Apron Strings (26 page)

Uncle Gordon came over to our house and drove us downtown to Mr. Myers’s office. The whole way there he kept saying, “You’re really going to like Mr. Myers. He’s a fine man.”

We sat in the backseat and rolled our eyes—as if it was going to make a difference whether we liked the man or not. Gordy stuck out his tongue and made a face. Helen and I giggled.

His office smelled just like the public library. And no wonder—there wasn’t a wall in the room that didn’t have cases stuffed with books. He wore half glasses that he peered over when he looked at you. His hooded gray eyes moved the whole time you talked, like his ears might miss something important. I got the impression that he expected me to lie. None of us did. Not that we got the chance. He’d fire a dumb question at us like, “Do you like living with your mommy?” then sit back and watch us like we were going to answer it. How do you answer a question like that when she’s sitting right there? I got the feeling he didn’t really care about our answers anyway because he was one of those people who didn’t like children. You can tell them a mile away. When they talk to a kid they get all cutesy with a voice that’s supposed to sound sweet but just sounds fake because nobody ever talks like that unless they’re trying to get a kid to do something. You’d think they’d know.

He sat behind his enormous desk and peered over at us. “You are going to go to the courthouse,” he said. “The judge is going to ask you where you want to live.”

On the surface, I thought that seemed like a fine thing. It even made me feel a little important, as if I really did have a say in what happened in my life. Except for the fact that I was a kid; how was I supposed to know?

The trial was the only topic of conversation when the lights went out at night. Helen asked me almost every night, “How do you decide where you want to live? Do you know how? Where do you want to live?”

“I don’t know!” I wailed into my pillow as I rocked my head up and down. “I can’t even think about it,” I declared. “I want to die before they do because I can’t imagine how I would live without them.” What I didn’t say, because I didn’t know how to articulate it, was that having to choose was the next worse thing. We finally decided we’d choose our Daddy because he played with us and was more fun. The decision
had a hollow feel to it. Like many decisions where the stakes are high and the choices onerous, it nestled itself into the recesses of my mind and began to assume a sense of permanence as if it had already gone into effect. Our talks trailed off to solitary musings. I’m sure we both cried ourselves to sleep more than once contemplating our future and the decision we were being forced to make. I know I did. The question loomed over us worse than a trip to the dentist when you just knew he was going to find a cavity because you hadn’t brushed since the last time you saw him.

Ethel was no help. For the last couple of weeks she had come to work short-tempered and snappy, and she was gone a lot more than usual. She didn’t look much like herself. Her hair was fuzzy and you could tell she hadn’t washed it in some time. Plus that splatterware cup of her’s was always full by the kitchen sink. She wasn’t even trying to hide it anymore. I didn’t much like being around her, but I asked her anyway what she thought I should say. She just grumbled and shook her head. “I jest don’ know.”

The day we went to the courthouse was all jumbled up, mostly because Ethel didn’t come to work. I resented that she hadn’t come. I grumbled to Helen, “When we need her the most we get this crummy treatment. You’d think we were the ones making them get divorced.” She was the closest thing we had to an advocate, and she had left us high and dry. “I can’t believe she didn’t come today. She knows how we don’t wanta go to the dumb ol’ court. She promised she’d be there with us and she didn’t even show up.” I kicked at my pajamas lying in a heap on the floor.

Helen said, “You’d be mad if she was here, too. You’re just mad. You like to blame people.” She could amaze me sometimes. As I whirled around in a fit of pique over this or that, Helen just went about her life adopting wise insights into the mysterious logic of our elders. It had a remarkably calming effect on me. Whereas I’d argue with Gordy about almost anything, when Helen spoke up, I generally listened.

I considered what she had said. “Yeah, I guess I do.” And then I thought,
It’s a good thing there are a lot of people to blame
. I rolled it around in my mind like hard candy, savoring the sweetness of its simplicity. Mr.
Myers’s talk did nothing to allay our fears. Stuart had her day in court before us, just a few days after our visit to the lawyer’s. She filled us in on all the gruesome details. She had a way of making you feel worse under the guise of soothing you.

“It’s no big deal. This guy comes in all dressed in black. He’s the judge.”

