CHAPTER TWELVE
It was the first time I had ever seen actual sunlight touch my mother’s pale hair and skin. We took the car into Lincoln, sold it for bus tickets, and got on a bus to Birmingham. In my last call to Cecil, I asked him to pick up Fidore.
I saw so much of the countryside change on that road. I saw huge mountains and frothy rivers. I saw young and old people unlike any I’d seen, but none of these things prepared me for Birmingham, and for my mother’s family’s way of life.
They were rich. Rich, rich, rich! Their home and land took 40 acres on the outskirts of the city.
The city, for it was one. It had so many paved roads that it seemed to me at the time I could take a million paths into my future. But none of my futures had Patrick in them anymore.
My Grandmother was a thin, stiff lady, and my first impression of her was that she was rather like a walking stick that I had found in the woods as a kid. She moved slowly and purposefully, and had a smooth, southern accent that at first I had a hard time understanding. It sounded like my mother’s, but it was different, as though it had been sown into her throat by a skilled seamstress. She was small, too, and I physically looked down at her. My second impression was that she was not a happy woman, but that idea faded in the first week we lived in their mansion. The impression went from sadness to meanness, for every time my mother spoke, my grandmother would chide her in some way. For example, the first night we arrived, my mother said that the children, that would be Barbie and me, could stay in one room together.
“Nonsense,” my grandmother had said. “You have lived with so little for so long with that man that you forget the necessity of privacy for a young woman.”
In a weak voice, my mother had said, “But they are only girls and we did give them their own rooms, it’s just that –”
Grandmother cut her off like changing a TV channel. “Joan, Cleo, follow me upstairs.” Then to my mother, whose eyes were spacey and distant, “Sandra, you wait right there. We have things to discuss about the raising of these two young women, such as why they are so dirty and in such poor clothing.”
My Grandfather, you ask? He was never home. Retired, but spent all his days fishing and hunting. No matter what the weather, he was always off on some trip, to one of their cabins in Georgia, one of their houses in Biloxi, Mississippi, or just off to some unmemorable place in the middle of nowhere. I only saw him on rare occasions, and he looked over my head when he addressed me, saying things like, “Hello, there, Cleo. Why don’t you run and fetch me a tonic water?” He often played Debussey on a record player and would lose himself in drink. The only thing I remember is that he loved Clair de Lune. I could hear him playing it at night when everyone was supposed to be asleep. There really wasn’t anything else to the man, I tell you.
Barbie hated Grandmother almost instantly. I could tell by the bratty way she pooched up her lips and glared at the woman each time Grandmother called her Joan. Within the first month of arriving in Birmingham, we were back in school. It was a small, private school for girls, where they made us all wear the same clothes and pull our hair back into tight buns. This especially bothered Barbie, because she so loved to let her long, straight, blonde hair bounce and dance in the sunlight. The teachers were all women and had that same accent as my grandmother, as did the other girls attending the school. I felt like an old doll somebody had washed in the sink and dressed up to put in a new baby’s crib. Somehow we did it, Barbie and me. We went to the school and we made good grades, along with Grandmother saying, “Well, I suppose our blood was strong enough after all.”
Oh, yes, I think I should mention that my mother’s brother was not a veterinarian. He was a politician in Birmingham, and a prominent one. When I learned of this, I went into my mother’s room, which she never left, and asked her why she had told us he was a vet. She didn’t answer, just turned her head away into her pillow and rubbed her temple like there was a splinter stuck there that she couldn’t get out.
My mother’s sister, Aunt Savannah, lived in some city up north. Nobody talked about her or anything, but her Christmas presents came all the same. Now they came to my grandparents’ house, so there must have been some communication within the family about our moving in with our mother’s parents.
No, no, I don’t want to talk about living there. I was a shell of a girl who would emotionlessly put on a pink dress twice a year for fancy balls, bathe regularly in one of the four lavish bathrooms of the mansion, go to school and believe everything I was told by spinsters without caring what the truth was. I don’t want to think about the screaming matches between Barbie and Grandmother, or how Barbie and I were convinced to go to a college for girls in Atlanta, or how Barbie told me we were finally free…I didn’t know I was in a cage. I was on a Ferris wheel in 1970 holding my true love’s dead hand, or watching my father fall down in his veterinary office. Barbie would come to me crying like some kicked puppy over this or that, and then accuse me of being my grandmother when I didn’t care. What life Barbie had as a young girl!
