Betty, a young woman preparing to go off to college, looks back on her childhood in Dixter, Oklahoma
Excerpt
Secrets
I AM SITTING AT the breakfast room table, writing the Farewell Speech
for my high-school graduation, when I hear it — the screen door out on
the back porch, rattling in its frame.
And I'm afraid.
It can't be Richard . . . this is Tuesday. Richard doesn't mow the yard
until Thursday.
Again the rattling.
Telling myself there's nothing outside to be afraid of, I get up
and head through the kitchen, over to the look-through window in the
kitchen door.
Squinting down the length of the screened back porch, a tunnel of shade
that runs between the house on one side and a thicket of mulberry trees
on the other, I can see only a blinding rectangle of sunlight at the
opposite end, and in it — as though giant scissors had cut out a patch
of the light — a squat silhouette.
Not Richard — Richard is tall and spidery.
Telling myself again there is nothing outside the house to fear, I open
the kitchen door and step out onto the back porch. Blinking against the
sunlight at the far door, I can see now that, whoever it is waiting for
me there, it is a woman. A black woman. Certainly a common enough sight
at the back doors of Dixter . . . but not at ours.
For we never keep help. Except when someone in the family is dying.
"Miss Betty don' 'member me," the woman says, her voice filtering
through the wheeze of labored, asthmatic breathing.
"Ethel!" Though her face is still in shadow, the sound of that long
reach for air has triggered memory and recognition.
"Miss Betty do 'member," she grins.
I can see her features now, the plaits of hair thinner than when I last
saw her, the front teeth longer, hanging looser in the gums.
"Come in, Ethel," I say, opening the screen door.
She sidles in, circles me at arm's length, studying me shyly out of the
sides of her eyes, her head lowered. "You a young lady," she concludes.
"Next month I graduate," I answer.
"Then you be leavin' us, I spec?"
"For college . . ." I catch myself, "that is, if Nanna's well enough."
"I heerd about yer grammaw," she says, looking at the rows of Nanna's
canning jars along the side of the porch. Then, still not looking me in
the eye, she adds, "I be sayin' to mysef, 'Ethel, Miss Betty could mos'
likely be usin' some hep'.' "
Facing away now from the glare of the door, back into the dimness of the
porch, I can see Ethel's dark face clearly, shade upon shade, memory
upon memory, and I know I have opened the door to the full face of my
fears: Nanna is going to die.
And Ethel has come to help me. She who knows that only in last illnesses
do we keep help.
Always, in those illnesses, it has been Ethel who has come to us,
unbidden, out of whatever life she lives, who has stayed with us through
the last days, through the funeral, for however long it took for the
household to get "straightened 'round," until the day Nanna would send
her away, to return to that other life.
* * *
The first was my aunt's. My mother's younger sister.
"Little Auntie" I called her.
I was four years old. Little Auntie was twenty-five. Mother, twenty-seven.
Little Auntie looked just like those sultry-eyed movie stars whose
pictures, right alongside Rudolph Valentino's, lined the foyer of the
Palace, Dixter's movie theatre. The Palace, in its way and in its day,
was as central to Dixter life as the First Baptist Church: one brought
another world to us; the other spoke of a world where we could go. Both
to the movies and to the church, men and women wore their best.
At the church they were greeted by the pastor, acting like he owned it;
at the Palace, by Uncle Ted and Little Auntie, who did own it.
Each night Uncle Ted stood in the foyer taking tickets — dressed, they
said, like the Prince of Wales, in knickers and bow tie; while Little
Auntie sat in the box office, taking money — dressed as neatly like the
stars lining the walls of the foyer as Dixter's customs and Nanna's
sewing machine would allow (the sewing machine that, for years, had
helped support the family).
Knowing that under her Theda Bara get-up lay the heart of a prairie
girl, the town forgave Little Auntie her beauty. Besides — they would
say and still say — couldn't she have been a star herself? And didn't
she turn down the chance ? To do what women were put here on earth to do
. . . And then, very proud, they tell how when she and Uncle Ted were
touring the Hollywood studios, Cecil B. De Mille — the great man
himself — tried to get them to stay over long enough for Little Auntie
to have a screen test, and how she thanked him and said she had other
plans (starting a family). And then they tell about the photograph he
gave her, to show her children some day — if they doubted her story.
(He signed it, "In memory of a beautiful lady. " Uncle Ted kept it,
alongside one of Little Auntie showing her in profile, wearing a large
net hat swathed in yards of sequin-spattered veiling, holding to her
face some dark-throated white flowers, translucent with light.)
