Ugly Ways (26 page)

"So, I told them, 'Well, I sure as hell wouldn't call Mudear, especially if I was in a weakened or stressed-out condition.'"

"You said that to those strangers?" Betty asked, surprised.

"Yeah, I wished I hadn't. Knew I shouldn't have as soon as it was out my mouth. I could just see these women just pull away, you know, just distance themselves from me after that."

"Oh, yeah, like all of them had Mother Teresa, no, Mother Hale with the little drug babies, for mamas. I hate that." Annie Ruth turned in her seat with her nose wrinkled in distaste, making the light sprinkling of dark freckles that all the girls had inherited from Mudear when they reached their thirties dance on her face.

"Naw, Annie Ruth, I don't think it's that," Emily said. "I don't think it's that they don't know what I was talking about. It was more like they rather not think about it because then they have to think about their own lives and mothers and even what kind of mothers they are or will be, know what I mean?

"It's like as long as we all keep talking and thinking like every black mother in the world is this great wonderful self-sacrificing matriarch..."

"Right, not counting the women who have children on welfare or who are drug addicts or who are children still themselves," Betty said.

"You know as well as I do that those women aren't considered 'real black mothers.' They just lazy black 'hos," Annie Ruth said. "That is, 'til they are of a certain age and become grandmothers themselves, taking in their babies' babies."

"Yeah, then they real mothers," Betty offered.

"Well," Emily said, continuing her thought, "it's like as long as we don't think about our mothers as anything but these huge black breasts oozing chocolate milk on demand, we keep all our demons in check."

"But now, you know, Mudear always bragged on the fact that she breast-fed all her children," Betty said with a sly smile. It was a fact that Mudear had tossed at them when she sensed any inchoate rebellion growing among her ranks.

"Yeah, she breast-fed us alright, but she didn't never give us no tit," Annie Ruth said.

Then, the whole car fell silent again.

"But you know there is something about what Mudear gave," Emily said softly. "You remember that time I was ready to quit my job because that cracker son-of-a-bitch supervisor was making my life miserable because I wouldn't screw him, said he was the only one in the office I wouldn't screw. He was about right, too.

"But you all know how I feel about that. As far as I'm concerned, white men have gotten all the black pussy they gon' ever get in this country.

"Well, one night I couldn't sleep I was so stressed out and was driving around town like I do and ended up on 1-85 coming down here to Mulberry. It was about three or four in the morning when I pulled into the driveway. Right away, I saw Mudear doing her gardening in one of those flowered voile dresses she liked to wear as some kind of joke. I wanted to run right over to her and bury my face in the front of that voile dress and cry 'til I had no more tears to shed. But you know how Mudear hated that, for us to come crying to her. So, I just rolled up the windows and sat in the car with my head on the steering wheel and sobbed.

"When I looked up. Mudear was standing in front of the car, standing right in the beam of my headlights like some kind of ghost. Nearly scared me to death. She was looking at me like I was one of her flowers that wasn't doing too well and she was wondering whether she should cut back on water, fertilize me, or snip my head off.

"When I rolled the window down, she stepped out of the beam of my lights and walked up to the driver's side of the car and waited for me to say something.

"I told her, 'I can't go back to that office.'

"She reached out to me and for a minute, just a minute, I thought she was actually gonna wipe my tears away. But she didn't. She reached up in my hair and picked something out, a leaf or a string or something that was stuck there. She took this litde piece of something out of my hair and examined it in the light from the car. Then, she threw it down on the ground and wiped her hand on the skirt of her dress.

"Then she asked me, 'Emily, you like that little piece of job you go to?'

"I didn't even have to think before I said, 'Yeah.'

"Then she said, 'You like putting on your pretty clothes every day and your makeup and perfume and going downtown and sitting behind that desk?'

"I said, 'Yeah.'

"'You like that little work you do, shuffling those papers or whatever it is you do?'

"Again, I said, 'Yeah.'

"'Then, daughter,' she said, 'don't you let nobody steal your joy.'

