You Can’t Drink All Day if You Don’t Start in the Morning (5 page)

In my research—I was going to be the smart queen—I learned that “pecan” is a Native American word which, translated from the Algonquin language, means “This is gonna make Stuckey’s a lot of wampum some day.” Would the Pecan Festival queen lie to you?

Riding on the float that chilly November morning, I felt the years melt away.

It helped a little, too, when Dan Rather, along about the same time, said that he thought Katie Couric would “tart up” the nightly news.

Katie Couric, the fifty-year-old tart! The notion that a woman our age could be a goofy sexpot was, frankly, refreshing. Granted, “tart” isn’t the kind of word you’d find in the urban dictionary denoting unrelenting coolness. To some, the reference was so dated they didn’t understand he wasn’t talking about a pastry. Nope, this tart was a hussy, a real strumpet!

Of course, Rather was chastised and had to issue a P.C. retraction saying that Couric wasn’t a tart but was, in actuality, a respected journalist.

Oh blah, blah, blah.

The whole thing reminded me of a scene in HBO’s fabulous
Six Feet Under.
Kathy Bates was a middle-aged shoplifter who never worried about getting caught.

“Don’t worry,” she told her friend. “They don’t even see you. It’s as if we aren’t even here.”

It was brilliant but depressing. I’ve noticed that when shopping in the cool stores, the wee, tiny salesclerks seldom offer to help me. I am invisible at fifty. Many times, however, they will run themselves ragged trying to assist their own tiny kind.

So, yes, it’s fun to think you could still be a tart—or a
queen—at fifty. Beats being the invisible drone buying her teenager’s underwear and begging someone to wait on her while thinking maybe it wouldn’t be so hard to just stuff it in her purse and walk on out . . . to get some coffee, good and hot.

Now here’s something wonderful from the N.C. Pecan Harvest Festival queen’s friend Mabel to try with that hot coffee. This pecan pie isn’t as cloyingly sweet or as rich as some. Try it sometime.

If you’re showing off for the circle meeting, be sure to top each slice with a generous dollop of freshly whipped cream and a dusting of cinnamon. If you must use the canned stuff, remember—it makes a racket coming out of that nozzle thing so you’ll need to turn up the radio preacher so the ladies won’t realize you’re fixing to serve them whipped cream out of a can.

• ½ cup sugar
  
• 1 tablespoon all-purpose flour
  
• 2 eggs
  
• 1 cup light Karo syrup
  
• ¼ teaspoon salt
  
• 1½ teaspoons vanilla extract
  
• 1 tablespoon butter, melted
  
• 1 cup pecan halves
  
• 1 unbaked pie shell
  

Preheat oven to 300 degrees. Sift sugar and flour together. Beat together eggs, syrup, salt, vanilla, and melted butter and add to mixture. Pour into unbaked pie shell. Arrange pecan halves in a pretty pattern on top. Bake for about an hour. Cool completely before cutting or it’ll be a royal mess.

The woman watching me wash my hands in the restaurant’s restroom approached with a look of amused curiosity.

“May I ask you a question?”

“Sure,” I said, figuring she was going to ask if I knew that fewer than half of the bathroom-going public washes its hands and that she couldn’t help noticing that I actually wash my hands while singing the “Happy Birthday” song twice in my head like I read somewhere you’re supposed to. Then again, how could she know that? Who was this woman and where did she get her eerie thought-reading powers?

The woman cleared her throat and looked me up and down.

“I’m visiting from California and I can’t figure something out about you people who live here.”

For a second or two, I wondered how she could be so sure I was a “local” but then I remembered that she had probably overheard me instruct the Princess to “See can’t you find us somewhere to dry our hands since this paper towel thingy’s all mommixed up.”

Yes, that might have been the tip-off.

“Go ahead,” I said, plastering my best “Welcome to the South” smile on my face.

“Why is it that the women here don’t have a tan? I mean, you people live on the coast. What’s going on?”

OK, that was twice she’d said “you people,” which is just one of those phrases that, no matter how innocently spoken, always sounds condescending.

She was plenty tan, this woman, and I felt like Casper McWhitelady standing beside her.

