Leaving Eden (3 page)

Mama didn’t just watch. She
memorized
, never taking her eyes off the screen. All the while she’d smoke and drink diet cola. No beer. You have to be careful, she said. On film, the camera adds ten pounds, she said. Between movies, she’d tell me things about Natalie. Mama was a walking, talking Natalie Wood encyclopedia. Where she got this stuff, I didn’t know. Like how Natalie had made twenty movies by the time she was sixteen. And how she’d dated Elvis and had even gone to Memphis once, but that Gladys didn’t approve of the match and his mama came first with Elvis, before any woman, so that was the end of that.

“Look, Tallie,” she’d say. “See how she always wears a bracelet on her left wrist. That’s because she had an accident and her wrist has a bump. She always wears a bracelet to cover it up.” It was amazing to me that someone as pretty as Natalie Wood would worry about something as insignificant as a bump on her wrist. “How did she hurt it?” I’d ask. “It was back in the late forties,” she’d say. “When she was making a movie with Walter Brennan, a bridge on the set collapsed. She broke her wrist and it wasn’t set properly.” “What movie?” I’d ask, testing her.
“The Green Promise,”
she’d answer, naming a movie even the video store people hadn’t heard of.

Mama particularly loved
Splendor in the Grass,
a film I could hardly bear to watch, especially the part where Natalie gets sent off to that place. No matter how many times I saw that part, it always made me cry. That was back when I still could cry and Mama never minded. Sometimes, she’d cry right along with me. Her other favorites were
Gypsy
and
West Side Story
and
Rebel
Without a Cause,
but she didn’t like
Inside Daisy Clover,
and not just because that creepy Ruth Gordon was in it. “Natalie was going through a hard time when she made that picture,” Mama told me. Like I said, Mama knew
everything
about Natalie, so I never thought to question the truth of her knowledge or how she’d gained it.

“She was terrified of water,” Mama told me more than once. “She had nightmares she was going to drown in dark water.” Here, Mama’s voice would drop and she’d shiver. “That girl had a premonition. Even as a child. She
knew
she was going to drown.” Mama used to say that Natalie drowning off Santa Catalina Island was the saddest thing she’d ever heard. Sometimes the way she acted each November 29—the day Natalie died—it was like our family really had lost blood. Mama’s sister. Her twin.

Once Daddy gave in, Mama put her plan into action. Before two weeks passed, she’d wangled traveling money out of my Uncle Grayson, bought her ticket and new luggage, and talked the people at the Lynchburg AAA out of a map even though she wasn’t a member. Then one night, Daddy drove her to the train. I was asleep when Mama departed, but I always had a clear picture of how she must have looked holding her gray suitcase and a one-track resolve that would not be refused.

I stared at the blonde in the feather boa. I missed my mama so much, it hurt to take a full breath. All the wanting in my heart, all of the missing her was focused on that poster and the possibilities it possessed. The moment I’d seen the sign sitting on the easel and Raylene explained what it was about, I’d known I had to do it, too. As I said, I had plans. Of course, I knew better than to tell anyone in Eden. Not much remained a secret in a small town like ours, and
nothing
was a secret at Raylene’s. My plan was this: Like Mama, I was going to be a movie star. Hollywood, for all its falseness, would be more forgiving than acting in New York. For example, you didn’t have to know all the lines at the same time. Just the one day’s worth.

I recognize the possibility that Mama was the one who had planted the idea of acting in me, but it was not as unreasonable a dream as you might think. Two years before, when I was only a freshman at Eden, I’d played Emily Webb in the drama club production of
Our Town
and when I delivered Emily’s speech on learning about life, people were actually crying. For a fact, Mama would have been proud. She would say I got all my talent from her.

The handicap to my goal was my looks; to tell you the truth, I resemble my daddy a lot more than my mama. For sure, I would never be confused for any famous actress. Except
maybe
Jodie Foster if she were a little plainer and her jaw a little bigger. Talent will take you so far, but Hollywood wants more. To be taken seriously, you must be beautiful. You might argue that there are plenty of actresses out there who aren’t Miss America material, or Miss Amherst County for that matter, but—even if they do win an acting award—you’ll notice they don’t get their picture in
People.
Character actors, they call them, which is about the worst thing you can say. Like they are a cartoon or something. I had no intention of ending up like that.

