Ugly Ways (12 page)

Cable television, Ernest thought, like catalogs and overnight delivery service, was just made for Mudear.

I wonder how long it will take before Ernest is laying all the way across that bed. Enjoying the freedom of not having to share it with me. I never could understand why more men aren't found murdered in they beds. I heard on television that most murders are committed in the kitchen. I guess I can understand that, too. I guess I should be mad at the thought of him enjoying my big pretty canopy bed without me in it, but somehow right now I'm not. Actually, now that I'm not there anymore, I'm beginning not to care about that bed. Funny, too, since it used to be so important to me. When I first saw it in that fancy catalog that sold reproductions of antiques, I could just see myself laying up in it, propped up with some big down feather pillows covered with material that matched the dust ruffle and comforter. I never once envisioned that wide old-looking bed with anybody but me in it. Not 'til I walked back in the room right after it was delivered about dawn from my garden and found Ernest laying up there sleeping like he been hoeing rows a' cotton all day instead of just playing out there in the chalk mines.

But that's one thing he refused to do, stop sleeping in my bed. And I sure as hell wasn't about to move from that bed.

Everything about that bed was important to me. The little footstool with the tapestry cover I needed to step up to the height of the big hard mattress. The way the sheets felt, the kinds of patterns in the pillowcases and sheets and spreads, just the right kind of blankets that didn't irritate my sensitive skin, the red plaid and purple plaid flannel sheets that I had to have in wintertime that felt so cozy against my skin that the girls sent me in the big brown UPS truck. God, Ernest was right, that truck was made for me. I loved to see that big brown truck pull up in front of the house.

I spent so much time up in that bed, I guess that's why it was so special to me. Lord, I guess I better start feeling the same way about this satin-lined casket. Although, in my heart of hearts, I can't really believe that this is where I'm gonna really spend eternity. Or else, if it is, then all that "she's gone to a better place" stuff that people love to say when somebody die don't mean shit.

I sure do hope this is not it since I know ain't nobody gonna be coming in here every few days to change the cream-colored satin lining in this box the way one of those girls Betty hired or Ernest did at home.

And seeing how the girls are acting already, I know they ain't gonna be making many pilgrimages back to Mulberry City Cemetery to visit my grave and plant some pretty Rowers, maybe some nice big hydrangea bushes around the back of my tombstone to set me off from the other dead folks—I wonder if all them dead folks make the soil acidy or alkaline?—and keep 'em up. They all claim they can't stand cemeteries. They think they so smart talking bad about graveyards like I don't know that they trying to pick at me on the sly just 'cause I sent them those few little times to the graveyard when they was little to get me a few cuttings from those lovely rosebushes growing all over the place.

Best rosebush cuttings you can get ... from cemeteries. None of these new-time hybrids they try to sell you in mail-order books now that don't hold up to bugs or heat or diseases. But the old-fashioned kind of roses that smell so good, almost like lemons, you want to lick the velvety petals just for the taste.

When I'd see in those magazines with all the lace and flowers and gardening shears on the front that the girls had sent to me every month about putting flower petals in salads and baking 'em in cookies, I'd just smile. 'Cause I knew just what they were talking about to do that. A garden of flowers is a luscious thing.

It's hard for me to believe that at one time I had stopped getting any enjoyment out of food, all that delicious food I prepared in that dark cramped kitchen in the old house in East Mulberry. Uh, everything started tasting like wet cardboard in my mouth, even my cakes. Wet and papery with a bit of paste thrown in. But I found out afterwards that it wasn't my cooking, it was my life.

At first, when I made up my mind it was gonna be different, I had thought about just walking away. Leaving that house and that kitchen and everything and walking away free and clear of it all. But then, I thought, why should I leave something that was mine? A nice comfortable house where I had three girls, two of them—and soon all of them—big enough to help with everything, the cooking and cleaning and sewing, and a man that I knew inside out who had a steady enough job. And the thought of leaving my garden at the old house—I bet I was the only one in Mulberry who had asparagus growing up 'gainst an old fence—made me well up with tears. Leave all that? Just to go off and to tackle the world by myself. Why?