“Anybody knows that,” Gordy said with a sneer.

“OK smarty pants. If you know so much I won’t tell you anymore.” She was already gathering her stuff off the bed to leave.

“Go on. I wanta know,” I said to her. Helen and I, slack jawed with interest, scowled at Gordy and hissed, “Shut up.”

She continued her grisly blow-by-blow description of her trip to see the judge. Gordy was listening mighty carefully, too. “Mother’s lawyer told you to tell the judge that you wanted to live with her, but you don’t have to. You can say you want to live with me and Daddy. He wants you to. I know he does.”

“But what about Ethel? What’s gonna happen to Ethel if we go live with Daddy?” Helen asked, and I wondered too.

“I heard Daddy talking to his lawyer the other night. He said that he had talked to Ethel and that she would come work for him and take care of ya’ll just like now, except not here.” She said all of this like she was describing a trip out in the country—all breathless and breezy. “Don’t worry. Ethel is going to testify for Daddy, so the judge will be sure to give you guys to him. So, whatever you say probably doesn’t make any difference anyway. It’s all going to be fine.”

The three of us looked at each other. What was it going to be like in a new house without our mother? What would happen to her?

My mother, never very good at overseeing how we dressed—although detail was everything when it came time to criticize the result—was busy dressing herself for court. The best she could do to help us get ready was to yell; and that she did at full volume. The task of picking out what to wear became ours for the first time. Up until that very instant, Ethel always laid out what we were going to wear. On our own, we wore our pajamas.

“How are you supposed to know what to wear to court if you haven’t ever been before?” I wanted to know.

Helen said, “I’m going to wear my Sunday school clothes.”

“Well, I’m not. I hate that old dress. ‘Sides, I don’t want to look like some goody-goody.” So declaring, I decided on a red corduroy jumper and white blouse.

As I stripped off my nightclothes, Helen said, “You probably outta…”

“Oh shut up,” I snapped, fighting my way into my blouse. “I’ve about had it with people telling me what I should do.” I decided against socks until Helen impressed upon me the need.

“Remember the last time you didn’t wear socks? You got one of those big blisters on your heel and it hurt.”

Mostly dressed, my mother blew around the house like a plastic bag in a parking lot. She was in our room one minute, and then I heard her up in Gordy’s room yelling at him the next. She flew in again and scowled at my choice of attire. Uncle Gordon’s car was crunching up the drive. “Hurry up. It’s time to go. Give me that brush. Sallee, when are you going to learn how to brush your hair?” She raked my head with the brush. Tears welled up.

“Stop, it hurts.”

“Then learn how to do it yourself.” She pulled my hair into a ponytail, yanking at it like it was an old hose stuck around a rock. “Stop,” I screamed, pulling away as my face streaked with tears. “It hurts.”

Uncle Gordon, the busiest man that ever lived, bustled into the room, his usual jowly red face almost purple. He started to shout, but checked himself in the middle of his question. “What’s going on in here? Why is she crying?” he pointed at me like I was something he’d scraped off his shoe. “For God sakes, Ginny, today is not the day to lose your temper with the children. We’re supposed to be in court in twenty minutes. Are you trying to lose custody?”

He, who never had a moment to speak to me in the past, put his big, old, bad-breathed face right up to mine and said, “Honey, everything is going to be just fine. Your mommy didn’t mean to hurt you. She’s just a little upset today. You know how it is. We all are.” He glared every so
often over my head at my mother who looked like she might cry at any minute. “You,” he said, pointing to Helen like he didn’t know her name, “go on and find Gordy—we gotta be going.”

Still whimpering, I resisted as he took me by the hand. His oversized, sweaty hand squeezed hard on mine as he pushed and prodded the rest of us into his big white car. After letting go of me, Uncle Gordon patted my mother on the arm. “Don’t worry,” he said. ““It is all going to be just fine.” In the back seat of his car I smelled my hand the way you do when you accidentally touch some dog doo, checking to see if the smell was still there, then wiping it on the seat and rechecking. I noticed Gordy’s green plaid shirt was buttoned up wrong. He had missed a button, causing the shirt to gap out over his belt showing his undershirt. Then he had skipped another button, making his collar look ridiculously cockeyed. I also noted that a brush had not touched his cowlick, stubborn at the best of times. The way things were going, it just seemed to make sense to keep it to myself.

