Yankee Doodle Dixie (2 page)

I can’t help but beat myself up for bringing Princess Grace Kelly up to the frigid North, where I had to leave her body for all of eternity. I know she was old and all, fifteen to be exact, but I’m told Yorkies sometimes live to be eighteen or even twenty. I think her body gave out because her blood froze to death. I know mine did, but I’m a lot younger than she was, if you figure she was 105 in people years.

Frankly, I ought to be blaming Baker. He’s the one who moved us up there in the first place. I used to be the biggest doormat in America but I am not anymore. I know, I know, I have my own mind, and nobody, not to mention a Southern woman, should do anything just because someone else wants them to. That’s called codependency. Stupid’s more like it. I will never let a man make my decisions for me again. Never. Well, I haven’t been put to the test yet, but that’s my plan.

Virginia’s house is totally dark when I pull up in her driveway. Nary a light in sight. Sarah lifts her brunette head when I turn off the engine. “Where are we?”

“Virginia’s house,” I whisper, trying hard not to wake Isabella. Digging into my purse, I fumble for my cell. After dialing her number by heart, the call goes straight to voice mail.
What?
She never turns off her cell phone at night. I can’t ring the doorbell and take a chance on waking up all three of her young children, so I call back, just in case. Same thing. After sitting in the cold only a minute I decide to go ahead and call the home phone anyhow. It rings just four times before I get the same result and pretty soon I’m starting to wonder what in the heck I’m going to do. “Well, shoot. Now what?” I say.

“Who are you calling, Mama?” Sarah asks.

“Virginia, but I guess she’s asleep.” I’m annoyed and Sarah knows it.

“
It is
one o’clock in the morning.” She’s pointing to the red illuminated digital clock next to the radio. My six-year-old, the voice of reason.

I think about trying the windows and doors but no one in Memphis goes to sleep with their doors unlocked, not to mention without setting the alarm. The last thing I need to do is scare them. John, Virginia’s husband, doesn’t seem like the type to own a gun, but who knows these days? The crime in Memphis seems to be getting worse and worse every year.

I try calling a few times more before finally giving up. Leaving her a message would ruin the surprise so I press the end button, toss the phone back in my purse, and back our mud-coated old BMW down the driveway, turning my car in the opposite direction.

Twenty minutes later, when I pull up in Kissie’s driveway, I turn off my headlights so they won’t illuminate her bedroom. At eighty-one years old the last thing she needs is to feel frightened. I don’t know why I didn’t plan on coming here in the first place. After all, she’s the closest thing to a mother I’ve got. Six weeks after I was born, the baby nurse that Daddy hired, in keeping with the standards of Memphis society, placed me in the arms of my white mother, only to be passed over to the arms of my black mother, so Mama could get her beauty rest. Just thinking about snuggling up in Kissie’s cushiony arms again soothes me and I open my car door.

Sarah unhinges the belt on her car seat and slides over the console in between the front seats. I step out of the car and she reaches out for me to pick her up. At six, her arms and legs can wrap all the way around me but she still likes the security of my arms. As we walk toward the front porch I notice the black iron on the front door and the windows that have been freshly painted. There’s a black urn planted with pansies in front of the stoop and two black iron chairs sit on the small porch in front of the picture window. Kissie sits there during the late afternoons so she can wave to her neighbors when they come home from work. Although her house is tiny, it’s made of smooth, uniform red brick and the yard, by far the best groomed on the street, is perfectly clipped and trimmed. Her old Plymouth Fury sits under a small attached carport.

Any rap on the door would be a futile attempt at rousing her elderly ears so I go ahead and ring the doorbell. Several minutes pass before I hear a rumbling on the other side of the front door. Kissie barely pulls back the heavy beige curtains covering the picture window and peeks outside. I hear the dead bolt click. The door opens slightly and her face appears just above the four-inch brass chain, which adds further protection from anyone who doesn’t belong.

“Is that you, baby?” Although it’s pitch black outside, the crescent moon has illuminated our silhouettes.

“I’m home, Kissie.”

She unhinges the chain and opens the first door, the sash on her pink fuzzy bathrobe loosely wrapped around her large middle. The keys on her keychain jingle as she turns the last dead bolt to open the heavy iron storm door. “Lawd, have mercy alive. Who is this?” A big smile spreads across her face as she stretches out her arms. “Come give Kissie some sugar.” Sarah and I melt into her huge bosoms. When I reach up to kiss her cheek, it’s greasy from Vaseline, her moisturizer of choice. “Where is Isabella?” she asks.

