Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir (21 page)

Our horizon widened. Soon after Nancy married, she and her husband settled into his first and only navy post in French Morocco. She began to write about shopping trips to Gibraltar, a duty-free port she could pop over to on a warship. (Surely this kind of thing is no longer allowed.) She began to send us tweed coats and cashmere twinsets in pearl pink, camel, and cobalt blue. How did she afford this? The question never has been on the lips of my family members. Money is to spend. The coats were English and made me think of hounds and foxes and crumpets. The sweaters were triple ply, lush and voluptuous. And so exotic.
Oh, thank you. I got it from the rock of Gibraltar
.

Frankye was burned with a powerful cultural lens. Her father doted on her; her mother constantly criticized her and every other living being within her walls.

My maternal grandmother, blind Big Mama, was referred to by my father as “that snake.” Because she lived seventy-six miles away and my father’s mother lived only two blocks down the road, my Vidalia grandmother was referred to as “your other
grandmother.” I suppose I heard my mother call her “Mother,” but I thought of her as “Other.”

When Mother and I make an obligatory visit, Big Mama always rocks in the breezeway. As soon as the car doors slam, she begins her complaint, her dirge, indignation, grievance against the world. She rocks faster, keeping time with her faultfinding. My mother has heard this caterwaul too many times. She leans casually against the porch rail with her arms crossed, smoking and staring out at the corn fields. She’s bright as a quetzal, impatient but silent. Still she frowns down at me, smiles, and shakes her head
no
as I cross my eyes, pull out my lips, and wag my tongue at my blind grandmother. Big Mama rails on against every ungrateful member of the family, then catalogs her ailments, which I count on my fingers until I run out. A little froth of spit gathers at the corners of her mouth. Jesus and the Lord are hauled out frequently to boost her charges.

She was always feeling my arms, as when Gretel held out sticks to the witch so she wouldn’t be eaten. She asked what I had learned in Sunday school and I always said, “Jesus wept.” I didn’t want to go into my feelings about a God who put a father to a test to see if he’d kill his own son like a lamb to roast, and then sent his only child to be nailed onto a cross and fed vinegar. Like Big Mama, the Sunday school God was just mean.

While she only insinuated that I was misbehaving and that Jesus had his eye on me, she openly castigated my mother for her profligate ways, for driving my father to drink, for not obeying the commandments. My mother was shiny metal for her raspy voice to scrape. Garbert Mayes was blameless. Generous.
He sent her checks. My mother was lucky to have married
into money
. What had
she
done with that luck? If she had the sense God gave a polecat she’d get right with her Master.

Big Mama lived with my aunt Mary, who mostly escaped the holy wrath because Big Mama was canny enough not to bite the hand that fed her lavishly. Only Mary walked free. Mother referred to her as The Saint. As the youngest, she’d been stuck since she graduated from high school with the care of her mother. Frankye and the other two siblings (both died in their forties of heart trouble, magnified by drink) had already struck out from there, never looking back.

No one mentioned Big Daddy, dead for a decade. Big Mama had inherited a good hunk of south Georgia land from her mother, iron-face Catherine Phillips Williamson, but Big Daddy, a jolly drinking man, had gambled it away over the years. All that I had of him—no memory at all—was a pine chest he made for my mother’s doll clothes when she was small. Big Mama, whose given name was Almeda, had her crosses to bear, for sure, and she bore them quite badly and with as many grudges as she could remember. She had hands so small I had the urge to squeeze hard and hear the fine bones crush. Her vitreous white skin revealed no wrinkle (no worries when you’re always in the right). Her feet made me want to say “prim.” She kept them together like a good girl at church. Her black hair, thinning, never turned gray, except for a few stray streaks. She kept it in a knot at the back of her neck, arranged over a horrid net doughnut she called a “rat.” Biscuits were her redeeming talent.

Always when we arrive, she bakes a sheet pan full of delectable, light biscuits, soft inside, toasty outside. Mary sets out the ingredients and turns on the oven; Big Mama mixes them by feel. A crock of fresh butter, a jar of Mary’s blackberry jam, and a plate of those steamy, airy, crunchy biscuits: worth the trip. I help myself to four.

Big Mama secretly can see, surely. Her staring green eyes look like marbles, and her lard-white forehead gleams. When I later saw the first photo of earth from space, I thought of her eyes.

“Take those things back, Frankye. I don’t want them!” she grumbles, sliding off her lap the velvet robe and fuzzy shawl my mother brought in extravagantly wrapped gift boxes. She pronounces her name as though it’s an accusation. Frankye: I wonder if my mother substituted the “ye” for the plain “ie.” It seems unlikely that Big Mama would spell any name in a fanciful way.

Named for her father, Mack Franklin Davis, Frankye must have been a disappointment. The firstborn a girl, slapped with a feminized version of her father’s name as small consolation. Her middle name was Catherine, mother of Big Mama. At least it wasn’t Almeda.

