Mississippi Sissy (19 page)

“Can I still show Mommy before we go to the carnival?” I asked my grandmother.

“Of course, you can, honey,” my grandmother said, then turned to Matty May. “I cleared it with Rogers. Visiting hours will be over but she's going to meet us at the Emergency Room entrance and sneak us in to see Nan so Kevin can show off his costume. I hope we're doing the right thing here.”

“Oh, Miz Jake, look at the child's face,” said Matty as they both watched me carefully running my hands down the black fabric that formed my ankle-length witch's dress. “Look how happy the child is. He ain't looked that happy in a long time. Long
time.”

I'm not sure what Rogers was expecting that night when she met us at the Emergency Room's door, but the look on her face proved she certainly wasn't expecting me to come dressed as a witch. Her eyebrows, which had never had a tweezers' pincers anywhere near them, seemed to grow even bushier as they registered her astonishment at the sight of me, an astonishment that quickly led to an obvious unease in my presence. “You're a witch,” she stated with not a little disgust, as if saying such a thing aloud confirmed the awful fact for her. Such unease pleased me. Witches were supposed to make people feel uneasy. I had witnessed Rogers doing her work for months now in my mother's hospital room. Nothing—not vomit, not shit-filled sheets, not the most wrenching pain—could throw her off her head nurse's stride. But I just had. It was a moment I cherished until I realized exactly where I was. I had not been in this part of the hospital since the day of my father's car accident when Kim and Karole and I had been babysat out on the bit of lawn by my father's great friend, mentor and prospective Black Angus cattle-ranching partner, Charlie “Chunkin' ” Ward, an earlier Mississippi basketball legend himself. As soon as he was called about the accident, “Chunkin' ” Charlie had sped to Lackey Memorial and brought along a football to pass back and forth with us to take our minds off what was going on inside. On
one of my many fumbled attempts to catch the football, I heard my mother's terrible heart-tearing scream echo in the tiled hospital hallway. I had just crawled under a struggling hydrangea bush, its faded blossoms suffering in the Mississippi summer sun, to retrieve the ball where it had rolled away from me yet again, end over end over end. I turned to Charlie—his ruggedly handsome face as full of unease and astonished horror at my mother's scream as Rogers's ruggedly handsome one would be months later when she first caught sight of me in my witch's costume—and I said this to him, only this: “I know what that means.”

“No, Kevinator,” he said. “Everything's fine. Fine and dandy.”

Then we heard my mother scream again and, as bad as her subsequent screams would sound when cancer later feasted on her, they would always be but faint echoes of those two that day, one right after the other, when she was told her husband was dead. Charlie put the football away. He huddled with Kim and Karole and me in what little shade the hydrangea offered. “Howard!” my mother called, her voice carrying out toward us in the blistering August heat. “My God! Howard!”

Charlie held us closer to him. “Hell,” he said. “Dammit to hell.”

My mother once more: “Howard! Howard!”

________________

“It's Halloween,” Rogers tersely stated, already regretting her decision to let me inside Lackey Memorial after visiting hours when the nurses under her supervision looked questionably at the little parade she was leading down the hallway toward my mother's room, my grandmother and me in tow, my grandfather and Kim and Karole having decided to wait out in the car for us. Could this really be that sad little Sessums boy? Is he really as odd as all this? Those seemed to be the two questions the nurses on duty that night were asking themselves
when it dawned on them that it was I beneath the witch's cap and green makeup, my dress and cape flowing behind me as I swept toward my mother in Rogers's wake. My grandmother looked embarrassed for me, but I liked the attention. I had tired of all the pity that grownups constantly showered on me in those days, and this new sensation of disapproval was a heady antidote to that. “You've only got a minute or two before Dr. Bill and Dr. Jones start making their rounds, so hurry up. Doc Townsend's already made his. I don't want to get in any trouble. We've caused enough of a ruckus already,” said Rogers when she opened my mother's door. “I just put a new drip in her,” she whispered to my grandmother. “So I'm not sure if she'll even recognize the child, especially in that get-up.”

My mother, already in morphined bliss, turned toward me when she heard the door open, ready to blather on like she did during those last days of her life when not only could I barely comprehend what she was talking about, but comprehend not at all the reason for such uncharacteristic blathering. I know now it was the result of all the morphine being pumped into her, but back then she was just my mother who was dying and not acting sad about it at all. She seemed giddy at the prospect. This tried my eight-year-old patience and, moreover, angered me. I was mad at her for not being as sad as I was at the prospect of her death. “Why is she talking to me like I'm Daddy? I'm not Daddy. He's dead already. Is she dead already, too?” I had previously asked my grandmother after the drip stand holding the morphine had been put in my mother's room at home and she was staring right at me and calling me Howard and how lovely it was for him to come visit her and how very sorry she was that she wouldn't move with him to New York City and how cute he looked in the Knicks uniform he was wearing.