“In the car,” I say, not wanting to budge from her embrace.

She snatches her arm back and nudges me away. “You better git her inside, ’fore she freezes or gets nabbed.”

“You have no idea what it’s like to freeze, Kiss,” I say over my shoulder, halfway back to my car.

Kissie’s neighborhood isn’t the safest place in town. Located just off Elvis Presley Boulevard, on a tiny little cove street with about nine other modest homes, her house is the pinnacle of the block. Despite the precariousness of the location, it still feels like a second home to me. She’s lived there as long as I can remember and this is not the first late-night visit from me, to say the least.

Daddy paid off her mortgage right after Mama died. All fifteen thousand dollars of it. I’m sure he figured it might be an incentive for all the extra hours she’d be investing in me. The ones she’s deposited in my life already should have bought her a mansion in Midtown as far as I’m concerned. If I understand the Bible correctly, her mansion’s coming when she leaves here. Not to mention a crown the size of Texas.

I lift Isabella out of the car and her little cheek is red and lined from the last few hours it spent burrowed into the rough-hewn material of the car seat. She wraps her arms around my neck, her legs around my waist, and glances around in the darkness. Her voice is scratchy. “Where are we?”

“Kissie’s house,” I say, and rush back to the warmth.

When we step inside, Kissie reaches out for Issie who gladly goes straight to her. “How’s Kissie’s lil’ baby doin’? Is she all right this evenin’?” Kissie uses her baby voice whenever she speaks to Issie who, at the moment, is a big mess of strawberry-blond curly hair swirling every which a way around her face. Kissie tucks it behind her ears and heads straight down the hall with Issie on her hip. I know what she’s doing. She’s looking for a rubber band. She did the exact same thing to me as far back as I can remember when my hair became a muss. Issie and I could pass for twins if you compare our baby pictures. Not so much for Sarah. She’s a Satterfield through and through. No one in my family has thick straight brunette hair and eyes as blue as a Hawaiian lagoon.

Ponytail holders are something Kissie keeps a plenty of around her house. That’s because her hair still hangs down her back. She always wears it in a braided bun, or “plat” as she calls it, on top of her head during the day, so most people have no idea her hair is that long. Kissie refers to her color as “butterscotch.” She’s part black, part white. Maybe even fifty-fifty. The truth is, sixty years ago, in Memphis, Tennessee, she would never have been accepted by the whites, so she had no choice but to live as a black. I mean that with no judgment. Black folks treated me with more love than some of the people in my own family.

Kissie married a black man named Frank and gave birth to a little girl they christened Josephine or Josie for short. That poor baby died of pneumonia when she was only three years old. Kissie doesn’t talk about it all that much but there’s a picture of Josie in a large ornate frame hung above the couch in the living room, in between one of her mother and another of me. She kicked Frank out years ago. He preferred spending his paycheck at the dog track over in West Memphis rather than on her or their monthly bills.

To me, she’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever known and she treats me just like I’m her own child. Her real name is Kristine “Krissie” Phillips King. When I was little I couldn’t pronounce my
R
s so I started calling her Kissie. Now everyone she knows calls her Kissie, all because of me. Even her own brother calls her by her nickname.

It would be impossible to guess her age. Between her flawless complexion and her razor-sharp mind, not to mention an agility that would rival someone half her age, Kissie is as healthy as I am. In fact, I’ve never known her to be sick a day in my life. She’ll talk about her “sugar” every now and then but I can’t remember the last time she’s even complained of a cold. And speaking of complaining, that word doesn’t even belong in her vocabulary.

Sarah heads straight for the cut-glass candy jar in the tiny living room. I try to stop her but Kissie’s already got the top in her hands. When I clear my throat, Sarah’s arm has disappeared from sight. She looks back at me, pleading, “Please. I’m hungry.”

“It’s one in the morning, sweet girl. The backseat of my car is covered in Goldfish, and you had a big dinner.”

She shrugs her shoulders, tilts her head back and shoots Kissie a wily grin. Kissie is absolutely no help. “Cain’t she have one piece, baby?” I roll my eyes in defeat, which tickles Kissie to no end and she bursts out laughing.

