Mississippi Sissy (17 page)

“What do I keep tellin' you?” she asked, her continuing exasperation at me the one thing that would not fade.

“I'm a ch
iiii
ld,” I said, rolling my eyes and mimicking her accent.

“And what do chirren do?” she asked.

“They dress up for Halloween,” I told her.

Epiphany looked at me with her hollowed-out eyes. I could see right through them. I'd win first prize in the costume contest at the school carnival for sure if I could go as Epiphany for she was looking for all the world like a real ghost. Or maybe I could go looking like my mother, all pallid skin and puny bones and blond powdery hair flat against her flaking scalp. “What are you supposed to be?” Bobby Thompson would ask me. He was the prettiest boy in my class. “I'm a'
about-dead mama,” I'd say, fluttering my eyelashes at him. Maybe he'd feel sorry for me. Maybe he'd like me more.

“Sooooo . . . ,” Epiphany said, eyeing me as best she could. “Tell me. You have to have some secret idea as to what you'd really like to go as on Halloween. Go on. Tell me. We'll start plannin' it. It'll be the last favor I'll do you.”

“Arlene Francis,” I said.

“No way! One of them carpetbaggers on
What's My Line?
” Epiphany asked, appalled by the suggestion.

“She's not a carpetbagger,” I said. “I know what a carpetbagger is. It's a book my mama said was trash when she tried to read it. Arlene Francis ain't trash.” I pouted and I put the book down. “I want to be Arlene Francis.”

“Ch
iiii
ld, let me let you in on something.
Arlene Francis
wants to be Arlene Francis. I didn't come out of the TV to turn you into no hoity-toity. Us sho'nuff residents of TV can't stand folks like her and that piece of work Bennett Cerf and Betsy Palmer and Peggy Cass and Kitty Carlisle. Don't even get me started on Henry Morgan and that Bess Myerson bitch. Art Linkletter? I don't like the way he uses us chirren for laughs. Chirren ain't punch lines. We got feelin's same as growd-ups. Oh, I could go on and on. They all trash. They all carpetbaggers. Real folks shouldn't put down stakes in the land of TV. It's hard enough for the likes of me there without them crowdin' in. All your kin is right. I don't believe in integration neither. Real folks should stay put out here outside the TV where they belong.”

“You didn't stay put. You come out here,” I told her. “What's the difference? You're integrating us.”

Epiphany stared at me with a combination of regret and contempt. “I'm integratin'
you,
ch
iiii
ld. Nobody else can see me, fool. Arlene Francis? I swuny.” We sat in silence contemplating my Halloween idea. “Ain't nobody at that carnival gonna know who the hell you are
if you go lookin' like a middle-age woman who lives in New York City and puts on airs,” she finally said. “Plus, pearls don't work on a person your size.”

“Arlene don't wear pearls,” I told Epiphany. “She always wears a heart'a diamonds.”

“Pearls. Diamonds. What's the difference. Your grandmama near ‘bout fainted that time she walked in on us when we was in her jewelry drawer a'tryin' on her clip-ons. What you think she's gonna do if you dress up like Arlene Francis?”

“She knows I like her. Sometimes I pretend I'm her already. I don't answer to nobody unlessen they call me that. My grandmama says she'd rather die of the grippe than do such a thing.”

“You ain't gonna catch me callin' you no Arlene Francis neither,” said Epiphany. “Don't worry. We'll come up with something else for you to go disguised as for Halloween. But we gotta come up with it soon. Ch
iiii
ld, listen to me. Look over thisaway. Can you even still see me?”

I turned to scold her for asking such an awful question. But she was right to ask it. I could barely make out her face in the air beside me. All thoughts of fighting with Epiphany about Arlene Francis flew out of my head at that moment. I could not bear the thought that she would no longer be a part of my world. And I most assuredly did not want to end her time here with me with a disagreement. “All right. You win. We'll think of some sort another Halloween costume, you and me,” I told her and tried to find her hand to hold, but it had already completely disappeared. Her face was all that hovered next to me now.

“Read on,” she said, her voice softer than it had ever been and, if possible, more insistent. “Do like I say, ch
iiii
ld. Read on.
Read.”

