Apron Strings (22 page)

I felt so much more grown up now than I had the year before. Then, I would’ve much rather gone to bed without dinner than to make an appearance at one of my mother’s parties or luncheons. Now I’d come to the surprising conclusion that some of my mother’s friends could be fun. They asked me questions and seemed to want to know the answers. As I helped Ethel pass hors d’oeuvres, I chatted with the guests. I discovered that I loved the attention I was getting. I could retreat behind the big serving plate, so I didn’t have to worry about introductions or what to say afterward. In an attempt to stretch my social skills, I mentioned that I had seen a redheaded peckerwood that morning to a lady who’d commented on how many birds she had at her feeder lately. Everyone laughed. I thought I was so clever until my
mother corrected me, patting me on the head, “That is a redheaded
woodpecker
, sweetie.” She turned to her friends. “It’s a fulltime job keeping the children from sounding like Ethel,” she said. “She makes me laugh, but honestly, I don’t want my children talking like that. What did she say the other day that was so funny…?” Stuart rolled her eyes at my mother. I looked around to see if Ethel was anywhere within earshot. I didn’t see her and sighed with relief. My face was burning with the embarrassment of having been corrected in front of everyone.

Our house looked as pretty as my mother: it was full of cheer, flickering candles, and a glittering Christmas tree. It was as if the house was wearing party clothes, too. The crystal, silver, and wood polished to a high shine for the special day added to the magic. Ethel was dressed up as well. Her usual light blue or gray uniform with white collar, white cuffs, and a big white apron was replaced with a black uniform with no apron at all. She looked formal and distant to me. Although it had come a little loose from her nipping at the gin, her hair was fixed in a single large bun at the nape of her neck instead of the four small buns she usually wore that made her head look square. As she bent to serve them, the ladies seated at a table greeted her as an old friend. I overheard someone say to my mother, “You’re so lucky to have Ethel. Good help just doesn’t come along like that, you know.”

“Ethel and I wouldn’t know what to do without each other,” my mother responded. “We’ve been together since before Joe and I were married.” At the mention of Daddy’s name, I thought the room went a little quiet.

Gordy, Helen, and I usually would sneak back to the kitchen to sample a few treats, but we didn’t want to spend much time there and risk Ethel’s temper. But, like always, we knew that if we seemed to be spending too much time around her friends, my mother would give Ethel the glare and we’d all be hauled out of sight into the kitchen. So we huddled in a corner of the dining room trying our best to be as unobtrusive as possible.

“They’re going to eat in a minute. What do you want to do?” I asked. “I don’t want to go to the kitchen.”

Helen shrugged.

Gordy seethed. “If I see her sneak that bag out of the cabinet again, I might just hit her,” he said. Finally, as the guests were being seated in the dining room and Ethel started to serve them, we crept into the kitchen. We snacked from hors d’oeuvres trays and kept out of the way whenever Ethel came back for anything she needed.

When the luncheon was over, the day lost its luster as if it were something my mother’s friends brought along with them to the party and then gathered up with their other belongings as they left. Ethel didn’t make it into work the day after. It wasn’t all that unusual. Parties had a way of doing that to her.

That Christmas season was a strange one. Daddy moved home again for the holidays, and it was just like old times. I think he and my mother made an effort not to fight. Things were going pretty well, and then, just before Christmas day, our new puppy was run over by a car and my mother fell apart. She started crying a lot. You would’ve thought it was one of us who’d been killed. It was a sad thing. I cried a little, but not as much as when Lance died. I don’t think my mother shed a tear about old Lance, but for that puppy we’d had for little more than a month, she wailed like Lassie had died. She’d stand in her bedroom and look out the window at the corner where the dog got hit and cry and cry. Ethel blamed it on her pregnancy. She said pregnant women cry a lot. But the day after New Year’s we learned the real reason. Daddy had packed up all his things and put them in his car. Then he called us into the living room and told us he was leaving. This time he wouldn’t be moving home again. He and my mother were getting a divorce.

Gordy stood up like a soldier called to attention. “You’re getting a divorce?” he shouted, “And you’re leaving us here, just like that? Leaving?” He glared at my father who looked away.

