Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir (15 page)

“Well, this is just what I want,” I said, “this and the dishes
Mrs. Beall painted.” I loved the flower plates. The only way they got me to eat all my dinner was to offer extra pecan pie if I ate enough to see which flower I got on my plate. Mrs. Beall painted a different flower from Mother Mayes’s yard in the center of each plate and a gold band around the edge like a wedding ring. I liked the white Cherokee rose, which climbed over my grandparents’ fence from the vacant lot next door.

But Hazel shakes her head.
Mama didn’t mean that, Frances is only eleven or ten, what could she do with rings besides just lose them? Mama would enjoy
my
enjoyment so much
.

Hazel’s hands had never touched Ajax or dishwater. I’d heard whispers that she “had an operation right after she married so she’d never have babies.” She lightly rinsed her nylons every night and hung them over a towel to dry. Everything that touched her had to be perfect, especially her hands.

She finds the tiger’s-eye necklace with gold beads interspersed, a gift to Mama from Boofa.
Mama would love for me to have this
, she thinks.
She never said a thing in the hospital; she just wouldn’t have upset us for the world
. Hazel rolls up the jewelry in the silk case Mama carried when she went traveling.
Oh! I should have the pearls. They’d look nicer on me than on Frankye or Mary Helen or certainly on Emmy with those awful sapphires she likes
. Quickly she unrolls the case and slips in the long loop of creamy pearls. She looks up and catches her breath.
Mama!
But how foolish—her own face centered in the oval mirror. She leans closer and lifts the corners of her eyes. Holding up the silver hand mirror, she twists her black hair into a high chignon. Shoe polish black, my mother said. Would she be blue haired and
wear lavender? Already she liked flowered scarves around her neck or dresses with soft ruffled collars. I told her she looked like the queen of England in my history book with the white stiff collar on her yellow piqué. Hazel pins up a loose strand and thinks of my tangle of curls.
That child runs wild. What is Frankye thinking of? She was never that way with the older girls. It’s as if she gave up by the third child. But Frances has Boofa’s ways, hard as nails, and thinks when she says jump we should all say how high
. Hazel feels the aquamarine through the soft jewelry roll. She will wear it with the sea green evening dress she found at the Nifty Shop the same afternoon she looked for a dark dress to wear to the funeral. She hates dark clothes. But she had seen this swath of pale silk, what she came back to the house with—nothing for the funeral.

The funeral! That would be half through by now.
Mama
. She looks over at the high bed where she and her brothers were born. It’s made up stiffly, the Martha Washington coverlet taut as if no one ever had lain there. Hazel opens Mama’s closet. Her smell, the sachet pillows on the shelves and musty lingering in the sleeves and collars of the dresses. From the zippered bag, Hazel pulls out the mink stole. Mama agreed entirely with her about that. When the three boys had chipped in and bought it for her last Christmas, they’d asked Hazel if she wanted to go in on it. She told them Mama wouldn’t wear it that much; it was too hot in Georgia to get the use from it. She rubs the fur against her cheek. It was much less suitable for the climate in Miami, but there are some cool nights. Mama seemed so thrilled when she opened the box from J. P. Allen’s,
but later she admitted to Hazel she probably couldn’t wear it too often. It looks brand-new. Hazel drapes the stole around her shoulders even though the room is stifling. From the balky chest of drawers she takes peach, blue, and muted pea green cashmere sweaters. Mama has a champagne silk blouse that doesn’t look too much like an old lady. Where would it be? She finds it in the top drawer. Carrying as much as she can, Hazel crosses the hall to her room. She tosses the things on the bed and pulls Mama’s suitcase out from underneath. Ten of three. She packs fast, stuffing the jewelry in the elastic pockets along the sides of the bag. Just as she starts downstairs, she pauses and looks back in Mama’s room. Two great arcs of soft sun curve across the bed from the big windows facing Lemon Street. Suffocating in there.
How Mama hated the heat!
On her bedside table lies a church fan with a picture on it of Jesus kneeling beside a rock. Mama’s room is so full of her absence. Hazel notes the little things on the table one by one: the thimble, the neatly folded lace handkerchief, the small photograph of Mama’s mother, Sarah America Gray, a fuzzy shape in white named Charlotte, Mama’s long-dead sister, and now, with Mama’s passing, utterly forgotten. There was Dad as a baby in England, held by a mother named Elizabeth Repton, who was shortly to die, leaving only this ugly little baby and a name that would reappear years from then in the middle of Frances’s. Hazel’s eyes follow the trailing vine of trumpet morning glories down the wallpaper. Idly, she pulls open the bedside table drawer and finds a scrap of notepaper with Mama’s sprawling handwriting in brown ink: bell peppers, yellow
thread, 2 hens, lemon, matches, squash. Hazel squeezes the list into a ball. All at once she feels a cold flare of sweat: Her mother’s life is over and there is nothing left but these tiny clues.
How I hate that foreign house in Miami
, she thinks suddenly. She hits the taut bed with her fists over and over. “No, no, no, no. It’s not fair.
Why
did this have to happen?” Then she notices the bedside table and pulls out the drawer; there’s the ring box. Mama kept her big diamond there at night so the setting couldn’t catch at threads in the embroidered sheets. Hazel opened the box and the ring flashed out rainbows over the wall. Mother Mayes had worn it ever since her mother died and they’d soaped her hand and worked the ring off because she’d grown so stout. Mother Mayes soaked it in ammonia overnight, then wore it every day.

