I’m sure you’ve heard people say, “It’ll be just like old times.” Which is ridiculous—nothing can be like it was. They know that. Still, they say, “Come on over. It’ll be just like old times.” Maybe in the part of their brain that knows it won’t be, they can’t accept it, and their words come out of their mouth the way they live in their heart: a sweet memory, aching like a piece of candy that was always their favorite—and still is—only now it doesn’t taste near as good as they remember. Memories are as strange as they are powerful. They can rest in the gentlest part of your heart, docile and dormant for years, meek and mild as a baby lamb. And they can pounce without warning, as ferocious as a lion denied food and freedom. Annie’s a memory like that. My folks don’t talk about it, and Rebecca and Clarissa won’t admit to it, but that hardly means our wounds have been properly tended to. They’re right below the surface, raw as fresh-skinned knees.
Annie died. Conversation regarding it ended soon after. We girls were very young. We had questions. It would have been much better and far healthier if we’d talked about it, placed Annie’s three years with us in a memory box where our wounds and our sorrow would be safe, and when our hearts ached too much we could have opened that box and shared what was in it with each other. I would have shared my favorite: Annie clomping about in Pa’s ancient four-buckle galoshes. She’d climb into those rubber boots—Pa wore a size thirteen, so they about covered her waist—buckle them up, and march around and around until she got so dizzy her eyes nearly spun off her face. Regaining her balance, she’d scramble to her feet for as many repeat performances as our stomachs or her begging would allow her. It never took much to keep her happy.
Once she got into the pantry and tore the labels off all the cans. Winter wasn’t over. Even so, we’d already eaten all the vegetables Mama canned from the proceeds of her garden. We were down to eating the store-bought kind, the mason jars resting on the top shelf—sparkling clean and empty—waiting on next year’s crop.
Annie scattered the labels she tore off the cans in every direction. The faded linoleum in the pantry was awash with color, pictures of peaches, tomatoes, green beans, beets, and fruit cocktail dressing the floor.
“What a mess,” Mama said and proceeded to make a game of it.
We took turns selecting three cans, and when it was our turn, we’d give them a good shake to guess what was inside. Usually we were wrong. No matter—whatever it was, that’s what we ate for supper. Pa wasn’t amused.
“Brussels sprouts, corn, and peaches,” he said. “Didn’t we just have this last night?”
“That was the night before, hon’,” Mama answered. “Last night was okra, black-eyed peas, and cranberries.” That was two of the better nights. One evening all three cans were the same. Beets, I think. “Well, lookie here,” Mama exclaimed, her trademark grin displaying dough-boy dimples. “What’s the odds of this happening?” Pretty good, I guess; it happened again a few days later.
“Well,” she drawled, “they had a good special on beets. I reckon there’s plenty more.”
It’d of been nice to have used those stories like a salve, slathered the hurt with it. Surely, it would have been a heap better thing to do—as Mama was fond of saying—than to let our silences deny she was ever ours. Annie was woven into the very blanket of our life; pretty hard to find which threads were hers and yank them out.
“How come Mama and Daddy won’t talk about Annie?” I asked my aunt Olivia that first Christmas after she was gone.
“It’s too soon, Adie,” she said. “Give it time.” So I gave it plenty of time. Months stretched into years. Aunt Olivia took sick and died—some kind of heart ailment they never knew she had—and still, we didn’t talk about Annie or what happened.
“It’s all your fault,” Rebecca would have pointed out. “How do you live with yourself, anyway?” As if I do. Rebecca kept running tallies on what was and what wasn’t. She had all the answers and kept her words lined up like bullets to fire at you, if you were within range. There wasn’t but three words I recall that never came out of her mouth, “I” and “don’t” and “know.” Rebecca didn’t say those words for the obvious reasons. Whenever Clarissa and I came across something we thought might stump her, Rebecca’d say, “That’s for me to know and you to find out!” And she’d flounce her red hair off her shoulders and march out of the room with her head tilted up like she was the Queen of Sheba and we were her servants. Used to irk me good. Mostly because her hair was so pretty and I liked the way it bounced when she twirled around. Mine was thin and stringy like Pa’s and never did that. But it was hard for me to tell for sure. When I whirled about in the mirror, I could never get a good look at the back. I had a terrible fixation about it during my developing years when I was trying to figure out whether I was true ugly or just sorrowful plain. This book I read said to uncover your best feature and concentrate on that. I figured if my hair was my best one, I wouldn’t have to stare in the mirror any longer to decide upon another, which was pretty much depressing me since none seemed apparent. Which brings back another thing about Rebecca that irked me—there wasn’t one spot on her face that wasn’t her best part. And she knew it, but how could she not? She had eyes. Still, she didn’t have to act so stuck on herself because of it.
