I’d reached for the dictionary but my mother had said, “Let it be, Diana.”
“It’s not a word!” I said. “She’s cheating!”
“I believe I read about that animal in National Geographic,” my mother said, and Peacie nodded and rocked, saying, “Um-hum, I know you did.”
Later, after Peacie had gone home, I’d asked my mother why she had let Peacie cheat. My mother had not answered my question; she’d just told me to clean up from the refreshments we’d had. LaRue had brought us a “portable party,” as he’d called it: Coke, chips, dip made with Lipton onion-soup mix and sour cream. Then he’d sat and read one of his yellowing paperback books while the rest of us argued over word definitions.
LaRue was proud of having learned to read—a nephew from his hometown of Meridian had taught him recently. His lips moved and he followed along with his finger when he read; he made it look delicious. I often imitated his style when I read my own books. It made me feel like a preacher man holding a weighty tome with gilded pages and a red ribbon marker.
“Li’l Bit,” he called his nephew, who was slight in stature but big in ambition. Li’l Bit had asthma that prevented him from joining the army, so he joined what LaRue called the Movement—he told me Li’l Bit was working all over Neshoba County that summer, helping civil rights workers register blacks. “Now, you find me a big man have that kind of courage,” LaRue had said. I wasn’t sure why “registering” someone required courage, but I didn’t argue. I never argued with him.
He was such a nice man, LaRue Royce, tall and gentle and patient. He moved with an ease that made you feel relaxed to watch him. I’d known him a long time. Peacie used to be a live-in—from the time I came home from the hospital until I was ten, she slept in the living room on our pullout sofa and kept her clothes in the tiny front-hall closet. She had a fake-fur coat, and I used to sit on the floor of the closet with the door closed and suck my thumb while I rubbed that coat under my nose.
When Peacie lived with us, LaRue used to stay over with her sometimes; I would hear them talking and laughing downstairs, and when the talking stopped, other noises began. Once, when I was eight, I’d been successful at sneaking up on them: I saw Peacie lying naked under LaRue with her head thrown back, her mouth open, and LaRue moving rapidly in and out of her. She was saying, “Uh! Uh!” and I saw her fingers dig into his shoulders. I snuck back upstairs and lay in bed moving my hips the way I’d seen them do. My mother kept a radio at her bedside that she never turned off. But I was sure she heard them, too. I believe her attitude was that they both deserved their pleasure, and more. We owed them more than we could ever repay.
There was a time, for example, when I was in kindergarten and my mother was in the hospital for a bladder infection and I’d awakened fearing she had just died. Peacie was there, sleeping on the sofa with LaRue, and I went to get her, telling her we had to go to the hospital right away, my mother had died. “She didn’t no way die,” Peacie said. “She only got a little infection. She be home in a day or two. Meantime I’m gon’ take my rest. And I advise you do the same.” But I stood insisting that we had to go, weeping, and finally LaRue said he would drive me to the hospital. Peacie said he would do no such thing. LaRue said the child was scared, he would take me to see my mother, it was all right, he didn’t mind. Peacie said I was no child, look in my eyes, I was the devil. LaRue laughed and got up to get dressed; Peacie sighed and got up, too.
When we arrived at the hospital, I was taken by a supervising nurse to the floor where my mother was. From there, the nurse caring for my mother took me to stand beside her bed, cautioning me not to awaken her. But I did that very thing immediately, woke her and many other patients, calling loudly, “Mama, Mama, are you dead?” My mother asked the nurse to put me up next to her, and she gave me a kiss. Then she told me to go home, which I did unwillingly. She had a TV in that room, bolted right to the wall. There was air-conditioning there.
When we arrived back home I’d asked Peacie to make me some biscuits. “You want to fall asleep in school tomorrow?” Peacie said. “Go on up to bed and don’t be calling no more. Act like your mouth sewn shut. In the morning, you have your breakfast as usual, but for now you got to sleep. And that’s the final end of this conversation.”
