Chapter Two
THERE IS AN IMAGE ENGRAVED IN MY MEMORY VIVID enough to evoke a smell (the red vinyl of a well-used armchair) and a sound (the flick of a cigarette holder against a metal ashtray): it’s the image of a twelve-year-old me, gangly and no longer a towhead, much to the chagrin of my mother, who seemed to greet the natural darkening of my blonde hair as a dereliction of filial duty. Also to her dismay, I was utterly contemptuous of most girlish playthings but fanatically preoccupied with horses. The school librarian looked squint-eyed at me for years, suspecting I’d stolen a copy of Olympic Horseman (I had), and I saved up the nickels allocated for orange Creamsicles to buy miniature plastic horses and Black Stallion books at the Poplar Plaza Shopping Center. At times I morphed into equine behavior myself, cantering around the house with a jump rope in my mouth and a bath mat belted on as a saddle. I would make a steeplechase out of the hedges separating the yards on our street and neigh in response to questions. But owning a horse was an extravagance far beyond the middle-class means of my parents, for whom canned asparagus constituted a luxury. The necessary deep pockets were worn by my grandfather.
We called him Da-Dee (accent on the second syllable), and my grandmother was always Moma, resistant to the notion of being “Grandma” and relegating her ownr to the more formal “Mother.” Outside of the family, they were Cy and Tommy, both nicknamed for their fathers. Norville Shapleigh “Cy” Shobe, the son of Missouri poultry farmers, was an electronics wizard, just a boy when he made front-page news in Kansas City by assembling the first homemade radio in the state-- strangers from half a dozen counties drove right up to the porch in four-wheeled surreys to hear the raspy wonder of it. When the family moved to Arkansas, he fell in love with fifteen-year-old Gladys “Tommy” Toler, whose father owned a dry goods store, and married her within the year. (At the time, the term child bride was more custom than pejorative.) To the newlyweds, Memphis was The City, where the delta was said to begin in the gilded lobby of the Peabody Hotel, and it was the only place for a young man with prospects.
My grandfather was named for the hardware store where his father earned the money for the chicken farm, and it was with a letter of introduction from Mr. Shapleigh that he got a job interview in Memphis at Orgil Brothers Hardware, agreeing to be a salesman only if they would agree to sell radios. From there he started his own business distributing wholesale appliances, and it provided well: in 1950, the year I was born, Shobe, Inc., grossed $5 million, a fortune half a century ago. (The company logo, a rooster boasting “We’re crowin’ because we’re growin’,” was immortalized in various shades of red stained glass on the porch door of my grandparents’ house.) It was this honeypot that could yield the horse and riding lessons I wanted. “You go on into the sitting room,” Moma told me in a conspiratorial whisper, “and love up on Da-Dee’s neck. He’ll give you anything you want.”
My grandfather was a lank and looming man, the angular contours of his body seeking out the familiar dents and curves of the red easy chair that served as his sanctum sanctorum in the second-floor study. His cherished pastimes were shooting and flying, and he sat beneath a gun rack and a pilots’ flight map of the United States. There were hints of tobacco and chicoried coffee in his clothes as I climbed onto his lap, ludicrously big for such an assignment, and nuzzled against his neck with my request. At first he responded with a low growl, more theatrical than alarming, to my “pretty please with sugar on top,” and his right had tapped ashes off the Camel in its crystalline holder. Then the tiny pings stopped, and his muscular hands tightened around my skinny arms. He wouldn’t answer, and he wouldn’t let go. He held me down on this lap, his body stiffening. In some inchoate way, I knew to run from such an encounter, although I didn’t recognize that it represented an exchange of money for feminine charms and wouldn’t know until much later what such a transaction was called. All thoughts of a horse vaporized as I managed to wriggle out of his grasp. I ran from the room, his muffled laughter mocking my retreat.
Love up on Da-Dee’s neck. More than any other fillip of memory, those words summon up the paramount message and mandate of my childhood: I was pretty, and my looks were a kind of currency. Nobody would care what I did, what I said, what I read, but beauty had magical powers, a kind of legerdemain especially effective with men. It was like being taught double-entry bookkeeping. At that moment I was to hug my grandfather not because it was good to express affection but because I had blonde and blue-eyed assets that might get me a horse.
Rather ironic, considering that I was not even supposed to be a girl. My mother had miscarried twice in the four years since my sister was born (christened Gladys, for Moma, but called Terry). Her unexpected pregnancy was ascribed with a sacred duty to provide my father with a son, but it was deemed a washout the moment the doctor peered at me and said, “It’s a girl.” (When her did produce a male heir four years later, she triumphed in a rare practical joke on my father, bringing my brother, Bill, home from the hospital with a pink ribbon Scotch-taped to his bald head-- small “up yours” to the intimation that boys were better than girls.)
