Chapter 3: Drapes and Drama

While it’s true my first home was the white stucco close to my grandparent’s house, my first memories planted themselves about a mile from there. The mile, halved between asphalt and dirt. Just a short distance for a mature child not quite three. With good reason, my first memory is that of a pregnant mommy, a daddy, a tricycle, and this stretch of road.

            If Mom was the first love of my life, MaMa surely was third. For much of my youth, it’s conceivable I loved MaMa best. She spoiled what was hers. And spoiled we were. For the most part, Aunt Frances and her two boys lived off. While I enjoyed my cousins’ annual visits more than life itself, I was appeased easily enough after their departure by our doting grandmother. I had her back to myself.

MaMa was the center of my world and all its sparkle. What belonged to MaMa belonged to me. Her beads hung from my neck and matching earbobs pinched my lobes. These baubles enhanced my appearance often enough. I found her dresses dull and discarded any attempt of their bulk or length around my body. Accessorizing was primary, calling then for the donning of high heel shoes of good taste three times my size. They looked nice with nail polish and lipstick. MaMa whistled in low and called me Miss Aster after my makeover. But soon after the games of dress-up, I was out climbing elms, searching barns, playing with boy-toys my boy cousins left behind, scarring and smearing the latest colors from Avon.

I’d ask each visit, “MaMa, can we go to Miss Wilson’s?” Amherst Variety was its name, but I called the store Miss Wilson’s. Mrs. Fred Wilson and her daughter, Artie Jewel, managed the store together.

To me, the place was Amherst’s own little pot of gold. Mrs. Wilson and Artie Jewel sold dry goods from shelves densely packed with overalls and khaki pants. Patterns, fabrics and notions sewed up most of the women’s interest. Hard oak floors (a lovely deep color in less shopped aisles) creaked with each step of a shopper’s foot while their children oohed and awed over baby dolls and toy soldiers, but none of these drew me. There was but one prime spot in this store as far as I was concerned, and the oak floor rubbed a little lighter for my days there. Artie Jewel's jewelry kept me at a standstill in that spot. I shopped for rings.

I’d walk over to the long bureau of mahogany. Patterns and zippers waited in a few of the top drawers, but the drawer I knew so well was just my height, and with a reliable pull, opened with ease. The treasure chest displayed an embellished assortment of dime store jewels. Circles of gold and silver, buried deep within the velveteen slots of a draped cardboard tray. I didn’t have to try on many, as there was always one or two that captured my attention more so than the others.

“Oh look, MaMa,” I’d say as I tried on an emerald atop a gold band then a sapphire nested in silver. I held my hand out, squeezed middle finger and pinkie to hold the one-size-fits-all band in place, squinted with a critical eye, examined it from afar, traded it for another, then asked MaMa’s opinion.

“Whichever you like, Sweetie Pie,” she always said.

The selected stone found itself upon the counter next to Artie Jewel’s cash register with buttons and numbers the size of nickels. I liked to watch her push its keys down and then crank the old register’s handle. At last, our dime was paid. The ring was mine. Sometimes I waited on MaMa to fit the band to my right finger, not too snug, but other times she wasn’t quick enough. I’d mash the metal, mess it up and bend it again to make it fit better. Soon enough, the loop cut into my fingers and gave reason for another trip to the dime store for replacement of the crippled gem.

MaMa rarely bought me two rings simultaneously. “Only one, Sweetie Pie,” she’d say. There was one exception to this rule, and the set was extraordinary. MaMa sized the pair to my finger. After all, they cost three dimes and a nickel. Everything about them was frosted. This set, intended for the left hand. MaMa told me this as she first placed a silver band pronged with seven small stars onto my ring finger, then snuggled a solitaire the size of a full moon in front.

I wore the set of rings as a student on my first day in school. It was a day in which fall’s future first graders visited the school for one full day: introduction to the tasks of the scholarly. Before morning recess, the teacher called out, “Children, if you have any valuables, please bring them up front. I’ll lock them in my desk while we’re outside.”

I raised my hand and when she called my name, I asked, “Will you keep my wedding rings for me?”

She looked confused, but as I approached her desk, she understood their value. She smiled at them and then at me. The other kids only handed in lunch money.