Little Auntie and Uncle Ted lived only two blocks from my grandparents'
house, where Mother and I lived, but for me that two blocks was like a
journey into my story books, from a world of heavy oak and dark maroon
upholstery and a tight-lipped air of guilt and impending doom to a world
of gaudy color and a laughing sense of expectation. Making that journey
to that other country, even Mother would speak a different language, a
language of idle chatter and large gesture. In that other country, she
would lay her hands on my shoulders and tousle my hair and put her arms
around me.
Outside, their house was a nondescript wooden bungalow of the 1920s.
Inside, it was a homemade, hand-painted version of what she had seen in
magazines and movies and of what, out of sheer love of color, she had
added — a blend of Moorish, Art Nouveau, and tropical jungle. A proper
nest for my dark and lovely aunt.
All of the wood of her furniture she had painted black (the Japanned
look); all of the upholstery she had buried in shawls and pillows —
pillows of red and purple and pink, pillows of black satin embroidered
and appliqued with the same reds and purples and pinks. Across a
nondescript table she had draped a silk, fringed Spanish shawl, black
with giant red roses.
Her personal leitmotif was birds. And she used them with bravado and
humor — embroidered on the pillows, beaded onto a velvet wallhanging,
painted onto a firescreen that concealed, not a fireplace, but an open-
flamed gas heater. (It was evident that the lady of the house, despite
her exotic plumage, spent her leisure hours as other women of small
towns of the flat and dusty plains spent theirs — in needlework and
china painting. )
On the sideboard in her dining room, where other people had cut-crystal
bowls or china tea sets, she had a basket of feathers — from common
birds like jays and canaries and from exotic ones like ostriches and
egrets. When I would visit her, she would hand them to me, and I would
spread them out on the floor, make bouquets of them, tuck them into the
collar of my dress where I could rub my chin against them.
In my grandparents' house, the sideboard was no less fascinating — but
forbidden. It held Grand-daddy's wonderful-smelling tobacco humidor, his
heady-smelling bottles, and the bottles with no smell at all but with
pictures of round-faced children in fur hats and fur jackets. These
children and their furry garb enthralled me: I would go into the dining
room by myself, pull up a chair, climb up on it, and study them and
wonder about them. All such study came to an end one day when Nanna
found me there, reaching across to one of the bottles. "Just what do you
think you're doing?" she hissed, pulling the chair away with such a jerk
that I almost fell. "Don't you ever let me catch you up there again!"
There was something very wicked about those children, I concluded. That
was the way of things in my grandparents' house: evil hid itself in
crystal bottles, on bathroom shelves, and even jumped at you from behind
certain words. One had to be very wary. Punishments were frequent;
explanations, rare. Not until I was twelve would I learn the secret of
the evil hidden in those heady-smelling bottles — Grand-daddy was an
alcoholic. How I grieved for the lost innocence of the round-face
children; and how happy I was, just this last year, when I encountered
them once again, smiling at me from a grocery shelf, from unimpeachable
bottles of Cliquot Club soda water. Exonerated, at last.
* * *
The summer I was allowed to give up naps, Mother and I, on one of our
regular afternoon visits to Little Auntie's house, found her in bed.
Surely grown-ups, I thought, don't have to take naps.
The visit did not follow its usual pattern. She did not play what had
come to be our little ritual that would begin with her offering me some
gum. "Yes, please," I would say. "What kind?" she would ask. "Juicy
Fruit, please," I would say. "Juicy Fruit? I don't think I have any."
"Well, thank you anyway." Then she would begin to rummage through her
bureau drawer, and I would wait, knowing she would soon exclaim in mock
surprise, "What do you know! Juicy Fruit! And some Life Savers, too!"
And we would laugh as though none of this had ever happened before.
This time, no offer. No game. No laughter.
The next visit, she was again in bed. And again, no ritual. This time I
decided to remind her by initiating it myself. "Have you any gum?" I
asked, smiling at my cleverness. Instead of picking up her cue, she
turned her head on her pillow, nodded toward the dressing table, and
said, "Top-drawer, left-hand side."
Without the game, the prize had lost its savor.
On this, my last visit to her bright nest, there were to be neither
smiles nor banter nor hugs.
I was certain it had to do with my asking for the gum.
And even more certain when the next day Mother, leaving for her visit,
told me I could not come with her.
For several days she and Nanna made their separate visits, each leaving
me behind.
Then, one morning I came across them in one of the downstairs bedrooms —
the "company" bedroom — putting fresh sheets on the bed. Who's
coming?" I asked.
"Little Auntie," Mother said.
