Ugly Ways (23 page)

Mudear never did use much makeup. As far back as Betty could remember, she couldn't recall Mudear in anything more than a brush of rouge from a flat round fifty-cent-piece-sized compact and red lipstick. But this was back in the days when Mudear came out the house from time to time like other mothers. Then, after the change, she didn't bother to put anything on her face. When Poppa had ruled, Betty had heard the arguments that he and Mudear had over any ornamentation Mudear tried to add to herself. Once, she had heard Mudear try to laugh off her husband's protestations that she looked like a whore going out the house with her two daughters downtown with makeup on. His own mother never wore it, he had shouted at Mudear as she stood at the mirror in the tiny bathroom of their old house and rubbed the red stains from her cheeks and lips.

As she put the electric hot curlers in her work bag, Betty thought about all the times she had done Mudear's hair in her life, standing on a little stool at the kitchen stove to reach Mudear's head in the old house, at the kitchen table, in her bedroom, in her La-Z-Boy in the rec room, wherever it was convenient for Mudear with enough light for Betty to see to do a good job.

Mudear insisted on a certain standard of service. She told her daughters as she ordered them around, "When I was cleaning a house, I always kept a beautiful comfortably clean well-run house. Betty she remember that. And I knew how important it is. That's why you girls so well trained."

So, she didn't accept anything, whether it was a cold glass of water or a plump Christmas goose, that was not top drawer. The girls knew there were standards to be met. And met they were.

Betty knew it was time to get up and get started, but her warm rumpled bed with the electric blanket turned to five was too inviting and she dove back under the covers headfirst when she finished packing her makeup bag.

God, what is Annie Ruth thinking of considering keeping and raising this baby? Betty thought. She can't even deal with Mudear being the way she has been practically all her life preferring the sight of a painted bunting to her own daughter's voice let alone a child who's going to turn out God knows how.

"Well, we'll jump off that bridge when we get to it," Betty said aloud and forced herself to leap out of bed as if she had the energy to do it. Since she was eleven, she had somehow found the energy to do whatever it was she felt she had to do.

Betty couldn't stop thinking something that her mother used to say all the time whenever anyone the family knew died. "When you dead, you done. So, let the good times roll."

Mudear's the only person I know who you can't say that about. "When you dead, you done."

It had never crossed Betty's mind to do anything other than take care of her family. From the time she made baloney-and-graham-cracker sandwiches for herself and her sisters when she was eleven. From the time she figured out how to use the old rusty washing machine and ruined a few loads of clothes before she taught herself about separating the colors from the whites. From the time she collected all the girls' report cards and made sure they were signed by one of their parents and returned to school and wrote all the notes giving permission for field trips.

She had felt it was her duty.

She could never forget what she had heard through the faded pink flowered wallpaper of her bedroom wall the night she first had to feed her sisters.

Betty remembered it clearly as the exact time that she knew that she was alone in this world, really alone, an orphan without a mother. Her stomach was beginning to cramp up on her and make funny noises.

Betty had just turned eleven at the time, and though she shot up in her early teens, she was not tall enough yet to reach the loaf of Colonial bread someone had thrown all the way to the back on top of the refrigerator behind the tin bread box. Even when she pulled a kitchen chair up to the refrigerator and stood on it, she couldn't reach the bread at the back. The baby, Annie Ruth, had started a low irritating whine for food. And the box of crackers had been left open on the counter. So, she took what she could reach and made baloney-and-graham-cracker sandwiches for her sisters and herself.

I hope our dinner don't make us sick, she thought as she looked over her sisters asleep in their beds next to her. The three cotlike beds were lined up like litde soldiers in the small room the three of them shared. There was just room between each of them for three little girls to hunker down tight together and weather a storm. This was in the old house over in East Mulberry where there were only two bedrooms and of course her father had insisted on the bigger room, "'cause I'm a big man," he had said. There was no further discussion of room assignments.

When she heard her father's sharp voice in her parents' bedroom next door, she sat straight up in bed.

