was a treat for Mudear to lift you into her bathwater after she had finished bathing. She'd say, 'Got some good sudsy water here for somebody who wants to get clean.' And it did feel good settling into her full tub of water with the Ivory soapsuds she had worked up to a lather still floating on the grayish water."

By now Annie Ruth was sure she could clearly recall splashing in the water between her mother's legs. Many of her childhood memories were really born and nurtured in Betty's stories to the girls rather than in actual experience. But Betty told the stories so well that over the years, and especially in their childhood, the stories had usurped even what slim memories they carried of their lives, enriching the reality to the point past true recollection.

Annie Ruth was just as sure she could taste the rolls Betty had told them about:

"Mudear used to make these rolls, not biscuits, but dinner rolls. It seemed that it took days for her to make them. She'd mix up the batter with milk and flour and yeast in litde fat envelopes in this big brown bowl with a light blue ring around the top, then she'd cover it up on the stove with a plaid dish towel overnight for it to rise, then the next morning she'd punch it back down with her fists, real hard like a man beating up another man. Then, she'd put it back in the bowl and cover it again with the dish towel and let it rise again.

"It just went on and on. These preparations. Then, when she'd roll out the dough—beautiful white tender-looking dough—she'd take this little juice glass—she only used it for the rolls, never to drink juice out of—and punch out small round pieces about the size of your palm, Em-Em," taking her sister's little hand and holding it up for Annie Ruth to see the size she was talking about. "Sweet small little pieces. And she'd lay 'em on a big ungreased cookie sheet and fold them over one time so they looked like they had little lips. She'd let 'em sit again for a while. Then, just before she put 'em in the hot hot oven, she drizzle melted butter, not margarine, not oleo, but real butter, over each one of them.

"Oh, Em-Em. Oh, Annie Ruth. When those things came out the oven, girl. You never smelled or tasted anything like 'em. They really were sweet. No, not like sweet rolls and honey buns. It was like they were naturally sweet. I don't know. Like a cantaloupe is sweet. Like a warm peach off a tree is sweet. Not with sugar you put in but sugar that's just there.

"You know how people say something melt in your mouth?

"Yeah, Annie Ruth, like M&M's. Well, these rolls just melt in your mouth. You didn't even have to chew 'em.

"You put them in your mouth and they just seemed to melt and just float away to your stomach.

"Yeah, Annie Ruth, like heaven."

Betty told them stories all the time. When Annie Ruth was eight and Emily eleven, Betty even told them the story of their impending menstrual periods. She went out and bought a box of Kotex and a box of Tampax and safe in the family bathroom of the old house, with Annie Ruth and Emily sitting on the floor watching, Betty demonstrated how to use both. Then, she gave her sisters the choice of which one to use when their time came. "If you use the Tampax, you can still go swimming when you're on your period," she told her attentive audience. They both nodded, but none of them ever learned how to swim. Mudear would never allow them to go to the old segregated pool set in the middle of a red dusty parking lot and after 1964 Mulberry closed both the black and the white pools rather than integrate them both. Betty's talk was a mixture of what she had learned from her own period, from junior-high hygiene class, and from what her friends at school had told her.

"Having your period is called 'the curse,' 'on the rag,' 'a visit from your cousin,' or 'having cramps,'" Betty informed them. "In the books, it says it means you are now a woman, you can have a baby. They keep telling us at school that it's something you're supposed to be proud of and happy about. But I don't know anybody who is.

"At school, the women teachers and the gym teacher keep saying over and over how a 'young lady' have to be especially careful to keep herself clean and good smelling when she has her period. And that is the truth. Nothing smell worse than old dried menstrual blood. That's another reason to use the Tampax instead of the Kotex.

"From what the older girls at school say, getting your period also means you're a woman 'cause then you can have sex, you know, Annie Ruth, do nasty. If you do, you called 'fast.' If you don't, you called 'bitch' or 'tease.'

"One girl at school, Velma, say once you start, you can't stop. So, I guess it must feel mighty good."

Annie Ruth couldn't look at a mirrored medicine cabinet without seeing herself and her sisters as girls at the family bathroom sink, elbowing each other, jockeying for a place directly under the light to pluck their eyebrows or put on makeup or curl their hair.

Mudear, awakened by their quarreling on school mornings over space at the mirror, would yell down the hall, "Daughters! Pipe down there and take turns. Everybody got to suck at the trough." Of course, it was easy for her to say. She had a bathroom all to herself. Before the house was constructed, she made sure there was going to be a bathroom built off her bedroom in the new house. For someone who claimed to take no interest in the plans for the new house, the girls noted to each other, Mudear had a great deal of input into the house's details. Although Mudear used whatever bathroom was most convenient for her at the time, no one was allowed to use her lavender bathroom, even in an emergency. There was another door to Mudear's bathroom off the hall, but Annie Ruth couldn't recall one time when folks other than Mudear used it.

She made sure even then, in the early sixties when Poppa had it built, that everything in the room was lavender, her favorite and, she said, most flattering color. Then, she sent Betty and the girls downtown to the local Belk's store to purchase towels, toilet seat covers, and rugs in shades of rose and pink and lilac and purple to coordinate.

For years, the girls speculated on what Mudear did in there by herself for what seemed like hours. They came up with the idea of bizarre voodoo rituals complete with three little girl dolls that she tortured with pins and thorns—"She probably stick thorns in my face just to keep it looking like a potato grater," Emily said throughout her teenaged years—and fire, suffocating them with towels and holding their little bodies underwater for long stretches. But as they got older and after years of fighting for time and space in the one family bathroom they had to share with Poppa as well as each other, it finally dawned on them that she was just in there luxuriating in the privacy, leisure, and convenience of her own bathroom.

With nothing left in her stomach, Annie Ruth felt better now. She stood and stared down at the clean smooth surface of the deep lavender tub. Then, she reached down quickly, so she wouldn't have time to change her mind, flipped the drain closed, and turned on the hot water full blast. Remembering, she raced over to her parents' bedroom door and rapped on it sharply.

"It's just me, Poppa," she said through the door. "Taking a bath."

Poppa just grunted in acknowledgment, but Annie Ruth knew the sound coming from Mudear's bathroom must have given him a start. Hearing his voice on the other side of the door made her think of the times she and her sisters had heard him screaming and cursing them out when they were teenagers. She could just see him emerging from the family bathroom, blood running down the side of his face from a deep nick he took from shaving with his dull razor that one of them had used to shave her legs or under her arms and then replaced in Poppa's "hiding place" over the jamb of the door.