A sudden, seething anger flared inside me. It was so powerful that my hands started to shake. I grabbed a hand mirror from the side of the sink and held it close to her face. “How could I have friends? Just look at what you do to yourself.”
Her lips parted when she saw her reflection, and a slow, unspeakable sadness fell across her face. She turned away and gazed at the flowery wallpaper, as if the secret to her damaged life was hidden behind a faded petal or leaf.
I put down the mirror, ashamed by what I’d just done. “I’m sorry, Momma. I didn’t mean it.”
Without looking at me, she whispered, “Nancy Drew is jealous because I’m a pageant queen and she’s not.”
I lowered my eyes and went back to reading my book.
When the bathwater grew cold, I helped Momma out of the tub, peeled off her slip and bra, and dried her off. After getting her into a nightgown, she climbed into bed and fell asleep before I fi n-ished untangling the tiara from her hair. When I finally pulled it free, I set it on the night chest and went downstairs to the kitchen.
After fi lling a bucket with hot soapy water, I scrubbed the macaroni and cheese off the stovetop, then I stood on a chair and wiped down the cupboard doors. There was nothing to be done with the scorched pan, so I tossed it in the garbage. Once I’d cleaned everything up, I got down on my knees, reached behind the stove, and pulled the plug from the outlet. From now on Momma could eat cold sandwiches unless I was home to keep an eye on things
Though I always tried to hide the worst of my mother’s illness from everyone, that night I couldn’t stop myself from running next door to Mrs. Odell’s. I was too embarrassed to tell her the really bad parts of what had happened, but I managed to give her an idea of what had gone on.
She wrapped me in her arms. “Oh, honey, your mother is a tortured soul. Shall I go over and see if I can help her?”
“She’s sleeping,” I said, fighting back tears.
“Good. Then, you’ll stay and have supper with me.”
Hungry for anything that even remotely resembled normal, I followed Mrs. Odell around her little kitchen, but she didn’t seem to mind. We talked about what I was learning in school as she prepared our meal, and then she served it up on chipped porcelain plates while I set up TV trays in her living room. Pretty soon I all but forgot about Momma as we ate our supper and laughed at a rerun of I Love Lucy.
After we did the dishes, Mrs. Odell and I played Chinese checkers until it grew dark, and then she walked me home. She went upstairs to check on Momma, and returned a few minutes later with a sad look on her face. “She’s in a deep sleep, honey. Maybe tomorrow will be a better day.”
Mrs. Odell gave me a squeeze and left, her white hair glowing like a fuzzy moon in the darkness. As I stood at the window and watched her disappear, the truth blazed in my mind. There would never be a better day, because no matter what day it was, my mother, Camille Sugarbaker Honeycutt, the 1951 Vidalia Onion Queen, was crazy.
I blew a foggy circle on the windowpane and pressed my palm against it. The coolness of the glass was strangely comforting. While watching the mist evaporate around my fingers, I thought about Gloria.
Gloria used to live across the street. She and Momma were friends and had spent a lot of time together when I was real little. They would do each other’s hair like the pictures they’d seen in magazines, and sometimes they’d dance around the living room while watching American Bandstand on TV.
When Momma started having her spells, it was Gloria who tried to talk to my father.
I remembered the day I was sitting in the grass by the side of the house, playing with a toy bear. I looked across the street and saw Gloria unloading bags of groceries from her car. As I was about to call her name and wave, my father pulled into our driveway. When Gloria saw him, she trotted across the street, her short black hair shining in the sun.
“Carl, I need to talk to you. It’s important. Something’s wrong with Camille,” she said, folding her arms across her chest. “I’m worried about her, and I’m scared for Cecelia. Please come over to my house so we can talk in private. I’d like to—”
“Gloria, I’ll handle my own family,” Dad said, holding up his hand.
“I just think—”
But Dad turned and left her standing in the driveway.
