MARY CATHERINE
Her hands. I watch them as she shuffles the Pinochle cards. I am sure that when she is at home in Philadelphia she drinks coffee and laughs with her buddies while she plays Pinochle, but here she sits across the cedar picnic table from me while she plays. She shuffles, deals and hums while she sorts her cards. She hums the tune for “Rings on her fingers, bells on her toes, elephants to carry you, my little Irish Rose.” I recognize it because she frequently progresses from humming to “dee dee, dee dee dee, dee dee dee, dee dee” to singing the words outright.
“Rings on her fingers, bells on her toes, elephants to carry you, my little Irish Rose.”
She wears a ring. It is a gold band with four stones. Four birth stones for her children. One for Stell her oldest and one for Earl who died when he was hit by a car when he was five. She never talks about Earl, but his birthstone is there all the same. There is a stone for my Uncle Bob and a December stone for my father.
The birthstone ring is slightly loose about the base of the right fourth finger and sometimes it twirls around so that only the gold band shows. Surely her finger used to be more plump. In fact, her hands are surprisingly bony given the rest of her body. Her hands are slightly rough and wrinkly at the joints. She has small brown spots across the back of them .
She interrupts her humming to lick her right thumb and use it to separate the hand of cards she holds in her left. She has red finger nail polish that is a bit flashy for her. During this one month in the summer when she visits us in Florida she is free from cooking and washing, so she paints her nails. On my visits to Philadelphia I have seen her nails neat, but unpainted. The polish would never survive her usual daily routine.
When I was a child I would follow her down the narrow wooden steps into the basement of her Philadelphia row house. It was dark with only a peek of natural light from small door with twin lights at the back of the room. The basement was dark, but warm and filled with the clean scent of soap powder. We would talk while she washed the clothes by hand in the round white ceramic wash basin, polishless hands red-fingered from the hot wash water. She washed, squeezed, rinsed, and worked every piece through the rollers attached to the washer. I would follow as she carried the basket of wrung clothes out through the back door. We would step up the few concrete steps into the July sun. We would step out into the long narrow backyard and hang out the clothes on the line.
As I look at her hands holding the Pinochle cards I am surprised at the slender fingers. The years of hand washing must have kept her hands in shape, but it has not been enough to keep her waist in shape. During this summer vacation my grandfather Beasley brings her fresh peaches every other day. She eats them for breakfast every morning. She will bring two of them to the breakfast table and hum while she peels them in long pink fuzzy strips. She holds the golden peach over her breakfast bowl while she uses the paring knife to carve bite size pieces that drop into her bowl. She sprinkles the Albertas with white sugar grains and sets them afloat in a pool of whole milk. She eats them with the same pleasure and enthusiasm she has for most food.
Years of peaches with sugar, pound cakes, beef and potatoes with German bread from the comer store have left her with the round waistless belly that is in stark contrast to the bony fingers. She wears summer cotton shifts that go a long way to disguise her figure, but I of all people know what hides beneath the pink paisley cotton. Years ago when I wasn’t following her into the basement or into the kitchen, I was up early to be there for her morning bath. She would step from the tub and use the birthstone-ringed hands to dry her peach-bellied body. Her breasts that nursed the four babies lolled flat to leave parous nipples resting on the upper curve of her belly. She toweled beneath her arms and beneath the breasts lifting first one and then the other. Singing and talking all the while, she would roll deodorant beneath her arms and pat flowery bath powder across her chest and under both breasts. She would fold her towel and put it on the stool before pulling on white boy-legged cotton underwear. Then came the stiff-cupped white bra. She would slip her arms through the straps and with remarkable precision hook up in the back. She would then hold out the left cup with her left hand and use her right to lift the droopy left breast and tuck it into the bra. The left hand would serve to tuck in the right breast in turn.
As I sat behind her I could see the bra strap that fell just to the outside of a large brown growth.
“What is that?” I once asked, touching the brown bumpy surface with my index finger.
“It’s a beauty mark,” she told me smiling. “It’s been there all my life.”
