Her Own Place (12 page)

Mae Lee shook her head sadly. “Poor Clairene, I'll bet her
old man has gone and overbit too big a chew of tobacco again. She's going to have to sing more than ‘Amazing Grace' to hang on to that big new white Lincoln he's tooling around in all over town.”

“I don't know how I even have time to fill my head with someone else's problems,” Ellabelle said, “I'm up against so much. My children are putting me through right much now. You got good children, Mae Lee.” Ellabelle seemed really sad. “Guess it does no good to talk about it, though.”

“Children always seem to offer some problems,” Mae Lee mused. “I heard my Taylor's spoiled wife Bettina threatened to pack up and go back to her mother's.” Mae Lee drew a deep breath. “I am careful not to interfere with my daughter-in-law and my grandchildren. The only problem, to tell the truth, that I'd have with Bettina leaving is that she'd soon be running right back to my son. Taylor is not only a fine schoolteacher, he's a fine husband!”

Mae Lee softly fingered the pin on her dress. A découpage photo of a grinning little boy, her grandson, Dallace's child, lay enshrined in a pseudoantique cameo pin wreathed in tiny plastic pearls. A printed nametag was never necessary for Mae Lee. The picture of her grandson was her identity, her reason for being. Mae Lee was the grandmother of Tread Wallace.

Mae Lee offered no apology for singling out her grandson for extra praise. He was the firstborn male of her grandchildren, not to mention being very special besides. She thought of the times when, as a youngster, he would beg and cry to come stay with her, beg and cry to not have to leave. She loved his little sister Shella, too, but disapproved of the way
she was being raised. She was a spoiled brat. “She is a precocious little girl,” her daughter Dallace had tried to explain. Her daughter may have had a lot of learning to be able to become Dr. Wallace, Mae Lee thought, but she sure raised a rotten kid in the process.

Unlike Ellabelle, Mae Lee had not used her tears for Clairene's singing. She needed them now. “My grandson,” she moaned softly, cupping her hand over his picture, “my fine baby boy. He's got an earring in his ear. An earring. And you know something, his mama is to blame. Yes, my daughter Dallace is at fault.”

“For heaven's sake, Mae Lee, the boy is almost fourteen years old. You know how these teenagers go out for these stylish fads,” said Ellabelle.

“Style? You know deep down in your heart what people think.”

“People don't think nothing if it's in their left ear.”

“All I know is for the first and only time in my entire life, I'm not sorry that my mama is dead. I never believed I would or could ever say this, but I know if my mama wasn't dead, this would kill her. Would kill her for sure.”

“Mae Lee, I'm gonna tell you like they do on TV—‘You can see what it's doing to someone else, but you can't see what it's doing to you.' Let it go. Listen to me, somebody who knows.”

Mae Lee looked at her friend. She believed Ellabelle remembered everything she'd seen and heard on TV. But she couldn't always put too much stock in some things she had to say. How could she? There is not much there for a woman who answers when asked if she has a middle initial, “I don't know
whether I have one or not. I have a middle name, though. Maybe you could use it instead.” It seemed Ellabelle's chest of knowledge was filled entirely with what she'd learned from watching television shows.

For a few moments, Mae Lee was lost in thought. Indeed, she was a little disturbed that she could blame her daughter, with all the unhappiness she was going through. Dallace was struggling under a load of problems too heavy for her to face alone at her age. She knew all too well how much Dallace needed her counsel—far and beyond what she even realized. It didn't matter that Dallace was over forty now; in the mothering department there are no age limits.

She had been startled, but not overly saddened, by her daughter's decision to divorce her husband. When Dallace told her about the child's picture she'd accidentally found in her husband's wallet, Mae Lee wished she'd been more understanding, more so than her mama, Vergie, had been with her. But she'd been angry, angry that her daughter in all her years of marriage had considered herself too proper and high-class to look through her husband's wallet every now and then. That was just one more form of the night work a wife had to perform. All she had to do was not have a headache, and she would be sure of a free chance to search his pockets and wallet when he fell asleep. Her mama had taught her all those kind of things long ago. But back then, daughters listened to their mamas.

