“We’re terrible,” Maggie said.
“Yeah.” The heat was paralyzing. “Maggie, was it this hot when we were kids? I don’t remember it ever being this hot.”
“I hate to break this to you, but you’re getting older. Have you had your estrogen checked?”
I looked over at her stirring her tea like the Queen of England. I took the bait.
“Estrogen? Maggie, I’m barely forty-something.”
“The first indication of menopause is a broken thermostat. It’s either that or your weight. In any case, if you don’t do something, you could be dead by August.”
“God, middle age is an unending insult.”
I closed my eyes and pretended to nap. It took about two seconds for me to sense her towering over me, her and her “I’m-a-self-help-book-waiting-to-be-published” lips. I opened my weary eyes.
“What is it?” I said rather testily. “What now?”
She just stood there, feigning mild offense, waiting for me to beg her to tell me how to fix my life. Her wheels cranked and turned in her head over the gentle rustling of the palmetto fronds and the incoming waves. She drove me crazy sometimes.
“Nothing,” Her Highness said, and heaved a deep sigh. She sighed the same way our mother used to. An unfair advantage.
“Come on, Maggie, spit it out. You’re gonna choke if you don’t.” She sauntered back to the coffee table and poured me another glass of tea. She dropped a lemon in the glass and handed it to me. I pushed it in with my finger, realizing I was being a little difficult. “Okay, I’m sorry,” I said. “I admit it. Nobody has ever done more for me than Livvie Singleton and you. So tell me what you’re thinking, besides that it would be nice if it were eighty degrees instead of a billion.”
“Susan, you have a serious opportunity here.”
I just stared at her.
“You do,” she said. “Come on, let’s rock.”
“What do you mean ‘opportunity’? What I’ve got is a daughter with probable simmering hormones, a stack of bills you could lay end on end to Charlotte that Tom won’t help me pay, a backside that looks like thunderous Jell-O, no matter how I starve the thing. All I do is worry. Forgive me, but I’m having a hard time finding the opportunity in all this.” I was prepared to mount my high horse now and she knew it. I took a seat in the rocker next to her.
“The butt’s easy to fix, just walk to work instead of driving.” She was perfectly calm, as though dealing with the borderline deranged.
“You’re probably right…”
“And the exercise would do you a world of good, give you a chance to think about how to handle the rest of the stuff. Exercise is good for your brain.”
“I know. You’re right, you’re right, you’re right. But, Maggie, it’s easier for you to see what I need to do than it is for me to do it!”
“Susan, listen ’eah! Do you know how many women would trade in their husbands if they had the gonads?”
“Yeah, but I never wanted to trade Tom, he traded me, remember?”
“Minor point. The fact is, what are you gonna do about it? First of all, it’s been three months. Do you have a separation agreement yet?”
“No, I’m not ready for that.”
“Well, if he wanted to come home, would you let him?”
I looked out at the ocean again, remembering the good things about my marriage to Tom. The way he kissed, the way it felt to be in his arms. But then, I remembered finding him in bed with his young thing and I felt my heartbeat quicken from the anxiety of his betrayal. I drained my glass. The boulder in my throat made it hard to talk about a separation agreement.
“Remember how Livvie used to say that if you rocked a chair when you weren’t in it, you rocked away your life?” I said. “That always spooked me.”
I avoided giving the decision and Maggie was having no part of it.
“Because you were wasting time, is what she meant. And let me tell you something else, Livvie Singleton would beat you to a pulp if she could see the time you’re wasting now. She raised us to spit in the faces of those who did us wrong, not to get fat and depressed and lie around moaning. Tom Hayes is a bum and the sooner you realize it and do something about it, the sooner you can rebuild your life. If Livvie was ’eah, she’d tell you to buck up!”
“Don’t mince words now. Tell me how you really feel.”
“I’m sorry, Susan, it needs to be said. You’re my closest sister and I love you. Now, for once and for all, if Tom came to you and said he was sorry, would you take him back? Please, think this through, because if you’d forgive him, so would I.”
