Читать книгу I Dwell in Possibility - Toni McNaron - Страница 14
ОглавлениеI grew up in a one-story white frame house, with living room, dining room, and kitchen on one side of a long hall, three bedrooms and a bath on the other. The house was in Fairfield, Alabama, home of Tennessee Coal and Iron (TCI), a subsidiary of United States Steel. Called the Pittsburgh of the South, TCI boasted a model steel workers’ town, with low-cost housing and schools located near the plant. Nothing was said about the grit that appeared on window sills and furniture within hours of dusting. Because the worst of the manual labor in the hellish blast furnaces was done by blacks, they outnumbered whites. Everyone in Birmingham, the city to which Fairfield was attached, worked directly for “the company” or for one of its necessary feeder industries and services. It was the late thirties, and the South had only just begun to pull out of the Great Depression.
My father progressed from working in the wire mill as junior bookkeeper to being chief accountant for TCI, and we lived where we did for his convenience. He liked to come home for lunch, and the mill was only about ten minutes from our house. Though an unpretentious house in a working-class neighborhood, my home was full of antiques. A few of them, including a delicate drop-leaf, three-drawer sewing table, came down the Mississippi on a flat boat with my maternal great-grandmother. With her French Huguenot family, she had fled one of many persecutions and landed in Canada. Some of the other fine pieces were gifts to my mother, primarily from my sister but occasionally from my father. I remember a fishing trip from which he returned with a four-branch gas chandelier and no fish. He had spied it in the barn of a farm where he had stopped to get fresh eggs. Painted red, it was being used by the local chickens, attested to by wisps of straw still falling from the lamp bases. My father bought it for a couple of dollars, and we all watched as it became a gorgeous brass light that hung from then on in our living room.
Most of the antique furniture was acquired by my mother in her many jaunts to shops filled with old chests and tables, china, silver, and other bric-a-brac. In the forties, Alabama shopkeepers were not always aware of the value of their holdings, but my mother knew wood grains, silver markings, porcelain symbols. Often I accompanied her to serve as decoy. We would arrive at a shop and browse until the proprietor asked if he could help us. Somehow, Mamie (the name my sister had used as a baby that became what most people called my mother) turned the conversation to me, and I launched into one of my distracting recitals. Since I knew names of rivers, oceans, continents, and other phyla, I could charm adults fairly easily. While I spouted off something years ahead of my comprehension, my mother slipped into remoter rooms of unfinished furniture. Using the pearl-handled penknife always in her purse, she quickly chipped through some colored paint on a washstand or end table. When she found cherry or mahoghany, or, on rare occasions, rosewood, she returned to me smiling. At the next lull in whatever conversation the owner and I were having, she would say in all innocence, “Oh, I happened to notice the little painted piece in back—how much is that if I just take it with me now and not bother you with refinishing it?” If the price was right, a bargain was struck, and the piece piled into the back of our old black Plymouth. Once home, and the newest treasure in the basement, she and I stripped off the bad color, restoring the wood to its original beauty.
Perhaps had my mother lived in another age or been able to tell herself a different story, she might have opened an elegant little shop. Then she could have bought up old painted pieces, restored them, and sold them to people wanting the pleasure of owning them. Instead, we accumulated pieces of antique furniture as my schoolmates’ parents might collect matchboxes or miniature china horses. Inside my house, I often felt overwhelmed by objects I had been told were priceless and feared I might accidently knock to the floor at any moment.
My mother seldom did anything on a small scale. Though she was only four feet eleven inches tall, her imagination and energy formed a force field that lent her at least an additional foot. This commanding presence left me often feeling eclipsed, effaced, though Mamie clearly adored me. I still remember going into our house on Holly Court some five months after she had died and being met instantly by the smell of her perfume. It was as if she had just stepped out and would return at any moment.
