The Way Back to Happiness (17 page)

“But you knew about them?”

“A little.”

“I wish someone had told me more about the Jacksons,” Alabama said. “Mom never wanted to talk about them, except to call them names. I asked Gladdie, and all she said was they owned a lumber business. She didn’t seem to like me mentioning them, even. Why would she care?”

Bev aimed a sharp gaze at her. “Mama stood by Diana all those years when those people wouldn’t have anything to do with her . . . or you.”

“Of course. Mom was Gladdie’s daughter. Gladdie knew she was honest.”

Bev lurched to her feet. “Alabama, I’m so sorry. I’ll handle it however you want when they call. If they call. If you really want to be involved with those people, I can’t stop you.”

“Those people?” Alabama repeated, at a higher volume. “They’re my family. Aren’t they?”

Bev raised her hands to her temples. “I’m not feeling well. I’m just not up to thinking about all of this, okay? In fact, I’m going to take a nap. You can wrap my hamburger patty in foil and put it in the freezer. But wait till it cools. And make sure the seal on the foil is tight. Otherwise the meat will get frosty.”

Her aunt drifted out of the room, spewing food freezing tips until her bedroom door snicked closed and Alabama couldn’t hear her anymore.

Left alone in the kitchen, she felt as though she’d wandered into the middle of a mystery movie and was missing vital information. She approached the letter on the table. She didn’t read it over again—she’d already pored over the pages so often she had it memorized—but she did marvel at it. The power of it. Something in those words had seriously disturbed Bev.

G
ladys hadn’t said why she wanted them in Dallas on a Friday. “I have an appointment,” she’d said. “Wear a dress, and make sure Alabama looks nice, too.”

“What kind of appointment?”

“An important appointment. You need to be here at ten o’clock on the nose.”

Probably it had to do with her lawyer, which would explain the mystery. Gladys had been raised in the days of party lines and still didn’t trust phones for talking about anything financial or legal. The instructions to be nicely dressed also seemed peculiar, but Gladys believed any errand that involved “going downtown” required a dress, dress shoes, and substantial foundation garments. She wore a girdle to get her teeth cleaned.

The secrecy of her mother’s plans aggrieved Bev, especially since she was having to skip an in-service day. Sneaky was the fashion, evidently, like Alabama and her Jackson correspondence. No one was behaving how she wanted them to, Bev thought as they were on the road to Dallas. Her mother was being mysterious. Derek wasn’t calling. Glen wasn’t fading into the background. Alabama wasn’t settling in . . . and obviously had no plans to.

That horrid letter from Dorothy Jackson! The mere threat of talking to that daughter of hers had required two BC Powders and an evening in bed. But nothing had banished that family from her thoughts. Hard to believe she and Dot Jackson had once thought they would be sisters someday, or that they had spent a weekend sharing a room.

The spring that she and Tom had graduated—spring of ’69—when Bev had visited Houston to meet his family in their large house in River Oaks, she’d been surprised to be put up in Tom’s sister’s room. The family had told her they were redecorating the guest rooms . . . but Bev always suspected the reason she’d spent three nights in the twin bed next to Dot’s was so Dot could keep tabs on her and report back. As if Bev had anything to hide! Tom wasn’t the kind to engage in hanky-panky in his parents’ house—and of course, neither was she.

During the visit, his parents, Dorothy and Thomas Sr., had been cordial but frosty. Their manners brought to mind noblesse oblige—and Bev was the peasant they were obliged to put up with. She felt like a shopgirl who had bumbled into the House of Windsor. It didn’t help that on her first night there, she’d busted a Lalique figurine in the library.

Oh, they extended a chilly hand of hospitality, although Bev guessed from the stiff curl of Dorothy’s lip, and the way the maids quietly removed all the valuable breakables in sight, that the woman believed her son could have found someone better. Or at least someone less destructive.

It was a stressful visit. Even in the privacy of Dot’s tastefully decorated bedroom, which resembled a bed-and-breakfast more than any teenager’s room Bev had ever seen, relaxation proved impossible. At the end of an evening listening to Dorothy Jackson holding forth on anything and everything, Bev just wanted to collapse and turn her brain off. But that’s when Dot went into Grand Inquisitor mode, peppering her with questions as they prepared for bed.

“Are you and Tom getting married soon?” she’d asked the first night, as soon as the door closed.

The subject was one Tom’s parents had shied away from. Heck, it was a subject
she
shied away from, and Tom did, too.

But not Dot.

“Tom and I are just good friends,” Bev told her.

Dot impatiently tapped her slipper. “That’s what girls always say about boys they’re interested in hooking. But y’all have been dating for several years. I saw one of your letters to him last summer. Its tone was more than friendly, I’d say.”

