Ugly Ways (20 page)

Annie Ruth was past shock at her usually quiet, even-tempered father and his show of grief. She wondered what he was drinking in that cup. He looked and sounded like legions of mourners at wailing walls, at funeral pyres, at mass graves. She tried to stop him from dropping his forehead so heavily on the table, but all she really accomplished was to sort of pat her father's head as he brought it up from the tabletop. After a few seconds, he stopped on his own and sat stiff and sad with tears in his eyes.

She felt so sorry for him. "Come on, Poppa, it's time to go to bed."

Annie Ruth leaned over to help him up from his chair. She fully expected to smell liquor on his breath. How else could she explain his talkativeness, his rambling, his strange extravagant behavior except to assume that he was drunk? But, other than the spilled coffee, she didn't smell anything but the fading scent of Old Spice. She was surprised the combination didn't make her sick.

Slipping her arm under his arm and around his back, she tried to lift him from his chair, but he seemed to be dead weight, much heavier than she had imagined, and when she remembered that she was pregnant, she let go of him so suddenly that he made a plopping sound as he fell back down, nearly missing the seat of the kitchen chair. Well, I can't leave him just sitting down here crying by himself, she thought.

"You gonna have to give me some help, Poppa," she said, steeling herself again to help him to his feet.

The sound of her voice seemed to bring him back to himself, and he mumbled, "Yeah, yeah, right, I gotta help my children. Right. I can stand up." And he rubbed his hand over his face a couple of times as if to clear his head.

He stood up shakily without any support from Annie Ruth. But he reached for her broad shoulders as he began to wobble. Seeing her father so unsteady, Annie Ruth could hear her mother's voice instructing the girls, "Your father's just an old fool. Don't pay him no mind."

As they headed for the steps, Annie Ruth asked him, "You want to just stretch out on the sofa tonight, Poppa?"

But he was adamant and said in a strong voice, "No! I want to sleep in my own bed. In your mother's and my bed."

"Okay," Annie Ruth said, but she thought, suit yourself and choose your poison.

She thought they would not be able to navigate the short flight of stairs to the second floor. But Poppa walked up the steps almost unaided. Then, he nearly collapsed onto Annie Ruth. She leaned him against the wall and then sort of scooted him through the first door on the right, to his and Mudear's room.

Finally, laying him in bed, she started to take off his wet pajama top and bottom soaked with Sanka and canned Pet milk, but she remembered the look of shame in the eyes of old men she had seen when she was an investigative reporter covering mistreatment of the elderly in nursing homes. As strange women in white uniforms roughly took off the old men's shirts and stripped them naked of their soiled and streaked pants as if they were store dummies, Annie Ruth would watch from her spot in a comer masquerading as a nurse's aide hired through a temporary service. Tom between averting her eyes and watching closely so she could make notes for her news report later on, she noticed that the old men in the bed would always manage to catch her eye with a look that begged that she not look any longer, that she not witness this indignity that they could no longer control.

But she watched.

As a new shift of nurses and assistants and attendants came in to hold their old dicks so they could pee, stooping beside patched-up wheelchairs as the men tried to help by tapping the side of their penises against the curved lip of the elongated plastic slop jars. In trying to coax urine from the eye of the lifeless piece of meat, sometimes an impatient attendant would turn to the low sink by the bathroom door and turn on the faucet of cold water in hopes of encouraging the old men's flow.

Eventually, all three of us Lovejoy women gonna probably have to take our turns undressing Poppa, washing his wrinkled old genitals, and wiping the spittle from his cheeks. It'll come soon enough. Let him keep some of his dignity now, she thought, and just pulled Mudear's pretty wine-colored comforter up over her father's sleeping figure before heading back to her room.

At the door, she turned and said, "Good night, Poppa," even though she felt he wasn't awake to hear her.

"Annie Ruth?" he said just as she was about to close the door to the bedroom.

She turned and came back to the bed.