When I first knew her, she was already forty, so I have very little sense of her as a girl or young woman. Old photos show her in typical twenties styles—tight-fitting black dresses with lace, low-slung wide belts, large ornamental pins on her equally large bodice, funny hats with feathers. One story from her youth that I heard repeatedly was about a dance in Montgomery to which she went, along with Zelda Sayre of whom my mother was an acknowledged look alike. She and Zelda reputedly decided to play a joke on Scott Fitzgerald, in town on furlough from the army. My mother was to “play” Zelda for a time to see if Scott could tell the difference. I listened as Mamie spun her tale about dancing with the dashing soldier who would become one of America’s great writers. The joke seems to have worked, at least in her reminiscence.
But the person I knew in childhood had changed in some major ways from that storybook character. No longer svelte, my mother was always either on a diet or about to go on one. Given her frame, at 160 or so, she was twenty to thirty pounds overweight. Rising in the morning full of resolution, she ate her two squares of zwieback and drank a cup of tea while pointing out her virtue to us egg and toast munchers. By lunch, resolve had weakened to allow a taste of whatever dessert she had made for the rest of us; by dinner, caution had flown into the southern air. Mamie was a fine and proud cook, preferring French dishes with rich sauces and elaborate sweets of all sorts. Her cream puffs were legendary, shared with many townspeople when she had to make her contracted monies for the church coffers. Birthdays brought out all her creative talents, not only in the cake of one’s choice but in the side dishes: sweet potatoes mashed and put into scooped-out orange halves complete with handles; fried chicken wings or pork chops dressed in paper “shoes” to keep fingers greaseless; tiny Parker House rolls shaped like miniature English pasties.
Her weight in no way obscured her elegance. Most weekdays, Mamie wore a house dress and a smock during the morning as she cleaned or cooked. In mid-afternoon, she took a leisurely bath and “dressed”—nice clothes over massive foundation garments, careful make-up to give her a certain old world beauty. Her hair was brownish with auburn tints, often worn wrapped around a thick rat that lent a halo effect not unlike Greer Garson. The wreath, which softened her face, also cast her backward in time.
Throughout my childhood, my mother wore tiny pince-nez glasses. Whenever she took them off, two bright red ellipses appeared on either side of her patrician nose. I called these “holes” and worried because they took so long to fade. When she finally succumbed to tortoise-shell glasses with regulation ear pieces, she lost some of her exoticism.
Early in the twentieth century, when she was nearing twenty, Mamie had won a scholarship to study piano outside the South. But before she could leave Selma, Alabama, she met, fell in love with, and married Mac, as she called my father. They carried on a brief courtship when he was on shore leave from Newport News, Virginia, and were married over Thanksgiving of 1917, because Daddy could get away at holiday time. Most of the photographs in their early years are of them in bathing suits or other casual wear at some beach with lots of relatives. A little later they appear with my sister, Betty, born about a year after they were wed.
My father was handsome in a craggy sort of way. About five feet six or seven, he had steel blue eyes that stare out of photographs much as they did in real life. He seems almost always to have worn his hair in a close crew cut. It was totally gray when I was born, the story being that it turned overnight after his father died. When I knew him, he too was overweight, though he never seemed to be doing anything to change that. My mother tried to get him to wear belts, but he insisted they cut him and so he preferred suspenders. They allowed him to buy trousers that were loose, that let him breathe. As a child I often watched in excited horror on those occasions when his trousers inched down over his stomach, lower and lower, until, suddenly recalling them, he hitched them back to his waist. He was the perfect antidote to Mamie, in her half-body girdles and massive brassieres.
But his laxity in the matter of fitted clothes was delusive. I was constantly surprised by the particular forms of his fastidiousness. One that seemed especially romantic to me as a child involved his donning a smoking jacket some weekday evenings after supper and on weekends for most of the afternoon. I thought him dashing and relaxed, especially in the silk one I gave him when I was twelve. The other manifestation felt much more oppressive. It involved forcing me to be letter and number perfect in school subjects. Nights often found me sitting on the cedar chest across from his favorite easy chair. We were there to go over my history or geography lesson, and Daddy defined that activity as follows: he would announce a topic heading; I would recite, word for word, the material underneath. If I missed even a preposition or conjunction, I had to do it over. Similarly, when I brought home tests graded 97 or 98, his only response was, “Well, why didn’t you get 100?”
