News of the Spirit (12 page)

L
OTS OF THINGS HAPPENED IMMEDIATELY AFTER THAT
. Daddy appeared and took Mama out of the local hospital and drove her to a “lovely place” in Asheville, North Carolina, for a “nice little rest.” I wouldn’t even speak to him. I stayed in my room smoking cigarettes until they left. Then I had a big fight with my grandmother, refusing to stay with her and Aunt Chloë, claiming I’d rather be dead and would kill myself with a knife if they tried to make me. Nobody knew what to do. I had become a “problem child.” I hoped to stay with Jinx, of course, but Jinx’s mother announced unexpectedly that she thought this would not be a good idea just now, that Jinx and I were “not good influences” on each other. And furthermore Aunt Judy had “
had
it” with all of us, she said, and was off to Bermuda for a much-needed vacation. So I stayed at our house and Dot stayed in the guest
room until Daddy came back and got me and took me down to visit Mama’s cousins in Repass, South Carolina, where I had never been. I wouldn’t go until Mama begged me on the phone, and then I had to. I had to do anything she wanted me to do. My mother’s cousin was named Glenda. They were sending me to her because she was a school principal whose home had “structure,” which I “needed,” and because she had a daughter about my age, who was a “model girl” and would be my friend.

I doubted this, and didn’t speak to Daddy the entire way down to South Carolina in the car, though he tried and tried to talk to me and never lost his patience, not even when he saw me spit in his Coke at a Howard Johnson’s. He looked at me sadly, solemnly, like a tragic hero. Daddy had dark circles beneath his eyes now, and his hands shook. He was supposedly living for love, but it seemed to me more like he was dying of it. I hated him. I hated him for being so weak, for loving her more than he loved us. I also hated Mama—for letting this happen, for getting sick, for going in the hospital. For abandoning me. I hated Aunt Judy for going to Bermuda, and my sisters for being so involved with their own jobs and babies and lives. I hated Jinx because she got to stay with her own happy family while I had to go live with complete strangers in South Carolina.

I already hated everybody I knew, so I was prepared to hate cousin Glenda on sight. And what a sight she was! Though I was told I had met her before, when I was little,
I couldn’t remember…and surely I would have remembered anybody as awful as this. Cousin Glenda looked like a fireplug, or maybe a built-in barbecue grill. She was five-by-five, and wore an orange suit with a flowered blouse and brown lace-up shoes when I first saw her. They were the ugliest shoes in the world. Her hair was a bright yellow lacquered helmet squished way down on her head. It was impossible for me to believe that she was related to Mama, or that they had grown up together. I had heard Mama say that she and Glenda “did not always see eye to eye” on things. Now I understood this was a huge understatement. Cousin Glenda was as hard as Mama was soft, as practical as she was flighty, as ugly as she was pretty, as mean as she was sweet.

Cousin Glenda stood in the driveway with her arms crossed and her feet planted wide apart as we drove up. Behind her, their house was completely square, as square as she was, as if it were made out of building blocks. It was a plain two-story brick house with no shutters and no shrubbery, sitting smack in the middle of a square green yard, with a walk going up to the front door and a maple tree planted on each side.

“I don’t want to stay here.” It was the first thing I had said all day.

Daddy turned off the car. “Honey, it’s only for a little while. You know that. It’s just until your mama gets out of the hospital.”

“I can’t stay here,” I said.

“Honey, please.”

It occurred to me that
Daddy
might cry.

“Let’s get your things out,” he said. “This won’t be for long, I promise.”

“
Sure
.” I sounded every bit as sarcastic as Buddy Womble.

Cousin Glenda rolled toward us like a tank. “I’ll take that,” she said to Daddy, grabbing my suitcase. “Come on now, Jennifer,” she said to me, and I surprised myself by getting out of the car. She grabbed my elbow. Her grip was iron. “Okay, John, I’ll take care of her. Send a check every week, and call her every Sunday night. That’s it, then.”

Cousin Glenda was talking
at
my father instead of
to
him, as if he were some lower order of being, and suddenly I felt my allegiance shifting in an alarming about-face, back toward Daddy. I felt that I could be as mean to him as I wanted to, as mean as he deserved, but I couldn’t stand for anybody else to be mean to him.

“Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,” I said, and he stepped over to me quickly and gave me a tight, fierce hug. “It’ll be all right, Jenny. It will. It won’t be long, you’ll see.” Close up, Daddy smelled like cigarettes and Aqua Velva, his old smell, and then I loved him more than anybody in the world and wanted to die for hating him so much and spying on him and spitting in his Coke at Howard Johnson’s and for the many other awful things I’d done.

“Come along now, Jennifer.” Cousin Glenda had a voice that made you do everything she said.

“You’re hurting my arm.” I tried to shake her off, but she held on like a bulldog.

“I know all about
you
, Miss,” she announced with a great deal of satisfaction, pulling me toward the house. “We’re going to put the quietus on you.”

T
HE QUIETUS
! W
HAT WAS
THAT
? I
WAS TERRIFIED
. B
UT
I soon learned that this was simply one of cousin Glenda’s favorite sayings. She was always going to “put the quietus” on somebody, or telling somebody to “get a grip.” She’d say, “Your mother called today, Jennifer, and said how much she hated doing all the things she has to do up there, such as exercise, and I said to her, ‘Billie, get a grip!’ I just hope she was taking it in.”

Cousin Glenda quoted herself endlessly, infatuated with her own good advice. She’d say, “That new substitute teacher came in my office all upset because we had to cut fifteen minutes off of second period for the fire drill, and I said, ‘Mr. Johnson, get a grip!’” Cousin Glenda reminded me of a blowfish, all puffed up and blustery, and I soon understood that I didn’t really need to be afraid of her. She was all hot air and good intentions. Growing up as one of Mama’s poor relations in Charleston, she had idolized Mama for her sweetness and generosity. Now that Mama was in trouble and had no brothers and sisters of her own, cousin Glenda was more than willing to step in and help her out. She would shape me up. She
would
make
me get a grip. And for a fact, it was easier to get a grip in that household than in our own, where so many things were too slippery to hold on to and so many words were never spoken and the rules were always changing.

The rules in cousin Glenda’s house were inflexible, and everybody toed the line. “Everybody” included her husband, Raymond, long-faced and lantern-jawed but clearly nice, who didn’t have a chance to get a word in edgewise with cousin Glenda around, repeating word for word every conversation she’d ever had. I can’t remember hearing Raymond speak once during the whole time I was there, though this can’t be true. He grinned a lot, however, as if he got a big kick out of cousin Glenda—out of us all, in fact. Raymond would never leave
his
wife. They had been married since they were both eighteen, and he had worked at the same job in the post office for twenty-three years. He wasn’t going
anywhere
.

Rayette, my model cousin, turned out to be a junior version of her mother. One year older than I, freckled, sturdy, and curly-haired, she had a wide plain face and big cornflower-blue eyes and not one ounce of irony or guile. I knew immediately that Rayette would never understand my spying, which I would never tell her about. I hid my Davy Crockett notebook under my mattress. Rayette was fascinated by me, and especially by all my cool stuff: the red plastic case containing my 45-rpm records, my Tangee lipstick and fashionable clothes, especially the crinolines and my two appliquéd circle skirts; my castle-shaped jewelry
box with its own lock and key, containing my add-a-pearl necklace and Captain Midnight decoder ring and jade paperweight and fourteen separate items (such as a ballpoint pen and a jujube wrapper) that had been touched by Tom Burlington. But Rayette did not have a jealous bone in her body. She seemed as glad to have me there as her parents were, and curiously enough, I did not mind being there, either, or obeying all the rules or following the rigid schedule.

I loved this schedule, which included getting up at the crack of dawn because we had to catch the school bus, saying the blessing and sitting down to eat a huge breakfast of eggs and bacon and grits, and then making our own beds and washing the dishes (no Dot) before we set out through the foggy chill of the lowland South Carolina morning to stand by the road and stamp our feet and blow out our breath in puffy clouds and wait for the big yellow school bus to come blasting out of the mist like an apparition and carry us away. Back home, Daddy or Dot had always driven me to school.

Rayette’s school was a hick school, as Jinx had predicted it would be, but as the new girl, I was more popular than I had ever been, and reveled in this development. All the girls wanted to sit next to me at lunch. All the boys bumped into me in the hall, acting dumb. A’s were easy to come by. After school, I’d stay late with Rayette for her 4-H and Tri-Hi-Y meetings—clubs I would have scorned back home. They were just beginning a sewing project in 4-H, and so I, too, got to make a terrible-looking bright yellow blouse with a
scoop neck, and sleeves that did not fit the armholes, and darts in the wrong place. I was intensely proud of myself.

