Our outhouse wasn’t much by outhouse design standards. It was a two-seater and had two doors, but it was a breezy thing that had somehow withstood all the storms and weather Mother Nature had thrown at us over the decades. In the old days I imagine all the old Island houses had one in the backyard, but by 1963 most of them had been torn down. Now ours would be the next to go.
I gave the warm-up speech to my little brothers.
“Okay, y’all, when I count to three, start whacking this thing in this spot right ’eah. Don’t clobber each other, don’t clobber me and remember, we gotta work fast or Momma’s gonna come out ’eah and cut our butts! If we all take a good hit on this side of it, and that one wall caves in, the roof might fall and then we’re done. We don’t want to rubbleize the thing; we want it to fall down looking natural. Got it? No screaming!”
“Okay,” they said.
On three, we started swinging. As predicted, after a few good hits, the wall came down and the whole thing collapsed on an angle. I should be an engineer like Daddy, I thought. We looked at each other, covered our mouths to repress screams of delight and ran like all forty to put the tools away. We were covered in perspiration and just full of ourselves over the cleverness and success of what we had done. Henry had redeemed himself by helping and even Maggie was laughing with excitement. When we came back in the yard from the garage, Alice Simpson stepped out of the oleanders. We froze in position.
“I saw what you children did,” she said in a mocking, singsong voice.
“So what?” Henry said.
“Shut up, Henry,” Timmy said, and turned to face our accuser. “What of it? We have our reasons,” he added bravely.
I just looked at her. She was a washed-out blond with faded blue eyes. My momma always said she looked like the cat that swallowed the canary and I never really knew what that meant until now.
“I have my reasons too,” Mrs. Simpson said with the slipperiest smile I’d ever seen. “My flower beds need weeding. If you children would be willing to pull a few weeds, Hank Hamilton will never have to hear about you destroying property. It’s against the law, you know. I could call the authorities.”
“Mrs. Simpson, no offense,” I said, with all the courage of an admiral, “you’re not calling any policeman, we ain’t pulling your weeds and you go right ahead and tell Daddy. It’s fine with us, right, y’all?”
“Right!”
Even Maggie had come down to join us by now. Although she was nervous about what Tipa would say, she wasn’t gonna let her brothers and sister be blackmailed by this horrible woman. Old Alice was stunned that her threats didn’t scare us. She stood there gasping for breath.
“Well! I never! I don’t know what’s come over children today! First they take a sledgehammer to the outhouse and then to be so rude!”
She spun around on the heel of her sandal and swung her behind back through the oleanders. Why a woman of her age would wear a top with no bra was incredible to me. She must’ve been thirty-five if she was a day! And she called herself a real estate agent! I wouldn’t rent a house from her in a hurricane.
We stood there planted like a patch of asparagus for a few minutes until we heard her screen door slam.
“This calls for a celebration,” Maggie said. “Come on, let’s walk down to Buddy’s. Timmy, if you’ll go in, I’ll buy everyone a Coke!”
“Deal!” he said, and off we all went.
I turned back and looked at the pile of boards, tar paper and rubble. The job was completed. It seemed as though the old outhouse got so tired it just sat down. It didn’t look to me like a gang of hoodlums had done this vicious thing. No. It looked like a reasonable thing that could’ve happened all on its own. I was satisfied.
We were cloistered in our rooms or at friends’ houses until suppertime, wanting Tipa to make his discovery without us within his reach to scream at and question. No one said anything about it at the table. We munched on fried chicken and gobbled up a mountain of stewed tomatoes over rice and butter beans as though everything was normal. We could’ve gotten an Academy Award for our performance: Best Liars on Sullivan’s Island. We children did the dishes, Momma went to bed, Tipa went to see about old Sophie, the Queen of Fumes, and Daddy went to the porch to read the paper. After drying a million forks and plates, my brothers, Maggie and I went out on the porch to catch the breeze. Tipa was sitting in one of the metal chairs and Daddy was lying in the glider.