Of course I adored him, as my first memory of him shows: It is early Christmas morning, and I am nine months old. Warm in my flannel sack, I come out of sleep to see my father leaning over my baby bed. His face smiles, his eyes twinkle; his prematurely gray hair is cut unusually crew for the holiday. He calls to me: “Wake up, Jay Bird Blue, it’s Christmas.”
Daddy had another special name for me—Son—that he used in private for the first six years of my life. In the South, a saying went, “If you can kiss your elbow, you’ll turn into a boy.” One summer when I wanted desperately to be Daddy’s son and was old enough to realize that I was only a daughter, I would sit in my back yard, alone, in my seersucker playsuit, contorting my arms, trying to get a lip over to an elbow. Once I even asked a girl friend to bend my arm further than I could. That night I lay awake in my canopied bed aching from my trial.
Failing the elbow trick, I tried other devices to pass. I asked for and got boys’ toys: a jungle gym, chemistry sets, Lincoln logs, tinker toys, baseballs and gloves and bats, and all manner of guns during World War II. I wore cowboy shirts with my school skirts; I learned to run fast, to play hard ball, to shoot marbles, and to throw a pocketknife so that it landed blade in ground.
When Daddy stopped calling me Son, my attempts to be one merely became more subtle. To avoid being a “dizzy blond,” I learned all I could as fast as I could. Because Daddy once showed me pictures of the Axis army’s territories and chuckled when I tried to say the French or German names, I studied history with a passion. Because I heard him humming the tune to “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” I read cowboy books until I could spout the lingo like a native. Because my father once said he admired Alan Ladd in Whispering Smith, I wore two six-shooters and leather chaps even in the hottest summer weather. When I saw neighbor boys working in the yard or on the family car so their dads could read the Sunday funnies, I pretended to like mowing the grass and washing our old Plymouth. When I began menstruating, I denied my pain so I wouldn’t be like “those silly girls” who stayed home from school the first day, lying under heating pads or hot water bottles. I carried books for boys I had crushes on in junior and senior high school, not even aware of how confused I was about my gender identity. Embarrassed in adolescence not to be able to shave my face, I took a razor to my underarms every morning, causing rashes that stung most of the day.
As I was growing up, I longed to hear my father call me Jay Bird Blue or some other term of endearment. But he stopped calling me pet names or any names as he and I got older. Something about me was causing my idol to fade from sight. Rare moments, to which I have attached tremendous importance, stand out. When I was four or so, he occasionally let me crawl up into his lap after supper and listen while he read me the daily funnies: “Major Hoople’s Boarding House,” “Gasoline Alley,” “Hazel,” “Dagwood and Blondie”—domestic strips in which well-meaning men were henpecked by imposing women.
In about 1943, I decided that my father bore some physical resemblance to Adolf Hitler—he too wore a small mustache in the center of his upper lip and had dark eyebrows. I would beg him to let me wet comb his crew cut over to the right. With his hair plastered down, the image was remarkably like the Führer’s. When he indulged me in this fantasy, I imagined him powerful and assertive, full of words and passion.
Wanting desperately to spend time with him away from home, I asked to go fishing from the time I was about seven. Though he often promised—“The very next trip, you can go, but not just now”—I never got to go on one of these magical adventures. He preferred the company of his friend Mr. Kelton, a huge beefy man over six feet tall, whom my mother disliked intensely. On lucky Saturday afternoons, Daddy offered to take me for a treat, when he was not off fishing. What we actually did was go over to Mr. Kelton’s house, and he and Daddy talked, while I played relatively unsupervised in a back yard, fenced in for Mr. Kelton’s hound dog.
