“Bullshit,” Cary said several times. “Children aren't responsible for their parents' lives. If she hadn't left Daddy, she wouldn't be alone. She left him when he was sick. I love her, but she's still a bitch.”
“Maybe she wanted to get in on the modern world,” I said once or twice. “Maybe she saw all these free young women and she wanted to be one.”
“She was always free. A rich man's daughter and a rich man's wife.”
“That's not freedom. That's chattel slavery.”
“It's freedom to a starving peasant.”
“It doesn't follow. It was slavery to her.” And so on and so forth. We talked a lot that night. Since we didn't sleep.
“Some vacation,” Arthur said. “What a pleasant rest.” See, he's a real funny man and after this, I definitely will marry him.
Finally, it was dawn and she was waking up. We had put music on the CD player. We had made coffee. Kathleen had gone out to a deli and bought eggs and bread and butter and bacon and pancake mix and syrup. Arthur and I had slept a few hours, curled up in our clothes. Actually, it was the kind of night I'd always dreamed of. A family in crisis and me in the middle of it. Decisions to be made, sacrifices called for, furrowed brows, the quick darting glances moving among us. You drugged me, she was going to say. You are disinherited.
Forgive us, we will plead. We love you. We don't want your face cut off and sewn back on to make your mouth into a straight line.
“We're sorry,” I said, as she opened her eyes. First one eye and then the other. “We love you. We did it for you.”
“Where am I?” She sat up on one elbow. “What time is it?” She pulled herself into a sitting position, shook her head, looked at me, then shifted her gaze to Kathleen.
“We drugged you, Momma. You missed your appointment, by the way. There's no reason to get angry now. You aren't being rolled into surgery today.” Kathleen leaned over and touched her mother on the arm. She kissed her forehead. Then she walked over to the television set and turned the plastic surgery tape back on. She had rigged it so that the opening scene was the surgeon poised above the patient with his knife. He cut into the flesh behind the ear, a long incision along the hairline and down below the ear. Blood seeped out. A nurse began to suction it.
Edwina sat up, stared at the set. She looked past me at Arthur. “Turn that off, please. Is there any coffee around here? My God, did I sleep on the sofa?”
“The coffee's ready,” Kathleen said. “And I'm cooking pancakes and scrambled eggs and bacon. You can forgive us and eat with us or you can disinherit us. And don't get mad at Sara. She and Arthur are getting married. She's in this by mistake.”
“I don't believe this,” Edwina said. “Where's the phone, Kathleen? I have to call those people.”
“We called them. We told them that you changed your mind.”
Edwina shook her head. She lifted her arms to the ceiling. She fell back on the sofa and started laughing. “Oh, God,” she said. “What have I wrought? This is unbelievable. I have to go to the bathroom.” She stood up. “Is there a bathroom in this house?”
She left the room, barefooted, shaking her head from side to side.
“She isn't going to disinherit us,” Cary said. “Let's get breakfast started.”
“Next time it will be something worse.” Kathleen walked into the kitchen and got out the bacon. “Next time it will be a man.”
“Well, are you going to have her some grandchildren? Are you going to interrupt your medical school and deliver the heirs and heiresses?”
“Maybe Sara will?” They looked at me. I picked up a carton of eggs and began to break them into a bowl.
“Not anytime soon. I'm playing tennis.”
When Edwina came back from the bathroom she had combed her hair and straightened up her clothes. It was amazing how well her hair had stood up, given the long sleep on the down sofa.
Arthur was setting the table. Edwina joined him and began to straighten the place mats and realign the silver. All the Standfields are perfectionists. Everything they do has to be just so. English genes. “I'm starving,” Edwina said. “I suppose you know I'm going to lose a four-thousand-dollar down payment. There's no way he will give my money back.”
“I'll get it back,” Kathleen said. “Leave it to me. You want jelly or honey or both? The coffee's ready. You want it now or with breakfast?”
“Now would be lovely. What did Arthur give me?”
“A Seconal.” Kathleen held out a cup of coffee to her mother. A beautiful cup and saucer with morning glories growing around the cup and handle. We had set the table with the prettiest china we could find. Food being cooked, sunlight coming in the window, life being led. Edwina took the cup of coffee and sat down in a chair at the table. “That's the first night's sleep I've had in weeks,” she said. “I don't care what happens after a night like that. I didn't even dream.”