Perhaps I sensed in vitro that my gender would come as a major disappointment to my family. I was in no hurry to enter the world and literally backed in, rear first (never the smallest part of my anatomy). “You were easy to deal with,” Mother told me, “until you were born.” She had gone to the Methodist Hospital when her water broke, naturally expecting contractions to start. When nothing much happened, she summoned my father from the clouds of cigar smoke in the waiting room and, in true iron butterfly spirit, went to have her hair washed and set at Gould’s Beauty Parlor. She had just ordered mint tea and selected a pleasing tangerine frost for her nails when my position in the womb, called a frank breech, became apparent and progressed to a harrowing labor, for which Mother has yet to forgive me. I was born with a birth defect, a nerve tumor on the back of my neck that had to be removed. (Ironic that someone who would earn a living projecting an image of female flawlessness would get the first of a lifetime of scars before even leaving the hospital.) I remained “Girl Shepherd” for several days while my family debated what to call this female child, finally justifying my presence by combining the names of my grandfather (Cy) and father (Bill).
Well before I could have articulated it, I was instinctively aware of my assignment in the family: to be perfect. If I couldn’t be a boy, at least I could be the uber-female: pert, polite, charming, compliant, and above all, lovely to look at. (It was implicit that my sister was excused from this commission, being bigger, brawnier, and brunette.) Certainly I was not to say or do anything controversial or unladylike. “Siboney,” my grandmother would intone, making a pet name out of the unofficial national anthem of Cuba where my grandparents often vacationed. “Don’t go too far to the left or too far to the right. Stay in the middle of the road. Stay puuuuure vanilla.” I wore white cotton gloves with smocked floral dresses. Against my vehement protests, my hair was tortured into a frightening mass of deep-fried curls, which was considered more feminine than my straight hair with the recalcitrant wave in back. My godmother, Marie Hay, asked me to select my silver pattern (“Chantilly”) when I was ten, and I learned to dance by standing on my father’s black and white wing tips, swaying to “Just the Way You Look Tonight” while my mother primped for an evening out. There was a limited choice of destinies for a girl like me, with the distinct suggestion that life’s ultimate achievement was to be anointed the Maid of Cotton, fetching symbol of Memphis’s most important industry, or (spoken in reverential hushed tones) Miss America, a possibility that might have justified being born female.
All of which conflicted with my natural inclinations. I jumped from the highest branch of trees, hiked the old Shiloh military trail, and used a key worn on a lanyard around the neck to tighten metal skates, which left me with perennially bleeding elbows and knees. I declined to brush my hair until compelled to do so, and wore the same pair of tattered overalls until they disappeared from my closet (my mother quietly consigned them to incineration). To avoid getting dressed, I streaked naked next door and sat on the neighbors’ porch swing until my mother by assembling what I thought to be a decorous outfit: a pink dress with puffed sleeves and my favorite red sneakers. “Look Shep,” she called to my father, as if I had placed a lampshade on my head, “she picked this out herself.” My grandfather would grasp my hands with unedited distaste for my gnawed cuticlaying, “You can always tell a lady by her nails.” I rejected all dolls, especially the busty new Barbies coveted by my prepubescent crowd, all of us still wearing Fruit Of The Loom T-shirts over flat chests, and when my brother got electric trains (derisively telling me, “That’s for boys”). I sulked for weeks and contemplated various means of derailment. (He also got a cross-country turnpike set, a Rin Tin Tin badge, and a Fort Apache. I got talcum powder and a bath mitt).
The tomboy temperament that vexed my mother helped forge a bond with my father, even after my brother came along. He endorsed my interest in sports, didn’t think it was weird to toss a football with me on the front lawn, gave me a baseball glove, and shared the sacrament of rubbing the leather with oil and shaping it by letting it spend the night cupping a ball. He even exulted when I beat the crap out of a bully named Chris Crump (as much crap as a whiffle bat could extract), for holding my little brother’s hand in an anthill. In those years when I was a surrogate son, my father let me accompany him on Saturdays to the warehouse he ran for Da-Dee, when it was quiet enough to roll a secretary’s swivel chair up and down the aisles. He taught me to swim by buckling on an orange Mae West and dropping me off the end of the pier at my grandparents’ summer home.