So, I decided to stay in body. But to leave in spirit and let my spirit free. So that's what I did. And never did regret it, either.

Ernest thought that his messing around with those women downtown at The Place would bother me, hurt me, maybe even make me leave, so he could have the house and his entire paycheck to himself, but I told him right to his face one night when he come in smelling of whiskey and pussy and that cheap-ass Evening in Paris or that Hoyt's cologne that I didn't give a damn what he did as long as I could live my life the way I wanted to and not have to clean up that house or cook dinner myself or stop taking care of my flowers. And I didn't, either.

I tried to tell the girls, tried my best to tell them: a man don't give a damn about you. No matter how much he claim to love you, even the ones who will eat your dirty drawers don't really give a damn about you, not really.

I told 'em straight out. I never did talk down to my girls the way some grown-up folks do with children. I always talked to 'em the way I expected them to be, women. And they understood me, too. Never did come crying to me with some little silly stuff that they knew I didn't have no interest in. I never could stand a whole lot a' childish crying and whining.

"
This teacher don't like me, she look at me funny all day.
"

"
So-and-so say she ain't gonna play with me 'cause her mama won't let her.
"

"
I might not have enough credits to graduate.
"

I tried to show them how freeing it is to discover that and really live your life by that... "That man don't give a damn 'bout me." ...To say that and know it ain't got nothing to do with you, that that's just the way a man is. And when it don't hurt no more, then you free.

Once you realize that about the person that you lay your head down next to every night, then you can move on to the other folk in this world who also don't give a shit about you.

Ernest certainly didn't give a damn about me, not even when we first got married and I thought he was really in love with me. I was stupid or innocent enough to think that he just
had
to care about me, with my little cute self. Keep living, Esther. I feel like a fool just thinking about it now, but I used to write our names over and over on my school pad: Ernest Lovejoy, Mr. and Mrs. Ernest Lovejoy, the Lovejoys, Mrs. Ernest Lovejoy, Ernest and Esther Lovejoy, Mrs. Esther Lovejoy.

It sound so foolish now, but I truly thought that Ernest and me, our getting married was like a wedding of two forces. We would be joining forces, taking the best of both of us, me a city girl and him a country boy, my strong points joined up with his strong points, his best traits and mine. We was gonna take life by storm. I really thought that at one time. That's how I thought it was with my Mudear and father.

And it did hurt for a while when I realized he didn't give no more of a damn about me than the man in the moon. The things he did to me didn't hurt me half as much as realizing that he did 'em 'cause he didn't give a damn.

That's what I was trying to save my girls from. From that time—and it eventually come to all women—when you all deep in what you think is love and you get slapped in the face with a rolled-up copy of the
Mulberry Clarion
newspaper or told what you think or what you think you are ain't shit. That you need to wear a bra all the time around the house 'cause your titties funny shaped. Or your rice is always gummy. If you already know that time is coming, then they can't touch you. Then, you ain't even got tears to shed when it happen.

It was even one of the first things I taught Emily to say when she wasn't no more than a baby, "A man don't give a damn about you." Heh-heh, it sho' was funny hearing that cute little thing saying that. And that time when she went waddling over to her daddy laying in bed and made him lean down and said right in his ear, "Poppa, a man don't give a damn about you." I thought I'd die right then. I laughed so hard behind my hand, I nearly peed in my drawers. I knew that when he came in the house the next day after work smelling like liquor and put all us out to scout around for somewhere to stay for two days that that was what was behind it. But I comforted myself with the look on his face when he heard his own child tell him that a man don't give a damn about you.

Gazing down at the rings the raindrops made on the murky surface of the Ocawatchee River, Emily hummed a few bars of a blues song she liked: "I'd rather drink muddy water. Sleep out in a hollow log."

