Apron Strings
Apron Strings
Mary Morony
Copyright © 2011 Mary Morony
All rights reserved.
No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form whatsoever without the written permission of the publisher.
ISBN: 0615951791
ISBN 13: 9780615951799
A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank each and every one of you for all of your help.
Hilary Jackson
Ralph Morony
Melissa Parrish
Susannah Shepherd
Sarah McCollum
Annie Morony
Katherine Kane
Ross Howell
John McAllister
Colin Dougherty
Sara Sgarlet
Alison Abel
Chapter 1
Sallee
C
hange; not even the quarter, nickel, or dime type was appreciated in our house. I don’t remember ever seeing a spare coin atop a table or amid the dross in the back hall drawer where everything that didn’t have a place ended up. No jar sequestered on a corner of a bureau collected dust and pennies. The thin dimes the tooth fairy brought, once discovered and delighted over, were promptly deposited in our sterling silver piggy banks; each with initials engraved in script. It was as if change didn’t exist. I wonder if coins in a pocket would have been eschewed if they had been called anything else.
My mother, Virginia Stuart Mackey, understood her biological duty was to nurture us children. She found the job difficult. Tall, angular, pale, and blonde, my mother spit my brother, sisters, and me out in her image, and then proceeded to whirl about our lives like an icy comet in an orbit rarely intersecting our own.
Our maid, Ethel, would puff up with pride whenever she said, “Miz Ginny done made a good-looking bunch of chil’ren.” I guess she was right. Each of us had our mother’s hair and blue eyes, although in varying shades. Not one of us had exactly the same color hair or eyes; but there was no question who our mother was. We each, in our own way, had something of her looks.
Soft and round, Ethel was the color of coffee with cream, with big freckles dotting her broad nose. Her wide set eyes were light brown,
and her lips were thin. Short, just over five feet tall; she weighed well over two hundred pounds.
I grew up thinking that Ethel and my mother were as close as any two friends could be despite the fact that it was 1957. Even to a child that seemed unbelievable considering they were so different in color, shape, and attitude. Friendship had to be next to impossible: in Virginia it was against the law for a colored person to drink from the same water fountain as a white. Yet, for as long as I could remember, thirteen hours a day, six and a half days a week, my mother and Ethel shared their lives. Well, that’s not quite true. My mother shared her life. Ethel listened and edited her own life. And despite their disparate worlds, their views were remarkably similar; their thoughts intertwined like neglected perennials in an old flower bed.
Each of us children was named for somebody else. My sister Stuart was the oldest and the prettiest, she’d just turned fourteen. She hated her name, though I don’t know if that was because it sounded like a boy’s name or because it was my mother’s maiden name. Next oldest to Stuart was my brother, Gordy, just nine at the time. Gordy was named after my mother’s brother, Gordon Stuart. Then there was me, Sallee; seven and named after Daddy’s father, Sallee. It was an unusual and unfortunate name for a man as far as I was concerned. I was happy to be a girl. Helen, at just four and a half, was the baby of the family and was named for my father’s mother who died days before Helen was born. It was lucky that Helen was a girl; I think my parents would’ve gone right ahead with the name even if the baby had been a boy. I can’t imagine a boy on earth who would have been able to tolerate Helen as a name.
The house we lived in was big like a mansion of the old South: butter-colored stucco with enormous fluted columns and dark green almost black shutters on the floor-to-ceiling windows in the front. It sat in one of the treelined neighborhoods that rimmed the University of Virginia where my father had gone to law school. It was the prettiest house on the street. My mother said that if it hadn’t been she would never have allowed Daddy to buy it because of the tacky houses that ran down one side of the property line.
“Not charming like slave quarters,” she’d say to most any visitor. “Just tacky post–First World War housing.” I didn’t know why she thought slave quarters were so charming. The ones I’d seen had been nothing but old, rotting, weed choked, falling down sheds. She definitely wouldn’t have wanted those right next door. I think the thing she hated most about those houses was their proximity. When our kitchen door was open, you could hear the neighbors talking; the houses were that close. So unless it felt like it was a million degrees inside, she always insisted that our kitchen door stay closed.
A few weeks after her birthday, Stuart decided to have her hair cut short, almost like a boy’s. She made the appointment herself, convincing the barber that our mother knew all about it. When we pulled up in the car to pick her up, my mother took one look at my sister’s head and started screaming. She left the car idling with us inside while she stalked into the barbershop to give the barber a lecture. Clear out in the car we heard her demand in her most offended tone, “How dare you ruin my little girl’s looks?” Still fuming when she got back into the car, she slammed the door and said, to no one in particular, “Cutting girls’ hair without their mothers’ approval. How dare he?” Stuart sat mute in the front seat. She had been acting pretty smug up until then, but I could see she was trying not to cry. As for me, I squirmed with humiliation.
