Ugly Ways (8 page)

She had only been pregnant once as far as she knew and that pregnancy and her reaction to it had helped to end her second marriage. She never was any good at lying so when her husband, Ron, had asked her if she had really fallen down the steps of their garden apartment or if she had had an abortion, she had told him the truth.

After that, no matter what she said to him, his reply was the same: "You flushed
my
baby down the toilet stool."

When she had told her parents her marriage was over, Mudear had said to her, "It's no surprise to me."

Besides the fact that Mudear thought Ron was crazy, she had been told by Annie Ruth that when he had come to the house the first time for dinner—Mudear, of course, didn't come downstairs for the meal—he had stirred his iced tea with his fork. He had simply slipped it in his mouth to wipe off the few grains of long-grained rice and brown fried-chicken gravy, stuck it in the tall glass of tea, and stirred. Mudear was not forgiving.

"Daughter, if you marry some man who don't know how to use a simple eating utensil right," Mudear had told Emily at the time, "then you a bigger fool than I been saying all these years."

Mudear never fully forgave Emily for marrying Ron. Emily didn't think she really cared whether or not one of her girls married what mothers in Sherwood Forest called a "professional man." But she had overheard Mudear's only friend, Carrie, whom she called "Cut," bragging to her over the telephone about a niece of hers marrying a "pharmacy" from Xavier University. And Emily had always felt in her heart that Mudear might have been a bit more generous if Ron had not worked fixing cars for a living, whether or not he knew how to use a knife and fork.

But his table manners were not the problem for Emily in their marriage. Ron, they all discovered too late to save Emily, was as crazy as his wife.

"He can't seem to let it go," Emily had told her sisters on one of their regular telephone conference calls of Ron's experience in Vietnam. When he began wearing camouflage fatigues to his job as a mechanic, no one paid much attention. But when Emily finally told Betty and Annie Ruth that he was wearing the things day and night, even to bed, she knew she was really in trouble. And so was he.

"I got to wash the dishes every night, not just scrape and stack 'em. He can't stand the smell of rotting anything. He says it reminds him of death and of rotting flesh. And the sound of the dishwasher reminds him of the whir of Huey helicopters twirling overhead to spray him with red-hot tracers. So, I got my hands back in dishwater just like when we were girls."

"Bless her heart," Annie Ruth told Betty on the phone later, "I guess it's like the shrinks say, we do all marry our mothers."

Mudear had insisted that Emily do the dishes for the household the whole time the girls were growing up. Emily's long slender model's hands slipped in and out of the soapy Lux suds with grudging efficiency as Mudear held forth from her perch on the sofa. "Now, Emily can't do a damn thing with those pretty hands of hers. Couldn't make a decent centerpiece for the Last Supper if she had the chance and the Garden of Eden to work with. But those long skinny hands sure are pretty, look like something out of a Jergens lotion magazine ad."

Emily, sitting on the banks of the turbid Ocawatchee, could see Ron in front of her now. Could almost smell the scent of his body fresh out of a shower with Lifebuoy deodorant soap and a hint of his musk clinging to his hairs.

Perhaps another kind of woman could have dealt with Ron and his memories of war, could have even helped him, gone through it with him, been there for him when he screamed at night from his Mekong Delta dreams. But his troubles seemed to just mirror hers too closely. Post-traumatic stress syndrome was what they both suffered from. One would have thought they were made for each other. Instead, they were both so deep in their own distress, in their own misery, that they merely canceled each other out. The war he still fought was too much like the one Emily had to fight with her own demons.

When she tried to help, it only seemed to make matters worse for Ron, confused him. Even as she tried to soothe him, held his hard sweaty body, cried with him, she was really crying for herself and for her sisters and for the destruction that family warfare had wreaked on all of them.

When Ron reluctantly agreed to go to a V.A. counselor for a while and his nightmares suddenly subsided, Emily would still wake in the middle of the night sweating and heaving as if
she
had had a nightmare. And then, to find Ron, her husband, sleeping the sleep of the innocent next to her shaking body would nearly send her into a rage.