This is where my mama would have come in handy. I know if she could have taken me in hand, a transformation would be easy. Without Mama,
Glamour Day
was my best shot. It was my ticket out of Eden. My pass to L.A.

I already had my name picked out. (Most actresses change their name, a fact you may not know. According to Mama, Carole Lombard—the actress who married Clark Gable who played Rhett Butler in
Gone With the Wind
—well, she was born Jane Alice Peters. You can see how Carole Lombard was a big improvement.) My movie name was going to be Taylor Skye. Taylor for Mama’s daddy. Skye for Mama. On account of her always saying that the sky’s the limit, a philosophy she passed on to me. For pure fact, my personal limit was not going to be Eden. Or the Klip-N-Kurl.

Twenty bucks was a dog-cheap price to pay for a dream, and I had two weeks to come up with the cash. The problem was every penny Raylene paid me went to help with groceries or my Daddy’s bar bill at CC’s. I was determined to find a way. Goody always said I inherited my stubbornness from Mama.

Word about
Glamour Day
spread quickly, and by midafternoon the sign-up sheet was nearly filled. Most of the women who added their names were middle-aged and looked like they could use some glamour. Mary Lou Duval was going through her fourth divorce. Ellie Sue Rucker was six months along with her third. Trashy Bitty Weatherspoon, who drove around town in her new boyfriend’s gold Camaro like she was still reigning prom queen, worked nights at the chicken factory. Aubrey Boles, complete with her dyed black hair twirled up in a beehive, added her name to the sheet. My mama believed it was a mistake for a woman to go jet-black. She was fond of pointing out how much improved Priscilla Presley looked after she lightened up her hair. Elizabeth Taylor could get away with it, Mama maintained, because of her pure coloring and those violet eyes.

Willa Jenkins, another regular, signed up, too. She said Raylene was the only white woman she knew who understood black people’s hair. She’d talked two of her friends into joining her. Of course, it was a surprise to no one when Ashley Wheeler heard about it and came in. Ashley had an inflated opinion of herself, a view consistently reinforced by her mama and a good share of the male enrollment at UVA. Day or night, Ashley had a smile plastered on her face, looking all sweetness, pure proof that looks do lie.

By five o’clock, there was only one opening left. I’d spent the entire day thinking on how I could earn the twenty dollars and keep it secret from my daddy. I had two weeks to find a way. I just had to keep faith, like Mama was always reminding me. Before we closed up, I added my name to the list. Raylene gave me a little hug when she saw me filling the last slot. Like most people in town, she felt sorry I didn’t have a mama. We stood there and stared at the perfect Hollywood blonde with the pink boa all framed in gold.

“Your mama,” Raylene said. “Your mama would have loved this.”

And she would have. Mama most surely would have.

Tallie’s Book

Don’t make Divinity Fudge on rainy
days.

Plant spring bulbs in the fall; drop a
tablespoon of bonemeal in the hole.

Scald the milk before adding to sponge
cake batter.

Take care not to let other people push
their dreams on you.

The sky’s the limit.

You just have to keep faith.

two

Raylene was dead right about how my mama would have loved Glamour Day. I could just picture Mama in the shop taking charge and bossing everyone around while we got gussied up to look like movie stars. I missed her so much then, I could have perished with the wanting. You’d think by that time I would be used to my mama being gone, but I wasn’t.

My stomach ached with the queer emptiness that came whenever I thought about her, and I considered heading over to Simpson’s Cash Store and buying a couple of Milky Ways. Then I thought about how I’d be needing every quarter I could get my hands on to put toward the twenty dollars for
Glamour
Day
. Besides, by then I knew the big, hollow hole of Mama’s absence wasn’t anything a candy bar could fill.

I wanted someone to talk to, someone who would make it seem as if at least part of Mama were still around. My daddy couldn’t help. Without Mama he was so sad and lonely it was like I had to take care of both him and me. Finally I settled on Martha Lee. She wasn’t near like Mama, but she was the closest I was going to get.