"To live here ?" I asked, filling with excitement. It did, after
all, seem thoroughly logical: had not Mother and I come back here to
live?
As though she had seen a tarantula on it, Nanna dropped her side of the
sheet, drew back, away from the bed.
"I'll finish it, Mama," Mother said quickly. "You go see to the dinner."
Nanna left the room, wringing her hands.
There it is again, I thought, that same wickedness. Where had it come
from this time?
Turning round to me, Mother said, "Why don't you see if your grand-daddy
needs some help?" She was smiling, trying to make it up to me, I
thought, but she was crying at the same time, so l didn't feel much
better.
"He's cleaning the Big Car, to go and get Little Auntie," she said.
That made it both better and worse.
The big yellow touring car was the one he used to take me for rides in,
those scary, thrilling rides on the brand new road the grown-ups called
"the highway" — the air rushing past my face so fast I could hardly
catch any of it long enough to breathe — and those funny rides up and
down the rises and gullies of dusty country roads, me laughing and
squealing and him laughing and looking over at me and yelling, "Tickling
your tummy yet?" Those rides that were now forbidden. "Never," Mother
had said. "Does that mean 'not ever?' " I asked. "Yes. Not ever," she
answered.
As with other crevasses that opened beneath me in that house, there was
no explanation; unable to ponder what I had done — or said — I
pondered instead that new word, a word I had not had to come to grips
with before: never.
I did not go the garage, as she suggested. Instead I watched from the
dark shade of the back porch as Granddaddy brushed out the back seat of
the big yellow car, as Mother came out with pillows, and as the two of
them drove off, Mother at the wheel.
In no time at all, it seemed, I heard Uncle Ted at the front door. Full
of expectation, I ran off through the kitchen, across the breakfast
room, the dining room . . . when I reached the front entrance, everyone
was already there. But no one was smiling. Uncle Ted was carrying Little
Auntie.
She did not speak, neither to me nor to anyone.
Thus it continued, day after day. For the first time ever, my beautiful
aunt brought none of her light and color to our gray house. Or if she
did, I was not allowed to share it; I was kept out of the room. In fact,
everywhere I turned, I was unwelcome; Mother, when she was not in the
downstairs bedroom with my aunt, looked at me as at some stranger
suddenly in her path; Nanna was more brusque than ever; and even Grand-daddy,
who seemed never to tire of playing with me and teasing me, would
now walk confusedly past me without a word.
I wondered what terrible thing I had done.
* * *
It was somewhere in these perplexing days that Ethel first came to our
back door. Part of her job, it seemed, along with the cooking and
washing and cleaning, was to keep me out from underfoot.
"Come 'long, chile, I be's bilin' the shirts this hyah day, " she would
say, taking me to the basement, teaching me the secrets of soaking and
boiling and bluing and starching. Or, "Fetch the matches for the
cinerary. " The world seemed to have an unending supply of wonderful
words, some quite unsuited to their use: "cinerary," for example, was
that piece of chicken wire Grand-daddy had tied into a cylinder to keep
the burning trash from blowing down the alley.
Every day after dinner (dinner was at noon) she would make two huge
glasses of lemonade, and, saying to me, " le's be off to our stoop,"
lead me out the back door, down the shady length of the screened porch,
down the steps, past the garage, past the chicken coop, out to the
servants' quarters (which we used for garden storage), and there we
would sit on the steps in the shade of the catalpa tree, watching the
bees in the vitex hedge that separated the quarters from the front lawn,
fanning ourselves with palm fans from the First Baptist Church, a gift
to the church from the Morton Funeral Home (modestly proclaimed in big
letters across each fan).
There, resting, she would reminisce about her childhood as one of eleven
children on a sharecropper's farm, about how they had scrubbed the pine
floor with lye, put the skillets in red hot ashes to loosen the caked
grease, and raked the dusty yard where children's feet had trampled away
every blade of grass. All the while we would sit there, happy, drinking
our lemonade, fanning ourselves, smelling the vitex on one side, the
chicken coop on the other, and occasionally just sitting, listening to
the singing at the weekday Bible classes across the alley at the First
Baptist Church.
One morning, during this first visitation of Ethel to our house, I
awakened to the sound of a house already up and about its business.
People talking, moving about, downstairs. And no one had come for me.
They don't want me around at all anymore, I thought, they have left me
up here, forgotten. Then I saw the clock on the wicker table (with the
book, The Bam Bam Clock, Grand-daddy had taught me how to tell
time). I had not been forgotten; it was still early.
But why was everybody up?
I went downstairs, across the back hall, and into the kitchen.
