I tried to concentrate on going over sales projections for my strawberry fields for-fucking-ever business and finally admitted to myself for the first time that I didn’t give two shits about strawberries. I was feeling particularly uncharitable when the thought crossed my mind that Miss Sweetie’s longevity wasn’t my responsibility either. I got up from my chair about every ten minutes and walked around my desk. Why had I committed myself to this business in the first place? I knew that on some level of my subconscious mind I was trying to replace my mother with Miss Sweetie, but I also realized that was just impossible because there would always be only one Lavinia Boswell Wimbley. Ever. As much as Millie or Trip might rail that I was becoming her, I knew that I was a weak imitation and always would be.
On the other hand, which would be the good-girl side of me, I did love Miss Sweetie. She was a dear lady. She had given my mother the benefit of her great friendship all her life and so much comfort in the end. I owed her something, but I didn’t owe her the rest of my life. Solving berry blight or mold problems wasn’t the thing on which I dreamed of hanging my life’s reputation. And when Miss Sweetie went to glory, did I want to spend the rest of my life worrying about jam and Sara Lee and breads and pies? No, I needed something larger and more important. I needed to live up to Mother’s reputation, to be truly bold and original. And how was I going to do that?
The minute I began flogging myself, there came a rush of justifications for my present state and an appraisal of its worthiness. Holding together Tall Pines was a noble endeavor. I was carrying on a tradition that had begun in my family generations ago and there was nothing that exceeded the importance of tradition in the Lowcountry. And overseeing the berry business wasn’t really a bad thing either. It anchored me to Tall Pines and gave some structure to my day. I was able to honor my mother’s memory by becoming meaningful and more relevant to her closest friend. To be perfectly honest, in some odd way, just seeing Miss Sweetie’s face lessened the loss we both felt without Miss Lavinia and kept her alive at the same time. That did give me a certain amount of genuine satisfaction. Maybe I would get the girls to help me over the summer. Belle and Linnie especially. Maybe having some purpose would help them mature in the right direction. I didn’t know, but I did know that I was sliding into a lousy mood.
I was missing my Eric then, and just as his face came to the forefront of my mind, the phone rang. It was him. The only thing, and I mean the
only
thing, that my ex-husband, Richard Levine, had ever been right about in his whole miserable insignificant life was Jung’s theory about the collective unconscious. Somehow Eric heard my heart pining for him.
“Darlin’? Are you all right?”
“Yeah, sure. Why?”
“Well, rare is the occasion when you call me during the afternoon.”
“It’s ‘rare is the occasion’ now? Mom? Are you channeling your mother again?”
“Perhaps.”
“Mom? You sound totally bugged. What’s up?”
“Well, lots of stuff. Uh, nothing. I’m not bugged. Actually, I’m fine. I’m a little concerned about the girls spending the weekend with Rusty and Trip, but other than worrying about their personal safety, you know, things like the house burning down or a knife fight with mortal wounds resulting in death, or some kind of terrorist explosion, I’m really fine.”
“See ya in two hours,” he said.
“Oh, no! Honey, that’s okay! I’m—we’re fine! It’s just like having Osama bin Laden for the weekend and worrying if loud noise might set him off, that’s all. I don’t want to mess up your weekend.”
“Yeah, okay. See you in a few. Love you!”
So that was it. Eric was coming to watch over my nervous system, which, even I had to admit, was growing a new network of tentacles complete with suction cups. Maybe it was a good thing, that he was coming home, I mean. Gosh, I surely was feeling goofed up. I decided to take a shower and blow out my hair. That always made me feel normal again. And I would find an opening in the conversation to ask him about his new woman!
I went down to the kitchen for a bottle of water and there was Millie baking something and humming one of her gospel tunes of ancient Gullah origins.
“Smells like sugar. You’re baking?” I said.
“Yes, ma’am! Making oatmeal-raisin cookies for them girls. You know, a little something to welcome them.”
