Dimestore (2 page)

Dimestore

GRUNDY NESTLED IN ITS MOUNTAINS
“like a play-pretty cotched in the hand of God,” as an old woman once described it. Surely I could always count on these mountains, this river behind our house, this town where I grew up in my father's dimestore and across the street in my grandfather's office at the courthouse and in the Methodist Church and in my grandparents' house just across Slate Creek, right next to my school. “Honey, the only thing you can count on in this world,” my granddaddy used to say, “is death and taxes.” But that couldn't be true, I felt. This was my geography. It would be like this forever. My daddy knew. He called it his “standing ground.”

I could drive that road with my eyes closed, or almost—twisty Route 460 as it wound up through the mountains of southwest Virginia. I turned at Claypool Hill, passed Richlands, and went over the heart-stopping Shortt Gap. I passed the huge Island Creek coal tipple; innumerable “yard sales,” held in no yard but right along the roadside; a storefront with a big sign that said
WE BUY GINSENG
; several houses turned into the kind of freelance churches where you get to scream out and fall down. Like a vision of Hell itself, the coke ovens appeared as I crossed the bridge over the Dismal River, brick chimney after chimney belching red flames into the sky. We used to drive up there and park when I was a teenager—it was the most exciting thing to do on a date (also the only thing, except for the revivals and the movie that changed once a week). There was a lot of traffic as I got closer to Grundy, where the large hollers spill out into the main road: Garden Creek, Big Prater, Little Prater, Watkins Branch, and Hoot Owl Holler, just beyond the house I grew up in. Somebody was sure to greet me by rolling down the window of his truck and yelling, “Hi, Lee, when did you get in?”

I was always struck by that preposition
in
. Driving into Grundy was like heading into a bowl, producing that familiar sense of enclosure that used to comfort me and drive me wild all at the same time when I was a teenager. These mountains are so steep that the sun seemed to set about 3 p.m., so steep that a cow once fell off a cliff straight down through the roof and landed in my Aunt Bess and Uncle Clyde's kitchen in downtown Grundy, close to the courthouse. This is true.

Founded at the confluence of the Levisa Fork River and Slate Creek, Grundy became the county seat of Buchanan County in 1858, enduring cycles of fire and flood, bust and boom, as lumber and coal businesses came and went. Perhaps its isolation and its constant struggles were what made its citizens so close to each other, so caring and generous—“the best people in the world,” my daddy always said, and this is true, too. Even after Mama died, I could never get him to retire and leave Grundy.

“No, honey, I need me a mountain to rest my eyes against,” Daddy always said.

MY VERY FIRST MEMORY IS
of downtown Grundy. I'm standing up in my crib, gripping its spool railings, looking out an upstairs dormer window of my grandparents' house at the flickering colored lights of the Morgan Theater, reflected in the waters of Slate Creek. First green, then yellow, then blue and red and green again, they twinkle through the distance like fairy lights in an enchanted kingdom, promising everything. In my mind's eye, I can see them still, mysterious, beautiful, and always too far away. I've been told I watched them steadily for hours, and it must be so, for that memory is indelible, as is the somber striking of the courthouse clock that marked the passing of every hour.

It is 1945. I am one year old. My father, Ernest Smith, is away in the Navy. My mother, Virginia Marshall Smith (nicknamed “Gig”), has left her job teaching home economics at the high school and is working at the Ration Board. She and I are living with my grandparents until my daddy returns. Then we will move into our own house up the river at Cowtown and Daddy will open the Five and Ten Cent Variety Store with the financial help of his uncle Curt Smith (who was actually Daddy's own age—it was that kind of family). Though the store will later become a Ben Franklin, it would always be known in town as simply “the dimestore.”

Many of my favorite memories of Grundy take place in this dimestore. As a little girl, my job was “taking care of the dolls.” Not only did I comb their hair and fluff up their frocks, but I also made up long, complicated life stories for them, things that had happened to them before they came to the dimestore, things that would happen to them after they left my care. I gave each of them three-part names: Mary Elizabeth Satterfield, for instance, and Baby Betsy Black. Their lives were very dramatic.