Nanna was not there. No one was there.
Heading through the breakfast room toward the front of the house, toward
the voices, I saw Ethel getting cups and saucers from the cupboard.
Everything, it seemed, was out of kilter — Ethel never came until after
breakfast.
Cups still in her hands, she placed her solid figure squarely between me
and the hall and, taking one of her long rasping breaths, said,
"Everybody's done ate, chile. " With her hands firmly on my shoulders,
she turned me back toward the kitchen. "Ethel calls hersef fixin' you
somethin' special."
Bleak and puzzled, I sat down at the kitchen table. I knew she was not
telling the truth: the place settings at the breakfast room table were
clean and undisturbed, just as they had been laid out the night before
by Mother. No one had eaten there.
"Cimmimum toast," Ethel declared proudly, setting before me two pieces
of brown, gooey toast still bubbling from the broiler.
As I waited for it to cool, she asked, "Miss Betty ever bury hersef a
secret?"
"What?" I had no idea what she was talking about.
"You ain't never buried a secret?
"No." The word secret only deepened my gloom. On my mother's
twenty-seventh birthday, Nanna had let me help her wrap the present — a
Japanese kimono of yellow and black silk, beautiful enough, I thought,
for Little Auntie. As she wrapped it, she told me it was a secret. That
being the first time I'd ever heard either the word secret or the
word kimono, I imagined them to be one and the same.
When the time came for the birthday cake, Granddaddy, Mother, Little
Auntie, Uncle Ted, and I sat down at the dining room table that I had
helped Nanna set, with the dessert plates Little Auntie had bordered
with painted flowers and a gold band, with the white damask table cloth
(Nanna prided herself that even when she was taking in sewing, she fed
her family every day on white linen). The door from the pantry swung
open, and in walked Nanna, carrying the birthday cake, all spiky with
candles, and I jumped up and cried, "Now we can bring in the kimono!"
Nanna, standing there at the end of the table, holding the cake on its
cut-crystal cake stand, tightened her mouth, set the stand firmly down
on the table, and — looking as though she had suffered some personal
and painful and untreatable injury — walked out of the dining room and
across the back hall, where seconds later, we could hear her bedroom
door close.
Because of me, because of words I'd said, all of us were sitting there
in silent exile, lighting joyless candles.
"A secret?" I repeated, looking up at Ethel with more foreboding than
expectation.
"Fust we gots to git ahsefs a secret," she went on. "Soon's you finishes
yer toast."
I had other plans. I could hear the voices again, up toward the front of
the house, and I started off in their direction. Ethel, moving so
quickly she couldn't get enough breath to speak, stepped in front of me
and turned me back. "Now," she said, as soon as she had refilled her
lungs, I bet yet grammaw be keepin' a button box."
Nanna had not just one button box but a whole huge drawer of them, each
of them brimful with buttons. (I was reared in the belief that only the
most slatternly of housewives would fail to keep a button box.)
"Yes," I answered.
"You know where it's at?" she asked.
As these riches had been one of my earliest and favorite toys, I knew
exactly where they were. "Upstairs," I said, starting again for the
front hall.
"We goes this way," Ethel said, steering me into the back hall.
It was becoming clear to me that no matter what was going on in the
front of the house, I was not to be a part of it. Because of something I
had done, I supposed.
Up in the sewing room under the eaves, we heard no more voices nor
moving around. The only sounds coming to us were the caperings of
squirrels jumping from the branches of the mulberry trees onto the roof.
From this room, from these drawers in the tall wardrobe of burl walnut,
from this oak veneer sewing machine with the cast-iron treadle and legs,
had come all of Little Auntie's exotic clothes.
Crossing to the wardrobe, I pulled out the bottom drawer, disclosing —
with no little pride — Nanna's onetime tools of trade: buttons of cut
crystal, of rhinestone, of jet, carved wood, filigreed gilt, and mother-
of-pearl. In every size and shape.
"De lawd bless us!" cried Ethel, her eyes devouring the treasure.
Pleased with my power to astonish, I pulled open another drawer, this
one filled with trimmings — gold lame, ecru lace, black lace,
embroidered eyelet, rickrack — and ribbons of velvet and satin and
grosgrain and moire. And in one corner, tiny rosebuds made of narrow
satin ribbon — saved, I had been told, from the bassinet Nanna had made
for her first-born, my mother.
And still another drawer — feathers. For hats.
"Ain't nobody nevah had a secret like we be havin'!" Ethel exclaimed,
running her hands across the lustrous velvet, holding the lame up to the
light from the big dormer window.
