Everything She Ever Wanted (42 page)

mother chose my wedding day to announce to everyone that she was

leaving my father.
 
She had a restraining order against him and he had

to leave at once.
 
He was absolutely dumbfounded.
 
He didn't see it

coming.
 
Even twenty years after, I think he still wondered what he did

wrong.
 
He was there, giving me away, and then he was gone.

Banished.

My mother had a new life planned, and he didn't belong in it."

Her dramatic announcement at her daughter's wedding was vintage Pat.

She did not like anyone else having the spotlight.

At some point in the months after they all moved into the house on Tell

Road, she had apparently come to the realization that Gil could never

provide her with what she needed.
 
He had worked three jobs,

complaining all the time.
 
He was a fool.
 
He had been so enthusiastic

about the new place, and it turned out to be just an ordinary house in

the woods.
 
He had no vision; he had no sense of grandeur.
 
Besides,

she didn't like the way he drank beer.
 
She decided he was probably an

alcoholic, while in reality he was only a moderate drinker.
 
When she

found a cache of beer cans he had buried out in back, she was sure she

was right.

Both her daughters were married now, and she was only thirty-three

years old.
 
She could do so much better.

Pat became a very young grandmother only two days after Susan married

Bill Alford.
 
Debbie was hugely pregnant at her sister's wedding and

went into labor a day later.
 
Every generation of Siler women in memory

had included fifteen-year-old mothers, and the latest was no

exception.

Her mother advised her to stay home as long as possible; complications

developed and Debbie had to give birth by cesarean section to her baby

girl, Dawn.

Later, five generations of Siler women posed for Susan's camera; Mama

Siler was eighty-six, Boppo was fifty-two, Pat was thirty-three, Debbie

was fifteen, and Dawn was a month old.

Oddly, not one of them smiled.

Pat became a grandmother again when Susan gave birth to her son Sean

the next year in April.
 
"Mom just wouldn't let me go to the hospital

when my water broke," Susan recalled.
 
"She kept insisting that I eat

this great big steak and relax.
 
Boppo just paced and smoked, telling

Mom I had to go.
 
I finally got there less than three hours before Sean

was born."

The house on Tell Road was much less crowded now that Gil, Susan,

Debbie, and Gary had moved out.
 
Only Ronnie, twelve, was left, and he

would have been delighted to live with his father, but Pat wouldn't

allow it.
 
Gil had ruined all their plans for a wonderful country home

and he didn't deserve his son.
 
Pat allowed Ronnie to do pretty much

what he pleased.
 
She bought him a motor scooter, and then, when he was

fourteen, she let him fake a driver's license and he was off driving

all over Atlanta.

The colonel was now responsible for the upkeep of Pat's "plantation."

And Margureitte maintained her air of quiet dignity, smiling her frozen

smile as if her life were proceeding exactly as she wanted it to.
 
She

would brook no criticism of Pat, nor would she complain about her

diminished life-style to anyone beyond Debbie or Susan.
 
They knew how

Boppo mourned for the home she had left behind, but appearances were

everything and Margureitte made everyone believe that she adored living

out in the woods even if her determined smile cracked her face.

Pat and Gil were soon divorced, but that was not the only change in

Pat's life.
 
It was the early seventies and long gone were the drab

skirts and blouses and the bobbed hair of her twenties.
 
She threw away

her glasses and wore contact lenses.

She had looked radiant at Susan's wedding in a silver and moss green

brocade coatdress that caught the emerald of her eyes, and she really

began to blossom now that she was a newly single woman.

She teased and back-combed her thick honey-colored hair until it added

a good four or five inches to her height.
 
She wore makeup that

accentuated her eyes and full lips.

Nobody would ever mistake her for somebody's grandmother.

She was a hot-looking woman.
 
In fact, Pat Taylor was already something

of a sly conversation piece among the men who moved in the horse show

circuit: the owners, trainers, veterinarians.
 
In her slow southern way

she was a shameless flirt, but none of them bragged that they had slept

with her.
 
If any of them had, they only joked and lied and said that

they would like to.
 
They were all married.

Pat's metamorphosis continued.
 
As her teased hair rose ever higher,

her skirts grew shorter.
 
They barely skimmed her panty line.
 
She made

halter tops and wore them without a bra so that her full breasts swayed

like ripe peaches clinging to the tree.