“Is that a fact?” I heard Daddy say.
“What are y’all talking about?” Henry said, racing Timmy to the hammock. “I called it first!”
“Oh, move over, shrimp!” Timmy said, climbing in the other end.
“I am not a shrimp!” Henry said.
“For the love of Pete, will you boys settle down?” Daddy said, and not unpleasantly. “Sophie and y’all’s momma have gone to bed!”
Maggie and I plopped in the porch swing at the other end of the porch.
“Now, I’d like to ask you a question. Do any of you rascals know anything about the outhouse?” Daddy’s voice was filled with thinly disguised mirth. It was a signal to commence telling whoppers, bobbing and weaving with the facts like a prizefighter.
“Daddy, I’ll be fifteen in six months. I’m hardly a rascal!” It was Maggie talking, of course, covering the sin of telling a lie by annoying everyone with her offended attitude. She never missed her chance to remind all of us that we were wet behind the ears, and that she was the great lady.
“Just answer me without any speeches, okay?”
“What happened?” I asked. Poker face.
“Well, it seems that today, I went off to the post office to collect the mail,” Tipa reported like a detective, “because everybody in this family is too busy and too important to do it, and when I came back our outhouse had fallen down.” He searched our faces for any slivers of guilt.
“Oh, no! Nobody’s gonna blame me for this one! I was at Bubba’s house and I can prove it!” Timmy was good at this lying business.
“You have an alibi too, I assume, Mr. Henry?” Daddy said.
“Yup, went crabbing with Stevie Durst. Ask his momma. She drove us to Breach Inlet.”
“Girls?” Daddy said.
“Oh, please, Daddy, I wouldn’t go near that nasty old thing if you paid me!”
Maggie hadn’t lied. Nothing on her conscience.
“Susan?”
“I’ll go with Maggie on this one. I’ll bet that thing causes tuberculosis! I’d rather hold it till I died!”
“No reason to be so disgusting, Susan,” Maggie said.
“Whose side are you on?” I said to her.
“TB or not TB! That’s the congestion!” Timmy said and he and Henry started laughing and punching each other. “Consumption be done about it? Of cough! Of cough!”
At this point we were all giggling, even Daddy. But Grandpa Tipa was steamed. He stood up abruptly and headed for the door. He stopped to face us, took a deep breath and began to stutter. I was just about to feel some remorse for us pulling one over on him. His seersucker pants were all wrinkled and his shirt had a big spot on the front. Very unusual for a man who was fastidiously neat. The remorse fizzled as he dropped another one of his bigot bombs on us.
“You all think you’re funny, don’t you? Well, let me tell y’all something, if you think your daddy is gonna bring another Negress in ’eah and that she’s gonna use a bathroom in my house, y’all got another thing coming, you ’eah me? Over my dead body! This is still my house!”
The door slammed behind him. We all fell silent. Even we, who always had a smart answer, didn’t know what to say. We looked at our old man, who was folding up his paper, obviously getting ready to call it a night.
“What are we gonna do, Daddy?” I said.
“We’re gonna build a bathroom on the back of the kitchen, that’s what. I checked the layout of the pipes when I got home tonight and it won’t be such a big deal. You boys can help me and Uncle Louis. Keep you out of tro
uble for a few weeks.”
“Cool!” Henry said.
“No problem, Dad,” Timmy chimed in.
“And you girls can keep the mess clear and keep us fed. Sound like a plan?”
“Yes, sir, sure does,” I said, “but, Dad, what’s Tipa gonna say?”
“Grandpa Tipa to you, young lady!”
“Yeah, Susan’s right, Daddy,” Maggie said, “Grandpa’s gonna raise the devil over spending money on a colored woman.”
“Let me worry about that. You girls lock up, okay? I’m gonna go see about your momma. She isn’t feeling so great tonight.” Daddy looked at us, his face satisfied for once with what he saw in us. He went inside. “See y’all in the morning,” he called over his shoulder.
