Ugly Ways (7 page)

She had had Poppa find an old stone park bench with flowers and vines chiseled into its legs, sides, and back and set it down in the middle of where one of the paths of her garden crossed the other. When she was a teenager, Betty would get up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and stop to gaze out the window at Mudear sitting on one of her benches brushing the side of her thigh lazily with a huge sprig of lavender and be so mesmerized by her mother's movements that she would forget to go back to bed and would fall asleep at the windowsill.

But Mudear had a knack for doing the strangest things and making them appear, at least for the moment, perfectly natural. Betty thought it was part of her charm, part of her beauty. Not that Mudear could be called a traditional beauty. She was nothing special really, just a little brown-skinned woman past middle age. She was never as pretty as any of her daughters, but she had a way about her, a confidence, a sureness in the way she moved, in the way she squatted down in the dirt next to a plant with real tenderness, a tenderness she never showed her family, that was downright seductive. And she could throw back her little pea head and laugh with such a robustness and a sense of abandon and irony that her daughters learned to talk about people in Mulberry and on television and in the news with a cutting wickedness just to hear her roar.

Mudear's actions just seemed normal. Betty didn't notice right away, for instance, that Mudear never came out of the house like her little classmates' mothers did until her teachers at school began making sly comments in class about mothers who didn't seem to care enough about their daughters to make the effort to show up at parent-teacher meetings. At first, Betty didn't realize they were referring to Mudear. But when the comments became so pointed that she couldn't misinterpret or overlook them, she began to watch her mother in the way that Mudear had quietly taught her to watch other people, then come home and tell her what the girl had observed.

Mudear always talked to her girls as if they were already women. They had conversations, never just silly meaningless small talk. They all understood that Mudear didn't take time for such trivialities as chitchat.

They had never, even before the change, had conversations about school, dates, homework, skinned knees, and such, but rather about feelings and impressions and conjectures and opinions. When they talked of their grade school, it was a discussion of their friends and teachers and other people and their families and their clothes and their personal habits and their personal histories.

If a teacher were cranky with the students, the girls would tell Mudear about it as they cleaned the house when they came home from school. Then, they would discuss the possibilities of the source of her displeasure. Finally, Mudear would make the call.

"Mrs. Johnson's husband probably had hell in him last night and got drunk. Ya'll said she drinks, too, huh? Maybe he didn't pay some bill. I'd be mad, too." Or, "Didn't you tell me Mrs. Johnson's brother and wife just moved in with them with a new baby? Probably kept them all up last night."

Then, on to the next topic.

They would come home offering up their news, perceptions, observations like royal honey for the queen bee. It was what was expected of them. Their ears perked up like little cats' ears when they overheard something outside the house that they thought might pique her interest. Sometimes, her girls brought her the outside world without even realizing it. If Mudear let them visit a friend's house, when they returned they reported to Mudear.

The conversation would begin with a few comments on what was done, what was seen, what was eaten and then it would slide easily into an examination of the adults and the intricacies of the household: gained weight, lost weight, new clothes, new anything, music playing, other visitors, nervous habits, mother and father touch, speak, fight. Were your little friends unusually quiet today? she would ask.

Anything that would add texture, perspective, feeling to the picture the girls painted for Mudear. Mudear would keep these images in order but overlapping like a plate drawing in a biology book of the human body and all its organs that has many overlays. With all the transparent colored pages in place, the picture took on a three-dimensional appearance that left the girls amazed that Mudear instinctively knew so much without leaving the house.

It added to their mythical image of her.

They never voiced their awareness that Mudear would have no connection with her community if they didn't bring the world to her.

Betty's thoughts seemed to drift out the car window like the cigarette smoke that trailed from her nostrils. She thought again about going back in the house to try and convince Annie Ruth to come stay with her and Emily at her house for the night. But she knew that the three of them could not stay under one roof that night. With the day she had had and the one that loomed ahead, she wouldn't have the strength to keep Emily from interrogating Annie Ruth about her plans. She felt Annie Ruth couldn't take it. Even though her sister looked a lot better now, Betty couldn't stop picturing her as she had been at the airport.