"You been laying around in bed all
day?
" Her father's voice, even through the bedroom wall, was strong, unbelieving, and angry. "Did you get up at all today?"

All she could hear of her mother's voice was a sleepy muffled sound.

"What about the girls?" He was almost sputtering with rage. "You been looking after them? Good God, the baby just got over being sick. Did you even fix them someum to eat?"

Another muffled sound and a long stretch—Mudear—in reply.

"Woman, don't you hear me talking to you? Your family's hongry!" Poppa shouted.

There was a slight pause and then Mudear said, "I done et, and when I done et, my whole family done et."

Poppa seemed as stunned by the statement at Betty was. The litde girl could hear her father take two steps toward the bed in his heavy chalk-covered work boots. But Mudear's voice stopped the advance.

"And cut up that heat on your way out," she said. Then, Betty heard the rustle of sheets and quilts as Mudear settled back to sleep.

Everything was silent for a while. Betty held her breath waiting for her father to explode on the other side of the wall. But even after what seemed like minutes, there was still no sound from her parents' room. Then, she heard the slow slow clump, clump, clump of her father's footfalls as he left the room and softly closed the door.

She didn't know why she did it, but when Poppa opened the door to their room to look in on them, she pretended to be asleep. What she really wanted to do was ask, "Did you
hear
what she said? Does that mean what it sounded like? From now on Mudear's only family is
Mudear?
What's gonna happen to
us?
" But instead she lay there as still as death. She knew that in their house no one was ever allowed to question Poppa. And after a second or two, he pulled the door to and walked slowly into the bathroom. Then, all was silent.

Although she closed her eyes tight and covered her ears, she couldn't drown out in her head what she had heard Mudear say.

"I done et, and when I done et, my whole family done et."

If I don't feed us, the child thought, we could all just waste away and die. But she thought it more with wonder than with anger and resentment.

Early on, Betty didn't even blame Mudear for abandoning all of them in favor of her own wishes. She hated going downtown on the bus to pay the bills and deal with white folks in the stores by herself after she turned about twelve or thirteen. But she really didn't mind the responsibility. Actually, most of her new duties she shared with her sisters, which lightened the load. And besides, at first Mudear hadn't dumped
everything
in the house on her girls. She just, bit by bit, let go of what she didn't feel like doing. And the girls picked it up.

Sometimes, for Mudear, doing just what she felt like doing meant cooking a good hot dinner every day for a week for her family. Some days, she even had it waiting for Poppa and the girls when they came home from school and work. But that was more cruel than not cooking at all because each time Mudear did something in the house like the old days, before the change, it got the girls' hopes up, made them believe in their mother, just to have their hopes dashed in the next day or so when they came home from school and found Mudear still lying in bed in her gown eating two bananas and reading a picture magazine.

But most days, it meant fixing something scrumptious for herself while the girls and Poppa were away at school and work, then sleeping through dinnertime, leaving her family to fend for itself. Sometimes, she'd clean up the bathroom a bit. Nothing big, just wipe out the sink of globs of dried green toothpaste or rinse out the tub after she finished. But never anything as strenuous and distasteful as scrubbing around the inside of the toilet or mopping the floor.

But over the months after Mudear's change, these simple duties she chose to perform became less and less frequent with all the girls taking up the slack Mudear left. Until the time when everybody in the household seemed to look up and discover that Mudear didn't do a damn thing in the house. And since the house and garden were the only places Mudear ventured, that cut out just about all her nonpleasant chores.

There was no real discussion of what had happened and what that now meant. Other than the girls' and Poppa's muttering under their breath as they tried and failed, tried and failed at some task that Mudear had done seemingly effortlessly.

At first, Betty was just barely able to keep herself and the girls relatively clean and fed because they had a washer and dryer and Poppa gave her enough money when he took her to the grocery store to keep the refrigerator full of food. Then, after a while, Betty discovered that she was actually good at keeping house.

