Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir (6 page)

I was also a big fan of her career success. I called her Executive Woman, and she loved that. I relished the fact that
my
mommy wasn’t a housewife like all the other mommies; that she brought home the bacon rather than fried it. I got to show her off at my school’s career day. She was the star parent since she was one of the only mothers with a
real
job. A beekeeper mom got a lot of attention for the obvious reasons, but Mama Jean looked the best. She wore a seersucker shirtwaist dress and white leather sandals with cork-wedge platform heels.

I caught Courtney Butler pointing to her shoes and giggling with the girl next to her.

My face fell. “What?”

“Your mother’s shoes don’t have any backs. Why is she wearing slippers?”

“They’re not slippers,” I said indignantly. “They’re
mules
.”

Eventually, the town got to see Mama Jean as the big-screen star I knew her to be. When we heard the honk of a horn in the driveway one day, Dad turned off the stove, I put down my homework, and we ran to answer it. As the reflection of trees and blue sky disappeared on the driver’s-seat window of a brand-new, navy-blue Bonneville, the Cadillac of Pontiacs, a beaming Mama Jean was revealed.

We knew this scene well—Mama Jean showing up in the driveway with a new car—but the first time it happened, Dad wasn’t enthusiastic. In that foggy dream of one of my first memories, I was pulled from my crib through the window and fled in the middle of the night with Mama Jean and my brothers. I never knew if we were in her blue Chrysler or her new, white Mercury Marquis. My brothers filled in the missing blanks of the story. I now know it was her Mercury Marquis. Her
just-bought
Mercury Marquis. She had traded in her Chrysler that day without Dad’s consent.

Dad wasn’t happy and got drunk that day. On my family’s way back from showing the car to Mamou, the fighting began while Mama Jean drove. Dad kept putting his foot on the brake. He was trying to take control of the car, take control of her. She pulled over and they both got out of the car. Ronny, Jeffrey, and little me sat on the backseat and watched them put on a show in a stranger’s front yard. We all made it home, but the fight continued into the night until Mama Jean pulled me through the window from my crib and fled to Mamou’s.

That was back in her nonworking days—a long time ago—before Dad officially handed over the reins, even though Mama Jean already had control of them.

Now Mama Jean honked the horn again. “Well, come on! Get in. Let’s go for a drive! And I have something to show y’all.”

Dad sat in front and I luxuriated in the cushy velour of the backseat and the intoxicating new-car smell.

“Don’t y’all love it?!”

“Yes, honey. It’s beautiful.”

“It’s not a Cadillac, but almost as good. I’m going to get that Cadillac if it harelips me. But wait till I show y’all what’s on Calder.”

As we approached Calder, right before I-10, we saw the American Real Estate billboard. Her face was plastered three stories high, announcing
JEAN BRICKHOUSE: AMERICAN REAL ESTATE’S MILLION-DOLLAR PRODUCER!

FIVE

The Pink Pantsuit

“Ugh! My face looks like a melted candle,” Mama Jean said, staring into her bureau mirror with her right hand in a strangulation clasp to hold back the loosening skin around her forty-six-year-old neck. I stood by her side, looking at me looking at her looking at herself in the mirror. She let go of her neck and tugged on the lapels of the pink pantsuit she was wearing with just a bra under the blazer and bare feet. This was the umpteenth time she had tried it on since she’d bought it two or three years earlier.

“And this suit doesn’t fit right. It’s too tight.”

“I don’t think so. It looks good,” I lied.

“You’re biased, darlin’. No. It was a mistake. I never should have bought it.”

She was right. And pink wasn’t her color.

Trying on clothes was a ritual she performed with me. She’d usually accessorize with two different earrings and two different shoes and walk into my bedroom with left hand pointing up to the earrings and right hand pointing down to the shoes and ask, “Which one goes better with this outfit?”

“Those and those,” I’d say, pointing to my choices.

“Wouldn’t you know it? Your father says these and these,” she’d say, pointing to the opposite choices. She usually went with his picks.