Once when I was ten, Daddy took me to a professional baseball game at night under huge flood lights that attracted thousands of southern summer bugs. Birmingham had two baseball teams—the Barons and the Black Barons. The Barons were a farm team for the Boston Red Sox, while the Black Barons trained the earliest blacks who broke into major league baseball. Spectators for each team were absolutely segregated. Sitting in the bleachers with my father, I felt excited to be there. I ate a hot dog and drank Coca-Cola in a paper cup with Walt Dropo’s picture on it. Walt was my hero since he, like I, was a left-handed first baseman. Near the end of play, Daddy bought me an ice cream sandwich. But he was annoyed by my questions: “Why do they fall onto the ground near home plate?” “Can we move down in to those seats where nobody’s sitting and we could see more?” “Why is that man with the red face yelling at the umpire?” “Wasn’t that a strike, not a ball?” “Why can’t I have a Popsicle?” He never took me to another ball game.
With his sudden death in 1954 when I was almost seventeen, my father became even more a mystery to me than his shadowy presence had caused him to seem. From that time until I entered therapy twenty-five years later, I made up stories about him and what he would think about his daughter/“Son” as I matured.
Early memories of my mother are much more troubled. I see her face, moon-round, smiling but often slightly strained, coming closer than was comfortable for me. “Don’t cross the street, honey, you’ll get hurt.” Hearing her say this, I feel instantly defiant and angry. Within half an hour, I’ve gone outside, toddled over to the curbing, looked across the road at nothing of interest, and crossed that street. No hurt comes to me, so I feel tricked.
Mamie seemed full of “don’ts,” sentences telling me what not to do in order to avoid danger: “Don’t go barefoot outside, you’ll get impetigo.” “Don’t go swimming in public, you’ll get polio.” “Don’t run and play, you’ll get over exertion exhaustion.” “Don’t get your nice starched white pinafore wrinkled.” “Don’t go out of your yard, the stray dogs will get you.” “Don’t lie in the dirt, you’ll get eaten by ants.” “Don’t play pitch, you’ll hurt your fingers for piano practice.” “Don’t perspire, it’s not nice.” “Don’t spit out your watermelon seeds, it’s common.” “Don’t ever eat ice cream and watermelon on the same day or you’ll die like Mrs. Munson did last Fourth of July.” I explored all these warnings and found only one true—when I played pitch frantically with a hard ball, I did sprain fingers, making piano playing virtually impossible.
My mother was acting out of her best sense of what was necessary for me to become only a slightly modernized version of the southern belle she had been. Two images of me clearly illustrate her hopes: All through childhood, I wore my golden blond hair waist long. Wanting me to look like someone in Gone with the Wind, my mother rolled hunks of my thick hair on worn-out boys’ socks that she scavenged from neighbors with growing sons. Trying to sleep on eight or ten wads of hair was an ordeal, and I felt only relief when my locks were finally shorn as I entered junior high. All through childhood, I also wore a starched white pinafore each morning over my dotted swiss or polka dot piqué dresses. Mamie would get me ready for a morning presumably of play, put her hands lovingly on my shoulders, look me hard in the eyes, and say: “Now, go outside and have a good time, honey, but remember not to get your little pinafore wrinkled or dirty, in case we have company this afternoon.”
My way of coping with so many don’ts was to lie, not merely to avoid trouble but as a way of life. Most of the time I wasn’t found out, but fear haunted me. When I was caught, it was shameful and full of pain for us both. One summer between college terms, I insisted, when Mamie asked if I was bored with spending so much time with her, that I liked playing two-handed solitaire every afternoon and sitting in front of the TV trying to think of something other than the programs or her occasional contented snoring. I wrote my true feelings to my roommate and buried her answering letter in my underwear drawer. My mother periodically inspected my drawers, insuring that my clothes were neatly stacked. The day she met me at the front door, tears in her eyes and Jean’s letter in her hands, I lied extra hard to calm her and to cover my rage. “There’s only a month left till we can go back to Tuscaloosa and freedom” meant that Jean was unhappy with her home life, not that I had said anything about mine. “Your mom is like mine—they want their little girls close, just in case” was really saying how much we appreciated the loving watchfulness from our mothers as we got older. “Just put on a smiling face and count the days”: I couldn’t construct any other meaning for that one.