She wore tight shiny vinyl boots that drew attention to her slender

legs.
 
For herself, she designed some very short wraparound dresses,

cutting the bodice in such a deep V at the front that men tripped over

their own horses as they peered at her breasts.
 
She also liked Tom

Jones and Engelbert Humperdinck.
 
She listened to love songs as avidly

as any teenager.
 
She especially loved "Please Release Me" and "What's

New, Pussycat?"
 
There was no question about it.
 
Pat Taylor was

sending out signals that she was most approachable.

Pat had affairs and fleeting assignations with a number of men.
 
Boppo

and Papa pretended they didn't know.
 
Susan and Debbie knew and were

embarrassed.
 
But their newly emancipated mother didn't care.
 
In her

mind, she had been held back for twenty years, suffocated in a

loveless, go-nowhere marriage.
 
Her changed appearance caused ripples

at the Siler Family Reunion in August of 1971.
 
The Righteous

Sisters-who had always adored her-were shocked at the skimpiness of her

bikini bathing suit and the miniskirts she wore.
 
The beautiful little

Patty Padcliffe was now the beautiful Pat Taylor.
 
She knew she was a

great-looking woman and she believed that men-or rather, a man-was the

only avenue to her heart's desire.

That's what she wanted, and she went after it.
 
As one of her lovers

later remarked, "There wasn't any way you could get away from her, even

if you wanted to-which I didn't.
 
Once she made up her mind she was

going to bed with you, you didn't have a chance.

She liked sex."

Pat needed a man.
 
She wasn't trained to do any kind of work, nor had

she ever worked.
 
She was an old-fashioned kind of woman, she always

said, content to do her sewing and fancy work.
 
She had only a junior

high school education and she didn't read anything but historical

romance novels, stories about Joan of Arc and Robin Hood, and Victorian

poetry.
 
She could sit a horse prettily, but not as competently as she

claimed.

For a southern girl, she wasn't a very good cook.
 
Her own tastes ran

to chili dogs, tuna sandwiches, tomato soup, and takeout Chinese

food.

If her mother didn't cook for her, she would eat bread spread with

pimento cheese or peanut butter or a tomato and mayonnaise sandwich for

supper.

Pat was no longer a military dependent, and without Boppo and Papa she

would have had no means of support at all.
 
It would seem that the

acquisition of a plantation would be the least of her worries; she

needed to find a job.
 
"I guess I'll have to work at the waffle house,"

she often cried to her mother.
 
"I can't do anything else."
 
Working in

a fast-food restaurant seemed, to Pat, the depths of degradation.

nd then, suddenly, any job was out of the question for Pat.

In April of 1972 she fell from one of the horses they still had at Tell

Road, and it stomped her.
 
Her injuries freed emboli (blood clots) to

float freely through her bloodstream.
 
There was real concern that she

might suffer a pulmonary embolism-fatal within minutes if it blocked

the flow of blood between her heart and lungs.
 
She complained of such

severe pain that it took Percodan and morphine to control it.
 
Her

doctors warned Pat,and Boppo that she would have to beware of embolisms

for some years, possibly for the rest of her life.

Invalidism suited Pat.
 
She looked especially fetching as she rested

languidly on the veranda, the heat-or a touch of feverdotting her upper

lip and forehead with moisture.
 
No one urged her to get up and get on

with her life-not with a wayward blood clot threatening to end it

without warning.
 
Boppo was, of course, even more solicitous of her

daughter, catering to her every whim.

Pat finally had surgery at Emory University's hospital.
 
In an

extremely delicate operation, surgeons inserted minuscule "umbrellas"

through her jugular vein, tiny catch basins that would stop a blood

clot before it rushed irrevocably into her pulmonary artery.
 
She spent

some time in intensive care but gradually improved.

Another catastrophe befell the family in August of 1972.
 
The

Radcliffes, Pat and Ronnie, the Alfords, and the Coles traveled as

usual to White Lake, North Carolina, for the Siler Family Reunion,

taking several cars.
 
On the way back home, the car carrying the Coles

and Ronnie had a terrible accident.
 
"It happened just south of the

North Carolina border," Debbie remembered.
 
"We had eaten there, and we

changed drivers, and I drove .
 
. . and everybody went to sleep.
 
. .