My birthday comes eleven days after my sister’s. Were it the other way around, I’d be three years and eleven days older than Lisa, so as possession laws go, the grown-ups in my life were ninety percent mine. At that age, I must’ve reflected some about my mother’s pregnancy and what this impending split of focus entailed, but I don’t remember anything material. Perhaps I was self-absorbed enough to believe it had little to do with me.

It wasn’t quite noon that first brilliant day stored in my memory. I pushed sweaty bangs up from my forehead. Without a ponytail, my hair hung down to my waist, but that was only at bedtime. Small girls with locks of length get used to the headache.

I had no remorse when I paused in my outdoor play and looked for my mother’s image in the window. Sure enough, there it was, dressed between the kitchen curtain pair. Nature had curled and thickened Mom’s hair in brunette. Full against the sides and top of her head, it fluffed in fashion halfway down her face. Just short of two perfect ear lobes, the hair-do framed flawless skin. She sometimes wore glasses over full brows the same color as her hair, and maybe she wore them that summer morning. Old black and whites snapped from that time exposed her eyes as thoughtful. Green, their color darkens in the photos. Underneath her eyes, small crescents, just lighter than her brow, cupped the set.

I somewhat understood her swollen belly, but I didn’t understand fatigue and hormones at that time. She smiled without conviction through the window and I smiled back with plenty. I had to be quick. Her outside checks started soon.

I slipped from her sight and went back to the tree where I’d parked. In secret, I bent to my companion and said, “Now you stay right here and don’t tell Mommy where I’m at. I’m going to MaMa’s and I’ll be back and we’ll ride some more.” It was my tricycle I whispered to. Just enough time for a quick get away, I left the yard and headed down the dirt road.

On the way to MaMa’s, I imagined how proud she’d be of me once I arrived. “What a big girl you are, Sweetie Pie,” she’d say as I sat in her kitchen. She’d fiddle, search, serve. The feast would begin. First, a distinctive treat of that old Chef’s canned spaghetti (or sketty as I called it, even after I could say it right). Welch’s grape followed, still slivery and icy-fresh from the freezer. Then, oh, then, sugar and cinnamon donuts. Oh, I hope she has some. Delectable. Fitting enough for an only granddaughter.

            Unimaginable thoughts these were not. Though I had seen MaMa snippy before, she’d never been impatient with me. And no doubt, I’d tested it. These and other grandiose scenes played in my head and I was busy enough with them. My thoughts and I covered the road and kicked its clots deep into water ditches. Rutted from tractor tires or stuck pick-up trucks, it was a path the color of rust. At last, my thoughts and I stood at the crossing.

            I looked down the paved road, to the right of me. To my distress, in a distance, I saw a familiar car in the far lane, headed home. It’s a classic now, the ’57 two-door and hard topped Chevy Bel-Air, but its future meant nothing to me then, save the very immediate.

Wings and ornaments of chrome glared against the green of its body, juxtaposed against a high Texas sun. It was as if the car itself warned me of imminent trouble. My imagination shifted gears pretty quick and captured the image of Daddy. Dark like Mommy, but with a flattop for hair. He was the most handsome man I knew, and much like his mother, indulgent or just tired, his wrath with me was rare.

Call it Providence or premonition. Maybe. But something told me the man’s even keel was about to change. I pondered thought of this too long and missed sight of the semi with a payload of cattle headed toward town in the right lane. His horn scared me in short and I jumped back from the crossway.

After Dad turned onto the dirt road, he got out and grabbed me. He cradled me, nearly crushed me. Then he spanked me and said, “When we get home, you’re getting another spanking!” We got home and I got one. He promised me I’d never forget that day and my father’s word holds.

            Later, after Mom and I drove to MaMa’s, Mom told her, “Una, you’ll never believe the stunt your granddaughter pulled this morning.”

            The stunt explained, I awaited the drama of the moment with my head held high. How brave of me. How proud she must be. I smiled and hoped for her praise.

            “What a big girl you are, Sweetie Pie,” MaMa might say as we stood there in her kitchen. She’d fiddle, search, serve. Commencement: first with a distinctive treat of that old Chef’s canned sketty, followed then by Welch’s grape, still slivery and icy-fresh from the freezer. Then, oh, then, sugar and cinnamon donuts….