Her question blindsided me. So I said the first thing I could think of, which was the truth.

“Southern women hate wrinkles and skin cancer.”

No applause necessary, Chamber of Commerce; I am here to serve.

Where did this come from? I sounded as fun-loving as mildew. Would someone, anyone, please remove the stick from my ass?

I had committed the unpardonable sin of being rude to visitors because Ms. California was brown as a nut and I was telling her that (a) she was gonna die and (b) she’d probably die ugly.

So I tried to make up.

“Of course, that’s not to say that you would have those problems,” I said, oozing in Southern charm. “I’m sure the California sun is much less, uh, sunny.”

“No, not really,” she said. “Sun’s sun. I just think it’s weird that you people are all so pale.”

Oops, a third “you people.” All bets are now off.

“We people,” I said slowly, “need to be pale; otherwise how would you detect our red necks?”

“Good point,” she said.

“I was being sarcastic.”

“Oh. That’s cute.”

Cute. Why was I letting this woman get to me? If she wanted her skin to look and feel like a pita chip, that was certainly her business, bless her heart.

Much is written about Catholic guilt and Jewish mother guilt, but I think Southern daughter guilt is the worst of all. We are raised to make sure everyone around us is comfortable, happy, included. I had failed miserably with this woman.

Southern men are raised to be polite. At least most of them are. Occasionally, there are unfortunate exceptions.

I’m thinking about the man I observed leaning against a Sun Drop cooler in a convenience store recently who was yelling loudly enough to wake the dead or, in this case, the store clerk whose head jerked up when he heard the commotion.

“Hey!” the man was shouting. “Don’t you got eyes? Can’t you see all these people waiting in line?”

I felt terribly sorry for whoever was getting yelled at. The restroom was occupied so I stepped back and waited to hear the sound of the useless hand-dryer gizmo. It wouldn’t be long now.

Suddenly, I felt that electrical charge in the air that you always hear people describe right before a tornado hits.

My hair stood on end. On a nearby rack, the Slim Jims appeared to be combusting in their little red and yellow jackets.

Yep. There was a lot of tension up in here.

I looked around, discreetly of course, to see who had cut in line, but everyone was staring back at
me
!

Oh, shit.

Yes, despite the fact that the yelling man, along with a woman who appeared to have the tremendous misfortune to be romantically aligned with him, and four fidgety children were a good twenty feet from the restroom door, I had broken in line.

“Are you addressing me?” Yeah, I said it just like that.

Addressing. Who
says
that? What was next? Was I going to invite him to engage in a battle of fisticuffs with my husband and his manservant?

Maybe it was the foot-long turkey drumsticks smoldering in their glass case a few feet away, but I felt the urge to go medieval on this guy.

Never in my life has a man yelled at me like that. I don’t
want to sound like Mrs. Drysdale but the truth is, a Southern man never raises his voice to a woman he doesn’t know, especially one who is just the teensiest bit older than he.

It simply is not done.

Besides, it was hard to understand how a person could basically stand on the shoulder of the interstate and expect me to deduce that he and his litter were in line for the facilities.

“Yeah, I’m talking to you.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said, sweetness oozing from me like a stomped-on Twinkie.

Which, now that I think about it, I was.

“Are these precious cherubs yours?” I asked, backing away from the restroom door.

“Do what?”

“These here your young’uns?”

“Yeah. And they need to pee.”

I wanted to tell him they might want to stand a little closer to the toilet owing to his family’s odd distance-perception problem, but that would’ve sounded vaguely snotty.

What had happened to this Southern man? Had he been raised by wolves, or worse, the French?

I decided that I could make it another forty-five miles to the next rest stop, so I power-walked back to the car, head held high.

“Make haste!” I hissed at my husband.

“What’s wrong?” said Duh. “You didn’t get to go to the bathroom?”

“Why would you ask that? Could it be because I’m sitting
here crossing my legs tight enough to crack walnuts between my thighs?”

“Yeah. Something like that.”

I told him the whole sorry story, embellishing it a bit from the safety of the car.

Southern women are, frankly, “bad to embellish,” as Aunt Ovalene would say. You can be “bad to” anything; just fill in the blank, although it’s mostly used as “bad to drink” to describe a relative’s disappointing alcoholism.

