Isle of Palms (10 page)

We all bit our lips and then Frannie whispered to me, “Think he’s stupid? He’s breaking the Commandments in the middle of a whipping!”

“You take the Lord’s name in vain?” Sister St. Pious said. She was incredulous. Sally scrambled away from her and ran out of the door and down the street toward Highway 17, where he lived. He was screaming at the top of his lungs.

“Police! Help! Police!”

Sister St. Pious did not flinch despite the echoing lament of Salvatore Denofrio. She rose from her chair and looked up and down our lines to see if anyone had giggled.

“I’m calling the Bishop,” she said and turned, her jaw squared to the front door. Then, she gave us the once over again with her sparrow eyes and then said, “Go back to your classrooms and get your things. School is dismissed.”

That was my orientation to Catholic school education. Sally Denofrio was expelled and transferred to public school. I knew right then that it was best to buy into the politics of the ruling class and double-bolt my big mouth.

I refused to let anyone taunt me.
I heard how your momma died, Anna.
That came from the intermural basketball team’s head cheerleader.
Yeah, my dad and I would appreciate your prayers,
I said. Shoot, I could play this game, I thought.

But sometimes, I got caught off guard in the girls’ bathroom.

“My momma said your daddy is screwing his nurse,” Denise McAffrey said to me while we washed our hands in the same sink.

I was stunned, believing for the moment that she knew something I didn’t. Then a stall door opened and out came Frannie.

“Go to hell, zit face, and leave Anna alone. Your momma doesn’t know shit.”

Frannie was very helpful in my adjustment period.

When spring came, I made May altars in my room at home to honor the Blessed Mother and prayed the rosary on my knees at night with my grandmother’s supervision.

“Now ask God for your special intention,” Grandmother Violet would say.

I said enough rosaries and novenas that first year to liberate the entire citizenry of Purgatory, Limbo, and the outer fringes of Hell’s gates. But not to rid my life of my grandmother.

God was either busy with another call or not interested in my problems. He was probably trying to unravel a bigger disaster than mine.

Then there was still the problem of Daddy. As if having a wife who died in the arms of another man wasn’t enough to reconcile, my daddy was still emotionally detached. I knew we would never be the same again. All the while, Grandmother blustered about every single thing.

I developed new ways to get her goat.
Did you eat the pecan pie I made for your daddy’s supper? You selfish girl!
Of course, Frannie, Jim—a new friend—and I had woofed it with a half gallon of two percent milk.
Well, that’s just fine! The next time you are wanting something, don’t ask me, young lady!
Fine, I don’t need anything from you anyway, I would think.

I could never win with Grandmother Violet. I had come to accept that some people just didn’t like kids. There wasn’t anything to be done about that. How was it that with all the nice women out there in the world, the two I’d lived with were both so difficult? No matter how hard I tried, my slightest infraction of any of her rules was met with a heavy-handed derision. I’d talk to Lillian about it, but she had a new best friend and all she talked about was her. Eventually, we stopped calling each other. Once I even called Miss Angel, but Miss Mavis said she wasn’t there. I never called back. I don’t know why. I just felt funny about it. I just knew if my grandmother found out I was talking to Miss Angel, she’d be mad as hell.

As time went on, I got used to her being there, in the same way I guess you got used to a leash if you were a dog. I was in the middle of the eighth grade, I had evolved to the status of an A student with an occasional B—partly from desire and partly from the unending efforts of the stalwart Sisters of Charity. They gave me books to read—Jane Austen, the Brontës—I loved them all and escaped through them to a nicer world. I was never flippant with them because even their most stringent demands paled next to my grandmother’s. In fact, I sort of liked the nuns and was curious about them. And I knew their
happy quotas
were limited by what one old bat was willing to do to help the other old bat. So sometimes I would even stick around after school and give them a hand. It was better than rushing home.

I closed classroom windows, helped them load their cars, put away books in the library and cut flowers from the schoolyard for the chapel’s altar. I think they grew to sort of love me and I was glad of it too. My exemplary behavior caused no end of speculation among them as to whether or not I would make a good postulate for the convent. I just let them think it was possible, because why not?

When parent/teacher conference time came, it was my grandmother who would come on behalf of Daddy. When the nuns told her how wonderful I was she informed them that they were being manipulated by a child.
What about her grades, Mrs. Lutz? They’re very good! She’s won every spelling bee for the past two years!
How are you knowing she’s not cheating?
Come now, she’s a dear girl!
You were not knowing her mother.

You didn’t know her mother.
This was her standard reply to anything which muddied her built-in poor opinion of me.

The good Sisters, renowned tough nuts, were horrified by Granny’s polar chill, which only served to increase their concern for me. Granny’s spew made spandex of the arterial steel that pumped their sanctified blood. They clucked over me like a flock of Rhode Island reds. My friends—Frannie, Jim, Tommy, and Penny at the core—were never jealous of that attention. There was a sense of justice among us and from what they had learned about my domestic tyranny, they all figured I was entitled to something out of life. They would have preferred the streets of Calcutta to
Life With Violet
. Besides, the last thing they wanted was an old goat with Communion breath hugging on them. That was how it was. And at least I had learned that not
all
adult women were cold-hearted Nazis.

As soon as I was old enough to get in a car with somebody’s sibling who had the Holy Grail—a driver’s license—I’d beg to go to the Isle of Palms. It became a joke.
You got a boyfriend over there waiting for you in the sand dunes?
Sure. Every guy in town was dying to date a bag of bones with glasses and bad skin.
What’d you lose over there?
The awful truth was that I had lost everything on the Isle of Palms.

We would jam ourselves into somebody’s mother’s sedan and ride, windows down, radio blaring. In fact, riding around in someone’s car all but completely defined my teenage years, as it was a popular Lowcountry pastime.

