The Improper Life of Bezillia Grove (17 page)

At first, I found it hard to concentrate, thinking any minute I would get another letter or maybe even a telegram, this time tersely informing me that Samuel had been killed. And without even needing to ask, Maizelle sent me his address, a secret the two of us kept to ourselves. I wrote to Samuel, reminding him to be careful, to come home alive, but I never heard anything back. And as the days fell into months, I became more confident, or maybe foolish, in thinking that my friend, wherever he was, would find his way back to Tennessee.

And while I waited, I pretended that life was normal. And peacefully tucked there against Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, I found it was easy to think that it was. I went to class and listened as one professor lectured about Jefferson’s influence on the Declaration of Independence and another about the Pythagorean influence on Platonic philosophy. And somewhere along the way, I always found an opportunity to voice my opposition to the war, whether it was relevant to class discussion or not. I could see my classmates roll their eyes at my persistent protest, but I didn’t care. Maybe they knew I was thinking only of Samuel, and not the thousands of other boys fighting in Vietnam. But I really didn’t care.

I wrote for the school newspaper and even joined a new yoga club on campus, although I didn’t dare tell Mother. She would insist that
this
yoga was surely some kind of devil worship for no other reason than what she had read about the Maharishi in some magazine, and would probably send Reverend Foster to bring me home straightaway now that I had learned to bend and stretch my body into awkward and unladylike poses.

I was, however, asked to join the Cotillion Club, something that I knew would please my mother immensely but that surprised me even more than Sarah, particularly given my new, more enlightened state of being. Apparently a girl’s last name was still considered by some at Hollins to be one of her most important assets. And apparently my last name was still considered to be of value, although Sarah said she would be forced to find another roommate if I joined a group of girls who did nothing more than plan dances and other frivolous social outings so that we could parade ourselves in front of a bunch of salivating young men with absolutely no interest in our intellect. I told Sarah that my mother actually considered dancing to be one of life’s most important talents. She rolled her eyes as if to say that I had proven her point.

Mother wrote me almost every day. She missed me terribly, she said, but knew the Lord would comfort her lonely heart. And as much as she missed me, she said Adelaide missed me even more. I wrote Mother back and suggested that my little sister come for a visit, that maybe a change of scenery would do her some good. Mother replied, offering no specific explanation, only to say that Adelaide was not able to travel at this time. I used the pay phone in the hallway outside my room and made a collect call to Uncle Thad. I needed him to tell me truthfully how everyone was doing at Grove Hill. He hesitated for a moment. And I told him if he didn’t speak up soon, I was hanging up the phone and jumping on the next bus home.

He paused again and stuttered a bit but finally admitted that everyone was doing much better now, although it had been quite a difficult few weeks. He said Mother had been taking Adelaide to church on a regular basis for several months now, convinced that a perfect attendance record would somehow cure Adelaide of any of her peculiarities. But Adelaide finally told Mother she had had enough of her religion and neither she nor Reverend Foster, or even God himself, understood the pounding pain inside her head. This time Mother believed her, so she threw her in the Cadillac and took her back down to Atlanta. The doctors said Adelaide was merely screaming for attention, but they would be more than happy to admit her to a psychiatric hospital for therapeutic rehabilitation. Mother didn’t care for their diagnosis much, so she brought her daughter, along with another very large bottle of pills, back home.

As soon as they returned to Grove Hill, Mother moved Maizelle upstairs, thinking it was better to have two sets of ears listening for her baby girl. Then she asked Maizelle if she still knew how to reach that voodoo witch on the other side of the river, the one who had been born and raised in New Orleans. I guess Mother was thinking that this was going to require the skill and expertise of someone more in touch with the underworld than her precious Reverend Foster.

Besides, she probably preferred he know nothing about this, even if she had convinced herself that it wouldn’t really be contrary to any biblical teachings she knew if all you were wanting to do was rid your child of an evil spirit. Even Jesus had been known to do an exorcism or two. But she grew so nervous about this woman coming to her house, especially after the sky turned cloudy and dark, that she telephoned Uncle Thad at the very last minute and begged him to run over just in case they needed some masculine and, of course, discreet protection.

By the time he got to Grove Hill, not long before midnight, the cleansing ritual, as Mother preferred to call it, had already begun. Uncle Thad said the woman did in fact look like some kind of voodoo witch he had seen down in New Orleans. She was dressed in a ratty old cotton dress with a bright orange cotton cloth wrapped around her head and was comfortably settled on the living room sofa, right next to Adelaide, chanting some kind of nonsense and burning homemade candles that smelled like rotten eggs.