Helen and I were crying. I didn’t know what to think or to say, though I was very proud of Gordy. I wished I could be so brave. I wanted to go to Daddy and beg him not to leave, or if he had to, at least to take me with him. Then I looked at my mother. She was sitting all bunched up in the sofa like a wad of Kleenex, sobbing and blowing her nose. Somehow
I felt it wouldn’t be right to hurt her more, so I didn’t say anything. Stuart came into the living room and said she was ready to go.

Helen and I ran from the room. Peering out our bedroom window, we watched Daddy and Stuart drive down the driveway and out of our lives. We collapsed into each other’s arms, sobbing.

I assumed that when grown-ups decided to get a divorce it just happened, but I soon learned that it takes a lot of preparation. There were lawyers to hire and court dates to schedule and decisions to make. The whole time we children drifted around the house like ghosts. The lawyers soon made Stuart come back home to my mother. During the months leading up to the hearing, my mother stayed home more than she used to. She trailed after Ethel, not unlike I used to do. I missed my visits with Ethel and sometimes felt a little jealous of my mother for taking up so much of her time. It seemed to me that the mere act of breathing had a way of making my mother mad. I crept around her as if she were a snake ready to strike. Anything could set her off.

“Hey, Gordy. You done your homework yet?” I asked one afternoon in early March hoping to entice him into a game of basketball. Gordy was sitting at the kitchen table struggling over his arithmetic. He was counting on his fingers and mumbling to himself.

“Miz Jones says you’re not s’posed to count on your fingers,” I helpfully informed him.

“Stop being so impudent, young lady,” my mother snapped, appearing from behind me. I didn’t know what
impudent
meant, and I was afraid to ask since I got yelled at for almost anything those days. I stole out of the kitchen.

When my mother did leave the house it was usually to run errands. There were no more luncheons or foxhunts or bridge club meetings to go to. When Daddy left, so did the fun. Besides shopping for clothes, the only place my mother went was the grocery store. She’d come home with the car full of groceries and we would all have to help Ethel carry them in. My mother would say to Ethel, “Something told me to buy this.”

And Ethel would say, “I thought ‘bout that jest after you drove ‘way.” All of a sudden, it was like Ethel wasn’t just someone my mother paid to take care of us; she was my mother’s best friend. I guess I should have been happy about that, but the truth was it about made me sick.

They’d chuckle about how they had such a close connection, that all one had to do was to think of something and the other would know it. I didn’t think that was true though, because Ethel said lots of things to me that I didn’t think my mother would have liked if she knew; like Daddy’s talks with Ethel. I bet my mother didn’t know anything about those, because if she did, we would’ve
all
heard about it.

After Daddy left, my mother started putting us children to bed. When she’d have us say our prayers, she would tell us, “Ask God to make Daddy come home.” I would, but I always felt sort of dirty afterward, like I’d asked God for something I didn’t want. After my mother switched off the light and left the room, Helen and I would whisper about how maybe Daddy should stay where he was. Maybe he was happier there.

If marriage no longer provided structure my mother could count on, social graces still could. There were absolutes at my mother’s dining room table: linen, silver, crystal, and china, no matter the meal. When the divorce settlement was finally reached, my mother took some of the money she received and rounded up her silver so that she had a complete service for twelve—luncheon and dinner. Even at nine years old, I thought it was a queer thing, but she seemed so proud of it. I remember her telling me that we would each inherit three full place settings.

Until Daddy left home, I hadn’t fully realized how fortunate I was to be a “little kid.” Gordy, Helen, and I were allowed to take our meals in the kitchen, but Stuart had to eat in the dining room with my mother. Stuart had been proud of her grown-up status before, but now she hated it. She was expected to sit up straight, hold her fork just so, and converse like a lady. She was allowed to leave the table only after asking to be excused—there were lots and lots of rules. When Stuart started to put on weight, my mother picked at her about it all the time. There seemed to be an argument between them at dinner every night. Usually one, or sometimes both of them, would leave the table in tears. Afterward, I’d
help Ethel clear the table. She’d shake her head slowly and say, “Lord, chile, I jest don’ know what ta think.” I didn’t either.