Stuart, especially as she got older, looked more and more like my mother. Adults loved to compliment her on the resemblance; Stuart loathed it. Anything that had to do with my mother was like poison to Stuart, it seemed. She and my mother got along about as well as beets and mashed potatoes. You had to keep them on opposite sides of the plate if you didn’t want to create a big pink mess.
My mother was a beautiful woman and we all knew it; my mother most of all. She wore her long golden hair up in a loose bun, or in a braid wrapped around her head for parties. Her features were delicate. She always wore jewelry that shimmered and jingled when she moved. We were lucky to have such an attractive mother, people said. It boded well for how we would turn out. Sometimes I would look in the mirror and study my face, searching for signs of my mother in it. But I’d ended up
with my father’s square face and round nose; features that suited him just fine, but made me look boyish in spite of my long hair.
That long hair was a Mackey girl trademark, as far as my mother was concerned. She took pride in it, delighting in the variations among us, even running her fingers through Helen’s soft curls sometimes. I think that’s why she was heartbroken when Stuart lopped her’s off.
When we got home from the barber, my mother announced that Stuart was grounded for a month. No longer fighting back her tears, Stuart ran up to her bedroom, passing a stunned Ethel on the stairs.
“Lord a mercy, whaddidya do to yo’ head, chile?” Ethel asked.
There was another change my mother was none too happy with. My father had started wearing blue jeans and work boots on weekdays. For years Daddy had been a lawyer, leaving and coming home from work in nice gray suits and handsome wingtip shoes. But he quit his job at the law firm to start building a shopping center. “The way of the future,” he called it. My mother called it an ugly atrocity, at least when she was speaking with her friends. I think Ethel was inclined to agree with her. More than anything though, I think my mother missed the suits. Thing is, I’m not sure my father even needed the jeans and work boots. They stayed nice and clean. And he still wore his suits some days when he had meetings. The way Ethel told it, my father worked on the “business” side of the project. I could see he liked his new clothes, but I wasn’t sure the jeans and boots were worth all the fuss.
Whenever my mother complained about Daddy’s attire, Ethel would reassure her. “Miz Ginny, ya know good as me he’ll be back in dem suits afore too long,” she’d say. But he never was. I think that was why Ethel never said anything to my mother about Stuart’s haircut. Ethel seemed to have a sixth sense about what could be said and what was best left unsaid.
I know it can’t really be so, but looking back, I believe the events of that morning when Stuart had her hair lopped off marked a tipping point. Things had never been perfect in our house, and at the age of seven I was just beginning to consider the possibility that other families might have it better or worse. Until then, things were simply the way they were, and they didn’t seem likely to ever change—boy, was I wrong
about that. I see now that thinking that way gave me a sense of security, like the way a recipe arms you with the notion that a dish will turn out the same every time you make it. As the winter of 1957 gave way to spring, it seemed that the Mackey household was about to have a whole new menu.
A few weeks after Stuart cut her hair, I almost died. At least I thought I was dying. The Saturday morning started off like any other. Ethel arrived for work, and the kitchen filled with her clean, earthy scent, which was alive with wood smoke, farmyard animals, hay, and grain. She lived on a farm with her husband, and finished chores there while I lay dreaming in my warm bed. She hummed spirituals as she set about fixing breakfast. Coffee perked on the stove. Bacon fried in the big black skillet. She softly sang, “
Gwine to chatter with the angels, Sooner in the mornin’, O Lord have mercy on me.”
Halved oranges waited on the counter, ready for squeezing as soon as my mother’s footfall was heard at the top of the stairs. Then she would help Gordy, Helen, and me get dressed.
Ethel stopped singing and started squeezing orange halves when she heard my mother start down the stairs. I always thought it was strange that my mother hated singing so much. If you wanted to really get under her skin, all you had to do was sing along with Ethel. “
Dem Bones, dem bones, dem dry bones,”
we’d shout along.
“Gordy, Sallee!” she’d snap at us. “Stop that this instant.” Then she’d look at Ethel and shake her head. “Please, Ethel, those songs are just too sad.”
“The past is the past,” Ethel would reply, looking my mother dead in the eye.
On Saturdays Ethel often brought Gordy, Helen, and me Three Musketeers candy bars in a too-dressy-for-everyday worn black purse that she parked on the counter behind the kitchen door in front of the folded paper bags. One particular Saturday she arrived with no such offering. Gordy and Helen didn’t seem to notice, but I felt a pang of dismay when she didn’t mention the candy. I decided to check her purse, just in case she’d forgotten.
