Charms for the Easy Life (10 page)

My mother woke up early and started organizing herself to get to town when the stores opened. She returned a few hours later with an astonishing Alice blue silk dress. We barely had dinner ready on time, unaccustomed as we were to preparing a full-course meal. My mother all but took over the kitchen, seeming with her new joy to be everywhere at once. My grandmother’s only comment was, “You need a traffic cop in here. If you were cooking blind you could not have made a bigger mess.” Her refusal to help didn’t surprise me, and when she was called late in the afternoon to deliver the sixth baby of a very obnoxious Christian Scientist lady who had yet to pay her for the first five, she didn’t grumble. She left quickly.

Mr. Baines arrived on time and with flowers and chocolate-covered cherries. If he had been any more charming, I doubt I would’ve trusted him. My job was to greet him and then entertain him in the living room, and then when he had had just enough time to wonder where in the world that handsome woman could be, my mother would enter. I chatted with Mr. Baines about my career plans, which I exaggerated so much that when I finished talking to him I was greatly enthused about all the opportunities in the field of medicine. He said a few things about his job, where he had gone to school, things like that. My mother must have been waiting to hear a lapse in our conversation. She walked into the room, and he stood to meet her. She held out a hand and said without speaking, “I’m what you have lived your whole life to get to. I’m why you were born. You are one lucky man.”

He was shaken to the point that when he stood to greet her he had to press the tips of his fingers on the arm of his chair for balance. My mother asked him if he was being looked after, and once he had swallowed the lump in his throat, he said that he was indeed. Then he sat down, or rather his knees unlocked and down he went. My mother displayed herself on the sofa across the room from him so he could get a glorious, full-length vision of her, and from the way he squeezed the arm of the chair, it seemed almost more than he could bear. I think that had he known she was reading
To Have and Have Not
at the time and considered it anything but scandalous, he would’ve been too amazed to speak. And furthermore, if he had seen her race into a stranger’s house, hike her dress up, and sit on a moaning husband’s chest to hold him still while my grandmother worked on what they called a butcher-knife accident, he would’ve considered my mother more than he could handle, and he would’ve run from our house. If he had seen her confronting my school librarian over the decision to pull Sinclair Lewis novels off the shelves, and winning, he would’ve wondered whether he was up to the challenge. As it was, he could barely deal with her outward appearance, shimmering as she was in her Alice blue silk.

She said, “Mr. Baines, I thought I heard you say you went to college in Atlanta.”

He cleared his throat and said, “Yes, I went to law school there, and then I lived there until a couple of years ago, when my wife and I divorced. I moved to Charlotte, then here.”

I looked at my mother. She took the part about law school in admirably. I watched the great dial in her head rotate, passing things she wanted to ask, such as how much money did he make, was there family money involved, did he defend poor colored people for free or had he grown out of that, all questions of this nature. Instead, she cocked her head and looked at him and said nothing. He stared back. I thought that after a minute or so of looking at each other, one of them would’ve grown embarrassed enough to stop, but they didn’t. I was the only one made uncomfortable by all this staring, so I got up and put dinner on the table. By the time they came to the dining room they had passed through the earliest, awkward stage of their love, and now they were asking questions of each other with the rapidity of a school spelling match. In a very short while they gathered all the basic information. By the time they sat down at the table, they seemed more than content, thrilled actually, to have discovered that they were just alike, and so they went back to gazing at each other. I considered saying I wasn’t hungry, excusing myself to my room, but I wanted to watch this. And hear it. I wanted to hear my mother laugh the way she was meant to, and I wanted to see her blush, as she did repeatedly. There had never been a meal like this at our table. My mother’s soul was fed as well as her body, and that sufficed to keep the two bound together, as they were supposed to be.

Mr. Baines stayed until nearly midnight, and had my grandmother been hiding in the bushes, waiting for his car to leave, she could not have timed her return any better. She came in as we were cleaning up the dishes. She was blood-spattered, and she was holding on to her right shoulder, which she tended to pull during forceps deliveries. Her left hip was also bothering her—another delivery injury she had received as a consequence of a woman’s suddenly drawing back her knees, catching my grandmother underneath her armpits, and driving her across the room, where she landed on a child’s wagon. My mother mixed a deep-heating compound and had my grandmother undress to her slip so she could massage it in. Nobody said anything about Mr. Baines. Instead, my grandmother filled that midnight hour with grousing about the self-righteous Christian Scientist husband who tripped and fell into the floor fan while his wife was in the final stage of labor. He refused my grandmother’s help, so she told him, “Okay, bleed to death. That’d be the true blasphemy.” After the baby was born, or rather, wrenched out of this woman, the husband consented to my grandmother’s suggestion that she apply the resin of Saint-John’s-wort to his cut. She told him the resin sprang from John the Baptist’s blood when he was beheaded, which, according to legend, it did. Then she tended to the baby, ignoring the fact that the mother was ignoring the fact that a great deal of money was owed for those first five.

My grandmother thanked my mother for soothing her shoulder, and got up to pour a brandy. She stood there, smelling highly of peppermint camphor, threw back her brandy, and then wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, like a cowboy at the end of the bar. She put the glass in the sink and said, “I’m flabbergasted. Damn a Christian Scientist.” Then she headed off to bed. My mother couldn’t stand it any longer, so she called after her, “Mother! Aren’t you going to ask how dinner went?” Still walking down the hall, my grandmother shouted back, “No. I know how it went. When’s he coming again?” My mother yelled, “Saturday!” just as my grandmother shut her door and limped across the room to her vaporizer. She must have hoped that by plugging it in she could drown out Christian Scientists, the neighbor’s howling dogs, and Mr. Baines’s tumultuous wee-hour dreams of my mother.

