“I wish I could want what they want, but it would be like wearing somebody else’s skin,” I wrote. “God, life would be so easy if I could feel like them.”
Don’t misunderstand me. My life wasn’t complete misery. I really liked school. Writing was fun and math was like solving little puzzles—a game. But Island society and the kids in school thought I was weird. They said behind my back that my brain was too big and it was a shame to waste it on a girl. And they said my mouth would someday be the death of me. Well, bump them.
I had my secret writing life and that had kept me sane. Every major incident in the Hamilton history was recorded in those pages, linked with one of my doodles depicting the scene. I consoled myself that someday I’d have my own life to live and I’d be all right.
Number two pencil in my hand, I curled up on my quilt and wrote.
“Someday, I’m getting the hell off this dinky island and moving to Paris to learn all about men. I’m gonna change my name to Simone. I’m gonna speak lousy French with a Gullah accent. I’ll live in a tiny apartment with lots of personality, only wear black clothes, smoke cigarettes and drink whiskey as I write great books. Maybe I’ll take Livvie with me. I’ll bet she can handle anything.”
I drew a picture of us in berets and sunglasses and giggled.
I heard Daddy’s car door slam. A minute later I heard the screaming start. Daddy had hit Timmy. The back door slammed. A second later I looked out and saw Henry running across the backyard—knowing him, he was running away from the belt. Good move, Henry, I thought. Then I heard Livvie’ s voice. She was every inch as loud as the old man.
“Stop this right now! Ain’t no man gone raise a hand to a child in my care, I don’t care who he is!”
“Are you pretending to tell me how to raise my children? Just who in the hell do you think you are?” Daddy hollered.
“Move out of here, Timmy!” Livvie commanded. “Now! Move when I tell you to move, boy!”
I could hear Timmy running for the front porch and, on my tiptoes, I moved down the steps to listen in the hall.
“I ain’t pretending nothing! I’m telling you. Let me tell you something, Mr. Hamilton. This is just who I am! I’m Livvie Singleton, the one who cleaned your house today, fed your children, washed your clothes and gave your mother-in-law a bath that she ain’t had since Gawd knows when! And iffin you think you can find somebody else to put up with your fool, you gone right on and do him ’cause I’m a God-fearing and righteous woman and I don’t need no trash from you!”
“Is that so?” he said. “Why, I ought to…”
“You touch one hair on this head and you is a dead white man, you ’eah me?”
Was Daddy going to hit her? Was he completely crazy? Then things got quiet and in a few seconds I heard my father laughing. He was laughing like a damn fool and I used the occasion to sneak down the steps to the porch. Timmy was lying in the hammock.
“You okay?” I asked quietly.
“Yeah, I’m okay. He just hit me in the side of my head.”
“Let me see.”
It was all red on the side of his face.
“Susan? That Livvie is unbelievable.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “You want a cold cloth?”
“Nah, I’ll live.”
We heard Daddy’s car start and leave the backyard with a screech. A few seconds later the screen door opened and Livvie came out.
“Timmy, let me see your face, son.”
Timmy sat up and showed it to her. She placed her hand on the slap mark and began to hum an old song.
“Sing the words, Livvie,” I asked, “please?”
She smiled and sang low in her rich voice:
“No more shall they in bondage toil,
Let them come out with Egypt’s spoil,
Let my people go!”
She sang and hummed for a few more minutes, holding Timmy’s face in her beautiful, long, dark brown hands. She looked at Timmy’s face again and the red mark was gone.
“Now, son, feel better?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “Where’s Daddy? Is he still mad?”
“You don’t trouble yourself about your daddy. He ain’t mad. In fact, he give me a raise. He gone up to your uncle Louis’s house to invite them to come over ’eah tonight. Now, don’t you be worrying about him doing this no more. Ain’t gone happen, all right?”
“He gave you a raise?” I said, completely shocked.
“Humph. Told him I put the plat eye on him iffin he try any more fool with me and then he start to laughing. I tell him, ‘I quit,’ and he say, ‘Don’t go,’ and I say, ‘Give me five dollars more a week and we’ll see.’”
“What’s the plat eye?” I asked.
“Humph. Mother Nature cure for evil, that’s what,” she said.
I started giggling and couldn’t stop, then Timmy joined in and next Livvie started laughing so hard I could see her tonsils. She slapped her legs, bending over and straightening up and bending over again. We were a sight, carrying on, celebrating her victory.
“Don’t ever leave us, Livvie,” I said.
“Ain’t got no plans to go nowhere except back to that kitchen and get ready for company. Y’all want to help Livvie? And, Mr. Timmy?”
He looked at her, knowing some advice was coming.
“Next time you ’eah your daddy’s car in the yard, run out and see iffin you can help him, all right? Makes him mad to have to ask. You understand?”
“Yeah, I get it.”
“That’s my boy,” she said.
We started back to the kitchen together, Livvie and I, but she stopped in the living room, looking at the big mirror at the end of the room. It was as tall as the windows and filled the space between them. The gilded frame glimmered in the semidarkness. I always thought that our living room looked like a funeral home. It was always dark in there and the mirror was so big it was spooky. When I was really little I wouldn’t go in the room by myself.
