Ugly Ways Read online

  She took it for granted that he would feel the same way about her that she felt about him. Because he was the first.

  Just the smell of sawdust still made her horny.

  I wonder if Cinque came by the shop today, she wondered as the thought of being horny made her mind immediately flit to her sculptured, broad-shouldered lover, Cinque. "It's not like he's eighteen or under the legal age or anything," she had told her sisters over and over about the shy local boy who had turned nineteen shortly after Betty hired him to do some quick handyman work in her beauty shop in East Mulberry. Now, she told her sisters primly as if she were doing good works for the church, she was trying to help him get into college. "He's really a very good poet, too," she insisted.

  Emily and Annie Ruth had just laughed at their big sister's embarrassment over Cinque. They thought it was great and kept feeding her suggestions to try with him and then come back and share the details with them.

  Following Annie Ruth's advice, Betty had one night tied Cinque to the big brass bed in her bedroom.

  "Miss Lovejoy," he had gasped. "You gonna make me scream."

  "Baby, I think that's the point," she had said, as breathless as he. "This is my house. We are alone. Yell all you want."

  When she came back to herself, sitting there in Mudear's driveway looking out over her field of flowers, she nearly blushed and became flustered, putting out her cigarette hurriedly and avoiding her own gaze in the rearview mirror. It seemed Mudear crept into her thoughts at the most unexpected and inopportune times. Like now, she thought as she put the car in reverse, backed out to the empty street, and sped out of Sherwood Forest.

  But she knew from talking with her sisters that Mudear did that with all of her girls. It seemed the kind of mother they had touched them all the way through their lives. Not just when they lived with her, not just when they spent time visiting her, but all through their lives. Mudear seeped into their lives and heads as easily as she had used them to go out into the world for her when they were children and she decided not to leave the house.

  Betty knew that people in town had all manner of theories concerning Mudear and why she stayed in the house. Over the years, a mythology had grown up around her as if she were some mighty goddess like Oshun out of an ancient legend.

  Some in Mulberry thought that Mudear was scared to leave the house. In recent years they had even been able to put a name to it: agoraphobia. As if Mudear were afraid of anything. Some just knew that her parents' situation was like that of Mr. Raymond and Miss Edna who lived in a small tin shack in East Mulberry. Mr. Raymond, who had had both his legs amputated because of sugar years before and who moved around in a beat-up wheelchair, kept his wife trapped in the house. As a child, Betty had heard two women ahead of her in the checkout line at the Colonial grocery store say as much about Mudear.

  "Poor thing, Esther Lovejoy is just like Miss Edna. She a captive in that house. And Mr. Raymond, he beat Miss Edna, too."

  "Well, hell if I'd let a man in a wheelchair beat my ass when I got two good legs and he ain't got none!"

  "That what make it so sad. Miss Edna must stand there and be beat."

  "Well, Esther probably getting her ass whipped in that house, too. That man only allow the girls to leave for school and errands. Yeah, Esther a captive in that house."

  The woman paying at the cash register kept clearing her throat and batting her eyes in Betty's direction. But the women speaking wouldn't turn around and see that one of the subjects of their gossip was standing right behind them and just kept talking.

  It had taught Betty a valuable lesson for someone who lived in a small town. After that, she never talked about anyone in her beauty shop or anywhere in public without looking over her shoulder first to make sure somebody's relative or friend wasn't listening nearby.

  Some folks in town spread the rumor that Mudear had some horrible facial disfigurement that caused her to set herself apart from the world, ashamed of the way she looked. That one amused Betty the most because she knew that Mudear thought she was the prettiest thing going. And that her flawless brown complexion was a matter of inordinate pride with her. But the thing that amazed Betty was when she discovered that Mudear had somehow heard all these rumors, probably from her friend Carrie, and that none of them disturbed the self-contained woman. She even laughed at some of the rumors. Since the change, Mudear didn't give a damn what people thought of her.

  Betty envied her for that. Over the years, she had grown to envy Mudear many things.

  She certainly knew how to "delegate" work at least if not authority. She was the original "delegator." She delegated heavy garden chores and errands requiring a car to Poppa and most everything else to her eldest daughter.

  I can just hear her now, Betty thought. Whatever comes up, Betty will handle it.

  Let Betty do it. Let Betty do it. Let Betty pick that up, she big-boned. Let Betty show you how to iron a long sleeve. Let Betty...

  Shit! Betty thought. Let her?

  When she pulled out of her parents' driveway, a light rain had begun to fall. She started to stop by her beauty shop in their old neighborhood in East Mulberry on her way home but thought, I don't have the strength to play boss tonight. And she headed home instead, knowing that her two assistant managers would have taken care of both businesses knowing there was a death in the family.

  By the time she reached her own house at the top of Pleasant Hill, the light drizzle had grown to a drenching downpour. And Betty noted that Emily's red Datsun wasn't anywhere around. Even though Emily had left Mudear's house at least half an hour before her, Betty tried not to worry as she pulled into the long driveway and parked in the garage next to her big restored stone colonial house and let herself in the old maid's entrance.

  CHAPTER 8

  Each time Emily was in town after a heavy and long rainfall, she went down to the overpass of the Spring Street bridge over the Ocawatchee River to see if the river was deep enough now to jump in and drown. She was a teenager when she first actually considered the act, but the riverbed always seemed to be muddy red or nearly dry, with hardly enough water rushing over it to come up to her chin. Her father, who loved to fish, said he remembered when the waters of the Ocawatchee regularly overflowed its banks, flooding the houses at the foot of Pleasant Hill, sending chickens and cats and dogs to higher ground. And the fat dark mullet could almost be caught with your hands on the banks. But Emily found that hard to believe.

  From the relative protection of the overpass, she had been watching regularly since she was a teenager and had never seen any such phenomenon.

  Just like Mudear said, "Don't pay no attention to nothing Poppa say. Poppa'll say anything," she'd think.

  But she couldn't stop herself from checking. Checking was something she did all the time. She told herself that she did it to keep some kind of control in her own life. Otherwise, she felt like a child riding a new two-wheel bike down a hill without holding onto the handlebars.

  When she came to a doorway wider than one door, she had to count with her foot five times before entering. It amazed her that no one seemed to notice her compulsive actions, as much as she carried them out during the day. But in the government building where she worked as an archivist, among her acquaintances, at her favorite gym where she had just started going to take care of the extra weight she had put on recently, no one pointed out her compulsions. Mudear was the only one who ever said, "Girl, what in the hell are you doing tapping your foot five times on the doorjamb? I have raised a fool." It never dawned on Emily that she had been doing these routines so long, touching a curl in the front of her hair five times, brushing down the hairs of her right eyebrow five times before checking a file, that they seemed part of her makeup, not some alien neurotic compulsions. Just how Emily was.

  This evening, just as it had begun to rain again, Emily had headed instinctively for the banks of the Ocawatchee River when she left Mudear's house. It was where she liked to be when she had something to figure ou
t as well as when she considered suicide. And now, with the news of Annie Ruth's pregnancy—a pregnancy that her younger sister had the nerve to think of letting go to completion—on top of Mudear's death, Emily knew she really had something to ponder.

  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.