If I managed to get away with most of my lies, my disobedient acts were more flagrant and perceptible. Mamie’s mode of dealing with me was effective. As an active child, I ran and played as many hours as possible. Feeling trapped inside my house, I stayed outside except for lunch and occasional bathroom breaks, though I even preferred to squat in our back yard behind a hydrangea bush so as not to interrupt my play. Knowing all this, Mamie devised “Punishment.” Never spanked, I was forced to sit perfectly still in a rocking chair in my parents’ bedroom every time I disobeyed. There was a direct correlation between degree of defiance and number of minutes in that chair. The range was from five to thirty: five minutes can be a long time for puppies and little girls; thirty an eternity. I couldn’t take anything of mine into the room—no crayons, paper, books, games. They would distract me from contemplating what a “bad girl” I had just been. My mother never understood that I was trying to be a bad girl, since that was the closest I could get to being a boy.
What I did, shut in that room without a clock to let me see how my confinement was progressing, was fantasize. Within a few months, I was able to become sufficiently involved so that sometimes, out of sheer spite, I refused to leave. Mamie would come to the still-closed door when the last minutes were passing and say, “Time’s up, honey, you can go out and play now.” Mostly I just sat out my fantasy, prolonging the last scenes while she waited for my appearance. Rarely, I said, “Just a minute, I’m busy.” She’d stand it as long as she could and then burst into her own room and urge me out into family space. Once or twice she cried from sheer frustration, saying over and over, “I just don’t know why you hurt me this way.”
After one of my refusals to leave the room on her schedule, Mamie smarted around the house for the rest of that day overlooking smaller disobediences. I comprehended that I had won something; I felt smug and mean and lonely.
Most of my schoolmates lived in situations where at least the bathroom was private. I did not. The excuse went something like: “Oh, honey, excuse me, but we only have one bathroom and I just have to. . . .” There was a turn bolt on that door and my sister used it. When I tried, I was sharply reprimanded for inconveniencing Mamie who, after all, was responsible for dinner or lunch or whatever was currently important. More than I resented those intrusions, I disliked being called in while she bathed and dressed for the day. We talked there, or I was asked to help her into one of her several armoring garments—brassiere, massive girdle, tight-fitting slip. The intimacy and role reversals that surrounded these meetings several times a week for years seem even at this great distance to be troublesome.
I always sat on a little wicker clothes hamper, my eight-year-old feet barely touching the cool tile floor. I stayed very still, hoping my mother would forget I was there. Mouse quiet, I gazed at her, drying from her morning bath. She stood before me, huge and strong and all soft, rounded folds—layers of folds—face, breasts, stomach, thighs, ass, or as she insisted on calling it, “derrière.”
Once dry, she would start all over, this time with a powder puff bigger than my whole hand. The powder made me want to sneeze, but I would hold fingers like a clothespin on my nose so she would go on, forgetting me. With short quick motions, she dusted under her melon bosoms, slowly so they poised between rise and flop. Then she moved down to her satin stomach with its big open space she called a navel—to me a cave. Then her puff-hidden hand moved down, but I have blocked that scene. At this point I would jump off the hamper and ask “why” about some silly thing. I wanted to make her dress; I could not watch her any more.
My question broke into her lazy ritual, and she started to pile on ladies’ armor that crushed her lovely folds. First, a vest, soft but hiding. Then a brassiere one size too small so that her floppy breasts looked like iron ones. Was she really a lady knight in disguise? Then came the girdle I helped her close; I snapped the snaps—one . . . two . . . three . . . four—from waist to . . . Then came hooks and eyes over what I eventually learned was pubic hair. Then soft panties over that and a clingy slipover everything. At the very last, she smeared on Mum, a white cream for marble-shaved underarms, rouged her cheeks, and lined her full lips with a hard red stick.
Then she would loom over me—a statue in a mask—ready to fight her own dragons, I thought. I could not see any skin and had no hope for a soft hug; I would hurt myself on some new-made edge.