I looked over at LaRue. “Not this time,” he said, but he gently tucked me in and sang to me, briefly, before he went back downstairs with Peacie. The feel of his big, warm hand on my forehead, pushing back my hair, that was something.
I threw my mother’s dirty sheets into the laundry basket and shook out the new ones. I always liked doing that, for the way they looked like billowing sails, for the way they suggested going far away.
After I finished making the bed, I asked my mother what she needed downtown.
“Milk and cereal,” she said. “And the icebox is broken again—it’s barely keeping things cool. Go over to the hardware store and see if Brooks is working today.”
Sometimes I wondered why we even had a refrigerator. Most times, it held more clothes than food—Peacie kept her sprinkled ironing there in a plastic bag. But the thing broke all the time and then I’d have to go and get Brooks Robbins to fix it, and I didn’t like him. He made terrible jokes, and he looked at my mother in a way I found disgusting. “Pretty Paige,” he called her, a play on Patti Page. She was still pretty—beautiful, in fact. Her arms were a bit too thin and her hands had a kind of elongated quality now, an eerie unnaturalness that could put you off even if they weren’t resting across the top of a hose that went into the center of a portable ventilator. But Brooks had known her before she got polio—since the day she arrived in Tupelo, in fact—and I thought he still saw her as that lovely young woman who was kind to him but would never take him up on his numerous offers to take her out. He retreated in his outright pursuit of her when she married my father—for one thing, Charlie Dunn was a friend of his—but he always flirted with her. These days, he liked to hang around when my mother was outside sunning herself, her legs revealed, resting long and still shapely on the extended rests of her wheelchair. She didn’t mind people seeing her. “I’m not ashamed,” she would say. “People who think I should be ashamed should be ashamed.”
Whenever she sunbathed, my mother wore a turquoise bikini top over her shell, and turquoise shorts beneath it. Peacie had made an extension for the top out of a tie that someone had unthinkingly donated to us, and had stuffed the cups with socks. When she finished sewing them in, she held the top up before my mother for her approval. “What do you think?” she asked.
My mother raised an eyebrow and cocked her head. “Just wear a smile and a Jantzen,” she’d said, then added, “A couple more socks wouldn’t be a bad idea.”
Peacie would plug extension cord into extension cord so that my mother could stay hooked up to her respirator, then push her down the board ramp LaRue had built over one side of the porch steps. She would position the wheelchair just so, and then give my mother sips of sun tea from a tall plastic tumbler. That tumbler had glitter embedded in the plastic, and my mother and I both liked to see it sparkle in the sun. Peacie liked drinking from a Mason jar, and she liked plenty of sugar in her tea. I once watched her spooning it in, and said, “Sugar’s expensive, you know.” She looked up at me and I felt ashamed. “You can have as much as you want, though,” I said, and she answered, “Lordy Lord, Miss Diana, I sho’ am grateful for yo’ kindness, yes I is.” “I’m sorry,” I muttered and she said, “Go outside. Miser.”
My mother tanned and smoked her cigarettes, leaving behind the red imprint from the lipstick she was never without during her waking hours—many times a day, she would ask, “Is my lipstick on?” Peacie sat beside her on a lawn chair, her shoes off her feet but her stockinged feet resting on top of those shoes—Peacie never went barefoot, claiming it caused epilepsy, among other things. She looked through magazines, holding them so that both she and my mother could see and licking her fingers delicately before she turned each page. When Peacie
wanted to know what a story was about, my mother read it to her. Sometimes they would laugh together over something, Peacie’s hand over her mouth to cover her missing side tooth, and when I said, “What? What’s funny?” they would say, “Oh, nothing,” and look at each other and laugh again. My jealousy at such moments made for a dime-sized pocket of heat behind my earlobes.
Last week I had slipped inside the back door where I stood unseen by my mother and Peacie. They were sitting at the kitchen table and my mother was reading tarot cards for Peacie—their heads were bent over the crosslike spread, and they were staring intently at the images. My mother did readings for lots of women—they would come in and pay a dollar to hear what she said, then leave as quickly as possible after the reading, though my mother always invited them to stay for a visit. Oh, they would love to, they always said, but…I imagined they figured the dollar was price enough to pay.