I had been at college for a year when Barbie joined me, and Barbie spent six months there, and then disappeared. Mother said she knew where Barbie had went, but only told me that, and as far as I know, she wouldn’t tell anyone else where Barbie was, either.
It is 1976 when I would like to resume my life story. I had very much enjoyed my studies in college. I loved English and all the books I read. I think my favorite, if it concerns you, was Frankenstein. Or perhaps Pride and Prejudice. Oh, I really cannot say what my favorite was. I just read everything that was tossed my way. I was not at the top of my class. Many of my professors did not agree with my essays and what I felt the stories were about.
At the time, I was often disappointed after spending so much time writing papers. Hours, I tell you, sometimes days. Did I mention the Canterbury Tales? Anyway, often I would get marks on my papers telling me that I was, “looking into it too much,” or, more specifically that the teacher had taught it one way, and that was the way it was. Honestly, in my college years, I felt angry and misunderstood for the first two years, and then I just didn’t care. My joy of literature in any form had taken over any desire to please, since I pleased so few with my interpretations. I had no friends in college, to say it so, except for one teacher, Dr. Hammerstein. After one essay I wrote about a Greek satire, she had written on my paper, “Come see my during my office hours this week.”
I went to see her. It was in my third year, but all I have to say is that she enjoyed reading my opinion. It somehow made me feel validated, but only because I appreciated her teachings so much. That was the young woman I was at that time. I had developed an understanding of authors, what they wrote and why. I still think, after that one meeting with my only “friend” in college, that all that mattered was what I got out of a piece of art. That is what Dr. Hammerstein taught me, in that one session. We never talked that way again, but I think I saw a glimmer in her eye whenever I turned in a paper to her. I was what some people might call withdrawing from society, but to me it felt very invigorating, very exciting to go into my own mind and just think.
Cecil had never stopped writing me, although I never wrote back, and he showed up at my dorm in May, 1976, as I was packing my things up, ready to move back to Birmingham to teach English at the same girls’ high school I had attended four years earlier. I appeared to be one of those mindless spinsters, trying to keep my hair pulled back tight like a little Christmas ball ornament, not a curl allowed to spring out.
But to tell you the truth, which is why I am here, I loved being that way at that time. It was romantic.
Cecil rang up to my room, and I went down to see him, only wondering what he might look like all grown up.
He stood in the hall with daisies in his left hand. He was wearing an old, ratty suit, the kind only a boy who had stayed in the Midwest for college would have been wearing. He was quite tall, taller than I remembered, and he looked at me for the first time in years with confidence and
pride, as though no time had passed. But to me…to me nothing really mattered at that moment. I had no idea why he was there, nor why he was carrying flowers, but he asked me to come outside with him.
We went out into the courtyard of my dorm and he said, “Cleo, you never wrote me back, but you have always been the one person in my life who makes sense. I have a million things I want to say to you about all the things I’ve learned in college and in the wild duress of this world we live in, but I am coming to you now with nothing to offer but these flowers and a little something that has been passed through my family.” He paused, looking me over, all the way down to my shoes, and I realized that he thought my shoes were quite nice. He continued, saying, “I don’t have much to give you other than these things and I haven’t developed into a man of romantic words. But I have come,” and he got down on one knee, “To ask you to marry me.” He reached into the pocket of his old suit and pulled out a small gold ring band. He held it up to me.
I told him I already had plans, as though he were asking what I was doing that Saturday night. His expression did not change. How determined he was. And what he said next was what changed my mind. He said, “I am going to work in this world for the better. I want to go into politics with you as my wife, my rock of sanity, and we can start our life in any part of the country you want. I have a Bachelor’s degree and intend on furthering my education. I have just enough money saved up from mindless jobs for us to move into a comfortable home and begin our adult life together.” Then his eyes did soften a bit, like he had caught a slight fragrance from the flowers and mistook it for the smell of my perfume. He said, “Anywhere you want to go. You name the place and I will offer you the most promising and fulfilling life you could ever have.”
He did not say he loved me, or that he wanted my love in return. He wanted to take me somewhere, and marry me.