“Humph. Should’ve made a devil’s food cake!”
“You’re bad, ’eah?”
“That’s why you love me!”
I could tell she was smiling without her even facing me just by the way she shook her head.
“And, I’m making chocolate-chip cookies for Eric.”
“How’d you know he was coming home?”
“Humph,” she said.
Because Millie just knew, that’s how.
It was almost four in the afternoon when I heard Trip’s big SUV roaring across the property. I wondered if he had Chloe with him and what kind of a mood she was in. Had she packed pajamas, play clothes, and toys? What if she didn’t have anything to occupy her time? Why hadn’t I thought to run to the drugstore and buy her some coloring books or something? A Barbie? I was a terrible, thoughtless aunt and I made a mental note to correct that.
“Millie? What did we do with Eric’s toys—you know, the ones he played with when we first got here?”
“It’s all up in the attic. Don’t you remember? We threw out the LEGOs and all the paper stuff like craft books. And we saved all the comics, them crazy Transformers, and his storybooks.”
“I’ll be right back.”
Because it was too warm that afternoon for a search through the attic, the first place I went was Eric’s room. A dozen or so model planes he had built from kits were suspended from the ceiling by invisible wires. His collection of remote-control cars was lined up on top of his bookcases, each car parked neatly at an angle like a miniature showroom of an exotic car dealership. My father’s field binoculars hung crookedly in their cracked leather case on the wall by the window, and Eric’s student telescope stood nearby. There was a Garfield piggy bank filled with pennies that served as a bookend to dozens of science-fiction paperback books from high school. He adored Robert Jordan and had read and reread every single word he wrote. Action figures, arms and legs askew in rigor mortis, reminded me of Eric as my little boy, so anxious to grow up and be somebody’s hero.
Well, he was more than my hero; in fact he was my raison d’être! And he always would be. I had a thought then about how powerful the role a birth father figured in a child’s mental health and how that relationship or the lack of that relationship traveled with us all through our adult life. Eric had a father who couldn’t be pleased. If Little Harry Shit Bird aced his SATs, it was because he was a natural genius. If Eric aced his SATs, which he did, Richard would’ve accused me of spending a fortune on tutors. Some loving father he was.
I had scant memories of my own father but I clung to them like a starving beggar. It seemed I was doomed to one unhealthy or compromised relationship after another because, and I would never admit this to a soul, I wanted what no one could give me. I wanted that bottomless empty place in me to be filled. That longing, that endless longing, to be quieted and soothed.
And little Chloe had a father who no longer loved her mother. At all. In fact, her father loved someone
else
with such passion there was no cunja magic on the planet that could ever undo the spell. Nice variation on the refrain. How were those little childhood nuggets going to impact this poor girl as time went on? We all understood why Trip’s marriage to Frances Mae was intolerable to him. It had been intolerable to
us
! So, to make matters worse, Chloe probably suspected that there was something enormously unacceptable about her mother besides her raging alcoholism. Like what if her daddy left because he didn’t love her or her sisters, too? Father loves someone else; mother is a reject and so are the children. It was a nasty soup to place before a little girl and then to expect her to happily swallow it.
Sometimes something else would emerge to save the self-image of many children with problematic backgrounds. Like a musical talent, a gift for science or math. Perhaps they would be fortunate to possess extraordinary good looks. Chloe could lay claim to no such thing. That poor frizzy-headed cinder-block-shaped chubby body of a little girl was as homely as a mud fence. In addition, she had a surly disposition and no particular gifts to recommend her. Worse, she was a whiner, which to my mind was the most obnoxious habit a child could develop. What would we do about her? This would require serious consultation with Millie and new combinations of her herbs.