"Yes, Poppa?" she asked, leaning over him.

"Your mother."

"Yes, Poppa."

He started to reach out for his daughter's arm, but he stopped himself and put his hand back under the cover. "Your mother, no matter what she was when she died, no matter how she ended up. She was a sweet girl when we met."

All Annie Ruth could bring herself to say was "Ummm." Then, when he closed his eyes again, she patted his shoulder and repeated, "Night, Poppa." And left the room.

He's damn right I was sweet when we first met. I couldn't help but be sweet. I didn't know no better. I was like my Mudear had been her whole life. She was a woman who always had a smile on her face. She loved her family and her life and it just seemed to love her back. We didn't hardly have nothing. Daddy seemed to work hard, but I think we rented our house all the time I can remember. But it didn't stop Mudear from seeming to love life. She was the kind of woman who hummed while she did her housework. She actually hummed a happy kinda tune while she went about her day.

I just assumed I had inherited that knack from her naturally. You know, like mother, like daughter. But that was before I came out from under that roof and found out how the world really was. Before I married Ernest.

Betty had meant to just go upstairs, change her clothes, and go back down to the kitchen to make a cup of tea and wait for Emily to come in. But after taking off her clothes and putting on some sweats, she didn't head back downstairs. Instead, she found herself drawn to her office desk across and down the hall from her bedroom even though she dreaded facing the piles of correspondence, accountant ledgers, and magazines there. Even with her home computer tied up to the ones at the shops, she seemed to have more and more paper flooding her office. But Betty was the kind of person who liked to put her hands on her work. That's why she loved the feel of books in her hand.

The room had almost as many shelves covering the walls as the library downstairs did. They were all crammed with books. In the library, the books were shelved in order by subject matter or alphabetically by author. The majority of the library book collection had come with the house. The family of the original owner had amassed an excellent collection of American and European classics as well as an extensive collection of old reference books and atlases. And Betty had added her own extensive collection of hardback books to the library. She had taken such pleasure in removing the old musty-smelling books from one section of shelves and replacing them with first-edition copies of fiction and poetry by black women writers. Betty even had a thin steel ladder that slid along the bookcases of one wall to enable her to reach the volumes on the top shelves.

But in her office the books were put in haphazardly, casually, paperbacks next to leather-bound reference books. A biography of Madame C. J. Walker next to a grocery-store-purchased romance novel. Books on business management next to
Blacks in the Military.

Sitting in the cool leather of the large desk chair made Betty pull her sweat suit tighter against her body. She got up and went to the thermostat on the opposite wall of her office. She turned up the heating dial and smiled as she felt the rush of warm air blow through the heating vents on the floor beneath her.

When she sat back in the wine-colored leather chair, she almost instinctively opened the drawer where she kept her personal family album. She smiled as she always did when she opened to the first photograph on the first page of the thin laminated book. It was a picture of the three Lovejoy sisters when they were girls dressed up for church. Standing by the passenger door of the family black car, shining in the bright sun of a long-ago late summer day in Mulberry. The three of them dressed in identical dresses in different colors. They all had printed skirts in muted colors with white short-sleeved tops and matching vests. The entire color picture had faded to an overall mellow yellow like a stain, but Betty could remember every detail about the dresses, the day, their lives.

She had been thirteen, Emily was nearly ten, and Annie Ruth was six. And Betty remembered that they were talking about Mudear like a dog among themselves just before their father snapped the picture. Later, they had examined the photograph for hours in search of telltale signs that they had just committed the unspeakable ... they had spoken.

The girls had not started out feeling so free to talk about Mudear the way they did now. Until Betty became a teenager, they were all afraid that anything they said about their mother would be magically telegraphed back to her and leave them open to some ghastly punishment. Anytime one of them began complaining about Mudear and how her ways infringed on everybody else in the household, the other two would shut her up.

"Don't be talking like that about Mudear," they would say in urgent tones. "Good God, she may hear."