I said, “What about Philadelphia?”
He blinked in the hot Georgia sun, and I thought he would rather I had asked to go to just about anywhere but there. He glanced back down at my shoes, then his own, and nodded, meeting my eyes again. “Philadelphia it is.”
My grandmother threw us a grand wedding, although at first she didn’t want to. Then she met Cecil and they went into the parlor for an hour, and when they came out, I think my very own grandmother would have married him. He did have a way with charming people when he wanted to. The wedding was held just two weeks later since Cecil wanted to be settled in Philadelphia for the start of school term so he could get a master’s degree.
Barbie even heard mention of my wedding, wherever she was. I didn’t know it at the time, but she and my mother had been in constant contact through letters over the years. All she did on my wedding day was show up in a red dress, which was frowned upon, but I must say she was more beautiful than the bride, which was also frowned upon. We did not speak except for when she kissed my ear and said, “Good luck.”
My mother was a gracious and spacious mother-of-the-bride. I believe it was the first time she had left her mother’s house since we had arrived there. She congratulated both of us, and when she hugged me she slipped a little envelope in my hand. I opened it after my new husband was asleep naked in bed. All that was written on it was an address in Philadelphia. Nothing else, just an address. It seemed about as personal as cigarette butt on the side of a stretch of highway in Virginia.
Cecil took me to a part of Philadelphia that was called Powelton Village. What I saw were beautiful Victorian homes and fading brick boxes. Cecil did not seem to see the different kinds of people I saw, but I remember squirming like a rat in a trap, wondering where I was and why I had wanted to make this a reality. But I let this thought, as all the thoughts I had that were not about books and writings, fade away like an after-taste of Cajun chili Grandmother would make when I came home from college. She would say, “Cajuns, taking over our Louisiana. But they make good food, so I imagine that is what kept them alive so long without being policed. Good food.” And then she would raise her little eyebrows and perk her lips, so like Barbie, and I would eat every bite of my chili.
Powelton, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The only thought I had that was my own that I kept without it fading was that Patrick was from this city, and that was as close to him as I would ever get. It was like a memorized poem, that thought. Like remembering the Lord’s Prayer. Words whose feeling had long since gone, but kept a strength in me that I would not release.
Cecil asked if I wanted to work. I told him I would think about it, get back to him. I never did, and he didn’t ask again. But for hours he would talk at me, like he did back in Nebraska. He would say things about equality, and how the justice system just needed a kick in the humanitarian butt.
Powelton Village. A place in West Philadelphia. It was all he could afford, he said. Grandmother would send me cash every month, and I would go out to stores in the city and buy fine linens and bedclothes and shoes. The salesladies fell all over me and I thought this was because they saw I had cash money.
There were a lot of Catholics in Philadelphia. They had churches much grander than any I had seen built by the Christians in the South. There was one called St. Patrick’s. I went to see it on my own.
It was so beautiful. I was a couple of months pregnant, and Cecil was in his classes, and I wanted to see it because it was named Patrick. I took busses, which I found uncomfortable, but I felt I owed it to the memory of Patrick to see the church that held his name. Have you seen it? You nod, but I don’t think you saw it as I did. That doesn’t matter, I suppose, just like the papers I wrote for teachers that didn’t care anymore. Now you look at me though I am criticizing you, but if you will, another cup of coffee. I have weak knees.
Yes, pregnant. It seems so far away, my pregnancy. I never got sick, I never got thick ankles. After two months of no menstrual period, I told Cecil. I remember it very clearly.
I said, “Cecil, I think I am pregnant.”
His face went empty, like space and stars, and then his eyes sparked. He grasped my hands and looked me deep in the eyes and said, “Already?” He touched my belly and grinned.
There are a lot of things I didn’t care about that perhaps I should have. I never cared much in Nebraska about Cecil’s home life, I just knew that he was much more brilliant than his family. I do have one recollection of his mother. She was a big woman, very big, and she never had a look of interest in her eyes. I also remember Cecil’s father in one memory. My memory is so scattered, good, maybe even photographic, but out of order sometimes, like a photo album in which the pictures are not time-sequential. I remember his father from one time when I came over to study. Cecil was explaining something about how humans had landed on the moon, how it all had to do with Howard Hughes, and his father looked at him. Cecil didn’t see that particular look, but I did. It was like Cecil had just proclaimed that he was spawned from the mailman and a goat.