“Now, Kevin, just humor her. It's the medicine she's taking,” my grandmother had tried to explain. “She really thinks she's seeing your poor daddy. Don't disavow her of it. You just stand there and pretend
that's who you are. You could do worse than pretend to be your daddy the rest of your life. He was a handsome fellow. A fine specimen. Look how she's a'looking at you, honey. She ain't never looked at you like that. Enjoy it, why don't you. When she calls you Howard you just answer up. The way I see it is, if you believe something, then it's the truth. Belief is the whole ball game as far as I'm concerned. If she sees your dead daddy standing there, then he's standing there. You standing there don't count none. Now behave.”

I was not, however, called Howard the night of the Halloween carnival. “Double double, toil and trouble!” exclaimed my mother when she saw me. It was the first time I noticed that her skin—or what was left of it on her now bony cheeks—had grown as lightly green with illness and morphine as the pallor I had so carefully applied to my made-up witch's face, a color rather lovely next to the yellow of her nightgown. “Look at you!” she rasped. “You are the perfect little witch! Wonnerful wonnerful wonnerful,” she said, sounding with her slurred speech like Lawrence Welk, who was never without his conductor's baton on the television, that fool my grandmother made me watch with her on Saturday nights. “Come over here so Mommy can get a better look at you,” my mother said. “Come on. Do like I say.”

My grandmother, pushing me forward, pursed her lips and stared on in a kind of half-hearted disgust, which helped disguise the full-hearted anguish that was becoming too much for her to bear as the death of her daughter was finally closing in on her inside that room so redolent of the medicinal that could no longer overpower the smell of rotting flesh that filled all our noses—hers, Rogers's, mine—a smell somehow sweetened when combined with the perfumy bath powder I had so often watched my grandmother tenderly apply around my mother's bedsores with the pink puff, mangy now with use, that came inside the powder's box. I climbed up on the stool by my mother's bed and whispered in her ear the question I had been planning to ask her all day, my voice mimicking her own overly excited
whisper when she herself was about to do something unexpected. “Dare I?” I asked her, leaning in so close my mouth touched her hot ear. “Dare I? Dare I?”

My mother gasped with delight at the question, hearing her own secret voice now filtered through me. She queried me with her wallow-eyed look until I once again came into focus for her. “Yes,” she whispered back. “Always. Always dare. That's my boy. You're Mommy's boy. Now you go out and scare you up some candy. Bring me back some of that awful Halloween kernel corn,” she was barely able to say to me through her cracked lips. Then, her frantic energy a complete surprise, she began to ask the question herself. “Dare I?” she wanted to know, wanted to know it over and over, as she squirmed around in the bed before me. She no longer asked it playfully as she once had, when the question was posed as but the preamble to one of her behavioral examples on how to be naughty and fearless and feminine all at the same time, but asked it instead quite pointedly, her tone urgent, as if she were wondering aloud if she should just go ahead and die right there in front of me. “Dare I?” she kept up the refrain, her legs dancing about beneath the sheet like they could in the old days when we pretended we were stars of the stage. “Dare I? Dare I? Dare I?” she kept going.

I heard Rogers whisper to my grandmother, “I've seen it happen toward the end, when they get crazed with illness like this. It'll pass d'rectly. Don't worry, Jake. Just wait her out. The pain'll pass. Soon she'll pass right along with it. You'll be grateful. She'll be, too. Even that little booger there will, too, though he don't know it yet.” I hated Rogers for making such sense. I wanted to disagree, but could not. I did not want to see my mother turn crazy. I tucked the hospital sheet about her body with a grim determination, in the hope that such busy work—I punched at the mattress, I punched at it over and over—would quiet her cries. Rogers went to help me but I pushed her away. I stared at my mother's breasts inside her yellow nightgown; they appeared to have shrunk to nothing but nipples still able to notice
the cotton sheet as I kept punching it tighter and tighter around her. When she calmed, she calmed in an instant. But her eyes, the only movement left her, continued to wallow about. I picked up the glass of water kept on the bedside table and bent the straw to her mouth. She barely had the strength to suck a swallow past her dried-up lips. I put the glass down and touched them, her lips, with my fingers. They felt like Matty May's calloused palm. I dipped a finger into the opened jar of Vaseline now also always on the bedside table and rubbed a bit of it onto her lips like I had seen Rogers and my grandmother so often do when I sat in the corner and pretended to do my homework. My mother puckered up and I let her scrape her greasy lips against my green witch's cheek.

Then, the morphine really kicking in, she gasped, raised her needled arm in a giant sweeping motion and grabbed my wrist. Rogers, always quick on her feet beneath her fat ankles, checked to see that the needle from her drip had not come out, then backed up again against the wall with my grandmother, both women aghast now at the scene being played out in front of them. “ ‘Jarge!' ” my mother shouted as best she could, sounding like Katharine Hepburn playing Martha Washington and calling out her husband's name in a fit of pique. What she was really doing was quoting from one of our favorite sections of
Pale Horse, Pale Rider,
in which the grizzled old copy editor of the newspaper where our beloved Miranda worked as a theater columnist bellowed the same sound. Yet my mother and I were never sure what exactly the word “Jarge” meant when the old man bellowed it. My mother at first surmised that it was, yes, the phonetic spelling for George, which might just be the name of the copyboy on duty for whom the old man was shouting, but, as my mother explained, “Porter, God bless her cynical soul, seldom resorts to being that cute, that's why I love her so. I hate cute writing. I hate cute anything—although I do like a nice pair of pedal-pushers from time to time. Wait!” she had said, her face reddening with pleasure when a
new idea dawned on her. “Perhaps it's World War One-era jargon for just that—JARGON!” she reasoned, and made me look the word up with her in our big World Book dictionary when I told her I didn't know what that meant. “ ‘Jarge!' ” she hoarsely shouted again that Halloween night from where she lay in her hospital bed.