While she sat to pull on her thigh high stockings that she would roll to just above her knee I stayed at her back and looked at the beauty mark. It stood out from her pale faintly freckled back. It was brown and knobby and the size of my thumbnail and then some. It was nowhere near beautiful in my mind.
The beach breeze ruffles the discard pile. I look at the watch on my left wrist. “It’s two o’clock,” I say. “We could probably walk on over to the beach.”
“Oh, sure. I’ll walk over,” she says, folding her hand. She leans on her hands on the picnic table and scoots free of the bench. She walks toward the screen door and slips into her flip flops. We step out into the sunshine and she rests a hand on my arm to steady herself in the sand. We walk down the small dune toward the two lane road that slices between the house and the water.
The effort of walking through the soft white sand makes her slightly short of breath. We are silent since she can’t walk and talk at the same time. By the road we stop for a few minutes of pursed-lip breaths. She is almost 50 years my senior. Last week I drove her to the Tastee Freeze for dinner. We had been left alone for the evening by her son and daughter-in-law and I couldn’t cook while she wouldn’t cook on her vacation. We sat across from each other in the booth waiting for the cheeseburgers and french fries. Her suntanned hands fiddled with the paper napkin from the cubic metal dispenser on the table. She rested the palms of her hands on the table, but her fingers were busy pressing along the folds, folding the napkin over on itself, folding it again to a small rectangle, then pressing the new foId .
We talked about my boyfriend and I told her about how he’ll be off to Auburn University in the fall and how sweet he is to me. Without a thought I asked her, “How did you meet Pop Wiess?”
She looked at the tidy napkin in her hands and was quiet for a moment. Pop Wiess is back in Philadelphia while she is here for the month. She made the trip to Florida alone 22 years before when my Catholic father married my Methodist mother and she still makes it alone every summer.
“I guess I was about your age,” she said looking back at me. “I was in high school and I went to this dance with my girlfiends and he was there. I met him then and we had a lot of fun. We went to other dances together and pretty soon Stell was on the way and we got married.” She looked back to the napkin and I needed that silence to assimilate what she has said. I had a lot of questions, but I am ready to be a high school senior myself, so what came out was, “Did you finish high school?”
“No, I never finished high school,” she replied smiling at me. “Louis and I married and he went to work.”
I wonder if my father knows that she got pregnant and married because of it. I’m thinking I don’t know a lot about my Aunt Stell, but I believe she left home pretty early, married and started a family. Furthermore, I am amazed sitting at the Tastee Freeze hearing this story that I’m not getting some warning about abstinence from sex or staying in school, but perhaps she can tell from my overall shyness and nerd-like behavior that I am nowhere close to a Stell-on- the-way situation with any boy. I don’t have her charming blue eyes and Irish spirit that must have captivated a 17 year old Louis Wiess.
She catches her breath. We cross the highway and make our way slowly up the big dune rise on the beach side. We reach the peak and she stops again to exclaim, “It’s beauty-ful!” Every day at the beach, every time she sees the emerald green gulf slipping gently up to the shimmering white sand she claims, “It’s beauty-ful.” I want to hoist her on my back and chug down the sandy dune and send her sailing through the air to splash in the cool water. Even if I could manage to carry her, I know that I could never release her over the luxuriant water because she can’t swim. We walk down to the wet sand at the edge of the waves. She wades ankle deep and gathers the hem of her skirt in her fingertips. I leave her there, content. I work my way out dragging my legs through the resistant salt water. I jump over the breakers and close my eyes against the spray of white foam. As a big wave rolls up to me I dive through it. I resurface to swim alone in the gentle salt water beyond the waves out in the beauty-ful water farther than my grandmother will ever be.