I am not laughing, not really. This coffee is good. Is it the gourmet?
Yes, pregnancy. I knew soon I would be dedicating my life to a child. Cecil was studying, and he was working in a democratic campaign office for free. Really, the only money we had came from my grandmother and Cecil’s student loans.
Cecil talked a lot when we went to bed at the same time. He talked and talked and talked. I did like that about him. It was interesting. I just listened, like I did on the phone when we were young. I often would start listening, then remember a story I had read or a book I had ripped through, but I always caught myself in time to say something that Cecil said was “profound.”
“Cleo, if only the city had a better program for helping the homeless. There are all kinds of medicines for the mentally ill now, and the medicines would work for them, but how can we get anything done when all the money is being put into mindless things like advertising for bullshit campaigns?”
I would say something like, “Bullshit campaigns are what create the mentally ill to begin with. Forget the medicines, just shoot two birds with
one stone and get rid of the campaigns.”
I want to skip forward a bit. I want to talk about one day when I was bored. I had read all my books, and I never re-read books. I had them committed to memory the second the words passed my eyes and they leeched into my brain and veins.
I knew Powelton Village after months of living there. Back in those days, I used to like to walk the streets, trying to become familiar with the culture and layout. I didn’t like feeling uncomfortable there, so I decided to try to understand it. My mother’s impersonal address was close by. I got up one night, a weird night when Cecil had drank two glasses of brandy and had fallen asleep before me. I watched him slumber, thinking he looked much like a dog sleeping on a chain in a gutter, and I got out of bed. I went to my music box, which had a lock. The only thing in the house that I had locked and hidden the key. Cecil had teased me for this after a week living together in Philadelphia. He had looked at me with mock respect, and said, “All women should carry at least one secret. And I think you should have some, and I don’t want to know them.” My secret was the piece of paper with the address my mother had given me that hid in my music box. I fingered the lock, but didn’t open it that night.
As you know, I always wake before dawn. I awoke the next morning and watched my husband sleep. He had long eyelashes, and they were twitching. Although he approved of my so-called secrets, I still slinked out of bed and made sure the music box was unwound before I opened it.
I looked at the address. Cecil woke up just then, and said, “Enchantress, looking in her secret box. Come to me, Bast.”
Bast was the Egyptian house-cat goddess. He liked to call me that. Bast was also a goddess of sunrises. I didn’t know that at the time, never having taken any classes on ancient Egypt.
He was at school soon after, and I was touching my pregnant belly. What was in there, I wondered. Cecil was at Drexel, just a few blocks away. He walked. How weird to remember this now, but he was very fit after several months of walking around in Powelton Village.
I unlocked the music box again. It was made of wood, and had a picture of a little boy and a little girl holding hands while crossing a creek. It played the theme to Swan Lake, but I didn’t know at the time what the song was.
No, the coffee is wonderful. I’m sorry I stopped talking, but to remember a certain sound, I have to close my eyes.
I went looking for that address that day. It was an apartment building, an ugly one, brick and small. I rang the apartment number’s call box. No one answered. I touched my belly and went home.
I was showing at six months. I was never as statuesque as Barbie. You see me as an old woman. No, don’t say I don’t look old. You haven’t looked close in my eyes yet, reporter, even though you know my age now.
I was always short, and short-waisted. Once, one of the college dorm girls called me plump.
When I was pregnant I never wanted to eat. I know that sounds unusual, but I was simply not hungry. I would swallow a nip of Cecil’s brandy once in a while. Back then it was debatable whether drinking during pregnancy was bad for the child.
When I was six months pregnant, the doctor I went to see told me that judging by the heart rate of the fetus, I was having a girl. Cecil was very excited, as he was in the room with us when the doctor listened to my womb. Cecil took my hand and said, “I always liked the name Angelica.” Angelica sounded nice to me. I thought, maybe she will be an angel among all, teaching and showing people things about themselves that they were unaware of. I could see in his eyes that he had hopes for her, too, though he didn’t say what they were. That was probably the closest I ever felt to Cecil.