For the great French writer Marcel Proust, the door of memory was opened by the taste of a Madeleine cookie. For me, it’s Dr Pepper: one sip, and I am returned to that summer house on a slender tributary of the Tennessee River in Alabama called Shoals Creek. It was built in the 1930s as a hunting lodge on a remote promontory near a forest of cedar, pine, and burr oak, but the original owner felt too isolated and sold the five-acre property to my grandfather for the 1950 bargain price of $35,000. As a toddler who couldn’t pronounce the letter l, I called it the “yake house,” and the moniker stuck with the whole family. On the four-hour drive from Memphis, we stopped at filling stations with green jars of sour pickles for sale by the cash register. (I could make a pickle last all day. The goal was to suck out the insides but maintain the outer shell so you could blow it up like a balloon, make it breathe. I’d find the jettisoned ends of pickles under my sister’s bed). Da-Dee arrived in a style more befitting the lord of the manor, landing his own twin-engine Beechcraft Bonanza on an airstrip across the creek and announcing his presence by buzzing the house from the air so that Moma would be waiting on the tarmac when he touched down.
In the early summer mornings, before the humidity would slap down like a biblical plague, Da-Dee and I got up before the others to sit in penumbral shadow on the long screened porch and watch the choppy surface of the water become streaked with first light, which looked like thousands of glittering broken mirrors, so bright that we had to squint. We’d wad up some day-old bread, stick the gummy ball on a hook and line at the end of a cane fishing pole, then plop into the reclining chairs on the pier and wait for the bite of catfish and bream and crappie (a delicacy not yet appreciated by chic chefs). I was the only one in the family with enough guts to eat calves brains and eggs with Da-Dee. There was a huge black cauldron in a tarp-covered clearing near the house for deep-frying fish and hush puppies, the crisp puffs of cornmeal meant to placate dogs driven mad by cooking smells but appropriated by smart humans. Moma kept baby goats, which ate up the shrubbery, and peacocks whose shrill reveille I learned to imitate with ear-splitting accuracy, and hens that roosted in the trees at night, but these were more pets than livestock. Dinner was often an anonymous quail or duck shot by Da-Dee (there were usually a few vanquished carcasses hanging in the kitchen), and we never sat down to a summer meal that didn’t include tomatoes, often fried green matoes, even at breakfast. I took the red paisley bandannas that served as napkins and made streamers for my bike or slings for a fake broken arm.
It was there at Shoals Creek that my grandfather seemed most content, only vaguely morose. He would lapse into a private reverie, occasionally broken with an enigmatic aphorism (“Everything’s gonna be all right”) said as much to himself as to anyone else. I never considered his taciturn manner an indication of a dissatisfied soul-- he had every conceivable creature comfort and was coddled by the sort of wife who put the cuff links in his shirt every day. Years later my father told me that he imagined the wistful cast in Da-Dee’s eye was a woman named Daisy, ensconced in a downtown Memphis apartment with my grandfather’s name on the lease. When Moma found prima facie evidence of the affair, she sent his suitcase to the Peabody Hotel, then thought better of it. I heard that she threatened to study taxidermy and mount the stuffed and formaldehyded bodies of Da-Dee and his mistress alongside the deer head over the massive stone fireplace at the yake house. Daisy disappeared, as did a certain kick-ass vigor in my grandfather’s spirit. He mentioned her name in the narcotic musings of his deathbed, when I guess he felt he had nothing left to lose or hide.
Moma was not about to abdicate from the perquisites of an indulgent marriage, exemplified by more than a hundred pairs of shoes filling three closets--a tottering chronicle of fashion victimization that ranged from Duchess-of-Windsor bejeweled to Chiquita-banana tacky. Years later I learned about one source of her shoe fetish: back home for a visit, I was exploring the Memphis Yacht Club, the hyperbolic term for what was then a series of wooden boathouses strung together with steel cable and wired with yellow lights to keep the bugs away. I was shocked to see a sailboat tacking back and forth across the Mississippi River. Sailing on the Mississippi? What kind of nutcase would try that? There’s a constant traffic of enormous barges, several cit blocks long, that move huge amounts of water out of their way, and it takes these behemoths thirty minutes to stop, often sucking smaller vessels into their wake like helpless anchovies. The current runs strong only one way over treacherous whirlpools, and the depths of the muddy water can be deceptive. So it was axiomatic that nobody would try to navigate the river without a least one engine. The mad sailor turned out to be a devilishly handsome silver fox named Smith. When I reported our meeting to Moma, she got a dreamy look in her eyes and said, “Oh, that’s Smitty from the Julius Lewis Department Store. I must have bought fifty pairs of shoes from that man.”
