Ugly Ways (6 page)

"Their mother gets them to do that just to get on my nerves," he would mutter to himself as Mudear yelled from upstairs for one of them to run fetch something for her. "Run get me this thing. Run get me that." He knew that eventually he would grow to hate the sound of her voice. Then, it was just her orders and the activity she generated around her that he had hated. She had died before he grew to hate
her
completely.

The easy conversations, the comfortable camaraderie Mudear and the girls seemed to share, it was never that way with him when they were in the house. It seemed that the girls had never been that way with him. Of course, there had been a time, long ago, it seemed, when his voice was the only one that mattered in the house, when he spoke with a big voice. That was when they were
his
little girls and she was
his
wife.

But then suddenly, it seemed, at the dinner table, on the porch, in the living room, during commercials on the television, he had to fight for a space in the conversation. As if his voice didn't matter. No one fell silent when he began to speak. No one stopped to hear what he had to say.

It finally wasn't worth the fight. He never won anyway.

The four women in the house had overwhelmed him. At first, he had thought it was just his wife who took over his household. But as he began carefully to notice the patterns of the house, he realized it was not just she but everything with a vagina in the house who seemed to want to rule. He had even thought briefly of calling for help. The police? His lodge brothers? Somebody. Sometimes, at work or while he ate dinner or in the middle of the night, he had just wanted to yell, "Womens taking over my house!" at the top of his lungs.

But he knew he couldn't do that. If he had shown any of those signs of weakness, of the panic he had felt for some time, they would trample him, engulf him, overtake him completely.

If only he had had a son, a boy, a manchild to stand staunchly with him, to take up his part sometime. Or even if one of his girls had stood up for him. Just once if one of them had said, "I think Poppa is right, Mudear." Even the thought of it made him shake his head. The outlandishness of the thought. The very idea that someone in that house would stand up to Mudear.

He had no idea that each of his girls had had just that intention at one time or another. Not just as little girls or teenagers but also as grown women living in their own houses. They had all dreamed of it. Of standing up for their father, of being, if only briefly, daddy's little girl, daddy's child.

But the same words resounded in all their heads at the very thought. All their lives they had heard Mudear say, "It's getting so in this house I can't say nothing 'out somebody going running back to
him
with it. Are you
my
child or are you
his,
make up your mind!"

Or intimately, she would ask each of them separately, call them up to her bedroom while Poppa was at work. "If me and your poppa was to get a divorce, who would you go with? You can't run with the hares and hunt with the hounds in this life. Choose." What a question, they noted to each other later in life, to put to a little girl, a child. Choose! It was just like Mudear to put the burden on someone else.

"Mudear." It was the only thing she had stood firm on, insisted on early in their marriage. "That's what I called my mother and that's what I want my children to call me. It's short for 'Mother dear.' No, baby, don't say 'Maa-maa,' say
'Mu-dear,'
'Mu
-dear,'
" she would instruct each of the girls from age one on until each said it with just the same lilting inflection on the
dear
that the originator used. At the time, Poppa had thought it was so sweet the way the little girls said it.

It was even what he called her now. Mudear. And for a moment he had to stop and think to remember what her given name was. Esther. Such a beautiful name. Esther. Beautiful. Like she had been at one time. Maybe she still was. She certainly thought of herself that way.

When he first met her, she had reminded him of the sparklers on a stick that children ran with on the Fourth of July. She had actually seemed to send off sparks. She had a firm little body and a laugh like a moving picture star, he thought.

But he stopped himself. He couldn't allow himself to think she was beautiful. Even dead. If he did, then all would be lost.

God! he thought as he sat on the side of the wide bed with his head in his long slim hands. It was so hard to stay strong.

Especially when you were doing something against your will, it was so hard.

"
Mens
needs to talk," he had heard a fellow worker say one day to a bunch of his buddies, effectively banishing a big old pushy woman from their circle at the bar. "Mens needs to talk." The fellowship of men, that was what he needed. He had that fellowship at work. And he had found it when he stopped downtown at The Place to take a little drink before heading home white and chalky from working in the kaolin mines among the other hard-working folks who frequented the popular bar and grill.

