Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir (5 page)

Then we stopped visiting. We hadn’t seen her in a while, and when we drove past her house one day, I asked Mama Jean why. She didn’t answer me until we got home. I asked her again. She stared straight ahead with her hands still on the wheel. “She killed herself. With a gun.” She shook her head as if she were trying to shake errant pollen from her hair and dabbed her eyes. “I just can’t imagine doing that to yourself. Nothing’s ever that bad.” She turned to me before opening her door. “She was an alcoholic. A
bad
alcoholic.” That was the first time I heard that word. I was still the perfect age. I was five.

*   *   *

Mama Jean had been wrong during that come-to-Jesus talk before first grade about how everyone might not love me. My teacher, Mrs. Chambers, was smitten with me, and the feeling was mutual. She had a big personality like Mama Jean and even looked a little bit like her—dark bubble of hair, bright makeup. While Mama Jean favored jungle-red lipstick, Mrs. Chambers sealed her lips with frosted pink. Thrice daily she’d fumigate herself with perfume from an amethyst glass atomizer that sat on her desk.

Mrs. Chambers wasn’t like the other teachers. She drove a navy-blue Mercedes. None of the others could afford to drive such a car. I knew from overhearing Mama Jean and Dad talking that Mrs. Chambers didn’t need to work because she was married to a lawyer and they lived in a mansion out in the woods of Evadale. Before that they had lived in a big house on Thomas Road, what Dad called “the Flamingo Road of Beaumont” (where all the rich people lived). I lucked out by landing in Mrs. Chambers’s class because I got the kind of attention to which I’d grown accustomed. She and I also had the same birthday, which sealed our bond.

In her class I found my ideal companion and first boyfriend: Eric Munson. We became fast friends during PE. As the other boys ferociously played dodgeball, we sat with our legs dangling atop the monkey bars discussing our favorite episodes of
Bewitched
. Dodgeball is a barbaric game in which opposing teams line up across from each other, red rover–style, but each player is armed with a large, red rubber ball. When Coach blows his whistle, the boys throw their balls at each other with intent to kill.
Kids are cruel enough. Why encourage them?

Eric had eyes the color of the aquamarine ring Mrs. Chambers sometimes wore and blond hair like I’d never seen before, almost white it was so light. They called a kid with that shade of blond a towhead, which I thought was an ugly name for something so pretty. He even had wisps of it on his arms like a grown man. He was tall for his six years.

He seemed to be equally enamored of my looks. During coloring time, he’d send me love notes on manila paper like “Roses are red, violets are blue, your hair is red, and I’m sweet on you.”

In the evenings we had long phone conversations, me talking on the wall-mounted dial phone in the kitchen. We took our cues from our mothers and the soaps we watched to mimic how ladies talk on the phone. I cradled the receiver between my ear and shoulder, hands free, so I could mock-file my nails or lethargically twirl the long cord like a jump rope. I always ended the conversation with “Well, let me let you go.” That’s how Mama Jean ended her phone conversations, but it was really she who wanted to be let go. It was the Southern way of dropping someone.

Soon we were hanging out after school and playing
Bewitched
. We didn’t fight over who would play the starring, Elizabeth Montgomery role of Samantha, the witch. I took that role because Eric was so homosexually advanced he wanted to play Endora, Samantha’s wicked, flaming redhead of a mother played by Agnes Moorehead. Eric perfectly imitated Endora’s drag-queen mannerisms as he cast spells with a tornado of sweeping arms, arched eyebrows, and sucked-in cheeks. In our
Bewitched,
Samantha ditched her mortal husband, Darrin, after serving him a double martini and gallivanted across Europe with Endora.

This was a perfect game for Eric because he wanted magic, not reality. The house he lived in was also a 1950s ranchburger, not too different from our mini–White House. However, it wasn’t as spiffy and clean as ours. The near-dead grandmother in the guest bedroom was supposed to be watching us because his mother, a nurse, was at work. He wouldn’t say where his father was, but he assured me that his family had another house, a mansion with an entire room of glass furniture and a three-car garage filled with a Jaguar, a Rolls-Royce, and a Mercedes, just like the one Mrs. Chambers drove.

I remained close with both Eric and Mrs. Chambers after first grade. Eric and I had different second-grade teachers, but we still played after school some days. On other days I would stay behind as Mrs. Chambers’s little helper, to stack her freshly graded papers or clean the chalkboard. On those afternoons it was just the two of us working in the empty classroom to the low roar of the window air conditioner and the aroma of manila paper, crayons, and her perfume.