I stood where I could see and not be seen. If my mother or Peacie noticed me, they’d make me leave—I knew this from past experience. Both of them regarded what occurred during readings as spiritual, fragile, almost holy. They saw it as being part of this world and of another one, too, one that was parallel and mysterious and reachable only by those with “the gift.” They believed my mother was benignly possessed when she read the cards, that she became a conduit for otherwise unknowable truths. Peacie would put the cards into my mother’s hands before they were cut; my mother would close her eyes and hold them for varying lengths of time. When she opened her eyes and nodded, Peacie would take the cards and cut the deck at a place my mother approved. Then she would lay out the arrangement my mother dictated.
My mother was talking about LaRue, and the card Peacie had just turned over was The World. “Hmmmm,” my mother said, “very interesting, considering what you just told me. This card is a journey that leads ultimately to a complete human being. There’s a real mix of things suggested here, a kind of battle inside, between opposite ways of being. But the two warring parts have to come together for some inner resolution, first. It’s a time of bold admission for him. And a time to gather the courage required to start this journey.”
“But will he be safe if he does it?” Peacie asked.
“Turn the next card,” my mother said, and then there was a long silence while she studied it. Finally she said, “I can’t really say.”
“Oh, my sweet Jesus,” Peacie said, and began to cry. “I don’t know why he got to do this.” She turned her head to wipe at her face with her apron, saw me, and jerked erect. “How long you been there?” she said. “Sneaky as a alley cat!”
“I just got here,” I said. “What.”
She knew I was lying. I wished her out of my house, out of my life. And though I knew very well its uselessness, I wished again that my mother had never gotten the disease that so unrelentingly dictated the life we led.
They’d been going to have a picnic, my parents. My mother had awakened that Saturday morning feeling more uncomfortable than usual with her advanced pregnancy. In addition to that, it was a blisteringly hot July morning with high humidity. She wanted to get in the car so that she could feel a good breeze—the fans, she said, were like panting dogs. My father laid plastic and then towels on my mother’s side of the seat, just in case her water broke. The car, though not new, was new to them, and they both took great pride in it. It was a 1948 Studebaker, banged up a bit on one side, but my parents didn’t mind.
They headed out northwest on Highway 78 for the open countryside, and drove for many miles, past Sherman, past New Albany, into the Holly Springs National Forest. My mother loved traveling, loved going away, but not on any planned trip. She liked to just spontaneously take off. As a child, adopted at age six from an orphanage in Oxford, she used to pack her cardboard suitcase with underpants and red licorice and then disappear into the fields behind her farmhouse. Or she would take off walking down the highway her family lived next to, driving her parents to distraction. At fifteen, she began running off with boys, returning at all hours of the night. Finally, at sixteen, her exasperated parents threw her out of the house. They believed that this rash act would make her come to her senses. Instead, she cut off all contact with them, found a job in a Tupelo motel where she ended up living, and two years later married my father. When she became pregnant with me, she found that she wanted to reestablish contact with her mother. But her parents had moved, and she never found them again.
On that July day, my mother pointed to a grassy bank under cottonwood trees next to a running stream just outside Independence. My father parked the car, and my parents took off their shoes and waded in the cold, clear water until their feet were numb. Then they began eating the lunch my mother had packed. But before she was halfway through, my mother began feeling much sicker—her sore throat, nausea, and weakness were worse, and her eyes began to burn. “I believe you’re in labor,” my father said, and my mother said no, it was the flu, and she really was feeling very bad, could they go home? My father helped her to her feet and she fell against him, telling him she felt dizzy. “Paige, the baby’s coming!” my father said, and at this point my mother, who was, remember, a nurse, grew angry. “I’m not in labor!” she told him. Then her anger gave way to fear, and she said, “It’s not the flu, either. I don’t know what it is, but I’m sick, I’m so sick. You’d better take me to the hospital.”