The door closed quietly. Maggie got up and lay down in the glider, pretending to sleep. The boys whispered and teased each other in the early evening light. Lightning bugs blinked all over the yard and the ocean rolled in. Another day was coming to a close.
I shifted my position in the swing to dream a little, rested my head on a pillow and turned away from them. I thought about visiting Harriet’s house and wondered who would be the next victim she sent us.
My father’s solution was a good one. He was right, about this at least. I mean he was a big s.o.b. and all that when it struck him to be one, but Tipa’s point of view was just plain wrong. What possible difference did it make where somebody sat on a bus, or which water fountain somebody used? Most of all, I’d be thoroughly and permanently reviling my grandfather’s guts if he pitched a fit over the soon-to-be-built bathroom being used by our soon-to-start new housekeeper. I thought that it must be hard for old people to know when they were being horrible and old-fashioned. I doubted that my father would be successful in changing my grandfather’s heart.
Everyone went to bed except Timmy and me. He was still full of the devil over the outhouse crash and wanted to talk about it. In whispers, we continued talking about all that had happened that day. I was too young to solve the big problems, but I could swing a sledgehammer with the best of them.
“I went bam! And it caved right in!” Timmy said.
“Shhh! They’ll hear you!”
“Think Daddy can build a bathroom?” he asked.
“Daddy can build anything, dog breath, he’s an engineer. Plus Uncle Louis will really be the one to do it. Quit breathing on me.”
“Bump you. Think Tipa’s gonna have a cow over it?”
“He’s gonna have a whole barnyard, but if Daddy doesn’t care, we shouldn’t either.”
Just then we saw the police car pull up in the backyard of Alice Simpson’s house. We dropped to the floor to watch. The chief of police, Albert Johnson, known as Fat Albert to the natives, got out and went up the back steps. Through the oleanders we could just make out the shine and clump of his heavy black shoes—regulation footwear for cops. Maybe she was getting us arrested. I thought, Oh no, we’re going to reform school! But, nope, her windows were wide open and all her lights were on. The music of Peter, Paul and Mary floated across the indigo darkness. With our noses near the floorboards, we saw her and Fat Albert together in the living room, laughing. He handed her a baggie of something. She gave him something to drink and turned off a few lights. A few minutes passed and then we saw them again in the living room. We smelled a trail of the most curious odor, like burning rope and sweet spices, as they settled themselves on the sofa in her living room. They were smoking something in a pipe.
“She’s not getting us arrested,” Timmy said, as quietly as possible. “Just what the hell do you think they’re doing over there?” We could see them dancing now, real close, sort of kissing.
“They’re not doing it yet, but they will be soon. Momma was right. She is a disgrace. Everybody knows old Fat Albert is married. Hell, he’s got four kids!”
“This explains what Daddy said.”
“What did he say?” This was news to me.
“He said the hinges on her door need replacing every month or so.”
“My God, Timmy, do you know what this means?”
“What? That we’ve got ringside seats for the wildest show in town?”
“No! That we live next door to a bona fide whorehouse! Holy Moly.”
Three
The Lawyer
1999
I specialized in small acts of defiance when I was young. The outhouse episode was only one of them. But years of Catholic school education and failed attempts at bucking the system had tempered my character and I was filled with dread at the thought of ending my marriage. I was extremely reluctant to file papers against Tom.
Several weeks had passed since that afternoon at Maggie’s and I still hadn’t engaged the services of an attorney. I’d spent nights thinking about what Livvie would have told me to do. I could hear her saying to get moving; the decision had been made, accept the truth, move on. But I couldn’t move. Once the lawyers got involved, I knew there would be no going back.
At first, I thought it would be less painful if I used a lawyer that Tom and I both knew, that a familiar face would make it easier. I made some phone calls and had a few meetings with a few of Tom’s colleagues that we’d known since law school. In all their scholarly wisdom they advised me that they’d seen a lot of men go through the “young chick thing” and that Tom would probably tire of it very soon and come home. I should wait, they said.