I had the strangest sensation of feeling smaller than usual, like Alice from
Alice in Wonderland
, only I didn’t have a bottle to make me bigger. The courthouse was brick and old. I bet I had probably driven by it a million times in the past and never noticed how enormous it was. The cannons outside were as large as two cars.

The enormous double doors were swept open for us, and we were herded into a green, cavernous room with a desk in front that looked like it went up forever. There were flags all around it. The windows were taller than small houses. Just like on
Perry Mason
, there was a banister that looked like a fence between where regular people and the lawyers and bad guys sat. After walking for what seemed like a mile, we went through the gate. My mother went and sat down with Mr. Myers at one of the tables. My father was sitting at another table with a man I had never seen before. Uncle Gordon stood with us. I gathered up enough courage to look around and saw Ethel sitting with Bertha way in the back of the room. Uncle Gordon and a man who looked like a policeman led us over to the far left-hand corner of the courtroom. Almost hidden in the green paneling was a door.

Big is too small a word to describe the judge. The black robe that he wore was easily as large as one of those holes in space that takes four hundred thousand years to fly through. Like a huge crow, he bent over and put his massive hands—each the size of Ethel’s cast iron skillet—on his knees; knees that came up level with my eyes. They called the room we were in “the judge’s chamber.” It didn’t seem big enough for the man; more like his broom closet. He stuck his colossal face in our midst. We could tell he was trying his best not to scare us, but he was failing miserably. His voice had the timbre as I imagined the giant in
Jack and the Beanstalk
had. I half expected him to bellow, “Fee fie foe fum.”

“I know what you are going through is very hard,” he said. His knees cracked as he eased himself into a chair. “You know where you are and why you are here. And I hope you know that you haven’t done anything wrong. Where do you want to live?” he asked staring at each of us in turn with is big hands lying on the chair’s arms. He looked like Abraham Lincoln. We stared back at him about as dumb as three kids could, not one of us said a word—too overwhelmed.

I had practiced this moment for weeks. I knew what was expected of me, and I knew that what I wanted to say was “With my daddy.” I had thought long and hard about how sad he would be without me. Never in the awful weeks that loomed before that moment had I even once considered how my mother would feel without me. I’d often contemplated how nice it would be to be free from the tyranny that reigned at home. No longer would I have to greet old ladies and learn how to be polite, nor would I have to do what was expected of me. We could eat hot dogs for dinner. But before I knew what was coming out of my mouth I started to cry and blurted out, “With my mommy.” The other two followed suit. I kicked myself going out of the courthouse. We all did.

As if the experience at the courthouse hadn’t been trial enough, Uncle Gordon had to feed us before he deposited us back at the house. My mother and Ethel stayed behind.

Uncle Gordy said, “Ethel will be back at the house by two-thirty, so we are going to get something to eat before we go home. You all go ahead and get in the car. I’ll be along directly.”

Uncle Gordon jabbered like a grackle bird as he drove us to a greasy hamburger place. The restaurant smelled like a nasty brew of stale beer, dirty ashtrays, and men—working men. It was blue with smoke and grease. I would rather have licked the sole of my shoe than eat right then, even though we hadn’t had breakfast. Uncle Gordon greeted a bunch of men at the bar. He seemed to be at home. I wondered if he ever brought my mother there for lunch. “Whattaya have ol’ Gordy boy,” he asked, clapping Gordy on the shoulder.

“I dunno. I guess a hamburger. Can I have a coke, Uncle Gordon?”

“Sure, kid, whatever you want. How ‘bout you girls?”

“I’m not hungry,” I said. Helen started to cry. “I’m going outside with Helen. We’ll sit in the car and wait.”

“Suit yourself,” he said.

Helen and I sat slumped in the backseat and stared at our feet, waiting to go home. “Do you think we’ll ever see him again?” she asked. Are they going to put him in jail because of us?”

“No, he’s not going to jail. But I bet he’ll be really sad.” I said feeling more shame than I had ever felt. “I’m sure we’ll get to see him. That is, if he wants to see us.” I choked up, leaned against Helen, and bawled.