Ugly Ways (2 page)

"Where's her Louis Vuitton steamer trunk?" Emily whispered to Betty as she moved to help the skycap.

Betty could feel the commotion they were causing around them as they made their way to the tiny airport parking lot with all the baggage. With so many people looking, Betty thought of what Mudear would say to them when as teenagers they had complained that people seemed to stare at them when they went downtown to shop or to pay the family bills. Mudear would always reply, "Just yell at them, 'Ain't ya'll never seen no crowd of good-looking brown-skinned colored women before?' That'll stop 'em in their tracks."

The sight of the three sisters at the airport—Annie Ruth, a half-madeup, perfumed wreck, still needing to be supported by a sister's firm hand under each arm—all trailed by the skycap, whom Betty knew, too, made even the woman at the Avis rental counter rubberneck around the corner of her booth to get a better look. Betty could already see the tongues wagging. She had always made her living working in beauty shops—the hotbeds of gossip—and she knew from experience that Mulberry had not stopped discussing and dissecting the Lovejoy family since the day Mudear changed.

Years before, it had been Emily, not Annie Ruth, who everyone in town who knew the Lovejoy family felt would be the first one to go crazy. Even some members of the family had thought that Emily would crack first. First, that is, after Mudear. Nearly everyone over the age of forty in Mulberry claimed they knew the date that they said Mudear lost her mind.

"It was one of the coldest winter days we ever had here in Mulberry," women would say, recounting the beginning of Mudear's seclusion. "And she ain't come out of that house since. At least, not during daylight hours. Except to move to that new one in Sherwood Forest. Even then, I don't know nobody who saw her move. And to work in her garden at night. Yeah, at night. Esther always did think she was above the laws of God and man.

"Heck, that woman didn't even come out of the house to go to her own mother's funeral."

Betty would hear the townswomen whisper about her family even as they sat in the specially designed chrome chairs in Lovejoy's 2, her sleek modern beauty shop at the Mulberry Mall, leafing through the latest issues of her magazines and sipping her complimentary coffee, tea, bottled water, and Coke. She would have to talk herself out of leaving the strong-smelling, lye-based straight-eners in their hair a few minutes too long, to bald them in retaliation for their talk. She feared a lawsuit when all their hair fell out. But still, she couldn't bring herself to confront the women directly. She had nothing to say in the family's defense. She knew what they said was true. She and her sisters—still little girls—had sat next to Poppa in the hot little church in East Mulberry in front of their grandmother's casket to represent Mudear while Mudear stayed at home looking at T.V. It made Betty mad that Mudear's actions had left her and her sisters so vulnerable, so defenseless, open and raw to the town's gossip. Always had.

So, it was Emily—the middle girl—who everyone in town who knew the family felt would be the next one to lose her mind. There were quite a few citizens of Mulberry who figured it was only a matter of time before all the Lovejoys were seen running up and down the streets of Sherwood Forest half-naked with their hair standing on top of their heads. Some said the whole family had "walking insanity" like other folks had "walking pneumonia." They still went about their daily routines, but as far as people in Mulberry were concerned all the Lovejoys were walking-, talking-, working-, shopping-crazy.

Some townspeople swore you could see it in the way Emily talked ... through clenched teeth. She also had, even as a child, the habit of unconsciously biting her bottom lip while she thought something over. These habits lent everything she said—even the most mundane statements—an intensity that she rarely wished to express.

Some of her grammar school teachers grew to hate her for her wild eyes and lip biting. "Look at her back there, looking wise and otherwise," Miss Leslie, her second-grade teacher, had muttered to herself at least twice a week for one whole school year.

Emily never went so far as to live up to her mother's epithet of a "raving, ranting maniac." But she came as close to it as she dared and still have enough of an edge to back off. In one of her recurring dreams, Betty saw Emily flitting on the precipice of craziness, an actual ravine. "What an unbelievably insane, foolish thing to do," she remembered saying in her dream. Even awake, when Emily talked, sometimes, Betty could see her just flouncing up to the fanged monster image of craziness and shimmying her shoulders at it. Then, jerking away at the last minute just as insanity reached out its claw for her. She flirted with it.