Martha Lee lived over on the north side of town, a good six miles away. I had no money to be paying Mr. Tinsley for any taxi ride, and with the heat, which had been shooting up steady for a week and now rose off the pavement in waves, I wasn’t up to the walk. I had no choice but the Raleigh. Sixteen years old and riding a bike. I might as well have been carting a neon-goddamn-sign saying:
Retard.

It was four-thirty, the sleepy time of day when there wasn’t much traffic, and I was taking up a good share of the road, pedaling hard to get there before anyone witnessed the humiliating sight of me on the Raleigh. I passed the old Tyree house and— predictable as can be—there were the Tyree sisters sitting in a row on the porch. Violet, Myrtle, and Rose. The Flowers, Mama used to call them. They had to be at least ninety. As I rode by, all three waved, their hands rising up in unison, as if connected by one invisible string.

Past the Tyree house, the sidewalk ended and the road got narrower. I continued on past Miss Easter Davis’s place and then by the run-down shack where the cripple Charlie McDaniel lived. Before Charlie got polio and had to walk on crutches, my daddy went to school with him and he could remember a time when Charlie walked straight as anyone. I looked directly ahead when I went by. The last thing I needed was to see Charlie. The sight of him always made me sad. But mad, too. Like somehow the two feelings were mixed up together.

I was almost at Martha Lee’s, just turning onto High Tower Road, when I heard a car honking on my heels. I pretended to ignore it, but it slowed down and my worst nightmare sprang up in living color. There was Elizabeth Talmadge in the yellow soft-top Jeep her daddy’d bought for her. An early graduation present, she said. A whole year early. Seemed like everything came early to Elizabeth. Early and easy. She was the lead twirler for the Sparkettes and acted like that made her Queen of the World. The car was filled with kids dressed in swimsuits, heading out to Elders Pond no doubt.

“Hey, Tallie,” Elizabeth yelled. She slowed down like we were best friends or something but really to take pleasure in my humiliation. I was probably the only sixteen-year-old in the entire Commonwealth of Virginia who didn’t have a license, let alone a car. If the universe were fair, Elizabeth would get a serious case of acne. Or eczema. Ringworm. But if I knew one thing for sure it was that the universe didn’t bother itself about being fair, so pure-skinned girls like Elizabeth Talmadge got to drive around in Jeep soft-tops while I rode a rusty Raleigh, sweaty as a hard-broke horse. Still, I had legs like a lifeguard, while the Queen of the World’s were soft as Wonder Bread.

I looked straight ahead, like it was a good thing to be riding a bike, like I was riding it by choice, like I was in training for that important bike race over in France, like maybe I was going to escape with the least amount of humiliation.

“Hey, Tallie,” a boy called.

My ears would have recognized Spaulding (everybody called him Spy) Reynolds’s voice if he’d been speaking out in a crowd in the center of Washington, D.C. I felt heat flood my chest and rise up in patches to my throat and cheeks.

I stood on the pedals, ignoring him, and pumped furiously.

“What’s the matter, Bullwinkle? Cat got your tongue?”

I was pumping so hard, I pulled right ahead of the stupid Jeep.

“Nice ass,” someone said. Not Spy. I didn’t
think
it was Spy.

“Shit heels,” I said aloud. I pictured the way I must have looked, all red-faced and sweaty in ripped jeans, looking like the poor trash they all thought I was. I wished my mama was around. Mama’d see to it that I had
style
. If my mama were there, Elizabeth Talmadge would freeze in her tracks, just struck dumb with my style. Then I remembered the
Glamour
Day
photo. My ticket out of Eden. I swore that before I headed for Hollywood I was going to make sure that Elizabeth got a look at it. And Spy Reynolds, too. I wanted him to see me looking like a movie star. For once—just once—looking prettier than any girl in town, even Miss Sparkette, the Queen of the Universe herself.

Elizabeth punched the gas pedal and left me in a patch of dust. “Shit heels,” I yelled after her.

Martha Lee’s house wasn’t exactly a trailer, but as near as a place could be without actually having wheels. Mama’d said she lived there to spite her daddy. Samuel Curtis owned half of Eden, but you wouldn’t have a clue to that by anything Martha Lee did.