“He was very threatening in his demeanor,” I said.

“You sound like the way they talk on
Law and Order.
”

“Nonsense. I haven’t used the word ‘perp’ in a sentence, maybe, ever.”

I fear that Southern mamas aren’t teaching their sons “how to do” anymore, and it’s disgraceful. Rather, we are raising a regionful of, well, perps.

Witness the young man who slouched unhelpfully at the shoe store when I took the Princess shopping for back-to-school.

“Excuse me. Could you help us?” I asked.

“With what?” he drawled, all eighteen and full of attitude and Doritos breath.

OK. Wasn’t expecting that response. Then again, he was young and it probably wasn’t his dream job to peddle kids’ shoes to middle-aged women, no matter how attractive I might be.

“My daughter needs some new tennis shoes. Can you recommend a brand?”

“Over there.”

OK, this wasn’t going well at all. This chile had no raisin’.

“Over there” didn’t even come with a wave of the hand. Still, as my Sunday School teacher Beth always says, you never know what another person is going through on a particular day, how tough his walk might be at that moment.

At least a dozen times a day in traffic, I fight the urge to cuss somebody by fantasizing that he or she is driving like a complete asshole because he is so distracted from having just been diagnosed with “the cancer.” Actually, if that was true, roughly 95 percent of my fellow drivers would be terminally ill by my estimation. That’s how much they suck at driving.

So, in my mind, I tried to give this rude boy the benefit of the doubt.

I smiled wider, this time through gritted teeth, Garfieldlike.

“Over where?”

Huge heavy sigh and irritated glare.

Could I
be
any more of a nuisance?

“You lookin’ for kids’ shoes, right? They’re over there under the sign that says
KIDS’ SHOES.
”

Ohhhhhh. So it’s like that. Suddenly I didn’t care how tough his walk was. In fact, if I could arrange it, he might never walk again.

Soph knew what was coming and began to back away from me very slowly, the same way you’d do if you saw a rattlesnake in your path.

“I see the sign,” I said, steely but still smiling. “What I was hoping for was some guidance. Are there brands that perform better? Is there one you’d recommend?”

“Depends on what you want.”

“What I want is some customer service,” I said, mentally adding “you little shit” at the end of the sentence.

“Say what?”

“Customer service. You know. Like how when a customer comes in and asks you to help them, you make sure that if you can’t answer the question, you’ll find someone who can and you’ll be cheerful throughout the process. Real basic stuff like that.”

I felt like Andy Rooney, without all the eyebrows.

“Look, the brands are all different. Depends on what you want. I guess you’re just gonna have to let her try some on.”

“Are you sure about that?” I asked. “Because, usually we just buy shoes without trying them on because it’s just too much trouble to take off socks and untie laces and all that.”

Blank stare.

By this time, Soph had found the shoes she wanted on her own. She tried them on and they fit perfectly. We headed to the cash register to pay. Part of me was irked that I was even giving money to this store, but most of me was thrilled that we could check something off our list.

“Was someone helping you?” asked the clerk without looking up.

She must’ve been kidding.

I took my mama to the Senior Center the other day to play “the bingo.” The words are spoken with such reverence in senior circles. It’s never “bingo.” It is “
the
bingo,” rather like certain country folk who still say “the Walmart” and “the Kmart.”

I like the bingo, but historically, it hasn’t liked me back. No matter. I fetched us a couple of cards and we sat in padded folding chairs at a card table with two Yankee ladies who were clearly regulars.

Not five minutes into the game, I hollered “Bingo!” but one of the ladies at our table leaned over and told me that she was afraid I didn’t have “a good bingo.”

How could this be? Wasn’t my bingo as good as the next person’s?

“Not a good bingo,” the caller said matter-of-factly into
the microphone after verifying my humiliatingly premature bingo.

Très
embarrassing! I slumped in my seat and could read the minds of the other players.

“Thought she had a good bingo. Can you imagine?!”

The caller went back to start another game, never failing to pronounce the number twenty-two as “toot toot,” like a train whistle. It was funny the first five or six times.