Then, all of a sudden she remembered Matthew, her first boyfriend in high school. Thinking about her sisters always put her in mind of her men. She smiled to herself thinking how he had asked her the first time they met, "You ever been shanghaied?" then proceeded to do it. Taking her to one of the new houses under construction in Sherwood Forest after all the workmen had left for the day, giving her a boost through one of the windows, spreading a tarpaulin splattered with rose-colored paint on the bare floor for them.

If he showed up right now, she thought, I bet he would make love to me. No matter if he's married and got children and a house somewhere with a big mortgage on it that he needs his wife's income to pay for. Right now, he would want to love me.

She took it for granted that he would feel the same way about her that she felt about him. Because he was the first.

Just the smell of sawdust still made her horny.

I wonder if Cinque came by the shop today, she wondered as the thought of being horny made her mind immediately flit to her sculptured, broad-shouldered lover, Cinque. "It's not like he's eighteen or under the legal age or anything," she had told her sisters over and over about the shy local boy who had turned nineteen shortly after Betty hired him to do some quick handyman work in her beauty shop in East Mulberry. Now, she told her sisters primly as if she were doing good works for the church, she was trying to help him get into college. "He's really a very good poet, too," she insisted.

Emily and Annie Ruth had just laughed at their big sister's embarrassment over Cinque. They thought it was great and kept feeding her suggestions to try with him and then come back and share the details with them.

Following Annie Ruth's advice, Betty had one night tied Cinque to the big brass bed in her bedroom.

"Miss Lovejoy," he had gasped. "You gonna make me scream."

"Baby, I think that's the point," she had said, as breathless as he. "This is my house. We are alone. Yell all you want."

When she came back to herself, sitting there in Mudear's driveway looking out over her field of flowers, she nearly blushed and became flustered, putting out her cigarette hurriedly and avoiding her own gaze in the rearview mirror. It seemed Mudear crept into her thoughts at the most unexpected and inopportune times. Like now, she thought as she put the car in reverse, backed out to the empty street, and sped out of Sherwood Forest.

But she knew from talking with her sisters that Mudear did that with all of her girls. It seemed the kind of mother they had touched them all the way through their lives. Not just when they lived with her, not just when they spent time visiting her, but all through their lives. Mudear seeped into their lives and heads as easily as she had used them to go out into the world for her when they were children and she decided not to leave the house.

Betty knew that people in town had all manner of theories concerning Mudear and why she stayed in the house. Over the years, a mythology had grown up around her as if she were some mighty goddess like Oshun out of an ancient legend.

Some in Mulberry thought that Mudear was scared to leave the house. In recent years they had even been able to put a name to it: agoraphobia. As if Mudear were afraid of anything. Some
just knew
that her parents' situation was like that of Mr. Raymond and Miss Edna who lived in a small tin shack in East Mulberry. Mr. Raymond, who had had both his legs amputated because of sugar years before and who moved around in a beat-up wheelchair, kept his wife trapped in the house. As a child, Betty had heard two women ahead of her in the checkout line at the Colonial
grocery
store say as much about Mudear.

"Poor thing, Esther Lovejoy is just like Miss Edna. She a captive in that house. And Mr. Raymond, he beat Miss Edna, too."

"Well, hell if I'd let a man in a wheelchair beat my ass when I got two good legs and he ain't got none!"

"That what make it so sad. Miss Edna must stand there and
be
beat."

"Well, Esther probably getting her ass whipped in that house, too. That man only allow the girls to leave for school and errands. Yeah, Esther a captive in that house."

The woman paying at the cash register kept clearing her throat and batting her eyes in Betty's direction. But the women speaking wouldn't turn around and see that one of the subjects of their gossip was standing right behind them and just kept talking.