But when he needed that fellowship most, at home with his wife and daughters, it wasn't there. Here at home was where he most needed that camaraderie. Didn't they understand that, like the man said, mens needs to talk?

He hadn't given up right away. He had held sway over his home, his wife, his children, his household, his territory for too long to give up that tyranny, that position, that authority right away.

When he had first felt his control slipping away, he had gathered his men friends around him. A few times, he had invited one or two of his friends over. One, a man who fixed televisions, he asked over on the pretext that the TV needed repairing. "Stop by and take a look at my TV, man, and we can have a litde drink, too, while you there."

But the friend had had more than a litde drink sitting at the kitchen table with Poppa. He had had quite a few, seeming to want to drink the full fifth of Old Forester dry before he left. Then, in his drunken stupor, he had gotten up and, turning the wrong way, had wandered into the living room mistaking it for the bathroom, unzipped his pants, and peed on one of the low side tables next to the sofa. Annie Ruth, still almost a baby then, had discovered it and gone running to her mother yelling, "Tee-tee! Tee-tee!" His friend had been banished from the house by the women.

Any time Emest dared to mention a friend or coworker in Mudear's hearing, she would say, "I hope he ain't gonna come into my house and pee on the floor."

It was enough to keep him from ever again venturing into the realm of male bonding. He was in this alone.

Emest looked down at his hands hanging between his legs and shook his head sadly at their condition. At one time, he had taken such pride in his hands. Even though he was now a supervisor near retirement at the mines and rarely had to even pick up a chunk of chalk, his hands still showed the signs of his years in the pits. The white powdery chalk still showed up starkly around and under his nails against his dark brown fingers.

Even though it was one of the first things she stopped doing after the change, Ernest could still picture Mudear seated on a small stool by his chair in the living room, her knees scrunched up to her still firm breasts, one of his hands lounging carelessly in hers. His other hand resting in a small bowl of soapy Lux liquid water on the arm of his chair.

For quite a long time, he relished the memory of that vision, Mudear manicuring his nails. He loved to remember her doing his nails. The filing, clipping, soaking, painting them with clear nail polish. She was so good at it, like everything she tried her hand at, doing his nails. The final step—buffing them to a pink healthy glow—was his favorite. As she zipped the soft pink padded instrument back and forth across his nails, her whole body shimmied to the rhythm of the buffer. It was almost as good as sex.

At first, after she refused to ever as long as she lived and stayed black ever sit on that stool—whatever happened to that wicker stool, he wondered—and serve him like some slave or something, he tried to do his own nails.

The only reason he did that was some of the guys at the downtown bar noticed what sad shape his nails were falling into around all that soft chalk at work. "Wife ain't taking care a' her job like she supposed to, huh, Ernest?" one of the guys asked two Saturdays in a row while he and his friends lounged over a couple of quarts of cold Pabst Blue Ribbon at The Place downtown.

Ernest had almost balled his fists up in shame. Damn her, he thought. Damn her, damn her. When he came in from work, she had the nerve to be sitting up there in bed polishing her own nails a creamy shell pink. Like she the Queen of Sheba, he had thought. That night he had dreamed that he drove both of his balled-up fists into her smug regal face and made her,
made her,
do his nails again. Made her do 'em right there in bed where she was painting hers.

But when he had awakened the next morning, he had looked over at his wife sleeping peacefully beside him with her muddy garden shoes still on and remembered immediately that he could no longer
make
Mudear do anything he wanted her to do. And he felt like weeping in frustration. Instead, he got up, steeled his back, and went downstairs to the breakfast Betty had made for the family.

He didn't know why he could never completely and finally hate her. Now that she was dead, he had to admit that he even admired some things about her after the change. Near morning, when she climbed back into their bed following her midnight wanderings and began immediately to snore softly, he would lie in the wide king-sized bed beside her and think, She really free. She don't have to get up at any set time in the morning. One of the girls will serve her a light breakfast in bed if that's what she wants. Or if she wakes up hungry, really ravenous like some hungry wild animal, she can stroll downstairs and one of 'em ul fix her pancakes and bacon with lots of butter and Alaga syrup and milk.