The other person living in our house was my sister, Betty. Sixteen and a half when I was born, she had been an only child until then. My first knowledge of her stems from a story Mamie told: when Betty found out that I was on the way, she is supposed to have replied, “If I can’t name the brat, I won’t speak to it.” My mother recounted this to relatives, neighbors, friends. She found it humorous, but I did not like being called “brat” or “it.” Betty was allowed to name me, and she chose Toni. Had I been a boy, I would have been called Tony. Many people do not understand the fine point of this gender-based spelling, so that all my life I have gotten mail addressed to Mr. McNaron. Once when I was going to church camp, I was mistakenly put into the boys’ cabin, only to be moved immediately upon arrival.
My sister is essentially verbal. From the beginning, she taught me words that I at first had no idea about, which I remembered by sound or later by spelling: “postprandial divertissement” was one of my earliest phrases, along with “marsupials are indigenous to Australia” and “the prolixity of lapins is horrific.” I see her sitting beside me rattling off these words, being amused and proud when I could repeat them to her latest swain.
In order to get finer instruction in Greek and French, Betty went to New Orleans to Sophie Newcomb College, then the women’s arm of Tulane University, but returned after one semester with a case of severe homesickness. The family doctor advised bringing her back home in November, but Daddy insisted she stay in New Orleans the whole semester; otherwise, he could not get a partial tuition refund. The story I always heard was that for the rest of that fall, Betty would call Mamie and cry into the long distance telephone.
Born a year after my parents were married, Betty was reared largely by her maternal grandparents. The Hurleys lived in Selma, Alabama, the seat of southern culture and agriculture. Adoring Betty, they lavished upon her clothes ordered from Bergdorf Goodman in New York, toys from Switzerland, and unconditional love. Since my mother’s father worked for a railroad, Mamie had unlimited passes to travel the eighty miles south from Birmingham. Mamie spent the last month or so of her pregnancy back home, and my father commuted on weekends. Once Betty was born, Mamie remained with her mother for several more months.
Grandparental showering at suchan early age convinced Betty that her family was without faultor flaw and that she would always be taken care of. When I was growing up under strict rules about keeping my room pristine at all times, my closet neat, and all my clothes properly hung or drawered, I chafed under tales of Betty’s youth. It seems that she often let her nightgown slip from her body onto the floor, only to have the faithful old family servant, Annie Belle Royal, come along to pick it up and put it away. I could not make sense out of two antithetical codes for children with the same mother.
Though the South of Betty’s youth and courting age was different from my mother’s, both women fulfilled the requirements of “belle.” My sister was what the forties termed glamorous. I remember one photo in particular; lightly tinted, it shows Betty in a soft hat with a huge brim that dips over her face just like Garbo’s or Rita Hayworth’s always did. Her smile is subtle, even alluring, and her soft hazel eyes glance upward from slightly shaded lids.
My sister had her own food story, as did everyone in our family. Determined to be thin at any cost but adoring sweets, she established a bizarre regimen. Breakfast was usually one piece of cheese toast and a mammoth cup of hot tea; lunch, a Hershey bar and Coca-Cola; dinner, tiny servings of food topped by a large dessert. If her morning ritual on the scale found the indicator pointing beyond her top weight (110 pounds), she ate virtually nothing that day except the Hershey bar and Coca-Cola. Next day, when things were back to acceptable, the earlier plan resumed. To this day, Betty has retained what can only be called a girlish figure, feeding others sumptuous meals while nibbling at Lilliputian helpings herself. Recently her doctor warned her that her blood sugar level was dangerously high, that sweets were off her diet. Realizing the genuine crisis this constituted, I quickly searched my co-op shelves for substitute snacks. But sesame sticks and trail mix hardly replace Lundt’s latest delight, a giant Hershey, or bulk chocolate triangles by the pound.
Her looks and charm made her quite popular with boys, who somehow did not hold it against her that she was also extremely smart. Since I was a flop at “boys” because they resented my success at my studies, I held my sister in some degree of awe. Betty was unwilling to sit home and pine, however, so she hid her all-A report cards, telling chums that she “did all right” at the end of each grading period. When I was preschool age, she had endless beaux wishing to marry her, all of whom she carefully kept at bay. Several of them paid court to Mamie, sensing that the way to Betty’s heart was through her mother. Others chose to focus on me in their struggle for supremacy: I was carried off to bed many nights on the shoulders of a sweet hulk of a man named “Box” Willingham, who threw me into the air to my delight and let me blow his army sergeant’s whistle. These World War II veterans played with me the way other children’s dads did, and I loved them fiercely.