Rebecca was the smartest girl in her class, too—got all As. She could have gone to a college. The counselor at school said she’d help her apply for a scholarship and started the paperwork. Before the ink was dry, Rebecca discovered she liked boys better than she liked books. She made other plans, which caused her a lot of grief. But you can’t tell a girl who knows everything what to do. Turns out, she knew a lot more at a young age than we gave her credit for. Years later when she told me what she’d been hiding, it made my stomach forget where it lived.
“You should have told Mama and Daddy.”
“He said if I did, the state would take us kids away.”
“And you believed him.” She nodded, and let more tears fall than I figured heaven had rain. I hugged her like I was the big sister and rocked her like she was a much younger one with her first broken heart.
“By the time I was old enough to figure out it was him they’d have taken, he was dead. Why tell and cause more grief?” Rebecca said and left to go back to work. But, all that sharing came later. Before that, mostly me and Rebecca wanted to stick knives in each other.
Anyway, Rebecca quit school her junior year and ran off with Riley Hooper. They started up a family quick as you can sneeze.
“Riley’s a freight train loaded with promise,” Rebecca boasted.
“Might could be,” Uncle Burleigh said, “but he ain’t never on the right track.” Riley took off two years later with a caboose who’d been tagging along the whole time named Roxanne. Rebecca had one little boy and was fixing to have another when Riley left. She came back home for a while, and Mama took care of Riley Jr. while Rebecca worked and took some night classes to get her high school diploma. Daddy said, “You took the road to misery, girl.”
“Oh, Charlie, hush! She took the scenic route, is all,” Mama said, her green eyes—Pa said she stole ’em from a cat—flashing even greener as they pounced on him with a message he best be quiet. She liked spoiling Riley Jr. and tried to as best she could. We didn’t mind. He was a sweet little guy, and we felt bad for him with his pa running off. A couple months later Rebecca moved out and nearly broke Mama’s heart when she took little Riley with her. Rebecca had a new man in her life—Delbert Coffee—before the baby she was carrying from Riley Sr. was even due to be born.
Delbert was a locksmith and had his own business. Rebecca said she was really coming up in the world and ran around with her nose in the air. Mama said, “Well, la-dee-da! Sitting in the hen house don’t make you a chicken.”
Things didn’t go well for Rebecca with Delbert like she counted on. She lost the baby a few weeks after they got married. Said she fell down the back porch steps carrying out the laundry to hang on the line. But the doctor caring for her told Mama she took a mean hit in the belly, one so bad he could see the bruise mark on the sac holding the baby. Mama suspected Delbert punched her in the stomach because he didn’t want another kid around that wasn’t his. He treated Riley Jr. real bad, called him a “dumb shit” and slapped him in the head when Rebecca wasn’t around. Pa never found out and I was afraid to tell him. He’d have made sure Delbert didn’t use his hands again for anything except pushing around his own wheelchair. Two months after losing the baby, Rebecca was pregnant again.
“Maybe it’s for the best,” Mama said. “Better chance he’ll treat this one right, being as it’s his.” Rebecca had another baby boy and named him Clayton, after Delbert’s pa who set him up with the locksmith business. Then a year later they had another and named him Girard, after no one in particular. Delbert strutted around like he’d invented baby-making. Mostly he was real jealous and never let Rebecca out of his sight. She was still as pretty as ever, and if you looked at her shape you would never guess that she’d had one baby, let alone three.
If you ask me, Delbert was one sick puppy. He had all these rules. When Rebecca took the car to visit Mama or to get groceries—whatever—he kept track of the mileage to see if it all added up. And he made her write down where she was every minute of the day. So that marriage didn’t last either. When Pa asked, “What’s the story this time?” Rebecca said, “I ran out of paper.” Mama said, “It’s complicated, hon’, and I ain’t got time to explain. I got cranberry-pepper jelly to get started if we’re gonna have any extra money for Christmas. Don’t none of you be bothering me, now.”
Mama busied herself with her jams and jellies a lot, until life turned sour. Then she started making pickles and relish; anything that called for vinegar. We sure missed her jams, but her fruit pickles were a nice touch. They went especially well with pork. She’d save a jar or two and slap one down on the table every now and then.
So, Rebecca gave Delbert a divorce that Christmas, and he gave her twenty-five dollars a week and two nice brothers for Riley Jr.