Betty, in fact, was relieved when Mudear finally stopped doing everything in the house. The uncertainty was beginning to make her an eleven-year-old nervous wreck. She'd sit in school trying to anticipate the situation at home, deciding what she would cook if Mudear hadn't prepared anything, if she and her sisters had clean clothes for the rest of the week, if she had remembered to remind Poppa of all the bills that needed paying that month.

Betty was just grateful that the baby was long out of diapers and almost ready for kindergarten by the time Mudear changed.

Of course, Betty's studies suffered along with her psyche. She loved reading and studying, but now she knew she had other things to learn. And she never did seem to catch up with her own class in school. But she took pride in her sisters' good grades and made sure they did their homework every night. That's when she finally learned her own lessons—four and seven years late as she went over her sisters' homework. "Oh," she would say with a real sense of revelation as she praised one of Annie Ruth's own hand-drawn maps. "
That's
where Madagascar is!"

The only thing Mudear insisted on doing herself was washing her own panties each night. She told the girls to do the same. She said, "Everybody in the world ought to wash out they own drawers. This world would be a better place to live if everybody had to wash out his own drawers."

So, a pair of Mudear's sparkling white cotton briefs, purchased by Betty from Woolworth's downtown in packages of three, hanging over a towel rack in the bathroom or on a big lavender bush outside was what greeted Ernest and the girls each morning when they arose.

For years, Annie Ruth and Emily, even in their thirties, had to fight the impulse to throw their panties in the bathroom sink each night after they took them off. Annie Ruth had broken herself of the panty-washing habit when she found herself crawling around on the floor of her bedroom in an ocean-front villa on a Caribbean island in the dark trying not to wake her current lover while she searched in the jumble of their discarded clothes for her black flowered silk bikini panties.

Emily still struggled with the quotidian ritual. Some nights, she could go to bed and go to sleep when she hadn't washed out her panties. Other nights, she lay awake fighting the urge to jump up and at least rinse her drawers out in clear water. Sometimes, she triumphed, and sometimes, Mudear's indoctrination won out.

Betty didn't even try to fight the years of teaching. She, like Mudear, washed her panties out each night before retiring.

Mudear's natural bossiness had been a plus, too. Since Mudear seemed to love controlling things, she did enjoy overseeing the duties, the responsibilities, the running of the household, even if she had no intention of actually participating in the work.

And at first, it actually helped the girls get organized to have Mudear shouting orders at them from her resting place. They all had done litde chores around the house before the change like making their beds or emptying the trash or helping to wash the dishes, but taking care of an entire household was a different matter. And the girls found that a "Did you put the clothes in the dryer?" or "What ya'll gon' take to school tomorrow to eat?" yelled from Mudear's bed kept the pace of the housekeeping moving along.

The only thing Betty truly hated handling was the telephone calls and visits—curious, hurt, confused, frantic, insistent, indignant—from Mudear's former friends inquiring about her sudden disappearance. "Mudear say she fine, better than fine. She just don't feel like coming out or talking," Betty told the women over and over. The only calls Mudear took sometimes were from her childhood friend Carrie.

But the uncertainty in the aftermath of Mudear's change had its effect on all the girls. Emily, especially, was unhinged by the sudden unexplained shift.

Betty did her best to help her sister. At night, the three of them would sit on the floor between their beds the way they had before the change when their father fought. They would huddle there on the floor like survivors of a village raid who suddenly found they had to deal with a new unknown leader. Knowing in their little stomachs that things were different, strange, altered, never ever to return to their original state. Like raid survivors surveying the burning rubble that was once their homes, their meeting places, their gardens, and knowing that, even rebuilt, they would not ever be the same. Not familiar, not safe, not comfortable, not ever again.

Sitting there, Betty would try to answer Emily's questions: "Who do we ask for permission now?" "Who's going to take us downtown for new shoes?" "Can we go downtown now whenever we want to?" "Who do we believe?" "Who has the final word now?" "Who cooks now?" "Who will tell us things about life?" "Who is who now?" "Will we change like Mudear sometime when we get bigger?"