Mississippi Sissy (9 page)

But were we on the same team, my mother and I? Or was I on my father's? Those were exactly the words he had used when swearing me to secrecy a few days before. On Sundays we split up into our gender-separated squads, my mother and Karole walking the half block up the
hill to the local Methodist church as my father and Kim and I turned right and down another block and settled into a Baptist pew a few minutes later. Sundays were simple to decipher, but there were those six other days of the week. I spent more time with my mother, that was for sure, and knew her moods much better than I knew my father's. He was more mercurial than my mother, who was at least predictable in her own mood swings. When she was alone with her children, listening to that rock-and-roll station on the transistor radio or doing her summer housework in that bathing suit of hers, she was freer, more alive. When she shared cups of coffee and pieces of lemon chess pie with her girlfriends while they laughed at each other's private ribaldry during the boring parts of
Search for Tomorrow,
she seemed even younger than she already was, more girlish. Most of all, when she allowed me to sit with her and her friends and listen in to such girl-talk, thinking I couldn't understand why they all loved endlessly to debate the specific circumcised charms of Eddie Fisher as compared to the speculatively uncut Richard Burton, she was as naughty as my next-door neighbor. I loved her for allowing my ear to be trained in the luridness of private female conversation; it came much more naturally to me than the dogged brusqueness required for the coaching lingo that my father utilized in his job. With him in the house my mother grew more reticent. She lowered her head a bit—like Coco could when she heard his voice as he approached the pen with a handful of dog food that he always insisted was enough for any Chihuahua to eat. My mother kept her wide-set blue eyes cast downward in a mysterious, stoic demureness the very minute my father stepped through the door and demanded our full attention. She was more than careful around him. She seemed to be slightly afraid of him yet comforted simultaneously by the familiarity of such a feeling. A
practiced
fright—she of his powerful allure, he of her separate tastes, each of losing the other—was the basis of their attraction. He had a foul mouth and a devilish sense of humor and—this was key, I think—kept
her laughing as well, the kind of laughter she made sure to save only for him, hence her hesitation earlier in the day at not letting her children know too intimately its timbre. But he never let her forget he was a man with a short fuse. He teased her with its combustive power. She teased him right back, knowing she could ignite him at will. They had been playing this game since their hormones kicked in back in Harperville. I'm certain their sex life was spectacular.

________________

In December 1960 I would often sneak into their bedroom those first few nights after watching
Peter Pan.
I lay in my own bed, freshly tucked in, contemplating why Peter was a blond, forty-seven-year-old woman and wondering whether Captain Hook, with his limp and his lisp, was going to come through my window and take me away to an island of boys who were, like me, lost and stagestruck and a little too lovely. I would wait until all the odd inviting sounds coming from my parents' room—grunted moans, a mew or two of pleasure, my mother's low laughter—had ceased. I would then tiptoe to their door kept slightly ajar in case Karole cried out in the night and sneak over to my father's side of the bed. I would lie on the floor next to him and watch him sleep. For those first few nights, he'd awake and pick me up ever so gently to take me back to my bed, admonishing me for my visits. “You don't belong in there,” was his lone groggy refrain. “You don't belong in there. You don't belong . . .” he'd continue, his voice falling back to sleep before the rest of him could, as I watched him shuffle away in his underwear to where my mother slumbered beneath their heavy pile of blankets.

One night as I lay on their bedroom floor staring at his face in repose—bristles of his dark head against the white of the pillow like the penciled forest of wintry pines he had once drawn for me on a blank sheet of paper as we doodled and did not talk—he kicked off
that heavy pile of bedcovers during a rambunctious dream and exposed the bulge of his immense erection. My mother's hand—her arm was around his waist where she lay cuddled against him—found its way down inside his underwear and moved the erection about in her grip. More frightened by this sight than anything that could have awaited me if Captain Hook had carried me away, I quickly slid underneath their bed. The mattress creaked above me as they repositioned their bodies.

“Kevin's not down there, is he?” I heard my mother ask.