Most of her wardrobe came, apparently without erotic subtext, from The Helen Shop: sherbet-colored chiffon sheaths for charity balls, pearl-buttoned cashmere cardigans, scarves to match every outfit, a prized chinchilla stole--all supported by a long-line girdle that redistributed a thickish waist from bust line to just above the knees. There was one set of noises when she was putting it on and another when she was desperately pulling it off, the indicia of zippers and garters pressed into flesh like thumbprints in yeast dough. In one of her closets were two tan leather suitcases with yellow knit bows on the handles, kept packed at all times in case Da-Dee had an urge to fly off for a “rendezvous,” one of the parties held by the Sportsmen Pilots Association all over the country, with buffet tables set up right in the hangar. I got taken along once as a teenager, and the gin and tonics started before the propellers stopped spinning.
Like me, Moma had been something of a jock, a predilection uncommon to her generation, until a heart attack in her forties curtailed all sports but golf. I liked to play with her trophies from country club tournaments, topped with tiny gold-plated figurines of sturdy women swinging drivers over their heads. Ldies’ Day at the clubhouse was the only time I saw my grandmother in pants, the kind of clothes I appreciated. She hated the female liturgy of the beauty parlor, preferring her own Aqua Net, and claimed she owed her baby pink complexion to a nightly smear of Lady Esther cold cream--once a week she left it on all day long, walking around the house with a greasy mask. Years before, according to the fashion of the times, she had plucked out her eyebrows and had to draw them back on. I would watch her apply the Max Factor brownish-black eyebrow pencil as we sang a duet of “Jesus Loves Me, This I Know,” with me doing the harmony part. Moma loved music more than anything, and growing up she taught herself to play the church organ. I never visited her house that she didn’t sit down either at her organ or her piano to accompany us kids singing the gospel hymns of her childhood. A few years after my grandmother’s death, my mother came across a note scrawled on a yellow legal pad concerning Moma’s only regret: that she hadn’t “followed up and done something with her music.” She was always urging me to do what she called those “sweet songs” like “Michael Row the Boat Ashore,” and at her insistence I sang it as my talent portion of the Miss Teenage Memphis Pageant.
Moma grew up in the small rural town of Carlyle, Arkansas. The churchyard was kept at full occupancy by the influenza epidemic of 1918, which claimed her mother when Moma was only seven. Startled by an unusual thump coming from the parlor where the body was laid out, she refused to accept that the window had slammed shut, believing that the coffin had been tumbled off a table by ghosts, and engendering a fear of spectral spirits that was not completely dissipated in adulthood. The care of three younger siblings fell to this child, with devastating consequences: baby sister Edith crawled too near a fireplace, and her leg was so severely burned that it was amputated above the knee. As a child I was fascinated by her prosthesis and was always trying to get a peek of it or her without it. But Great-Aunt Edith never let her false leg keep her down. She became a graceful dancer, married Saul Byarly, who printed the Arkansas Gazette, and had four impressively achieving children: an airline pilot, a doctor, a lawyer, and a chief nurse in cardiovascular surgery.
As adolescent lady of the house, Moma enjoyed certain benefits along with the burdens, partnering her widowed father at every rural shindig. When her position was subsumed by a stepmother, she began a rebellion of such ornery defiance that she once ate an entire shipment of green bananas meant for the store and was sent to live in a Little Rock boardinghouse owned by a family friend. With only one line left on her dance card at the DeMoolay Young Men’s Organization, she caught the eye of a hulking blond boy with elephantine ears and a killer smile, two years older and ready for a wife. Perhaps she saw marriage to a clever and ambitious fly-boy as her ticket to ride. Moma and Da-Dee crisscrossed every square mile of the delta in his plane, which was red canvas covered with two open-air cockpits. Having baby Patricia Cornelia Shobe didn’t much crimp their style, my mother was often left on the farm with grandparents who doted on her, waiting for her parents to swoop down in a cleared field and pick her up. I have a photograph of Patty, Tommy, and Cy when my mother was a toddler; they look like the American dream, an enviable portrait worthy of a cereal box or a postage stamp.
The custodial grandmother, Clara Shobe, was known as Ma-Maw. Every Sunday morning she chose the plumpest chicken in the yard, casually wringing its neck for dinner, and the storm cellar was lined with Mason jars of her bread-and-butter pickles and Prohibition “home brew.” My grandfather, the electronics wizard, made sure they had the first telephone in those parts and installed a gas range, but Ma-Maw preferred the old wooove and wouldn’t let him remove it. With their only son gone, the older couple adopted a series of orphans who helped satisfy my mother’s endless yearning for siblings. On summer nights, she caught lightning bugs in a canning jar and put their illuminated tails on the boys’ model planes.