No one on earth has a belly laugh like hers. It comes from deep, down in her gut. When you’re least expecting it, she’ll let it out and it’s the most contagious sound on earth. I can’t think of another laugh that gets me going as fast as hers—and like clockwork, despite the late hour and exhaustion, I’m chuckling and smiling along with Kissie and Sarah.

The candy jar sings as Kissie replaces the lid. That jar has been stuffed to the brim with a mixture of Brach’s hard candy and Hershey’s Chocolate Kisses since I was wearing pigtails, a hairdo Kissie thought more of than Mama did. After Kissie had spent a half hour “platting” my hair just so, Mama would undo the pigtails. “That’s so common,” she’d say, in her thick Mississippi drawl. “A high ponytail looks much more refined.”

Now Kissie disappears into the kitchen and I can hear her pulling food out of the fridge. Her fondest expression of love is cooking for the ones she cares about most and before I know it the smell of bacon is wafting through the house. People in Memphis have known about her culinary skills for years. That’s actually how my grandmother came to hire her. She was catering a party once and when Grandmama put one of Kissie’s cheese dreams in her mouth, she begged her to come cook for Granddaddy and her. That was back in the early fifties and she’s never worked for another family a day in her life.

She has this little noise she makes while she’s cooking. It’s a soft grunting actually, with a
hm, hm, hm
sound that she repeats in threes over and over. It’s quite endearing, most of the time, unless she’s disgusted with something or someone. Then it turns into an irritated chant. I’ve been on the other side of that peeved
hm, hm, hm
a time or two and my preference is to stay this side of it—lest I find myself in line for a big talking to.

Like the time Virgy and I tiptoed home at four in the morning shortly after we got back from Ole Miss one summer. Daddy was out of town and Kissie always stayed at our house when he was gone. Even though we were twenty-one years old, Kissie thought it highly inappropriate for a girl to get home at that hour. The beep of the burglar alarm alerted her that we were back and here she comes huffing and puffing down the hall, wearing her favorite pink nightgown. She didn’t even bother throwing on her housecoat. Her hair was hanging down her back and she smelled like Jergens lotion and Vaseline. “Where you been, chile?
Hm, hm, hm
.
Hm, hm, hm
.
Hm, hm, hm
.”

Virginia and I looked at each other and tried our best to keep from giggling. We were slaphappy and quite toasted from the Long Island iced teas we consumed at Bob Wilder’s booth at the Memphis in May Barbecue Festival. There was no hiding it. She could smell it on us a mile away.

“You think you can git away with such drunken foolishness?” she said, madder than a hornet’s nest. “What do you think those men are gonna do when they see you like this? Huh? They’ll be takin’ advantage of you is what they’re gonna do.
Hm, hm, hm
.”

Virgy said, “No, Kissie. We’re not those kinds of girls. We
just
kiss.” She pinched my arm behind my elbow where Kissie couldn’t see her.

“You
just
kiss? And then what? You think they don’t want a feel? Those men will be tryin’ to git whatever they can. They’re just like a dawg. They git off one and then git on another. You young ladies needs to be comin’ on home at a
decent
hour.
Hm, hm, hm
.
Hm, hm, hm
.
Hm, hm, hm
.”

“Don’t be mad at us,” I told her. “There were lots of girls at the party. We weren’t the only ones.”

“Till four
A.M.
? Nice girls don’t do that. You hear? You lucky your Daddy ain’t here, Leelee.”

Back then, Virginia and I dismissed her as being old-fashioned. Now that I’m a mother, I know she was exactly right.

*   *   *

It’s after three in the morning by the time I slip under the covers in Kissie’s spare bedroom. As is always customary with Kissie, we stayed up talking and rehashing the events of yesteryear until I could hardly hold my eyes open another second. I heard for the three hundredth time the details of my grandmother’s, as Kissie calls it, “beautiful death.” “I fetched your Grandmama a fresh gown when I knew she was goin’ down fast,” Kissie always explains. “She was layin’ there like an angel. Nary a wrinkle on her face.” We talked about Daddy’s death, and started to discuss Mama’s, too, but I just couldn’t bear to go there again. Breast cancer took her when I was only eighteen. Not a very good way to start college.