One Thursday morning at 4 am when I finished writing the story about my grandmother, Mary Catherine Wiess, my great-grandmother Vassie Leonia spoke to me. Vassie Leonia was my grandfather Beasley’s mother and I never knew her. She must have been a scrappy, determined woman in her life here because she came to me that way that morning. As best I know from my grandfather Vassie lived her adult life on the homeplace which was sharecropping acreage farmed by my grandfather’s father who I only know as Mr. Beasley. It must have been an extremely poor household there in Clayton, Alabama. I was never sure from my grandfather’s stories whether the 13 or so children born to Vassie Leonia and Mr. Beasley brought extra helping hands or more hardship. At any rate I did not know Vassie Leonia when she lived, but in those early morning hours when she spoke to me it was clear to me who she was. I understood from her words and tone that she came to speak her piece because she had been aggravated by my Mom Wiess story. She could see that I had written it with sympathy for the limited opportunities that I thought Mom Wiess had had compared to the many opportunities that I have had. In particular I think Vassie Leonia was annoyed that I thought that Mom Wiess had had to work hard. Vassie ‘s words came hurling at me that early morning and I did my best to write them down. Here are her words as nearly as I could transcribe them:
MRS. BEASLEY
Sure, Vassie Leonia is not a pretty name. Not today by any means when you have Michelle and Heather and such as that. You can just call me Mrs. Beasley, anyhow. Folks today are just way too common with each other to my mind. Callin’ everbody by a first name. Not in my house. We were too busy to be much nice to each other. We were too hot or too cold or too tired to have such luxury as to be nice. I would just say to you that you just think how you would have acted if you had been in that same spot like me. Today you talk a whole lot about bein’ organized and makin’ lists and all that, but it is just like me havin’ to keep it all goin’. If everbody was to be fed, then everbody had to do what I needed them to do. I couldn’t just make a list and do it all by myself . Even gettin’ up at first light one or two of those children was just goin’ have to help out and get some water in out of the yard and get up some wood. Even with that, my self, I was goin’ to have to get the eggs in and start the stove up and get to cookin’.
I didn’t likely have much time to go about shakin’ shoulders and sayin’ “Rise and shine” all sweet like, now did I? I suppose I would be standin’ in the kitchen cuttin’ round biscuits and cookin’ eggs and fryin’ up what meat we happened to have that morning. So, you just go put a bagel in that electric toaster thing and pour yourself some orange juice and think as to how we might have had some milk on our breakfast table if one of those children were to get out of a bed and go out to milk our cow. I’m glad enough if some of those older ones could help some of those little ones to get to school. By the time I could get some of those breakfast dishes up off the table and washed I couldn’t be sure who had done what. Mostly they needed to stay out of my way, so I could get to washin’ Mr. Beasley’s shirt and the baby diapers and thank goodness for my Annie who could keep that baby quiet while I did it all, too.
Mr. Beasley and several of those big boys were sure to show up for lunch and you should know that it would take at least part of my mornin’ to get the beans snapped and boilin’. So, there’s a day for me and it was not peaches and milk. My hands were skin and bones and all of me was skin and bones. The food was scarce and the hungry mouths were aplenty. I had not much known Mr. Beasley when we married when I was fifteen. He came along at a time when it was proper for me to leave my family home and make a new home for myself. He married me simple and then the babies started comin’ and not the other way around like your Mary Catherine.
A baby came nearly every year and I believe I tended each one well, but once walkin’ each had it’s own way to make in this world. Some of them was keen on school and I couldn’t tell them one way or the other whether that was a good thing. Mr. Beasley and I expected them each to read the Holy Bible, but other than that it was up to them. Most of the boys were needed to help Mr. Beasley on what corn and cotton he could grow and sure Annie and Juanita should help with the mendin’ and cookin’.
I just had to come speak to you because of that Mary Catherine story. Sure enough you look at what you’ve got and it is way above what your grandmother had. You who have been to college and had your Emma when you chose to do it and poor Mary who washed her clothes by hand.
But I tell you, there I am with one dress at all, cotton or otherwise. There I am in a sharecropper’s house with the water pump in the front yard and the outhouse out back. But life as a woman is downright simple to me. You are either alive or dead. And, if you are alive, you best be cookin’. Now, that is not a sign of my good humor either.