Cecil worked all the time. He was in classes for five hours a day, and then off to the democratic office to serve the things he believed in. I went there from time to time just out of curiosity. There were a lot of people there that I thought were very intelligent. They all loved Cecil. At that time, he was moving up from a supporter to a political writer.
One man Cecil worked with, Hernandez, was a poor man with no family, but he had invented some household device, and had invested. When his investment paid off, he started pushing Cecil into a good position in the democratic office at a low level. Cecil, still in his master’s program, stopped campaigning for others and began to research history and society to a deeper extent with pay, thanks to Hernandez.
We now had more money coming in than just from my grandmother. I was seven months pregnant. That was when I went to the address up the block again, for the second time. I had awoken before dawn, watched Cecil wake and smile almost shyly, calling me Bast, then he was gone and I showered. I went to the address my mother had given me.
This time, when I buzzed up to the apartment, I heard a woman’s voice answer. It was high and sweet, a southern accent. Maybe that is why it sounded sweet, and I immediately thought of my mother. I said, “Hello? I am Cleo. My mother gave me this address.”
There was a pause.
The front door was released with a buzz.
I went inside and climbed slowly up the stairs to the second floor apartment.
The door opened and a beautiful woman with long, blonde hair and a shapely figure opened the door. At first, I was silent with the shock of a street cat whose sleep had been disrupted by a night shower. This woman was my mother, with longer, rattier hair, but somehow the dry ends of the strands made her more whimsical. She looked like a fairy version of my mother with more…Ah, feminine aspects, such as hips and breasts.
She looked at me with full moon eyes. Then, without a word, she looked down at my belly and touched it. For a moment, she looked as vacant as a bar parking lot after hours, then she said, “Joanie will be jealous.” Her eyes changed to the mirth of the mystical creature I had first seen. She reached her arms around me and pulled me into an embrace. She said, “I’m your Aunt Savannah. So great to finally meet you.”
The door closed and my mother’s sister took my hand. I was in a small apartment, much smaller than my place, and her hand was so very dainty compared to the dump she lived in, like a special china teacup in the middle of a jungle. I smelled jasmine incense, and saw that there was another room. In that room was a bed, a bed without a frame. Just a mattress on the floor, really. In the bed slept Barbie. She was lying on her side, with her back to me, but I knew that figure and hair anywhere. Long, silky, blonde hair, but dirty at the roots. There was the sister I had for many years awoken before and watched sleep after she had come to my bed in the middle of the night when she had some unspeakable nightmare.
She woke up as I stared at her bare back. It was so bony and seductive, much like a model in a magazine nowadays. Then her head turned, and those blue eyes looked at me. Her mouth opened but she said nothing.
She was naked, and jumped out of bed, hair reminding me of when it is all yellow outside because of some strange fog. I embraced that weather, and she said, “You’re carrying!”
I want to skip ahead. The in-between moments that mean something to me, I just feel happened in other times. Like feeling…So many things at once and later trying to map them out in a linear order.
Do you perhaps have a nip you could spill into my coffee? It is making me talk too fast, the coffee is. I am feeling anxious. Do you, perhaps?
Thank you, yes, I think whiskey in coffee is just right. Maybe a tidbit more. Thank you.
I can tell you want to know more about when I found Barbie and my Aunt Savannah. Not much to tell at that point. Barbie dressed and we sat in the small living area on the floor on purple and blue cushions and Aunt Savannah made us green tea. I was worried at that time, worried about how they looked at me, how they looked in general. Worried about the smells I smelled, and the small glass pipe that my aunt tucked away under a pillow when I glanced at it. I did ask one question: why were they there?
Aunt Savannah told me that Barbie, whom she called Joanie, had come to live with her a few years ago. At that time Aunt Savannah was living in New York City. My aunt told me Barbie wanted
to move to Philadelphia, and in her high, musical voice she told me she liked new places, and that the idea of moving to Philadelphia sounded like fun. Then she and Barbie shared a look that I didn’t understand. Barbie said very little that day. She kept looking at my belly with more interest than at my face. She would look out the window as our aunt talked about whatever was on her mind. I was still in shock. Barbie looked so very different and even more beautiful as a young woman than as a child. When our eyes met, she seemed empty, and we were silent in each other’s company. Her initial excitement of seeing me again had washed away into an impenetrable sea.