“You read Tom’s mail?”

“He left it right out in the open on the dining table. That’s a communal area.”

She said it as though some hard-and-fast rule excused her behavior.

“Well, yes,” Bev admitted. “We’ve dated for . . . a while.”

“I see.” Dot bobbed her head sagely. “He hasn’t asked. That’s so typical of Tom. We were all curious, see, because he’s never brought a girl home with him before. Not to stay over. Of course, he probably mostly wants you here as a buffer.”

“A buffer?”

“Because he has no future plans. I guess he thinks if you’re here Mother and Daddy won’t pester him about what he’s going to do with his life, after college. He hasn’t planned on a profession.”

“He’ll make his way,” Bev said. “He’s very bright.”

Dot’s eyes widened. “
Tom?
He can’t be that smart—his grades weren’t good enough to get him into an Ivy League school. And he refused to even think about West Point, like Daddy wanted. I’m probably going to Stanford or Radcliffe myself. And then law school. I’ve known that for ages.”

“Well, Tom’s different.”

“That’s why Mother and Daddy are so worried. They wanted him to be more goal oriented. Like me.”

“Not everyone can be like you,” Bev said. Thank God.

“Which is a good thing, I suppose. If people like Tom went to prestigious colleges, they wouldn’t be prestigious anymore, would they?”

Bev didn’t have an answer for that—not a polite one, anyway.

But Dot was already moving on to a new topic. “You’re training to be a teacher, aren’t you? What do you want to teach?”

“Home economics.”

“My school doesn’t offer home ec. It’s a private school, so homemaking’s not our scene, although I guess some skills like that are important to know—sewing and cooking and things like that. Especially if you don’t have much money. You make your own clothes, don’t you?”

“Most of them.”

“I guessed that.”

Seventeen
. People said all kinds of thoughtless, pretentious things at seventeen that they would never dream of saying once they became a sentient adult. Trouble was, it was hard to tell whether Dot was being thoughtless and pretentious because she was seventeen, or because that’s who she really was.

The only good thing to say about Dot was that she was a lot less intimidating than her parents. Or, rather, her mother. Thomas Sr. seemed as though he could have a nice side, although he was hard to get to know because of his wife. Dorothy Jackson might be a Southern lady who wore gloves to the supermarket and would remain planted in the car until the person she was with came around to open her door, but she was no wilting violet. She talked right over her husband—over everyone—making puzzling pronouncements in such an unswerving tone that they would sometimes stop the conversation cold.

“Your mother is a widow?” she asked Bev one night at dinner.

Bev was happy to turn her attention away from the seafood aspic on her plate. All those little shrimps and bits of crab and scallop looked like salmonella suspended in Jell-O. “Yes, ma’am, she is.”

“A war widow?”

“No, my younger sister and I were both born after the war. My father died quite a few years after he got back from overseas, from appendicitis.”

Dorothy put her fork down to take this in. “He had an appendicitis attack when he had two little children?”

Bev shifted uncomfortably and looked over at Tom, but his aspic had apparently mesmerized him into a blue funk. “I’m sure he didn’t mean to die.”

“Well, naturally not. But if he had died in the war, that would have seemed more excusable,” Dorothy proclaimed.

Bev glanced at the others. No one else appeared to think it odd that a person would intimate that a man would need permission to have his appendix rupture. Or if they did, no one challenged Dorothy on it.

During the day, Dot tagged along with Bev and Tom and would inject herself into their conversations. A professional Nikon camera—“I’m on the school paper”—always hung around her neck, and Bev never knew when that telephoto lens would zoom in on her—sometimes when she was with Tom, sometimes when she was merely wandering around the house, looking at things. It was hard to tell if Dot was capturing memories or gathering evidence.

The nights unfolded in a relentless pattern. Around midnight, Tom would peck Bev on the lips in the dark hallway outside Dot’s room, and Bev would go inside and be harangued by Dot, and slowly curl into a defensive fetal ball until she dozed off into a fevered sleep of insecurity.

The worst was the final night when the interrogation turned to sex. As Bev was brushing her teeth, Dot, sitting on the bed and staring through the bathroom door, asked her, “Have you and Tom been intimate yet?”

Bev narrowed her eyes at the mirror, fixing on the relentlessly inquisitive face over her shoulder.
I will not answer that question.
But with a mouthful of foam, all she could manage was a shake of her head.

“That’s what I guessed.” Dot scrunched her knees to her chest and hugged her arms around them in satisfaction. “I just couldn’t see it.”

This was too much. Bev spat into the sink. “You’re not supposed to see it. It’s not your business.”