The pink pantsuit was an impulse, off-the-rack splurge. It was inspired by the one Barbra Streisand wore in
A Star Is Born
and was at least two years and as many flared legs out-of-date. The modeling sessions of that suit were never joyous. This one happened at dusk just as darkness crept into her unlit bedroom. The suit was stored in the closet of the bedroom next to her and Dad’s. It was my old bedroom, which had become the junk room when my brother Jeffrey moved to Houston at nineteen and I took over his room. The closet housed Mama Jean’s overflow of clothes that she didn’t wear regularly (such as ball gowns), that she had either slimmed or ballooned out of, or that she was waiting to make right, such as the pink pantsuit.

Deflated that the suit still didn’t fit, she lay diagonally across her king-size bed, cast in shadow from the setting sun, and stared into space with her thumb in her mouth. I lay in sympathetic silence with her at the foot of the bed, absorbing her emotions, which filled the room like fog.

She sucked her thumb in moments of distressed contemplation. When she pushed Dad too far in a fight, throwing the money she was making in his face, and he was fortified with white wine, he’d swipe below the pantsuit blazer with “And quit sucking your thumb like a baby! That’s pathetic!”

That was like stabbing a lion’s paw. Her tears flowed and she’d flee the scene with “Shut up, Earl! You are so mean and hateful!
Hateful!
”

I often witnessed these fights because they rarely happened behind closed doors. They could explode without warning, anywhere, anytime. I hated to bring friends over for fear that Mama Jean and Dad would embarrass me with one of their fights. The explosions usually happened during our nightly family dinners at the kitchen table.

After one of those meltdowns, and after Mama Jean had fled the scene, I stood awash in my own tears, scraping the half-eaten food off my dinner plate into the kitchen sink. Dad rubbed my back as I said through hyperventilated sobs, “Why don’t y’all get a divorce? I wish y’all would just get divorced!”

“We’ll work it out, Jamie-poo,” Dad said. “We always do.” They separated not long after that.

Mama Jean pulled her thumb out of her mouth now and unbuttoned the pantsuit blazer. She broke the silence. “What do you think of that town house we saw?” She had taken me on house-hunting tours since the separation.

“I like it a lot!” I said overenthusiastically, trying to lift the gloom. I knew my role. It was to always be her happy little prince, always in a good mood. My sad or angry feelings were quickly negated with “Now, what does a little boy like you have to be sad about? Don’t you know how much I love you?”
Yes, but can’t I be loved and be sad too?
There was no room for anyone else’s feelings. Mama Jean’s emotions took up the whole house, like her clothes.

“I don’t know. Maybe. If your father and I don’t get back together…”

Maybe they weren’t going to work it out this time.
He was living at the Red Carpet Inn on I-10.

I liked the idea of divorce. I didn’t look at it as Mama Jean and Dad not being married. I saw it as glamorous, something that all the trendy adults were doing. And it meant we might get to move into a two-story town house.

Mama Jean sat up in the nearly dark room and turned on her bedside lamp. “Well, we don’t have to decide today.”

I didn’t know what I wanted that decision to be. I looked at her hair, now spotlighted, and pointed to it. “I see one.”

She leaned her fixed hair in my direction. “Where? Come get it!”

I walked across the bed on my knees and came up behind her. She leaned her hair toward the light so that I could find the gray hair.

“Pull it! But pull it from the root.”

I did. “I see another one.”

“God
damn
it! They come as fast as you pull them!”

I went to work on her head like a baboon picking lice out of another baboon’s hair and pulled out four more. I balled them and handed them to her.

She looked down at them in her hand. “Those sons of bitches!”

She stood up and looked in the mirror and lightly picked her hairdo back into place with her fingers. As she did this, she spoke to my reflection, which was watching her.

“I don’t know if your father and I ever should have gotten married.” She removed the blazer and tossed it with a look of disgust onto the velvet love seat across from her bed. She looked back at my reflection. “But if we hadn’t, then I wouldn’t have you.” I smiled up at her and she enveloped me in a hug. She looked away from my reflection in the mirror and down at my actual face. “And I couldn’t live without you.”

SIX

The Neon Lights Are Bright on Broadway

“You can have a champagne cocktail like me. But just
one,
” Mama Jean said. The old-school, liveried waiter stood hovering over our table at the Russian Tea Room in New York City.