I was beginning to feel that this time around I might be less of a
disappointment in the matter of secrets.
"We needs us a saucer," Ethel said, stretching out the piece of gold
lame.
"l know where," I said getting up to go for one.
"Nevah mind what Miss Betty know," she said, grabbing me by the arm.
"She stay right hyah."
And I did, while Ethel went downstairs.
Soon she returned, with a saucer, a salad plate, and a piece of
cardboard. "Now we gits down to business," she said.
Spreading out the piece of lame on the cutting table, she laid the salad
plate on it as a pattern and cut out a circle of gold. Then, using the
saucer, she cut a circle of cardboard.
"Look keerful," she admonished as she stretched the lame over the
cardboard and, reaching for pins from Nanna's red felt, tomato-shaped
pin cushion, pinned the excess margin over the edge and into the back of
the cardboard.
"Now we chooses," she said, with a nod toward the drawers, "from all
this hyah lot."
I was mystified. Ethel, quiet and intent, selected and discarded,
selected and discarded, setting aside small mounds of buttons and
trimmings, talking to herself as she fondled her way through the bright
horde.
"How come it your ma nevah dig into these hyah?" she asked. She had been
a part of our household long enough to have seen on Nanna's walls the
pictures of Little Auntie in her fanciful plumage and to have noticed
the unobtrusive clothes of my mother.
"Because she has a divorce," I said knowingly, although actually I had
no idea where she had it — growing out of a rib or protruding out of
an armpit — but I knew it kept her from wearing pretty clothes because
I'd heard Nanna say to her, when Mother was trying on one of Little
Auntie's dresses, "You can't strut around in clothes like that — not
with that divorce!"
Ethel dropped the subject.
Just as I was losing interest in whatever game we were eventually going
to play, Ethel closed the drawers and declared, "Now we's ready."
Gathering a handful of crystal buttons, she began placing them one by
one on the gold circle — a straight line, breaking off into another,
and another, and — "Miss Betty get it yet?" she grinned.
One more line. "A star!" I cried, deciding the game might after all be
fun.
Next, in the heart of the star, with iridescent blue buttons, she formed
a rosette. Just at that moment, a beam of morning sunlight from the
dormer window, having edged its way unnoticed across the cutting table,
focussed like a searchlight on our jewelled star, broke apart on the
prisms of the crystal buttons, and fell in a rainbow on the golden
circle.
Entranced, we watched.
As the beam of light moved ever so slowly on, Ethel brushed her hand
roughly across the lame, flicking the lovely star away.
"Oh-h-h," I cried, distressed, "Why did you do that?"
"Miss Betty's turn," she answered. "How 'bouts this time a flower?" She
pointed to some curly white feathers and to some pieces of green ribbon.
I was beginning to understand: it was like the kaleidoscope Uncle Ted
brought me from Hollywood, only better, because we made it happen
ourselves.
She began to chuckle, "Ethel's secrets ain't nevah held a patch on this
un."
"What?" I asked, having no notion what she had said.
"Know what I mos' often uses?"
"Not buttons?"
"Nehi tops, castor beans, leafs, flowers, 'n' foil out'n cigarette
packs," she laughed.
We were having a fine time.
Unobserved by us, absorbed as we were now in our acts of creation, the
beam of sunlight had moved away from our enchanted gold circle, crossed
the room to the wardrobe of burl walnut, and climbed the wall behind it.
When at long last our inventiveness ran out and we had settled on our
favorite arrangement, Ethel said, "We be's 'bout ready to bury it now."
What?" I asked.
"Digs us a hole and puts it in."
"No!" I protested. "It's too pretty. Why can't we keep it?"
"Cuz a secret be's somethin' you don't want nobody to git holt on. It
belong to jis us. Miss Betty not to tell, and Ethel not to tell. Then it
be's ourn. Jis ourn."
Like the kimono, this secret, too, had begun better than it was ending.
Though dubious, I followed her down the back stairs and to the cleaning
closet where, trying several boxes, she settled on one with a pattern of
Christmas holly; then, from a drawer where Nanna kept string and rubber
bands and the waxy paper from the store bread, Ethel took several pieces
of the paper, carefully wrapped our shining secret, laid it in the box,
and tied the box with string.
"Now," she announced as though with some finality, "kin you skeer us up
a shovel?"