She kept a muslin bag filled with roots and herbs tied to her waist and told Mother to boil some water on the stove. Then she placed her hands on Adelaide’s head and chanted and sang for more than an hour, filling the room with words that none of them understood. She gave Adelaide a bitter tea to drink. My little sister took one sip and promptly fell asleep. Mother screamed out loud, thinking she had gone and hired a witch to kill her baby girl.

The woman told her to hush and promised that Adelaide had been finally freed from the evil that had kept such a strong hold on her. She told Mother to put her to bed and keep a cool cloth on her head during the night. When Adelaide finally opened her eyes, a day and a half later, she said her head wasn’t hurting anymore.

Adelaide did seem better, but Mother just kept trying to fix her, trying to turn her into something she was never meant to be. Maybe Mother felt guilty, or maybe she felt embarrassed by her slightly awkward daughter. But either way, she never gave up trying to make Adelaide into a girl she was more comfortable knowing.

Mother continued to write. She said nothing about Samuel, only that Adelaide was always asking for me, even crying out for me in the middle of the night. I wasn’t sure if that was the truth or if Mother needed me at home so desperately she was willing to say anything to get me there. She and Adelaide had certainly convinced themselves that life at Grove Hill would be better only if I was there. And by May, I found myself dreading the thought of going back home, where I would certainly be suffocated by their constant attention.

So instead of packing my trunk like the others girls excited about leaving for the summer, I found myself lying about needing to stay at Hollins. A visiting English professor, I said, had come all the way from Boston and selected me as his assistant. It was an honor, an opportunity I just couldn’t forgo. He said my writing had promise. And if she would let me stay, I would even register for two additional classes so that I might be able to graduate a full semester early. Mother wrote me a brief letter and said she hoped this was indeed a once in a lifetime opportunity. She and Adelaide would both be looking for me at the end of July.

Only a few hundred of us stayed behind for summer study; even Sarah went home. She said she was going to organize a local chapter of the National Organization for Women in Troutville. Well, she was going to try. And, to be honest, I was glad she would be gone for at least a few weeks so I could finally think about something other than equal rights and congressional legislation. Instead I took an English class and wrote a short story about a wealthy family with an alcoholic mother and a doctor father who mysteriously died in his own home while everyone was sleeping. My professor thought it was brilliant, a rich and dark insight into the privileged American family. He gave me an A, said I should continue writing, and then asked if I’d like to join him for a cup of coffee.

Mitchell Franklin was more of a graduate student from Boston University than a full-fledged professor. He was finishing his doctorate degree in American folk literature and was spending the summer researching and teaching at Hollins. Before long, we were having coffee together every morning. And not long after that, we were meeting in his tiny apartment on the edge of campus every afternoon. He would open a bottle of wine and pour me a glass as if I was comfortable drinking the alcohol that made me feel both warm and slightly confused. We listened to Led Zeppelin and made out on the couch. And when our bodies started feeling relaxed and our heads slightly numb, Mitchell would take my hand and lead me to his bed.

“Bezellia,” he’d whisper in my ear, lying next to me with nothing but a thin, cotton sheet covering our bodies. “You are so intoxicating, like a sweet, sweet nectar on my lips,” and then he’d pull himself on top of me and work his way inside. So instead of studying, I found myself wandering across campus and knocking on Mitchell’s door, every time discovering more and more about the sheer pleasure of sex. He was always there, always eager to invite me in and show me to his bedroom, always willing, if only for a few hours, to take my mind off Samuel.

“Hey, Mitchell, you in there?” I hollered late one afternoon, standing outside his apartment. I knocked again and again, banging my fist against the door until my hand started to ache. Everything about this day felt oddly the same as the one before except the stereo in his front room was playing Elton John, not Led Zeppelin. “Mitchell, Mitchell Franklin. Hey, it’s me, Bezellia. Open up.”

The door finally opened just wide enough to reveal a hint of Mitchell’s face, his bare chest, a towel wrapped around his waist. “I’ve been standing out here knocking. Were you in the shower or something?” But his hair was still noticeably dry.

“No.”

“Didn’t you hear me?” I stepped toward him, but he didn’t move to the side making room for me in the doorway.

“I thought you were studying for your exam tomorrow,” Mitchell said with a blank expression smeared across his face. “You really should be, you know. It’s going to be a tough one.”

“I was. But I … What’s going on? Why are you just standing there all of a sudden acting like some kind of English teacher?” My voice began to tremble, and I was afraid I already knew the answer.

