God Save the Sweet Potato Queens (11 page)
The godmothers had a very sweet, traditional baby shower for us. The invitations had my grinning face superimposed over a large (but still undersized by actual comparison) naked person, with a slightly lewd poem. Vats of wine were consumed on my behalf. BoPeep is set, having already received all the essentials for pageant school—tiara, long white gloves, pearls, and a baton. Wilson and Lynn Wong, the ever-thoughtful Young Republicans, gave me a green-sequinned set of pasties and a G-string—perfect for entertaining at home.
People take unbelievable liberties with pregnant women. Aside from fondling our swollen bellies and asking about our weight, two other sources of unquenchable curiosity for the public seem to be “Are you going to do it natural?” and “What size bras are you wearing now?” The answer to the first is: sort of. It will be drug-free but somewhat of a new departure in that everybody in labor and delivery will be naked and we are planning a nasal delivery. Margaritas will be served in the birthing suite. Re: the bras—not sure the size we’re up to at the moment, but suffice it to say the cups are too big for my head. I’m thinking of making hats out of them when this is all over.
Your big fat sister,
Jill
LETTER TO FRIENDS, 8:03 A.M., JANUARY 28, 1988.
BOPEEP DOES, IN FACT, ARRIVE AMID WILD ACCLAIM. Moon Pie performed his hand-holding detail admirably. Dr. Rascal did all the hard stuff, and me and ’Peep just cruised. We all had snappy outfits for the occasion. Moon Pie looked just like a cafeteria worker. They gave him a whole paper outfit, complete with shower cap. I kept threatening to rip off his little paper pants and give the nurses something to talk about.
All in all, it was a totally satisfactory experience. I had her at the Mississippi Baptist Medical Center and, I have to tell you, they have great pie. If you are thinking of coming to Mississippi to give birth, keep it in mind—great pie, also totally acceptable fried chicken. These things are important to me, especially on occasions that I anticipate will be stressful—such as having a baby for the first time ever in my whole life. I expect you are no different in this regard. Add to these important facts that the nurses were as sweet as the pie, and they didn’t even know I was the Boss of All the Sweet Potato Queens, being unable as I was to fit into the outfit (I guess I was incognito—disguised as a really fat woman).
Plus, I got this really great baby out of the deal! I could spare you all the gooshy details about how wonderful BoPeep is just by saying that she is, in a word, perfect. But I won’t, since I know you are dead to hear all the gooshy details. I am sorry to inform all of you currently in possession of babies that we got the best one and so you, unfortunately, did not. This baby is the cutest thing I ever saw. The only even potential flaw was the ears, and they, too, are perfect—flat on her little punkin head, just where they ought to be, like Moon Pie’s, and not wafting in the breeze like her mom’s. This baby is just sweetness in a little-girl suit is all she is. She goes from wide awake to REM sleep in the space of a second. I guess she dreams about the only thing she really knows anything about at this point in her small life—titties. She lights up with a big, unconscious smile and coos in her sleep as she dreams of titties, and then her little lip quivers and she starts and shudders as she dreams of that worst of all possible worlds—no titties. Michael Rubenstein confesses that his own dreams have never progressed beyond that stage.
BoPeep’s preoccupation with the titties/no titties dilemma brings up another point: major life change. In one instant, I went from being Jill Conner Browne, Boss of All the Sweet Potato Queens, tantalizing woman of passion, wit, and mystery, to Jill Conner Browne, somebody’s mother and personal lactating device. ’Peep sprang from the womb and promptly (and permanently, it seems) attached herself to my more-than-ample bosom, pausing only to switch sides. I imagine it to be not unlike being intimately involved with a lamprey eel, only cuter.
JANUARY 28, 1989.
BoPeep turned a whole year old. This is a milestone in everyone’s life—when your baby has survived your parenting for an entire year relatively unscathed. ’Peep accomplished a lot in her year—in spite of my inept attempts at being somebody’s mother: She said not one but two two-syllable words, those being “titties,” naturally, and “bubbles”—as in “Tiny,” very fitting for the daughter of THE Sweet Potato Queen. I bet she’s in a very small demographic grouping of people twelve months old who can identify Don Ho and his song. We’re very proud. My sister, Judy, called every day, several times a day, for months, just to converse with ’Peep. Admittedly, the gist of the conversation was always the same—my apparently shameless sister endlessly exhorting the child to “Say ‘Hi, Judy!’” We all tried to help her, actually. Every time the phone would ring or we would pass a pay phone, we’d say to her, “Say ‘Hi, Judy!’” But would she say it? She would not. But then Moon Pie had one conversation with his friend Cecil, to whom he speaks maybe once every six months, and as soon as the conversation ended with “Bye, Cecil,” you guessed it—’Peep has not shut up saying “Bye, Cecil! Bye, Cecil! Bye, Cecil!” with perfect clarity. Judy did have success in one linguistic venture with ’Peep, however—the two of them can deliver a chorus of “nyaa nyaa nyaa”s with matching tones and accompanying sneers. Yet another source of pride for any young mother.
