Ugly Ways (24 page)

The girls had to shift the focus, the line in which they were growing, when Mudear changed, became as she called it "a woman in her own shoes." They did not know at first if they liked it better this way or the other way, when their father was in total charge. They just knew that this change left things so different, so strange that it was frightening.

Betty stood under the steady spray of the shower for longer than she had allotted for herself because she had discovered that with the six shower heads aimed directly at her body, surrounding her, it was the only time her mind wasn't spinning with plans and memories. She was always grateful after a shower that she had had the money to install the specially designed fixtures in her modern bathroom shower stall. She also had a Jacuzzi in her tub and a hot tub on the balcony off her bedroom, but she never seemed to have time to lounge in either one of them. Sometimes, after working out, Cinque took her up on her offer and came by to soak in the hot tub, leaving his scent throughout the house.

When Betty came downstairs, she found Emily still in the X-large T-shirt she slept in but already up and sitting in the big glass atrium drinking a cup of steaming black coffee.

"Morning, sugar, how you feeling?" Betty asked as she came in with her own cup of coffee in the bone china she had bought for herself when she opened her second shop.

Emily just lifted one hand and sighed in reply. "Just standing on the battlefield...," she said softly.

Betty felt sorry for Emily. Betty herself had only gotten a couple of hours of sleep, restless tossing sleep but at least she had dozed off a bit. Poor Emily probably didn't close her eyes all night, Betty thought as she passed by her sister and patted her on the shoulder. Emily was a terrible insomniac, unable to fall asleep each night until nearly dawn.

"You better think about getting dressed," Betty said. "I'm going to go by the shop for a second, then go to Sherwood Forest and pick up Annie Ruth, then swing back by here and pick you up for the funeral home. In about an hour and a half? Okay?"

She put down her coffee cup and headed for the kitchen. At the door she turned to Emily and said, "Em-Em, go easy on Annie Ruth today, okay? We got enough to handle with Mudear."

Emily didn't reply. She just sat there biting her bottom lip.

When Betty pulled into the driveway at Sherwood Forest, she saw Annie Ruth sitting out on one of the beautifully weathered wooden swings in Mudear's back garden with a big mug in her hand. She sat watching flocks of birds—fiery cardinals, tiny blackpoll warblers, goldfinches, cantankerous bluebirds, brown thrashers, and mourning doves—swoop and eat around the dozen or more bird feeders placed around the yard. Dressed all in black with a flash of red and yellow at her throat and wrists, Annie Ruth looked like a bird herself, a red-winged blackbird perched on the edge of the swing.

The feeders—some built and painted like little woodland cottages, others made of clay or stone or glass or copper and terracotta shaped like domes or half a clamshell—gave added variety and personality to the thick lush garden that already carried Mudear's stamp on every square foot of dirt. The whole garden was homey and inviting, like the hard yellowish gourds Mudear had hung from wires for martins to make their nests in.

"How's it going, girl?" Betty asked as she came up one of the cypress-chip paths Mudear had had Poppa lay throughout her garden. Brushing a huge leggy bush with small violet flowers, she brought the smell of rosemary with her.

Annie Ruth reached up for Betty's hand and pulled her down next to her on the swing.

"Just standing on the battlefield," she said with a smile. "Poppa still sleep. I didn't bother him."

"Poor thing," Betty said and shook her head.

"Yeah, but this is a man who slept next to Mudear for the last forty-some year. Hell, the least he deserve is to sleep late."

They both laughed, but then Annie Ruth turned serious and added, "Urn, he had a kind of a rough night."

"I don't doubt it," Betty said looking up at the split-level house that Poppa kept up so nicely. "I'm surprised Mudear let me get any sleep at all last night."

"She was probably too busy out here in her garden last night to bother us," Annie Ruth said, rocking the swing softly.

"It's funny you should say that," Betty said. "I was just thinking last night that this would be where Mudear would show up if she were to come back."

Annie Ruth looked around. "It is quite a place. I was noticing really how truly beautiful and well laid out this garden is. Mudear's garden is just so beautifully groomed and taken care of. I mean this woman only did work in this garden during the nighttime and there's no sign of a weed, no stinging nettle, no dollar weeds, no tufts of nut grass sticking up like unrelenting hairs out of an old man's ears. Nothing unwanted anywhere."

