“What’s this? Old newspaper articles? Does this have to do with Daddy?” I could see that she didn’t have the same enthusiasm for my research that I did, but she thumbed through them politely. “What’s this one about the Klan got to do with anything?”
She referred to an old article about an African-American church burning near Georgetown, about forty miles from Sullivan’s Island. Huge crosses had been burned in the yard the night before the church completely burned to the ground. The Ku Klux Klan was suspected of the crime but they had no suspects. No surprise there.
“Well, I’m not sure, but I decided to see how much stuff I could dig up. Maggie, we were so young then. I just want to know as much as possible about how it was and what really happened.”
“What’s it going to prove?”
“Probably nothing, but certainly there was more violence going on than I remember.”
“Yeah, I’m sure that’s so.” Her interest had shifted because the next thing she said was, “You need to come over with Beth and spend the night. I feel like I haven’t seen you in an age, girl.”
“You’re right. Maybe next weekend.” I folded the copies and put them away. It wasn’t that Maggie didn’t care; she didn’t have the same desire to know as I did. “Beth starts school on Wednesday, freshman orientation. God, I can’t believe she’s going to high school!”
“Merciful mother, where does the time go? High school! What’s happening with Mr. Tom?” she said, changing the subject again.
“Well, let’s see. Last week, I saw him cruising King Street in a new convertible Mustang with Miss Karen in a ponytail and halter-top. They were wearing matching Ray-Bans. Isn’t that adorable? I’m so happy for them.”
“If Grant ever did this to me and the boys I’d kill him. Get a lawyer yet?”
“Nope, I got the lawyer. Michelle Stoney.”
“Michelle Stoney?” Maggie whispered. “Michelle Stoney? Jesus, Mary and Joseph! Even I know who she is! Oh, my God! I can’t believe you didn’t tell me!”
“I wanted to see your face.” I picked at a radish. “Close ya jaw, girl, or you gone be catching flies.”
“This is gonna be like squashing an ant with an anvil! Wait till Tom finds out!”
“Tom found out.”
“How’d he take it?”
“Not well.” I couldn’t help laughing. “He little party be over now. She gone clean he clock.”
“Men stink.”
“Listen, I’ve been saying that for years, except that we love the smell. This whole thing is incredible. He’s been driving me crazy. This is typical Tom: He says he’s coming for Beth on Friday at four, he calls at three to say he’s held up and he’ll call later. He calls back at six, I can hear he’s in a bar, and he lies, saying he’s hung up with a client, can he pick her up in the morning. I say, ‘Sure, sure,’ and take Beth to a movie or something.
“The next morning he doesn’t call, so I have to call him. There’s no answer at his place because he’s sleeping at the slut’s apartment. I leave a message on voice mail and he picks it up around noon. Then, he calls to say he’s taking Karen to do some errands and can he pick Beth up afterwards. I say, ‘Sure,’ and he arrives at five with the slut and a car full of packages from every clothing store in the mall. All stuff he’s bought her, I’m sure. But just let me ask him for the money for the mortgage or something like heart surgery, he goes into this routine how he’s not a rich man and what do I think and blah, blah, blah. But Michelle is gonna take care of all that, thank God. And, needless to say, these little psychodramas aren’t doing much for Beth’s stability or her relationship with him. ’Eah?”
“Do you need to borrow some money? I have my own stash, you know.”
“No, thanks, I’m fine.”
“What can I do to help?”
“There’s nothing to help. Everything’s actually going to be fine. At least, I feel like it is. But thanks, you’re the best sister in the world.”
The late afternoon sun was shining the next day as I walked home from work down King Street toward my home. Maggie called this “power walking” or something like that and she had no idea how on the money she was. The myriad benefits of this daily routine were priceless. First and foremost, I was looking not half-bad. I could wear everything in my size-ten closet, even though they were so out of style that they looked like costumes. They fit. I recycled what seemed usable and dumped the rest into the trash. And I felt so good that I had even regained my sense of humor, especially when I’d think about Big Tom and Michelle in the ring. Ha!