I had given hundreds of hours of thought to how it would be if Tom came home. I might forgive him but I had come to the conclusion that I’d never trust him again. A good marriage was impossible without trust, I knew that.
“No, I’d never take him back now, Maggie. No, it went too far and he’s just been awful to us. He’s the one who screwed another woman in our bed and walked out.”
“Are you absolutely sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure. If I took him back, he’d just do it again the first time some bubble wit lifts her Wonder Bra in his direction. Who needs it?”
“You’re ready. I’ll get you a list of lawyers and you can start interviewing them next week.”
“Okay.” I inhaled the healing salt of the beach and exhaled my soured marriage. “I just hate dealing with this, you know?”
“I know, I don’t blame you for that at all.” Maggie reached over, patted my arm and continued. “Look, a family breakup is a tragedy, no doubt about it, but you don’t have cancer, you’ve got a great job and you have Beth. What’s he got? Some stupid twit! Big deal! Sounds to me like he’s the loser, not you.”
“I hope he rots in hell.”
“That’s the spirit!” Maggie started cleaning up. She took our glasses and put them on the tray and, balancing it, wiped the tabletop with a napkin. “You need a new haircut.”
Having someone who always told me what I needed was a little exasperating, but I knew it didn’t pay to call her on it.
“You’re right, I need to do something about my looks. But that tightwad I need to serve with papers still has the five bucks his Aunt Helen gave him for his tenth birthday! I need another job or something.”
“Or a bulldog lawyer, somebody with zero sense of humor.”
“Yeah, with big teeth who’s got the guts to tear a big piece out of his miserable carcass. Wait! Don’t take the celery! You want a hand with that? Where are our children? It’s getting late.”
“You just relax, I can handle this. I guess they’ll be home soon. Listen, if they caught anything, why don’t you stay for supper? Crab cocktails and grilled steaks? Not the worst meal on earth.”
“Sounds good,” I said. “Hey, Maggie?” I stared at her while I dug around for the right words. “I’m gonna get a lawyer. I just have to find the right person and I have to find my nerve, you know?”
“Since when have you had a problem finding nerve?”
“Very funny. What I mean to say is that I really appreciate your advice.”
She smiled at me. “Well, you know your own mind. You always have. I just don’t want to see you victimized again.”
“I was never victimized. I just married the biggest ass in South Carolina and was too bullheaded to see it.”
“Well put by the family poet!” Maggie smiled at me again. “I just want you to be yourself again, you know? Like a bad dog, chasing cars. I miss that about you. I mean, what would you do if you could do anything with your life? Like, change careers?”
She balanced the tray on her hip, held the screen door open and challenged me to come clean.
“I don’t know. Maybe…oh, shoot, Maggie, I don’t know.”
“Well, think about it, little sister. There’s a new world out there if you want it. Seize the day and all that. Livvie didn’t raise us to wallow.”
“You’re right. Hey, you know, on the growing list of
things I intend to do with my life is another tidbit.”
“Yeah, what’s that?”
“I’m gonna figure out what happened to Daddy.”
She ran her fingers through her hair and looked at me like I had said something foul. “Give it up, Susan,” she said. “Daddy’s been dead for decades.”
“That’s not it, Maggie,” I said. “I just have to know that I didn’t cause it.”
“Susan. I’m your sister. I love you….”
“I know that….”
“You need to concentrate on other things. Daddy died of a heart attack. Period.”
I hated when she looked at me like that, taking the posture that her word was the final one on the subject. So I said, “It ain’t period. It’s a question I have to resolve for my own soul.”
“Suit yourself. But I think your time’s better spent on other avenues,” she said.
“Whatever. But, I’m telling you I know in my guts that Daddy was murdered,” I said.
“Susan, ain’t nobody on this planet who loves you more than me but I’m telling you I can’t stand to listen to this.”