Patty Shobe was not destined for animal husbandry but for husbandry of another kind. In 1943, she was engaged to an air force bombardier who was the scion of a prominent Memphis banking family. Like all the young ladies in the area, she dug a pretty dress out of the cedar closet and went to help entertain the servicemen at the Millington Naval Air Station, where her father was serving as head flight instructor. A handsome young cadet saw her swaying to Glenn Miller and asked her to dance. He was William Jennings Shepherd from Buckingham Courthouse, Virginia. (The town took the name of its most prestigious edifice, which was designed by Thomas Jefferson, but was so small that it reported only two surnames to the census: Spencer and Shepherd.)
“Do you know Cy Shobe?” Patty asked her dance partner. “He’s my father.”
“Oh, c’mon,” Shep answered. “I’ve had five girls tell me that tonight.” Apparently my grandfather’s name was invoked to ensure proper behavior from any man dancing with his “daughter.”
Bill Shepherd’s mother and grandmother had died on the same day, both from cervical cancer, surely evoking disturbing feelings about female fragility and creating a powerful urge for someone to ply the womanly arts in his life, to do the caretaking. He proposed to Patty on their third date, saying he urgently needed an answer before being assigned overseas. When she accepted, the two of them made an appointment to see her former fiancée’s father at the bank, carrying a Dear John letter to be forwarded. Her guilt at writing “I’m sorry I’ve fallen in love with someone else” was compounded when she was told the bombardier had just been shot down over Germany and was a prisoner of war. My father never did get shipped out; the POW returned a war hero and married a childhood friend of Mother’s. More than fifty years later, this woman sometimes encounters my mother in Memphis and sighs, “You know, Patty, he’s still in love with you.”
It was simply taken for granted that my father would go to work at Shobe, Inc. (his only experience had been on a high school football field and in the cockpit of a pilot trainer), but that opportunity dissolved into a classic scenario of the son-in-law who feels gotten for cheap. Dinnertime at my house was often punctuated by his tirades about Shobe stinginess, despite his ascension from warehouse stock boy to executive vice president. “Nobody’s told the son of a bitch that the slaves were freed a hundred years ago,” he railed. “How’s it fair that he lives so high on the hog while we eat chitlins?”
My parents must have been salivating when they went to Little Rock to help settle the estate of Da-Dee’s Aunt Diloma, one of the first women in Arkansas to work for the phone company. Jilted by her fiancée, she lived with Dickensian eccentricity: she continued in her job for half a century, a stylish woman in cinch waisted suits and a Gibson--girl pompadour (her fifty year employee pin is still hanging from my mother’s charm bracelet), but she talked to cows and secreted money in mattresses and walls. Da-Dee got most of the cash, plus a fortune in AT&T stock, hidden in burlap tobacco sacks, and my parents hoped some of the windfall might trickle down to them. The Shobes denied themselves little but acted as if gifts to their only child and grandchildren were debts to be grudgingly paid. Maybe they couldn’t forget that in Memphis, unless your money came from King Cotton, you weren’t rich, just nouveau. Maybe the Depression mentality endemic to their geration had ripened into a canon about the perversity of the universe, which holds that good luck is transient and bad times last forever. Maybe it was just a pissing contest between my father and grandfather. But the Shobes had little talent for sharing.
Most of my childhood was spent in a one-story brick house on Highland Park Place (you could stand at the front door and see straight through to the backyard) with a fake fireplace mantel, plastic violets in a vase, and a mechanical bird that sang in a cage (a gift from my grandmother). One of the few genuine furnishings was a leather top table that became a disaster of watermarks from cocktail glasses. My mother pasted S&H green stamps into books and redeemed them at the catalog store on Union Street for a prized lamp with a silk shade. I took a cold bath on nights when my sister’s rank as firstborn gave her priority and there wasn’t enough hot water to fill the tub a second time. Neither was there money for the piano lessons I wanted, much less the instrument itself. So I borrowed my grandmother’s old ukulele and songbook I found in her attic and taught myself everything from “In the Evening by the Moonlight” to “Ja Da.” Whenever my parents had guests, they insisted I entertain. When I finished my songs everyone always seemed slightly underwhelmed. This definitely eroded my confidence, but nothing, it seemed, would ever stop me from singing: It was something I just had to do, like walking or breathing.
My grandparents, by sharp contrast, had a piano and organ in each of their three homes (Memphis, Shoals Creek, and Fort Lauderdale, including one painted Moma’s favorite cherry red. (My mother detested the color, and after my grandmother’s death, I was given the red organ on the condition that I have it refinished. When I was ten, we got a tabletop keyboard with a fake wood veneer and a songbook showing how to push preset “chord buttons. The spine of the book was permanently opened to the two melodies that got played ten times a day: “On Top of Old Smokey” for Terry, “Liebenstraum” for me. (When I first saw the title of the song, I thought it was an ode to Liederkranz, the stinky cheese my mother loved but my father banned from the house.)