“Those three little guys are worth all the trouble I been through to get ’em, so don’t talk to me no more about them poor choices you think I made and how I ruined the best years of my life,” she told Pa when he razzed her. Later, Rebecca got a bit wild. Pa said, “Fool girl. Runs after every man don’t have a ring on and can’t keep his pants on.”
I guess Rebecca thought a man would make up for the hole in her that needed filling. Clarissa filled hers with food, and I filled mine with guilt. Years later, me and Clarissa talked about that—the empty spots in us that grew hungrier with time.
Rebecca said it was poppycock. “The empty holes is in your heads!” she said, which made me mad, since she butted right in on our conversation
“Who are you to talk?” I said. “You got yourself three boys by two different daddies, and you’re not married anymore to either one of them. And according to Pa you’re on the prowl for another.” It was a mean thing to say. I told her later I was sorry, but careless words can do more damage than a hurricane, and no amount of apologizing is going to fix the damage. All you can do is level the land and start rebuilding.
Clarissa, on the other hand, could have filled in for St. Francis of Assisi, if ever he wanted a day off. She never said anything bad to anyone about anything. Maybe she should have. She let others do the talking. And while they talked she ate—and ate. Eventually she had so many pounds to lose to even get close to being a normal size that it’s possible she kept eating because of that.
“At least I don’t have any more holes that need filling, Adie,” she told me. “Every single one’s plumb full up with cakes, pies, and cookies!” She laughed when she said it, but any fool could see her face was lying.
“And if I get me a new spot feels empty, I’ll just start in on the chips and dip,” she added and bowled over like she’d told a really good joke. She had herself a giggle fit until tears poured down her face.
“Good golly,” she said, “I’m laughing so hard I’m crying. You see that?” I saw a bit more than I cared to.
I probably should have helped Rebecca and Clarissa sort through their problems and find some answers. I loved them plenty, even Rebecca with her sassy ole mouth. And I’d taken my education, limited as it was, more serious than they had, so I might have had a bit more wisdom. Still, I was a mess. Mostly, I was afraid of turning into one of those people who get all fired up over fixing someone else’s problems when they have the same ones, and a worse case of them at that. Mama said those kind are “more pesky than the Jehovah’s Witnesses” that came calling at the door.
“At least them Jehovah’s got good hearts. They’re only trying to save your soul. Them others don’t all have their rocks in a row. All they got is a bunch of opinions that make matters worse,” she said. “Stay out of people’s business.”
It sounded like good advice. Not to say I didn’t look for some answers. This one particular book I read on neurosis said to find the root of the sorrow from childhood and unravel the mystery from there—then took up two-hundred and seventy-three pages to say it, and not much else. It was a national bestseller. I wasted three dollars and ninety-five cents on that one, and so did plenty other folks. Somebody should have written a book about the people who bought it, read it, and made it a bestseller, and then printed their comments. Now that would have made an interesting book. It might have included better information on how to get to the root of one’s sorrow, too, seeing as when you ask most folks their opinion on something, they’re usually more than happy to oblige you. And a lot of them can’t shut up and will give you their thoughts on something else while they’re it. Especially women—Pa calls it double “indemlady.”
“They discovered it in France,” he said, explaining that it meant “in them ladies” and was a condition women were afflicted with after they got married.
“All them that has it don’t have no shut-off valve in their brain, so they drip, drip, drip,” Pa explained. “Drives a man to drink.”
“Charlie, you telling that garbage to them girls again?” Mama yelled. She was ironing our school dresses but always kept an ear out. “I swear you are flat out gonna have them so messed up.” She finished with Clarissa’s and started in on one of mine, the purple plaid hand-me-down I hated. “Why just last week, I read this here article and it said—”
“What I tell you?” Pa interrupted. “Drip, drip, drip,” and he winked.
I spent plenty of dollars on some other books before I realized the people writing them meant well but they weren’t being too helpful. They talked about uncovering the root source, but they didn’t give much instruction as to what to do once you did. I already knew our problem was not just losing Annie but the way we lost her, too. Where to go from there was a total mystery, so I gave up on helping Rebecca and Clarissa.
It came to me during catechism classes when I was studying to be confirmed in the Lutheran church. We went over the part about not pointing out the log in another person’s eye if you have two in your own. Mama had switched us out of the Holiness Church when they informed her that makeup and movies were both serious sins.
“I can do without the movies,” Mama said, “but why in heaven do I have to go without cosmetics?”