“Maggie,” I said, “I can’t stand to think it. I have to know that the fight didn’t cause him to die. I have to believe it was the Klan.”
“What is this fight you always refer to? I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
She was becoming agitated. It was suddenly clear that for some reason she didn’t remember the fight. Maybe she had blocked it from her mind. I didn’t know. I just wanted the waters smooth again.
“Never mind,” I said, “I’ll figure it out someday.”
“Well, my advice is worry about the living. The dead had their chance.”
“Whoa, that’s cold,” I said.
“No, it’s not. I care about you and Beth. That’s all.”
She went inside. The door slammed behind her with a loud thwack and the sound of wood slapping wood woke me up like a sock in the jaw. Maggie had just succinctly reduced my life to an ancient Latin maxim and some hard facts. She was right about Livvie too. Livvie would be incensed to have seen me rolling around in my despair of chocolate chip cookies and fast food for the past three months.
Maggie was always right. When all hell broke loose, Maggie was right there at my side. She’d taken Beth under her wing too. She had listened to me wail and moan ad nauseam. It was enough now. I looked defeated and that had never been a word in my vocabulary.
It’s just that my head was in gridlock at the thought of a new life. I was a little afraid, you know? What if I failed? What if I couldn’t take care of Beth? What if she went wild and flunked out of school and got pregnant? What if this was all there was? O Lord, I prayed, help me figure this out!
I peeled myself up from the rocker, knowing the slats had left their imprint on the back of my legs. I decided to throw one leg over the banister and straddled it like a horse, hanging on to a support beam, the same way I did when I was a child. The tide was almost high and its power was mesmerizing. I wished I could have some of it for myself.
The waves had now grown from the baby hiccups they were at low tide to crashing rollers, and washed everything in their path with silvery foam. They began down at the eastern end of the Island at Breach Inlet. Danger, danger. People drowned in whirlpools and ebb tides there every year in spite of posted warnings. Didn’t people read?
I knew that attempting to investigate Daddy’s death was dangerous too, but the compulsion to do so was growing each day. Of all the stones I carried in the sack tied to my heart, his death was the heaviest. I had told Maggie it was a personal guilt thing, but the guilt stemmed from being the only one who seemed to care if he had died at all, never mind how. Added to that was Tom’s deception, which only exacerbated my thirst for truth.
The waves arrived in stacked sets of three, the current driving them in on an angle. As they reached our end of the Island, they seemed to calm in the faint, sweeping beams of the lighthouse. Turning tides were hypnotic. The water flooded the shore in anger, then turned, withdrew and renewed itself.
The beams from the lighthouse grew in intensity, spreading protection for boats at sea. It was in these moments that I was sure there was a God. He was tapping me on my stubborn shoulder, telling me the scene before me was a metaphor for my own life. Withdraw and renew; life goes on. Maybe Beth and I would stay for dinner, crack some crabs, grill steaks and shoot the breeze. Maggie was right. I needed to reinvent myself. The question was, could this old dog still hunt?
I could just see Beth and Maggie’s boys now, coming down the beach in silhouette against the edge of dusk. They were swinging a basket of crabs and a bucket of bait. It could have been a photograph of our childhood, the happy days. So many days I spent with Maggie, Timmy and Henry, catching fish and crabs, throwing plough mud at each other…those were, I think, my happiest memories. We’d come home all sunburned and sticky and present Momma and Livvie with our catch of the day. They’d act like we were heroes for feeding the family. We were so proud.
And then there was our daddy, Big Hank.
Two
The Outhouse
Summer, 1963
DON’T, Daddy! Please! I’m sorry! Please stop!”
It was the unmistakable lament of my little brother Henry begging for mercy while he got a rare whipping from the old man. Henry was seldom spanked. I thought he must’ve blown up the church or something, because Henry was Daddy’s undisputed favorite.