Even if she had told her, Mae Lee didn't believe her daughter would have listened. Her guarded daughter was, after all, Dr. Dallace Wallace, a professional person who claimed she
always respected a person's privacy. So she'd found the picture only when her husband asked her to hand him his wallet and it fell out, a picture of a little boy whose Asian heritage could not be denied, nor could it disguise the genes of her husband.

When she confronted him, he readily admitted that, yes, that was his son. Mae Lee thought of her grandchildren, the mental image of the missing-tooth smile of her pretty, ponytailed granddaughter, Shella, and the impish grin of her little Tread, with his second-growth of buckteeth, flashed before her.

Lately Mae Lee's daughters had always been reminding her that her thinking was not on the “same page” as theirs. Well, in that case she wanted to tell her daughters that on her “page,” and on the same for her friends, the child was a “you-know-what.” In her eyes the father was no longer married to her daughter. As far as she was concerned, her daughter's marriage had ended when her husband slept outside his marriage bed. This is the eighties, she wanted to say; be a smart young woman.

She wanted personally to hurt her son-in-law for what he'd said to her daughter Dallace about the braces that were so badly needed for his son Tread's teeth. He had said that the money spent on the outside son was better served. After all, he didn't want to alter their son's looks; “He's a spitting image of his old man,” he had laughed, adding with a roguish wink, “hell have some pretty young thing as wild over him as you are over me.”

It pained her that in recent years her precious daughter
had been hanging on to such worthless trash. Changing to crazy hairstyles, spreading layers of makeup on her face, as if she were competing with a seven-layer pineapple cake, and of course there were the miniskirts. A wife trying to force a chaser of miniskirted females to turn around and chase her. Dallace's saving grace was her legs; she had great legs, legs like her mama's.

Poor Dallace. It didn't matter that she had “doctor” before her name, or “Ph.D.” after it, or wherever they put it. She was a pitiful woman. Dallace had been stricken with a “mother's affliction,” thorns in a mother's side. Mae Lee wanted so desperately to gather her child and grandchildren to her side, and give them the down-home grandma comforts, sunshine-fresh ironed sheets that smelled of the fragrant lilac talcum powder she always sprinkled on mattress covers; her home cooking; long hours on the front porch.

Ellabelle offered more advice. “Remember, when we were coming along we did plenty, plenty of stuff that would have worried our parents to death, but we turned out all right.”

“Speak for yourself,” Mae Lee retorted. But then she relented. “It's true,” she finally agreed. “But for the most part they didn't know about it. I wonder which is better, to know or not to know? I think not knowing keeps your hair black longer.”

“Or else, not allow a gray hair in the county and do like you're doing, buying out the drugstore to cover the gray,” laughed Ellabelle. She slapped her arm; a whining mosquito raised itself. “These mean old boogers are starting to act nasty. They say only the females bite. That figures. Guess I'll head
home and turn in. Oh, Lordy,” she groaned, “I can tell I'm getting old. I'm starting to get pains where I didn't even know I had a place.”

“You're going to end up on a kidney machine if you don't start drinking more water. The only liquid you get comes from a can.”

“How do you know that all I drink is soft drinks?”

“It's all I ever see you drink. I don't believe you can swallow water. You even take your blood pressure pills with Pepsi.”

“Well,” Ellabelle said, “you won't have to worry about it no more. I'll never bring my cans of soda again. Not as long as I live on the face of this earth. You are sitting here talking behind my back. I can't stand that.”

“Ellabelle, we are face to face,” Mae Lee reminded her.

When they finished laughing, Ellabelle said, “I've been aiming to tell you I saw Fred Rivers's widow the other day. She's nothing but skin and bones. Going down fast, she's going to worry herself to death over. . . .” Her voice trailed off. “I know where we all need to take our problems. I know exactly where I'm taking mine.”