Hazel snaps shut the box and puts it exactly where she found it. She will have to wait and see if Dad gives her that. Before she closes the drawer, she takes out the Murine and the glass eyedropper and puts them in the pocket of her robe. She must run down to pack the Lincoln now, but as she hears the cars return she will freshen her eyes with the drops that look just like tears.

All the time Hotch Dickinson delivered the eulogy, the eyes of everyone in the church fasten on the tall ivory candles around the coffin. One by one they slowly give up to the heat and droop over like the necks of swans bending toward fish under water. Most fall to the left and flicker out. A few stay lit, spattering
white wax onto the burgundy carpet last winter’s collection bought. The blanket of roses over the coffin turns dusky, the tight buds feathering out like heads of sleeping birds against the leaves.

I sit almost still but my dress scratches the backs of my legs and I try to inch it out from under me so my skin will be cool against the smooth white wood. It is the hottest May in memory, one of those unexpected, blistering warnings in spring of what’s to come. My mother shoots me a look:
Be still
. Daddy Jack mops off his mustache of perspiration.

“I will lift mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help,” Rev. Dickinson says. I look out the open window, past the two shacks, past the railroad tracks, past the apartment building where Johnny Leverett lives. Not a hill in sight. I turn around in the pew. There is Miss Hattaway, the principal. I remember how to spell “principal” because my teacher said that the principal is your pal. Miss Hattaway, some pal, in the seven years I went to Third Ward School, never cracked a smile once. Way in the back I spot the dark faces, Fanny and Drew and Willie Bell sitting together. Fanny still hides her face in her hands. Over where her family always sits, Edna Lula, my best friend, waves to me. As I start to smile, Aunt Mary Helen pokes me sharply with her elbow.

I sit straight. I smell something and wish Aunt Mary Helen would move over because her green silk dress has ugly wet quarter moons under the arms.

In the funeral home car, I ride on Daddy’s lap, feeling the town rather than seeing as we drive from church, up Central,
down Main, left on Lemon, our street, and out Evergreen Road to the cemetery.

Daddy holds open the door and helps Daddy Jack out. Suddenly Daddy Jack’s suit looks too big for him and he is looking around as if he doesn’t have on his glasses but he does. Mother Mayes will be the first to lie in the family plot. Her people and Daddy Jack’s are buried in North Carolina. The threshold has
MAYES
carved in the center. I liked the old part of the cemetery better. One iron gate gives a three-syllable squawk as you swing on it. Mother Mayes, I see, will sleep near a lamb in a nearby plot. Carved under the lamb:
ASLEEP IN JESUS
.

“Now what does that mean?” I whisper to Mother. I’d asked the question before. Mother squeezes my hand too hard.

