The Improper Life of Bezillia Grove (21 page)

Nathaniel pulled the car out of the garage for me. He wanted to know why I was heading out to the lake so late in the day. It was already after lunch, and the days were short this time of year. He thought it best that I wait till tomorrow. He thought it best that I let him go instead. He said he didn’t feel comfortable with me driving on the interstate alone. He said if my mother were here, she would never allow it. I stood there with my coat over my arm and my hand resting on the kitchen door, reminding him that my mother was not here. He reluctantly pulled the keys from his front pants pocket and placed them in my hand.

“Be careful, Miss Bezellia. Call me as soon as you get there. I won’t be leaving this house until I hear from you.” Nathaniel followed me to the car and stood there while I started the engine and let it warm itself in the cold fall air, seemingly afraid to walk away and let me go on my own. I wasn’t sure if he was scared of me driving on the interstate all by myself or of me heading straight into my grandmother’s temper. Either way, I was ready to go.

“Nathaniel,” I said, as I slipped the car into gear, suddenly feeling fearless behind the wheel of my mother’s Cadillac, “I’ll be okay. Don’t forget, my name’s Bezellia for a reason.” I smiled and revved the engine louder.

Nathaniel shut the car door and took two steps back. “Now don’t go pushing that gas pedal too hard. There’s three hundred and forty-five horses under this hood, remember, and they’d love to take you for a wild ride,” he cautioned, allowing a slight smile to cross his face.

I eased the car around the driveway and headed for the road, my heart beating faster with every passing mile. Not much more than an hour later, I pulled off the interstate onto Route 171. I rolled the car window down like I always did when I came to this stop, and even though it was fall and what leaves were left on the trees were golden and orange, I found the air here feeling oddly thick and stale. Everything else looked pretty much the same as it always had. The gas station on the far corner of the intersection still looked abandoned. And the old man dressed in his blue coveralls was still sitting in an old wooden chair and leaning against the building’s dirty white wall. His triangle-shaped display of Quaker State motor oil still looked perfect; not a single can was missing.

The sun was lingering fairly high in the afternoon sky by the time I pulled into my grandparents’ drive. Pop’s old pickup was parked next to his John Deere, neither one looking like it had been moved in days. I pulled Mother’s Cadillac alongside her father’s truck. Surely my grandmother was standing watch in the kitchen window and would come running from the house any minute now with her hair falling loose behind her head. Surely supper was already waiting on the table.

But my grandparents’ house looked dark, even lonely. The curtains were tucked shut, not a tiny sliver of light making its way through the windowpanes. Nobody was hurrying across the drive to greet me. I stepped closer to the house and heard muffled voices on the back porch. Nana and Pop, both of them bundled in heavy old sweaters, were there, sitting in their folding chairs. Their eyes were fixed on the water, which was still and glassy. The sun’s soft reflection and a perfect mirrored image of the trees bordering the water rested on top of the lake’s surface.

Neither one of my grandparents appeared surprised to see me. They didn’t even bother taking their eyes off the water. Nana sat particularly still, almost as if she was frozen, her ratty chenille robe wrapped loosely over her sweater and her hair set in tight curls, held firmly against her head with a collection of bobby pins and old barrettes.

“Hello, Bezellia,” she said, finally acknowledging my arrival.

“Hi there,” I answered her cautiously, and then stood and waited for an explanation for their odd indifference. After a while, I knew I wasn’t going to get one. “You two don’t seem too surprised to see me,” I added, begging for some sort of answer. “I figured you’d be expecting Nathaniel, not me.”

“He called to tell us you was coming,” my grandmother finally answered, still not taking her eyes off the water. “He was worried about you driving that big car of your mama’s way out here. Would have appreciated it, dear, if you had given us a little notice.”

“I didn’t think I needed to ask permission to come and see you.”

“Well, sweetie, company’s company.” My grandmother sat motionless in her folding chair, only pursing her lips and swatting at a slow-moving fly that had somehow managed to survive the first frost. Pop seemed too afraid to do any differently, so he just sat there too, staring at the lake and occasionally taking a puff on his Dutch Masters cigar. I pushed my way against their feet and stood directly in front of them both, resting my body against the black metal railing behind me.

