Ugly Ways (3 page)

Their father was just sixty-eight, a year away from retirement at the kaolin mines outside of town where he had worked since he was nineteen. He still had the slowly weakening strong slim body of a man who had spent his youth and most of his middle years digging and hauling chunks and boulders of the soft white stone. He had always taken pride in the way he looked—his tall strong body, his large head, his big feet, his slender hands—being careful not to take on a paunch and soft sagging breasts when the company was hit with a class action discrimination suit and he moved from laborer to lower management. He almost welcomed the sweat-producing work that Mudear had delegated to him in her garden for keeping him in some kind of shape.

"A man never know when he gon' be called on to take care of himself," he'd mutter to himself as he struggled—sweaty and out of breath—to dig a hole at the edge of Mudear's garden big enough to accommodate another of her new nearly full-sized trees.

The kitchen looked to all of them as it always did. Clean, scrupulously clean. Mudear, even though she didn't use it, wouldn't stand for anything other than a strictly clean kitchen.

"A person can tell what kind of woman you are by checking to see how clean you keep around the burners on your stove" was one of Mudear's favorite dictums.

The kitchen was a smaller room than would have been expected in a house the size of theirs, with three bedrooms. But Mudear had insisted on taking some of the space planned for the kitchen and putting it into the screened porch
she
planned. The first time she had shown some interest in the construction of the new structure was when she had discovered that her husband planned for the kitchen to be one of the largest rooms in the house. "You know good and well I don't spend no time in no kitchen," she had told Poppa.

Their father hardly touched the vegetables and cornbread the girls fixed for him, even though Betty had made a special swing by the new enclosed farmers' market out by the Mulberry Mall to buy his favorites—okra and rutabagas. The four of them sat around the dining room table in near silence looking down at their plates and trying to think of something to say to each other that didn't involve Mudear. But Mudear's presence, as always, was too strong.

"You know we holding off the funeral 'til them relatives of Mudear's up north can get off work and get down here," Poppa said to the table in general.

The girls just made agreeing sounds over their plates.

"All those folks do up there is work. They ought to have plenty money."

Again, the girls just agreed. "Uh-uh," they said.

"So, I was thinking, I wanted all you girls to be here before I said anything." He paused as if getting up his nerve.

"'Bout what, Poppa?" Betty asked.

"I was thinking we should just move that funeral service, it's not like it's gonna be in a church or anything, just a memorial service in the Parkinson Funeral Home chapel, just move it up to tomorrow or the day after. Shoot, I don't know what I'm holding this funeral out for. I was thinking 'bout it and it just don't make no sense not to go ahead and put your mother in the ground instead of leaving her out there at Parkinson Funeral Home waiting for some unreliable no-good northern Negroes to go hat in hand to some northern white folks to ask for a couple of days off so they can go back 'down south' to bury some backwards country relative.

"It just don't make no sense. All this waiting and not knowing when those folks gonna really show up. If they can't get away from their jobs, they'll just wait 'til the last minute and call with some big high-flown excuse.

"I was just thinking, just move this funeral on up. All this waiting is just too hard on the family, on you girls especially."

Then, Poppa was silent. He had said that all in a rush. He felt like a young boy, the young awkward "Shag" that he had been, saying his Easter speech in front of his old bare-board country church's congregation, nervous, uncertain, afraid of overstepping his bounds. His suggestion was more than the girls had heard him say unsolicited and at one time in years. Annie Ruth didn't think she had ever heard him say so much. The girls just cut their eyes at each other.

"If that's what you want, Poppa, that's what we'll do," Betty said. "Why don't you go on up to bed and try to get some rest. You look wore out."

And he did, the other girls noticed with surprise.

"You're not eating anything, anyway."

Her father just nodded, almost with relief, and sort of patted the tabletop near his plate before pulling his long frame wearily up from his chair and heading out of the dining room for the stairs.

The patting gesture reminded the girls of something they hadn't seen for a long time but couldn't quite put their finger on. It made them feel helpless watching him leave with a slow unsteady gait.

Betty wanted to leave the dishes on the table for a little while, but Emily jumped up as soon as they heard their father's bedroom door close and began running soapy dishwater in the sink.