Second, I walked past shop windows, seeing my reflection, which reminded me to correct my posture. The displays tempted me with new things to save my money for. Shoot, I should tell Michelle to demand a clothing allowance for me, I thought. If I got married again, Tom wouldn’t have to pay alimony! It made perfect sense to me.
Third, I had the time to shake off work and prepare to meet Beth. Now, this was a formidable challenge, but for the first time in months, I was up to the task. Beth, Beth, Beth. Barely fourteen years old and she wore her smorgasbord of teenage issues like a badge of honor. Beth the Contrarian. Beth the Contentious.
Hormones. There seemed to be time for hormones in everyone else’s life except my own. When Beth wasn’t trying to smoke something or drink something, she was trying to pierce something. Just this morning she took another six months off my life.
“Mom! Why are you always treating me like such a baby? God, Mom, every person in my entire class has a third hole in their ear! I mean, it’s totally infantile not to have a third hole!”
“Someday, you’ll thank me your ears don’t look like Swiss cheese,” I replied with practiced calm.
“I hate living in this house!” she screamed, and slammed the front door almost off its hinges as she left for school.
When possible, I tried to ignore her hysterics because I didn’t have the strength to fight over everything. Then too, it was time for her to test her own judgment and make some mistakes. I couldn’t be in an adversarial position with her all the time if I expected her to come to me and tell me her troubles. I thanked God I had a sister like Maggie. When Beth was possessed by the devil, I’d call her and we’d have a good hen session.
“There’s no book of instructions on how to raise a teenager, and darned little to recommend the job anyway,” Maggie told me this morning. “You think my boys don’t give me a run for my money? Remember Bucky and his friends watching that X-rated movie in my den last year? The Moans of Marilyn! I still don’t know where they got it!”
“Yeah, God. I love her so much, but sometimes I’d like to just start screaming, you know what I’m talking about?”
“Susan, you probably should scream once in a while, and you probably love her too much.”
The elder sage had spoken through the prophets, and I ignored her as I had whenever possible for the last four and one-half decades.
“Well, at least you have Grant to help you with the boys.”
“Oh, some big help he’s ever been. The only time in twenty years he’s ever stepped in is when Bucky and Mickey had that party when we were out of town. If the police hadn’t been called, and if they hadn’t drunk all his Wild Turkey and wrecked the Jeep, he wouldn’t have said a blessed word. Never marry a cardiologist. They are incapable of focus on anything but blood work, patients and an occasional football game.”
“Men. Tom has time for his midlife crisis and I gave birth to mine.”
“You’re right. There’s no justice. Wanna have dinner this Friday? I’m having some people over for Beaufort Boil.”
“Sure. Talk to Beth, will you? Give her a little religion.”
“With pleasure. Tell her that her auntie on the Island wants to have a little ‘come to Jesus’ meeting with her. Momma always said God would get even with us and send us children like we were.”
“Revenge from the grave. She’s probably up there in the big cocktail lounge in the sky drinking a Diet 7-Up
and bourbon, laughing her brains out.”
“No doubt. Cheer up, okay?”
“Oh, I’m fine, really. It’s just this teenage transition stuff. I adore Beth. I’d marry Tom all over again just to have her.”
“If you tried to marry Tom Hayes all over again, I’d drag you up the side of a mountain in Tibet and leave your sorry behind there for the birds.”
But there was no trip planned for Tibet, just this nice walk home, as I prepared to meet my daughter head-on. Maggie was probably right about me loving Beth too much. It’s pretty classic stuff that the wronged woman goes overboard to provide the perfect nurturing environment for her helpless child. I was dealing with her separation from her father and her transition into young womanhood with all the patience, understanding and humor that I had.
On the bright side, and there was one, there were many things that Beth and I did that brought us closer together. Naturally, we shopped, we had lunch, we did homework and we cleaned closets together. But beyond those mundane amusements—and this was a particular pleasure for Charlestonians alone—we exhumed our ancestors. Not literally, of course, but we loved to indulge ourselves with a short walk through St. Mary’s Cemetery, where we would offer a prayer of thanks that our forefathers had the good sense to make Charleston their home, and in turn, ours. I’d tell the stories to Beth as my father told them to me and his father before him. Being part of this continuum was as rich a legacy as a treasure chest filled with jewels.