As I helped her, Mrs. Chambers would let me in on the classroom gossip: “Travis Boudreaux can’t concentrate. He’s what they call hyperactive.… Kathleen Winslow is very creative, my star pupil, just like you were.…” I even got to spend our birthday weekend with Mrs. Chambers and her family at her redbrick mansion in Evadale. Set back in the woods down a long, winding road, it was almost as big as the post office downtown and kind of looked like it, with its front porch of six soaring white columns. “I think she was going for Tara, but she wound up with a federal building,” Mama Jean told Dad.

On one hot after-school afternoon, Mrs. Chambers called me over to her desk for a heart-to-heart. I sat down and met her gaze with a smile in anticipation of the latest gossip she was going to tell me.
Another parent-teacher conference with Travis’s mother? The school is cutting back on manila paper? Show-and-tell is becoming more show than tell these days? Or is she going to invite me for another weekend at her federal mansion in the woods?

“I want to have a little talk with you, Jamie.” I loved little talks with big people. I held her gaze with eager anticipation. “Do you know the word
sissy
?” Her eyes narrowed and her head was cocked. I stared back at her. “Do you know what a sissy is?”

My eyes zeroed in on a close-up of her frosted-pink lips as she said
sissy
. Never wanting to show ignorance, even at that early age, I said, “I think so.” I don’t know if I did, or if I intuitively did. I felt that I was in trouble. I looked away from her lips and out the window at some boys laughing and playing tag around a lonesome live oak in the blinding afternoon sun. I turned back to her pink lips.

“Well, Eric might be a sissy. You know, people might think you’re one too if you hang around him. Maybe it would be a good idea if you took a break from him for a while.” Then she winked and ruffled my red hair to lighten the mood. “Just something to think about.”

I don’t know how much I thought about it, but I know that when Eric came around after school I started making excuses for why I couldn’t play. I was going to a birthday party. My parents weren’t home and I couldn’t have anyone over. I didn’t feel well.

The last time I saw him before he finally stopped coming around, I was standing under the transom of the mini–White House’s front door while he stood on the porch. As I made up yet another tale of why I couldn’t come out and play, he didn’t protest. He said limply, “Okay.” His aqua-blue eyes were damp. We both knew that my excuse was a fairy tale. I finally broke the awkward silence with the only thing I could think of to say, “Well … let me let you go.” He got on his bike and pedaled away.

Later that night I watched a rerun of
Bewitched
. When Endora popped onto the screen, cast a spell, and then disappeared with a whirl of her arms, it made me sad.

I was in junior high when I realized that Mrs. Chambers had been right: Eric was a sissy. I was one too. I rode my bike over to his ranchburger to see if we could pick up where we’d left off. I knocked on his door. A man I’d never seen before answered. Eric’s father?

“Is Eric home?” Blank stare. “Eric Munson?”

“He doesn’t live here anymore.”

“Where did he go?”

“The Munsons moved to Kansas years ago.”

FOUR

Driver’s Seat

“Read the sticker price on that one,” Mama Jean said, staring at a fleet of brand-new 1979 Cadillacs and pointing at the black one. We were cruising the lot of the Cadillac dealership in her silver Ford LTD under cover of night so no unctuous salesmen would hound her. Like cat burglars casing a mansion, we were shadowed in a film-noir chiaroscuro of moonbeams and parking-lot lights.

I obeyed her command; my eleven-year-old legs hopped out of her car to read the eight-by-ten printout stuck on the backseat window (the one behind the driver’s seat). The Cadillac—as a Cadillac ought to be—was loaded. I read off the car’s amenities: leather seats, illuminated makeup mirrors on the visors, power steering, power windows, power doors. Power.

I read the price and turned to her goggle-eyed. The Ford’s electric window, a glass curtain black with night, disappeared into the car door to reveal her covetous face. “How much?”

“Fourteen thousand and eight hundred dollars.”

“Well, I don’t need leather seats. After you switch to velour, knock off some other amenities, and haggle with them, I could probably get it for eleven or twelve. But I’d need to sell at least two of those houses in Thomas Park before I’m behind that wheel.” Thomas Park was the wealthy development at the end of Thomas, aka Flamingo, Road.

“But it says fourteen thousand.”

“You never pay sticker price.”

And she almost never did.