When Daddy took off his belt, we paid for it with the stinging disappearance of a layer of our childhood innocence. The old man had an uncontrollable temper. It simply didn’t pay to draw a line in the sand with him. If you argued with him, his rage grew to such outlandish proportions that you might walk away in the right, but your backside would be covered with welts. He would never understand that these beatings changed the way we felt about him. The cracking of leather across our young skin sliced away layers of trust, and our love.
Timmy and I were on the porch, holding our breath, not moving a hair. A door slammed somewhere inside. What now?
“Get in the car! On the double!”
Daddy’s command boomed from upstairs out to the front porch. I was sure Henry’s wailing could be heard for miles. I felt very sorry for my little brother, but I wasn’t sure that we weren’t next. Timmy and I weren’t sure if Daddy meant for us, or someone else, to get in the car. We heard Daddy stomping down the steps. Next, the screen door flung open, slammed against the back wall and he pointed his index finger at me and then Timmy.
“You children deaf?”
“No, sir,” we answered together.
“Then, get in the damn car when I tell you to!”
The screen door slammed again behind him and we jumped up and followed his lead down the hall, into the kitchen, out the back door and down the steps. He was on another rampage and for whatever cryptic reason he had, he wanted us to go someplace with him. We said not one word to each other or to him.
We got in the car before he had the chance to consider boxing our ears, as he often did when his fury got the best of him. We’d unearth the details with our silence.
We were the children of a gifted and brilliant man, a World War II veteran, a civil engineer who had graduated with high honors from Georgia Tech, an adored and only son. Daddy was tall and handsome, with piercing brown eyes and straight brown hair. He wore thin wire-rimmed glasses, which wrapped tightly around the backs of his ears. On sight, he could’ve passed for a diplomat. His laugh and voice were loud, no, enormous. We wondered if he hadn’t suffered a hearing loss during the war.
His parents, dead for nearly a decade from heart ailments, were a quiet Baptist couple who had prided themselves on refinement and doted on their son. Daddy had been accustomed to getting his way, but everything about his life with our mother’s French-Irish Island family had denied him that privilege. It would have required the patience of a thousand saints to tolerate our house and there was no news of a pope traveling t
o Sullivan’s Island to canonize our father. Daily doses of our family drama and the chaos of our grandparents’ infirmities fed his rage like shovels of coal feed the furnace of a tramp steamer.
And he was having trouble at work. As an engineer, Daddy and his partner had been awarded a contract from the South Carolina Department of Education to build a new school in the country, in a colored area, which was slated to be integrated by bussing. Daddy had figured out how to heat the school, build a new gymnasium, a cafeteria and a library, all on a shoestring budget. That wasn’t such a big deal; certainly there was no uprising from the colored people. But there sure was noise from the Department of Education and the local school boards. The reality was that no white family would bus their children there and it would always remain a colored school. This infuriated the authorities, who claimed that our daddy’s plans would lead to having to upgrade the rural colored schools all over South Carolina. Things were happening, such as him finding his tires slashed and construction equipment destroyed, and he knew it was the work of the Ku Klux Klan.
When I thought about him like that, I had empathy for him. But when his demons bettered him, I ran for cover like everyone else.
We lowered the car windows and didn’t utter a single syllable about how hot the car was as he backed out of the driveway and started down Middle Street toward the small business district. It was a sticky Saturday in the middle of June and we’d been out of school and shoes for about three weeks as another summer got under way. The United States was in the midst of the Civil Rights movement, which as far as we knew was something happening at lunch counters in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and Montgomery, Alabama. When Medgar Evers was murdered, we thought for a moment how that could happen to our daddy, but he was white and nothing like that ever happened around Charleston. We were frightened, but we were just kids and not focused on it. All the same, violence was everywhere that summer, in the newspapers and in our house.
Because of the high attrition rate of our housekeepers, we hadn’t ever had a stretch of time to consider the grave injustices done to the Negro population at a close look. But the world was evolving in front of our eyes and we were changing our minds about a lot of things.