Her pickup wasn’t in the drive, so I fished the key out from under the cracked slab of black stone by the front steps and let myself in. The place was in its normal state, which is to say pure mess. I’m not the world’s greatest housekeeper, but you’d need a front-end loader to make a serious dent at Martha Lee’s.

It wasn’t because she was lazy. She was an LPN and didn’t mind taking on the dirty jobs. Anyone who would change an old lady’s diaper and bathe old men wasn’t shirking work. Mama always used to say Martha Lee was a saint. And maybe she was, though my piddling knowledge of saints made it hard to picture a holy person drinking and smoking and leaving a week’s worth of laundry heaped on the floor.

While I was waiting, I put a load of wash in the machine, wiped down the counters, then swiped myself a beer and went to sit on the steps. Most of the yard was as run-down as the house, but off to one side was just the prettiest patch you could imagine, where Martha Lee had planted hydrangeas and zinnias and hibiscus with blossoms as big as a meat platter. There were tomato plants I had to look up to, and bush beans with marigolds laced between each plant. Nothing was neat or in rows like most people’s gardens, but it was so pretty and rich it looked like the Garden of Eden. Lush is what Mama used to call Martha Lee’s garden, and the word set exactly right.

Whatever Martha Lee did with her yard would have been perfectly fine with Mama. They had been best friends since second grade, although no one in Eden could figure how two girls so different could be tighter than the knot on a noose. Daddy called them the original odd couple, and I had to agree with him there.

Martha Lee Curtis was, Jesus forgive me, the plainest woman in Eden. The kind of homely that was hard not to stare at, even if you’ve seen her all your life, which I had.

Mama was nothing if not delicate. She was the kind of woman who could put a gardenia in her hair and not look foolish. The flower sat there like it had spent every moment of its short but flawless life just waiting to be pinned in that bed of dark curls. For a fact, no one on earth would even consider fixing flowers in Martha Lee’s hair. A flower would just up and shrivel at the prospect of landing anywhere near her head. I think men felt pretty much the same. Even Mama, who had a kind word for every drunk and fool in Eden, even Mama didn’t protest very long when Daddy said Martha Lee’s face would stop a blind mule dead in its tracks.

Martha Lee was a big woman. And she didn’t hold much truck with personal grooming. Half a block away you could tell she cut her own hair. And she didn’t know about things like using the juice of a lemon to bring out the shine. Mama used to encourage her to pluck her eyebrows and give lipstick a shot, but Martha Lee couldn’t be bothered. My personal theory— which I’ve given a lot of thought to—is that if you look like she does, early on you give up even trying.

I was maybe seven or eight when my mama began her earnest campaign to get Martha Lee to pluck. She used her own eyebrows as the example to which Martha Lee should aspire. I would sit in the corner of my mama’s bedroom and watch her working till the brows of her arches were as neat and perfect as Greta Garbo’s, an old actress Mama greatly admired, along with Carole Lombard, who died eight years before Mama was born and, like Garbo, had pencil-line brows.

When Mama attended to her own, it was a precise and perfect ritual. Her eyes would narrow against the stream of smoke curling up from the ashtray on her dresser and she would lean in close to her reflection, smooth a fingertip over the patch of skin beneath her brow and then, with a sharp jerk, yank out a stray hair. She never so much as winced, although I know for a fact that it had to hurt. I myself tried it once, and I want to tell you it made my eyes water something fierce. I can see why Mariel Hemingway chose not to pluck, although I know Mama would have believed it would advance her career if she thinned them just the littlest bit. This was a theory she employed to explain the acting career of Joan Crawford, who, Mama said, was beautiful early on when she waxed her brows, but as soon as she let them grow out thick as a man, all she got was those creepy roles. This was pure fact. I don’t think Mama could even bear to watch Brooke Shields.

So for years Mama had been dying to get her hands on Martha Lee. Mama maintained thin brows would be the start of a big improvement—a
transformation
—but Martha Lee would pop the tab on another can of Pabst, light two more Salems for herself and Mama, and laugh her big laugh. “You can’t transform the hound dog into the flea,” she’d say. In most things, I stood firmly on Mama’s side, but I was glad Martha Lee held her ground. I couldn’t picture her with nervous Garbo brows.

