Charms for the Easy Life (9 page)

Maveen held on until nine o’clock that evening. My mother kept her sister in the yard most of the time. I could see them through the bedroom window. My mother had pulled two metal chairs close together, and though I couldn’t hear anything, I could see that the sister held a Bible in her lap. Her head was nodding in rhythm to the verses. Under different circumstances my mother would’ve nitpicked discrepancies and rolled her eyes over the miracles, but on this afternoon she nodded along with Maveen’s sister. I stayed inside with my grandmother in the dying light of that old woman’s dying day. My grandmother held one of Maveen’s hands, and I held the other. She slipped away from us in a manner that I almost want to call graceful, and she purged, not much but some. I put my head on the foot of the bed and cried until the lingering odor of vomit in the sheets made it impossible for me to breathe.

I felt my grandmother’s hand on my back. I asked her, “What do you think she meant to say? What do you think were her secret wishes and desires?”

As she covered the body and reached over to stop the clock on the nightstand, and moved about the room, hanging towels on mirrors and glasses, making all her death rounds, she said, “I’m not sure, but it could’ve been something having to do with a certain useless doctor. I’m thoroughly disgusted. He’s blinded one and helped starve another, and that’s just the two I know about.”

When we left that evening, my grandmother directed my mother to drive to Anderson Heights, a neighborhood of grand houses and fine lawns. In these homes lived Raleigh’s chief doctors and lawyers and a dying breed of Southerner, white people who seemed to earn a living automatically. She gave me a street address, and she would not listen to my mother’s protests that she couldn’t go to anybody’s house this late in the evening. My mother asked into the rearview mirror, “What do you want me to do?” She said, “Keep driving. The hour does not faze me.” We drove through what felt like a true maze of affluence before we found the right house. My mother and I sat in the car and listened to the radio while my grandmother went up to the house. A butler let her in. I remember my mother’s saying, “Remarkable. Truly remarkable. People are hungry three miles from here. A butler. Remarkable.” My grandmother stayed in the house about fifteen minutes, and when she returned, all she said was, “I took care of the situation for certain this time.”

The next week my mother brought a newspaper article to my attention. She pointed to a picture of a fine-looking gentleman and said, “Isn’t that him?”

I said it was. It was the real doctor, and the world, I’m sure, was shocked to learn of his early retirement. My grandmother came in the kitchen and looked over my shoulder at the article.

“What do you think about this?” I asked.

She said, “I think I should have taken him off the streets a long time ago.” Then she took down her mortar and pestle, mashed two cloves of garlic, spread the paste on toast, and ate it without blinking.

One morning my mother asked why I wasn’t dressed for school. I reminded her that it was the end of a grading period, and students with high averages were allowed to skip the reading day before examinations. She suggested that we go to the movies. She wanted to see
Gone WiththeWind.
Because of the movie’s grand popularity, the theater stayed so packed in the evenings and on the weekends that a weekday afternoon was the only time she believed we could find three seats together. My grandmother went even though she had disliked the novel and thought the movie could only be worse. My mother and I didn’t really care, as we would watch anything all the way through and see it again if it stayed in town long enough. My grandmother would not. If she didn’t like a picture, she would get up and leave without a word, and if she had suffered through no more than thirty minutes of the movie she would request, and receive, a refund. She’d sit in the lobby and read until we came out, and if we asked her why she had left, she’d say, “It was stupid” or “I didn’t believe any of it.”

The only time she ever implored us to leave a movie with her was that afternoon. She leaned forward in the darkness and whispered, “Come on. I’m not going to let you watch this.” I mouthed, “Why?” She said, “It’s hideous. You’ll walk out retarded. Come on.”

My mother wouldn’t budge. I got up because I didn’t like the thought of my grandmother alone in the lobby for two and a half hours. She had forgotten to pack a book in her satchel, so we walked down to the bookseller’s and bought
The Yearling
at the clerk’s urging. We walked around a bit and then went back to the theater lobby and read it together. I remember her asking me, “Do you think this is maudlin?” I told her I did not. She considered my opinion a moment, grunted, and started back on the page. After a few minutes, she handed the book to me and said, “You take it. I can’t stand it. Not enough happens.” She got up and said she was going next door to the drugstore to buy a newspaper, and while she was gone I wondered at all her complexities and inconsistencies, how she could walk out on a movie in which everything in the world occurs, and then dismiss a novel on the grounds that not enough happens.

When my mother emerged squinting from the theater, she was not alone. She had a man with her. He was of ordinary height and weight, but unlike the other men in town, who hadn’t been able to buy a new stitch of clothing since 1928, he was dressed in sharply pleated gabardine pants, a tweed jacket, a stylish tie, and excellent cordovan loafers. He walked right up to us with my mother and put out his hand as she introduced him. “This is Mr. Richard Baines,” she said. “We met during intermission. Where were you two?”

