Isle of Palms (6 page)

“We’ll go home in the morning. I love you, baby, and I don’t want you to worry.”

“I’ll help you, Daddy,” I said. “I’m almost eleven and there’s a lot of stuff I can do. I can cook scrambled eggs, you know.”

I could see him smiling in the dim light of Merilee’s bedroom.

“I know, honey. You’re growing up fast but you’ll always, always, always be my baby. Don’t ever forget that.” He got up and walked to the window.

“Daddy?” He didn’t answer. “Daddy?”

“What, sweetheart?”

He turned to face me. Maybe it was the blue light and shadows of night that cast his face in such a way that he looked completely spent. And old.

“What happened? I mean, how did all this happen?”

“I don’t know.” After a moment or two he said, “I really
don’t
know. Try to get some sleep, okay?”

He kissed me on my forehead and left the room, without closing the door all the way. If I needed him, I would call him, the same way I had when I was really little and had nightmares. It was always Daddy who came to make my world right. After all, Daddy was a pediatrician and he understood children. Most people, except me, called him Doc. The nickname alone implied that he was the one who could make things better.

But no sleep would come to me that night. And Daddy never came to check on me. I called for him a couple of times, but he never came. Despite the late hour, the front door of Miss Mavis’s house continued to open and close with people offering sympathy and help. While it was really nice of Miss Mavis to let us stay with her, I wished all the loud voices would be quiet. And why wasn’t Daddy at least looking in on me?

Then I heard Officer Jackson, the Chief of Police, say,
“I’m sorry, Dr. Lutz. They were in bed. We’re holding the fellow over in Charleston. Apparently he was giving her a controlled substance—amyl nitrite—and her heart just stopped. He’s going to lose his pharmacist’s license and . . .”

They had been in bed? My momma had been in
bed
with that man! The man drugged her? Even though I was a kid, just a Geechee brat from the Isle of Palms, I knew what that meant my momma was. My momma was a whore. From that moment, and for the rest of my life, I was sure I would despise her. I was so ashamed I wanted to die. And, worst of all, where was my daddy to tell me that everything would be all right?

Split Ends

 
BETWEEN the time Momma died in 1975 and now, enough stuff happened to me to make your hair stand 
up just like it would if you stuck your tongue in a football stadium light socket. I ain’t lying. I got married, had a baby, got divorced, moved back in with Daddy, went to beauty school, became a stylist, raised my daughter, Emily, and learned so much it makes my head spin like a globe in the hands of a third grade boy.

I pride myself on the fact that I can garden like nobody’s business and, honey chile, I can cook, doing my voodoo on chicken and pork chops in a most excellent and reasonable, down-home fashion. Now, I have no intention of dragging you through every blessed detail of my life. I just want to give you some highlights. Highlights? Get it? Salon humor. God, I just crack myself up sometimes. Sorry. Occupational hazard.

Where were we? Ah, yes. The present situation. Here’s something nobody knows except me and the South Carolina Federal Bank. I have seventy-four thousand eight hundred and eighty-three dollars in my interest-bearing account, not that interest is anything to brag about these days. But, I have no debt. I never thought I’d see the day, but here it is. But there was this monumental problem blocking the path of my beach house spending adventure.

Daddy.

I knew it was time for me to leave because he had been completely driving me out of my cotton-picking mind. But I was afraid to go because, somewhere along the line, I had forgotten to get a life for myself.

I love when people say that. Get a life. What is that stupid cliché anyway? (I think, if one wants to be taken seriously, one should avoid clichés like the plague.) Some guy cuts some other guy off in traffic.
Get a life!
the guy in the other car yells. Well, my father spends years in front of a television. So,
get a life!
I think to myself. Wouldn’t you know, this stupid
get a life
business finally got around to me. Thank you so much. Took long enough! My eyes got yoinked open in a most unceremonious and insensitive blast delivered by Jim and Frannie.

Jim lives in San Francisco and Frannie lives in D.C. They’re my best friends in the world since forever. We were doing our monthly conference call last week and they gave me the freaking, red-suited devil. I made the foolish, self-indulgent, tiny mistake of complaining once too often about Daddy’s moodiness.

