Authors: Lisa Howorth
“Breaking a perfectly good plate,” Evagreen muttered, stiffly lowering herself to her knees in front of the dollhouse. “Not even on accident.” From beneath the diminutive claw-footed bathtub she pulled a paintbrush and began gently dusting the dollhouse surfaces. When this was complete to her satisfaction, she took a Q-tip, dipped it in the lavender oil, and carefully swabbed the tiny rosewood and cherry furniture and the walnut wainscoting and chair rails, turning the Q-tip to the dry end to buff it all down to a rich, miniature luster. Sometimes Evagreen would arrange the rubbery play people and beds, tables, and chairs, narrating to herself: “They’s a new baby. Everyone got to move around.” Or, “They mama died. Good riddance. They grandmama got to move in an’ take over.” She longed to redecorate the old dollhouse, to cheer the place up and paint over the faded old miniscule forget-me-not wallpaper in a warm, bright color, peach or aqua or sunflower; crochet some cozy acrylic granny squares for rugs—you could
wash
those—and throw away the stiff, stained little “Aubussons” with their ugly moth holes.
The dollhouse furniture was quality, Evagreen knew that, and although she herself preferred furniture styles that were more substantial and more comfortable, she appreciated the beautiful woods and craftsmanship of the pieces. All the little drawers worked, tiny gateleg tables opened, the cast-iron oven door folded down; it was something for things so small to work so well. “Hmph. Not like around here in
this
house. They’s some nice furniture, family things, but knobs gone, veneer peeling, drawers warp and don’t close, even if I do run over ’em with bar soap. Don’t nobody care.
Umn
.” Although Evagreen was happy to fail to notice cobwebs and dust bunnies and fingerprints around the real house, and tarnish could darken the Thorntons’ silver and brass, for Evagreen, the dollhouse and its family was a model of good housekeeping and family behavior, and she planned to keep it that way.
Eliza took little notice of Evagreen’s efforts except to remark to her mother, “Mom, my dollhouse smells like you when you get out of the shower.”
“Does it?” Mary Byrd had answered. She’d vaguely noticed the scent in her daughter’s room, too. “I thought you were just poaching my lavender.”
“Right, Mom. Like I would
really want
to smell like you.”
“What was I thinking?” her mother had lightly replied. It never paid to take a daughter’s insults seriously.
Evagreen finished straightening in Eliza’s and William’s rooms and very casually cleaned their bathroom. The children’s environment was a mixture of filth and persnickety hygiene. Socks could be worn for days, hair and toothpaste slobber could coat the tub and sink, boogers could be wiped on the corner of the bed sheets, William even had what he thought was a secret booger crop on his wall, but yet each child
had
to have a clean towel every day, and in Eliza’s case two: one just for a hair turban. Despite what she perceived to be a spoiled upbringing, Evagreen felt a strong, if not deep, affection for the two Thornton children and blamed their shortcomings and flaws on Mary Byrd. “Don’t go to church, that’s why. Animals live in the house, eat and sleep on the table, the chair, everwhere. Things be pile up all over.” There was a long, long litany of cause-and-effect about the Thorntons—at least this generation—that Evagreen recited to herself every Thursday. Basically it came down to how far white people had fallen, and how foolishly they brought so many of their problems all on themselves.
With her own family, her own four children, Evagreen had been strict to the point of military: church, school, after-school jobs, college. She and L. Q. were there for them in the mornings, after school, and at night, even though it meant L. Q. had to take the graveyard shift at Chambers Stove. Maybe “The Dream” hadn’t quite been theirs, but it sure was going to be those kids’. No doubt.