It was Emily of the 4:00
A.M.
long-distance calls. "Now, tell me, Betty, now tell me. Now, if a woman loves a man and she does all she can for him and she tries to make him happy, then, shouldn't that man love her back? Now, tell me, now, isn't that the way it should be?"

Betty would be so sleepy. "Well, Em-Em," Betty would say, trying to speak as if it were noon straight up and she didn't have to rise in a few hours and open up her beauty shop and do some heads. "You know it doesn't always work out that way."

"But if you love him, if he's married or not, it doesn't matter, does it? If you love him and you do all you can for him and you're there for him. Now, tell me, shouldn't that man love you back?"

Betty would even fall into the soft, calm manner of speaking she had used with Emily since childhood, using the pet name for her middle sister, "Em-Em." Her use of it sometimes forced Emily into seeing that she was just talking to her sister Betty, not to her psychiatrist, Dr. Axelton, or to a palm reader or priestess who professed to have all the answers.

It was Emily who drove around her neighborhood in Southwest Atlanta at various hours of the day and night, looking for all the world like a wolf clutching the steering wheel of her red Datsun, her eyes darting dangerously here and there, always in search of something. Atlanta was not so far away. The stories got back to Mulberry.

But it wasn't Emily who went first. It was Annie Ruth. Two years before. Everyone called it a nervous breakdown. Mudear called it a heart attack.

Annie Ruth, an anchor at a television station in Washington, D.C., at the time, checked into an expensive private clinic in Virginia for a rest. Then, when she checked out two weeks later, she took the anchor job at the Los Angeles station that had been trying to hire her for nearly a year.

The word of Annie Ruth's breakdown spread quickly in Mulberry. Mudear went right to work. Over the phone she told Carrie, the one woman she still talked with in town and who still talked with her, "Cut, my baby done gone and had a heart attack. Working in that fast-paced northern city, all that stress and overtime and all that. You know, Carrie, all my girls are working women."

Mudear couldn't help it. She went with the strength. That had been her life's philosophy, at least since her youngest was five, and she much preferred to think of her child falling victim to a heart attack, the disease of the hardworking, rather than letting herself become the plaything of the mind's whim. A nervous breakdown. Mudear couldn't even bring herself to say the words. A nervous breakdown.

It was so weak sounding. A breakdown. "What she got to break down about?" Mudear had asked the walls of her sumptuous bedroom over and over. And then she had badgered her husband when he came home from work in the chalk mines with the same question. "What she got to break down about?"

Even when Betty, considered the strongest of the girls, went through that period when she couldn't stop itching and scratching herself even after she went to the dermatologist and got a soothing lotion that didn't work, she showed up for work every day, helped put on the annual hair and beauty show like always, and made sure dinner was cooked for Mudear and Poppa.

She was only doing what was expected of her. What Mudear expected of her. She could still hear Mudear say, "Save that crazy shit for your own time, now get up off that floor and go on to that cosmetology seminar, like you got some sense."

Taking care of responsibilities, duties, business was always the first priority. If the three girls expected to live out their lives in Mudear's good graces, then they had to produce.

"There's nothing worse than a trifling, slouchy woman. It's okay for a man, what more can you expect? That don't have nothing to do with my girls. Being a trifling man. You know what I expect and you know why I expect it.

"Women who don't care nothing about themselves," Mudear would mutter to herself as she sat by the kitchen window looking out over her yard and overseeing dinner preparation in a flowered housecoat with a flounce at the neckline. "Don't even take baths. Be smelling like the city docks." And her daughters would immediately stop their cleaning or cooking or chopping or washing or frying and begin scrutinizing each other for signs of triflingness, smelling the air around each other. They never felt they could assume that their mother was referring to some event or person far removed from them. They couldn't take that chance.

It was what Betty finally said to Annie Ruth at the airport to get her to walk back to where the car was parked under her own steam.

"Don't be so trifling, Annie Ruth," Betty whispered to her baby sister as Emily showed the skycap the way to the car. "Buck up."