“Then why were you doing it?” We all drew near. Moved around her.
“I don't know. I guess I thought it was my duty somehow.”
“To not get old?” This from Cary.
“Well, not to be ugly. To go find love.” Edwina hung her head, then started laughing again. “What did you tell them? Oh, my God, what did you say?”
“That you had changed your mind. That you were going home.”
“We went to the opera,” I offered. “It was the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. I brought you a program and a libretto. It's on again tonight. If we could get some tickets, I'll pay for them. I'd love to take you to the opera, Edwina. I bet we could get some if we tried.”
“But there's the ballet,” Cary said.
“There's a spectacular show at the Metropolitan Museum,” Arthur added. “Ancient Greece. We could take you there.”
“We'll do it all. Why not.” Edwina reached out her hands and touched two of her children. “First let's eat. Someone say a blessing.”
“Let me get the eggs,” Kathleen decreed. “Sara, put the toast on the table.”
A Wedding in Jackson
T
HEY WERE NOT getting married in a fever. Although they were young and full of hope and at least the bride seemed bright with passion. The boy was scared to death. His parents were there from Minnesota and his sisters stuffed into their ridiculous pink bridesmaid's dresses. Well, there's no point in getting judgmental. The point is, I was there. I hadn't been to a family wedding in five years. I'd been too busy getting yet another anal-retentive Momma's boy to like me to have time for my family. From the age of fifty-four to fifty-eight I spent all my time and money getting this slightly younger man to squire me around and show the world I was still physically attractive. What a bore I must have been. Mooning around and getting dressed up to go to movies just so people would think I was getting laid. Not that what we were doing could be called getting laid. Still, it got the job done and I'm not complaining about him. It was my idea to begin with, then, suddenly, that spring I had let it go and I was free to go back to the bosom of my family.
My name is Rhoda, by the way. Rhoda Katherine Manning. You might have heard of me. I'm a famous scandal in some circles in the South. Our crazy cousin Rhoda, my respectable cousins call me, in Birmingham and Nashville and Memphis and New Orleans. Even some of the ones who are making it in New York City run me down. Who cares, you might ask. Well, I cared enough to spend four years on this quasi-respectable man just to keep them at bay.
Then I was free again and the first thing I did was call my mother and tell her I would come to Jackson for the wedding of my great-niece, Annie Laurie. She's the first of her generation in our family to be married and I had made up my mind to be there. Was it my fault the plane couldn't take off from our goddamn fog-ridden mountain town?
I had gotten up at five-thirty in the morning to be out at the airport for a flight at seven. I had spent two days packing a dress and hat and shoes and pearls and even bought new earrings. I had called my ex-daughter-in-law and begged her for an hour to bring her new boyfriend and my grandchildren and meet me there. I had acted with enthusiasm and good faith. No, it was not my fault that I was late.
If I were writing this as a play I would begin in my mother's house on Woodwind Lane in Jackson, Mississippi, where she is waiting for me to come and take her to the wedding. She won't ride in the car with my father and besides, he always rides with my brothers. The men against the world and so forth.
My plane was supposed to get in around noon, which would have given us plenty of time to make the wedding at four. Only the plane was not taking off. The plane was sitting on the runway with a light flashing in the cockpit saying the right engine needed oil. It didn't need oil. The switch to the light was broken and they didn't have one in Fayetteville, Arkansas. So, fifteen minutes went by and it was hot as Hades in the plane and I was wearing my allergy mask and reading Rilke. “All this was mission, but could you accomplish it? Weren't you always distracted by expectation, as if every moment announced a beloved?”
I'm a published author by the way, in case you want some credentials. I'm an ex-alcoholic. My face is wrinkled but my legs are good and I'm in perfect health except for the allergies. Pollen, house dust, grasses, and seven kinds of mold. What else? I'm a lot of fun. People like to be with me. I'm likable and aware. Sometimes I'm smart. Lots of times I'm smart.
But back to the light in the cockpit. By the time they got it fixed the fog had rolled in and by the time it cleared I'd missed my connection in Memphis. The stewardess finally opened the door and told us to go back into the terminal and we did. I ran for it and reached the desk first and began to demand satisfaction.