“Nooooo,” came my father's deeply elongated reply, which seemed, as it faded into an “oh” and an “oh” and an “oh,” to be nuzzling itself into an area of flesh I would later learn to refer to as another's nape.

“Mmmmmm . . .” my mother moaned. My father moaned back. Their breath kept pace with my racing heart. Trembling from the cold, I waited for the wrestling going on above me to stop. People wrestled when they were mad and hated each other. It was what the boys who made fun of me always wanted to do. Though my mother and father often fought with their voices, I did not want them to fight with their bodies. A foreboding fastened itself to me under their bed that night, as physical a sensation as any that accompanied the thrashing which was occurring overhead, and has never really let me go:
Would I ever be where I belong?
My parents fell silent. I carefully crawled—like Karole—back to my own bed. I waited for Captain Hook.

For weeks afterward, I refused to set foot in my parents' bedroom. Even when my mother would summon me from in there, I would go only as far as the doorway, no farther. My return visit, ironically, involved my father carrying me back in. At breakfast one morning my mother offhandedly accused my aunt Gladys, his cherished big sister, of being a liar. I can't recall the reason for such an accusation, only the epithet itself. My father did not take a moment to contemplate such an assertion on her part. He did not try to argue with her. He instantly,
instinctively, reached over the breakfast table past me and violently slapped my mother across her face. She ran crying into their bedroom. Kim and Karole sat stunned staring at their cereal bowls. My father scooped me up and carried me into the room with him as he followed after her. My mother lay on their bed sobbing into her pillow. He stood me by her and whispered in my ear, “Tell your mama I'm sorry. Tell her I love her. Tell her. Say it.”

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I love you, Mommy.”

She cried louder.

My father shook me with the full force of those hands of his that could so effortlessly palm a basketball, scoop up a sissy child, hit the woman he loved. “No, goddamn it. Say
Daddy's
sorry. Say
Daddy
loves you.” I stood there on the bed as his grip grew tighter and refused to obey.
“Say it”
he demanded. I remained silent. He knew me well enough to know that if he became too insistent I, as stubborn as he, would not budge. He tried another tack. His fingers loosened their grip on me and he leaned in closer so he could proffer more softly a futile enticement, his breath redolent of Folger's coffee and the crispy bacon he had pilfered from my plate. “Tell her I'm sorry and that I love her and I'll never call you a girl again,” he whispered to me. He had to be joking, I thought. Did he really think this was going to make me obey him? I
liked
him calling me a girl. It was one of my favorite things in the world. The way he had settled in to saying it could send welcome shivers down my little spine. His voice no longer sounded angry and shocked like the first time he said it. Its tone instead had ripened with his repeated ribbing until it contained the same sweet sarcasm with which he could tease my mother at times and take her breath away, a sarcasm outmatched only by the latest vulgarity-infused persiflage that could so easily fly past his extravagantly pouting lips right before he just as extravagantly pursed them, knowing she would kiss him just to shut him up. His calling me a girl and my eye-batting reaction to it—a mirroring of my mother's
only response to such an onslaught of his dirty words—constituted the first stirrings in me of what it meant to flirt. “You girl,” I would goad him into saying. “You goddamn girl.”

My father had been throwing that word at me ever since I had called forth all my three-and-a-half-year-old charms to persuade my mother to make me a skirt. We had been visiting my grandparents one Saturday in August and I was hanging out with the women in the back bedroom that doubled as my grandmother's sewing studio while they busied themselves with making my mother some new maternity clothes, as she was just beginning to show with Karole. It is the earliest memory of my childhood. They had all been cutting out patterns atop the chenille bedspread on the queen-size four-poster that stood next to the old foot-pedal-powered Singer machine. A small square of material, a remnant from the last carefully rolled out yard, was left over from the final Simplicity pattern they had spread out on the bed and they had wondered what they should do with it, hating to throw anything away if it could be put to use. Aunt Vena Mae was there that day too and she had warned the two other women about the idea I had been brave enough to come up with. “You better not let Howard know about this,” she had said, eyeing me with her usual disdain and fanning herself with a copy of
Better Homes and Gardens
magazine. Her golden charm bracelet clanged with the back-and-forth of her wrist, the sound competing with the whir from the oscillating electric fan as it flickered the tissue-thin brown paper of the Simplicity pattern onto which they had let me help them pin the woolen material. “This child is the one that'll get the whupping. Y'all don't want Howard to whup this child,” she cautioned, though the way she was looking at me seemed to counter her concern. “I sure hope you're gonna have a real daughter this time, Nancy Carolyn,” old Venomous Mae said to my mother as she reached out and touched her teeming stomach. “Maybe it'll help knock some sense into this one,” she said, nodding my way. “Convince him he's a boy
by comparison.”