As soon as we would cross Breach Inlet, I’d hang my head out the window like a dog and cure myself with beach air. My friends wanted to cruise Burger King to see who was there. Not me. Just keep me out of Violet’s reach, long enough to allow me a dose of island breeze.

As the years passed, my single obsession was to go back to the Isle of Palms and make things clear in my mind. I had suppressed too many things for too long. Maybe I thought that if I could begin again on the Isle of Palms, I could wipe away the pain of my childhood and teenage years.

I finally arrived at the moment to face my past. There we were on moving day, Daddy and I, unloading the truck together. I was sure he was thinking about Momma, the day she had died and how we had left this place. I was thinking about her too. I had many things on my mind.

I sat down on the truck’s back bumper for a moment. Retracing the events leading up to our move to Mount Pleasant and my return here, I couldn’t help but think of all the years I had worked and saved to make this purchase of poor Mr. Simmons’s house become reality. It was a huge coincidence that my new house was next door to where Miss Mavis and Miss Angel had lived when I was a kid. I wondered if they were still kicking. If they remembered me . . .

Miss Mavis Says, There Goes the Neighborhood

 
 
 
“A
NGEL? Angel? Where are you? Come quick!” She was ignoring me and I knew it. It made me plenty hopping mad when she did that, I can tell you. Whoever on God’s earth named her Angel didn’t know what the hell they were doing too, ’eah? I pay her
good
money. She should at least have the decency to answer me.

There I was, just like any other Thursday. I was just going about my business, as I normally do, fixing to get ready to go on and water my African violets. They’re my babies—besides Blanche and Stanley, my kitties.

I heard the hullabaloo outside and peeked through my living room curtains. Some wiggling tart was moving in that awful little house with a man old enough to be her father. I nearly sucked in my tonsils and had a stroke of paralysis from the sight. If I hadn’t realized that a fall could damage my hand-painted watering can that I created myself in craft class last February, I might have just let myself collapse.

“Angel? Answer me!” I passed through my living room and dining area and swung open the kitchen door so hard it hit the wall and I did not care one iota. “Well?”

There she stood right in front of the sink, polishing my copper pots as though the world wasn’t coming to a complete standstill.

“Well, what?” she said, just as sassy as she could. “Just look at this pot! You can see your pretty self in it clear as day!”

I poured myself a glass of water, scooting her big old lanky self over a little. “You want to see something, you come with me! Why didn’t you answer me?”

“’Cause I didn’t hear you. Did you call me?”

She was lying like I don’t know what. She always did.

“Just dry your hands and come with me this instant. You know you hate to miss anything.”

She came behind me muttering about Lincoln freeing her people and Dr. King and all kinds of liberation speeches but her jaw flopped like a crocodile’s when she looked down at the yard next door. There was Exhibit A—young woman in shorts with old goat in long trousers.

“Um-um,” she said, staring right out the window so the entire planet could see her. “I had a dream last night about flowers blooming all over that house.”

“What?”

“I said,
Last night I dream that house was covered in flowers!
You are so deaf!”

“I am not! And there’s nothing in that yard except stickers and dollar weed! Move back, you old buzzard, they’re gonna see you!”

She stopped and turned to me with that look of hers, that laser of ice only Angel can deliver. It gave me the chills.

“Who you calling old? If I is an old buzzard then you is one too! Tell me, what got you all rattled up? That woman down there ain’t no floozy! She’s a schoolteacher or something!”

“And just how do you know
that?
” I leaned over her shoulder to have another look. There wasn’t a single indication for my money that she was a teacher.

“Her shoes. She’s wearing them awful Birkenstocks that my granddaughter wears. All her friends too.” Then she narrowed her eyes at the scene below and added, “She’s a little long in the tooth for ’em, too, ’eah?”

“Humph! Even so! It’s because of women like
her
that I never remarried.”

It had always been a particular point of sadness for me that another man never came along for my comfort after my Percy died and went to hell. Angel and I had discussed it many times.

“Iffin you say so,” she said and went back toward the kitchen.

Now what was that supposed to mean? I just shook my head and followed her, deciding to ignore her double entendre for the moment.

“Where are you
going?
” I said.

“Gone make our new neighbors a pound cake, that’s what.”

“What?”

“I said,
I gwine make a cake!
Catch more flies with sugar? Where are your manners, Miss Mavis?”

Now. You may tell me all manner of things and I won’t get upset, but don’t anyone tell me I have lost my manners or I’d send them from here to Kalamazoo! However, when it came to Angel, I just let her run her mouth. We’d been sharing a roof for so long, I had already heard every thought of hers a thousand times anyway.

When my Percy was alive, he bought me this house thinking it would only be temporary. We had a nice couple living downstairs and we lived upstairs. Both apartments were very acceptable. Our apartment had three bedrooms and two bathrooms and a lovely view of the Atlantic Ocean. The downstairs had two small bedrooms, a living room combination dining room and a tiny kitchen. It was smaller, to make room for our carport and utility room, and it was a little dark, but still could be very cozy in the right hands.

When our little Thurmond was born, Angel came in to help me. She helped me raise Merilee too. Then when Percy drank himself to death and when the couple downstairs got divorced and moved out, Angel moved in. I imagine she has been here almost a hundred years. Now my Thurmond’s changed his name to Fritz and he’s off in California with his third wife, Karyn with a
y
, thank you. Merilee is still married to that banker in Atlanta. I never saw either one of them unless I was at death’s door. It’s just
Life With Angel
, and an orchestrated visit to death’s door every five years.

All right, I’d admit it. I liked a little drama now and then. Kept my blood sugar down and my spirits up. Still. My new neighbor? I knew her type, all right. Home-wrecking man chasers! Humph!