Four of a Kind: A women's historical fiction (22 page)

It’s Civil Rights, where it’s at. Let’s just say I’m not their Equal but I can be Civil – real Civil. Do you get my drift, man?

Anything I’ve done – that I can talk about – is done here and I can do this in my sleep I’ve done it so much: changing countless sheets, washing and hanging endless panties, more women and kids coming in with the same sad stories. And no matter how hard I work,
Jesi Messy
, is Mama’s nickname for me. Where is the love, man?

And speaking of love, where the hell are the men? I don’t get it, why My Mamas make such a big deal about birth control clinics when they never do anything to get pregnant. Women Only: there are enough sanitary pads around here to choke the old well out back. I love men, man. Just call me
Jesi Yessy
. Thank God for The Pill.

I had my awakening and it wasn’t here. And that’s all I have to say, period.

GB hands me back this paper a second time. THIS IS GETTING OLD.

“Write more,” GB says. “I’m tired of your insolent attitude. You’ve contributed nothing thus far.” I write down just that, just what she said.

“Why are you staring at your Grandmama Bess like that?” Mama says to me, referring to GB. “Be respectful! And sit up straight, stop slouching,” I tell her I’m just thinking, but I’m really just waiting for GB to say more so I can write it down. What I’m really thinking is, Why does Mama sometimes look at me with hate in her eyes? Not Cool.

“Leave her be,” says GG. “At least she’s writing something.” For a Great Grandmother, Ruby is groovy.

“As long as she’s not writing about Bob Dylan again,” Mama says, taking a long draw from her cig and making me wish I had one. “That long-haired beatnik can’t carry a tune in a bucket and that’s all I hear her record player playing. He sounds like somebody is stepping on his tail.”

“‘It ain’t me, Babe, no, no, no, it ain’t me, Babe, it ain’t me you’re looking for, Babe,’” I sing softly as I write my Dylan’s words.

“How do you know what she’s writing about?” GB asks Mama. “No one is supposed to read the submissions except me. I have the papers locked in my wardrobe.”

Mama blushes and lies badly. “Shit. It’s not hard to figure out.”

“Just. For. You.” I stab the air with my pen with each word. “I wrote a Peter, Paul and Mary song just for you but it still isn’t good enough,” I say. “What I do is never good enough.” I start singing Bob Dylan:

“‘Come mothers and fathers throughout the land/And don’t criticize what you can’t understand/Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command/Your old road is rapidly agin’.”

“Katy, would you please stick to our agreement?” GB says to Mama, ignoring my off-tune. “Why must you go your own way and then learn things the hard way? And your language is trash ever since you returned from Georgia. (“Here we go again for the thousandth time,” Mama mutters.) For once do as I say,” GB continues, “and please stay out of my locked wardrobe.”

“Don’t we have enough damn secrets around here?” Mama snaps back. “I thought the whole point—”

“The whole point is to write exactly what’s on the chalkboard,” GB interrupts (it’s so cool to call Grandmama Bess by her initials – she hates it).

GB gets up and leaves the dining room and soon returns with tonight’s second bottle of red wine. Between you and me, I think they’ve all had enough and I don’t know how they can drink
something that looks like blood and tastes like vinegar. There are better things out there to make you Feel Good.

“Mercy, Bess, my head is swimming from the first bottle,” says GG, reading my thoughts – or is my great-grandmother being sneaky and reading my paper? She goes on with “You need to be careful of how much drink you take. It’s not good for your nerves. And what is another word for clothesline?”

“My nerves are fine, Mama,” GB says with a sigh, always in that it’s-hard-to-tolerate-you voice. “String. Another word is clothes string.” And when GB talks to my mama, Katy, she uses that voice that says I’m Superior. And when GB talks to me, I feel about five years old.

She refills their wine glasses but leaves me out. By this point I could use the buzz.

“Then why is there an empty wine glass in your room every morning?” Mama says to GB in a syrupy southern drawl. We all blush to that even though I’m thinking the same thing, especially since I’m the one who usually makes GB’s bed.

“I’ll forgive you for that, Katydid,” GB says to Mama after a moment of silence. Mama flinches at the down-low of hearing her whole name. “I realize that asking you all to write the truth exactly as it happened may have opened a Pandora’s Box – it’s causing you to be far too outspoken. But I simply won’t hear anymore.” GB stands and gathers her papers. “If you want to say it, write it down. I’ll finish my chapter in my bedroom.” She picks up her wine glass and then reconsiders and sets it back down. She leaves the room with her head in the clouds, Miss Mount Everest.

They had said all that too fast and I’m writing it down as quick as I can. Now it gets quiet.

You know what? We’re all yappy poodles that nip at each other but never sink our teeth into any meaningful rap; that’s where it’s at. Maybe it’s because we hear enough sad stories from the down-and-out women who come in here that we’ve become like clams, man, so that none of that irritation will penetrate. Whooa! Deep Thought.

“Jesi, you started this,” Mama says, drumming her pen on the table. “If you’d be more cooperative—”

Uh-oh. This lecture has lasted a lifetime.

“Leave her be!” GG says in an exasperated tone. “As Jesi says, just go with the blow!”

I laugh for the first time today. “It’s go with the
flow
, GG, not blow!”

Mama laughs too. It’s easier to do when GB leaves the room.

I start fidgeting, my leg brace clanging against the chair leg, waiting for somebody to talk.

Mama gives me a flash of her overused
irritated look
because she hates me reminding her that I wear an ugly brace - which of course is why I do it. She stands up in a hurry, gathering up her papers and drinking down the rest of her wine. “Maybe finishing my chapter in the bedroom isn’t such a bad idea. Nor is taking a glass of wine up there with me.” She grins at both of us as she refills her glass. “I got her that time!” She walks out in her knee-high “kinky boots”, a lookalike to her heroine Cathy Gale in
The Avengers
. Lucky, lucky.

