Leaving Eden (5 page)

At school they made me go to a therapist for a while. “How are you doing?” he asked me the first time I went, which was such a stupid question, I didn’t even bother to answer. I mean, duh. How did he think I was doing? Then he asked me to talk to him about Mama, so I told him some of the things on my list. He listened like he really cared and then he asked me if I thought it was possible that maybe I was “idolizing” her, and after that I didn’t say a word to him. They’d pull me out of P.E., and I’d go sit in his dumb office and stare at him and not say one thing and finally they stopped making me go.

Another thing. Mama loved birds. And butterflies, which she said were bugs with birds’ souls. She was plumb crazy about butterflies. She got chickadees to come and eat seed from the palm of her hand. And she knew the Indian names for all the full moons. Names like Snow Moon, and Feather Shedding Moon, Strawberry Moon, and Travel in Canoes Moon. And she could recite by heart all the lyrics of songs from the ’40s to the ’80s. Even the sad old ones like “Isle of Capri” and “Streets of Laredo,” and she’d sing them loud. Pat Boone. Little Richard. Elvis. The Platters. Patsy Cline. Barbra Streisand. Reba. She knew them all. The other thing was she had this really bad voice. She couldn’t hold a tune in a ten-gallon pail.

Mama taught me things that I kept written down in a book I called my rules for living. Forks go on the left. Always stand tall. Everything tastes better with a little salt. Everything. And if you really, truly want something, you can have it.

Which wasn’t true.

All the wanting in the world wasn’t going to bring my mama back.

Tallie’s Book

Forks go on the left.

Everything tastes better with salt.

Always stand tall.

Things don’t always require a pattern to
make sense.

Use the juice of a lemon to bring out the
shine in your hair.

three

Wanting hasn’t one blessed thing to do with the way things turn out. Or with what ends up coming our way. During the winter of 1988, when Mama was off pursuing her dream, I’d spent every waking moment wanting her back. But when she came home that June, I still wasn’t satisfied. I wore discontent like a second skin. I wanted
more
. I wanted everything to turn back exactly the way it used to be, as if she’d never gone away.

I wanted Mama to restore order to our lives. Instead, she acted like every rule ever made was designed for other people. Later I wondered how I could have missed this neon clue that something was wrong. Nobody changed overnight like that. Not without a reason.

Before she went to Hollywood, Mama used to take pride in her housekeeping even though our house wasn’t much, nothing like Mama’s childhood home. “You deserve better,” Goody used to tell her, which was her common theme. By “better” we all knew she meant better than my daddy. According to Goody, Mama’s marriage to my daddy was the biggest disappointment in her life.

“It killed your daddy,” she’d tell Mama. “Just killed him.”

“The thing that killed my daddy was living with you,” Mama’d shoot back. “If anything gave Daddy a heart attack it was living with you.” Mama was the sweetest thing in three counties; Goody alone could make her take off like that.

Anyway, after Mama came home from L.A., all the rules went out the window. She left dishes in the sink and the beds unmade. She drank soda for breakfast and didn’t check to see if I’d brushed my teeth at night. She didn’t make me wait an hour to go swimming after I ate. “An old wives’ tale,” she said, although the summer before, if I’d taken so much as one bite of a soda cracker, I would have to sit on the blanket and wait for a full sixty minutes to be marked off on her watch.

That summer, I spent a lot of time swimming at the creek, working to get in shape for the swim team and outdo Sarah Reynolds, my biggest competition. Sarah was small, like Mama, but she was tough. A good swimmer. We were school friends. She was a rich girl, but not a bitch girl like the others who lived up on the hill in two-story houses. Back then, my biggest secret, the one I even kept from Mama, was the crush I had on Sarah’s older brother, Spaulding. If I married Spy, I’d be marrying up for damn sure.

All the other kids went over to Elders Pond to swim, so Mama and me would have the creek to ourselves. While I practiced the breaststroke and crawl, Mama’d lie stretched out on the blanket, smoking and calling out instructions. “Head down, Tallie,” she’d yell. “Legs straight. Keep your legs straight.”

Buoyed by the water and Mama’s attention, I would lock my knees and flutter kick, knifing through the creek, growing stronger every day. Florence Griffith Joyner was setting records in the U.S. Olympic Trials that summer, and Mama cut out pictures of her and pasted them on my mirror. For inspiration, she said. For a role model. Mama said Flo-Jo proved a woman could be loaded with glamour and win medals, too. It was a useful thing to know, she said.

On the way home from the creek, we usually stopped at the Dairy Queen. Mama drove a used Dodge with rusted-out rocker panels, but she’d pull right up to the drive-thru like she was driving a new Buick. One afternoon she unfolded a twenty that my Uncle Grayson had sent her. “Get whatever you want,” she said. This wild permission so unhinged me, I settled for a single cone, no dip. “You sure that’s all?” she asked, then ordered a butterscotch sundae for herself. With whipped cream and extra nuts. And she didn’t jiggle her knee, her tip-off sign that she was nervous about something like spending too much. Mama told me that whenever Daddy was feeling bad about something he did, he’d whistle an old Bo Diddley tune called “I’m A Man.” He didn’t know he did it, and Mama didn’t tell him. And I never told Mama about her knee jiggling.