“What?” I said.
“Nothing. Where’d you get that mirror?”
“Um, Grandpa Tipa got it. It came from the Planters Hotel, an old hotel that used to be on the Island. Used to be flipped horizontal and it hung behind a bar. Why?”
“Ain’t no good. Big mirrors ain’t no good. No, sir. They hold the spirit. The spirit come out and then you got the devil to get him out of your house. No. Ain’t no good.”
“Livvie! What in the world are you talking about?”
“Huh? Oh, chile, don’t pay Livvie no never mind. Come, we got work to do.”
WHEN AUNT CAROL and Uncle Louis pulled up in front of the house that evening, I was on the front porch with Livvie arranging little bowls of nuts and pretzels with paper cocktail napkins while she arranged glasses and an ice bucket on the card table she had covered with a white cloth. An official bar on our porch was a new feature and when I asked her why she was setting it she said, “Because I got better things to do with my time than run back and forth like a puppy dog fetching them drinks all night, that’s why.” It made good sense to me.
When Uncle Louis opened her car door, Aunt Carol emerged from the car one leg at a time. She was in love with her own legs and so was every man on the Island who could frost a mirror. So here they came, one by one. Long, tanned and perfect. Her toenails and fingernails were a pale frosted pink and she wore a pastel pink shell sweater with a matching cardigan over expensive linen Bermudas. Her brown alligator belt had a gold buckle with her initials on it. She shook her perfect blond hair and removed her sunglasses and smiled up to me on the porch.
“Hey, Miss Susan! How are you?”
What a phony, I thought. She thought she was Marilyn Monroe or somebody. I shot a glance at Livvie, whose jaw was locked.
“Fine! I’ll tell Momma y’all’re ’eah!” I called back. Passing Livvie I muttered, “That’s Aunt Carol.”
“Humph,” she said.
The grown-ups had their night and we had ours. Maggie had gone to her be
st friend’s house to spend the night. Timmy was upstairs with Henry watching television. I hung around with Livvie in the kitchen. She had tried to shoo me off to bed several times, but I wasn’t moving. Her arrival that day might have been the most important event of my life and I didn’t want to miss anything. I was washing plates when she came back in with a tray of crab shells.
“Humph,” she said.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she said.
“Come on, let me guess.”
“Humph,” she said.
“Aunt Carol’s playing footsie with Daddy under the table again?”
“How’d you know that, chile? You ain’t supposed to be knowing about that kind of thing at your age!” She was honestly horrified.
“I know a lot more than I should,” I answered.
“Lawd, Lawd. I got to do a lot of praying on this family. I can see that now.”
Six
First Dates
1999
THE following Saturday, Beth and I took a drive out Highway 61 with a packed cooler and our camera. We planned to picnic at Magnolia Gardens and then tour the house. As a little girl, Beth would imagine herself to be a plantation belle, wearing hoop skirts and perfecting her curtsy. I loved that memory and besides, I had had enough of work for one week. My idiot boss, Mitchell Fremont, had taken a personal shine to me and was driving me crazy. As a boss he was bearable, but if I lapsed into a momentary daydream of him naked, it was so repulsive it gave me the shakes. A plantation trip was the perfect medicine after a week of Mitchell’ s leering.
I pulled into Magnolia Gardens’s gate, paid the admission fee and rolled down the long road to the parking lot. “Lock your door, okay, honey?”
It was a perfect September day. The brilliant blue sky above was so clear—not a cloud anywhere to be seen. The air was not humid and the temperature was somewhere in the low seventies. Our feet crunched on the gravel as we ambled along to the picnic tables.
It didn’t take long to unpack the sandwiches, low-fat chips and diet sodas I had brought along. Suddenly, I was starving.
“Pickle?” I said, taking a bite from a kosher dill.
“Sure, thanks!” she said. “Why is it that eating outside makes everything taste so much better?”
“Good question. I don’t know. But I do know that when we cook on the grill at the beach, even hamburgers taste like heaven. Chicken or tuna or half of each?”
“Tuna salad, please, just half. When do you think was the last time they painted these tables?”
“Before the War of Yankee Aggression,” I said, smiling. “Watch out for splinters.”
The sun was dancing through her rich, auburn hair and once again I found myself saying a small prayer of thanksgiving that she was mine. “Beth, you are going to be a beautiful woman, do you know that?”
“I look like my momma,” she said and smiled at me. “I love you, you know. A lot.”
“Baby, I adore you and you know it.”
“Yeah. I know. Hey, Momma?”
“What, darling child?”
“Did you and your momma ever go on picnics?”
“Well, yes we did, sort of. Once every year Stella Maris Church had a big family picnic at Alhambra Hall. Old MC—we loved to call Momma that—she’d make deviled eggs. Livvie would fry a bunch of chicken and bake brownies. Of course, every year Momma and Uncle Louis would fight about who made the best potato salad.”
“Ukk. I hate potato salad.”