Gloria was never the same after that day. She came over less and less, and then she stopped altogether. She’d always smile and wave hello whenever she saw me, but she didn’t come across the street and talk to me like she used to. Then one day a big green moving van pulled up and parked in her driveway. Later that afternoon, Gloria and her husband locked their front door and moved away. She didn’t even say good-bye.
And now here I was all these years later, staring into the starless sky, thinking about how much easier everything would be if my mother was locked up in a sanatorium. I sometimes even wished she were dead. It was terrible to think such a thing, but I just couldn’t help it. I’m not saying I wanted to skip through life in a rosy blur from one Disney experience to the next—all I longed for was to know one whole happy day.
The following Saturday morning the phone rang, and when I answered, a woman’s voice said, “Oh, uh, hello. I’d like to speak to Carl.”
I recognized her voice. She had called several times in the past. “He’s not home. Who’s calling?”
There was a long pause, and then she said, “It’s not important, I’ll call back another time.” And she quickly hung up.
Late that afternoon she called again, and still she refused to leave a message.
Not ten minutes later I heard my dad’s car roll into the driveway. I ran out the back door and watched him pull a six-pack of beer and a small suitcase from the trunk. Before he reached the top step of the porch, I blurted, “You have to do something. Momma needs help. And I—”
“C’mon, CeeCee, move over,” he grumbled, pushing past me.
His face was as tight as a clenched fist, and he reeked of liquor, underarm sweat, and a three-day-old foul mood. I knew that smell was a big red flag warning me to stay clear, but I followed him into the kitchen anyway.
“Momma needs to be in a hospital, and she—”
“For God’s sake. Can’t I even walk in the door without getting hounded?” He grabbed a beer, shoved the rest of the six-pack into the refrigerator, and pushed the door closed with his foot. “I took your mother to a big-deal doctor in Cleveland. He put her on so many pills the bathroom looked like a damn pharmacy. You know darn well she won’t take them, and even when she does, none of them do much good.”
“There’s a special hospital in Eastlake for mentally sick people. I looked it up in the phone book.”
He opened his beer and dropped the bottle opener into the drawer with a loud clang. “Do you have any idea what that would cost? I’m not made of money.”
“But you’re not here to see all the things she does.” I marched across the kitchen and yanked open a cupboard door. “These are the only dishes we have left, and do you know why? Because when she gets mad, she throws them against the wall. Last week she threw the toaster down the basement steps, and then she—”
He grabbed hold of the back of a chair and squeezed until his knuckles turned white. “My life isn’t a walk in the park, either. I just lost a big sale yesterday. As it is we’ll have to tighten out belts. I can’t afford to send your mother to a hospital.”
“I can’t take it anymore. If you won’t send Momma to a hospital, then send me away.”
He leaned toward me, his breath foul-smelling and hot. “Has your mother ever hurt you? Has she ever slapped you or paddled your behind?”
“No, but she—”
“Then just keep her inside the house when she isn’t herself.” He looked away and rifled through a stack of mail.
“If you don’t do something about Momma, then I will. I’ll tell the nurse at school about it, or I’ll . . . I’ll . . . go the police, and . . .” My chin quivered so much I couldn’t finis
h the sentence.
“And what do you think the police will do—arrest your mother for throwing a toaster down the stairs?”
I was so mad I started to shake. “No. They’ll make you do something about Momma.”
Dad’s lips thinned. “Who do you think you’re talking to?”
“I’m trying to talk to you, but you won’t listen! Where are you all the time? Why do you go to Detroit so much?”
“I travel for my job, you know that,” he said, ripping open an envelope. But it was the way he averted his eyes that stirred a suspicion deep in my gut.
I took a breath for courage and stepped forward. “Some lady called here for you, twice, but she wouldn’t give me her name. And today isn’t the first time she’s called, either. So is that why you’re never home?”
Splotches of red bloomed on his neck and he glared at me. “What kind of question is that?”
I held his gaze, matching his fury with my own. “Do you have a girlfriend?”
“You know what? I don’t know why I bother to come home anymore.” He pulled out his wallet, dropped some money on the kitchen table, and walked out the door.
