Mississippi Sissy (14 page)

Those nights lingering over Porter's prose with my mother led me to other writers who gave me just as much solace in my own weary solitude when my teenage years commenced, a solitude that in and of itself was a way to connect with the very memory of my mother during those first few months in that green and azure bedroom without her husband, when she taught me that a companionless soul could comfort itself with the beauty of a well-chosen word, a well-written sentence, a well-parsed phrase. Salvation, she imparted, was offered in a paragraph's perfect form when one was capable of reading it with understanding, with empathy, with purpose. All such contrivances—words, sentences, phrases, paragraphs—could be combined into a lifeline one could throw to oneself. So it was that, as a teenager, I turned, always with her hushed voice in my head, from Katherine Anne Porter to the poets Muriel Rukeyser and Anne Sexton and W. H. Auden and David St. John, as well as the mighty Iris Murdoch, E. M. Forster's
Maurice,
and, of course, Flannery O'Connor, a little Faulkner, and Miss Welty. But it all started back in my mother's empty bed, that little reading lamp of hers illuminating not only her favorite pages of Porter's prose, but also, in some greater sense, her need to pass on to me a love of language that would linger with me,
she seemed to intuit, long after any memory of her visage had become blurred and distant, a diaphanous face that, yes, only words would be able to sketch someday, once I tried visually to conjure her and found I could not.

On other nights I'd discover her alone with our stereo, its mahogany cabinet my father's favorite piece of furniture, listening to his cherished country-and-western singers or playing over and over his favorite album, Brother Dave Gardner's
Ain't That Weird?
Gardner was an ex-preacher who had become a stand-up comic, a man my father insisted was “one of them reformed Bible-thumpers, a gol'durn atheist when you get right down to it, who believes that a good belly laugh can save a bad man's soul better than any goddamn Son a'-God.” Preaching such a sacrilegious belief to his friends and in-laws, he made them all sit and listen to Brother Dave, daring them to laugh at the jokes and the rambling redneck-loving stories on the album, which, of course, they did, finding my father's delight at his own bad-boyness as amusingly seductive as any of Brother Dave's punch lines. My mother, after my father's death, would sit and listen to Brother Dave go through his slightly subversive cornball repertoire and no longer crack a smile.

Other nights, when I longed for her to read another of her selections from Katherine Anne Porter, she would lock herself up in her bedroom and cry herself to sleep without the benefit of my company. I once knocked on her door when I couldn't sleep myself because of the sound of her tears so close by in the next room. She finally let me in and I found her on her bed with the Scrabble board opened up before her as she arranged the letters to form all the dirty words my father liked to spell. She reached down to scramble the letters so I could not make out what she was doing, although I already knew enough of the words. My father had tried to toughen me up with early knowledge of such language as I sat listening to him argue with his buddies about the merits of the Mickey Mantle versus Roger
Maris debate that seemed to consume him during the last full summer of his life. He was one hundred percent a Maris man and made sure I understood every word he used to make his case before the manly conversations turned to pussies and cunts and the careful consideration of Hollywood's big-titted women—Mansfield, Monroe, et al.—compared to the smaller-titted variety. “Women almost as pretty as my own little-titted Nancy Carolyn,” he'd continue his commentary, always loving the way my mother's two names fit in his mouth, their having comfortably settled into his cheek after all my parents' years together like a juiced-up chaw of tobacco, its sluice, like the lovely flow of her name, a form of relaxation for him, a resultant moment of sweet release when either expulsion occurred. “Janet Leigh, let's say—she's got little'uns like Nancy Carolyn,” he'd keep on regaling them, as sure of his delivery as Brother Dave was. “Or—who else? Oh, yeah—a looker like that skinny bitch Audrey Whatshername. I reckon that little Audrey gal ain't got nothing bigger than a couple of mosquito bites, but, boy oh boy, I'd like to scratch them mamas for her,” he'd say, grinning that lopsided grin of his, all of his laughing buddies, Mantle men and Maris men alike, finally agreeing that it was indeed that latter kind of little-titted women, especially their favorite, someone named Juliet Prowse, who, in an attempt to compensate for their bra size, could probably suck the best cock in show business. “How big you think Frank Sinatra's dick is?” I remember him once asking. “He acts like it's big as mine, but I bet it's no bigger'n Kevinator's here,” he said, rubbing my head and making everybody laugh even more.