At breakfast my mother sat at the head of the table, reigning like a queen, as though Daddy were still around. Smelling faintly of face powder, Chanel No. 5, and lipstick, she would read the morning paper over a second cup of coffee while she waited for us to get ready for school. Her breakfast of poached eggs and bacon with one slice of toast and strawberry jam that Ethel had prepared for her was finished and cleared. With her reading glasses perched on her nose, she’d peruse the paper. Though she read two papers a day, whatever she read never seemed to have much effect on her—or at least not like it had on Daddy. He held some strong views on the way things in government should be and a discussion about them could get pretty lively.

I don’t remember hearing my mother interject a single word into any of those discussions. Nor did I hear her have discussions with her friends that related to the news of the day unless it was about something sensational—like when an acquaintance of my mother’s was arrested for embezzlement. I heard her talking on the phone with a friend one day. Her voice was excited, her fingers winding and unwinding the phone cord as she spoke. “I heard the sheriff came straight to his house and took him away in handcuffs,” she said. “Can you believe that? I’m surprised that Bernard would have allowed such high handedness. He must be coming up for reelection.”

“Ethel, what does
embezzlement
mean?” I asked over a peanut butter and jelly sandwich that noon.

“Have you been lis’nin’ to yo’ Momma on da phone, again? You best stop that ear droppin’.”

Since Daddy no longer lived with us, it was always my mother who drove us to school in the morning: four kids, going to three different schools, and one of the few times Stuart’s life intersected with mine. She was spending as much time as she could away from home, but to tell the truth, the trip was far more enjoyable when she decided to catch the bus or ride with friends. Otherwise, Gordy, Helen, and I had to sit in the back of the red woody station wagon and listen to my sister and mother bicker all the way to school.

“Why can’t I go the dance?” Stuart would implore. “Dad would let me go,” she’d say. “I want to live with him. He said I could.”

“The lawyers said…”

“I don’t care what any old lawyer says. I’m going back to live with Daddy and you can’t stop me.” Stuart slammed the car door behind her.

Gordy was lucky: he was the first out, so usually he was dropped off before my mother and Stuart had even started to get worked up. I remember some mornings when my mother wept all the way as she drove Helen and me to our school. Then the routine, unpleasant as it was, changed for a second time that year.

With Daddy out of the household and with expensive lawyers to pay, my mother found she could no longer afford to send us children to private schools. The four of us were switched to public school.

Ethel said one morning while fixing breakfast not long after that, “You know, Miz Ginny, I heard dey is gonna close down da schools here in Charlottesville.”

“You heard what? Where?” My mother shook her head like Ethel was all wrong. “Who said such a thing?”

“In church on Sunday, the reverend say we’s ‘pose ta send our chil’ren to school—ta the white schools—as soon as the law be signed. He say dat no matter what’s we hear we is ‘pose ta gets ‘em ready fo school. And if dey close da schools like dey say dey is, we is ‘pose to take ‘em anyways. And ta sit outside da school all peaceful like. He say he ‘spect dey will too.”

“Will too what?” My mother looked puzzled.

“Well,” Ethel stated flatly, “close da schools.”

Gordy and I were elated to think we wouldn’t have schools, but knew enough to stay out of the conversation. It never occurred to us that we would still have to go to school.

No sooner had we started to get accustomed to our local public school, then, for reasons that made no sense to me, we were sent off to attend classes in church basements and old houses. Within a month of our switching schools, the public schools had closed rather than have white and colored kids go to school together. We were relocated to makeshift classrooms and our teachers came with us. More and more
often Stuart was getting rides with friends, so that everything seemed to me to be changing at once. It didn’t take too many weeks of driving to school every morning to convince my mother that carpooling might be a good idea; that way she’d only have to drive once a week, and if she made Stanley the yardman drive for her, she could avoid the tedium altogether.

I may not have fully understood why the schools had to close, but I knew one thing for sure: I didn’t want our yardman driving the car pool for my mother. Stanley was fine in the yard, though a little stinky, but
mothers
were supposed to drive car pools. Three other mothers took turns driving us to school. Jerry’s mom was the best. She was always late. She had a car with only two doors and we had to really squeeze ourselves in. I loved to snuggle up to her fuzzy coat in the front seat. She said funny things and made everyone laugh. One cold morning she let me wear her already warm gloves because I had forgotten mine.