Rayette was president of Tri-Hi-Y, a Christian service club that pledged itself to goodness at every meeting and did good deeds all over the county. While I was there, they were raising money to buy an artificial leg for a little boy named Leonard Pipkin. Rayette called each meeting to order by banging on a table with a gavel. This gavel impressed me so much that I gave up espionage and literature on the spot, and vowed to be just like her. I wanted to bang on a table with my gavel, to run clubs, to wear a huge cross around my neck every day, a cross so big it would pitch me forward and weigh me down, and most of all, to be
absolutely sure
about everything in the world.

The main criterion in cousin Glenda’s house was, “What would Jesus think of this?” Jesus did not think much of rock and roll, for instance. Specifically, He did not like fast records that caused young people to move their bodies in sinful ways. He hated “Whole Lot-ta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” “Wake Up, Little Susie,” and “Blue Suede Shoes,” so these had to stay in my special case, but I was allowed to play “Que Será, Será,” “April Love,” and (strangely) “The Great Pretender.” Jesus was very picky.

He apparently prized neatness, cleanliness, and order above all things; I imagined that the plastic runners on the living room carpet and the cellophane covers on all the lampshades were His idea. I liked them myself, as they gave the
living room such a weird, ghostly aspect, and the runners popped and crinkled nicely when you walked on them. Lots of things had covers in cousin Glenda’s house—the toaster, the Mixmaster, and the blender wore matching piqué jackets with rickrack around the edges; the Kleenex box and the Jergens lotion bottle had crocheted skirts; the toilets featured big fuzzy pads.

And everything had its place. I learned this fast. Rayette burst into tears the third day I was there because I had borrowed her hairbrush (without asking) and put it back in the wrong place, and so it wasn’t
exactly where it was supposed to be
when she needed it. Pearl Harbor! This threw Rayette for such a loop that I never did it again, striving for a Jesusy order as great as hers. I got into it. I put my shoes in a row in my closet, as if some dainty princess were going to step into them at any minute. I rolled my socks into balls. I learned where all the dishes went, and everything in the refrigerator. I loved to fill the bird feeder and put away the groceries, both tasks that had to be done just so.

Another virtue right up there with order was
being prepared
. “Jesus will look after you, honey,” cousin Glenda often said, “but He expects you to do what you can.” Therefore the family was prepared for any possible crisis, with a first-aid kit, emergency flares, a snakebite kit, a shotgun, and—wonder of wonders—a Bomb Shelter!

Rayette didn’t appear to care too much about the Bomb Shelter one way or the other—I guess she was used to it—but
I thought it was the coolest thing I had ever seen, the coolest place I’d ever been. You went down into the Bomb Shelter through a trap door in the garage. This was an orange metal door with three black X’s on it. It was impervious to radiation. You had to go down a dozen steep steps into the cavelike Bomb Shelter itself, which was equipped with all the necessities for nuclear war, including:

It was always cold down there, and it was lit by a faint blue light that buzzed with a thrillingly extraterrestrial sound. I loved to sit in the Bomb Shelter. I also loved to survey the
backyard from the kitchen window while I washed dishes, thinking,
The Bomb Shelter is right out there! Nobody knows it, nobody can possibly tell, nobody knows it but us!
I spent as much time in the Bomb Shelter as I could get away with, without attracting too much attention to myself, whenever we weren’t at school or doing chores or praying or going to church.

We went to church a lot. We went to church every time they cracked the door; but even at home, we’d pray at the drop of a hat. We prayed over everything: that I would make an A on my math test, that the lady up the street would see the light (
what
light?), that Mama would get well soon and Daddy would see the error of his ways and Jesus would forgive him, that the family’s old station wagon would make it through the winter without a new clutch, that the upcoming Tri-Hi-Y bake sale would be a big success and Leonard Pipkin would get a new leg. Cousin Glenda would throw one hand up, bow her head, and set into praying whenever she felt like it, and then we’d all have to bow our heads and pray, too. Used to the sedate and abstract
Book of Common Prayer
, I was as startled by the personal nature of these prayers as by their frequency.