And, like always, he was gone.
Late the following afternoon, I found my mother sitting on the back steps. She was still in her nightgown, and her hair was a snarled mess of bobby pins and rollers from the night before. With her knees hugged tightly to her chest, she sat quietly and gazed into a sky that was as brittle as charred tinfoil.
I went outside and lowered myself next her. We didn’t say anything. We just sat and watched the wind whip up angry gray clouds. The strange, electric smell of a storm fi lled the air, and when a roll of thunder sounded off in the distance, I reached out and touched her hand. “You’d better come inside, Momma. It’s going to rain.”
Her lips barely moved when she said, “I’m watching that bird. Way up high in the tree.”
I couldn’t see it, and I wondered if her imagination was playing tricks again. But a moment later three chirps sounded and a red-winged blackbird lifted out of the tree. Momma and I watched until the flash of his scarlet epaulets disappeared.
“I wish I could be a bird.”
“Why? What good would that do?”
She turned and looked at me with exhausted blue eyes. “Then I could fly to Georgia and get my life back.”
I could tell she was about to cry, so I took hold of her hand and urged her to her feet. As we walked into the kitchen, Momma looked pale and seemed wobbly. “Why don’t you rest for a while?” I said, leading her up the stairs and into her bedroom. “I’ll make us some supper a little later.”
She sat on the edge of the bed, as limp as a worn-out rag doll. I pulled her slippers from her feet and placed them beneath her night chest, but when I reached out to remove the curlers from her hair, her hands flew over her head and she began swatting the air like she was being attacked by a swarm of mosquitoes.
“What is it, Momma? What’s wrong?”
She jumped up and shrieked, “I’ve wasted the best years of my life. Damn him. Damn him to hell. I wish he’d drop dead!”
Momma grabbed a container of scented talcum from her vanity and hurled it at the closet door. It exploded on impact and sent so much white powder into the air, I felt like I was standing inside a giant snow globe.
Three
Friday, June 2, 1967
There were three eyewitnesses, and each of them said the same thing: the Happy Cow Ice Cream truck came over a crest in the road and hit Momma so hard she was knocked clean out of her geranium-red satin shoes. A big-bellied policeman stood in our driveway and told my dad that Momma had died instantly.
“I’m sorry to be delivering this terrible news. Real sorry. It happened so fast she didn’t feel a thing, Mr. Honeycutt—I can promise you that.”
My legs turned liquid, and I grabbed hold of my bedroom window frame to steady myself. Red shoes? Yes, she was wearing her favorite red shoes.
Ashen-faced, Dad glanced toward the house. For a brief, searing moment, his eyes locked with mine. A thousand unsaid words hung in the air between us. His voice broke apart when he turned to the officer and said, “Where . . . where did you say this happened?”
“On Euclid Avenue, about fi fty yards west of the Goodwill store. The driver of the truck said she ran right in front of him. He didn’t even have time to swerve—”
Dad held up his hand, palm thrust forward and fingers spread wide, as if trying to block any more words the policeman might say. “Good God,” he said, slouching on the porch steps with a heavy moan. “Good God Almighty.”
The policeman pulled a toothpick from behind his ear and slid it into the corner of his mouth. “This is an awful shock, but I’ve got to ask you a few questions. Your wife was walking on the road wearing a fancy party dress, and she had a crown on her head. Now, I know she had a tendency to be a little . . . well, a little colorful at times. And I’m wondering, was she on any sort of medication?”
Dad let out a low groan and shook his head.
“Mr. Honeycutt, do you know where she was going all gussied up like that in the middle of the afternoon?”
Dad hung his head and said no. But that was a big fat lie. He knew darn well Momma walked to the Goodwill store at least once a week, but I figured he was too embarrassed to tell the policeman why.
This was the first day in almost three weeks that Dad had been home, and he hadn’t been in the house more than twenty minutes before the policeman knocked on the door. Though I teetered on the edge between feeling no emotion for my father and downright hating him, I was drop-to-my-knees grateful it was him talking with the policeman and not me.