Dad, on the other side of the table from Mama Jean and me, looked at the waiter and ordered. “Uh, two champagne cocktails for them”—I was holding my breath that the waiter wouldn’t give us any trouble since I was only fourteen—“and a vodka martini for me.”

Mama Jean glared at Dad and shook her head.
“Earl.”

“All right, honey.” The waiter waited. “Uh, two champagne cocktails for them. I’ll have a glass of chardonnay.”

The waiter left. I exhaled.

At the thought of that champagne cocktail, I beamed as I had been beaming that entire week in early December of 1982. I was wearing a navy-blue, Shetland Polo sweater with black plaid wool trousers and Weejuns penny loafers, elated that I was finally in a climate cold enough to warrant such an outfit. I had finally made it to New York City and to “BROADWAY.” We saw a show every night (
Cats, Woman of the Year
starring Raquel Welch,
Dreamgirls, Little Shop of Horrors
). Our family may have been Catholic, but we worshipped theater.

“Now aren’t you glad you came with us?” Mama Jean asked rhetorically. I had had the choice of going with the Monsignor Kelly High School drama club on the New York Easter-break trip or with Mama Jean and Dad in December. As I’d weighed my options, Mama Jean had said, “All right, but you’re not going to be eating at Tavern on the Green and the Russian Tea Room with the drama club.” I knew Tavern on the Green from the TV commercials where they secretly replaced their regularly served coffee with Folgers. I chose the December trip.

Mama Jean considered herself a New York insider since she had even lived in the city for a month two years earlier when she was in training to become a stockbroker. As a Realtor, she had sold a house to the new regional manager of a national stock brokerage firm. She impressed him and he talked her into leaving real estate “to make real money” as a stockbroker. She was one of two women stockbrokers in what was still a Southern good-ole-boys club. In the first year she made it clear that she was playing for keeps. When she overheard two brokers bragging about poaching clients from another broker, she poked her head in the door and said with a smile, “Hey, fellows. I heard what y’all just said. Listen to me. If y’all ever do that to me, I’ll cut your balls off.” By the second year those good ole boys watched in fear and respect as Mama Jean clawed out a chunk of the pie with her manicured, jungle-red nails and ate their lunch.

When Mama Jean was in New York for her training, Dad visited for a week. It must have been like a second honeymoon after they had gotten back together. They did what they liked to do best—after dancing—and saw a show every night and ate out at places like the ‘21’ Club, where they had a lunch that cost the staggering sum of one hundred dollars. I knew that ‘21’ was Joan Crawford’s favorite restaurant from the A-earning book report I gave on
Mommie Dearest
in the sixth grade. I remember looking at the cover, which promised, “The #1
New York Times
Bestseller, Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture!,” and thinking,
When?! When?!
The tell-all book by her ungrateful adopted daughter should have made me hate Joan, but instead I became a lifelong fan and wanted to see every movie she ever made. I also couldn’t wait to someday dine at ‘21’ like Joan and Mama Jean and Dad.

All the Beaumont Country Club weddings I attended with them were dress rehearsals for this Russian Tea Room moment. I lived for those wedding receptions, when I could teeter on the edge of a gold vinyl banquet chair, dressed in my Sunday best, legs crossed, right hand curled around the stem of a champagne saucer, feeling like one of the adults. I was allowed a sip or two of champagne at weddings, as long as it was done under Mama Jean’s watchful eye. The additional sips of champagne were done under her nose. Once a waitress called Mama Jean down when she saw her giving me a taste of her drink. “But he’s
my
child!” she answered with a don’t-tell-me-it’s-not-okay-if-I-say-it’s-okay look of indignation. I liked the taste of champagne and the instant pedigree of sophistication it gave me.

I had already had my first drunk a couple of months before this trip, when I felt my life opening up. I’d found the drama club, and in that club, my two new best friends, Nicole and Hunter. Not since Eric from Mrs. Chambers’s class had I found friends that fit me so well. Nicole, two grades ahead, was in speech and debate and always spoke her mind. “James Earl, don’t let me ever wear this dress again. It makes me look fat.”

Nicole wasn’t fat. She was tall and big-boned, with a round, smiling face and penetrating brown eyes. She always took charge, the kind of woman I understood. She made things happen, got us out of the house, much to Mama Jean’s consternation.