There was none to be had. The best I could do by flying around half of Arkansas and Louisiana was to get to Jackson at two-forty. Give me back my money, I demanded. I'm driving. I had just spent seven hundred dollars putting Pirelli racing tires on my BMW and I was in the mood to drive. I collected my suitcase and ran for the car.
It was ten to eight. I have a friend who once made the trip from Fayetteville to Jackson in seven and a half hours and I thought I could do it. If I failed I would still make it to the reception. Seven and a half hours to drive, five minutes to dress, ten minutes to make it to the church. If I didn't stop to eat or drink I could make it. It was Holy Saturday, the day before Easter. I could make it if I tried.
I started up the curving mountain road leading from Fayetteville to Alma. I once killed a character in a novel on that road. Later, I brought him back to life in a short story.
Meanwhile, at Momma's house in Jackson, she is waiting for me. “I knew something was going on,” she said, when I called to tell her where I was. She's an intuitive. Nothing gets past her. She is eighty-five years old and she has been there for every minute of her life. She is beloved in the world, worshiped really. She has never put down her pack for a moment or stopped to complain, except once when Daddy was going through his midlife crisis and “acting like a horse's ass.” There are three profane things my mother has been heard to say. Hell's bells, tacky, and “he was acting like a horse's ass.” She was a classics major. She believes in the Graces, in service and gentleness. I love her, that's the long and short of that, and I have given her plenty of heartbreak and disappointment. Also, I have acted out for her the life she never got to lead, have been selfish, spoiled, hot-tempered, all the things she married my father for. Is it my fault that's how the genes fell out? Is it my fault I have red hair?
So she is in Jackson waiting for me. Putting the bedspread I sent her from London on the bed in my room, making the pound cake, putting out the towels and the pink Vitabath, picking roses for the dresser. Here I am, up in the Ozark Mountains, dying of allergies and she is out in her backyard spraying poison on the roses without a sneeze. She could have given me her immune system in the gene exchange. I wouldn't have minded that.
The Pirelli tires were great. I drove up the mountain taking the curves at twice the speed on the posted signs and the car was sweet. The sun was bright, the mountains were beautiful, I had Mozart on the CD player, and I was going to make it. I stopped once to buy gasoline and a bottle of drinking water and kept on driving. At nine I drove into Alma and took the ramp to Highway 40, bound for Little Rock. Not a policeman on the road. Hardly any traffic. Holy Saturday. Everyone who was going anywhere was already there.
Wildflowers were growing in profusion along the highway. Blue cornflowers and the vibrant red triflora Lady Bird Johnson caused to be planted when she was First Lady. They bloom beside the highways all over the American South.
I drove eighty for a while, then eighty-five. The radar detector I paid five hundred dollars for in a fit of thinking the movies were going to make me rich scans five miles to the front and five miles to the back. Not a sound, not a beep.
Back at Momma's house she has decided what to do. Wait for me even if she's late to her great-grandchild's wedding. She wants to enter the church with her daughter on her arm. Her other choices are driving with Daddy or one of my brother Dudley's wives. The first one, the grandmother of the bride, the second one, who is still everyone's friend, or the fourth one, a twenty-eight-year-old student in graduate school. The third wife had not been able to come.
Maybe Mother is not waiting on me because she doesn't want to pick and choose among my brother's wives. Maybe she is waiting on me because she loves me. There's a thought. The squeaky wheel gets the grease and so forth. The squeaky middle child, that's me. Whoever is in need. Isn't that the deepest truth of the maternal instinct? Once a physician and I were sitting in a bar in New Orleans on a rainy day in August discussing that. One of those hot muggy New Orleans days that has finally turned into rain. We were in the Napoleon House on Royal Street looking out into the rain and talking about women. This was years ago, before I believed in Germaine Greer, when I only read her in a sort of dazzled haze. “There is an act of volition in every pregnancy,” he was saying. “And something else. If I threw a baby down on the floor every woman in sight would rush to pick it up. And some men too.” I looked around me. It was true. Even the woman wearing black and pretending to be gay. Even the girl in the lace hat and patterned stockings, even the two charmers at the bar.