“MY MOTHER EASED FURTHER AWAY FROM MY father so thus he had less and less time to talk about my illness or anything else to her. Her intent, in fact, was to leave him without leaving him. Soon we were living more outside our home than in.
In the afternoons after my school let out, she and I would strike out walking and return home barely in time to lay out the meals that Polly Deal had already served my father for lunch and left on the stove disguised as supper. Polly Deal was a wonderful gingercake-colored woman who worked as our part-time cook and laundress and doubled as a midwife and baby doctor.
The most clever trick was for Polly to serve a bland boiled chicken at lunch and then leave the leftovers for my mother to lay forth six hours later muddled in with some canned stuff. For years I watched my mother fairly teeter on the edge of having my father ask her where she’d been all afternoon that she couldn’t fix a fresh meal at supper, but he never noticed for his senses were dulled in this regard.
My mother and I seemed to go in one person’s house and out of another’s, stepping into most houses without knocking, merely calling, Woo Hoo! She knew everything everybody had and where they kept it. She could’ve put her hands on rolling pins and colanders in the dark. She knew to the date when women would need their knives sharpened.
Her goal was to organize a gang of women for a habitual social hour, though this plan met with difficulty when woman after woman said, We’ll have to meet elsewhere, for I’m ashamed of my house. As homes were in the grip of Mr. Hoover and his Depression, these women meant what they said.
My mother solved the problem by selecting Porter’s store for the meetings, the back of which served as kitchen and sitting room for Porter and his wife, Celia. So thus five or so women more or less chartered the meetings, and though things got off to a rousing start, after three gatherings they exhausted things to discuss and spent most of the hour offending Mr. Hoover, which wore thin on Celia, the one Republican present and the owner of the table and chairs and the coffee pot.
My mother thought and thought, and finally thought of everyone’s playing cards, which was looked upon by some as immoral, if not for the gambling then for the pleasure women received from something other than home and hearth. All were shocked when my mother insisted on betting, though they became jolly after she convinced them that families couldn’t starve over the likes of pennies. So they reached into their apron pockets and pulled out their little dabs of egg and pin money, twirled and tied in the corners of cotton handkerchiefs, and listened to my mother explain odds. Her father and uncle, as was to be expected, were big on cards and my mother had soaked up everything they said. I fast became an excellent player. My mother bragged to some that I could hold my own aboard a riverboat.
My father hated gambling or anything at all involving the luck of the draw. My mother’s method with him was to swear to stop and then pretend for weeks that she had merely watched the games without playing, and then he would bring home a rumor that she’d played, dealt, and even taught those interested pinochle. Then she’d say she was weak at heart and agree to stay at home the next Saturday afternoon, but the next week he’d slacken his watch and off she’d go to play cards until she was caught again. This process rotated around perhaps six or seven times, and impressed me at thirteen years old as a very trying way to organize one’s relationship.
Sometimes when my mother and I walked about the community in the late afternoon we would stop in the road in front of houses, and she’d tell me if the women inside were happy or sad, if they were loved or not loved by men. She would tell me secrets she suspected and sometimes she would slip me suspicions that women had revealed as the truth. This was very, very educating. She would look at a house and say, for instance, Martha’s passing as loved, which must be tiring. My mother, of course, had given up trying to pass. Everyone knew or knew of my father and how he lived to squeeze pennies out of people, and everyone knew that he loved work and gain more than his family.
Other women’s news wasn’t always bad, however. One time my mother told me that a particular friend, Amanda Bethune, was loved more than a usual amount by her husband and that this husband would lie down and die for Amanda if called to.
Can you believe it, Betty? They’ve been married for ten years and no trace of love has rubbed off, not a trace. I wouldn’t know what to do with a man like that. I wouldn’t know what to do with a man who did more than show up for meals. I wonder where she found him.
I thought my mother’s idea of Amanda’s love was built on the memories of all the times her husband Richard had come in the store and given her a piece of money for extras and looked the other way concerning her cards, all the times I’d heard her remark of this thing and that she’d been given. Up until our community met Mr. Boll Weevil, Amanda left her children with her mother once a year and headed down to Warm Springs with her sister for hot water soakings, her annual birthday gift from Richard. Also, at Easter he habitually sent Amanda’s hats to Charleston for trimmings that surpassed her dreams, and each spring she wore these hats and posed with her children for the man who came around Kodaking. All-in-all, nothing seemed too good for Amanda, and in spite of all she received she was kind.
My mother said, though, that these gifts weren’t true signs of Richard’s feelings. Money doled out in public this way could possibly hide the worst kinds of secrets galore.
I said, Then what is the sign? How can you look at your friends and tell if they’re loved right?
Listen and hear what the men call their wives when they come to the store to fetch them. Listen. Old squaw. This sounds bad but it’s truly sweet. Dear and Honey. I wouldn’t trust these. They have an unnatural ring. No name. Just, Come on! This is what your father says, so that should tell you something. And this is what Roy Duplin says calling for Sade, and you know how nasty this sounds. Watch Sade’s shoulders hop the next time he yells for her. At least your father’s call has no kind of tone attached to it, which is almost worse. Rarely, rarely though will you hear a woman called from the store by her name, which is best. So listen for each time Richard Bethune comes to the door and calls, Amanda! so nicely. And watch how she gladly goes to him. A woman’s name will always suffice, but if you’ll keep your ears open in a room with men and women, you’ll hear it’s the call used least often.