My mother contemplated the concept of a skirt encompassing her son as she circled the extra bit of cloth around my ready body. “Oh, Aunt Veence,” she said. “I think he'd look right cute in a little matching outfit.”

My grandmother took the remaining pins out of her mouth. “You sure you know what you're doing, Nan?” she asked. “Veeny's right. Howard might not like it. You know what he's like when you get him riled.”

My mother and I locked looks. The thought of my father riled up rather riled us too in unexpected ways. “This'll only take a few stitches,” she said, and she had the skirt done in no time flat. My grandmother had to agree that I certainly was “right cute” when I modeled it for the women there in the sewing room.

“He's not any such thing,” said Vena Mae. “He's not right
nothin.
And ya'll aren't right in the head for letting him get his way and encouraging him like this. He has to learn to live in this world and this world don't abide boys like that.”

My mother grabbed the Better Homes
and Gardens
from her and gently smacked her on her arm. “Hush up, Aunt Veence. I say let him get all this out of his system while he's young. He'll grow out of it,” she told the other two women, who exchanged worried looks. “Patsy Kirby told me Dr. Spock says not to be spooked by such shenanigans.”

Old Venomous Mae grunted and untangled a few of the charms on her bracelet. “Shenanigans—you got that right,” she said. My grandmother tried not to laugh. My mother spun me around and made the little skirt blossom in billows about my body. I loved the way it felt as it lifted from the flesh of my legs and fell back into place as soon as I stopped spinning. I ran out to the carport and waited for my father to return from a trip to Harperville, certain that he would love the way I looked as much as I did, no matter what Vena Mae predicted. He drove up as the three women positioned themselves at the kitchen sink looking out the window at the scene about to occur. I sashayed
up to my father and begin to spin and spin so he too could marvel at how cute I was. He stopped dead in his tracks and dug his heels into the drive, a gravelly sound that seemed to speak for him since he was struck speechless at the sight. I stopped my spinning and grabbed the skirt in each of my hands and rocked my hips to and fro before him in the way I had seen the petticoated Angela Cartwright do on the TV program, called, appropriately enough,
Make Room for Daddy.
In this way, she teased Danny Thomas when he himself was in the midst of one of his infamous slow burns. My father turned and looked at the three women staring out the window who quickly began to pretend they were washing dishes or cleaning the spotless counter. “Is that a goddamn skirt you've got on?” he asked and lunged at me. I ducked just in time and ran back into the carport. He chased me down and grabbed me by my neck holding me in place. “You think you're a goddamn girl? Is that what you think you are? A girl? A goddamn girl? Nan!” he called. “Get out here this minute! Miz Jake! You, too!” he shouted for my grandmother.

The two of them sheepishly came out the back door into the carport. Aunt Vena Mae stood at the screen door taking in the scene, a look of satisfaction on her Merle Norman-ed face seeping through the wire mesh. “What is this?” my father wanted to know. “Where did a boy of mine get a goddamn skirt to wear?” My mother grabbed me from him and held me to her. My grandmother backed up toward Vena Mae at the screen door. “I made it for him,” my mother said, her eyes cast downward toward me where I looked up at her seeking her protection. “He's not hurting anything,” she chanced saying.