Mae Lee grunted, thinking, if you're planning on taking them to the Lord tonight, be prepared to wait a spell for help. Because with just the calls coming in from Rising Ridge alone, I don't think he could handle them, even with “call waiting.”

One spring afternoon in 1987, Mae Lee's son, Taylor, made her aware that there was a world beyond her front porch.

Having suffered a badly wounded knee and leg during the war, he was eternally grateful for hospital volunteers, and now he urged her to make the decision to volunteer down at the hospital.

“Mama,” he coaxed, “you need to get out and do things. You're too intelligent to sit around all day and do nothing worthwhile. If you aren't careful, you are going to front-porch yourself to death.”

“Strange, my girls don't feel I'm all that intelligent.”

“What do they know?”

“They know I wouldn't fit in with all the white ladies down there. That's what they know.”

Mae Lee thought of the countless hours when she did nothing but while away the afternoons on her front porch, the hours of meaningless talk with Ellabelle that all too often
turned to mean gossiping. Maybe that was why she was beginning to think her mind was slipping away. Maybe since she wasn't using it, the old mind may have thought she didn't need it anymore. Maybe she did have too much free time to think and worry. She'd always known that a person should keep busy.

She smoothed a few strands of hair back from her forehead and fanned her face a little. “I've never done anything like that before, son. Besides, I don't know any of the ladies down at the hospital,” she said.

“That's the least that should hold you back, Mama. You've never met a stranger in your life,” Taylor said.

Mae Lee shook her head. “I don't know if it would work for me. It would sort of be like moving next door to Mrs. Grant, in that rich neighborhood she lives in.”

Taylor swirled the ice in his tea around and around—clink, clink. His mama watched him knit his brows in a worried frown, his jaws moving in a seesaw fashion. She shook her head. “Stop gritting your teeth, son.”

He flashed a broad grin. His mama stared. He was so good-looking, it was pitiful. Looked so much like his daddy it hurt.

“What you thinking about, baby?” she asked after a minute.

“Thinking about what you said. How you probably wouldn't fit in at the hospital.” Taylor was dead serious. “Lots of black women are volunteers at hospitals.”

“Not in Rising Ridge, South Carolina.”

Taylor frowned.

“Name one, just one,” she urged.

“Well, maybe I can't,” he sighed, “but, Mama, they need to
be. Somebody's got to be first. First in Rising Ridge, that is. When I was in the hospital in San Francisco, the hospital volunteers were black as well as white there. And oh, Mama, I can't put into words how much they meant to me. Think of all the children in the hospital. And Mama, you know in that department we have our share. As far as handling things, you can handle any situation that comes up. Just handle it the way you handle us. By the time you're finishing up with your guilt salve, they'll come around.”

Mae Lee showed her surprise, “What do you know about guilt grease, child?”

“Same as I know about everything else. The instructions on how to apply it don't read For Use by Women Only. The ointment can work both ways.”

“Taylor, we are talking about old-timey stuff here. I haven't heard guilt salve mentioned since my mama died.”

“My mother-in-law said that she heard you say, ‘If you want to make someone do something, just rub a little guilt on them just like you would rub on some ointment,'” Taylor laughed. “She shouldn't have told me that in front of Bettina. Now I'll know what she's trying to pull on me. Bettina can't bring me to
my
knees, trying to lay on guilt.”

“You shouldn't give her cause to try,” Mae Lee opened her refrigerator. “You want a slice of egg custard?”

“Oh, yes, ma'am!”

Mae Lee sliced the pie. She couldn't get her son's mother-in-law out of her mind. How dare that old gray biddy share that kind of information with a man as young as Taylor! A young married man doesn't need to know that sort of thing. If
he ever starts to chase skirts, which he may have already, his wife won't have any kind of tool to settle him down with. Taylor is a married man, so let him be saddled with guilt when he needs it. If and when he deserves it, let his wife lay it on him.

“That was my mama's secret,” she said aloud.

“I know,” her son said, cramming more custard into his full mouth. Taylor thought she was talking about the pie. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then drew in a deep breath through his nose, Andy Griffith-style, saying, “But yours is better.”