My mother and I sat studying the scrambled Scrabble letters in our silence until, brightening, she asked me to help her pick up the huge tan
World Book
unabridged dictionary embossed in red and gold lettering, which was kept under her bed along with the Scrabble set. “Let's learn some new words,” she said, deciding to practice her teaching skills on me. It was the first of many nights when I'd sit with
her on the bed and we'd get out the Scrabble tiles and go through the gargantuan dictionary picking out words in order to spell them correctly, then focusing on their numbered meanings. She also taught me about subjects and predicates and adjectives and adverbs while sitting in the middle of that bed with all those Scrabble tiles between us. “We'll take a week for each letter of the alphabet and see how many words we can spell and learn,” she said that night, opening the dictionary up to the A's. It was during the fifth week, when we'd made it to the E's, that her health began to decline to such an EXTENT (one of the words she taught me) that it could no longer be ignored. Her tears that night surfaced not from sadness, but from the physical pain she was suffering. It was after studying the words EXOTIC and ELITE and ELIXIR that she made me make the call to my grandparents as she lay on the bed barely able to whisper the instructions to me, telling me each word to tell them as if such an S.O.S. were part of the teaching duties she was trying out on me. It was one of our last nights in that ugly little shingled house, a frightening hubbub of activity ensuing inside her dimly lit bedroom (never again an enclave of the intimacy I alone shared with her) as we were rescued by doctors and preachers and grandparents and aunts and uncles who that night descended upon us once that first call went out. A decision was subsequently made, after my mother's diagnosis of cancer a few days later, that she and Kim and Karole and I would move in with my grandparents. Goodbye to the Hinds Hi-Steppers and her private readings of Katherine Anne Porter—although I made sure to hide her copies of
Ship of Fools
and
Pale Horse, Pale Rider
among my own belongings at her suggestion before anybody could arrive that night. They were secret treasures I would dip into after she was dead, in order to summon her voice, a voice that was attached to the very rhythms of Porter's prose, until the copies, threadbare from perusal, were lost by a shipping company during my transatlantic move to Paris. They were in a small box of other books the shippers misplaced. I'm still not over the
loss. I wanted them around me for sentimental reasons once I attempted to make a home for myself in a land where the comfort I found in the English language would prove to be not a refuge but a hindrance, deepening a loneliness that continued more forcefully to creep into my being while I sat, day in and day out, and stared at the empty chairs across from me at Cafe Flore or choked down Nutella-slathered street-vendor crepes and questioned whether I ever again would have a conversation with anyone other than my silent self. During my year in Paris I missed my mother more than any other time in my life. I knew, as my silent conversations swooped from my past to that Parisian present and back again, how cute Nancy Carolyn would think all the little African girls were that I encountered on my long and winding walks through the city. I'd conjure Nancy Carolyn to accompany me and pretend that she was commenting on their tiny faces, lovely and alien and proud, some so black they looked oddly blue in the Parisian sun that stubbornly lingered on those late-summer evenings, when my imaginary mother and I would meander until nine o'clock rolled around, sometimes till ten, and I made my way back to the Pont Neuf where I'd watch the sun finally set. The little African girls, not quite old enough to be safely ensconced in their first year at some Muslim preparatory school out in the northeastern edges of the nineteenth arrondissment, held their harried immigrant mothers' hands and hid their sweetly embarrassed faces from me when I made a point of acknowledging their presence, their smiles too quickly buried in the flowing, colorfully printed skirts of their mothers, the richly dyed fabrics that formed so many of the bubas and wrappers and head ties as deeply blue and briny green as the heavily woven drapery back in that bedroom in Raymond, Mississippi, which I pulled shut for the last time for my own mother that awful night full of hastily culled family members who lurked helplessly in the blue-green shadows of the room, drapery I can to this day feel beneath my fingers as I stood in the corner and rubbed the nub of
its wide, burlap-like weave over and over, waiting for my mother's pain to subside as she was carefully lifted from the bed and put into the ambulance, my hands fumbling for the cords as she cried out my name, unable to move toward her, unable to open the drapery back up, unable still.