It strikes me upon reflection that it will only be twelve short years before ’Peep goes to live with her godparents—Joan and Buster Bailey. Joanie was in Hawaii the day ’Peep was born and she called me in the hospital. She wept when I told her I was naming the baby after her.
[No, Joan’s name is not BoPeep. ’Peep’s actual name is Bailey Browne.]
Buster was in the background, pointing out that Bailey was, in fact, his name; Joanie only acquired it by close association. I allowed as how the baby did look a lot more like Buster, which was purely coincidental, I assured all interested parties. They could fight amongst themselves about whom the baby was actually named for—I was naming them both godparents, but there was an addendum to the deal that they might be interested in.
This baby was getting named for them and they could be good-time Charlies for her anytime they pleased, but come January 28, 2001—’Peep’s thirteenth birthday—this baby would be coming to live with them for the ensuing eight years. My own personal teenage Karma is so horrific—I still cringe at the thought of it all—I took this precaution to insure that ’Peep and I both survive until she comes of age.
[I have reminded the Baileys of their commitment each and every January 28. They are beginning to get nervous.]
I think I have hit on a swell idea here. ’Peep will still live here in town, and go to her same school, but she won’t live with me. I can’t afford boarding school, but this will accomplish much the same thing in that we will eliminate that personal proximity factor that makes the teenage years so tumultuous for families. It will, of course, be tumultuous to the Baileys’ family, but who cares? I think of it as sending ’Peep off to a boarding home, and if you currently find yourself pregnant or in possession of a small baby not yet named, let me encourage you to pick out some friends (think gullible, easily led, sucker-types), name the baby after them, and tack on the Thirteenth Birthday Clause. The first thirteen years are a breeze—especially compared to the following eight—and you can be off somewhere having fun again while the hapless godparents are “wrassling” with your teenager. This knowledge can only enhance your sense of wonder, and gratitude, not to mention hilarity.
By the time you read this book, ’Peep will have been under the roof and tutelage of the Baileys for at least a month, and I will be enjoying an extended and long-overdue vacation.
13
Divorce, Dating Again, and Revirgination
I
n
SPQBOL,
I briefly touched on what I perceived to be the many advantages of widowhood over divorcement. A close friend of mine has experienced both and has verified the accuracy of my position. The entire world is united in its support and succor of the Little Widow. Everybody invites her to everything and is even more solicitous of her little feelings if she’s not up to attending. She can even use her bereaved state to get out of attending affairs that she formerly would have been forced to attend although preferring to be set on fire, if the choice was offered, and it seldom was. On the other hand, she can be lauded as brave and strong for attending, in spite of her grief-stricken condition, all the fun stuff that she would have sooner died herself than miss. When she is not taken out for dinner, food is delivered, unsolicited, to her door. Everyone is concerned about her financial state, and it is not unusual for her to receive donations. She is patted and petted by all—indeed, so many aspects of widowhood are so appealing, it is a wonder more women don’t make a studious effort to avail themselves of it. We concede that, if you happen to have loved the deceased a powerful lot and feel as if part of your heart has been ripped out of your body, which our Little Widow did and does, it can quite often put a damper on your enthusiasm. But when someone shows up, as someone most assuredly will, to provide a diversion, a distraction, or something to eat, well, don’t you think that might provide a little relief?
Divorce
Consider now the plight of the hapless divorcée and see by comparison how pitiful is her lot. When your husband is removed due to death, everyone brings you food. People come to help you with your children. Your errands get divided up amongst your friends. Your laundry gets done. Your house gets cleaned. Everybody wonders if you’re getting enough rest: They want you to go lie down for a little while, take a nap, take a break, get out for a spell.