She smiled and shrugged as she cleared the dishes from in front of her sisters. "Force of habit," she said, scraping the uneaten food into the tall plastic trash can by the door and silendy slipping the plates into the sudsy water before placing them in the dishwasher.

By the time the three women had finished the few dishes and pans, Betty was nearly pacing the floor.

"I can't stand this one more minute," she said. "I need a cigarette."

As badly as she wanted a cigarette, the idea of smoking
inside
Mudear's house never crossed her mind. As always, she felt like a little girl sneaking a smoke of rabbit tobacco or an unfiltered Camel pilfered from her grandfather's pack left in the breast pocket of his sweaty farmer's shirt.

"Annie Ruth, fix us something to drink. I got to go out on the porch for a smoke," Betty said as she rummaged through her purse for her pack of Benson & Hedges Menthol Lights and headed out the sliding glass door that connected the screened porch to the back of the house.

Annie Ruth settled on bourbon and ginger ale because that was all that was in the house except for some Scotch. None of them could abide the smell of Scotch. Even though Mudear did not drink, the bottle was hers. At some time, Mudear had heard from Carrie, her only friend in town, that people thought she stayed in the house all day drinking, that the reason no one ever saw her emerge was because she was in there drunk. Immediately, Mudear had stopped drinking any alcohol, even the fancy wine and champagne that the girls sometimes sent for presents.

"Ya'll know I don't give a damn what people say about me, but I be damn if I'll give 'em ammunition to wag they tongues."

Even Betty, who had promised herself three months before that she would stop racing toward that drink at the end of the day and who drank only Evian water with a twist when she went out, had the bourbon. It was what their father drank and kept on the bar in the rec room.

Without conferring, Annie Ruth decided to use the good small old-fashioned glasses, the frosted ones that Mudear had never let them use. She tried to pretend it was no big deal to use them, but her hands shook slightly as she took them out of the glass breakfront and placed them on the bar. For a moment, she feared she would be swept with another wave of nausea.

When she saw Emily watching her quivering hands, she smiled and said, "I guess I'm not as steady yet as I thought." And her sister stood behind her a few seconds and massaged the muscles in the back of her neck with her still-damp hands.

Annie Ruth remembered as a girl standing in front of the cabinet gazing at the glasses the way a child looks at a snow-filled paperweight globe. She believed for years that it was indeed freezing inside the breakfront as she believed it was inside the paperweight. But she was always too frightened of getting caught to open up the cabinet and investigate. Or even to press her fingers to the glass.

She poured them all a drink but made hers mostly ginger ale. She wanted one of her sisters to notice and then again she didn't think she could talk about her pregnancy yet with either of her sisters after what had happened on the plane. She was still working on not throwing her head back and screaming.

Betty stood in a far corner of the screened porch, her crossed arms tucked under her breasts, her body appearing to lean against air in what her sisters called her "Betty pose" ("You got to learn to lean on just about anything you can in this life, even air," Mudear would say, gazing at her oldest daughter). Her broad shoulders were like her sisters'. Their mother called them "Lovejoy shoulders, like men's." Only on Betty they seemed gargantuan. She had to take the shoulder pads out of all her dresses and jackets before she wore them to keep from looking grotesque.

She looked out over the field of waning wildflowers at the edges of the garden in back and took deep drags on her cigarette. The Benson & Hedges Menthol Light felt like a cool sprinkler in her throat and she smoked it all the way down to the filter. Then, she started to put it out in the dirt in one of Mudear's many potted ferns but stopped herself and instead slipped upstairs into the bathroom and flushed the butt down the toilet.

Coming back through the house on her way to the porch, she rubbed her arms through her beige cashmere sweater and decided to collect a thin blanket from an upstairs bedroom and two afghans from the den couch. When she handed an afghan to each of her sisters as they stepped onto the porch, she got a whiff of Mudear's talcum powder rising from the fuzzy yarn. She kept the blanket for herself.

Emily, absentmindedly drying her already dry hands on the breast pockets of her western shirt, sat on the flowered cushion at the far end of the porch sofa and tucked her legs under her. Betty saw her spread her afghan over her lap so no one could see how big her thighs looked splayed against her calves through her fringed jeans.