“You could get me something useful,” she barks. “My eyes are on fire.” My mother brings a cold washrag with lemon juice squeezed on it and lays it over the bald eyes.
Let’s go
, she motions to me, tilting her head toward the door. I pretend to look in the glass-doored bookcase—my aunt Mary is a reader, too—but really I watch their distorted reflections in the foxed mirror above. They seem to move in a haze, as though from another time. “Come out from back there,” my mother snaps.
She’s tense as wire hanging a picture frame. I wonder if she, too, thinks it impossible that Big Mama can’t see.

After every exit from Mary’s house, my mother drives fast, lighting one cigarette with the other, burning up rubber all the way back to Fitz. When we turn into the driveway at home, bugs streak the windshield and the hood ticks.

Apparently, she was just as poisonous before she went blind. On the other end of the seesaw, Mack Franklin Davis indulged Frankye endlessly while she was growing up. Frankye told me that when her mother said
no
to the pleated chiffon crystal-beaded
dress in the window of a shop, her father brought it home in a box that night. She dove into the tissue paper and held it up, twirling in front of her mother. Maybe that night Big Mama’s eyes went stony for good.

When her mother said college was a waste for a girl, her father ordered the application. If even half the stories of my mother’s conquests are true, she was a femme fatale, if for a very short period. She met my father at twenty. Not much time to break hearts. My father was considered quite a catch, and I don’t know how long it was before she realized that she was the one caught.

My sister was born a year after they eloped. My other sister four years later, and I, “the baby of the family,” was born a long eight years after her. Obviously a mistake.

My mother told me they were happy only for the first year. She said the Depression “destroyed our generation.” By their midthirties, they’d lived through World War I, the influenza epidemic, the Great Depression, and World War II. Daddy sat out the war. Since he was engaged in making cotton cloth, his staying in Fitzgerald was considered essential to our nation’s well-being. Perhaps if he had gone, his life would have been better. He would have been out of small-town patterns and cast against history instead. As in books, shouldn’t he have a quest? Then I could have discovered, as a friend did, a stash of photographs of stick-and-bone people and learned that my father was one of the liberators of Dachau. A handsome young Italian would have knocked at our door, searching for his birth father.
I am from Anzio, where a Garbert Mayes met my mother,
Costanza
.… Or, he’d just been stationed, like his brother, in San Francisco on a gray battleship. He might have written to us:
Sell the house; this could be home
. If he’d come back from war to Georgia, he might have brought the luck to live.

If he’d gone, perhaps she’d have developed some resilience and pluck. She would have stepped in and managed the mill in his absence, have all the millhouses painted yellow, and the swept dirt yards planted with butterfly bushes and azaleas. She could have opened a café out behind the mill where the workers could sip iced tea, play dominos, and listen to blues.

But they were fated to the one-mile-square town, wearing out the streets with their heels and tires, wearing out their expectations, wearing out their love. When I read about an eighteenth-century table decoration in Naples—a live goldfinch in a cage of spun sugar—I thought of Frankye in her saffron silk slip, fluffing her hair and spritzing her pulses with Shalimar.

I can get no real satisfaction with first causes, the reasons they wrangled constantly. Clearly, they were bored and created drama to give some high resolution to their days. Beyond that, there’s the mystery of other people’s lives. How do the early years shape you? Raising children, you think you’re forming their character. But one of them with a steely eye may be determined to be just what you are not.
We’re fated to wonder,
Of those so close beside me, which are you?

FRANKYE AND GARBERT—A MATCH FOR 20 YEARS
was printed in gold on the white matchbooks their friend Marteel gave them for the anniversary. I was seven and it might have been the
first little double entendre I got. Ha! The matchbooks suggested many guests at a celebration, all smoking, dressed up, leaning to light one another’s Camels, the flaring lights isolating happy faces, the yard decorated with lanterns and the table set with my mother’s favorite Country Captain Chicken, tomato aspic, green beans with tarragon. My father in a white suit toasting his bride of twenty impeccable years. But I don’t really remember a party.

I knew that you could strike one match and set the whole book on fire; my parents seemed, over and over, to do that, so I must have understood metaphor, or at least the limits of the literal. They were no match for each other. They smoked, so they always were looking for matches. “Light the candles,” my mother said. “I want to bloody see what I’m eating,” my father answered.

For months the white matchbooks sat in crystal ashtrays rimmed with silver, prizes my mother won for flower arranging. I had my own supply for my playhouse in the front room of the barn, which I’d divided with trunks and suitcases into individual rooms, the kitchen being near the door where there were shelves for my tea set and the toy stove heated by a lightbulb. My dolls ranged along the discarded sofa cushions and their clothes hung on miniature hangers on nails. “Don’t you dare light any matches,” I was warned. “That barn could go up like a tinderbox.” But in a cigar box, I had many candle stubs
and when my mother’s car backed out of the driveway, leaving me with Willie Bell, I lined them up on a box and struck one of the matches for twenty years and by candlelight fed my dolls gruel made of sand. I liked the sudden burst of blue flame, the sulfuric smell, how quickly the matchstick bent and charred toward my fingers.
Frankye
, I thought.
Garbert
. I had no way of knowing that matches, made in heaven or not, continue to flare, lighting up the mind as they burn the heart.