            Not. No, MaMa was not happy.

The first memory of meeting my sister is enameled in white. Her bassinet’s soft wood arched and weaved around our bundle. The diminutive bed stood shielded on its west side by a dressing table and stool. A double bed had its east and an armoire of cedar flanked its left. Double decks of double windows flanked a double bed from the right. Forever sticking or leaking moisture and cold air, fogging. Identical windows sell for small inheritances in antique stores today.

The windows wore drapes ordered from a Sears and Roebuck or Montgomery Ward’s catalogue. Two single closets finished the south, one packed full with PaPa’s clothes. The other, nearest the armoire and difficult to get into, lived stuffed with cardboard boxes filled with pictures of stern men and their cars or buggies. Tired women and bonnets worn thin. Even the babies looked aged. There were pictures of MaMa’s youngest brother as a sailor, after he’d survived the bombs at Pearl Harbor. In fact, Uncle Charles was the only one who smiled from the photos. Everyone knew he drank whiskey, so maybe that was it, because the others wore faces as serious as some Sunday sermon.

Each closet hid mothballs.

This was the bedroom Lisa and I would share for hundreds of secrets to come. The room I’d later comb through cardboard boxes free of moths. Covert in my actions, I sometimes sought pictures of Zane in his casket while Lisa waited on me. Sometimes I looked at pictures of Bobby, MaMa’s baby brother who’d drowned when he was fifteen-months old. More than once, I had MaMa tell me the story of how she’d fallen asleep on their front porch, ill after a fever, rheumatic maybe. In my youth, I believed that MaMa relished these purges as much as I did. And maybe it was so. Sometimes it’s easier to talk to a child or a tree or a wind chime. Often enough, I prompted scene and tale of how in the time she was responsible for Bobby, her charge had wandered to the horse tank and fell in while she dreamed.

We have pictures of Bobby in his casket too. There are no such pictures of sleeping bodies since. Not to my knowledge. I’m not sure when the snapping of bodies died, but it certainly wasn’t until after dead bodies no longer slept at home and awaited their burial. I only remember one of these loved ones. His name was Millard. He was Aunt Frances’ father-in-law. I’d often ask MaMa to repeat other “sitting with a dead body” stories. She’d relay again, how in the old days, families sat with their dead, somebody’s casket in the middle of their living room. They did this to scare-off the cats that clung to the screens of their front doors late at night.

After the repeated and macabre tales, I’d sometimes sleep in the same room with my grandmother, if the stories proved good enough, or if by chance I’d watched some Dracula movie earlier. I’d ask the woman who slept alone on “the back porch” (because she coughed so much), “MaMa, would you make me a pallet next to you?”

But MaMa’s guest room was the room I usually tossed-in, late at night. There, I studied a small gas stove, listened to the hiss of orange and blue flames. Their light comforted me as I pushed on my stomach and kneaded cramps sure to come if I’d managed just a “sup” of MaMa’s steeped senna tea. I listened to rare traffic when it traveled back and forth FM 37 and wondered how far the passengers journeyed. Imagining them, a mommy and daddy talking low, their children sleeping and dreaming on the way to a relative’s home far away.

I still listen to that sound out my bedroom window late at night. Thoughts of lonely tread against asphalt, they cross at Eleventh and Tyler now. The hum of the tire’s rubber against the road is similar to the resonance I listened to as a child, then listened for when Aaron was a teenager. But now the vehicles carry a payload of the unfamiliar. Gone are the days of youth, and finally, even searches through cardboard boxes have shifted into low gear.

Foremost, MaMa’s guest room is where I first fell in love with my baby sister. Transformed I was into a little mother of annex. I was, after all, the big sister of those tiny fingers and full lips. She arrived fully decorated in dark hair and lashes, dimpled.

Smitten with her splendor, I searched further and pulled back her blanket, examined little toes and full tummy.

Whoa! I jumped back. A black stump gripped the baby’s tummy.

Something needed tending, and why hadn’t it been already? Deadpan, I hastened to the door and called out to our mother, “The baby’s tummy has a bug on it.”

