She laughed, but her heart wasn't in it. She dabbed at her eyes with a white handkerchief. I was sorry I asked. Her mascara left black spots, bits and dashes. Like what my cat Boots did once to a spider.
Jolene is my cousin. I hadn’t seen her in years. Sort of my cousin. Jackie, her mother, was sort of my aunt. The waitress says, lemon pie’s awful good, and Jolene and I nod. I’ve heard that expression all my life. Today it sounds strange. I came for the service, to pay my respects. Two slices of awful good, please.
Aunt Jackie had a laugh…they must have it heard it three counties over. A real character, and a beauty, too, in her day. Always, always, wore candy-red lipstick.
They lived in a house about half a mile up the road from my grandmother. Jolene, Aunt Jackie and Jimmy—Uncle Jimmy, Jolene’s dad. In the South, in a time, that made us all kin. Born of necessity, I expect, a residual effect of hardscrabble days. You have cows, they have chickens. They need milk, you need eggs. Makes you all kinfolk. Howdy cousin. Come on in.
I don’t know that for certain. It’s only my guess. Wisdom, said Socrates, is knowing how little you know. That would make me a genius; every day, I learn how much less I know than I thought. What I want is a way to un-know. Like when we were kids and we got a do-over, and having our fingers crossed wiped the slate clean—Had my fingers crossed—NOT!
There were a lot of things I didn’t know. Mr. Beeson, for instance. He lived a mile or so down the road from my grandmother—in the other direction. He painted houses. Mr. Beeson always wore white coveralls. Splotches of paint, bottom to top, in a rainbow of colors, Whenever I saw him I thought, what a great job.
Maybe it was. My grandmother was generous. I’m sure she paid Mr. Beeson well for his time. She also called him “the colored man”. The paint on his coveralls, I thought.
Different time, different place, in her defense. The way it sounds now, it didn’t sound then. Some would’ve called Mr. Beeson much worse.
The paint on his coveralls. Jackie's red lipstick. So much of what I remember is color. Some residual effect, maybe, from primitive times. In a black and white world, we might never learn: fire hot. Fire burn.
At the service there were pictures from back in the day. Aunt Jackie was something, alright. Raven-haired and alabaster skin. A pageant girl, if they had pageants then. Slender and always, always, that candy-red lipstick. You could see what Jimmy—Uncle Jimmy—saw in Aunt Jackie.
He was fair-haired and thin. Quiet, and not in a good way. I never understood what she saw in him. He didn’t speak much and when he did, it was invariably something of a negative cast. He was like a frayed wire, stretched to its breaking point, ready to snap. They told me Uncle Jimmy had once been a prisoner of war. Whenever I saw him, I thought, he still is.
After the service we went out to eat at one of those country buffet places. The kind where “country” is spelled with a “K”. You mourn, you cry, and then you go eat. A strange custom I always thought. Left over, maybe, from hardscrabble days. Eat well and hardy. For tomorrow we may…
She favors her mother. But no candy-red lipstick. Jolene doesn’t laugh the way Jackie did, and I had forgotten how shrill it became. How it burst out at times as if someone just whispered a joke in her ear. How she laughed for no reason and stared at the air and became like those cat paintings that change bit by piece until they're not cats anymore.
I pictured a punch bowl, the first time I heard it, filled with frothy, pink fruit juice and big as a whale, and you drank ‘til you staggered from a ladle almost as big as your head…
Different time, different place. I was sorry I asked. The way we speak now, we didn't speak then.
It was awful good. I had whipped cream on mine, and I thought of those cats and I thought about war. I thought to myself, in a way, we all are.