“Yeah, me too, but that’s not the point. You see, Momma put olives in hers and Uncle Louis put onions in his. I think they both added bacon fat to the mayonnaise. Can you imagine that? It’s a miracle I’m alive from eating all that garbage! Maybe I should see a vascular man. What do you think? Oh, you should’ve seen us in those days, three-legged races, sack races, all kinds of foolishness!”
“I think you’re a little bit crazy.”
“No doubt about it. Lunatics abound in the family history. I am proud to continue the legacy, even if only on a part-time basis. I do the best I can given the restraints of my life. If I didn’t work in a library, I’d open a drive-through body piercing and tattoo parlor and serve barbecue sandwiches to go.”
“You’re feeling full of beans today, aren’t you, Momma?”
“Yep. No doubt about it. Who wouldn’t on a gorgeous day like this?” And I was. I had decided to put everything serious out of my mind for a little while and take a well-deserved break.
“You know what? I wish I’d been a little girl when you were. It’s so boring now. It seems like everything happened in the sixties.”
“I think I probably romanticize the past, Beth, a lot. Old people do that, you know.”
“You’re not old! Hey, can I ask you a personal question?”
“By all means.”
“Are you ever gonna go out on a date? I mean, are you and Daddy getting back together or what’s going on?”
Wham. She had me now. I hadn’t told her anything about Michelle Stoney and I had to decide then and there what she was old enough to hear and understand. I plunged ahead, hoping our good moods would soften the blow.
“Honey, Daddy and I have been separated for a while now.”
“Yeah, almost seven months. I can’t see him marrying Karen, you know?”
“No, I can’t either. But I’m afraid I can’t see us back together either.”
Her eyes began to fill with tears. “I know,” she said. “This is so awful.”
“Yes, it is, but sweetheart, listen to me and think about this. I know I’ve said this to you a hundred times since Tom left, but be patient because it’s the truth. Sometimes relationships run their course and lose steam. Sometimes people get middle-aged and get afraid of dying and do stupid things, not just men but women too. A marriage can’t survive unless you recommit yourself to it every single day.”
“You were committed,” she whispered.
Once again I found myself in the position of holding all the aces. I had another opportunity to blow her relationship with Tom to smithereens. I decided to shoulder some of the guilt instead.
“I was committed, Beth, but probably didn’t work at it hard enough. I mean, I saw signs and ignored them.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, like Daddy was working later and later. And, when he was home, he was glued to the television or worked in the yard and we wouldn’t speak for days on end. And he lost twenty pounds and started working out every day and got in shape. Then, he bought those three-hundred-dollar Italian eyeglasses and that was the beginning of the end.”
“Don’t you think you could’ve done something?”
Ah, she was going to blame me now. I took a long look at her and then at a group of tourists walking by, thinking what I would say.
“I don’t know, to tell you the truth. I mean, by the time I finally faced up to what was going on it was too late, I think. And you know what? I’m the lucky one. I have you and he’s got her, right?”
“Yeah, sure, and y’all are gonna fight about money till the cows come home.”
“No, sweetheart, we won’t. I hired someone to work all that out for us.”
“A lawyer? You hired a lawyer? I can’t believe you did that! You didn’t tell me this! When did you do this? Why didn’t you tell me?” She was very upset.
“I’m telling you now.”
“Why, Momma? You don’t have to sue Daddy. He swore to me he’d take care of us!”
Tears were streaming down her face. A lawyer’s child knows what divorce lawyers do. They landscape the graveyards of marriages.
“Honey, I did it because I had to. Daddy has been having some difficulty accepting the fact that he has to commit to regular financial support for us. You know that. Believe me, I waited as long as I could. It was a terribly hard decision for me to make, but I don’t earn enough to support us without some help from him. You don’t think I’m relishing the idea of a divorce, do you?”
> “No. I know you. You’d have walked through fire first.”
“Right. I hate lawyers and I hate change. But they’re a necessity, especially in today’s world. My lawyer’s name is Michelle Stoney. She’s going to work it all out. I don’t want to fight with your father.”
Beth shook her head and sniffed. I handed her a tissue. Watching the clouds swimming by, I thought about my conversations with Michelle. I had asked her how it usually went. I wanted to know if men in general took care of their families because they knew they should or was compliance with support motivated by fear of breaking the law. She put it in a rank nutshell when she said that women who get the best support have the most obnoxious lawyers. It tells me that time marches on and men who leave their families, for whatever reason they leave, begin a new life. They have more children, they buy another house, they join another club, and they fish in a different river. They make new friends, find new restaurants, and go to new places on vacation. Pretty soon, years pass and they can’t remember what it was like with their old family.
“Honey, it’s important while he still cares about me, not you—this has nothing to do with you—for me and my lawyer to make sure that we are provided for in a way that’s fair for everyone. Do you understand? This is something I have to do for you and for me.”
“If you think Daddy still cares about you why don’t you fight for him?”
“Daddy cares, but not enough for our marriage to be like it should be. Do you understand, doodle?”
“He’s changed anyway, Momma. You probably wouldn’t like him now. I mean, why he would rather be with Karen I don’t understand. What’s wrong with him?”