M
R. BAINES was glory in my mother’s life. He came to our house almost every night for dinner, always showing up in one of his beautiful suits, his straight white teeth gleaming, giddy as a forty-year-old man could be without appearing drunk, retarded, or foolish. After dinner he would sit on the sofa with his arm around my mother’s shoulders and talk about places he wanted to take her. He compiled such a long list that after a while I worried that the plans would never materialize. My grandmother noticed this as well, and asked my mother several times, “Well, where’d he take you tonight?” They were never grand places, and his attitude was not that of a self-satisfied traveler who wanted to impress this homebound woman with how much he’d seen of the world. He wanted to take her to Middleton Plantation in Charleston to show her the ancient live oak tree because she’d look so pretty standing next to it in a picture. He wanted to take her to Cypress Gardens because she’d look radiant in the light. He wanted to take her to the Homestead resort because she deserved to be pampered.

The first place they went together was Charlotte. Mr. Baines closed up his family’s home there and brought his elderly mother back to Raleigh to live with him. She suffered from a form of dementia that would later be called Alzheimer’s. She brought all her ferns with her on the train. They had lined her porch in Charlotte. My mother told us how she arranged the ferns around her feet, in her lap, in my mother’s lap, stroked them as if they were lapdogs, and repeated all the way to Raleigh, “Maidenhair fern, very pretty. Lady fern, very pretty. Angel’s hair, very pretty. Boston fern, also very pretty.” My mother helped settle Mrs. Baines into her bedroom, and she wrapped the planters in green tissue and tied large red bows around them, winning the old woman’s heart, as she suspected she would.

Although my grandmother was not yet too fond of Mr. Baines, she stepped in to help with his mother. She wanted to make sure the woman’s needs were well met. She called all the hospitals in the county and located a private duty nurse for her. She interviewed several women before finally hiring one who did not appear to be lying when she said she would not allow Mrs. Baines to wander out into traffic or sit around in soiled underthings while she lazed off in front of the radio.

If Mr. Baines had never taken my mother anywhere but Charlotte, she would’ve been content to sit by him three hours a night in that one spot, with my grandmother sitting across from them, pretending to read. When they did leave the house, it was on foot. They’d take our old railroad lantern and walk the trail by Crabtree Creek for hours. My grandmother would decide when it was past time for them to be home, and would start watching the back door, saying things like, “I hate to think what they could be doing out there. Those woods are owned by the city. If they got caught doing something, the newspaper would have a big time with the story. They’re old enough to do it at home. That’s where they should do it.” Several times I caught my mother coming back in and whispered for her to check her clothing, particularly her skirts, which would be twisted around her hips. Mr. Baines always stopped and combed his hair and straightened his tie in the cloudy mirror that hung over the utility sink.

One evening, deep into that exceptionally cold January of 1940, they ignored my grandmother’s frostbite warnings and went out anyway. I helped bundle them up as if they were my children, and sent them out with the lantern, making them promise as I turned up the wick that they wouldn’t be gone for too long. I fell asleep listening for the door to creak. After midnight, I woke up feeling a coldness next to me, not a sharp chill, but a spready, cloudlike sensation of the sort one would notice with a ghost beside the bed. It was my mother, stooped over with her face inches from mine. She looked so tender in the dim light. She asked if she could sleep with me and borrow my heat. I said she could, and she crawled over me to get to the other side of the bed, saying as she nestled underneath the covers, “I have never felt such wind.” The night had been still, and so I asked her where the wind had come from. She explained that during the walk she had mentioned her unfulfilled desire to ice skate, and how the fear of broken bones had been the only thing that ever stopped her. Mr. Baines then walked her back to the house, crept inside and got a dining room chair, put it in the trunk of his car, and drove her to Lassiter Mill Pond. He pushed her about on the frozen pond while she sat in the chair, head back and legs out, as if she were riding a swing. As my mother lay there with her dress on and her stockings, I could feel the cold night air still about her. She turned on her side with her back to me. She was asleep before I could take all the pins out of her hair, warm now, melting in love.

In the next months, Mr. Baines took her everywhere he said he would. She stayed in a swivet, packing and unpacking, rushing film to the drugstore, pasting snapshots in a new album. She would write underneath them in white ink, her head down almost touching the page, concentrating on neatness and style as if she were copying penmanship lessons. It seemed that every other page had a snapshot captioned: “Sophia having the time of her life.”

She became so attached to him that after he had spent a day with her, particularly a Sunday, she would cry when he left. As his car disappeared down the highway, she would press her cheek to the windowpane and whimper like a lonesome pet. She generally had terrible monthlies, and during especially rough ones her reaction to his leaving was highly dramatic. She would lie across her bed and sob, threatening to present herself at the door of the state asylum. She would say, “Maybe I need to be locked up. I don’t feel so good.” When she was cried out, she would wash her face, dose herself up with evening primrose oil and False Unicorn, and pretend to pay attention to the radio, and after enough hours had passed for her to have forgiven him for leaving, she would start to smile again. And after more time had gone by, she would be reeling in love, showing me whatever trinket he had most recently brought her, things like marcasite earrings, pearl hatpins, and leather-bound editions of her favorite books.

But if my grandmother was around, she’d force herself to tolerate his departure, no matter how furiously her hormones were warring inside her. If my grandmother had seen such an excess of emotion, she would’ve warned her of an even sadder day to come, the day Mr. Baines would drive off and keep on driving. Then would come the fight. Charles Nutter would be flagged about, as well as my father and his yellow wedding shoes, his girlfriends, and if things really escalated, my mother would ask her mother why, exactly, her own husband had left. And so, if it took my mother’s biting herself to hide these departure miseries from my grandmother, she would do it. The alternative bruised her spirit, as well as my grandmother’s, and mine.