"She sucked her teeth lightly the way she do. Then, she turned and walked back into the dark of her garden.

"I only sat there for a minute more, then I put the car in reverse, backed on out the driveway, and drove on back to Atlanta. 'Don't let nobody steal your joy.' Umph, umph, umph.

"I went into work the next day and told him if he ever said shit to me again, I was filing a sexual harassment suit. And that was that. Mudear saved my life that night. I wonder if she knew that?"

"Humph, I wonder if she cared," Annie Ruth said.

"Mudear could do that sometimes," Betty said from the front seat. "You know, give you just what you needed with all the other stuff cut away."

"What do you mean, 'the other stuff cut away'?" Emily asked.

"You know, just the basic, the real deal, the bottom line without the hand-holding, without the sympathy, without the 'umph, umph, umph' that we go to each other for. You know, without the tit. Like a piece of chicken without all the fat and skin and bone and gristle and the crust..."

"And the seasoning!" Annie Ruth cut in.

"Yeah, and the seasoning cut away. She just give you what you needed, you know, that little piece of wisdom without any of the flavoring to make it taste better.

"I guess that's what we all wanted so bad," Betty said. "We wanted that seasoning from Mudear."

"Maybe, she didn't have it to give to us," Emily suggested timidly.

"Stop it, Emily," Annie Ruth said. "You know as well as I do that Mudear had everything she ever wanted or needed. She just didn't want to give it up."

"I don't know, Annie Ruth, maybe that piece of chicken was it," Betty said. "Maybe that was all she had to give. It was all Em-Em needed that night, wasn't it?"

"Oh, the both of you getting too soft. So, now we gonna start remembering Mudear as this sweet saintly little woman just 'cause—'God rest the dead'—she
dead?
"

"I didn't say nothing 'bout Mudear being no saint," Emily countered. "But when she'd talk sometimes, even when we were kids, I'd feel, I don't know."

Emily seemed as if she were groping for something.

"It was like she was giving up some message from some higher power, like she was channeling the message that helped us," she said finally.

"Okay, Em-Em, I'm 'bout with Annie Ruth on this if you start that New Age bullshit. Next thing you know you gonna be calling up your psychic adviser and saying we ought to have a seance and call up Mudear's spirit."

"And you don't think we can call up Mudear's spirit talking about her like this?" Emily asked. "She probably somewhere now trying to get Saint Peter or whoever to let her come back one time just to get our little asses straight."

"Look, if we coulda called up her spirit or anything having to do with her, don't you think we would have done that long ago as much as we talk about her whenever we get together?" Annie Ruth asked.

"Yeah, but she was in control then, now I don't think she is," Betty said.

"Really?" Emily asked sincerely. "I can't imagine any situation, even death, when Mudear ain't in charge. It's just her nature, to be in charge."

Lord, these girls still talking 'bout what they think they didn't get, from the tit on up.

Such complainers!

That's why they keep those ugly looks on their faces all the time. Because they have such bad attitudes. Those girls can't seem to see the lighter side of things.

You would think we didn't never have no good times together in that house, and the old one, too, to let them girls tell it. Hell, if it wasn't for me, they wouldn't 'a had nothing in neither one of those houses. Their father sho' wasn't about to make things nice for 'em.

And what about all those good meals I made sure they cooked? Sitting around the table eating, that was fun.

And we laughed and talked a lot.

"
Tell me something, daughters," I'd ask them alter I'd call them up to my room. "Now, this here woman on television is letting this man with a microphone and camera crew interview her with those pink rollers in her hair. Now, she's out at the shopping center. So she had to get in her car and come out in public like that knowing people were going to see her. She didn't even have the decency to put on one of those thin chiffony scarfs. Now she's gonna let this man take her picture and put it on television for all the world to see.
"

"
Um-huh," the girls would say.

"
Now, tell me. I have one question. Where is this woman going tonight that is so important that she has to keep her hair up in curlers, not just in the mall, but on television?
"

Then, we'd try to figure out where this woman was going tonight.

Annie Ruth, the baby, was real good at it.