It had taught Betty a valuable lesson for someone who lived in a small town. After that, she never talked about anyone in her beauty shop or anywhere in public without looking over her shoulder first to make sure somebody's relative or friend wasn't listening nearby.

Some folks in town spread the rumor that Mudear had some horrible facial disfigurement that caused her to set herself apart from the world, ashamed of the way she looked. That one amused Betty the most because she knew that Mudear thought she was the prettiest thing going. And that her flawless brown complexion was a matter of inordinate pride with her. But the thing that amazed Betty was when she discovered that Mudear had somehow heard all these rumors, probably from her friend Carrie, and that none of them disturbed the self-contained woman. She even laughed at some of the rumors. Since the change, Mudear didn't give a damn what people thought of her.

Betty envied her for that. Over the years, she had grown to envy Mudear many things.

She certainly knew how to "delegate" work at least if not authority. She was the original "delegator." She delegated heavy garden chores and errands requiring a car to Poppa and most everything else to her eldest daughter.

I can just hear her now, Betty thought. Whatever comes up, Betty will handle it.

Let Betty do it. Let Betty do it. Let Betty pick that up, she big-boned. Let Betty show you how to iron a long sleeve. Let Betty...

Shit! Betty thought.
Let her?

When she pulled out of her parents' driveway, a light rain had begun to fall. She started to stop by her beauty shop in their old neighborhood in East Mulberry on her way home but thought, I don't have the strength to play boss tonight. And she headed home instead, knowing that her two assistant managers would have taken care of both businesses knowing there was a death in the family.

By the time she reached her own house at the top of Pleasant Hill, the light drizzle had grown to a drenching downpour. And Betty noted that Emily's red Datsun wasn't anywhere around. Even though Emily had left Mudear's house at least half an hour before her, Betty tried not to worry as she pulled into the long driveway and parked in the garage next to her big restored stone colonial house and let herself in the old maid's entrance.

Each time Emily was in town after a heavy and long rainfall, she went down to the overpass of the Spring Street bridge over the Ocawatchee River to see if the river was deep enough now to jump in and drown. She was a teenager when she first actually considered the act, but the riverbed always seemed to be muddy red or nearly dry, with hardly enough water rushing over it to come up to her chin. Her father, who loved to fish, said he remembered when the waters of the Ocawatchee regularly overflowed its banks, flooding the houses at the foot of Pleasant Hill, sending chickens and cats and dogs to higher ground. And the fat dark mullet could almost be caught with your hands on the banks. But Emily found that hard to believe.

From the relative protection of the overpass, she had been watching regularly since she was a teenager and had never seen any such phenomenon.

Just like Mudear said, "Don't pay no attention to nothing Poppa say. Poppa'll say anything," she'd think.

But she couldn't stop herself from checking. Checking was something she did all the time. She told herself that she did it to keep some kind of control in her own life. Otherwise, she felt like a child riding a new two-wheel bike down a hill without holding onto the handlebars.

When she came to a doorway wider than one door, she had to count with her foot five times before entering. It amazed her that no one seemed to notice her compulsive actions, as much as she carried them out during the day. But in the government building where she worked as an archivist, among her acquaintances, at her favorite gym where she had just started going to take care of the extra weight she had put on recently, no one pointed out her compulsions. Mudear was the only one who ever said, "Girl, what in the hell are you doing tapping your foot five times on the doorjamb? I have raised a fool." It never dawned on Emily that she had been doing these routines so long, touching a curl in the front of her hair five times, brushing down the hairs of her right eyebrow five times before checking a file, that they seemed part of her makeup, not some alien neurotic compulsions. Just how Emily was.

This evening, just as it had begun to rain again, Emily had headed instinctively for the banks of the Ocawatchee River when she left Mudear's house. It was where she liked to be when she had something to figure out as well as when she considered suicide. And now, with the news of Annie Ruth's pregnancy—a pregnancy that her younger sister had the nerve to think of letting go to completion—on top of Mudear's death, Emily knew she really had something to ponder.