Mudear had always reminded Emily of an old blues singer, someone like Alberta Hunter: tough, capable, and knowing, with beautiful skin and gold hoops in her ears. Seeing Emily tend her poor bruised teenaged face in the bathroom, Mudear had always told her that she must have gotten her sensitive skin from Poppa's side of the family.

"Even when I first started my period, I never had so much as a pimple," Mudear would say lightly from her seat on the toilet as poor Emily struggled in the mirror with Noxzema and tubes of Clearasil to cover and treat her blackheads and zits without crying. "I think that stuff just make it worse. Make your face look like a potato grater," Mudear would add as she wiped herself dry and walked out of the family bathroom without washing her hands. "That cream is lighter than your skin, daughter, now everybody can see just how bad your face looks. You look like a dough-face."

Mudear would not have let snatches of blues songs, her favorites, snatch her back from the jaws of death if it was her destiny. But Emily did. "I'd rather drink muddy water. Sleep out in a hollow log. Before I let you make a fool out of me."

The irony of the songs always struck some chord in Emily's life that made her chuckle and eventually head back home.

"Before I let you make a fool out of me." It sounded like something Mudear would say. "I'd rather drink muddy water. Sleep out in a hollow log."

"Daughter," Mudear instructed Emily one day after her abortive first marriage when she came upon her middle child sitting on the staircase in the new house hugging her knees to her breasts, sobbing over her predicament. "Don't cry over nothing that don't cry over you." Mudear literally said it in passing as she continued down the steps to lie on the chaise longue on the porch. At the time it had just made Emily cry all the more. But a few days later in school, she saw her seventeen-year-old ex-husband trying to rub up against a tall light-skinned freshman with a long red ponytail and realized he wasn't crying over her at all.

Emily had married the first boy who showed any interest in her. She made no bones about it. As she threw a few things in a suitcase at the age of fifteen to elope with the boy, she told her sisters, "I don't know about you, but I'm getting the hell out of here while the getting is good. I'm bailing out, sisters."

Then, as an afterthought she turned to Betty and Annie Ruth, who was standing watch at the bedroom door for her, and suggested, "Why don't ya'll come with me? You can leave, too."

But Betty didn't think it was such a good idea for Emily to be running off as it was, to say nothing of dragging her and the baby, a very developed twelve-year-old Annie Ruth, off with her and her new husky husband. Emily and the boy (even the bride had trouble now remembering his name) made it across the state line to South Carolina in a raggedy black and white Ford with a broken muffler and to a justice of the peace who didn't care about anything but the requisite twenty-five dollars they had to pay for the license. But when they came back to Mulberry the next day to move in with the boy's mother, Poppa was waiting on the boy's porch to take her home. The affair was cleared up quickly without Emily's prior knowledge or full participation. And the marriage wasn't mentioned except in sly comments from Mudear.

"Daughter, run over to the drugstore and get me a bottle of clear fingernail polish, that is, if you ain't got a fine young man and no immediate plans to run off and get married this afternoon."

Then, it would strike her that what had happened to her was worse than what she and her sisters said they feared and resented the most. She had played her own self for a fool.

How many times had they talked about some other poor stupid girl they knew. "Girl, you know that litde knock-kneed, no-talking, tied-tongue boy played her, played her for a fool."

"Oooo," they would all say with a shudder, their eyes shut, their mouths tight and disapproving. To be played for a fool by a boy, a man, none of whom, Mudear had told them, knew shit from Shinola anyway, was the worst.

Mudear had made it so hard for her or any of the girls to love a man. For Emily, love was a serious thing, not something to be made light of or demeaned with casual pointed comments. Visiting Mudear some weekends, Emily would glance out the window at the field of wildflowers in the front and spy a pair of steel-blue dragonflies mating in midflight. It reminded her of her own love life. Of how difficult it was to find love on the wing.

Each time, she had been tempted to share her insight with Mudear—she knew that Mudear would appreciate the sight of the dragonflies, would even take credit for their being in the area because of her garden. But even Emily knew that Mudear didn't give a damn about her love life.