When your husband is removed from the marital home while you decide whether or not to divorce him permanently, and you are totally out of your mind with grief, worry, anxiety, guilt, fear—you name it, you got it—you will more than likely find yourself by yourself with all of it. If ever there was a time when you needed all that stuff done for you, this is it. As you move beyond the separation and into the divorce phase, you may become more and more isolated. Parties are planned not so much around convivial people as they are planned around convivial couples. Even if everybody hated your husband and adored you, the couple of you were invited to every party. When the party-throwers have the chance to have you, the desired one, alone without your millstone, do they avail themselves of this opportunity? They do not. Your ex-husband will, of course, retain his position on all the guest lists: Everybody wants a spare man around. Meanwhile you will only be invited to lunch with the girls because many husbands cannot be trusted to behave well in the company of spare women. You are left alone to rebuild your life from the ground up, and more often than not, all you’ve got to work with is your own mother wit. Fortunately, that is usually plenty.
This ties in with our overall philosophy, which we call our Refrigerator Box Theory of Life. What we’re referring to is that bygone time when the best thing that could happen to you was for somebody on your block to get a new refrigerator, because it came in a refrigerator box—the best toy imaginable. All you needed to operate it was your imagination, and that box could be almost anything—castle, boat, log cabin, jail, spaceship, schoolhouse, grocery store. A refrigerator box lasted forever—or at least all summer, which felt like the same thing back then—unless somebody forgot to drag it into the garage when it rained.
When you get divorced, you’ve got to first look realistically at the dark side: He’s gone, and you’re all alone. You’ve got to figure it out by yourself and make a plan for the rest of your life, or at least this next little part. Okay, to do this, let’s make a very slight but crucial mental shift in your thinking. Let’s move to looking at the bright side: He’s gone! You’re all alone! You get to figure it out by yourself and make a plan for what you want to do. You’ve just been handed a brand-new refrigerator box all your own and you can make it into anything you want, and you can change that plan at any time without consulting anybody else to see if that might interfere with the ball game or duck season. I charge you, therefore, if you are the one in the middle of the divorce, to get up off your ass and make something good happen for yourself.
And if you are the friends of the one who is in the middle of the divorce—get over there and help her out. Do all the things for her, and with her, you would do if she were burying her husband instead of just running him off with a stick. Sometimes the whole situation is so bleak, it’s a stretch to find any flicker of hope. On those occasions only other women can help women through this. We have given a few Divorce Parties for our nearest and dearest. One party was given on the occasion of a husband leaving his wife (our friend) for the Sunday-school teacher of one of their three children. He upped and ran off with the bitch, and then the bastard filed for bankruptcy. For her party, we bought a very large, black plastic rat and suspended it from the ceiling. Small plastic bats were dispensed to all attendees, who took turns at whacking the rat—just like a piñata, except there were no treats inside; we were just whacking for whacking’s sake—very satisfying. Some girls, who are quite handy at cake decorating, collaborated on a delicious project that produced a large—very large—cake in the shape of a full set of male genitalia—very festive. We made song sheets appropriate to the occasion and had a sing-along. Among the crowd favorites were “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” “Heartbreak Hotel,” “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair,” “You Broke My Heart So F**k You,” and of course, what gathering would be complete without “D-I-V-O-R-C-E.”
On that particular song, our good buddy and the undisputed Queen of Rock and Roll in these parts, Suzy Elkins, doctored the lyrics just the teeniest bit; we think that if Tammy Wynette were still singing it, she would love the change. You know the line that says something about me and little J-o-e going away? Suze changed it to say “that A-S-S-H-O-L-E.” It fits perfectly and gives it a nice zing, don’t you think? Try it at your next Divorce Party and see if you don’t get raves.
But now, lest we seem harsh and unfair, let me hasten to say that if you happen to have a male friend about whom you care deeply, and all of a sudden his wife runs off with a blackjack dealer or another woman or something, then by all means throw the Divorce Party for him. That’s another thing about divorce: It forces us to choose sides, and death doesn’t.
Dating Again
Your girlfriend will probably need help to ease back into dating. (Your male friend will need no assistance; women will be hurling themselves on the windshield of his car.) I have been divorced from Moon Pie for a while now—oh, not to worry, he’s still close by, not in the same neighborhood or anything, but certainly close enough that I can report when he does something silly and/or annoying, which is still fairly often. He has always been such a good fodder—not to mention a pretty good sport—so I could never let him stray too far afield. But anyway, there had been somewhat of a lull in my dating career there for quite some time. Being married just puts a cramp in it, don’t you know. And, too, not a whole lot of guys will ask you out if you are not only married but hugely pregnant as well. I spent the next two years as a lactating device, there again not a real big dating draw. After that came that thick sort of mental fog that full-time motherhood wraps you in, and I didn’t even think about dating.