“Sorry, Bee. I wasn’t expecting you. I made other plans today. I thought you’d be busy with finals.”

“Other plans? I leave you alone for one day, and you need to make other plans?” I screeched, my voice sounding ridiculously high-pitched as a leggy brunette walked up behind Mitchell and wrapped her arms around his waist. I tripped and stumbled as I stepped back off the front stoop. All I remember after that is the smooth sound of Elton John’s voice calling after me.

“I hope you don’t mind that I put down in words
How wonderful life is while you’re in the world.”

But I never looked back.

My grades revealed my summer affair better that any diary could have—a C– in French conversation and an A+ in creative writing, even though my exam book was not filled with the answers to Mitchell Franklin’s inane questions about Plath and Poe. But it was full all the same. It read very simply, “Mitchell Franklin is an ass. Mitchell Franklin is an ass. Mitchell Franklin is an ass.” Three hundred and fifty-three times, until every line, every page of my blue book was filled. Mitchell Franklin left Hollins at the end of the summer session and never returned my exam.

I desperately wanted to talk to Samuel, now more than ever. I wanted to tell him that I loved him and needed him to come home, that I had done a stupid thing while I was trying to forget how much it hurt without him here. But he was too far away to hear me, fighting in some mosquito-infested jungle while I was drinking too much wine and having too much sex. Maybe Samuel didn’t need to hear this. Maybe I just needed to pay for my transgressions. So I went home. Mother was right after all. There was too much temptation and evil in the world.

chapter eleven

N
athaniel opened the back door of the Cadillac, and I stepped into my mother’s arms. She pulled me close, drawing my face into her neck. Her skin felt soft and warm but had a familiar and unsettling scent, a smell I hadn’t been able to identify as a little girl but had learned in time was an unsavory blend of Chanel No. 5 and stale Tanqueray. I pushed myself back from my mother’s embrace. Her eyes looked a little dull and distant, but she smiled and kissed me on the cheek. Surely, I thought to myself, I had made a mistake.

Adelaide and Maizelle, who had been patiently waiting on the front steps, rushed toward me. Maizelle’s tummy jiggled up and down as she tried to keep pace with my little sister. They both flung their arms around me and cradled my body between theirs as they had the morning after my father died, neither one of them willing to let go. Maizelle said I had grown a full foot taller since Christmas, maybe more. I laughed and reminded her that I hadn’t grown an inch since my senior year in high school and that maybe she was shrinking instead. She swatted my bottom and said she was going to stand me against the doorframe in the kitchen, where she had monitored my growth since I was a baby barely able to stand on my own two feet.

Now that I was here, everything about Grove Hill seemed new and fresh, as if I was seeing it for the first time—the marble columns, the pink impatiens that highlighted the flower beds along the side of the house, the sweeping front lawn. A part of me felt oddly homesick for something that was right in front of me. And yet another part of me dreaded being here.

Nathaniel was keeping pace right behind me. He started whistling an old hymn, one about surrendering everything to Jesus. He used to sing this to me on my way to school in the morning, and now I wondered if he was humming that old familiar tune just to calm me down. Mother quickly turned her head and with one scathing glance told him to hush. Maizelle’s body stiffened, and I could see Nathaniel patting her arm as if to remind her that Mrs. Grove’s reprimand would never keep his heart from singing. And true as that may have been, the voice in my head telling me to run was all but shouting now.

As soon as we stepped into the house, Nathaniel headed directly up the stairs, carrying my bags in both hands. He hollered that he’d bring the trunk up in a minute if he didn’t break his back carrying the load he had with him. Then he laughed and disappeared above the landing. Mother covered her ears, as if to say that Nathaniel’s voice was too loud and too rude.

Nathaniel had not said one word about Samuel on the ride home from the bus station. I had kept my mouth shut, not wanting him to see how much I missed his son, still not sure if he would understand that dull, persistent throbbing in my heart that had never gone away. But for the first time in my life, I thought Nathaniel looked different, and not just because what little hair was left on his head had turned completely white. No, it was more than that. His eyes seemed weary and his shoulders were hunched forward, and I understood that Samuel’s absence had turned my friend into an old man.

Maizelle hurriedly shuffled back to the kitchen to finish up the evening meal. She said she had made all of my favorites, including a fresh pound cake that was cooling on top of the stove. She hoped I had packed a healthy appetite along with all those dirty clothes she imagined needed washing.

Mother immediately shooed me toward the stairs. She insisted that I unpack my bags before doing anything else. Dirty clothes must not sit in those suitcases, she said, or we’d never get the smell out of that new set of luggage. She told me to unpack my bags at least three more times, each time as if she had forgotten the one before. She tugged on Adelaide’s hand and pulled her toward me.