I moved away from the window, collapsed on my bed, and took several slow, deep breaths. A rush of blood thundered in my ears and a strange heat snaked through my veins until I got so hot and sweaty I thought I’d throw up. Just when I was about to run to the bathroom, I cooled down so fast I shuddered. Whoever it was that said life can change in the blink of an eye sure wasn’t lying. Less than two hours ago I had walked out of school with my year-end report card in my hand, feeling glad for the beginning of summer vacation. Now a policeman claimed my mother was dead, and I didn’t know what to believe or think, much less feel.
The skin on my forehead tightened and my hands went numb, but not one tear leaked from my eyes. All I could do was stare off into space and imagine Momma flying through the air as the chiffon skirt of her beauty pageant dress billowed in the wind like a white gossamer parachute. I imagined her landing lightly on the side of the road, her dress splayed out prettily around her, and I could see her crinoline slip, full and stiff, standing up against the breeze—its lacy hem fluttering when motorists passed by.
I could picture all that so easily, but I couldn’t picture Momma actually dead. Momma had always been the great pretender, and I half-expected her to twirl into my bedroom, giggle, and then flop on the bed and tell me that she wasn’t even hurt—that it was only something she’d done just for fun. I could almost hear her say, “I only did it to liven things up in this boring old town.”
I sat up and looked out the window. It struck me as odd how my dad and the policeman were talking as if they were friends. I wondered if maybe death does that—turns strangers into friends for a few minutes, or an hour, or maybe even a whole day. I was also struck by how the birds kept chirping, how the traffic kept moving past our house, and how the man across the street kept right on trimming his hedge. Even the neighbor ladies kept on walking by, pulling their wire carts fi lled with groceries.
Momma was dead, yet the day marched on as usual.
The remainder of that Friday is forever lost to me. The Saturday and Sunday following Momma’s death are much the same—nothing but blurry bits and pieces that never quite fit together. I remember Mrs. Odell rubbing my back, and I remember waking up in the bathtub, hearing the phone ring and ring in the kitchen below. I have a vague memory of wiping vomit from the rim of the toilet, yet I don’t recal
l throwing up. Mostly I stayed in bed, hiding behind the black screen of my closed eyelids, listening to the tree limbs scrape a sad melody across the roof. I have no memory of eating, but one night I woke to find a bowl of cereal tipped over in my bed, the milk soaked into the sheets, and a banana squashed beneath my arm.
But no matter how I’ve tried, those few things are all I can summon from the storehouse of my memory.
Momma was laid to rest on a bright blue Monday morning. Other than Dad and me, the gathering around her plain wooden casket consisted of a preacher whom I’d never seen before, Mrs. Odell, and Dottie McGee, the woman who ran the Goodwill store.
Mrs. Odell reached over and took hold of my hand when the preacher said a prayer and asked God to take Momma to heaven. Dad stood off to the side with his hands shoved deep inside his pockets, looking pale and waxy.
When the preacher finished speaking and closed his Bible with a soft but definitive thump, Mrs. McGee sniffled into a tissue. “Camille was the best customer I ever had,” she said, dabbing her eyes. “She was so funny and full of stories. I’ll never look at a prom dress again without thinking of her.”
Whether that proclamation angered or humiliated Dad I couldn’t say, but his lips thinned and he turned away.
Mrs. Odell had made up a bouquet of white irises and pink peonies from her garden and tied it with a white satin ribbon. She handed it to me, leaned down, and whispered, “Here, honey, take these flowers and put them on your mother’s casket. It’s time to say good-bye.”
As I stepped forward, a high-pitched ringing began in my ears. And though I was swollen with a sorrow I’d never known, I stared at my mother’s casket, dry-eyed and numb. My chest hurt and I could hardly breathe. I felt I might smother beneath a blanket of guilt.
Is this my fault? Were my prayers misunderstood? Did God intervene and decide this was the only thing He could do?