He stood and began undressing for bed.

And if the milk and pancakes tear up her stomach, that was okay 'cause she would be at home and could go to the bathroom, her own lavender bathroom, whenever she wanted. And stay in there as long as she liked.

I guess I'm gonna have to die to be that free myself, he thought with a resigned sigh.

Poppa didn't know what he was going to do now that Mudear was dead and, he assumed, out of his life. He didn't think he was ever going to be able to really get her out of his life. He didn't even know if that was what he really wanted ... Mudear out of his life. Perhaps, now that she was truly gone, he would be able to find someone else, maybe somebody like his drinking buddy Patrice, someone who was not so heartless, so evil, so lacking in what he called a little human kindness.

Sometimes he feared that Mudear either was not human or didn't possess any kind of kindness and living with her all these years, forty-five altogether, had somehow contaminated him. And he feared even more that his girls, Mudear's daughters, would turn out the same way. He shivered slightly as if someone had walked across his grave at the very thought.

When he heard the sound of automobile doors closing, he went over to the side window of the bedroom and saw his two oldest daughters get in their cars. After Emily pulled off in her little red car, he stood there watching Betty sitting in hers parked in the driveway. As he watched, he smiled at the trail of cigarette smoke drifting out her car window. Betty was the only one of his girls who smoked like he did. Mudear had been a heavy smoker at one time, smoked Kool filters. Used to smoke in bed, too. But she told him one night when he came in from work late that she had heard on a medical talk show that smoking gave you wrinkles, so she stopped immediately. It seemed to him that Mudear could do anything she wanted to when she put her mind to it.

And, of course, when Mudear stopped smoking, all smoking in the house had to cease.

Looking down at Betty's cigarette smoke, he felt ashamed that he took pride in the fact that one of his girls smoked like him. As if sucking on these cancer sticks is something to be proud of, he thought. But he couldn't help it. There was so little he could claim in his own children.

Betty sat in her car for a few minutes smoking a cigarette and looking out over the garden and the field of wildflowers around her parents' house before starting the engine. The moon, nearly full, shone through a break in the clouds and flooded the field with a soft white light that made the colors of the late-blooming wildflowers—goldenrod and blue sage and some black-eyed susans—stand out as in an eerie night painting. And the white blooming flowers and plants of the formal white garden her mother had grown especially to stand out at night—the moonflowers, the stalks of ginger lily spreading in waves against the house, the caladiums and hostas with their pale green and white stripes, the climbing peace roses and the iceberg roses grown as standards—looked like spirits dancing in the autumn wind. The town marveled that Mudear's plants kept blooming so profusely and so late in the season.

Some folks said she had bodies buried back there.

If Mudear were to come back, that's where she would come, Betty thought. She was like some strange exotic mixed-up plant herself.

During the day lounging around in her freshly laundered gowns and robes and pajamas giving off noxious fumes like carbon dioxide as she made everyone's life miserable in the house. Then, at night blossoming and exuding oxygen, coming to life and giving off life in her garden outside. She was like a strange jungle plant that had reversed the natural order of the plant world. Betty had even seen her stoop down and take a bit of her garden dirt in her mouth one night.

Betty could see her mother now as she had seen her innumerable nights wandering around in the field of flowers in her nightclothes, barefoot in the summertime and heavy boots in cooler weather, as if gardening were the most natural thing in the world to be doing in the middle of the night.

For Mudear it was. She had possessed night vision. Extraordinary night vision, as far as Betty could tell. Her night vision extended to seeing at dusk and all the shadings in between when most folks with night vision said it was more difficult to see. Even more unusual, Mudear could not only see in pitch dark as most blessed with the sight could, but she could see just as clearly as day. Mudear could not only make out shapes and figures in the dark, she could see the ants crawling over her vines, the aphids on her roses, the blossoms on her eggplant, the drooping falls on her beard iris. She could see to turn her compost pile and where she left the garden fork she needed for the job leaning against the side of the aluminum storehouse.