Every now and then, Betty would prefer me out of the living room so she and her current visitor could be “alone.” In addition to the proverbial nickel for an ice cream cone, I was bought off in clever ways. The most original was the time Betty finagled me into turning the crank of her old blue Victrola while she and Tookie Teague waltzed. I was intrigued by the magical machine that made sounds if you cranked and by the graceful swirls my sister made. She negotiated the furniture and ornaments so much better than I.
During the war when men were off fighting Germans, Betty worked as a public school teacher. I picture her, frantic in our living room, watching a high school senior doing calisthenics that she herself would have to lead her class in the next day; or helping Mamie cut out endless patterns of leaves for borders in her third-grade room; or standing in tears in the middle of the floor having vainly tried to locate middle C on a pitch pipe, readying herself to teach music class. Finally, she got to be the librarian for a year until the regular guardian returned from her stint in the navy.
Books suited my sister better than basketballs or chalk pointers, so after being replaced in the schools, she found her way to the Birmingham Public Library. Beginning in the circulation department, checking out books, she quickly rose to be head of the popular literature wing. In those days, libraries tried to maintain quiet. Betty loved jewelry, especially gold charm bracelets. I can still hear her clinking delicately around shelves, urging three more novels on one patron, four more books on camping on another. Circulation doubled during her first year in the job, since her customers, especially the men, simply could not refuse her recommendations. Who knows whether they read every word, but they certainly exposed themselves to much more culture and information than they had intended. Though she complained about the hours, my sister probably liked her job—not exactly a salon, her section of the library was definitely her domain.
Betty left the library in the early sixties, returning to teaching, this time in a private school across town from where we lived. But in 1963, in December, our mother died suddenly, and Betty was permanently changed. One sign was her decision never to return to work. She asked a friend to bring any personal belongings from her desk when he came to pay his respects. Her last check was mailed to her at home.
We had what is now thought of as a closed nuclear family. When I was born in 1937, three of my grandparents were dead and the fourth died when I was three. My parents were old enough to be my grandparents, and my sister could have been a youngish mother. Though one of my mother’s brothers and one of my father’s sisters lived in Birmingham, I spent very little time in their homes or getting to know them. They visited us at Christmas, and occasionally we went to their houses for some special event. They called on my parents when they needed help, or when one of their sons (they all had only boys) got into some kind of trouble. I resented their arriving on our doorstep with their newest crisis, expecting Mamie or Daddy to solve it. I resented even more Mamie’s and Daddy’s persistent willingness to do just that, even when it meant hardship or strain for them.
My family’s insularity meant I was shut out of my history as well as on-going holiday clan gatherings. Neither parent liked to talk about the past: my mother said it was too painful; my father simply never mentioned his. I have been told that the annual July 4th celebrations in Selma took place on my mother’s parents’ lawn and that Mamie’s father worked for the railroad. Mostly, he dressed himself in starched white shirts and immaculate suits, summer or winter. Daddy was born and reared on Sand Mountain, at the tail of the Appalachians. His family was supposedly dirt poor and uncultured. My father’s father walked out on him, his mother, and two sisters when Daddy was in his teens, forcing him to end his youth and go to work to help support the family.
I know these shadowy ancestors from faded pictures, shown me under duress and at my insistence. I held back questions and responses so as not to upset whoever was showing them. Daddy’s father looks like a slightly ill kempt, overgrown kid, usually with some old hound dog at his feet, holding a bottle or glass in one hand, a string of dead fish in the other. His eyes are not quite focused, and he looks as if he could run at any moment. The first time I saw a snapshot of him after I had gone through treatment for years of alcoholic drinking, I felt I was meeting a kinsman. My father’s refusal to touch liquor at home suddenly made more sense.