Those are some of the times I felt closest to my girls. Us all sitting around talking 'bout people.

Guess they don't remember none of that.

God, those girls got ugly ways!

When they arrived at Parkinson Funeral Home at the comer of Poplar and Pringle and caught a first glimpse of the row of big shiny ebony hearses with faded maroon satin curtains at the side and back windows, all conversation ceased in the car. Emily wanted to shout from the backseat, "I don't want to see my mother riding in one of those dead wagons!" But she kept her counsel and closed her eyes a moment to collect herself.

She had a distinct but distant memory of Mudear sitting on a small round stool at the side of Poppa's chair in the old house in East Mulberry. Mudear had seemed to Emily, who was small herself, so tiny and defenseless sitting there with her knees nearly up to her breasts. Her father sat in his overstuffed chair with his slim dark hand resting indolently in a soup bowl of soapy water on a tin tray perched on Mudear's knees. Next to the bowl of water was a small travel manicure set.

On Mudear's face, a look that appeared to Emily to smell like burning brimstone, sulfur, the odor she associated for life with burning, white-hot hatred.

That face, Emily thought, lies lifeless inside that building. Lord, Lord, Lord.

Betty, who had been there the day before and had already seen Mudear's body, knew what to expect. But seeing the funeral home with her sisters, sensing their reactions to the accoutrements of death made her feel a bit woozy, too. She didn't realize it, but her body went kind of limp behind the steering wheel and she let her foot rise from the accelerator. The car coasted to a stop a few feet away from the funeral home door.

Betty put the car in park automatically and put the hand brake on without thinking. As they sat in silence in Betty's big steel and black Town Car, a side door to the mortuary flew open and two men in black suits and ties and plain white shirts rushed out, propping the door open and signaling in the direction of the line of parked hearses. One of the hearses started up and pulled up to the mortuary door as if by magic. Just as the funeral car pulled up to the door, the two men standing there whipped inside and returned immediately wheeling out an ornate black casket on a collapsible gurney. Then, the rear door of the hearse seemed to suddenly pop open.

The three Lovejoy women, still sitting in Betty's car, had all jumped when the hearse door swung open. It was the first time since they had rolled to a stop that Betty was able to pull her gaze away from the mortuary and get herself a smoke. She rolled down her window and reached in the purse next to her for her cigarettes. As Betty lit up, Emily cleared her throat and rolled down her window, too.

Then, they went back to staring at the black hearse pulled up to the side of the building with its rear door swung wide open ready for that final trip as if they expected something to come flying out.

"I never once thought that we would all be here doing this for Mudear," Emily said from the backseat. "Not once."

"'Keep living, daughter,'" Betty said, because nobody else would say it. But after she did, Emily intoned, "Humph, humph, humph."

Annie Ruth hadn't said anything. Her sisters hadn't noticed, but ever since they pulled up, Annie Ruth had been edging back into her seat, seemingly trying to wedge herself into the crack between the door and the seat.

Annie Ruth wanted to tell her sisters that she was frightened of the gang of cats that she saw hanging around the door and the wide brick gate with the initials P. F. H. etched on the front of the portal. She just couldn't get out of the car and make the few paces up the front stoop and into the cool quiet airless room where Mudear lay. Not through that barrage of cats.

But the cats weren't the entire problem. Even if she had not seen them prowling around the entrance to the building, Annie Ruth couldn't face Mudear. She couldn't do it. Annie Ruth knew she couldn't go inside and see the woman that she feared and hated and admired and cursed, the one who had brought her into the world, the one who didn't throw herself down a flight of steps early in her pregnancy, the one who had given her life, lifeless.

She could not imagine how Betty was going to be able to bear to stand there and do Mudear's hair and makeup. Everybody knew that Betty was the strongest one in the family, but this, Annie Ruth felt, was asking too much. It would have been for her. But then, neither Annie Ruth nor Emily could have stood to remain in Mulberry all these years in such close proximity and heavy service to Mudear. But it was never even discussed that Betty would leave Mulberry to live somewhere else.