Charleston had given us the gift of knowing who we were, what we stood for and where we belonged in this complicated world. That pride and confidence was our birthright. Even Tom Hayes, with all his legal expertise, couldn’t make this community property. Charleston was ours. Tom Hayes was from Greenville, which in my estimation was just about as pitiful as being a Yankee.
The warmth of the South Carolina afternoon sun was giving me my second wind. I turned the handle on my wrought-iron gate and began the walk up my short brick path to my little girl who was waiting for me. My Beth.
Four
Beth
1999
THE booming sound of the front door closing behind me thundered down the hall to the kitchen. Beth’s young voice rebounded, punctuated by exuberant shrieks of delight and excitement. I riffled through the pile of catalogs and bills that waited on the hall table.
“Ohmagod! Ohmagod! Did you see the way he looked at me? He’s so freaking fine!” Short pause. “I don’t know! Do you think so?” Shriek. And then, in a guttural voice, “Oh! My! God! I’ll die if he does!”
I sighed with some relief that Beth was discussing a member of the opposite sex. The nonsense I’d been dealing with lately, it could have been anything. Wait! What? Opposite sex? She was hardly old enough for Midol! Calm down, I said to myself. Breathe. Visualize the beach. Breathe. It was okay then, I was fine. I announced my arrival.
“I’m home! Hello?”
“Gotta go, the parental unit is back.”
“Oh! You’re on the phone?”
Parental unit? Was that who I was? In any case, my rhetorical question prompted her to hang up. As I stepped into our kitchen there was evidence of major league terrorist activity. The contents of her backpack were strewn across the counter along with an opened carton of milk, an abandoned bag of Doritos and an open container of salsa. The breakfast dishes she promised to wash were growing moss in the sink. The dishwasher hadn’t been emptied from last night. It was typical.
“Mom! I met this guy!”
“Good, honey, what about this mess?”
“Mom! You’re not listening! I met this totally, devastatingly fabulous guy!”
This was a test. If I made too much of the disaster area, I was a shrew. If I gave the politically correct amount of interest to the possibility that she had met the love of her life, I was cool. If I didn’t stop hyperventilating over the filthy sewer that used to be my kitchen, she might never tell me anything again. That was potentially more damaging than anything else I could think of at the moment.
I dropped the mail on the kitchen counter in the only clean spot there was.
“Tell me every word,” I said, kissing her on the head, closing up the various containers. “How can you drink milk with salsa? Ugh!” I smiled obliquely. “So, tell me, who’s the lucky devil?”
She made her famous sucking noise and crammed her books into her backpack.
“Jonathan. Jonathan something.” Beth stopped and put her hand across her chest. “Oh, God, Mom, he’s so fatally gorgeous!”
“Is he a freshman? Please don’t say God.” I narrowed my brows into a unibrow and put an armload of food back in the refrigerator, bringing out the half-defrosted chicken to prepare for dinner.
“Sorry.” She was insincere at best. “No, I don’t think so. He just transferred from Porter Gaud. Me and Lucy were walking…”
“Lucy and I.” A minuscule correction, I thought, as I placed the boneless, skinless breasts in the Pyrex dish.
“…by the tennis courts and we saw him hitting serves? Jesus, the ball must’ve been going like a hundred miles an hour!”
“Please don’t say Jesus. Did he talk to you or what?”
“Sor-ry! Gosh, Momma, it’s hard to talk to you if you keep yelling at me!”
Her hands were on her hips and I motioned for her to continue as I cleaned up.
“I’m sorry, Beth, you’re right, but technically I’m not yelling. So tell me, did this Jonathan faint from your dazzling beauty when he saw you? Hand me the sponge, will you, please?”