Mom gave me some child’s version of the umbilical cord, what it draped to.

The long ponytail my mother now gathers her hair into each morning reveals in full measure two perfect ear lobes. Each draped with a hearing aid. Because of this, her once already audible voice grows the louder. She tests her hearing each morning with the volume on her television turned to fourteen. When she’s home, and that’s nearly always, the sets remain at fourteen through the daytime and early evening.

            One TV set orates to an empty bedroom during the day. The other room, more active, is where Mom stirs hearty soups and embroiders day of the week cup towels. She researches Biblical history in both rooms and these sets remain on until bedtime at eight-thirty. Then hearing aids and ponytail, loosed. In bed, she consumes half a novel, right before one final scripture-search from within our Father's Word. Fed from the pages, my mother right-clicks the knob to her lamp, sleeps. Squints.

In Virgie’s golden years, she often turns to memoir of her own and passes it down to her girlfriends and me from high school. About a year ago, during the summer of 2007, she e-mailed the story of my parents’ betrothal.

One time my little band of friends got together and I suppose we had nothing much to do and as we were discussing this we decided “Let’s do a wedding.” This was between our junior and senior year. There was a movie at the time that featured an elaborate formal wedding and we definitely liked how glamorous it all looked. We were this little bunch of best friends and as daring as one could be at that time. To be honest, no one was very daring. Daring was not a very popular thing back then at old Amherst High School. Mostly it was just giving Mrs. Weddle a hard time during Home Economics. It wasn't even a very hard time at that. Bobby Joe, a boy in our class, got hold of her notebook where she had taken notes on us disrupting the class. Joy: talking out of turn. Joyce: disrupting class by going to the bathroom without permission. That sort of mean and evil action. Jo Ann: refusing to complete assignment on drapes for Home Economics cottage. Virgie: talking out of turn, going to the bathroom without permission, failing to complete assignment on drapes for the Home-Ec. cottage. Really daring stuff.

At any rate, Jo Ann, already married to my cousin, lived in California at the time. We had room mothers during high school; they were always the same ones. It was a given that it was mine, Barry's, Joy's, Joyce's, and the list had included Jo Ann's mom right up until Jo Ann ran away to marry and was no longer in our class.

We could talk any old time, go to the bathroom on a whim, and let some other class finish the drapes that we came to hate anyway. In other words, they let us do pretty much what we wanted when we wanted. This was really just about it and was harmless, looking back on it now. Oh, there was a time that one girl called me a name that rhymed with witch when I was a freshman and I considered a fight with her. My friends and I discussed this and I had to talk to Mother and Daddy and get a feel as to what this would entail in my home life as far as giving up privileges. Mother told me no dice or she would ground me for a week, Daddy threatened me with a few weeks and so the die was cast. It was probably the most exciting event to happen at our school for a long time. Well, Joy's Dad was on the school board and she looked into just what would happen if this grand event took place. Come to find out, as long as it was off the school grounds it was not going to be within the school’s jurisdiction to do anything, and so the event took place down on the lot behind what is now Artie Jewel’s Dry Goods Store. I was to wear my jeans as were all the rest involved. I wasn't too concerned about who would win this catfight. I was younger than Mickey who was eighteen months older and older than Bennie by eighteen months and had been fighting with and against them all my life. An old hand at this you see. The girl I had to fight was an only child as I remember and so therefore not much of a challenge that I could see.

After a while, things got quite stale for us, so we decided to plan a wedding. I could have had a dozen fights by this time, but they didn't materialize, and for that, I was thankful. They would have whipped me all over the place and I wasn't going to push my luck on that score. But back to the wedding.

Well, I was chosen to be The Bride. I was thankful for the lead in this drama. I had played the lead in the Junior Play and relished being the main character. For The Wedding, we favored picture hats and off the shoulder dresses for the bridesmaids. Then there was a little number I thought would do for my starring role. My friends decided that pastel colors were the fashion for such a thing and of course, white for the bride. I really felt that the costumes they had were by far the cutest, so we tossed the idea around that maybe someone else could have the lead and I could be a bridesmaid. But no. They knew their parents would never go for it and for a while, it seemed that the event of the summer just might be cancelled.