Dot was either deaf to the anger in her tone or delighted by it. “You’re not at all like Tom’s other girlfriends. The flakes he used to gravitate toward! You’re so sensible. It’s the best thing about you. We’re all grateful for that, at least.”

Dot was fond of using the Jackson royal we, which meant Tom Sr., Dorothy, and herself. The entire weekend, Bev never saw them talking in private—in fact, most of the time the parents seemed as coolly formal toward their own children as they were toward Bev—yet Dot always seemed to have her pulse on Mother’s and Daddy’s thoughts on every subject. It was eerie. As far as Bev could tell, the three of them communicated via mind vibes.

“Although we figured you would have more of a steadying influence on Tom than you’ve actually had,” Dot went on. “Maybe he needs an outlet . . . if you know what I mean.”

Bev huffed toward her bed. She’d never thought she’d be glad to go home. She’d always imagined Tom’s home as a paradise—big house, two parents, plenty of everything, a smart little sister instead of crazy, unpredictable Diana. Now she understood where his insecurity stemmed from.

“I’m not an outlet.” She tossed the covers over herself.

“I didn’t mean that you should serve the function of a prostitute. Believe me, Houston’s got plenty of those, if that’s all he needed. But I think Tom needs it all—sexual and emotional stimulation.”

Given that this was his little sister talking, the conversation veered too close to gothic creepiness for Bev’s comfort. She flipped off the light. “Frankly, you shouldn’t be thinking about your brother’s needs. Or his career plans, or anything else, except maybe his happiness.”

“I was only trying to make you feel better,” Dot said. “If you’re trying to trap Tom into marriage, I don’t think Mother and Daddy would be totally opposed. You’re not their ideal daughter-in-law. I’m sure they dreamed of his marrying a debutante or something like that, but Tom’s always acted like he’s above all that social register stuff. They’ll bear up eventually.”

Every sentence out of the girl’s mouth seemed to be designed to needle her rawest insecurities. As she blotted out Dot’s voice and squeezed her eyes shut, all her fears bubbled to the surface. A popular girl had broken Tom’s heart freshman year, sending him into a tailspin. Then he’d met Bev. Of course she wasn’t like his other girlfriends—she was his tailspin rebound girlfriend. Tom hadn’t strayed . . . as far as she knew . . . but there always seemed to be something missing. That spark. He never seemed as excited about their relationship as he was about Dante, for example. Surely that wasn’t a good sign.

She tried not to care what the Jacksons thought of her, but being the acceptable alternative to Tom’s dippy former girlfriends was unsettling.

“I’m not trying to trap anyone,” she declared.

After the visit, it took her two weeks at home again to get the sour Jackson taste out of her mouth and remember that she loved Tom. And that he seemed to love her. Their relationship had nothing to do with tailspins, good sense, his snobby family, or her practical homemade clothes. It had stood the test of three years.

In retrospect, what galled Bev was how quickly Dot had sussed the situation, how psychologically astute she had been, even at seventeen. And, as horrible as it was for Bev to admit it now, maybe the next spring she
had
been trying to trap Tom—with the wedding dress, and then the baby . . . and her desperate hopes. And then her bitterness. That had been the biggest trap of all.

“You aren’t planning to tell Gladdie about me and the Jacksons, are you?” Alabama asked.

Bev sucked in her breath. She’d been so lost in thought, in history, she’d nearly forgotten that anyone else was in the car.

“I don’t want to upset Gladdie,” Alabama said.

Bev had to switch gears from the distant past to the current conflict.

“But it would be odd not to say anything until you were packing your bags to move to Houston.” They’d have to mention something. A courtesy warning, say, along the lines of
FYI, your granddaughter is going over to the side of Satan.

“I’m not moving,” Alabama said. “Mrs. Jackson doesn’t even believe me.”

“She will.”

“Why do you think so?”

“Because it’s the truth.” She couldn’t help glancing over. “You’re her flesh and blood.”

Alabama’s eyes widened, and Bev focused her full attention on the road again.

“How do you know? I mean,
really
know?” Alabama asked.

“Because . . .” Bev swallowed. “I believed Diana.”

Alabama let out a puzzled sniff. “Mom wouldn’t have taken
your
word on anything. She didn’t trust you.”

“You’re wrong about that. Diana—”

Luckily, she stopped her words, but she couldn’t stop the hysterical emotion sneaking up on her. Poor Diana. Poor all of them. The back of her throat gummed up, and her arms shook on the steering wheel. Bev recognized the symptoms as the warning signs of a grief meltdown. Blurry vision would be next, in four . . . three . . . two . . .