This time I led the way, with Ethel in tow — across the back porch,
past the garage, past the chicken coop, out to the servants' quarters,
and into its dark interior. Inside the door I stopped, waiting until I
could see again. The air was thick with the fumes of fungicides, insect
sprays, and box upon box of chicken manure, salvaged by Nanna for her
garden. Behind me I heard a choking sound; Ethel's hand pulled loose
from mine; I turned, saw her silhouette against the light at the door as
she stepped back outside, as she stood there gulping long drinks of
fresh air When she could speak again, she said, "Ethel be took for sure,
chile, if she go back in theah. You jis fetch the shovel 'n' come
'long."
Grand-daddy had bought me my own gardening set, and I knew right where
to find it. When I came out with the shovel, Ethel was walking along by
the vitex hedge, studying the ground. "This hyah is tolable soft," she
said, toeing the earth.
I started scraping away, making a shallow trench the way my Grand-daddy
and I had done when we planted the zinnia seeds.
"Naw — " Ethel objected. "Leastways ankle-deep."
I sliced into the earth. It was dense and dark like fudge, I thought,
and sliced again, and again, then scooped up a shovelful and tossed it
out; more shovels full, and the sides of the hole fell in — looking
like cookie mixings in a bowl. Slicing once more, I cut an earthworm in
two, stopped to watch its wriggling halves.
I was enjoying myself, quite forgetting our mission, when Ethel's felt
house-shoes and cotton stockings came into my line of vision. "Tha's
enough," her voice came, and next I saw her hand holding out our well-
wrapped secret.
Reluctantly I took it, put it down in the hole, then stepped back,
trying to fix in my memory the image of its feathers, its bright star.
"Kiver it," Ethel said.
Half-heartedly, I pushed a little dirt in on top of it.
"Tha's no way," she said, and I saw her feet, in their felt houseshoes,
pushing the soil in, stamping it down, then the pink palms of her dark
hands, smoothing it out.
I looked up at her.
Straightening up, standing almost tall, she brushed her hands against
each other and proclaimed, "This hyah's yers 'n' mine now — ain't
nobody else's."
She seemed very proud, and, sad though I was to part with our pretty
toy, I felt rather proud, too, as though we had done a fine and worthy
thing.
The next morning, I was not left, forgotten, in my bed. Mother came to
awaken me, sat with me while I dressed, sat with me as I ate my
breakfast. I had the feeling I was no longer an outcast.
While she washed the dishes, I stood on a low stool Grand-daddy had made
for me and dried the silverware. I was very happy, helping Mother,
having her all I to myself. While she finished wiping the water from the
pine countertop (which was always a little furry with rot), she turned
to me and told me that Little Auntie was dead.
I looked up at her, wary, uncomprehending.
Sensing that I did not understand, she said, "It's like being asleep,
except for a long while." It was the first time anyone in that house had
ever tried to explain to me what their words meant.
I was just hoping it didn't prove to be one of those words that would
turn on me, get me into trouble. To stay on the safe side, I made up my
mind to be very quiet in my play, to walk softly so as not to awaken
her.
Mother was taking off her apron. "I have a surprise for you," she said.
"You've been invited to Catherine's house, to spend the day."
Catherine's house . . . where her mother gave us tea parties with a
child's tea set! I started off for the hall, running to get my doll to
take with me. At the door of the downstairs bedroom, I remembered about
Little Auntie being asleep and stopped short, tiptoeing by.
The door was open and I could see into the room. The bed was empty.
Wherever she was sleeping, it wasn't here. If she has gone home, I
thought, I don't have to worry about waking her up, and with some
relief, I skipped off down the hall, clattering along the polished oak
flooring.
The next morning, another invitation. The day after that, another. My
world was turning sunny and warm — breakfast alone with Mother, going
away from our frightening house, and having playmates.
After a few days of this, just as I began to expect that every day after
breakfast Mother would announce an invitation, she made a different sort
of announcement. "Today we're going to the cemetery," she said.
I began checking through my store of words for a clue: cinerary,
cimmimum . . . cemetery? I looked a question at her.
"To put flowers on Little Auntie's grave," she explained.
As I went off to brush my teeth, I was hoping Little Auntie would be
going with us.
On the back porch Nanna was putting flowers into jars of water — her
canning jars. She handed one jar to me, two to my mother, picked up two
herself, and pushing the screen door open with her elbow, led us out to
the back driveway. There beside the big yellow touring car, holding the
doors open, Grand-daddy was waiting.
We got in, balancing our jars of water and flowers carefully in front of
us, and Grand-daddy backed slowly down the driveway. The car smelled
like Lela's Flower Shop.