“Anna? Girl?” Jim said. “You know, Frannie and I are so not ready for you to start your rag on Doc. I think it’s a little tired, you know? Like a lavender, glen plaid polyester pant suit.”

“With a safari jacket,” Frannie said. “And shoulder pads. With epaulets.”

“Oh!” I said. “O-kaaay.” I started feeling largely and understandably defensive. I mean, if I couldn’t take my troubles to my dearest friends, who could I tell?

“Give it up! It’s worn out!”

“Anna, Jim’s right,” Frannie said. “Look, you haven’t had a date in two years, that I know of. You haven’t been to the movies since when? I mean, do you even know who Cameron Diaz is?”

“Yes, I do. But who cares?”

“Look, hon,” she said, “and I mean this in the nicest possible way, it seems to us that when you come home from work, you piddle around in the yard, fix dinner, and go to bed, only to start the whole thing over again the next day! You’re acting like you’re sixty years old! Like me dear old granny from Waterford was fond to say, you need to dry your arse. Go have more fun, excuse me,
any
fun in your life and then your daddy wouldn’t bother you so much. Or us!”

“Anna? You need to rise from your rut and never go back.”

I exhaled my disgust at myself and my frustration with them. Dammit all to hell. I hated it when I was wrong. “Well, you’re right, all right? You both are. I know that.” I was chewing on the ends of my hair, a disgusting habit of mine, I suppose, but one I had found comforting since I was a kid.

“Well, that’s a start. It’s just that I hate to see you like this, you know? We both do. Hell, Anna, Frannie and I love you!”

“Listen to Jim. You need to move out of your
daddy’s
house, Anna, and you know it. It just ain’t natural for our generation to go through menopause under our daddy’s roof. It just ain’t becoming for a Magnolia to pale on the branch in daddy’s shadow.”

“Ouch! Jeesch! Menopause! Of all the despicable and totally disgusting thoughts!” That would have been the old proverbial cold water sloshed in my direction. God. Reality truly sucks. Sometimes. “Frannie? Okay. You’re right. Listen, I know y’all won’t believe this but I’ve actually been looking for a house on the Isle of Palms. Sort of.”

“What?”

“Finally! Great God, woman!” Jim said. “Great God!”

I could hear Jim sit up straight and Frannie’s gasp was powerful enough to blow any earwax I had right to the core of my brain.

“Just be sure you’re having a guest r-r-room,” Frannie said, trilling her r’s. “Ocean view would be good.”

“Dream on, but yeah, I’m looking. Maybe something will turn up.”

“Sugar Pants, if ever there was a woman who deserved a beach house on that island, it’s you!”

I giggled at Jim calling me Sugar Pants. I told them about how I had been combing the ads and how I had a real estate broker working on it. We all agreed that a house was essential for my relationship with Emily and for my own sanity.

“God’s good, Anna, but now you’re tap dancing in a small boat! What if you actually find something? Old Doc will howl like a wild animal on a full moon!”

“Well, he’s gonna have to howl. I also know that eventually I
will
find something and then what will I tell him?”

“Girlie, listen to your ex-husband. You’re gonna tell him that
I
said you should do this and that Frannie said so, too.”

“Oh,
that
will solve the whole issue!”

I wished it would but we all knew it wouldn’t. Yes, Jim was my ex-husband and we will get to him soon. Suffice it to say that Jim was my closest and dearest love, despite the fact that his hormones had other plans for our marriage. Frannie was my most important girlfriend of my entire life. If it hadn’t been for her, my Emily would have been at some loser school instead of Georgetown University. Frannie was an alumna and a recruiter and one of the most powerful lobbyists in Washington. She had spearheaded and won Emily’s acceptance. Frannie and Jim were devoted and vocal feminists, believing that every woman should be able to stand on her own two feet. I had adored both of them since Momma died. They had saved me then, but I guessed they were a little weary of propping me up. I couldn’t really blame them.

“I’m gonna do it,” I said. “I have a lot of money in the bank, enough for a deposit and I know I can get a mortgage. Hell, I’ve been working for Harriet for a billion years.”

“If you need help, let me know,” Jim said.

“Thanks, sweetheart, but I gotta do this on my own.”