Upstairs in my father's office, I got to type on a typewriter, count money, and talk to Roberta Ratliff, pale, blonde, and pretty as a princess in a fairy-tale book. She would later become the manager. I spent hours and hours upstairs in that office, observing the whole floor of the dimestore through the one-way glass window and reveling in my own power—nobody can see me, but I can see everybody! I witnessed not only shoplifting, but fights and embraces as well. Thus I learned the position of the omniscient narrator, who sees and records everything, yet is never visible. It was the perfect early education for a fiction writer.

I always went down to check on the goldfish in their basement tank. And every spring I looked forward to the arrival of the pastel-colored Easter chickens. But my favorites were the little round turtles with roses painted on their shells. I used to wear these turtles to school on my sweaters, where they clung like brooches. I liked to visit with John Yuhasz, a very kind man, on my trips to the basement to “help” him put up stock. Clovis Owens, in charge of maintenance, could fix anything, and his wife made the best pound cake in the world. She always sent me a piece, wrapped in wax paper.

Up on the main floor, I chatted with the dimestore “girls” who had all been working there for as long as I could remember—sweet Ellen Clevinger in children's wear; Viola, back in piece goods, who always hugged me; floor supervisor Ruth Edwards; and Ruby Sweeton, supposedly in toiletries, who seemed to be everywhere. With bright red spots of rouge on her cheeks, Mildred Shortridge presided over the popcorn machine and the candy counter at the front of the store, whispering the craziest things in my ear. She made me laugh and laugh. I always bought some of the jellied orange slices and the nonpareils, those flat chocolate discs covered with hard little white balls of sugar. My friends were surprised to find that I never got anything free at the dimestore; despite my protests, I had to save my allowance and pay just like everybody else.

I WAS ALLOWED TO RUN
free all over town, which was filled with our relatives, not only Smiths, but Dennises and Belchers as well. Russell Belcher ran the Rexall drugstore. Uncle Curt Smith owned the Lynwood Theater and lived with his wife Lyde and her sister Nora Belcher in a shotgun apartment above it, reached by a long, dark staircase. I was fascinated by this apartment, where the rooms were all in a row and Lyde cooked a big hot lunch in the middle of every day. Uncle Vern Smith (longtime member of the Virginia State Legislature) and his son Harold had opened the first Ford Agency. Uncle Clyde Dennis ran the insurance agency. Uncle Percy Dennis, Sr., was the Superintendent of Schools, while Percy Dennis, Jr., operated the Mingo lumber yard across the river. My grandfather's alcoholic brother, piano-playing Blind Bill Smith, often came over from West Virginia to play boogie-woogie piano for dances. My grandparents Chloe and Earl Smith lived across Slate Creek from town in a big old brick house reached by a scary swinging bridge that I crossed each time with my heart in my mouth.

I went to town every single day when school let out, across that swinging bridge and then the real bridge they built later on. First I went to the dimestore and got some candy from Mildred and did my homework upstairs in the office, or crossed the street to the old stone courthouse and did my homework in my grandaddy's treasurer's office, eavesdropping all the while. In the dimestore I learned who was pregnant, who was getting married, who had got saved, who had got churched for drinking, who was mean to her children or made the best red velvet cake. In the courthouse I'd hear a different kind of story—who was in jail, who had gone bankrupt or shot his brother or tried to short his employees, who was out of a job or had set his house on fire just to collect the insurance money. I also liked to go around the county politicking with Granddaddy on Sunday afternoons, sitting down to eat some Sunday dinner with everybody. I liked to stand out on the courthouse corner with him on Saturdays when he gave out dollar bills. Men would be smoking and shooting dice and “loafering around telling lies,” as Grandaddy said, on the courthouse bench, and boys would be shining shoes. Somebody would always be playing music, guitar and fiddle and maybe banjo, out on the sidewalk in front of the dimestore.

Next to the dimestore was the Rexall drugstore, where as a teenager I gossiped with my girlfriends, bought Maybelline makeup, ate mysterious “meat sandwiches,” and read
Teen
magazine with its articles like “How to Talk to Boys (Tip: Learn about Cars).” Then came Russell's Men's Store where I held Christmas jobs during high school; and finally, Uncle Curt's Lynwood Theater which I attended virtually every time the movie changed during my entire life in Grundy.