My grandmother and Rogers looked completely baffled by her outburst. But I knew exactly what she wanted from me. It was my cue. I took a breath, proud to be able to please her with my ability even then to recall words and scenes with a preternatural precision. “ ‘Never say
people
when you mean
persons
,' “ I told her, reciting the
Pale Horse, Pale Rider
section she had made me memorize when we closed the dictionary after having quickly dipped into the J's. “ ‘Never say
practically
,' ” I continued, “ ‘say
virtually,
and don't for God's sake ever so long as I am at this desk use the . . .' ” I froze. I could not remember what came next. It was the first time my memory had failed me when reciting these lines to her. I panicked. I stuttered, the very genesis of the stutter that would afflict me the rest of my life. “ ‘Use the . . . use the . . . use the . . .' ” I stared into my mother's dying face. I was stricken. Words would not form in my mouth.

My mother licked the Vaseline from her lips. “ ‘Barbarism,' ” she said so softly I could barely hear her. “It's ‘barbarism.' Isn't it?”

I started again. “ ‘And don't for God's sake ever so long as I am at this desk use the b-b-barbarism
inasmuch
under any circumstances whatsoever.' ”

My mother smiled. I gave her another sip of water. I re-Vaselined her lips. “ ‘Now you're educated. You may go,' ” she quoted Porter. And I did.

________________

It was my first Halloween in Forest and I was nervous wondering what everyone would think of my witch's costume. I knew enough to know
it was a rebellious and troubling choice. Although I can't remember what Kim and Karole went costumed as that night to the carnival, I do distinctly remember the crowd parting as we made our entrance and the looks of puzzled appreciation on the faces belonging to the other families, sleek with youth, who were there and all still intact, mothers and fathers in their twenties showing off their first go at kids. Suddenly, a disapproval even more pronounced than the kind I encountered from the nurses on duty at Lackey Memorial descended upon the crowd as it dawned on them all that it was I who had come dressed so convincingly as a witch. A bit of nervous laughter took root. Then, as they saw how serious I was taking my role, an appalled silence cast itself across them. What kind of creature was this that had settled in their midst? “That's not right,” came a whisper, the judgment, once espoused, once passed, encouraging others to judge. “If that boy's daddy was still alive—I hear tell his mama's not long for this world neither, lingerin' like she's doin' up at Lackey's—he wouldn't've showed up like that. Coach Sessums would've whupped him good,” came another whisper right at me. “What a sight,” someone else said. Another: “We better pray for that young'un.” Yet this—“What a shame! What a awful shame!”—is the admonition that has stuck with me above all others from that night, a whisper that seemed to be honed among those gathered in the elementary hallways—the Zorros and Casper the Friendly Ghosts and Robin Hoods and Cinderellas and My Favorite Martians even greener than my Wicked Witch—until it was shortened into the one-word condemnation that all little sissies must deal with at some point, the one that reverberates in the echo chambers of our collective memory. “Shame,” came the utterance, “shame,” the “sh” of it like the rustle of that imagined petticoat Epiphany always longed for when she'd slowly twist her hips back and forth and pretend she had one on, “shame,” that phantom sound now found. I swallowed hard and sashayed through the crowd as if it were I who had on Epiphany's
make-believe clothes. I threw my bewigged head back in defiance. I made sure my “Dare I?” demeanor did not crack. This was for my mother. This was for myself. This was who I was. If death—my father's shocking one the year before, my mother's encroaching at any moment—was making me, back in that meanspirited Mississippi year of 1964, a pity-worthy spectacle for fellow Mississippians to focus on and feel less bad about the belligerence they were displaying in all its ugly glory for the rest of the country to behold, then I would take up its mantle and make the spectacle my own. No longer would I be the child for whom overweening sorrow was a parental replacement. No longer would I be a vessel for sympathy so that the sympathizers, through a sadness that was not even theirs, could cleanse themselves of their sinister culture and the sinister politics it bred. With a pride that confounded all who were in my path that night, I decided I'd go ahead and be the sissy everyone said I was. Let them whisper as I walked through them all. “Shame.” “Shame.” I would really give them something to fret about, to fight against. I might never be a woman. “Shame.” I might never be a man. But I would always be a witch. The world could kill my parents, I reasoned, but I could kill it right back by being otherworldly. I would show them that a sissy could be just as sinister as they all were. I had had enough. “Shame.” I felt like I was going to shit. “Shame.” “Shame.” I shuddered at my power.