Mom and Dad were separated at the time and mother was so used to me performing that she rather got into the role of mother of the lead role, and so it was on. Joyce decided that June was the required month for a wedding. She, more than the rest of us, was more up on that kind of etiquette. So the rest of the summer was taken up with the fun things of deciding on the costumes. It was an elaborate affair for that day and time. To choose patterns and to have bridal showers and picking out music and singers and piano players and churches for the ceremony was as much fun as I had ever had. Picking out crystal (still un-used to this day) was a plus. Every choice was of course, a group decision, and it wasn't hard to come up with what the male cast to this event was to wear. Blue suede shoes were all the rage. So were blue suits for the guys.

Actually, it wasn't much fun on that choice. Men clothes have never been much fun. We didn't have a place to shop for a tux within a hundred miles it seems. Oh, I’m sure if we had tried, we could have found something a little more formal, but we considered the guys to have very minor roles in this production. I had pretty much settled down on the groom department for quite a while by then. Harvey and I had set a record by going together for my entire junior year.

Just because I didn't like to sew on drapes for Home Ec. didn't mean I didn't know how, so I designed my elaborate trousseau. I think Joyce was the one to tell me that this was a custom for brides and I relished the idea.

When the Junior Play was over, I went home just the same old girl as always and things went on in my life as usual, but the June Junior Drama was different. I think that I loved the idea of a honeymoon, but it never occurred to me that my life would change for good. That as a married woman I would no longer have my mom to do the cooking and the washing. It never was even in the discussion.

When I was gathering up my clothes to become a Mrs. instead of a Miss, my mom wanted to know if I wanted to take my old ratty house shoes that I dearly loved. I was horrified at the idea that she even entertained the thought. With everything new and pretty, who wanted those old ugly things?

I guess I was married for about two weeks when the reality of the situation set in. We had gone to visit my family in Fieldton and I decided the play was over. Harvey was much younger than his sister who was married and lived off somewhere. It really was as if my husband was an only child. We lived out in the country and to be honest, I missed the brothers and sister that I had grown up with. It was so quiet and lonely being a wife. My groom spent his day in the field. We had no telephone and no TV. The most excitement I had was when my mother taught me to sort clothes and how to wash at the steam laundry in town.

 I knelt down by my mother’s chair during the visit. With tears in my eyes, I clung to her. Harvey stood by the door a little embarrassed. He liked the honeymoon part much more than I did. Finally, Mother told me that I needed to go, that my husband was waiting for me. Well, I went into my old bedroom and grabbed those awful looking house shoes and glared at that old honeymoon loving man and said, “Alright, let's go!”

Well, the wedding really was absolutely a thing of beauty. I finished my senior year as a married woman with what I am sure was because of a little power behind Joy's dad being on the school board, and best of all, Mother made my drapes.

P.S. Joy, please send this to Joyce. I don't have her e-mail address handy.

            Charmed I am when Mom satires the wedding of my parents and fails to have her friend’s e-mail address handy. Not to worry. She easily sways or wears down those around her. No doubt, the memoir found Joyce via Joy’s handier address book.

            When I was young, I’d imagined my parents falling in love, but my drama was dissimilar to Mom’s June wedding. It involved elopement and extraordinaire. Perhaps I envisioned it as an escape from the hot plains of Texas. After a quick wedding in a faraway land, I visualized a honeymoon of romance and the way it launched.

Morning dawns quiet on the balcony of their honeymoon cottage. The moon has given up most of its marshmallow light as it quietly surrenders its place over the mountaintops. Part of one mountain resembles the head of an aged and balding man. Distance draws the rounded peak as a few sparse trees in the middle of a full crop of pine’s spruced outer circle. From the couple’s view, there are two distinct mountaintops. The smaller mountaintop slopes full and rises to the larger, reverent to the bold and still. Small bits of snow replicate the color of an old wooden cross. With its arms held out, the cross seems to wait for an embrace.

“Am I bothering you?” The groom’s breath warms the back of his bride’s neck. He kisses her there and hands her a mug of cocoa.

