Anne Siddons - Fault Lines

I had no reply. Put that way he was right. It did not seem that Mommee could last much longer; the fury of the dementia seemed to be eating her alive. And it had been I who had suggested she come to us when she was unable to stay in her house any longer. His pain at the thought of a nursing home had been too much for me to bear. But she had not been so bad then, and Glynn had seemed so much better…

I answered him now, though, stamping along the path toward the house and the clamoring of the bell. I did not speak the words aloud, but they were full and whole in my mind.

What do I want to do? Who knows what I want to do? Maybe I want to go back to work and own my own agency and win Clios. Maybe I want to take off with Crisscross and go to Cancún. Maybe I want to raise Siamese cats, or buy a llama. Or go sit on a mountaintop in India and find myself. I want to take one quiet pee that Mommee doesn’t shriek for me. I want to come into the house with a load of groceries and not have Ina stalk around after me telling me what the old lady did wrong that day. I want to walk into my own guest bathroom and not smell shitty adult diapers. I want my daughter to come home after school and bring her friends like she used to do. I want her to stop drifting around like a ghost; I want her to stop studying and get into some adolescent mischief. I want to hear her laugh. Of course she’s a good, responsible child, but she’s also a lovely young woman and my best friend when she’s not under siege, and I want her back. I want you to come home and make love to me before dinner like you used to, without having Mommee scrabbling and kicking at the door. Do you even realize that you hardly ever eat dinner with us anymore? Do you think I just love these intimate, stimulating little dinners alone with Mommee? You try wiping stringbean purée off her chin after every bite. When you say, “We take care of our own,” you mean me, Bubba.

The bell accelerated its angry summons and stopped, and I broke into a lope and hit the searing-hot flagstones of the verandah and leaped like a gazelle over them into the dim, cool kitchen. It was empty, but I could hear voices from the living room, Mommee’s the high, thin wail of a scolded child, Ina’s the exaggerated crispness of an exasperated adult. The air of the empty kitchen still rang with the percussion of the bell.

Halfway into town, stuck in the malodorous traffic that seemed forever clotted on the old ferry roads around the river, Pom noticed my hair.

“What did you do to it?” he said, studying me through his wire-rimmed sunglasses. “You don’t look like yourself. It’s nice, though. Exotic.”

“Tondelayo, that’s me,” I said.

What I had done to it, after taking the scissors away from Mommee before she decimated the other drapes in her room and getting her into a bath and coaxing one of her tranquilizers down her and waiting until she nodded off, was to pull the wild tangle of air-dried frizz straight back behind my ears and slick it down with so much gel that it looked shellacked. Then I coiled it swiftly into a high bun and gelled that, too. I skinned into a white linen halter and long black wrap skirt with a slit in it, cinched a red patent belt around my waist, added red high-heeled sandals that I had worn once and vowed never to wear again, and slashed bloodred lipstick over my mouth. Hearing the crunch of Pom’s Cherokee on the driveway and the light, waspish tap of its horn, I grabbed long gold earrings and a massive gold bangle bracelet he had given me last Christmas and flew down the stairs without my bag, any makeup but the lipstick, or a wrap. On my way through the kitchen I grabbed his blue blazer, which was hanging from the pot rack still swathed in dry cleaner’s wrap, and the striped tie he had requested. On my teetering way down the verandah steps I impulsively snatched a huge red hibiscus blossom from the bush beside the walk and stuck it into my hair behind my ear. I knew the gel would hold it like superglue. Cookie, the pretty coffee-skinned nurse from the clinic whom Pom had inveigled into staying with Mommee because her regular sitter’s car wouldn’t start, grinned at me and said, “Uh- huh !” as we passed.

“Uh-huh yourself,” I grinned back. I liked the tough, flirtatious Cookie. “Call me if she gets out of hand. We’re at the Driving Club.”

“That’ll be the day, honey,” she said. “I took a knife away from a two-hundred-pound crackhead today. You mama-in-law gon’ look like Mother Teresa after that.”

“You wish. See you before midnight. Got your jammies?”

She held up a bulging tote and I laughed and got into the Cherokee and laid the blazer and tie on the backseat and Pom gunned out of the driveway, spurting gravel. As usual, he was late to his own party.

As we turned into the driveway of the Driving Club he looked over to study me again.

“I feel like I’ve run off with another woman,” he said.

“And how does that feel? Does it do things for you?”

“It could. It definitely could. You look Eurasian, or something. Like that woman in the William Holden movie. Is it true what they say about Oriental women?”

“There’s only one way to find out,” I said, and leered.

Just before we stopped the car under the portico, I pulled down the sun visor mirror and looked at myself. I had hardly even glanced at my reflection before I left the house. A strange, carved face looked back at me. The gel had lacquered my streaked brown hair to a shining tortoise shell color, and without the softening bangs that I had always considered necessary for an angular face my sharp cheek and brow bones and tilted nose stood out as in bas relief. Without makeup the coppery freckles ran together over my cheeks and the bridge of my nose, making me look as though I had been long in the sun, or did indeed have the golden blood of the East in my veins. The red lipstick and the hibiscus blossom looked barbaric. I smiled theatrically. My teeth flashed stark white in my face.

When I got out of the car I felt the reckless blood of that alien half-caste warm my face and chest. For a moment I wanted to prowl, to stalk like a jungle cat, to growl low in my throat. I took an experimental prowling step and the high red heels wobbled so that I stumbled.

“You okay, Mrs. Fowler?” said Clem, who parked cars. He reached out to steady me.

“I thought you said you’d never wear those shoes again,” Pom said.

“I said a lot of things,” I sighed, abandoning Tondelayo and tripping cautiously into the Driving Club on Pom’s arm.

This was perhaps the ninth or tenth clinic gala we had attended. Both of us could predict the course of the evening down to the air kisses on the way in and the slightly tipsy mouth ones on the way out. Compared to some of the other fund-raisers in town, this one was simple, even modest. Pom did not think the huge flowered and gilded and costumed balls and galas that benefited most of the city’s good causes were seemly for a charity clinic, and he had the aging sixties’ radical’s contempt for privileged pleasure and play in the name of underprivileged pain. So he would allow seated dinners for perhaps a hundred couples at this club or that, or a private home, with simple floral centerpieces and candles and perhaps a combo for dancing afterward, but that was all. In the beginning he had not even allowed that, insisting that the fund-raiser be catered drinks and a few peanuts and pretzels at the clinic. I had finally disabused him of that.

“You’re asking some of the richest and most influential people in Atlanta and the South to part with a very considerable amount of money,” I said. “You’ve got to give them more than bad scotch and peanuts down in the projects. What’s next, pork rinds at Juvenile Hall? You can show them what the clinic is all about another way; have slides at the party or tours beforehand, or buses with drinks and hors d’oeuvres on board, or something. I don’t mean you’ve got to give the auxiliary free rein; I agree, you’d end up with a bacchanalia or worse if Betty Burton had her way. But at least a good club or a pretty home, and live music, and really good food.”