Less than a mile but light years away was my grandparents’ elegant three-story Tudor house on East Drive, with an S for Shobe on the awnings, harlequin print drapes at the windows, jewel-toned Oriental carpets, and crystal chandeliers. The silverware was gold- plated, and the furniture was made of rich woods, rather too grandly ornate and ostentatious for my tastes (then or now) but substantial in a way that represented money. Visiting was entry to Valhalla, seductive but tenuous. They financed what they considered good for business or social standing, like membership for my family at the Chickasaw Country Club, even though the monthly dues took food off our table. As a child, I gorged on several grilled cheese sandwiches a day at the poolside cafe and an astonishing tomato ice cream in the dining room, and I stood under the shower in the ladies’ locker room for an hour at a time, never running out of hot water as I did at home.
The family business being appliances, my grandparents bragged that they had a television in every room, even the bathroom (competing in entertainment value with a book called Jokes for the John that lived on top of the wicker hamper). My parents did achieve some permanent prestige on Highland Park Place with the first TV on our block (perpetually tuned to wrestling or Dragnet) and the first air conditioner (installed in my parents’ bedroom, where all of us gathered when the August heat sucked the breath out of our own rooms). We participated in the careless abundance of my grandparents’ lives, like the wondrous fruit ambrosia with marshmallows, coconut, and pecans, or the three kinds of turkey dressing and cavalcade of pies at Thanksgiving.
Perhapss only the disparity with my grandparents’ groaning table, but I never felt that there was enough to eat at home, with only rare trips to those exotic pleasure palaces: the Joy Young Chop Suey restaurant and Pappy’s Lobster Shack. What we never ran out of was pickles, pork rinds, and canned Vienna sausages, and we ate a lot of “falling off the stool” eggs (soft-boiled and mashed with butter), so named because my brother fell backward off the stool the first time Mother made them. About once a month my grandmother would take me to the “curb market,” where local farmers brought their produce to town. She’d buy a big bag of wild greens called “polk salad,” which she described as a spring tonic (the digestive equivalent of spring cleaning), and we got thinly sliced ham sandwiches slathered with mayonnaise from a large man with the improbable name of Mr. Ham.
My mother had a taste for sophisticated foods like artichokes that weren’t popular in the South, but these were so expensive that she examined our plates for microscopic edible morsels possibly overlooked. (‘You haven’t cleaned that leaf,” she’d say. “Do you know how much it cost?”) I scrounged food with the thrift and cunning of the Artful Dodger, stealing from my brother’s dish when he looked the other way and licking the pots and pans before washing them.
Half a mile away, in the home of my best friend Jane Howard, there was a ubiquitous earthenware crock of homemade pimento cheese, and okra stewed with tomatoes, and endless rashers of bacon for breakfast--only part of the salvation she provided in my life. Jane and I bonded in the fifth grade when, as teacher’s pet, she was given the honored responsibility of collecting the girls’ purses after lunch, to be stowed in a closet during recess--a pile of child-size pastel plastics and black patent leather. She needed an assistant and chose me. Very soon we discovered our mutual passion for reading everything from the Nancy Drew mysteries to Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights.
Jane and I defied the carefully delineated description for southern female adolescence. “Those girls have too much fun,” a neighbor observed to my mother. (Jane continued this pattern with my children, whom she taught to burp on cue, her theory being that there are some things in life you just need to know.) I was awed by her ability to shoplift licorice by stuffing a huge wad of it in her mouth, and when she failed to grasp the concept of grapefruit segmenting in home ec., she glued her botched slices back together, to the outrage of Mrs. Kernodel. We played soldiers in the musty third-floor attic of my grandparents’ house with German military memorabilia--some of the men who trained under Da-Dee have brought the souvenirs back at the end of the war. We joined the Brownies, thinking that we were going to whittle and tie knots and light campfires, but the troop leader thought it more valuable to learn proper place settings, and her idea of an interesting craft project was waterproofing paper bags from the Piggly-Wiggly grocery with shellac so we could sit on the ground without sullying our uniforms.
I got admonished and ousted by parents and teachers for a lot of Jane-inspired misconduct (the only time I got sent to the principal’s office was after Jane double-dog-dared me to slide down the school banister), but she often got away clean and had an enviable ability to defy grown-up rules and without seeming insolent. My mother once tried to enlist her in clearing the detritus of an evening at home--the empty bottles of Wild ‘Turkey left like deflowered vases on the windowsill, the stale stubs of cigarettes heaped so high in ceramic ashtrays that they’d spill on the way to the trash can. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Shepherd,” Jane said, “but I didn’t make this mess and I’m not cleaning it up.”