“Is something bothering you, Nana? Are you mad at me for coming out here?”

“Why would I be mad at you, Bezellia? What have you done?”

“I haven’t done anything. But it sure seems like you think I have.”

My grandmother kept her eyes on the lake, and my grandfather just turned his head and looked away. I realized in that moment that Pop was no braver than my very own father.

“I guess sending my daughter off to some loony bin has me a bit bothered, if you must know the truth of it,” she finally snipped as she sat firmly planted in her favorite folding chair.

“First of all, it’s not a loony bin. It’s a hospital. And she is doing much better. Thank you for asking.”

“Oh, I know. Those crazy doctors called here. Wanted your grandfather and me to drive over there and talk to Elizabeth, said she was on the verge of some kind of breakthrough. Listen here, Bezellia, we went through hell with that girl when she was not much younger than you are now. Why do you think your grandfather has a bad heart? She wore him out. I can’t get into her troubles no more. It’d damn near kill him, maybe me too.”

I knelt down directly in front of my grandmother so she had no choice but to finally look at me. And even though my heart was racing, my voice sounded calm and insistent. “Why’d she leave, Nana?” I asked.

“Just let it be, Bezellia.”

But I stayed very still and waited for a better answer. The sun had drifted quickly down toward the horizon, turning a bright, brilliant orange as it fell. Apparently the world was trying to tell me to proceed with caution.

“I just can’t do that, Nana. I can’t leave it be.”

My grandmother shook her head and gripped the arms of her folding chair a little tighter, looking resigned at last to telling me something she felt certain I wouldn’t want to hear. She kept her eyes focused on the water. I guess she figured that, if she searched hard and long enough, she would eventually find some kind of comfort out there. Then in a flat, distant tone, she began to share my mother’s story, feeding it to me as if I was a little baby, one small bite at a time.

Apparently my mother was no more than sixteen when she fell “all crazy in love” with a boy who lived on the other side of Old Lebanon Dirt Road. His family didn’t have much of anything, not hardly a pot to piss in, according to my grandmother.

“But that didn’t seem to matter much to your mama back then. She just thought that boy hung the moon, even if his pockets were always empty.

“One night your mama and this boy done come into the kitchen and sat down and announced they were gonna have a baby.” Nana stopped at this point and let out another long, steady sigh. “I told her no way in hell was my only daughter gonna have an illegitimate baby and ruin this family’s good reputation.

“Turned out the boy wanted to marry her, try to make things right. But his family said what they had done had been a sin. Said their boy had been led astray and that he could never see your mama again. They as much as called her a tramp.” Even all these years later, my grandmother’s voice was loud and offended.

“That boy was man enough to get her pregnant, but he wasn’t man enough to stand up to his parents and do the right thing. He never called her again, and before long he left town to join the Army. Came back and everybody around here slapped him on the back and told him he was a great American. A couple weeks later, he up and married some poor white trash, and now it looks like their son is gonna be some famous country music singer. Isn’t that something, Bezellia? His daddy gets my daughter pregnant, and then his son fools around with you and turns it into a hit song. Looks like you and your mama are just two peas in a pod after all.”

My skin was hot to the touch, and my head was already crammed full of so many hateful thoughts I wanted to slap my grandmother’s mouth just to make her hush. But I had come a long way, so had my mother, and we both needed to hear everything she had to say. So I just sat there and bit my tongue, bit it hard till it bled.

“I threw your mama in the car the day that boy enlisted and drove her over to the next county. There was a doctor there who had a reputation for taking care of girls who done been thinking with the wrong part of their body. And he did just that. He took care of your mama’s little problem right there on his kitchen table. She put up a fight at first, but it was for her own good. I told her that was the end of that, and we weren’t to ever talk about it again.

“Elizabeth never was the same. I’ll admit that much. She was angry and mad at everything and everybody. Never once thanked me for making things right. She took off not six months later, leaving us nothing but a piece of paper taped to her bedroom door and a shoe box filled with a bunch of love letters from that good-for-nothing boy.” Nana stopped talking for a minute. She quickly wiped a tear from her eye and crossed her arms against her chest.