Nothing was predictable about Mama that summer. Some nights we’d have cereal for dinner. Other times she’d fry up a chicken. One day she spent the whole week’s food budget on a leg of lamb. “For a barbecue,” she’d announced. I watched while she sliced an entire bulb of garlic into little slivers and stuck them in the meat. Then she put it on a platter and coated it with oil. A marinade, she called it, which sounded like something she must have learned about in California. Then she made a little tent for it out of aluminum foil and set it over coals on our old charcoal grill. All afternoon, while she napped and I rested on the glider and read, the smell of cooking meat filled my throat and drew the Bettises’ yard dog. Later, when Mama took the lamb off the grill, it was lumpy and black, charred beyond recognition, but instead of being upset—all that work, all that money—she just laughed and tossed it to Old Straw.

Nights after supper, she took the food left on the table and, instead of wrapping it for another meal, tossed it outside for the birds. “I don’t plan on eating one more sorry leftover ever again,” she told us. Raccoons took up residence beneath our back stoop. I expected Daddy to complain and talk about how money didn’t grow in a garden, but he didn’t say one word.

As if to make up for the reckless wastefulness of Mama, I hoarded things. Silver foil I’d peel off gum wrappers. Pieces of string. Elastic bands. Anything I could get my hands on. I would have saved the songs coming out of the radio if I could have figured a way to draw them from the air. I picked up soda cans in roadside ditches and biked over to the Cash Store to turn them in for the deposit. Every morning I counted the pile of change.

“What’re you saving for?” Mama asked me one day.

“Nothing,” I said. I was rolling nickels into a coin wrapper I’d picked up at First Federal. “Just saving.” She watched while I counted out fifty pennies and slid them into their paper cylinder.

“Oh, baby,” Mama said. “Forget saving. Use it up.” She flung her arms wide and tossed back her head. “Spend it. All of it. Squander it.”

Squander
. The word gave me chills. I wanted to yell at my mama that one of us had to be responsible. I was a miser that summer, holding on to everything, not yet knowing that no matter how tight we held on to things, they’d still slip away and there was no way on God’s earth we could prevent it.

On Saturday, when I got to the shop, Raylene had Etta Bird under the dryer and was giving Miss Tilly Pettijohn a shampoo and a roll-up. On the house. Miss Tilly’s husband, Lloyd, died back in the ’50s, and except for a grown son who left town and never came back, she had no relatives. She and Raylene went way back, back to when Lloyd was alive and the Pettijohns had money. Now Miss Tilly went from month to month waiting for Mr. Rollins to deliver her Social Security check. According to Raylene, by the end of the month Miss Tilly reused tea bags so many times that if she asked you to sit and have a cup you had to figure out the date or you’d end up drinking tea so pale and watery it looked like pee.

Lenora was there. She had owned the shop before Raylene and was older than Moses, with fingers bent sideways from arthritis and eyes all filmy. Once or twice a month she liked to come in and do a few perms. “To keep my hand in,” she said, but Raylene said it was because she got lonely and needed to feel useful. “Every living soul needs to feel useful,” Raylene said.

Lenora was giving Pearl Summers a permanent, and the whole place stunk from the solution, one of the worst odors on God’s green earth. With all the dumb inventions people come up with, you’d think someone could figure out a way to make the permanent wave solution smell better. Cinnamon would be good.

The place was abuzz with the comforting hum of women’s voices. Usually I could pick up some information for my book. All I had to do was listen. Like the time Mary Lou Duval said a woman should never get hitched up with a man who wore more jewelry than she did, which made sense to me, so I copied it down. Cora Giles and Effie Bailey were talking about whether or not Bitty Weatherspoon was knocked up by her new boyfriend, but that was nothing I wanted to add to my notebook.

I got out the broom and swept up the clippings from Etta Bird’s cut. Etta was stuck under a dryer revealing her latest revelation to Miss Tilly. Etta was about ninety-two, but she was real peppy and still got around good. And she was always having a
revelation
of one kind or another. It could run from big things like Jesus appearing in a dream to minor stuff like rain on the way. I swept around the chairs and the edges of the rubber floor mat, taking care to get every gray snip from Etta’s cut so we wouldn’t be tracking them around all day. Then I used the excuse of straightening out the magazines to go out front by the
Glamour Day
photo. By now I knew every detail: the attractive way the blonde’s hair curled over one cheek and, on the other side, swept back behind an ear to reveal a crystal ear-ring; the way her lipstick matched the feather boa; the precise way in which she held her hand beneath her chin, fingers slightly curled, a pose I had perfected in front of my mirror. I knew every particular by heart. There was nothing about that blonde even Mama could have thought to improve on.