For most of their lives, Emily had been the slimmest of the girls, petite, a size seven since she hit puberty. But now, in her late thirties, she had started to put on some weight which she at first couldn't see. Then, when she did see it, she became embarrassed by the extra pounds and her inability to lose them. For the first time in her life she had to think about what she ate and how she looked in certain styles. She hated it.

The youthful fashion styles she had always chosen and shown off to perfection now looked a litde ridiculous, a bit
jeune fille,
on her expanded figure.

Especially since, as Annie Ruth had pointed out to Betty on the phone one night, she refused to "move her big ass on up one more size and give those skinny clothes to someone who can use 'em before they all go out of style."

"Someone like you, Annie Ruth?" Betty had suggested with a laugh.

"Well, at least I can still get my butt comfortably into
some
size eights."

"Yeah, the expensive ones, right?" Betty had pointed out.

"Well, whether she gives those pretty things to me or not, she better start thinking about getting her body snatched before it's too late," Annie Ruth said knowingly.

"Snatched?" Betty asked with a laugh.

"Yeah, snatched," her sister said. "You know how you snatch your hair back into a ponytail. Well, that's what our sister girlfriend needs to do with her body—with diet and mostly exercise: snatch it back to the size it was, before her body forgets what it was like to be that size."

Betty smiled. "Emily said she can't believe
she's
got to actually go to exercise classes."

Annie Ruth had chuckled like Mudear and said, "Tell her, 'Keep living, daughter.'"

Annie Ruth, still weary from the ordeal of her journey across the country, gave Betty her drink, plopped down on the other end of the sofa, curled up there, and just threw her afghan around her shoulders. Annie Ruth acted as if she felt she had nothing to hide with her body.

All her life she had been called "fine." She had the big legs, ass, and breasts that black men of the sixties and early seventies loved. And they had lavished praise on her for it. When she walked down city streets, even in the North, men felt perfectly justified in shouting at her, "Brick house!" (She assumed that white men felt the same but just didn't have the vocabulary or the nerve to say anything.) Before men's comments on the street had started turning ugly, sometime in the middle seventies, she had enjoyed the attention even though she had resented the implication that she was big and solid enough to be compared to a brick shithouse.

It wasn't that she was hefty, she just had curves that made folks want to run their hands along them the way a farmer in the field fondles a huge ripe warm watermelon.

If she didn't watch it, she felt her rounded butt and big firm breasts could have overtaken her hourglass figure and made her chunky. But there was little chance of that. She was always on some diet or another. Even if television didn't put ten extra pounds on your ass. And she had been known to stick her finger down her throat after she had slipped and enjoyed too much bread and olive oil with her lobster ravioli, salad, and blue cheese dressing.

Now that men seemed to be more influenced by magazine ads and music videos rather than by their own instincts and chose skinnier and skinnier women over their more voluptuous sisters, Annie Ruth watched her diet even more and worked out at her gym at Marina del Rey five days a week instead of her former three, making sure her body stayed "snatched."

Betty looked at her younger sisters wrapped up in their afghans and smiled as she settled in a rocking chair catercorner to them by a stretch of screening, with the blanket thrown over her knees. It comforted her that whenever they all went somewhere together people always commented, "Ya'll must be sisters." Even though their coloring and sizes varied, from Annie Ruth's light brown to Emily's dark, they did look like different versions of the same woman at different stages of her life.

All her life, Mudear had called Betty "big-boned"—"Betty is big-boned, let her pick that box up"—but she wasn't really big-boned. She was just about Emily's size only taller than the other two girls. But as with most things, she couldn't shake Mudear's image of her. In high school, Betty would scrutinize the wrists and hands of her female classmates to compare hers with theirs. Once, she had even unconsciously slipped her fingers around her own wrist and then around the wrist of the girl sitting next to her in the biology lab. The gesture had startled her lab mate so that she dropped the whole frog, the pins, and the wax-filled pan to the floor, splattering both girls with formaldehyde. It seemed that Betty had no hope of attaining the ability to see herself objectively. Mudear's image of her always overwhelmed her own self-image.