At eleven o’clock every day, ed vases r had a Coca-Cola, which I sometimes prepared to her specifications: the ice-cold soda had to be poured like beer down the side of a tall glass to preserve every bit of carbonation. There were slightly different regulations for cocktails: I was taught to select the highball glass (squat but not too squat), measure out a jigger of Scotch and fill the glass with ice, leaving just a little room for water. I never saw Mother drink a beer, but once when I knocked someone else’s beer off a tray, my mother said, “That’s the best thing you can spill because the smell doesn’t stay in the carpet.” (I still say that but have no idea if it’s true.)
In my family, the happy hour began before noon on weekends with Bloody Marys, by sundown on the average weekday. Drinking was a subject of unabashed levity, without menacing undercurrents. There was a gag clock at the lake house bearing the epigram NO DRINKS BEFORE 5, the punch line being fives at every point on the dial, and cocktail napkins imprinted with whimsical instructions on “How to Recover from a Hangover.” Da-Dee had a full bar in the room back behind his office, a dimly lit tabernacle to the manly creeds of liquor and cocksmanship, with a plaque praising “men who come together and find contentment before capacity.” I liked to sneak up onto the tall bar stools and touch the beer mugs that had naked ladies as handles.
Da-Dee’s drinking followed a predictable and not very alarming pattern, winding down to sullen solitude. Moma just tried to keep up with him. One night at the lake house when I awakened to hear virulent cursing, my sister informed me it was a bogeyman from the bottom of the lake (she had recently been impressed by readings about the Loch Ness monster). But the disturbance was just Moma, roaring drunk and attempting to move a sofa upstairs by herself. She gave up drinking for twenty years, then started taking “just a sip” of wine, ending up with a twelve-ounce tumbler and turning the basement into a wine cellar, the ceiling covered with clusters of plastic grapes and stocked solely with her favorite Blue Nun.
It was said, in a jocular tone, that my father could find his way driving home by feeling for the curb with his foot. One Thanksgiving he passed out in the front vestibule, the door wedged open by his inert body until a chilly draft alerted the household. My brother grabbed his arms, my sister and I his ankles, dragging him far enough inside to close the door, then we turned out the lights and ignored the phone, pretending that no one was home. During their parties I huddled in bed under an inadequate bunting of protection provided by my nubby white chenille spread. With cotton balls stuffed in my ears, I sang to drown out the raucous laughter from downstairs.
One morning I awoke to find a huge oval crater in the wall outside my parents’ bedroom. My mother had locked my father out, and in his attempt to force the door open, he ricocheted backward, pushing his body through the opposite wall. The hole was plastered and painted over the next day, but we all knew it was there, like pentimento on an artists’ reused canvas. My legacy from this incident is a recurring nightmare: I run from door to never-ending door of the house where I grew up, frantically making sure they’re all locked, but there’s always one I don’t get to before someone or something gets in, and I wake up screaming.
Men of my father’s generation never heard the expression “What part of ‘no’ didn’t you understand?” As an adult, I have come to know that there is a place between consenting partners where “no” can be erotic, and that sexual fantasies don’t have to be politically correct. The sounds of sex are confusing to a child, who can’t distinguish between pleasure and pain. Once when I tried to come between my parents, my father flung me out of his way and then roared “The hell with both of you” as he lurched from the room. And I still can’t explain or forget the time I walked into my parents’ bedroom and found my mother weeping while my father and grandfather stood near the end of her bed, laughing.
Without warning, the loving man who coached my softball team and taught me to dance and painted my rusty bicycle bright red like new would disappear, and I knew instinctively to stay away from the drunken impostor who took his place. Logically, I thought, if the poison that made him act crazy wasn’t in the house, my real father would prevail, so one night I took all the bottles from the bar and stashed them creatively-beneath sofa cushions and inside the zippered stuffed animal that was the “pajama buddy” on my bed. He found the bottle I’d stowed under the sink and mumbled something about being lucky that he hadn’t drunk the drain cleaner in the “new” liquor cabinet.
The morning after one of these episodes, my father would come down to the kitchen with amnesia, smooth-shaven over a gray pallor. He’d skulk up behind my mother, encircling her waist with his arm, and give her neck a quick kiss. She’d elbow him away, her voice taking on a noticeably defeated tone as she got breakfast ready, making the choice between Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes and Rice Krispies sound like a matter of critical attention. My father poured his own coffee and settled behind the newspaper, pretending not to notice the punitive silent treatment.