Saturdays were always busy, and I got to shampoo Effie and Cora, which meant the possibility of two more tips to add to the two dollars and thirty-five cents I had managed to hide in Mama’s silver syrup pitcher. The pitcher once belonged to Goody, and before that to her mama. It was real silver and used to be just about my mama’s favorite thing. She’d polished it every Saturday night and showed me how to use a toothbrush to get the engraved part clean. When Mama made us griddle cakes on Sundays, she’d set it out like we were eating in some fancy dining room instead of on a picnic table in the kitchen. Sometimes she used it to hide the money my Uncle Grayson sent her, which was where I got the idea to stash my
Glamour Day
money there. Two dollars and thirty-five cents. Seventeen and change to go. With luck, Cora would tip me fifty cents. Effie wasn’t any sure bet. She was the kind of demanding customer who drove us crazy and didn’t pay for the privilege.

“I want it
big,
” she’d tell Raylene during the comb out. “Make it look big.”

“I ain’t no magician,” Raylene complained about Effie. “That woman ain’t got but three hairs on her head and two of them is damaged.”

I rinsed Cora and worked in another dab of shampoo. (Wash, rinse, wash, rinse, then conditioner was how we did it.) I was lost in the pleasure of shampooing and half dreaming— thinking about Spy Reynolds was what I was doing—when Cora interrupted my thoughts.

“Tallie,” she said. “Call Lenora over here. I need her to take a look.”

I sighed, thinking,
This is all I need
.

The peculiar thing about Lenora was that she knew how to read soap bubbles. She said her mama had done it, too, that the gift ran in her family. Sometimes she’d be shampooing a head of hair and chatting on about how her son, Earl, was thinking of buying a place down at Virginia Beach or about how Earl’s wife, Sophine, a woman Lenora couldn’t abide, had aspirations beyond her place, or about how young Earl was doing up in Charlottesville, where he worked maintenance for the University and fathered such a brood of kids a person’d think they were Catholic, and she would pause right in the middle of a sentence and get this vague look on her face. Her hands would freeze and she’d fix her filmy old eyes on a patch of soap foam in the sink, like she was seeing it and not seeing it at the same time. “You’re having a visitor this weekend,” she’d announce to the woman tilted back under the faucet, who would say why, yes, that was right, she was expecting a second cousin from Richmond.

Lenora saw a whole world in those suds. Women with moles on their faces. Someone crying. People who walked with a limp. Weddings and funerals and money being spent too freely. Once she saw a rabbit in Mrs. Harewood’s soap and told her to slow down, she was taking on too much. “Can’t,” Mrs. Harewood said. “Got too much to do.” And then the next week she’d had a heart attack, which had slowed her down for good.

“Surprised I didn’t see a dove,” Lenora said when she heard the news. Death usually came in the shape of a dove, unless it was violent or tragic and then it was a horse. A heart meant a new friend. Or a bride. Flowers could mean a funeral or wedding; but usually they signified a celebration. Lenora said everyone had the gift—especially women—you just had to be open to it, to pay attention.

“Lenora,” Cora yelled. “Come over here.”

Lenora left off the permanent wave rollers she was putting in Pearl’s hair and walked her arthritic shuffle over to the sink. Just watching her made your knees ache.

“My ruby ring,” Cora said, “the one that belonged to Boyce’s mama. It’s lost.”

Lenora sunk her hands into the helmet of suds and wrung up a handful that she flung into the basin. She stared at it like she was watching TV. I looked, too, but no matter what Lenora said about everyone having the ability, the gift, I just saw ordinary soapsuds.

“It’s on the bedside table in your spare bedroom,” Lenora declared after a minute.

“I remember now,” Cora said. “I left it there when I was washing windows.”

As if she’d done nothing more amazing than read the lunch menu at Wayland’s Diner, Lenora dried off her hands and went back to rolling Pearl’s hair. I
never
let Lenora shampoo me. Anything she could see in my hair, I wasn’t wanting to know. It was better not to know. People liked to think it would help, but it wouldn’t. I already knew the past, and there was no preparing for the future. For sure it wouldn’t have made one bit of difference to me if I’d known back during that summer what was waiting ahead for Mama.

All that first month after Mama came back to us, I was edgy. I’d wake up at two or three in the morning, the heat of summer mixing in with the heft of waiting and soaking me through. Some nights I’d go out on the porch, hoping to catch a breeze. I’d open my shirt and let the air bathe me. Like Mama’d noticed, I had grown out. In the past few months I’d developed distinct breasts, and I was starting to have feelings about my body. I’d wrap the night around me and stare into the darkness while some unknown thing hung in the air like a promise, as real as the fireflies that danced and sparked above the grass. I’d never seen a firefly in daylight, but I pictured them like miniature dragonflies. Delicate and nearly transparent.