"Mudear had Poppa put down so much mulch and compost on this soil over the years that weeds didn't have much of a chance to appear let alone take hold," Betty explained.

"It's not that I'm surprised that it's so well taken care of," Annie Ruth said. "Mudear took better care of this garden than she ever took of us. But I really don't think I ever really appreciated how beautiful it is."

"How could you?" Betty asked as she picked an angel-wing jasmine bloom from the vine crawling up the trellis over the bench and examined its long fragrant petals before throwing it over her shoulder into a tangle of sweet william and scented geraniums.

"But, Betty, it's so green. I don't think I ever remember it being so green back here."

"That's 'cause it rained last night," Betty said matter-of-facdy. "But this is how it usually looks 'cause Poppa put in an automatic watering system a few years ago."

Annie Ruth still just shook her head in awe at the show of garden glory. At her feet were tiny alyssum blooms and English thyme used as a ground cover that exuded the sweet smell of a kitchen when she walked over it. Behind her, a line of loblolly trees set in huge tubs guarded her back with their fragrant Cherokee-roselike flowers peeking out at the tips. Behind the loblollies, a cluster of tall magnolias with their thick shiny leaves blocked out all the other ranch-style houses on the next street. Mounds of hydrangea—Mudear had adjusted the pH of the soil with extra lime to make the blossoms white—ringed a section of the garden that made a private space filled with roses and a small maze of tea olive hedges. Lamb's ear sat like plump rabbits ready to munch on the exotic red and green and purple lettuces nearby that Annie Ruth had sent the seeds for from a California nursery.

Betty looked around the yard dispassionately. "You know what I noticed after I moved out of this house? Mudear grew a buffer around this house. The plants and the trees and flowers set us off from this whole neighborhood. Even when she let us visit around here or go to a basement party, we were still set off. As soon as a boy walked you back home, they could see from our house, we were strange and different."

The plants and trees continued on through another lot and up to the next street of the development because Poppa had bought the lot behind them when Mudear had looked at the plans for the house and announced, "You expect me to garden on that little piece of land back there?"

Betty had told the girls how proud Poppa was to have been able to secure another loan for the land behind their new house. She had heard him on the phone talking about it. But all the girls had heard Mudear tell Poppa any number of times, "I certainly hope you don't think I give a damn about this litde piece a' house out here on Pork n' Bean Row. It don't mean shit to me and my girls. I could make it anywhere with or without a house."

And the girls had believed her.

"All kinds of flowers, tropical flowers, grow in southern California," Annie Ruth said as she surveyed Mudear's garden. "Birds of paradise next to people's driveways, exotic palms in front of run-down apartment buildings. But even with that mild climate and all that water they pump out of neighboring states and use to water that dry desert land in L.A., you never see anything as naturally beautiful as this." Annie Ruth got up and walked to the side of the house to look at the last of the wildflowers growing in place of a lawn in front. Mudear hadn't even bothered to let the contractor lay sod. One night after the Lovejoy family moved into the new house, Mudear went out and strewed local and regional wildflower seed she had been collecting and exchanging with Georgia gardeners through the mail.

"God, I miss the South." Annie Ruth rubbed her hand over the velvety moss growing on the outside of a huge strawberry pot and smelled her palm. She sounded as if she might cry as she touched the tongue of a stone frog set among a bed of frilly ferns with the toe of her boot and came back to the swing and sat down.

Betty didn't even bother to ask anymore why, feeling the way she did about Los Angeles and the South, why Annie Ruth was there instead of here. She and Emily had been trying to get her back home for years. But Betty knew what it was like to try to put some space between herself and Mudear. She reached for Annie Ruth's cup, but her sister pulled it away.

"You don't want this," she said fingering the rim of the mug. "It's Poppa's Sanka."

Betty just chuckled.

Annie Ruth smiled, too.

"You don't know everything, Ms. Betty Jean Lovejoy. It's not because of the baby. It just seems that my bouts with PMS have been getting out of control lately. I read caffeine makes it worse."