“However?” Frannie said, laughing.

“Okay, I’ll holler if I can’t manage it, but I swear to God, y’all, I’m gonna do it.”

“Just make sure it has a room for me. I wanna tell everybody in San Francisco that I have a house on the infamous Isle of Palms!”

“Ocean view, please.”

“I’m taking notes,” I said.

That was it. I knew my days of assassinating Daddy’s reputation had ceased or else their respect for me would be compromised. That innocent monthly chat with Jim and Frannie lit the final and long overdue draggling string of my bloomer’s fuse. I emerged as a woman on a pyrotechnic mission.

I was like an IRS agent, sifting and scrolling the ads and minding the obituaries every day—with the proper respect, to be sure. It was a known fact that this was how the “classic houses” on the Isle of Palms came onto the market. Sadly, somebody had to keel over and drop dead.

If the deceased was over eighty, the odds were that the departed’s offspring already had their own brand-new beach houses with Anderson windows and Pella doors and were anxious to settle the estate by selling the well-worn family home. That was how I house shopped and I told myself that it wasn’t morbid or callous.

My real estate agent, Marilyn Davey, kept me on the go. She called me every time she thought there was something in my price range. We would race out to see it and sure enough we would be greeted by the sellers shaking hands with the buyers. Every single time.

“Damn it!” I could see her mouth the words from behind the steering wheel of her navy blue BMW. She would get out of her car and apologize. “I swear, Anna! We just got the listing this morning!”

“It’s okay,” I’d say, “the right house will find me when the time’s right.”

Apparently, there were a lot of people with the same plan I had, but I was still hopeful. Counting up my chits, I figured I was next in line for an intergalactic, multidimensional, karmic act of Divine justice to reclaim, at the very least, my rightful spot on the planet. Just gimme my damn house, okay? While I’d never been someone to believe in entitlements, I had come to believe that this time, I was
entitled.
I got gypped out of living on the Isle of Palms as a child, my daughter got railroaded into living with her grandfather because of my problems, and we had all endured enough.

I didn’t want a big splendid house on the ocean, mainly because I knew I couldn’t
afford
a big splendid house on the ocean. Maybe fate would throw in splendor at a later date. Just a reasonable house would have sent me to heaven.

At last, excellent news! Mr. Randolph Simmons, of the Isle of Palms, eighty-eight years old, choked and died last week on a hunk of mustard pork barbecue at a family picnic. His children were playing touch football and thought he had a heart attack. When they realized later the Heimlich maneuver could have saved his life, they were aghast with shame and consumed with regret. Guilt worked for me. Mr. Simmons’s tiny house would suit me fine. I considered it a sign from God that I heard it in the salon at the same time Marilyn heard it from one of Mr. Simmons’s children. Affordable houses stayed on the market for about two seconds, because that kind of news traveled faster than Palmetto bugs in the kitchen when you turned on the lights. And, in a bizarre twist of fate, Mr. Simmons’s house was only a few houses away from where I had lived as a child. I made an offer and shook hands. Marilyn and I hugged and screamed like schoolgirls.

Now I had to tell Daddy. I sweated it all the way home.

First, I called my gurus for courage. I squirreled myself away in my room and dialed their numbers.

“Jim? Hang on. Let me flash in Frannie.”

“Hey!”

“Hey, Frannie!” Jim said, “Okay, Angel Heart, spit it out! I’m out here tasting Merlots and we all know California grapes don’t hold forever!”

“Yeah,” Frannie said, “I’m on the way out. Got a dinner at the Capitol for some jokers from Merrill Lynch.”

“Okay. I have major news,” I said.

“Doc find himself a bride?”

“No such luck,” Frannie said, “that would undermine his chances for martyrdom.”

I giggled. “No, Daddy ain’t found no babe, but I found a house!”

Much screaming ensued.

“That’s wonderful!”

“Tell it and be quick! I got two seconds and then I’ll call you tomorrow for details.”

“Well, I told y’all I was looking, ’eah? It ain’t no palace and it’s little, but I can afford it. And y’all can please help me figure out how to make it look like something?”

“No problem. I’ve got so much stuff in storage, you wouldn’t believe it,” Jim said. “Is it on the water?”