“Surely you two sisters would enjoy spending the afternoon together, catching up and all. Adelaide, I bet you have so much to tell Bezellia about your first year in high school.” But Adelaide only stared at the floor, desperately trying to ignore our mother. I realized at that very moment that while I had been away at school, my little sister had grown into a teenage girl who was determined to spend the afternoon exactly as she had planned.

“I wanted to finish something for Bezellia,” she finally mumbled.

“Sweetie, you’re going to wear those fingers out. Now go on,” Mother insisted. “All you’ve been talking about for months is Bezellia coming home. Now here she is.”

“Adelaide, what are you making?” I asked, and I pointed to the knitting needles clutched in her right hand. “I didn’t know you could knit.”

“She knows how to knit, all right. She’s been knitting all day,” Mother quipped, now sounding impatient and desperate for her daughters to leave her alone. “Adelaide, I want you to put those needles down and give your fingers a rest and help Bezellia with her unpacking. You hear me?” And she pushed my sister’s body closer to the stairs.

Adelaide just rolled her eyes. And when she knew Mother wasn’t looking, she glanced at me and smiled real big and motioned that she would see me later. Then she ran up the stairs, two at a time, and I could tell by the sound of her footsteps on the floor above that my sister had passed my room and gone into her own. Her door slammed shut, and Mother shook her head in frustration and promptly turned her attention to me.

“Okay, then, you start unpacking. At least one of you is going to mind me. Maizelle will need to get started on that laundry before going to bed if she’s ever going to get it all done. I’ll be out in the garden. I want to put together an arrangement for the table before we sit down to eat. My roses are particularly stunning this year, if I may say so myself.”

“Mother,” I said as I reached for the handrail, a habit I had developed since my father’s accident, more out of concern for Maizelle’s anxious disposition than for my personal safety. “Do you think Maizelle and Nathaniel could eat at the table with us tonight? I mean, since it is my first night home and all?”

Mother tucked her chin against her chest and moaned. Obviously I should have known better than to ask such a presumptuous question, even if it was my first night home.

“Don’t put me in that position, Bezellia. You know I can’t allow that.”

“Why not? They’re practically family.”

“Why are you asking me this now? Tonight? I have enough on my mind already. I don’t need to be dealing with this. And what you need to remember,” Mother said, her voice rapidly becoming more cutting and bitter, “is that we all love Maizelle and Nathaniel, but they are not our family and they never will be. Now go on and get those clothes unpacked.”

I didn’t dare tell Mother that Sarah Stanton Miller, Gloria Steinem, and Dorothy Pitman, the feminist triumvirate who would argue that even God was female, would be appalled to know that our black help had never once been invited to share an evening meal with the family they had served for most of a lifetime. And truthfully, I wasn’t really sure if it was a moral sensibility that was guiding my desire right now or just a need to be with the people I loved. I had hoped that in the months since Father’s death and her own rebirth, Mother might have become a bit more accepting of the two people who had never left her side. But apparently history and hatred were proving much more powerful than years of faithful service and recent Christian conversion.

I climbed the stairs two at a time, just like Adelaide had done, just like I used to do when I was little and wanted to run from my mother after she had spent the day playing bridge at the club. Now I was afraid she was hiding in the garden, pulling weeds and cutting flowers and drinking gin disguised in a glass of Maizelle’s homemade lemonade. I fell on my bed and stared up at the ceiling, at the fine lines that had carved their way into the plaster, spreading out in different directions like a spider’s intricately woven web. It was as if the sadness filling the rooms of this old house was so thick and heavy it was splitting the walls apart right in front of me. I wondered if the Bezellias before me had watched this web grow as carefully as I had.

Everything else about my room was perfect. My bed was crisply made. The pillowcases were freshly starched. My collection of German teddy bears was neatly lined up on the window seat. The silver-framed photograph of Mother and Father holding me on my first birthday, even the jewelry box made out of Popsicle sticks and the pincushion I had needlepointed years ago were all perfectly placed about my room, another shrine, it seemed, to another lost daughter.

Subtle, muffled noises drifted up from the kitchen. I could hear them, faintly, but they were there—the same soothing sounds that had always reminded me I was never alone here. I left my suitcases untouched right where Nathaniel had put them at the foot of my bed and wandered back downstairs, following the familiar smells of corn bread and cake and fresh green beans simmering in bacon fat. Maizelle had the kitchen windows open wide and a fan running on high. She was standing at the stove stirring a pan of creamed corn. A light blue dish towel was thrown across her shoulder, and every so often she would lift it to her forehead and wipe her brow. Nathaniel was sitting at the table peeling potatoes, helping with the hash brown casserole just like he always did.