"Oh, so now we've moved on to calling it 'the baby'?" Betty asked.

Annie Ruth just looked at her sister.

Betty kept talking. "Well, you won't have to worry with PMS, then. They say it gets worse as you get older, but better after you have a baby."

Annie Ruth sat tearing the ivory petals off a tiny iceberg rosebud.

"Don't say anything to Emily about it yet, okay?" Annie Ruth's voice sounded pleading. "About me planning to really keep this baby."

"I don't have to, sugar. She's already on the scent. We all know each other too well to try to keep secrets."

Emily was waiting outside when Betty and Annie Ruth pulled up in the winding gravel driveway to get her. Emily, dressed in a bright red long-sleeved knit dress cinched at the waist with a wide black and red leather belt, climbed into the backseat, leaned forward, and kissed Annie Ruth on the cheek, leaving a slash of red lipstick there.

"Emily, you
know
you in that dress. And you look pretty in red," Betty said to her sister as she reached over and pulled out a tissue form the car's console and handed it to her. "But you got a booger in your nose."

Emily took the tissue and they all chuckled. "'Lovejoy women
keep
dirty noses,'" she recited, laughing again. "And as Mudear say, 'Just when you dressed up and think you looking cute, too.'"

Emily leaned forward again and checked her nose in the rearview mirror. She noticed Betty running her fingers through her hair. Whenever Betty was trying to figure something out, she ran her hand through her cropped, permed hair, really just over the top of it. It was hardly long enough to get her fingers through.

Betty's hair was barely longer than a boy's with practically nothing in the back, but she kept it straightened to within an inch of its life because she liked to have it grow down the back of her neck without forming nappy little balls of hair at the nape; Mudear called them "pepper pods." When the girls were teenagers and straightened and permed each other's hair in the kitchen and family bathroom, Mudear would look up at their French twists and upswept hairdos and point to a brush—not hers because she didn't like anybody using her personal things—and say, "Daughter, take that brush and crack them pepper pods in the back of your head." Mudear made it sound as if the girls had cooties or lice. She couldn't stand "pepper pods."

One time when Betty was a teenager, she got Emily to get Poppa's razor from where he "hid" it up over the bathroom doorjamb so the girls wouldn't use it to shave their legs and up under their arms and give her a "tape"—shaving the hair from the nape or "kitchen" of her neck. The idea was to give a smooth, clean edge to her hairdo. But Mudear protested.

Lovejoy women don't get no tapes, Mudear told her daughters, it makes you look common and hard, like wearing an anklet. Only whores and sluts got tapes and wore anklets, according to Mudear. But then, Mudear had a long litany of things Lovejoy women did and did not do.

• Lovejoy women
love
pretty clothes.

• Lovejoy women are
strong as mules.

• But Lovejoy women go to
nothing
when they get a cold.

• Lovejoy women can cook.

• Lovejoy women
keep
dirty noses.

• Lovejoy women can arrange
weeds.

• Lovejoy women don't get no tapes.

• Lovejoy women don't wear no anklets.

• Lovejoy women don't take no tea for the fever. (She had to explain that one. "It means you don't take no shit. You so bad you won't even take a soothing tea to break your fever.")

• Lovejoy women have shoulders like men.

• Lovejoy women are terrible liars.

• Lovejoy women don't wear no cheap clothes.

• Lovejoy women don't wear no Hoyt's cologne.

• Lovejoy women don't wear no costume jewelry.

Over the years, the list had grown into a type of mythology: "The Lovejoy Women." Mudear would start and the girls would join in as if they were reciting a mantra.

Whenever Mudear caught the girls making light of "what Lovejoy women do and don't do," looking at each other out of the corners of their eyes when they didn't think Mudear was watching, she'd smirk and say, "Well, there must be something to it. 'Cause married or not, I notice all ya'll still go by 'Lovejoy.'"

As usual, the girls couldn't say anything, couldn't dispute her. It was true. After both of Emily's marriages and even while Betty had been married briefly, they still kept their maiden names. Even Betty's shops, Mudear would point out, were named Lovejoy's i and Lovejoy's 2.