Mama Jean fell into real estate when she pushed Dad in 1976 to abandon our mini–White House and move to a bigger, better, brand-new house in a new development on the west end of town. It had four bedrooms, not three; two and a half baths, not one and a half; a detached, two-car garage in the back, not an attached one-car garage in the front; a fireplace; and a white terrazzo-tiled foyer. The best part: no aluminum siding.

Against Dad’s protestations she started working when I was in first grade. As much as she liked playing the Southern hostess with her Haviland fine china and sterling silver (buttercup pattern), she was bored once I went to school. As she said in later years, “I’d rather be dipped in shit than go to another sip ’n’ see!” (A sip ’n’ see was a fine Southern tradition of paying a visit to the mother of the bride’s house to “sip” tea and “see” the wedding gifts displayed on the dining-room table.)

She told Dad her plans over the phone when he called her from a business trip. “I’m going back to work.”

“Why?”

“Because you don’t make enough money.”

“You most certainly will not!”

“I most certainly will. Besides, it’s too late. I’ve already taken a job.” That was her motto: act now, don’t apologize later.

Dad was director of the Chamber of Commerce’s Convention and Visitors Bureau. It was a high/low job: high profile/low pay. He got to meet all the visiting dignitaries who came to town—Miss Americas, Dr. Joyce Brothers, Pat Boone, even First Lady Betty Ford, who looked like Genevieve, and, according to Dad, had hands as sweaty and warm as fish left out in the sun. There’s a photo of Mama Jean proffering me to Pat Boone as he blesses me with his hands as if he were the pope and I were the baby Jesus.

Mama Jean’s and Dad’s different ways of driving summed up their different approaches to life. He seemed more like a passenger than a driver, as if the car were on autopilot. He turned the key and tapped the gas pedal. The rest was up to the car. Mama Jean, however, had an aggressive, focused way of driving. While her foot assaulted the gas pedal, propelling her car in and out of lanes in search of the fastest route possible to “make good time,” Dad seemed to float into traffic as if the car were a sailboat with a good wind behind it and magically glide to his destination. Someone was always in front of Mama Jean, slowing her down, getting in her way. When stuck behind a meandering driver who wasn’t going left or right—or wasn’t even going—she would moan, “Jesus. He didn’t know whether to shit or go blind, so he closed one eye and farted.” Dad was that kind of driver.

That first job she took was at the Southeast Texas Arts Council. It wasn’t going to get her a Cadillac, but it did get her a fox stole and helped enough with Dad’s salary that we were able to make the move to the new house. The Realtor recruited Mama Jean into the publicity department of American Real Estate. While she collected a modest salary, she watched the mostly female Realtors around her closing deals on their exclusive listings, cashing hefty commission checks, and hanging
MILLION-DOLLAR PRODUCER
gold plaques above their desks. Within a year she got her real estate license. Soon after, Beaumont’s front yards were decorated with
JEAN BRICKHOUSE EXCLUSIVE
for-sale signs.

Dad had long gotten over the idea of Mama Jean’s working and became her biggest supporter. He was already her biggest fan. The family photo albums are crammed with Dad’s adoring shots of Mama Jean in an array of locations—next to an azalea bush in full bloom on Easter morning, on a hotel balcony in Acapulco, in front of a flocked Christmas tree—but always in the same glamour pose: hands on hips, right elbow point in front, left elbow point behind, right leg extended down to the right high-heeled shoe on point, and radiant smile in a head-on collision with the camera. My favorites are the candids he took of her looking into mirrors and applying her makeup. The one I love predates me. She wears a white dress accessorized by white ball earrings that drop from under her bouffant flip. She leans into a motel-room mirror with her lips stretched as she applies bright red lipstick. In the background is my father, his face blocked by the flash of the camera.

As her Realtor working hours became erratic—showing houses at night, sitting in empty “open houses” on the weekends—Dad took over in the kitchen, which meant we went from tuna casseroles with Lay’s potato chips on top to veal scaloppine with mushroom rice. She was a back-of-the-box cook. He threw out the box. This role reversal was big news in town. The
Beaumont Enterprise
Sunday Lifestyle insert ran a cover story on Dad and Mama Jean’s modern marriage: “She’s a busy real estate agent who doesn’t have time to cook for her family anymore. He’s a gourmet chef who now puts food on the Brickhouse table every night.” The story ran with a photo of Mama Jean sitting at the head of the table in the formal dining room. The glass table is set with her cobalt-blue and burnt-orange Imari china. Candles are lit and Dad is serving her his famous spinach-stuffed chicken breast with pine nuts. Never mind that he only made that for dinner parties and they only ate at that table for holidays and parties.