Here, for the cost of a mere quarter, the big silver screen brought us the rest of the world. Here we formed our notions of bravery, of glamour, of danger and sophistication, of faraway places and people like no people we had ever seen. Western theme music swelled our hearts. Our ideal of heroism came from stoic John Wayne; of beauty, from Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe. Was anything ever as scary as
Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte
? Or as sad as
Imitation of Life
? We found Ma and Pa Kettle hilarious, and howled at the Three Stooges, the Marx Brothers, and later, Jerry Lewis. Our first dates took place at the Lynwood (“Nice girls do not sit in the balcony!” our mothers decreed) where we grimly held our dates' hands in a kind of death grip throughout the whole show, afraid we'd hurt their feelings if we stopped for even one minute to wipe off our sweaty palms.

The movies taught me that place can be almost as important as personality, and that actions really do speak louder than words. Plot is all-important; beginning, middle, and end is the most natural and satisfying sequence of events. Most important of all: something has to happen. People in a movie do not just sit around thinking all the time, the way I did in real life—“mooning around,” my mother called it, disgustedly.

From Main Street, it was only a stone's throw to our little Methodist Church. With its chiseled stone exterior and beautiful stained-glass windows, it looked totally different from every other church in town—much more holy, I felt! Its slightly damp, mildewy smell was a holy smell, too. At Christmas, each child received a paper bag containing an orange, an apple, some walnuts, and a Hershey bar. In the Christmas pageant, I was first an animal, then a wise man, and finally an angel, but never the Virgin Mary. The Virgin Mary could not have curly hair. On Mother's Day, you wore a red carnation corsage to church if your mother was still alive and a white carnation if your mother was dead, something I could not imagine. Everybody wore a corsage on Easter Sunday. Summer's Vacation Bible School featured Lorna Doone cookies and red Kool-Aid in paper cups. We made lanyards and sang, “Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight, Jesus loves the little children of the world,” though we had never seen any of those other ones. Later, at Youth Fellowship, we made pizza, which we called “pizza pie.” We had learned about it on our summer trip to Myrtle Beach. “Ju-ust as I a-am, without one plea,” we sang tremulously at revivals, where I always rededicated my life, to my mother's embarrassment. “A nice girl does not rededicate her life at the drop of a hat,” she said. We ate three-bean salad and coconut cake at church suppers.

From church we crossed Slate Creek on the swinging bridge to my grandparents' house. A low stone wall separated their front yard from the road in front of it. I remember the paw-paw trees by the gate, the pungent smell of the pods rotting on the ground. I remember looking up from the yard to watch a long, slow line of people carrying a casket up Hibbetts Hill for burial in the town cemetery. “Oh where is my dear brother? Oh where is my dear sister? Day is a-breaking in my soul,” they sang.

My grandmother's flower garden, to the right as you faced the porch, was her pride and joy, perhaps the purest expression of herself—for she had an innate artistic bent, a love of beauty and poetry, that had nothing to do with her own biography: an isolated childhood up on Fletchers Ridge, marriage at sixteen, and a lack of formal education. But she never stopped learning. In her later years, she attended summer courses at Lake Junaluska, the Methodist version of Chautauqua. Their house was filled with books and catalogs that she had sent off for. She sent off for some of her plants, too, which bloomed in astonishing variety and profusion. Her garden was like an English garden, its flowers planted in clusters rather than rows. A clematis-covered white lattice arch shaded two benches and a table. In curlicue lettering, an iron placard proclaimed:

The kiss of the sun for pardon,

The song of the birds for mirth,

I am nearer God's heart in a garden

Than anywhere else on earth.

The living room was too dark and too formal for me as a child, with its flowered carpet, velvet armchairs with fancy lace antimacassars on their backs and armrests, the hissing radiator behind them, and the piecrust table with its tiers of dainty knickknacks that I was just dying to break, particularly that white china lady from Japan. My grandmother would sit in a wine velvet wingchair, all dressed up in some kind of filmy voile dress with matching brooch and earrings. She seemed to have hundreds of these sets. When she died, I was astonished to learn that they were all fake. Grandmother—for this is what we were instructed to call her at all times—received a steady stream of visitors. Years later, I learned that my own mother had first developed serious colitis “about the time I realized that I was expected to visit your grandmother every day.”