Safe from the Neighbors (6 page)

Of course, I could’ve been just as wrong in my assessment as I thought Dad was in his. There might in fact have been nothing at all in her expression, and that possibility was what made it so hard for me to see my mother. She looked just like any number of other old people who’d lost themselves completely.

“I smell something good,” he said. “What’d you bring us, Jenny?”

Jennifer hates being called Jenny and has never let anybody else do it. “I baked you a chicken, and there’s some green beans and mashed potatoes and some corn bread, too, though it may be a little too sweet.”

“I doubt that. I could use a little sweetness along about now, and I believe Momma can, too.” When he let go of her chin to push himself up off the couch, her head dropped again and she began humming and kept it up as I wheeled her into the kitchen.

•   •   •

People in the Delta, whether black or white, educated or ignorant, almost always pronounce
ruined
as
rurnt
. I’m no linguist, so I don’t know if this results from our well-known reluctance to employ two syllables when one will suffice or simply the desire to find a harder sound that more accurately reflects the verb’s meaning. Regardless, that’s how we say it, and my mother said it that night.

In the kitchen, having rolled the wheelchair up close to the table, I watched Jennifer tie a bib around her neck and dish out some food. She passed the plate to Dad, and he scooped up a lump of mashed potatoes and raised the spoon slowly towards my mother’s mouth. “Open up now,” he said. “Come on.”

She looked at Jennifer, who’d sat down directly across the table from her, and the trace of a smile crossed her face. Then she laughed and said something unintelligible, and while her mouth was still open Dad stuck the spoon in there, leaving the white lump on her tongue. For a second, before her jaws began to work, I thought she’d spit it out, and again I recalled my desperate hope, when the girls were babies, that their applesauce or green peas wouldn’t end up oozing out before they swallowed.

While my wife watched my father feed my mother and offered encouragement, I took the top off the garbage can in the corner, lifted the bag up and pulled the drawstring tight, then carried it out to the street and put it in the container for pickup. I stayed out there as long as I could, bending over and pretending to police the driveway, in case the neighbors looked out the window and wondered what I was up to. I finally went back inside, grabbed another garbage bag from the utility room, and walked into the kitchen.

Gobs of mashed potatoes lay all over the floor, alongside a spoon and shards of glass. If a person with Alzheimer’s sees an object or a hand coming towards his or her face, what’s left of
the reflexes will sometimes take over, and for that reason my father always tried to sit beside my mother and feed her from an oblique angle. This was easier if something in front of her could hold her attention, which was why Jennifer sat directly in her line of vision.

Today, apparently, it hadn’t worked. Dad was standing at the sink soaking a towel to wipe his pants off, and Jennifer was scrounging through the cabinets looking for a dustpan.

My mother looked at me and smiled shyly, as certain female students will when they haven’t read their assignments and don’t have a clue what’s going on but are pretty sure it won’t be held against them. “Rurnt,” she said. “All rurnt.”

Did my father hear her? The water was running in the sink, so it’s possible he didn’t, though he was closer to her than I was and his hearing had always been acute. He turned the tap off and vigorously rubbed his pants leg while I lined the garbage can and squatted down with the dustpan so Jennifer could sweep up the mess.

Dad made another attempt—more successful than the last—to feed my mother, so I mopped the floor, wrung out the mop and put it back in the utility room, then returned to the kitchen. It looked as if Momma had eaten all she was going to, so Jennifer glanced at her watch, said she needed to get ready for tomorrow’s classes and stood up to leave.

While Dad was rising out of his chair, probably hoping for a peck on the cheek, I mentioned that Nadine Calloway’s daughter had just returned to Loring from North Carolina and asked if he recalled what had happened to her mother. And it was as if an unseen hand had settled onto his head, pushing him right back down.

S
HE WAS NEVER
M
RS
. C
ALLOWAY TO ME.
Just Nadine. Several inches taller than her husband, she had auburn hair and in my recollections is often wearing jeans, though I’ll admit you almost never saw those on women in the Delta back then and she’s got on a dress in all three of the pictures I would eventually be shown of her. Nevertheless, as we proceed beyond my comfort zone—into something that might be more, or maybe less, than strict history—she sports a pair of stiff blue Wranglers, the kind you wouldn’t be caught dead in today until you washed them several times, and a long-sleeved white blouse in the cowgirl style, with fake pearl buttons down the front and on the cuffs. Boots would go with this outfit, but instead she wears red Keds.

The sneakers are the only element that makes sense. In 1949, as a senior, she led the girls’ team from Hard Cash High to the Mississippi state basketball championship. By the time she enters the life of my family, the town of Hard Cash no longer exists, having voted itself into oblivion to avoid taxation. In other words, a certain part of her past had already been wiped out before I knew her.

She’s not the type of person you expect to forget. This is partly due to her imposing height—taller than any other woman in town, she’s sometimes referred to as the “Jolly Green
Giant”—but also to her tendency to hug every man, woman and child, not to mention her ability to shake her head and say “shit” without making you think she’s just done something awful. There aren’t a lot of people around here who can get away with that kind of talk, and most of those who can are men like Mr. Sturdivant and the crowd that assembles in his barbershop.

The first time I become aware of her, she’s standing on the front porch of a country store where my mother often stops to buy me an Orange Crush. She’s hugging a girl with one arm and a boy with the other. I’ve never seen any of them before, and the kids capture my attention to a degree that Nadine can’t, not in this initial encounter. The girl’s older than the boy and a little taller. His hair’s the same color as his mother’s, but hers is “cold black,” as I would have phrased it then. Superman’s hair is cold black, Batman’s too.