Slow and steady, we drove away, past the First Baptist Church, past the
high school and the lumber yard, past all the houses and out beyond the
town. But not over those gullies and rises Grand-daddy had once for my
amusement turned into a roller coaster; this was a long straight road
ending at a flat open place where the earth seemed scoured clean, like a
town where all the houses had been blown away, leaving only the streets
and a few bushes. And a few blocks of stone.
Where we stopped, there were flowers, lots of flowers, all stacked up
and spread out. But wilted. A man was gathering them into a truck.
Out of the box on the running board of the car Grand-daddy lifted
something that looked like a doormat and carried it across to the spot
where the man was removing the last of the wilted flowers. With our
jars, we followed, putting them on the ground beside the mat.
"Give me your pocket knife, Frank," Nanna said.
Taking the knife, getting down on her knees, she began pulling the
flowers from the jars, cutting the stems almost to stubs; as she cut
them and laid them aside, Mother sorted them by color, into little heaps
of red and purple and pink. When they were all cut, Nanna, closing the
knife and getting shakily to her feet, said, "I just can't do it, Alice.
You'll have to do it."
Mother, kneeling down before the mat, picked out a handful of pink
zinnias and began sticking them into it, in a long sweep of a line —
like a bird's wing, I thought; then she sat back on her heels, studied
it, frowned, took them out, started a straight line.
I stood watching, intent. "Try a star," I suggested.
She looked up at me. I have surprised her, I thought.
"Would you like to help?" she asked.
"Yes," I said. Proud and excited, thinking how I would now really
surprise her, I began a starburst of purple ageratum.
"Why, Betty! You're going to be an artist!" she exclaimed.
"That's what I keep telling you, Alice," Nanna put in.
Aware that I was the center of attention, I added line after line,
recreating in flowers all the trial patterns Ethel and I had made in
buttons and feathers and sequins, using only the patterns we had
discarded, being careful not to repeat the one we had settled on — our
final, secret pattern.
I heard a snuffling noise, coming from Nanna. "If only your Little
Auntie could see it!" Then, the same snuffling sound from Mother.
I was laying out a line of pinks . . . I stopped. There it is, I
thought. Even out here, away from the big, gray rooms. The same old
wickedness that never wears a face of its own but always hides itself in
the nicest faces anyone could imagine — like those happy children on
Grand-daddy's bottles. And now, even these pretty flowers.
"Why can't we take it home for her to see?" I suggested, hoping to make
up for whatever had gone wrong.
But it wasn't working; I could tell by the looks they were exchanging —
all three of them now. Grand-daddy, standing off to one side, was
saying, "I told you. I told you the child didn't understand."
Mother, looking stern and sharp at Nanna. "And you saying she was a
hard-hearted little thing. 'Hadn't shed a tear,' you said."
While I sat there among the flowers, afraid even to touch them, just
listening, the three of them shuffled the blame, the blame for something
I had done — something that wasn't my fault but someone else's. They
couldn't agree as to whose.
Then they started talking about how I didn't understand, but this, too,
seemed the fault of somebody else. And of words. Words someone should
have explained to me.
On and on they argued, while I looked at the zinnias, then at the pinks,
and finally at their feet — feet that were doing lots of moving about
but still managing to stand in one spot — Mother's black patent pumps,
Nanna's laced shoes with the pointed toes, Grand daddy's funny-looking,
fat-toed, high-ankled shoes.
Now Mother was crying again, and her pumps stepped off to the side;
Grand-daddy was swearing at Nanna, and her shoes went away entirely.
By now they had said enough that I was no longer looking either at the
flowers or at their feet. Instead, my eyes were fixed on the ground out
in front of those feet, where the wilted flowers had lain: freshly
raked, without grass or weeds, like the ground under the vitex hedge
after Ethel had stamped it down in her felt houseshoes. And there — I
was trying to imagine it, trying to fit it into the patterns of those
things I knew, to find a place among them for this new thing, this
terrible thing — that there, in that ground in front of me, lay my dark
and lovely aunt.
Buried. Just like the bright secret Ethel and I had buried under the
hedge.
Buried, moreover, by those feet that were just now beginning to encircle
me.
I felt Grand-daddy's strong hands under one shoulder, Mother's under the
other, and though I do not really know, cannot remember, I think I began
to scream. Most certainly, I struggled against those lifting hands.
I was afraid of their hands, afraid of their feet — I was afraid of
them.
* * *
I do not know when Ethel left.
Though she came to our house three other times — at Grand-daddy's
death, at Mother's, at a great uncle's — I was in school then, and she
would come to work after I had left in the morning and would be gone
when I came back in the afternoon.