I obeyed and turned my attention back to
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
. I continued the chapter regarding the one-eyed Wicked Witch of the West and how she she sent the crows and the bees and the wolves
in her thrall out to kill Dorothy and her friends but they were violently thwarted each time by the Tin Man and the Scarecrow. It was when I read the incantation that the witch came up with to summon her flying monkeys, “Ep-pe pe-pe kak-ke ziz-zy zuz-zy zik!” that it dawned on me who I could go costumed as to the Halloween carnival in a couple of weeks. “The Wicked Witch!” I squealed with delight. “Epiphany! I can be the Wicked Witch for Halloween!”

I turned to see what her reaction would be to this brainstorm but Epiphany was no longer by my side. Instead, sitting right where she had sat, as if the incantation had conjured her, was dear old Matty May. “How y'dwine?” she asked, Epiphany having transmogrified in that instant into my grandmother's maid. Or had my grandmother's maid months earlier transmogrified into Epiphany? Back then, in the days to come, I reasoned as best I could, when I tried to figure it all out with my eight-year-old brain, that each had literally blended into the other, that they had been in
CAHOOTS
, a word I had learned with my mother during our C-word week. As I try to figure it out today, it's as good an explanation as any I can come up with, other than the fact that I might really have been crazy with too much grief as my mother's death approached. CAHOOTS is the kind of word that suits them both.
CAHOOTS
it will have to be. Although Epiphany was certainly not real, the vivid memory of her anchors my sense of reality during those dark days between the deaths of my parents. In many ways, she is more vital in my thoughts today than my parents, whose flesh deceived me, defeated them. I do remember Matty once overhearing me carry on a conversation with Epiphany and warning me at the time, “Child, don't you start talking to yourself on top of all the other troubles that's going on in this here house. Matty don't know much,” she said. “But Matty knows this—when a soul be talkin' to itself it be talkin' to the devil. You hush up now. You got something to say, you say it to old Matty. You know I don't never have a never-mind for you.”

Matty May's face registered a deep concern when I turned to her with the Wicked Witch idea. My own expression, an amalgam of emotions, must have been one of astonishment and confusion and anger at Epiphany's exit from my life. She had not even said goodbye. “What's wrong, child?” asked Matty. “Do like I tell you. Read on.
Read.
This here book is just gettin' good. I liked that part when the Scarecrow wrung all them birds' necks. As good as in that
Noon Wine
stemwinder that that Porter woman come up with about when Mr. Thompson, think that was his name, kilt that carpetbagger with his ax when he come to get that nice crazy man who played the harmonica. That
Noon Wine
is Matty's kind of story. You read it ‘bout as good as you read this'un here about Miss Dorothy and her dog. Makes me think of Coco, though. Po' thang.”

“Where's Epiphany?” I asked, tears beginning to sting my face. I tried to climb from under the Singer and hit my head. “Where is Epiphany? Where is she?” I asked louder.

“Calm down, child,” said Matty, pulling me back to the floor. She checked my scalp for blood. “You want me to go get you some Tang? That always calms you down. Let me see that head. Let me see that bump. Naw, now, Matty don't think you gonna need no Merthiolate on that. Didn't break the skin. Tell old Matty what's wrong.”

I buried my face in Matty May's lap and rubbed the calluses on her hands over and over. “I want to be the Wicked Witch,” is all that I was able to say. “I want to be the Wicked Witch.”

“Well, we'll see ‘bout that. Don't know—Lawd be—what Miz Jake and Mr. Lyle will say to your dressin' up like a girl agin. I remember hearin' tell ‘bout that day your daddy had a hissy fit when your mama made you that little skirt. He near ‘bout threw you in that garbage drum out yonder in the backyard, Miz Jake say, with that thang all ablaze. Say he near ‘bout burnt you up with that skirt. But you just leave it up to old Matty. We'll make you a witch's costume ifen that'll make you happy. You hush up that cryin'. We'll see what we can do.
You just got too much woe for a child to ponder on, that's what's so. That's what's wrong. Woe's—ah-woe!—what makes a witch, sho'nuff. You come by it honest, I guess.”

When Matty and I told my grandmother about our witch's costume idea, she quickly shot it down. “I won't allow it,” she said. “I just won't do no such thing. How about you go as a cowboy or maybe John Glenn?” she asked too brightly. Appalled at those those ideas, I proceeded to throw the only tantrum of my childhood. I hit the floor with a full-body thud. I started kicking and screaming. It was behavior so unlike what my grandmother and Matty were used to from me that the two women stood startled watching me for a long minute, not knowing what to do. “I want to be a witch!” I screamed through my tears. “I want to be the Wicked Witch! I want to be wicked! I want to be a witch! The Wicked Witch!”