The boy and I start sizing each other up, as boys always will, each looking to gain an advantage over the other. If his mother let go of him, maybe I could lure him over to the edge of the porch and trip him off it. I did that one day to my cousin, who was visiting from Jackson, and he fell right into a mudhole, got it all over himself and was headed for a whipping from my aunt until he pointed a finger and hollered, “He twip me! He twip me!” So I got the whipping, from Momma, but the pain and embarrassment were hardly commensurate with my pleasure in seeing my citified cousin covered head to toe in country mud.

The problem with trying to trip Eugene, however, is that his mother won’t let him go, and even if she does, his sister will keep an eye on him and on me as well. I can tell she’s a tattler.

“Arlan’s going to take over from Buck,” Nadine is telling Momma, who’s sitting in a rocking chair underneath a big thermometer shaped like a bottle of Barq’s root beer. That’s where she always sits while waiting for me to finish my drink so we won’t have to pay a deposit on the bottle. Lots of women sit there, though men never do. “Buck’s heart’s been acting up, and
the doctor’s told him that if he keeps getting out on that tractor in the hot sun, he’s going to keel over and die. So this just seems like the time for Arlan to come home. He’s been wanting to go back to farming. He thinks the world of James and is glad to be your neighbor again. As for me, I’ve heard a lot about Loring. Of course we used to play y’all in basketball.”

“Used to beat us, too,” Momma says. “But then it seems like us Loring girls have always been puny.”

“Who’s this young man here?” Nadine asks, nodding at me. “He wouldn’t be y’all’s son, would he?”

“I’m afraid so. He’s got a little meanness in him, like his daddy, but I expect most of it’ll be drained off in another thirty or forty years. That’s generally how long it takes with men in the May family.”

Before I know it, the tall woman is hugging me, too, pulling my face into her stomach, my nose grazing one of those imitation pearl buttons. I can neither see nor free myself, not with that Orange Crush in my hand, but I know she had to let go of her own kids to grab me and I’d bet they’ve both moved some distance away.

“Hello, Mr. May,” she says. “My name’s Nadine. And these two ruffians with me are Maggie and Eugene.” Then she lets go and is squatting down in front of me, eye to eye on my level. “You like basketball?” she says.

I barely know what a basketball is. But Grandpa’s been teaching me to punt a football, though he’s no good himself and half the time he misses it completely. “No ma’am,” I say. “Like football, though.”

“Well, I’m not supposed to play that because I’m a girl. But I’ll tell you a little secret, if you’ll keep it between you and me.”

It won’t be a secret, and we both know it. My mother’s still sitting there. The boy’s over at the corner of the porch trying to prime the pitcher pump, and the girl has backed off a few feet and is watching her mother and me. “Yes ma’am,” I say. My face
is hot, but I don’t know why. I never will, at least not for a long time.

“I’ve got two brothers I used to play football with,” she says. “And you know what? I beat the tarnation out of them. They couldn’t catch me, and even if they did they never could bring me down. So just remember that if you ever need somebody to play football with.”

I tell her I will, but by then I’d say anything to make her stand up and let me alone. Rising to her full height, she reaches out and musses my hair, at the same time telling Momma that she needs to go inside and buy some cheese and crackers and baloney and Dr Peppers for her husband and his dad, who are crawling around in the dirt at their headquarters setting the plows on a cultivator. Then Momma says she needs to go in and return my bottle, which she pulls from my hand even though there’s still a little drink left in it.

As soon as they disappear into the store, I take off towards the steps, intending to bound down them and jump in the car and hide my hot face. But something happens and suddenly I’m flying through the air, starting to tumble, my ultimate destination the same mudhole my cousin ended up in.

Nobody saw her trip me, but I don’t say a word, just lie there breathless on my back looking up at the porch where the girl with the cold black hair stands watching.

More than forty-five years later, she was eyeing my phone, which lay on the table next to the paper sack that held the remains of my lunch. “You’ve got a message,” she said.

It’s one of those black Nokia fliptops with a red light that pulses when somebody’s left you a voice-mail or sent a text. I opened it to find a missed call from Trish and a message, too. I keep the phone on silent when I’m at school, and the girls know they’re not supposed to call unless there’s an emergency, though
for Trish that term’s broadly defined. I figured it was nothing, but you never know. “Excuse me,” I said, and put the phone to my ear.

Whereas Candace rarely gets excited, her sister’s seldom calm. She spits words out as if they tasted bad, then strings clauses together, one after another, until you can’t even remember how the sentence started. And she was in classic form for this message.

The “emergency” was her discovery that today was the last day students could buy football tickets at reduced prices, so she needed me to transfer two hundred forty dollars to the bank account she shared with Candace. That wasn’t in the budget Jennifer and I had agreed on for the month, though I’d figured the subject would come up sooner or later. It had taken until now only because Ole Miss kicked off the season on the road the previous weekend and hadn’t played a home game yet. Also, this was a Wednesday, when Jennifer had a night class and wouldn’t get home before ten. She’d kept that schedule for years, so it was probably no accident that Trish had waited until now to call. I’d have to decide without talking to their mother, unless I could reach her by phone, which wasn’t likely.

“I need to call my daughter,” I told Maggie.

“Do you want me to leave?”

“No, you can hear it.”

So I phoned her, but even before I could say hello she blurted, “Daddy, I’m sorry to bother you, because I know you’re at school and I’m not supposed to call unless it’s something serious, which in this case it is, since if we don’t get our tickets today—”

“I’ll transfer the money when I get home.”

“Couldn’t you do it sooner?”

“Nope, sure can’t. We’re not supposed to use these computers for personal business.” I knew that before agreeing to this she’d make it sound as if I’d just told her we couldn’t pay her
tuition and she’d have to come home and work at Wal-Mart, so I said “Bye now” and pressed
END CALL
.