________________

That Parisian summer was not my first experience with imaginary female companionship. Perhaps the reason I was so taken with the faces of all the little African girls is that they reminded me of the imaginary girl who “befriended” me after I moved in with my grandparents. Back then, I just thought she looked like a miniature version of Matty May, my grandparents' maid. It never dawned on me that I would be able one day to compare my friend to African immigrants with whom I shared Parisian sidewalks as a grownup who had become brave enough to move worlds away from a Mississippi country road where he, a child, was not brave at all, but cowered grief-stricken in the culvert under his grandparents' gravel drive. I'd crawl as far inside the culvert as I could and lie down and listen to Kim and Karole and the fat little Derrick boys from down the road, whose parents owned the ramshackle chicken farm one pasture over, play cowboys and Indians until all their little necks would go grimy in the heat, the crevices turning black with dirt, “nigger beads,” my grandmother would call the summer filth that gathered there. She'd try quickly to swab their necks with a damp dish towel as they raced inside the kitchen for the red Kool-Aid they still drank by the gallon before they galloped off for more of their Kevin-less fun. As soon as they were safely playing all those freshly Bush Hogged acres away from me, I'd crawl back outside the culvert and carry on inside with my secret trove of Katherine Anne Porter. I'd pretend I could make out all her words as I hid inside my grandmother's sewing closet with a flashlight
I had stolen from one of my grandfather's drawers. My new stuffed animal, the green curving phallic form of Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent, listened intently as I whispered in his earless presence all of the story I could remember about that German ship, those fools, the drowning bulldog.

My imaginary friend, a replacement for Cecil once she had arrived on the scene, was a tiny thing just like Matty May, who was but a bent slip of a woman, a comma typed onto the white world around her. My friend's eyes were as sly and mischievous as Matty's and she had the same oddly smoky smell. Her hair was also worn like Matty had worn hers all her life, plaited in flat precise rows to her head and culminating in a few tiny pigtails down around the top of her neck, a few around her ears. Matty was always running her tongue around in her mouth as if she had just eaten something delicious or was about to say something equally so. Epiphany had a tongue just like her.

She first appeared to me—my Epiphany—when Matty May and I had finished watching our umpteenth rerun of Johnny Weissmuller, still the love of my life, in one of his Tarzan movies that Jackson's Channel 12 would air as a Saturday afternoon double-feature with episodes of
Jungle Jim,
his 1950s television series. Those were touch-and-go days back then, when my brother and sister were out in the yard playing their own make-believe games with those fat dumb-ass Derrick boys while I shut myself off indoors to ruminate on the death of my father and how my mother was insisting on following in his footsteps. Her love of him, I was just figuring out, was proving to be greater than her love of us. “Naw, now,” Matty May assured me when I first ran this theory past her during a commercial for Cowboy Maloney's appliance store during one of the Tarzan movies. “Naw, now, child. Naw, now. Don't you think no such thing.” This is when my imaginary friend, waiting silently till Matty had excused herself to take down the load of laundry she had drying on the clothesline, told me that an African witch doctor had conjured her for my benefit and
that her name was Epiphany. She also got tough with me right off the bat. “That old darkie was wrong,” she said. “But you was, too. Yo' mama loves yo' dead daddy different'n you. She don't love him no more'n you. That's the firstest thing Epiphany's here to tell you. But you just keep a'listenin'. I got—Lawd be—a lot more to say.”

________________

I had asked my grandmother only the Sunday before in church what the word
EPIPHANY
meant, wondering if I would have learned it myself a few months earlier if my mother had not gotten sick that night in her bedroom and we had kept up our study habits. The preacher that Sunday, after mentioning my mother by name in his prayer, had, during his sermon, pursed his lips powerfully around those four perfect syllables, e-pi-pha-ny, in order to pronounce them (he was rather prissy himself, now that I think of it) with an urgency, a fervor, and my grandmother had whispered down at me, my head in her lap, “Oh, honey, that's just a pretty name for a little nigger girl,” showing no compunction at all for using the N-word in a house of worship since the preacher himself often used the word from the pulpit when railing against the civil rights movement by citing chapter and verse from the Bible as evidence that separation of the races was the righteous stance to take in such times.