She tossed it to me and I began scooping up the truckload of crumbs on the sticky counters as she leaned against the sink, eyes aglow and young heart palpitating in the sunrise of her newfound love.
Look at her, I thought. One hundred and ten pounds, five feet and six inches of pure, youthful, romantic fantasy. I had felt that way about Simon at exactly her age.
“I wish, but he did stop and look at me and smile this smile that, oh, my God, made my hands like totally start sweating and my throat got like all tight. I mean, if he had said anything to me I think I would’ve died. This is the real thing, isn’t it, Mom?”
“Like, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God!” Hell, I’m not such a prude!
“Mom!”
I couldn’t help laughing. Bad timing. She took my delight to mean that I was laughing at her, which I wasn’t.
“Sorry, sweetie. Look, it might be the real thing. Who knows? Let’s put the dishes away, shall we?”
I opened the door to the dishwasher and Beth began building a temper tantrum that could be heard across town.
“We? You mean, me! Fine! I don’t care. We should be planning my trousseau, but I have to do the dishes first.”
“Look, Beth, I’m delighted you met a guy who makes you feel all gooey inside. When I was your age, I never even saw a member of the opposite sex except from across a ballfield.”
“That’s because you were imprisoned in an all-girls school run by a bunch of Nazi nuns.”
“That’s right. But even if I had gone to a school like yours, when I was fourteen I was so ugly, I would’ve had to grovel and pay big bucks for somebody to defile my virtue. I was too proud to beg.” I paused to do a shag step. “In addition, I lived in a perpetual state of negative cash flow, sort of like now, so I never even thought about boys.”
“You always say you were ugly. You weren’t. I’ve seen the pictures.”
“Right. The one of me in my plaid jumper and knee socks?”
“Yeah, the uniform was dorky and you looked like a refrigerator in it…”
“A refrigerator?”
“Well, sorry, but you did, all sort of square…but your face was cute! It was!”
“Was is the pity.” I opened a can of Diet Pepsi and lit a cigarette. “But thanks, I think. So, tell me again, what does this paragon of maleness look like?”
“Paragon? What kind of nerd-word is that? Don’t blow smoke in my direction. It’s gross. Secondhand smoke,
Mom!”
“Remind me to remind you of that when I find the ashtray in your bathroom.”
“I thought we were having a conversation about Jonathan, the whatever of maleness.”
“Ah! Yes. Paragon, defined in the dictionary as a model of perfection. You know, somebody who’s got it all.”
“Gosh, you’re like the four-one-one of English!”
“Thank you.”
I took a slight bow. We smiled at each other and continued the work of restoring order. She rambled on as she unloaded the dishwasher and my mind floated away. I was a tad fanatical about the kitchen. I knew that. It flashed through my head that the whole room needed a fresh coat of paint and a change of wallpaper. The kitchen looked awful when it was dirty and pretty darn bad when it was clean. Or maybe it was that the wallpaper was one that had been here since Tom and I got married. We’d hung it together. Now I’d like to hang him. Maybe I was harboring this secret desire to wipe every room clean of every trace of him so that I could get on with my life. And what did it say about my life when I had two master’s degrees and couldn’t afford to change the wallpaper without taking a second job? Pretty pathetic, that was what.
“Mom! Are you listening to me?”
“Sorry, honey, my brain just took a side trip to the wallpaper store. Wouldn’t it be nice to do this room over in yellow and blue with lots of white? You know, cabinets with glass doors and fresh curtains?” She looked at me as though I’d just returned to consciousness from massive electric shock treatment. “You’re right. Now, you were saying about the boy wonder? He transferred from Porter Gaud, plays tennis, has a great smile and looks like a god?”
“Yeah, he’s about five-ten and has huge blue eyes, thick blond hair and more teeth than Antonio Banderas. Not skinny, just fit, you know?”
I began to choke on my Pepsi. She had just described her father without realizing it. Christ on the couch of life, Freud breathes and Oedipus did the CPR. She was going to get her little heart broken—I knew it. I struggled to maintain my composure, steadfast at the wheel, as we sailed into the treacherous, uncharted waters of romance.