I took another sip of my beer and watched while a hawk circled over a stand of white ash to the left of Martha Lee’s house. I knew he was only searching for his dinner, but I started thinking about how that bird had a big picture of everything on the ground, a
context
for things, and I had to wonder how my life would look if I could see it from a distance instead of always being stuck in the middle. I wondered if things somehow would settle easier in our hearts if we could see the whole picture of our life while we were living it, like the hawk’s view of the ground, instead of jangly bits and pieces that didn’t seem to fit.

I was still drinking the beer, enjoying the prickly feeling it brought to my forehead, and staring at Martha Lee’s garden and reminding myself that things didn’t always have to be laid out straight as string to make sense, when her truck pulled in the yard.

“Hey, there, Cookie,” she said, like she expected to find me there.

“Hi,” I said, stashing the beer below the steps.

“How’s things going at the Flip-N-Furl?” Martha Lee had a deep disdain for Raylene’s shop. Then and there I decided to keep the facts about
Glamour Day
to myself. Telling Martha Lee wouldn’t be one bit like telling Mama.

She kicked off her shoes, then—right in the front yard— stripped off her nurse’s uniform, which sported some kind of stain on the front that was gross-gross-gross, an orange splotch that made me queasy just to look at it. I didn’t even want to
think
about where that might have come from. I went in the house and grabbed a clean T-shirt and cutoff jeans for her to cover herself with. Martha Lee in bra and panties was not a sight you’d want to be spending much time looking at. Not like Mama, who could have modeled for Victoria’s Secret if she’d wanted to.

“How’s your daddy faring?” she asked as she got dressed. You didn’t need a translator to know she was really trying to determine if he’d been drinking.

“He’s okay.” Course he was drinking, but without Mama, my daddy was so lost, it was hard to stay mad at him. And he still kept his job at the mill. In our town, a drinker who held his job wasn’t an alcoholic, just a man enduring a streak of bad luck.

“What about you?”

It was so good to have someone listening to me, I reeled off my list of complaints, starting with the scene with stuck-up Elizabeth Talmadge, who was
so
obvious, it was pathetic. Then I told her how I was the only one in my class who couldn’t drive and how my daddy said he’d teach me but never had the time when he was sober and after he stopped at CC’s you wouldn’t want to go with him unless you planned on ending up in some culvert counting broken bones. Finally, despite myself, I told her the whole thing about the Glamour Company coming to Raylene’s and how there was a team of trained professionals who did your makeup and how you got to pick out five outfits and how they took your picture and you got to keep one. “Raylene says they make you look like a star,” I told her, but she didn’t seem the least interested or say anything like Mama would have.

“I miss Mama,” I finally said.

“I miss her, too, Cookie,” she said. She went in to get herself a beer and then rejoined me on the steps.

Back that summer, when Mama returned home from Hollywood, a full day hadn’t passed when Martha Lee showed up. Though I wanted to keep Mama to myself, I wasn’t completely sorry to see Martha Lee’s pickup turn into the yard. I’d been impatient for facts, and Martha Lee would see to it that Mama’d start talking. You could count on it. They didn’t have a secret between them.

The second Martha Lee hit the ground, Mama was out the door and across the yard. They’d grabbed each other and started twirling in circles, squealing like baby pigs. I’d had to bite back a taste I knew was jealousy—Mama hadn’t acted half so happy to see me—and trailed after them as they headed for the house. With the two of them sitting in the kitchen, it was just like old times. Although it wasn’t yet ten A.M., Mama opened the refrigerator and got out a couple of bottles of beer. She set them on the table, not even bothering with glasses. Martha Lee took out a pack of Salems, lit two, then handed one to Mama. I hung around the door, trying to look invisible. This was my best chance to find out the precise details of what Mama had been doing for those months and whether she had come close to accomplishing what she’d set out for. Of course, Mama spotted me right off. “Tallie, sugar, be a good girl and go play. Martha Lee and me got some catching up to do. Girl talk.”