I can almost understand why Mudear always said she was surprised more men aren't found murdered in their beds, she would think. Then, she would wish immediately that she hadn't recalled Mudear's words because they always made her remember that each time her mother said them when Emily was young, Emily had a hard time sleeping through the night. Staying awake 'til dawn, waiting to hear the sound of her father's footfall in the hall on his way to the bathroom so she would know that he had made it through the night. That Mudear had not in fact acted on her implied threat against her father. Hacked him to death with a butcher knife, splashed kerosene around his bed linens and set them on fire.

Poor Poppa, she thought now. What he gonna do without Mudear?

Emily shifted her butt uncomfortably on the rocky ground of the riverbank. She had been sitting in a relatively dry spot under the bridge protected from the misty rain. And after rummaging through the back of her car among overdue library books and hair spray from Betty's shop, she had found a plastic garbage bag to spread on the hard wet ground to protect the seat of her favorite jeans. But she still had to unzip the tight pants in order to breathe and sit comfortably.

Once when she came to sit under the bridge in foul weather, she had discovered a makeshift shelter of cardboard boxes left there by some homeless person. That time, fresh from Betty's beauty shop and distraught over the bitter ending of a quickie relationship, she had really planned to kill herself. But the thought of a homeless person in the tiny town of Mulberry kept intruding on her deadly thoughts. And instead of killing herself, she had left her lined leather gloves there with a twenty-dollar bill tucked inside.

All the way back to. Atlanta, she had kept saying to herself, A homeless person in Mulberry. A homeless person in Mulberry.

She didn't dare say it, even to herself, but she had thought, it could be Ron. The last time she had seen him, a year or so before, he was walking near the river wearing his old camouflage jacket and dirty jeans with his red toolbox on his shoulder. She had made an illegal U-tum to avoid passing him even though she yearned to ask him what he was doing in Mulberry. She could tell by the way his camouflage jacket hung on his shoulders, a bit too large for him, that he was shooting bad.

It was nearly pitch dark by now, but Emily was confident that Betty wouldn't worry about her when she didn't go directly to her sister's house at the top of Pleasant Hill. Emily thought Betty was used to her wanderings around town when she came home to visit. Although she felt the town hadn't been kind to her, with its gossip and harsh judgments, Emily still loved Mulberry like an old friend. Other than her sisters, she felt her hometown was all she had. The only thing that anchored her to the world was her identity in Mulberry, even if it was as "the craziest Lovejoy sister." She knew all the back streets, even the ones that no longer existed, the ones changed by the construction of the interstate through the middle of Pleasant Hill. The community had complained that the plans were drawn up just to disrupt the black neighborhood. But the highway didn't bother Emily even though it left parts of the community with dead-end streets that overlooked kudzu-covered trees and the expressway instead of more houses. She kept in her mind just how the town had looked when she was a child and walked everywhere, even downtown, by herself.

There was little Emily didn't know about Mulberry. Her job as an archivist gave her easy access to all kinds of material. She had not only mulled over countless old documents—plantation logs, census records, deeds, birth certificates—and ancient newspapers at the state archives in Atlanta and in the local Mulberry libraries to learn the history of the place. And as a senior researcher for the state of Georgia, she had more access to files and archives than most.

She had also made it her business to know the daily and current shape of the town. In Mulberry even in the nineties, Emily thought, people still seemed to know more of the intricacies of other people's intimacies than in any other little town she knew of. Things you would think no one but the parties involved would know. That's how people gossiped in Mulberry. "And he reached over his plate of liver and onions, picked up a dull dinner knife, and threatened to stab her to death with it if she said one more word to him about that garbage disposal."

Listening as she got her hair done to the talk in Betty's first beauty shop, Lovejoy's 1, the one she opened in East Mulberry, Emily would wonder to herself sometimes, now how does she know what they were eating and just what he said? But it was never questioned. The other women would nod their wet and cur-lered heads in affirmation, slap their copies of
Essence, Lear's, Ebony, Mirabella, American Visions,
or
Vogue
against their thighs, and go on to the next topic.

Emily clung to everything that reminded her of the Mulberry she remembered or thought she remembered as a child.