“They want you to scare hell out of everybody,” Pa said. “Makes their jobs easier.”
The Holiness ladies told Mama to concentrate on her spiritual body and to think of her earthly body as the temple of the Lord.
“Is that so?” Mama said.
“That’s right, Sister Thacker,” this Holiness woman said, who had her hair piled two feet on top of her head on account it had never been cut since the day she grew it, and Pa said she was older than rocks, so it was probably down to China and if she ever took it down the earth would tilt, so stay away from her and her kind or we would fall off the edge of the planet. How could we stay clear? Everywhere we looked, the place was plumb full up with women who had those same hair towers. Clarissa and I were terrified the whole time we were at that crazy church. Every time we walked through the door, we clung to each other like lint on a sweater.
“If we fall off the planet, Adie,” Clarissa said, “we gonna do it together, okay?”
One of the women in the group showed Mama the exact page the scripture verse was on, about our bodies being a temple. Mama read it over and admitted it was all there, just as she said.
“I told you,” this other Holiness woman said, who was three times the size of Mama. I wondered why she didn’t stay clear of the sin that said not to eat too much.
“Well, this temple of mine looks a whole lot better with some paint slapped on it,” Mama said. “And if you don’t mind my saying so, yours would too.”
“Well, I never—” the fat one said. Another butted in, “The Devil is working his evil deeds! Form a prayer circle, sisters! Hurry!”
The women surrounded Mama and one laid hands on her head and pressed down so hard her knuckles turned white. They started praying in tongues, supposedly so the Devil couldn’t understand what they were saying. The first time I ever heard these folks do that, some of them were dancing with their arms raised up high. A few dropped to the floor and moaned while they twisted their bodies all around in a circle. Me and Clarissa started crying, and Rebecca told Mama somebody better call an ambulance.
“They’re having some kind of fit, or maybe they been poisoned,” she said.
Mama said to hush up. “This here’s how they worship.”
I told Pa when we got home that Mama had lost her mind. She’d joined us up with a church that accepted crazy folks who babbled and had fits, and the minister let them flop all over the room.
“Do we have to keep going, Pa?” Clarissa said.
“I think it’s fun,” Rebecca said.
“Hhmmff,” Pa snorted, and went back to his paper.
A few weeks later Mama told the Holiness ladies, “All this praying in tongues is driving me batty. I grant you the Devil don’t know what you’re saying, but I don’t know what you’re saying neither.” She grabbed Clarissa’s hand—who grabbed hold of mine—and motioned with her head for Rebecca to follow.
“Nothing against you personal, mind you,” Mama said. “Me and my girls are going on over to that Lutheran church down on South Street where they pray in English.” True to her word, Mama took us over to Good Shepherd. It was the last time I saw the Holiness ladies. They were standing outside the front door of the white frame church. The paint was peeling and the latches were rusty. They looked so forlorn all lined up in a row with their hair towers and their long dresses that had the white crocheted collars, their lips pursed tight together like they’d each bitten off a piece of the same sour pickle. I thought about those scary Holiness ladies each time Mama got the bowls out to cut our hair. She was never any good at it. Pa agreed and said persons with hormones weren’t safe to be around when they had sharp objects in their hands.
“That’s why we menfolk that got any brains stay out of the kitchen when they’re cooking,” he said.
“What’s hormones, Pa?” I asked.
“These particles floating around in women that stir up all kinds of trouble.”
I asked Mama if that was true. She said Pa was exaggerating, as usual. It was all part of a woman’s monthly pain.
“What’s that?” I wanted to know. “And why’s it called a monthly pain?”
“’Cause mental illness was already taken,” Pa said and laughed.
Mama put her hands on her hips and gave him a look that said he best get out of her kitchen if he wanted to keep living. I was sure they were crazy and so fearful I’d catch whatever it was that drove them there that I hid in the bedroom.
Pa went down and had his hair cut at Fishburn’s Barber Shop. Mama coaxed me back into the kitchen and cut mine.
“How many inches has it grown?”
“A good bit,” she said. I sat still as possible—hoping my bangs would turn out even, for once—and studied on how long the Holiness ladies’ hair might have grown by then.
“All done,” Mama exclaimed. I ran back to my room and looked in the mirror to see which one of the Stooges stared back. Then I kneeled down next to the bed and prayed that the Holiness ladies would repent and cut all their hair so the earth wouldn’t tilt. When six haircuts went by and we didn’t fall off the edge, I figured they had—or maybe they’d died.
I thanked God and told him it didn’t matter which.