In the meantime, there were others besides Chloe to consider. There was Belle and Linnie, and although Amelia seemed to have made great strides in college, all four girls were going to need vigilance and care. I needed to win their confidence! Yes, that would be the first step! I needed to teach them about what mattered to Wimbley women and to women all over the Lowcountry and to women of stature all over the world! Tradition! By golly! I would join forces with Rusty and Millie and together we would raise the sights of these young women, raise them to look at things they had never considered. I would open their eyes!
I had no idea of how to begin, but without that consultation with Millie, I took my father’s binoculars and threw the strap over my shoulder. Chloe might get a kick out of learning about birds. Okay. Birding was a bit nerdy, but I also knew that knowledge was power. The first step to empowering Chloe would be to teach her about the natural world around her. She could ignore me, but she would learn all the same. Osmosis would rule.
I dressed for Trip’s barbecue, deciding this was definitely not a caftan occasion but rather a time for casual, nonthreatening attire. The night might get chilly and no doubt dusk would bring out hordes of bugs. Bugs were the one drawback of living on or near the Edisto. Or anywhere in the Lowcountry for that matter because water was all around us. My mother used to say, where water is found, bugs abound. She was right. I sprayed my ankles and the back of my neck and hands with Skin So Soft. The advantage of Skin So Soft is that it actually worked and it didn’t reek like other regulation insect repellents loaded with DEET, which gave me a toxic rash. I chose a plain pair of beige trousers and a lightweight rose-colored cotton sweater set. I put Mother’s pearls around my neck and then took them off, deciding they might trigger an unpleasant memory for the girls. Hadn’t Frances Mae just about had a nervous breakdown when she saw me wearing them the day Mother died? Didn’t they represent the matriarchy? Yes, they did and it didn’t seem the appropriate moment to flaunt any kind of authority from my camp.
“Mom?”
Eric was home.
“I’m up here, baby! We’re supposed to be at Trip’s by six. I’ll be right down!”
“No worries! Amelia just dropped me off. She’s already there!”
“Good!”
So, Amelia had come, too! Well, of course she had. How else would he have come? I was completely befuddled then, but Amelia’s coming was an important step in the right direction. The next generation was stepping in to run interference against the infidels. My chest expanded with a long-overdue sigh. I did a quick mental review of the morals and ethics I wanted to impart to the girls and took a last glance at myself in the mirror.
“Aunt Caroline?” I said aloud. “Brace yourself.”
Somehow I knew because, like Millie, I knew things. Before we arrived at Trip and Rusty’s with Millie’s cookies, stacked and resting in a cheerful covered tin on the seat between us, before we saw the long red-and-blue flames leaping from the barbecue and Trip screaming “Stand back!” and spraying the fire extinguisher like a madman sending foam everywhere, before we saw Belle and Linnie perched on opposite sides of the picnic table, carefully and deliberately positioned out of Trip’s line of vision, arms draped around the necks of two unknown swarthy young men with visible tattoos, all of them engaged in some serious and frantic tickling of the tonsils, and even before we saw Chloe spinning alone, looking up at the sky to make herself dizzy, and yes, before she threw up all over her dress, I knew. The enemy was all around us and we were headed for a revolutionary war.
H
OLY SHIT, MOM! WHAT THE
. . . ?”
“Please! Do not use vulgar language in front of your mother! Isn’t this enough to deal with?” I swept my arm across the scene before us. Did anyone have a sense of decorum anymore? Apparently not. This insufferable and flagrant nonsense had to stop immediately and never happen again! In front of me, anyway. Or innocent little children especially. I didn’t know where Rusty was at that moment, but she certainly would not have approved of what Belle and Linnie were doing in public or in private. In fact, if they behaved this way in public, what
did
they do in private? The audacity! Five generations of Wimbleys had to be spinning in their graves at warp speed. Pearls or no pearls, I was going to step in and assume the matriarchal position.
“Take Chloe in the house right now to get her cleaned up, will you? Please?” Eric seemed rooted to the place where he stood, his jaw hanging open like a nineteen-year-old bloodhound. “Eric? Are you with me?”