During the lunch hour I would see her, fleetingly. Except when Mother
lay dying — then I hardly saw her at all because, as soon as Nanna and
I would sit down to lunch, Ethel would go to Mother's room and stay
there until we finished. As with the visitors who came to see Mother in
her last weeks, Nanna was terribly jealous. "What do you talk about in
there, Ethel?" she would ask. Her excuse for this possessiveness, as
with the visitors, was "It just takes her strength." As though Mother's
strength were something she needed to hoard — for the final business of
dying.
Whatever Mother told Ethel, or Ethel told Mother, Ethel never revealed.
It was a secret, and remained, just between them.
Now Nanna lies in the hospital, paralyzed by a stroke, and Ethel has
once again appeared at our back door, for this, the last of the last
illnesses.
Having to be in school or at the hospital, I see little of her, but she
cooks for me and gets the house in order for what she takes for granted
is coming — the funeral.
After the other funerals, the living — as soon as they could — got
around to the business of shaping the house to the lives left in it.
This time is different. This time, the funeral is not just for Nanna; it
is for the house and the lives it has stood for.
Now, the house has finished with us.
After the other funerals, it had been up to Nanna to let Ethel know when
she was no longer needed. This time it will be up to me.
But first, there is the business of the house; it, too, deserves a
decent burial.
Night after night I walk its rooms, memorizing all that I must leave
behind, choosing the little I can take with me. What is to become of
mother's furniture that, after all the years of waiting in the attic,
was never called again to a home of its own? Of Nanna's sewing machine
that in the early years kept the family in food and, during the later
years, Little Auntie in her finery?
Among the things I put aside to take with me are Little Auntie's long
sequin-spattered veiling, Mother's Japanese kimono, Grand-daddy's
humidor, and the needlework — the doilies, pillow cases, tablecloths,
and even handkerchief — on which Nanna and Little Auntie and Mother had
lavished their lives.
Each night, when the stories of the rooms become sadder than I can bear,
I go up to the sewing room and there, sitting on the floor, I sort
Nanna's buttons. After sorting a few piles, I string them and lay them
on the cutting table. For many nights I do this, because I am coming
around to the realization that though I can walk away from these rooms
full of thoroughly useful furnishings, I cannot walk away from these
strings of useless baubles.
* * *
On Ethel's last day, after I have given her a last check and a last
bonus, after we have said our good-byes, I follow her out, down the
length of the back porch to the screen door. As always, she is spending
more effort in breathing than in talking. When she reaches the door, she
turns back and grins, her head hung low, looking up at me askance as she
always has, and starts out the door and down the steps.
"Ethel!" I call, as though already she were at a great distance.
She turns back.
"Ethel . . . do you remember our secret? Out under the vitex?"
"Yes'm, Miss Betty."
"Do you really, Ethel ?" I am holding on hard — why should she? I
wonder — she who was just doing her duty as a nursemaid; I was the one
who was the impressionable child . . . "Do you suppose it's still
there?" I ask, still holding on.
"Who be diggin' it up?" she asks. "I never tole. Did you be telling?"
"No." I can think of no more to say. Then, "No. I've never told. It's
still our secret."
"Yes'm, Miss Betty; it's jis ourn. " She looks at me more directly than
she has ever done. "They's nobody lef' what knows the things we knows."
Excerpted from The Silver DeSoto
by Patty Lou Floyd.
Copyright © 1987 by Patty Lou Floyd.
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be
reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Copyright © 1987 Patty Lou Floyd.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0-933031-03-3
With unassuming blandness, this first-time author begins a collection of anecdotes shaped by a child-narrator whose voice resonates more and more insistently as they proceed. Except for Granddaddy, an incorrigible drinker who conjures flowers and vegetables out of the otherwise implacable Oklahoma dust, Betty Jane grows up in a household of women. They keep secrets from herthe secrets of Auntie's death and Mother's divorce, of Nanna's thankless years as a hired girlas well as ordinary facts that all her peers seem to have accumulated. As the others die before Betty Jane is 14, it is Nanna, heavyhanded, uncommunicative but prescient in important ways, who guides her through maturity, forbids her to have dates but sees nothing wrong in her going for a ride with Bob Wyant in his silver DeSoto. So tongue-tied adolescent Betty Jane rides alongside Bob, speaking never a word but transforming the DeSoto into a silver bird flying through fields of stars along paths of moonbeams. Throughout the book, the power of her imagination transports her from the flat, gray dust bowl of real life to a land of marvels, where movie stars are close enough to touch and daughters are reunited with their fathers. And the wonder is, the reader is transported too. (October 31) Copyright 1987 Cahners Business Information.