“Shhh. It just means he died of diphtheria. It means that you should hush, that’s all.” Her answers usually involved at least one crazy link but I understood her. Rev. Dickinson stands by the hole, his big angel sleeves billowing out. The air is cooling off, mercifully. All the people from town gather around the tent, but only the family sits down in the folding chairs on a strip of carpet. Is Mother Mayes really in the coffin? I sit between Daddy and Aunt Mary Helen, who keeps checking the run she got in her stocking when she stepped out of the car. I can’t see Aunt Emmy or my uncles down the row, or my two sisters, who sit on the other side of Mother. Rev. Dickinson picks up a handful of red dirt, raises both arms, and says, “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” in a loud voice. I look up to see if that makes Daddy mad. My father’s face looks out between the tent poles, toward the fields and out as far as he can look. I take his
hand in mine. Mother glances down and frowns. His hand is limp, not like his face that looks as set as wax. With his right hand he wipes his cheek on both sides with his whole palm. “Don’t cry,” I say softly. Rev. Dickinson throws down the dirt on the clean coffin. Daddy doesn’t look at the grave hole. He had come out of her and now she is inside a box. I rip off my thumbnail with my incisors.

When he finishes talking, Rev. Dickinson comes over and hugs me and says he feels close to all the Mayes family even though we don’t attend church as regularly as he’d like. I swallow so hard my ears hurt. Then Mother Mayes’s friend Mrs. McCarthy pulls me close to her bosom. Her eyes are funny, gray with a brown rim, eyes like a wild animal’s might be. Her thin red hair looks almost pink. She even smells soft, like vetiver cologne and sweet peas. “Your Mother Mayes was a grand old gal, Frances. You got a lucky name from her.” I rest my head and let myself be patted. I don’t mind having Mother Mayes’s name, but I would fight anyone who ever called me “Fanny,” as they did her. Mother Mayes and her cook had the same name and it was embarrassing—fanny was a rear end. Many of Mother Mayes’s friends called her “Fan,” not so bad but almost. “She would have just loved these flowers, just be thrilled to death, oh my, thrilled to pieces.” She leans down to look at a bunch of fragrant narcissi Fanny brought in a mayonnaise jar sitting among the florist wreathes. “Fan loved the wild narcissus.” She straightens up slowly, a little unsteady. Her red nails dig into my shoulder for balance. “It’s a beautiful world, darling; that’s why we’re so sad when one of us has to leave it.”

As she walks to the car, I start to cry, a flash of fast tears and the hot awful rock in my throat. I don’t know if I am crying for Mother Mayes or for Mrs. McCarthy, who can’t see well and thinks of Mother Mayes whenever she sees the wild narcissus that springs up unasked in Fanny’s yard every spring. Mother Mayes was a grand old gal, she had said. I kick up the silver tufts of leftover winter grass under the new. My parents and uncles and everyone shake hands with the same people they see every day while the man from Paulk’s smokes behind the clay mound. My sisters walk off with three of their friends toward a white convertible.

For a long time, I wait in the black Cadillac. When I look out the window at the grave, I see my own reflection in the window. If I stare into my own eyes, the grave disappears. If I look at the grave, my eyes disappear. I stare at myself.
I wonder if I will be beautiful
, I thought. I jump onto the backseat and cross my legs slowly, lifting my dress just above my knee the way Hazel did. “To the opera, James,” I say to the empty driver’s seat. They don’t come and don’t come. “Why are they always so slow?” I shout aloud. I roll down the window and spit as far as I can. I pull the scab off my left knee and put it in the ashtray because it wouldn’t be nice to drop it on the floor of the fancy car.
I would like to drive this
, I thought. I see Daddy helping Mrs. McCarthy to her old two-toned, humpbacked Chevrolet. He was once balled up inside Mother Mayes’s stomach. How could he breathe? Now she is trapped under dirt. Children sometimes suffocated, shut in refrigerators. I kick the seat with my heels, then sigh, jerking my shoulders
up and down.
When I’m grown, I’ll wear only red silk
. Aunt Emmy and Mother are walking toward me, their arms around each other’s waists. I don’t know what I want to happen next. I trace my finger around my lips that are cool and thin, just like Mother Mayes’s.