As if by consensus, my siblings and I ignored the friction between my parents and never discussed the family drinking patterns, except that we referred to Moma and Da-Dee’s Florida condominium as Fort Liquordale. Sometimes my grandparents, for the moment lucid and sober themselves, herded us into their white Cadillac, its leather seats the color of coffee ice cream, and gave safe harbor. Moma would put us in a guest bedroom and bring us thin-sliced raw potatoes and radishes in ice water while we watched What’s My Line. Our tacit contract matched the adults’ denial: if we didn’t name the problem, maybe it wasn’t true, or would just go away, and it wasn’t really polite to mention it anyway. Southern etiquette requires no validation of unpleasantness, the kind of social myopia related in a quirky story called “My Mother’s Dead Squirrel” (everyone ignores the stiffened creature on the sofa out of a sense of good manners).
Our family turmoil seemed to go unobserved in the other houses on Highland Park Place. The chief of police, who lived across the street, just called his customary “Morning, Shep” to my father as they both left for work. I was a little blonde ornament high in many trees on our block; sometimes climbing a neighbor’s elm was the safest harbor from my parents’ warfare.
I did not ascribe any special significance to the delivery of new beds for my parents, just like the ones Lucy and Ricky Ricardo had. It was unthinkable that a marriage (theirs or anybody’s except Elizabeth Taylor’s) could be vulnerable. Parents weren’t supposed to be happy or unhappy, satisfied or not, and the word dysfunctional was not part of the common parlance. Their old double bed was moved into the room that my sister and I shared, and it was thrilling, at the age of four, to leave my baby bed, to finger the fat puffs of faded blue quilting on the big new headboard. I was already under the covers when Terry turned in for the night, and I reached out to cuddle against her, but she kicked me away and pummeled me with her fists, yelling, “Leave me alone.” Hugging a few inches of mattress edge, I whimpered all night.
When my father saw my bruised shins and red-rimmed eyes, he made Terry bend over, hands to ankles, and walloped her with his belt. She incurred a similar punishment every time she chased me around the house and attacked me, which was often because I regularly provoked her (awfy dumb, since she was older, bigger, stronger, and faster). I hid over a floor furnace in the hallway outside the den every time she was punished, talking to my plastic horses while my sister yelped, determined to avoid such punishment myself. I, Miss Perfect, rarely got whipped: my most egregious sins were repeatedly scribbling in crayon on the living room wall and taunting my brother to bite me, then telling on him when he did. The spankings came to an end when I stopped crying.
My sister had every right to be jealous over my designation as “the pretty one” in the family, but I was hardly her only target--she once took a hammer to the TV because the picture kept rolling across the screen. I wonder if her aggression wasn’t the inevitable result when kids are asked to be the container for family turbulence. My brother and I were close playmates until he reached puberty and made an early emotional defection from the family. All our attempts at building bridges seemed to fail. For a while we went for counseling together, and at one session the therapist suggested, “Draw an imaginary line around yourself showing how close you want people to get.” When I made a circle about fifteen inches away from my body, my brother looked stricken. “I don’t know why you’d shut me out like that,” he said.
I’ve never stopped mourning how my sister and brother were lost to me at an early age, in ways that have been difficult to recoup even with adult understanding--a wound that wouldn’t be cauterized. I knew I was loved by our parents, perhaps loved better than Terry or Bill because I tried so hard to be perfect. But our sibling relationships were defined and limited by our mutual needs to survive and to contain the secrets of our fragmented lives. When there’s so much anarchy, so much hidden in a family, the natural ability to bond and establish meaningful connections is broken because it’s every man for himself.
And yet each Sunday we answered the carillon bells of a city that was reputed to have more churches than gas stations. We washed our tearstained faces and put on clothes that smelled of Niagara starch, to sit in sanctified silence at Holy Communion Episcopal Church. I sang in the choir, a perfect perch for looking at my family in a front pew, miserable but spit-shined behind a Donna Reed facade. Whatever tempest had been weathered at home, I would feel renewed and forgiven after church, caught up in the exotic, quasi-erotic imagery of eating the body and drinking the blood of Jesus Christ. The Holy Communion itself, that most blessed of sacraments, seemed to speak directly to me: “Almighty God from whom no secrets are hid, cleanse the thoughts of our hearts.” I made Faustian bargains in silent prayers: I’ll be good, just please make Terry stop hitting me, please make Mother and Dad stop fighting, please make everybody stop drinking. 1’11 be good, I’ll be so, so good.
Of course, I was almost a teenager, and good was out of the question.