Evagreen had been cleaning house for Mary Byrd and Charles since they married, and she was something of a legacy. Her Auntee Rosie had taken care of Charles’s old great-aunt Rosalie for most of Rosalie’s spinsterhood, the two becoming like an old married couple as their years together totted up. Totally in tune with one another’s personalities and foibles and tricks, and united against outside interference, they became a formidable two-headed beast, not to be taken lightly or for granted. The two roses: a thorny totem of the Old South. Occasionally there would be a falling-out. When Rosalie’s health began to flag, they almost broke up over Rosie’s desperate attempt to trick Rosalie into eating. After exhausting every nourishing excitement she could think up or cook, Rosie had offered Rosalie ants on a log—celery sticks slathered with peanut butter and studded with raisins, the heinous “salad” of elementary school lunches—and this had been such a grievous affront to Rosalie’s sophisticated palate that she had rallied and regained strength out of sheer indignation, a response that Rosie had probably anticipated. The two didn’t speak for weeks. When Rosie’s family asked why she tolerated Miss Rosalie’s uncalled-for wrath, Rosie only replied with a wink, “That all right. Ever mornin’ I spits in her coffee.” They were much more like Gertrude and Alice than Morgan Freeman and Jessica Tandy. In fact, they were both more like Alice B. Toklas: small, sinewy, dark, and prickly as mock orange.
Evagreen had a lot of her Auntee Rosie in her. Mary Byrd, someone from away who had just married in, with no breeding, no idea of how things worked in an old family in a small Mississippi town, did not know her place, was never going to measure up to the examples set by the women in the Thornton family, most notably Charles’s sainted mother, Lydia—everyone called her Liddie—and her sister, Evelyn. Evagreen knew that Mary Byrd knew the truth of the matter, too. Didn’t count that she was from Virginia; as far as Evagreen was concerned, anything north of Louisiana, Mississippi, or Alabama was
north
. Even Georgia. “Atlanta full of gangster trash, pervert baby-killers. Might as well be Chicago,” she’d say. And even Alabama didn’t hardly count: “Not enough black folks to make it a decent place to live. Just rednecks and cracker trash, mud and clay,” was her feeling about it.
Evagreen gathered up a bag of bathroom and bedroom garbage—empty Gatorade and shampoo bottles, Mountain Dew and Coke cans, a few empty bubble packs and Styrofoam chunks that some of the children’s mysterious electronic gadgetry had come in. She stomped on the garbage bag to mash the cans and plastic down so that Mary Byrd wouldn’t notice that things weren’t being recycled. “Recycle—more crazy white people’s notions. What the matter with the dump and burning, way it always been done?” She gave a last satisfied look at the dollhouse.
Downstairs Evagreen surveyed the kitchen, taking a moment to stick one pointed fingernail into her small, perfect helmet of a hairdo for a thoughtful scratch. She began to rinse and wash the coffee machine, taking the cleaned drip basket and placing it far back in a little-used cupboard. It
could
be seen but would have to be looked for. She considered that this might be pushing it a little, since just the previous week she had hidden one of Mary Byrd’s favorite earrings in the same way, and not long before that she had allowed—had
encouraged
—one of the dogs to chew up a high heel, a prized Jimmy Choo, by rubbing the tiniest dab of bacon fat around the inside. “Only a ho gone wear a shoe like that, anyway. Four hundred dollar shoe.
Umn
,” Evagreen rationalized. “It be Jimmy
Chooed
now, all right,” she’d laughed. Even though Mary Byrd had the sense to put two and two together about these mutinies she was still not in a position to do without her, Evagreen knew. Charles wouldn’t have it. She began loading the dishwasher, noticing with grudging approval that this morning anyway the family had apparently had bacon and eggs for breakfast instead of sugary cereal for the children or that birdseed mess Charles and Mary Byrd ate. No meat, nothing hot, that part of the problem, she thought. Don’t have strength to get through the day. And bring in pizza, Taco Bell, that nasty fish for supper—terrible square little bites—not even cooked.
Japanese—umn.
The world done had enough
Japanese.
Pitiful, just pitiful. Evagreen moved on to the drier and began removing warm, fragrant bed sheets. She said out loud, “And don’t know how to fold a bottom sheet, hang a towel. Nasty things round the house and on the walls.
Art,
she say.
Umn
.
I
say
pestilence
. Just pestilence.”
In the master bedroom, the phone rang.