They didn't trust themselves to talk about her in the house, out in the yard, at school, on the bus downtown to pay the bills or buy new shoes. Nowhere, they felt, was safe enough to be out of ear range or spirit range of Mudear.

But one summer day just weeks before Poppa had snapped the Sunday morning photograph, they made a discovery.

All three of them had been invited to a wiener roast in the backyard of one of Betty's schoolmates. And Mudear had agreed. The girls were so excited about going that they had done all their housework and their homework on Friday evening and early Saturday morning. Then, at the last minute, while Betty was ironing crisp cotton shorts for all of them to wear, Mudear decided she needed Betty to wash, straighten, curl, and style her hair for her. And that would take half the day. It shouldn't have taken half the day, but Mudear was so particular about her "personal appearance." She wore her hair then the same way she wore it when she died nearly thirty years later. She had Betty keep her coarse thick hair bobbed just at her earlobe. Betty curled it all over with small hot curlers and brushed it back from her face into a light froth of shiny black curls.

Mudear called it classic.

With Betty doing Mudear's hair, the two younger girls couldn't go across town on the bus without their big sister, so their plans for the wiener roast were off.

The girls were stunned with disappointment. But they knew better than to even raise the question of the wiener roast with Mudear. They never cried and pleaded for anything to Mudear. They had discovered early in life that those ploys, sincere or feigned, were useless with her after the change. She would tell them straight out, "Don't be coming bothering me with that little petty stuff. Fix it, forget it, figure it out, or get over it yourself." Even when a sudden thunderstorm came up and awakened the girls in the middle of the night, they knew better than to go crying to Mudear. She always slept right through the worst storms, with lightning and thunder cracking around the house, and could not stand to be disturbed. She had told them that sleeping through a storm was some of the best sleep you could get. The girls would just have to close their eyes, put their pillows over their heads, hug themselves in their little beds, and try to go back to sleep.

But they had wanted to go to the wiener roast so badly. The party giver had told Betty at recess that week that they planned to roast hot dogs on straightened-out coat hangers that each guest made and held herself over the open fire. She had told Betty that her father had already dug a big hole in the backyard and filled it with oak wood for the fire and that her mother was going to make chili to go over the hot dogs. Then, for dessert, each guest was going to use her coat hanger to roast marshmallows.

All week, the girls had hardly been able to contain themselves. They planned the route they would take to get to the party in Pleasant Hill. They discussed what they would wear and how many hot dogs they would eat. They made Betty ask if they should bring their own coat hangers.

And to have their raised litde spirits, their high little hopes, dashed so quickly, so casually was bitter enough to make them retch. They all felt that they were as powerless as insects.

It was so unfair. The girls really rarely asked to go anywhere. They had a lot to do in the house usually on weekends when the two younger girls helped Betty with the major cleaning, shopping, and cooking projects. There was litde time left over for outings. Once in a while on Saturdays, Poppa would drop them off at the Burghart Theatre to see a matinee while he did some household shopping or drank a couple of beers at The Place. But that was a rare treat.

And they seldom had company at their house. Anyone visiting the girls would have to stay outside in the yard to play because no other little girls were allowed to come into the house and disturb Mudear. The sisters had gotten used to these rules fairly easily, but not their friends. Their litde schoolmates thought the rules were strange and insulting—having to run home to the bathroom or for a drink of soda—and rarely came back. But the Lovejoy girls rarely felt deprived because they had found each other to be the best possible company.

So regular visits weren't even considered. But this one time they had really wanted to go.

Of course, Mudear hadn't cared about that. She didn't even seem to notice that they wanted to go to the wiener roast so badly.

With all their work and Mudear's hair done, they had spent the late Saturday afternoon just roaming around their own backyard, being careful to avoid stepping on Mudear's plants.

In their boredom and anger, their talking about Mudear seemed as natural as listlessly drawing circles in the dirt with a stick.