“Lookie here. If it’s not the big college girl come to pay us a visit, Maizelle,” Nathaniel said and laughed, never taking his eyes off the sharp knife in his hand. “We thought maybe you had gotten too big for the likes of us.”

“Never,” I said and sat down at the table in an old wooden chair with one leg shorter than the others so it left you rocking back and forth whether you wanted to or not. Nathaniel had promised to fix this chair years ago, but I told him not to. I never had to sit still in this chair. And right here, in this chair, in this kitchen, was my favorite place to be in the whole wide world. If Mother dared to ask where all I had been, I would tell her that I didn’t need to travel the world to know that there was no better place on earth than here with Nathaniel and Maizelle.

Then out of nowhere, still staring intently at the potato and knife in his hands, Nathaniel started talking about his son. It was almost as if he had a tightly held confession to make, and I was certainly ready to listen. He admitted that every day that passed without a Marine in uniform showing up at his front door was a good one. He prayed without ceasing that Samuel would come home safe and in one piece. And best he could tell, his son should be out of that godforsaken place in little less than a year if Uncle Sam didn’t go and change his mind. If he had to go back, Nathaniel sighed, it might very well kill his mama.

“I just thought you’d want to know that, Miss Bezellia,” he said, and then Nathaniel lowered his head and went back to peeling his potatoes.

“Thank you,” I replied rather weakly and leaned across the table and kissed him lightly on the cheek. Maizelle just kept shaking her head, as if she wanted us both to know that Samuel’s leaving had broken her heart too. Every once in a while she stopped to rub her hands together. I think it made her nervous imagining Samuel tiptoeing through some jungle in the dead of night. But she said her arthritis was only getting worse and even rolling out the biscuits was getting to be a chore.

Although she was real sorry about the circumstances, she sure was glad that my mother had seen fit to move her upstairs. She just didn’t think her body could handle the chill that never left that old basement room of hers. Adelaide, in her opinion, was doing much better. She was growing out of her affliction, just like Maizelle knew she would. She wasn’t sure my mother had noticed yet. I walked over to the counter and took the rolling pin from Maizelle’s hands. She wiped her eye with the corner of her apron.

“What’s gotten into us?” Nathaniel laughed real gently. “Bezellia comes home from school and we’re all sitting here crying like a bunch of newborn babies.” Then he winked at me. “You know, Maizelle, we’re not the only ones crying. I heard those babies of Adelaide’s bawling up a storm in the attic the other afternoon. Don’t you ever hear ’em?”

“Shut your mouth right now. That ain’t funny. And don’t you say one word about those dolls, Nathaniel Stephenson,” Maizelle popped. “They’re nothing but evil, pure evil,” and then she spit in the sink and threw some salt over her shoulder.

“Maizelle, Lord, quit throwing that salt all over my kitchen floor. How many times do I have to tell you that now?” Mother quipped, startling all of us with her sudden entrance. She was wearing her garden gloves and a wide-brimmed hat to protect her face from the sun, but it completely hid her eyes. She asked where Adelaide was, and Maizelle explained with her hands that she had no idea. Mother’s lips tightened, and then she told Maizelle to pour her another glass of lemonade and suggested that I go and check on my little sister instead of playing with the biscuit dough.

“Mother! I’m hardly playing here,” I said, surprised and embarrassed that she would insinuate I was wasting my time helping Maizelle with the dinner. But she just waved her garden gloves in my face and said she’d be out back if anybody needed her.

“Don’t mind her, Bezellia,” Maizelle said in an unexpected and understanding tone. “Who would’ve thought she’d have it in her to last this long? Ever since your daddy died, she’s had a lot to take care of all by herself, not to mention your little sister. Lord, your mama frets over that girl.

“First she had her writing in that journal, then she plunked her down in the garden, thinking if she kept her hands busy in the dirt her head would calm a bit. But it was no time at all and Adelaide starting making them mud pies again. ’Cept these didn’t look quite like the ones she used to make, looked more like balls really. Not sure what that girl was thinking. But you can imagine your mama put an end to that real fast. Now she’s got her knitting. And you know Adelaide, once she puts her mind to something, you can’t barely get her to stop to eat. But it does seem your sister is doing so much better. Always knew she was gonna be just fine. Like I’ve always said, some babies just need more time than others to get comfortable with this world.”