Jack Ernest came to with the sickening but sexy sensation of something foul and warm and wet on his face. His aunt’s shameful little Yorkie was standing on his chest, feet foursquare, lapping at Ernest’s mouth. With one hand he chucked the dog across the room where it landed with a wheezing squeak like a child’s rubber squeeze toy. He reached for a Marlboro; after a smoke he’d consider full consciousness. Since his return from Bosnia he’d switched to filtered, not entirely unconcerned about his health. Eventually he would rise, shower, and descend to the kitchen where he would have breakfast with his aunt and grandmother. Then he would go back into his room and write about the war. He did this eighteen days out of the month and had accumulated most of his novel, to be titled “It Tolls for Me.” Every other weekend or so he went up to town, where the university was, to party. That was what he planned to do Saturday.
In a not-so-far-back part of his mind he hoped to cause his path to cross that of Mary Byrd Thornton, whom he enjoyed imagining he loved because he should not. If not Mrs. T, there might be a splendid array of substitutes. But it took something away for Ernest if it came without enough resistance. It was as much about the hunt as anything else. Like a Pink Palace steak never could taste as good as something he’d stalked in the woods for hours, brought down himself, dragged out, field dressed, and grilled under the stars. He relished things that tried to get away. That’s why they called it game, right? Trophy meal, trophy fuck. Elusion and trouble were his condiments of choice. He cared about Byrd in his own way. He
liked
her. She was smart enough and fun and cynical; she shared his view that many things in life were bullshit. She looked good enough—she was pretty in a schoolmarmish way—but there was a sort of animal, wildlife thing about her that Ernest found enticing. He supposed he was just pussy-struck, as usual, but he could detect something dark about her that needed encouraging; something wounded and self-destructive that would be so sweet to take advantage of and would make her his perfect partner in sexual crime. She’d asked him to back off, and he could, but it was more interesting not to. She didn’t mean it anyway.
From downstairs, women’s kitchen chatter wafted up with the warm aromas of bacon and coffee. Best smell in the world, he thought, then re-thought: well, maybe second best.
Ernest sat down at the table with the women. Sisters, but they could not have been more different. Aunt Anna, Ernest’s grandmother, whom he called “Antenna” because as a kid that’s what he thought his older cousins were calling her, was conservative and provincial in all her notions but first with the latest fads at the mall, wore a wind suit—a plastic abomination of turquoise and fuchsia geometric designs. Ernest thought that after jogging suits, which people now actually wore out in public as if they were real clothes, wind suits were one of the most hideous affronts to the human body since leisure suits. He had not forgotten the jarring sight of those, like garbage men outfits, worn with white shoes and white belts by his grandfather and uncles, or the cheesy feel of their polyester Sansabelt slacks. Even at six or seven, running around shirtless and shoeless, he wanted to look like a frat guy: khakied, tweedy, club-tied; the perfect rebelsexual. Or like his mother’s brother, Uncle Pothus, who never wore anything that he hadn’t bought at the Brooks Brothers or Rosenstein’s in New Orleans.
Antenna had had only one husband, Toy, who had simply sat down under a pine on the fifth hole of the Hatchatalla Country Club golf course one day and never got up again. She was as sad and prim and prissy as her sister Ella King was loose and generous of disposition.
Ella King on the other hand looked like Aunt Bee—hen-breasted, tiny of foot and voice—but she held advanced ideas and had a sharp sense of humor. She had had two husbands and four children and was never without an escort for a movie or church event. She enjoyed David Letterman and smoked Parliaments. The recessed filter kept you from getting lip cancer.
“You know, Jacky, if you’re going to party this weekend, there’s a big winter storm coming—it’s all across the TV,” said Antenna.
“It’s true—Dolores called and she watches that new weather channel day and night,” said Ella King.
“You might could use those tire chains,” Antenna said. “The ones we had for that last ice storm in nineteen seventy-three.” She rocked the skillet back and forth to distribute the grease.
“I’ve got plans for those chains, my good grandmother,” Ernest said. “And they don’t include putting them on the car.” He winked salaciously at Ella King, who laughed.
“Honestly, Jack. What a white-trash thing to say,” said Antenna. She sniffed to signify indignation.
Ernest ignored her, slurping his coffee and wondering how he could find Teever to drive him around up there. He hoped he wasn’t in jail again. His mouth full of a third egg-and-bacon biscuit, he asked, “Whersh Pothush?”