As a child and a teenager, she never imagined that she would ever feel tenderly toward a town, a community that pegged her and her family crazy, that gossiped about them, that even scorned them when party lists and invitations to be local debutantes were sent out. Not in a million years did she think she would care about Mulberry. But as Mudear always reminded them, "Keep living, daughters."

Emily even chose Lovejoy's 1 to have her hair done each week because it reminded her of old times. The beauty shop was still housed in the original building that Betty, when she was in her mid-twenties, renovated for the first shop she opened. There, she built up a large and loyal following with older women who still preferred to have their hair straightened with a hot comb. She eventually moved them into the era of straightening perms and got their daughters' and granddaughters' business to boot. Eventually, the smell of burning hair in the air was replaced with the stench of straightening chemical perms. But in an antique display case at the front of the shop by the receptionist's desk, Betty still kept examples of the original tools of her trade: the iron hot comb with the charred black wooden handle, three sizes of the long slim iron hot curlers that hairdressers spun around at their axes to cool off, the open gas burner used to heat up the utensils, and the small improved steel heating "oven" that followed.

Scattered among the pressing and curling tools in the case were photographs, eight-by-ten glossies, of the glamorous black women of the forties and fifties—Dorothy Dandridge, Dinah Washington, Lena Home, Billie Holiday—who had used just these kinds of utensils to keep their coifs in control. The whole shop—though outfitted with every modem convenience—looked like one that these famous women might have stopped in to get their hair done if they had been traveling the "chitlin' circuit" in the South back in another decade.

Betty had even set up an antique barbershop chair with red leather upholstry and brass studs in the middle of the shop and used it herself when she worked on some old special customer, a former teacher or a friend of Mudear's before the change.

Lovejoy's 2, on the other hand, looked as if it could have been transplanted from some tony address on West Fifty-seventh Street in New York City and set down at the far end of the Mulberry Mall. While Lovejoy's 1 was all wood and plaster, Lovejoy's 2 was all glass, chrome, and tall wide mirrors reflecting the track lights spotlighting every chair. The floor was Italian marble, a bitch to keep clean, Betty's cleaning crew discovered, but the customers seemed to think it added to the ambience they sought as they got their hair washed, clipped and colored, chemically straightened, waved, frozen and permed. New customers had to make appointments weeks in advance.

Emily drove down to Mulberry nearly every weekend to get her hair done or perm touched up at Betty's shop. Afterward, she would go see Mudear for a short visit. But even with a new hairdo to buoy Emily's spirits, she always left Mudear's feeling so lonely that the rest of the week she hated herself for going. If Mudear were looking at television or repairing a garden tool on the screen porch, she wouldn't even acknowledge Emily's presence except to ask her to sweep the kitchen floor or to make her a frothy banana—orange juice drink in the blender one of her daughters had bought for her.

Most Saturdays, Mudear didn't seem to notice when Emily left.

It wasn't Mudear that she longed for so much as it was Mulberry. In Atlanta, she missed the small-town feeling of knowing people's business and knowing who was related to whom, who had gone to school with whose brother. But she never even considered moving back to her hometown. Not as long as Mudear was living there, and it was hard to think of Mulberry without Mudear. And it was impossible for her to think of Mudear not living. She was grateful for the protection the hundred and fifty or so miles to Atlanta gave her.

But truly, it was always the loneliness, the wide gap she felt at the pit of her stomach, that made her feel so disconnected. I don't have anyone to care about me, except for my sisters, she would think as she drove back to her empty disheveled apartment each week.

She was alone and lonely. And that was a terrible way of being. It was and had always been what was driving her crazy. All of her good news, her good fortune seemed to fall flat because there was no one outside her sisters in her life to whom it made any difference. No one to share it with.

At least, Betty had had Mudear for a few years before the change. And Annie Ruth had always got so babied and was so cute that everything was an easy slide for her. But me, I ain't never had nothing ... nothing but my sisters. Lord, if it hadn't been for them, what would I have done? But she knew what she would have done. She would have actually jumped off the Spring Street bridge over the Ocawatchee River, no matter whether the riverbed was bone dry or flush with running muddy water.