Sure, I’d let him have his little fling all over Charleston in my face and I’d just knit him some nice socks in the meanwhile.
“I think not, okay?” I said to them.
One particularly unevolved attorney was on the Broad Street lawyers softball team with Tom and flat out refused to hear my side, citing “the team” as a conflict of interest. This idiot ball league was so uncreative that they called themselves things like the Lawmen, the Medicine Men, the Home Boys and the Numbers Guys. You got it. Lawyers, doctors, real estate brokers and accountants. Cute.
“Well, Harold, why did you give me an appointment?” I leaned forward in the tufted leather chair opposite his burl walnut desk, only to notice he was bestowing on me his lackluster interpretation of the “come hither” look. Lucky me.
“I was hoping you’d just want a shoulder to lean on. I heard you were looking pretty fantastic these days and I wanted to see for myself.”
“Why, Harold Small, you’re married. I don’t think your Marla’d be too thrilled to hear you’d loaned me her shoulder.” Sarcasm dripped from my lips.
“Well, I can’t represent you. It’s a conflict.”
“Conflict of what?” I said. “What do y’all think? That y’all are Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra?”
“I’m sorry, I’m just not comfortable about taking your case against Tom. He’s a teammate.”
“Excuse me. I’ve been turned down by better lawyers than you, Harold.” I got up and went to the door. “Have a nice life. And, by the way, I’ve seen you play. You couldn’t bat a ball into the broadside of a barn.”
My list of old friends and Grant and Maggie’s list were practically the same and it was getting me nowhere. One interview was more ridiculous than the next. They did, however, fuel the fire of my courage. I needed to do my own research. On an impulse suggested from a poster at the library, I called the battered women’s shelter and asked to speak to the executive director. It couldn’t hurt. Somebody like her had to be much more in the loop of what a woman could do to resuscitate herself. I should have done this in the first place. She gave me the name of a splendid new attorney who’d moved to Charleston two years ago from somewhere in Vermont. Michelle Stoney was reputed to be the most skilled and intimidating feminist lawyer in the city, handling messy cases like kidnapping by parents, child and spousal abuse and deadbeat dads.
A Yankee feminist, I thought. Perfect. That should scare the hell out of him.
That night as I lay in bed, checking and recording the decline of my thighs with a tape measure, I thought about my prospective lawyer and burst into lau
ghter. I had called Ms. Stoney and had spoken to her for a few minutes. She sounded so capable and understanding. I couldn’t wait to meet her. We had made an appointment for four-thirty the following day. At last, there was hope.
I WAS A spastic bag of radiating raw nervous energy when I pulled into the parking lot outside her office west of the Ashley River. Miraculously, I managed to get from my car to her office without convulsions.
I loved her waiting room. It was solid establishment and reeked of success, but feminine. The overstuffed couches stood against paneled walls of gleaming mahogany. The enormous windows, swagged in salmon velvet, were flanked with bookcases filled with books that looked to be a hundred years old.
A huge arrangement of fresh flowers graced the center of a round table that offered pamphlets of information on divorce law. I guess I expected to see pictures of Gloria Steinem and Susan Faludi on the walls. There were only photos of families and dogs on a rocky shore that I assumed was Maine, or some other foreign place.
After taking my name and assuring me that Ms. Stoney would only be a minute, the smart, young receptionist offered me a cappuccino or espresso and I declined.
“I have decaf too. You sure?”
“Yes, thanks.”
She’s got a regular Starbucks franchise going here, I thought and picked up a copy of People. The buzzer of her telephone intercom rang and she picked it up.
“Yes, Ms. Stoney. I will.”
That was the moment I started coming unglued. My hands became clammy and my tongue got thick.
“Mrs. Hayes? Ms. Stoney will see you now. Please follow me.”