“Kevin, child! Lawd be! Kevin! Stop that! Don't you know yo' grandmama got enough to worry about!” Matty shouted over my screams, bending down to try and calm me, but afraid to step into my thrashing arms, frozen like that time an angry dirt dobber's nest exploded with a buzzing swarm toward our faces after we had poked a stick at it up in the corner of my grandfather's storage room behind the garage. We had been beside ourselves with boredom that day, after she had run the wash through my grandparents' antiquated hand-cranked wringer while I sat watching her do it, astonished at how flat the clothes were coming out piece by piece as she cranked and cranked and cranked, “as flat as Mr. Abe Hisself's face on that five-dollar bill Mr. Lyle give me on Sat'days,” she had said. “Lawd, child!” she said now as I kept up my tantrum about wanting to be a witch. “Listen to your Matty. Hush up all this craziness. You ain't this crazy.” She paused, amazement registering on her face as she felt she had to ask this next question: “Is you?”

My grandmother was wearing her crisp, light-blue nurse's aide uniform, her nametag and job title embossed on a pin attached to her
breast like a medal a soldier might wear. She pushed Matty out of the way. I could hear the sharp rustle of her crispness coming closer to me. I could smell the white polish on her shoes, for they were the genuine article, bulky manlike brogues that all nurses wore, especially her idol, that chief R.N. at Lackey's, the big-boned boss woman my grandmother always referred to by her last name alone: the estimable Rogers. “Rogers says I should polish these shoes last thing before I hit the sack. That's what Rogers says—hit the sack. That's what she always does. Kills a couple of birds, Rogers says. Keeps you professional-looking. And helps you focus on what you have to do tomorrow at work. Me? I run my patients' names in my head while I'm putting this white polish on here so I won't forget ‘em when I'm sleepy in the morning and make ‘em feel less embarrassed when we got some bedpan business to tend to first thing.” She had told me this when I asked her why she polished her nursing shoes every night, shoes that were now standing right next to my reddening face where I was pressing it against the floor. With her uniform on, my grandmother became more officious, her presence less softhearted. She stomped one of those white nurse's shoes right in my face. “That's enough,” she announced. “You hear me, Arlene? That's plenty ‘nuff. Arlene! Stop it!
Arlene! Arlene!
”

That did the trick. I had been after my grandmother to call me Arlene for weeks. At least my tantrum had gotten that out of her. I stopped my thrashing. “Ah-woe! Miz Jake!” said Matty. “Don't go a'-callin' him no such thing as that. Don't go fannin' that notion in the boy. It ain't right. Boy's ain't supposed to be fancy like that. I'm tryin' to break him of all that nonsense. Arlene? I swuny. You just leave it to me. I'll break him of it yet.”

“Well, too late, he done broke me first, Matty,” said my grandmother, her voice completely exhausted. “I'm broke. Look at me.” She settled into a chair. “I'm plumb broke.” She sat at the modern black-and-white wrought-iron dining set my mother had moved in
with us and ran her hand along the smooth flecked-marble top. The table sat juxtaposed to the old oak sideboard my grandmother refused to give up, the room too crowded now with different lives, different tastes. Other pieces of my mother's modern furniture in bright oranges and turquoise competed with the Shaker-like rockers and stools and beds in the rest of the house after we had upturned my grandparents' lives with our presence and our possessions. “What do you mean you are trying to break him of it anyway?” asked my grandmother. “You seem all for this witch idea. How do you explain that?”

“It's just Halloween,” said Matty. “One night a year, Miz Jake. Not ever'day. A witch ain't nothing but fittin' for Halloween. And a hell of a sight better than goin' as Arlene Francis.” Matty sat down next to my grandmother and put her arm around her shoulders as I dried my eyes all by myself. The two old women began to laugh softly in that conspiratorial way they had when, since they were girls growing up deep in the Mississippi countryside, swatting bugs off each other and swearing everlasting friendship, they found the same thing oddly amusing. “Maybe we should let the boy's mama have the final say ‘bout this witch business,” Matty suggested. “Might make her feel better bein' a mama for a while agin, bless her heart. She is—let's be God-honest here, Miz Jake—just yet the child's mama,” said Matty.