“Oh, baby, are you sure?” my father asked. They had no insurance, and they’d intended to have a home birth. Over and over he asked her if she was sure she needed to go to the hospital. She did not answer him. She lay in the backseat of the car feeling worse all the time, and my father drove fast, then faster, back toward Tupelo. By the time they got to a hospital, my mother could no longer walk. She was diagnosed immediately—she remembered the doctor taking one look at her and saying, “This woman has polio,” and then she was put into an isolation room. When her breathing failed the next day, she was transferred to a larger facility and put into an iron lung. I heard this story several times, and I remember asking once if it wasn’t frightening, being put into that contraption. “It was a relief,” she said. “It was like being pulled out of a pool where I’d been drowning. I could breathe again. You have no idea what a relief that was. I remember telling myself, I’m alive. I won’t think about anything else now; I’ll think about that tomorrow. Just like Scarlett. I thought that every day for three years until I got to come home.”
“You don’t think it anymore, though, do you?” I asked her.
She smiled at me.
“Do you?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t think that anymore.” But she was lying. Denial was not a bad thing, in her mind. And I have to say, I think it served her well.
She talked very little about the time she spent in the lung. Over the years, I’d learned bits and pieces of information: that there were many iron lungs, all in one large room, and the only privacy was curtains that were sometimes drawn between them. That her iron lung was a mustard-yellow color and her neighbor’s a muddy green. That one Christmas Eve, the patients had sung—with difficulty, of course—“O Holy Night,” and it had made the staff cry. That the sound the bellows made with their rhythmic squeaks and thunks reminded my mother of windshield wipers. That when someone died, the patients’ overhead mirrors would be turned so that they couldn’t see the now silent iron lung being pushed past them. That my mother read three books at a time from her overhead rack so that the page turner wouldn’t be needed so often. That the women patients wore their hair in topknots, necessary because of lying flat in the iron lung, and the style was called a “polio poodle.” That a psychiatrist once asked my mother, “How does it feel to realize your daughter will never know your touch?” (To which my mother responded, “How does it feel to be an incompetent asshole?”) That a patient once complained of feeling cold and his caregiver put a blanket over the lung rather than him. That the patients who couldn’t talk made giddyup sounds to call for help, or clicked their teeth together, or ma
de a popping sound with their lips. That there was a ward newspaper to which my mother contributed poems and short stories. She learned, in occupational therapy, to write with a pen held in her mouth; it took an hour and forty-five minutes for her to write one page.
I asked once if people ever cried, and she hesitated, then said yes. “Did you?” I asked, and she said yes, but rarely. And only once had she cried hard and for a long time. It happened after she overheard a conversation between a doctor and a patient a few lungs down from her. The patient, whose name was Sam, asked, “So when will I go home, Doc? I want to drive my new car. Got a new convertible two days before I came in here.”
The doctor asked for a chair and pulled it up so Sam could see him, eye to eye. Then he said, “I’m sorry. But I have to tell you that you won’t be able to walk again. Or even breathe on your own.”
There was a long silence, and then Sam said, “What do you mean?”
The doctor told him again, saying that the time for recovery had passed.
Sam said, “Well, you’re wrong. I’ll drive to your house. And when I get there, I’ll take you out for a ride so fast it’ll blow the hair off your head.”
“I hope you will,” the doctor said. “But Sam, I want you to start thinking about what it will mean if you can’t.”
It was the night after that incident that my mother had sobbed, at least to the extent that she was able: She said it was more like highpitched squeals, really, and that that had frustrated her as much as anything, that she couldn’t even really have a good cry. But when she had finished crying, she decided that if this was her fate, she would use what she had left. “I could still taste and smell and hear and see,” she said. “I could still learn and I could still teach. I could still love and be loved. I had my mind and my spirit. And I had you.”
We have to start charging more than a quarter for our plays,” I told Suralee. I had taken her through the hole in the latticework at the side of my front porch for what I considered a staff meeting. We were sitting in the dirt, leaning against the foundation of the house.