Daddy’s mother came to live with him and my mother and sister when Betty was a child. Mamie told a story about sterilizing dishes and glasses in order to protect her child, only to have Mrs. McNaron, who suffered from tuberculosis, go into fits of hurt or affronted self-pity over the special treatment. Whenever my mother and father were in deep wrangles, Mamie would drag out her recital of these scenes, guaranteeing a yelled out, “I don’t want to hear that story one more time, Old Lady” (my father’s affectionate name for his wife). In the single snapshot of her that I have seen, my paternal grandmother stares out of eyes filled with betrayal, holds herself like a ramrod, seems afraid to smile. She is as thin and sparse and held in as her husband is fat, messy, and without boundaries. I would describe her as handsome rather than beautiful, him as childish and irresponsible.
I have many more photographs of Mamie’s side of the family, especially of her father. He is dressed to the hilt: rounded high collars centered by tasteful ties always adorned with a stick pin, never lacking a suit coat, framed in oval, arty tintypes taken by a professional photographer in downtown Selma. “Doc,” as Mamie’s father was called, smiles from his neat borders and reminds me of the Mona Lisa—reputedly enigmatic if not downright profound but vapid to me. In the full-standing photos, this saintly creature always has a pocket watch, visible from the gold chain and jeweled fob that show just below the center of his buttoned vest. Betty remembers him as “the sweetest man that ever lived.” All I remember about him is a walk down Holly Court hill when I was a baby of about two and a half. I needed to hold his hand to steady myself. Because it would have been less than gentlemanly to walk any way other than upright, I had to strain my short arm because he was too tall to walk upright and still reach down to my level.
Mamie’s mother looks like a matriarch from the United Daughters of the Confederacy, though we never belonged to that group: buxom and tightly corseted; tall and big boned; eyes looking straight ahead, unflinching and steely; hair pulled back from her face severely, only to roll into a soft circle around her head. When Betty showed me this picture a few years ago, my unvoiced but immediate response was, “I wouldn’t want to have her mad at me ’cause she could hold on to it forever.”
My mother’s mother died quite suddenly one summer in Foley, Alabama, in a movie house. Every year, my family vacationed there, staying in the cabin owned by Mamie’s parents. Foley boasted a picture show among its more modern attractions and Mamie’s mother took Betty and a boy cousin to afternoon matinees as often as the feature changed. There, in the darkened theater, my grandmother had a heart attack, and while my sister held her head her cousin ran for a doctor. My grandmother died, and my mother fell into a depression that lasted three years before my father intervened. At his insistence, they visited Dr. John, the family doctor. When my father asked what they might do to “cure Old Lady,” Dr. John recommended having another child. Though my parents were almost forty, I was conceived. Whenever Mamie told the story of Dr. John’s suggesting that she and Mac have a baby to “cheer Theresa up,” I felt like running. I grew up in the shadow of that expectation, always trying to please, so often sensing that what I did was not quite enough.
I felt too important to the adults in my house. They kept close watch over me, encouraging me to be what they were not or could not be, reluctant to let me be myself. As a result, my childhood was full of instances in which I very much wanted their attention, but when it came in quantities, I would feel compelled to pull away. For instance, my junior high school teachers seemed intent on having us create “projects,” assignments that caused me considerable consternation. Visual effects were to accompany our written reports, and we all knew that decorations determined whether our work received a B for competence or an A for “creativity.” Part of me welcomed the help readily forthcoming from Mamie, with Betty as her assistant, since I was not particularly artistic. They would cheerfully volunteer to make my covers, correct my spelling, encourage me to do yet more reading and writing to insure the coveted A. Somewhere in the middle of this process, my gratitude would turn sour, and I would feel taken over, unable to own my work but equally unable to snatch it from them.
My family taught me to see myself as superior to virtually everyone and to isolate myself in the name of precocity or independence or some other large, empty word. One result was that I developed an extraordinarily active imagination, another was few companions my own age. Angry and confused, I took my feelings outside where I ran and played, day after day, to the point of exhaustion.