Shaking this man’s hand, I told my mother we had been down to the bookseller’s and must have missed her then. He shook my grandmother’s hand. She looked at him hard enough for him to understand that a quick explanation was in order. He told us that he was new in town, and that after a nice chat with my mother during intermission she was gracious enough to consent to sit with him for the remainder of the picture. He looked and sounded as if he already adored my mother, right down to the ground. My grandmother glared at her, and had she reached over and twisted her earlobe my mother could not have felt any more chastised. I stood there and made small talk with him and my mother for a moment, and then suddenly my grandmother blurted, “Well, Mr. Baines, it was nice to have met you.” We were out of the theater in no time.

All the way to the car and all the way home, my grandmother and mother fought as I had never seen them fight before. They fixed their theme early and stuck to it: There is a man lurking. What are we going to do about it? My grandmother said mainly that my mother didn’t need a man, that she had been happier without one and would
remain
happy that way. My mother responded with variations of, “What makes you so sure? Haven’t you been looking at me close enough to tell I’m actually lonely?”

She was showing signs of loneliness. She had recently begun the process of resigning herself to the slide from beautiful lady to handsome older woman, adjusting her lipstick color from fire-engine red to brick, exchanging bright beads for pearls and stylish platform soles for pumps. And by “process,” I mean just that; she had not fully committed her body to middle age yet. There were still her stockings with the perfect seams that she knew exactly how to reach down and adjust in a restaurant, making all the men’s heads swivel in such a way that their wives must have said to themselves, “She’s not sixteen anymore. How does she
do
that?” There were her cheekbones, high as they could be without disappearing into her eyes. The shadowy hollow of her cheeks gave her a slightly hungry look, and of all the things she gave me, even the bright beads that I would exchange for her pearls in the coming of my own middle age, I was always most grateful for the cheekbones. There were other signs, seen not so much in her appearance as in her behavior. She hid herself in her room and read romantic stories too much, listened to the radio too much, busied herself with volunteer work too much, blowing arguments with co-workers out of proportion so she would have something to fix her mind on for a day or two. And when I changed her sheets each Monday morning I saw the indisputable evidence of her rising loneliness. She had started going to bed with her makeup on, and then smearing the pillowcase with mascara cried off during the night. Although I had always believed my grandmother to possess the ability to see into, beyond, and through the human heart, she had not seen my mother’s loneliness emerging. Even as quietly and slightly as it came, I thought she would have seen it.

My grandmother shouted, “You could’ve had Charles Nutter when he was offered to you. Now look! You’re thirty-five years old. Haven’t you learned
anything?”

My mother wouldn’t answer, even though she was probably about to explode with the reply that Charles Nutter hadn’t wanted a child bride. She knew my grandmother meant hadn’t she learned anything in regard to men and how they would, at best, take advantage of her or, at worst, leave her.

My grandmother said, “Well, if you won’t answer that, would you mind at least telling me what he does for a living?”

My mother said she didn’t know. He hadn’t mentioned it to her.

Under her breath, my grandmother said, “Must not be much.” She turned her body toward the window, letting us know the conversation was closed.

My grandmother believed our household was fine as it was. If there was heavy lifting to be done, the three of us did it together. If a picture needed hanging, we tapped the wall to listen for the stud and then drove the nail in with an admirable economy of hits. If anything mechanical broke, for instance the mantel clock from Pasquotank County, we took it apart on the kitchen table and spent the afternoon putting it back together. So my grandmother was of the opinion that not only would a man be a threat, he would be an intrusion, wholly unnecessary.

The fact that my mother was moving so steadily toward middle age meant that my grandmother would soon have a grand companion, one more like herself. If my grandmother could’ve populated the world, all the people would’ve been women, and they all would’ve been just like her. And if she had been able to attach a rope to my mother and pull her through time, she would’ve happily greeted her somewhere on the other side of fifty. My mother, she probably thought, would be adequate compensation for her lost sister. But instead my mother was eyeing another man, and that meant she would want to remain youthful. She would no doubt visit the Elizabeth Arden counter to learn how to accentuate those cheekbones. She would buy ultra violet lipstick, a new panty girdle, satin pumps, and an Omar Kiam cocktail dress. The problem, though, was that my mother resisted any sort of tugging. She had the will sufficient to go her own way, which is what she did. When we got home that evening, she went straight for the telephone, took it with her into the coat closet, and shut the door. My grandmother sat and stared at the closet door, frowning. After my mother came back out, my grandmother asked, “When’s he coming?”

My mother said, “Tomorrow night, if that’s okay with everybody. If not, I’m sorry.” Then she went to her room and left my grandmother and me alone in the living room. My grandmother jerked the radio on, turned the dial through every station, and jerked it off. Then she announced she was going to sleep, and suggested I do the same. I didn’t. I sat up into the wee hours of the morning and finished
The Yearling.
When I finally went to bed, I saw that her light was still on, so I pushed open the door and was almost knocked down by the odor of Vicks VapoRub, which she always put in a noisy hot-water vaporizer and smeared underneath her nostrils when she sensed that air wasn’t moving freely in and out of her system. She sat up in bed and asked me why I wasn’t asleep. I told her I had finished the novel, and I wanted to report that something did indeed happen in it.

Before I could say anything else, she interrupted me. “I know,” she said. “The deer dies.”

I asked how she knew. She said, “I could see it coming. The problem was that not enough happened while she was getting there. Go to bed.”