The girls never even considered saying what they all had thought at one time or another when Mudear went into one of her tirades about triflingness: that Mudear was probably the most trifling woman they had ever seen. A woman who spent most of her days lying in her throne of a bed or in a reclining chair or lounging on a chaise longue dressed in pretty nightclothes or a pastel housecoat. Doing nothing with her time but looking at television, directing the running of her household, making sure her girls did all the work to her specifications. Then, if she felt like it, some gardening at night.

She did nothing else. Nothing, that is, but wash out her own drawers each night after everyone else had gone to bed.

When the three Lovejoy sisters walked into the foyer of their parents' split-level house, they were not even aware of it, but they dropped the bags they were carrying and reached for each other, their fingertips barely brushing. All three of them felt the absence within the house, a house that even still smelled faintly like Mudear, like red spicy cinnamon balls. The girls all caught the scent of the fiery candy at the same time and almost looked around for Mudear to appear.

They had been nearly silent on the car trip from the airport. Annie Ruth, back in the bosom of her sisters, had just about regained her composure as she lay across the backseat of the car listening to Sade sing of faith, trust, and love. Pulling herself together was what each of the Lovejoy girls did best. But there in the hall, its bare cream-colored walls reminding them that Mudear hated pictures of any kind on the wall, the living room furniture lived-in and free of what she called "Sherwood Forest plastic," it hit them all that their mother, who had ruled this modern brick split-level ranch house for nearly thirty years, had ruled it in the same way she had commanded their old two-story wooden house in East Mulberry before, was truly dead. They fell into each other's arms weeping and moaning like the surviving village elders at the funeral of a child.

They felt again as they had for a good time after Mudear changed when they were young children. Like survivors of a war. Like Vietnamese boat people, soldiers, young boys turned men on the battlefield, bloodied, gimp-legged, hobbling on to the promise of peacetime. Stepping over the dead bodies, the ones who didn't make it, who didn't survive.

For a long while they didn't even notice that their father was standing there next to them by the door, his long strong arms dangling uselessly at his side, waiting to greet Annie Ruth, his youngest. They were too taken with themselves to notice him. Too taken with their own personal sorrow. They didn't mean to exclude him. They never did. They were just too busy with themselves to think of him.

These girls always did belong to Mudear, he thought. He silently waited his turn.

They were hardly girls. Betty had just turned forty-two, Emily was thirty-eight, and Annie Ruth, the baby, was still thirty-five, although she told people she was thirty-two. A woman with two days' makeup on she had met one night taking a whore's bath in the sink of an L.A. nightclub ladies' room had instructed Annie Ruth with a wink, "You look young, hon. Play younger."

The sisters, still dressed in their outerwear, smelling of designer perfume and cigarette smoke, wept in the hallway until their sobs faded into moans and then trailed off into muffled hiccups. It wasn't that they mourned for Mudear as much as they feared the absence of her, the lacuna they knew her absence would leave in their lives.

Their father stood to the side watching the whole scene of his daughters' weeping like an atheist watching a Passion play. At one time he, too, had worshiped at the altar of Mudear, weeping, bowing, pleasing. First, out of awe. Then, out of competition. Then, out of fear, he worshiped.

"Betty Jean?" he finally said softly to his eldest daughter. She turned wiping the tears dripping from her high cheekbones.

Betty heaved a sigh and said, "We okay, Poppa. It was just coming in the house and knowing she's not here. That's all. We okay. You want something to eat?" and she began taking off her shawl as she headed for the kitchen.

While Emily struggled to push the luggage out of the entranceway, Annie Ruth turned to her father.

"Hi, Poppa," she said and walked over to get her hello hug. He hugged the way many men did: stiffly, like a stick figure inside his long-sleeved plaid shirt and worn brown work pants with his arms and body at angles to her. He didn't embrace her. Rather, he let her lean against him, let her brush her cheek against his as he patted her on the back sharply two times.

Annie Ruth steeled herself for the brush of his beard stubble against her cheek, but she was not at all prepared for the doughy feel of his face. Her father's face felt to Annie Ruth like her grandfather's had the few times they had visited him in the country when she was a child. Poppa can't be that old, she thought.