“Lord, all I was ever trying to do was protect that girl’s reputation. And look what you’ve gone and done. Locked her up in some mental institution. No telling what people are gonna think about us now.”

The crickets started humming, their pitch picking up strength. The sound of my grandmother’s voice had thankfully been swallowed in theirs. But I could hear my mother, loud and clear, screaming to keep her baby as they forced her onto that kitchen table and spread her legs apart. I needed the crickets to sing even louder. I needed to quiet that sound forever.

Nana finally tapped my thigh with the palm of her hand, signaling that she had shared all she intended to. Then she motioned for me to follow her into the house. On the floor, right outside my mother’s bedroom door, was a large cardboard box. Her room was stripped bare. Every photo and keepsake was gone. Even the plaque with Jesus’ picture on it, the one Mother had made in Vacation Bible School, was apparently now stuffed inside this box.

“Nana,” I said, more like I was asking a question, desperately wanting to know why she had packed away her daughter’s childhood.

“Time to let the past go, honey,” she answered. And she picked up the box and carried it out to the Cadillac.

By the time I made my way back to the interstate, the old man in front of the gas station was gone. One single, ghostly light was left burning in the office, highlighting his display of motor oil. Suddenly I needed to see my mother. I needed her to know that she hadn’t done anything wrong. She had loved a boy, that was all, a boy who probably didn’t even know how to dance. There was nothing wrong with that, nothing at all. And now she just needed to come home.

Early the next morning, Uncle Thad called the hospital. The doctors were not very eager to release my mother, not even for a short visit home. They said her treatment was not going as well as expected. They needed more time. And Mrs. Grove, in their expert opinion, seemed very anxious about returning to Grove Hill. They said maybe we should instead consider a quick trip to the hospital one afternoon during regularly scheduled visiting hours. Our desire to have Mother home might be genuine, but it was not, in their expert opinion, in their patient’s best interest.

Nothing about that sounded right to me or to Uncle Thad. Mother loved Grove Hill. And I knew, if given the opportunity, she would want to come home. Uncle Thad agreed and said that first thing in the morning he was driving over to Chattanooga and checking on Mother himself. He told me not to worry, but even his own voice sounded concerned.

The next morning Nathaniel hurriedly swept and cleaned every inch of the house. And Maizelle started fussing about the kitchen making chicken Kiev and tomato aspic, Mother’s favorites. She would bake a lemon meringue pie before the end of the day, she promised.

Just three or four hours after Uncle Thad left Grove Hill, he called to say that he would be bringing Mother home immediately. He was packing her suitcase now, and they would be on the road by early afternoon. He said nothing more than that and then hung up the phone, his voice, firm and uncomfortably vague, resonating in my ear.

When Mother did arrive at Grove Hill, it was as if I was seeing her for the very first time. Her hair was pulled back neatly in a low ponytail, and her face was scrubbed clean. She was dressed in a pair of khaki pants, a white collared blouse, and a light blue cardigan sweater. She looked beautiful, at least so I thought, until I looked into her eyes. They were different. They were hollow and vacant, and she stared at me as if she had never seen me before.

I stepped toward her, wanting to welcome her home, to pull her into my arms and tell her that I understood now. But she inched closer to Uncle Thad, reaching for his hand, reminding me more of a child who has accidentally bumped into a stranger than my very own mother. Uncle Thad slowly guided her up the large marble steps. Mother stood on the porch for a moment, seeming a bit cautious or maybe confused. But Uncle Thad squeezed her hand a little tighter and led her back inside her home.

Uncle Thad stayed until dinner, and then he stayed some more, carefully watching over my mother’s every move as if she was a little girl learning to walk. And in a way, she was. She did get better, slowly. She never drank again. She never spoke hatefully to Maizelle or Nathaniel. In fact, she didn’t even seem to notice that the color of their skin was different from her own. She never called me Sister or forced Adelaide to knit. And yet sometimes I wished she had done those things, because the woman who came back to Grove Hill was timid and afraid. She was just not my mother.