“And don’t forget to turn out your light!” I call out, mocking GB. Mama leaving her light on all night drives GB ape-shit.

And Mama has such a cool smile, when she wants to. Wish I’d gotten that from her but they tell me I have more of a solemn look like my great-aunt Opal. That’s kind of freaky. In that old picture, Opal looks about a hundred years old and she had about a hundred kids. And we know I ain’t never having kids.

GG and I sit there for a few minutes writing nothing. She has her hands in her lap and giving me her own cool smile; I guess that’s where Mama got hers, skipping generations (GB didn’t pass down a smile, that’s for damn sure). Like I said, GG is such a groovy great-granny.

I lean toward her and whisper, “Are you really telling it like it is?”

“I’m shocking myself!” GG says with a laugh. She leans in too, and whispers, “You may find a key under a china vase on a bedroom mantel right next to
the
wardrobe. Go find out for yourself. But you didn’t hear that from me.”

I probably shouldn’t write that down since GB will read this but what the hell. She won’t give GG a hard time about it, no matter how she puts on The Bitch. In this family, shit only rolls downhill.

“Are you reading what we write, GG?”

“Mercy, no,” GG answers. “My eyes are too weak to both read and write, so I save them to write. Besides, I love surprise endings!”

If GG’s story is as juicy as she claims, maybe sometime I’ll write some real happenings, man, like, The Truth, if nothing more than to entertain myself.

B
y the time my brother, Jesse, and I reached the farmyard I thought my heart was going to squeeze in two. Like an invisible clothes string wrapped there and its other end strung to my front door. The farther we plodded, the tighter the string became. I could barely breathe from the pull when Jesse at last heaved back on the reins between the dusty red barn and the weathered-gray backdoor of the farmhouse. Scattering chickens and dogs announced our arrival, cows and the horses made their replies, the screen door squeaked and slammed, and I simply tried to adjust myself into a presentable human for the onslaught of family fuss.

Edith came out drying her hands on her ever-present apron. “Why, Ruby, what on earth!” Although close to my age, I looked at her as being much older. Thanks to Jesse, her once-thin figure had thickened permanently in the middle from nine pregnancies, six of which produced large healthy boys. Her hair grayed like their back-door, but more than that it was those penetrating brown eyes that held ancient wisdom. She gave me a hasty hug, always in a hurry. “You’re as pretty as you ever were,” she said in her habit, scrutinizing my every inch, her eyes asking,
Is everything all right?
She patted my cheek with a callused palm.

Mama trailed behind, the arthritis in her hip causing a slight limp, her height shrinking, her back bending a bit more each time I saw her, like gravity was having more effect on her than years were.

“Ruby, honey, what is wrong?” Mama squeezed my arm, making sure I was alive. “Has one of the children taken ill?” She wiped her
dish towel at a dirt smudge on my sleeve. “Did something catch fire in your kitchen?”

I didn’t know what to say and afraid to cry, I cast a helpless glance over to Jesse who was off to the barn lugging milk cans, and then I looked down at Edith. She continued to watch as if she were studying tea leaves in her tea cup. This was her nature until she knew what to do. She seemed to hone in on reading action, not words, a necessary skill for her boys’ storytelling of who was right or wrong. “Boys, say hello to Aunt Ruby and go back to your breakfast,” she said without wavering her study of me. The boys had swarmed to the screen door and jammed there. They disappeared one by one back to the kitchen.

Without so many faces staring at me, I breathed a little easier.

“Child, come in and eat.” Mama said firmly. One thing Mama knew for sure and that was that good food soothed the heart of everybody.

But I was humiliated enough with my story, let alone of my appearance. “Could I wash first?”

Besides, I needed more time to think of how to tell them. The dirt soaked in to sin and I suddenly felt unworthy of my Christian family. I knew very well how they believed that the woman’s place is in the home; I’d been fed that as a side plate to the good food.

I went up the backstairs and knocked on sister Opal’s door. She answered with a mouth in an o-shape of dismay but quickly recovered. “Ruby, your hair! My goodness, I haven’t seen you wear your hair down since we were in school. You look so young!”

“Yes, it is the latest fashion, along with wrinkled clothing,” I said dryly.

She smiled at that as if doing me a favor and returned to her mirror still holding her hair in place and finished pinning the complicated braided knot that only Opal could create. She topped it off with a comb trimmed in opal stones, a gift from Papa before his death. That same Christmas he’d given a similar comb to me with rubies, and one to Mama with her namesake of garnet stones, all to represent “Papa’s gems”.

She had dressed for an outing in a cool silk taffeta day-dress colored in light rose. What a lovely dress it was, with lace she’d sewn on the sleeves and around the neck, and long lace strips were sown in even intervals from the waist down to the hem. Longer than fashion to her ankles yet Opal was such an excellent seamstress, she could design dresses that could become the fashion if she’d wanted to. She knew how to distract from her own large bosom and thick waist.

As she rustled past to fetch me water for the basin, she left behind a scent of rose water. Without meaning to, she diminished me down to a lump of barn dirt brought in by the boots of the boys.

I worried needlessly about how to tell them of my participation in the ‘devil’s workers’, as our preacher called the suffragists. As I entered the kitchen hitching the too-long skirt of my sister’s loaned house dress, I saw there on the table in plain view a newspaper. On the front page was a picture of my group in the parade with me clearly recognizable. Worse, I looked angry, my mouth open, my sign lifted above my head, one knee lifted high showing my white petticoat and scuffed boot. Headline above the picture read, ‘
Evolution: Girl, Government, or God?
’, written by a Mr. Edrite Formen.