So then, all of a sudden, I was in a position to date again—and who knows how anymore? Who ever knew really, but let me tell you, it is just the weirdest feeling in the world when you take it up again after a long hiatus. When it came to pass that I had the first real date looming large on the horizon, the Queens were in a state, a dither, a tizzy as it were. At that point, most of them had been married twenty years or more, and the concept of a date was mind-boggling. The date, Brint Motheral, was coming from a long way off especially for the occasion, so it wasn’t like I could chicken out the night before and weasel out of the whole thing. He was going to an inordinate amount of trouble just to take me out, so I felt obliged not only to go but even to be nice the whole time he was here. I was nervous. I mean, when was the last time you tried to be nice to one person for two or three days at a stretch? Married people, don’t even try to remember.
We were going to the Symphony Ball, of all things. I figured it would be some adult prom, and this would, of course, mean major dressing up on my part. I had to search and search for just the right dress because Brint advised me that his tuxedo was twenty-some-odd years old with bell-bottoms. He keeps it, he said, as a point of pride because nobody else he knows can still fit into anything they wore twenty-some-odd years ago. (I didn’t mention this to him, naturally, but I would also be one of those people who can’t fit into anything I wore twenty-some-odd years ago.) I was driven to find exactly the right dress that would complement and not be upstaged by a shiny, bell-bottomed tuxedo. I was tempted to have a dress made to fit over my Sweet Potato Queen outfit.
Snags in dating can crop up where you least expect them. In this particular case, the impediment proved to be my car. Now, most of you reading this will not have had the benefit of actually seeing my car in person, but for those who have, nothing more need be said. Remember when you were growing up and your mama told everybody that you were “really tough on shoes”? Meaning by that, that you could wear a new pair of Hush Puppies (if you were “tough on shoes,” that’s all she would buy you) for five minutes and they made it look as if your goal in life was to wear your shoes until they rotted off your feet and you were in the final stages on achieving that goal. Well, I am “tough on cars” in that same way.
The car I had at the time—its original color being blue—looked like nothing so much as a Dumpster with four wheels and a windshield, one with many cracks. See, for me, cars are nothing more than something to
go
in. My car is neither a status symbol nor a love object. Here is my essential evaluation of cars: If it goes, it is a really good car. If it does not go, it is a really bad car and should be abandoned by the side of the road. Anything remotely connected with car care, be it cosmetic or mechanical, constitutes an errand, and you should already know by now how I feel about errands of any kind. That’s right. If somebody else does not do it, it won’t get done.
And so it was, at the time of this big date, that I found myself in possession of a good car, meaning it was currently going, but if you were to see it parked somewhere, you would not be taking bets on its driveability. My car looked as if it had been up on blocks in a yard somewhere and a very large family of really nasty people had been living in it with all of their dogs.
Not only had I never personally washed that car, or caused it to be washed, it also had a whole lot of extraneous material inside it. Now, occasionally, I would do what I call a “big sweep” through the interior. This would entail moving about the car with a giant lawn-and-leaf bag, raking huge piles of debris, some part of which I will remember as soon as the garbage man hauls it away, like the critical piece of someone’s iron lung. Every time I manage to throw something away, it turns out I desperately need it five minutes later. Having seen this pattern repeated so often in my life, I’ve learned to leave the stuff where it is until I need it again. Makes sense to me, but man, is it messy. And offputting to certain people. Joe Fendley, my favorite person ever in the history of the entire world, living or dead—who decided when we were seventeen that we were meant for each other because we looked like the number ten when we stood side by side—used to pick up his feet in my car and say he didn’t want to tread on the larvae of the common houseflies routinely found in filth and decaying matter, a.k.a. maggots. He intended to hurt my feelings sufficiently to spur me to clean out my car, but I am impervious to the slings and arrows of all car lovers and neat freaks alike, and also the health department—speaking of which, can a car be condemned if it still goes?
Since this guy was coming all this way—going to all this trouble on my account—just to take me to the Symphony Ball in his bell-bottomed tux, there were those who felt it an undue imposition to necessitate his obtaining special inoculations before riding in my car. My erstwhile friends were nagging me nonstop to clean up my car before I picked him up at the airport in it. Now, I ask you, if they were any kind of friends, wouldn’t they know how I feel about this sort of thing, and if they really loved me, wouldn’t they just do it for me while I was sleeping? Some friends. Add that to the list of things you should do for a girlfriend going through a divorce: Take her car to the car wash for her once in a while.