The bride blows on the chocolate, peers through its steam out over the mountains. A half moon nearly retreats as the yellow morning light rises to reveille. It does not hurry, but hides behind three large pines that grace the middle of the backdrop. A yielding groundcover stirs gently in the breeze. White, yellow, pink and red varieties flower in the midst of its quilt. The bride is chilled and trembles, much like the flowers. She wants to hurry the brilliance of the perfect morning. The birds, more patient than she, rise in praise.

In a child’s dream, the honeymoon never goes further than this.

An alternative version. The couple date in high school. Between math and social studies, steady commitment, discussed. After that, Virgie wears Harvey’s letter jacket of wool, lined with silk and heavy. A navy blue bulldog, stitched on its back, large in leather and the tufted blue A on its front—proof of loyalty to the Amherst Bulldogs, his size on her frame, proof to others, their loyalty to each other.

Her finger, size six, sports the ring of her true love, size nine, his class, one year ahead, sized-down with adhesive tape or maybe blue yarn. Then again, it might dangle from her neck, on a long chain underneath a cashmere sweater. When she walks with him to class, he carries her books. She, in her penny loafers and poodle skirt, struts with the swing of a glamour girl. The metal tether dances against her chest, feels cold somewhere near her heart.

Flirting together at sockhops, dancing the jitterbug and falling in love, deciding to take the dance a step further, the handsome man in blue suede shoes is dropping hints of popping an important question between the splendor of love, unchained melodies crooning from the circles of 45’s.

Or maybe the sockhops had really been at one of those drugstores from the fifties, though no one ever danced at the drug store in Amherst that I knew of. Better yet, I imagined their betrothal began in a movie theatre where Rock Hudson fell in love with Doris Day, but isn’t fiction always that?

I’d pictured my parents as part of some fairy tale movie. They shared popcorn from one carton, its cardboard as warm and yellow as the butter each licked off their fingers. They chased the salty goodness with swills of coke syrup and carbonated water frothed together and iced. They dunked Milk Duds into the frost of the fusion. The cup waxed and iced the chocolate caramels. Time and friction chills the candy and crystallizes it into a good crunch. Refreshment concluded, they sit a single cup with two straws on the floor beside the empty container of corn and laugh when they join sticky hands.

But perhaps Mom’s, the better story after all.

            She’s audacious in speech and thought. There’s no middle ground in her world and few who encounter her leave without some strong impression, one way or the other.

The volume and drama of my mother sometimes reminds me of my son. Like the matriarchs of the maternal side of his family, Aaron pushed his luck. His voice and his life were always in high volume. When he pretended to read just before age three, he read the pictures and rehearsed the stories from a Little Golden Book. Cinderella was Aaron’s favorite. He’d read it to me. And to the woman he called Granny. Such a precious voice. “Cindawella, queen the house, queen the dwapes….”

Aaron favored each of us in many ways. My mom could share more than one story of my blanket and me. It was a soft white thing. I used to fall asleep while I rubbed it under my nose. It finally fell to nothing more than a strip no bigger than a long gauzy bandage. When I’d ride my blue Schwinn bike in the second grade, that strip stayed tied around my handlebars.

Before Aaron was born, his paternal great-grandmother made him two quilts. When he was eight-weeks old, I returned to work at Lubbock State School. I left my baby to nurse other babies who were much in the same sad way as Shane.

Of the two quilts, Aaron stuck only one of them in his mouth. As time grew, he knew his own scent. No other blanket, not even the identical quilt, substituted for the one he loved. Breast feeding finished, blanket sucking commenced.

He was my breast-fed, blanket-sucking baby boy, a little Linus look-alike. He threw his blanket away when he was ten. Lord, how I wish for that blanket now. It surely would have carried some scent. You couldn’t even bleach it out.

Funny how some things change in a heartbeat and others never do. As a toddler, my son was afraid of a few things. Fireworks and sleeping alone among others. He was petrified of dogs. Displays of fear ended shortly after he spoke well. But before we ever owned a dog.

I can still see him running down Lisa’s hallway, hollering, dragging that bleached quilt behind him. The blanket that never left his side only enticed even more, some puppy my sister always had.

Making the chase all the more.

All the louder. Familial echoes.