A Little Salty to Cut the Sweet Page 4

  I still wasn’t sure why Mama was so upset. Since Mrs. Cunningham was the kindest, most grandmotherly woman you ever did see—and since Mama thought the world of her—I knew Mrs. Cunningham wasn’t the problem. But given Mama’s level of uncharacteristic exasperation, there had to be more to the story. My brain grappled with all sorts of possibilities. Maybe Mama didn’t think the story was newsworthy. Maybe she was aggravated that Daddy hadn’t told her about the article. Or maybe she didn’t like the clothes Daddy was wearing in the pictures.

  That last option wasn’t all that unlikely, really. Mama was forever trying to get Daddy to be more mindful about his wardrobe selections, but Daddy never had the slightest interest in the latest styles or trends. Mama always contended that since Daddy’s job required him to be on television a few times a month, it might not be a bad idea for him to invest in a few nice-looking shirts and sweaters. But Daddy was perfectly content with whatever was clean, provided it was free of any gaping holes.

  It was actually about the same time as the biscuit fiasco when Mama’s frustration with Daddy’s clothing choices came to a head. One night Mama and I were watching the local news while a reporter interviewed Daddy about something like tomato plants or Japanese beetles or soil erosion, which is such a coincidence since I considered writing this book about those exact same topics. Anyway, Mama commented that Daddy was wearing his favorite sweater—a remark that was made with some degree of disapproval in light of Mama and Daddy’s ongoing discussions regarding the merits of brand-name clothing vs. off brands. Mama stood firmly on the side of buying brand names, arguing that it just made good sense to pay a little extra for better quality. Daddy contended that all clothing came off the same assembly line and the only differences were the emblems and labels someone plastered on the shirts or pants or sweaters before they left the factory.

  (I believe we’ve just pinpointed why I like to shop at Stein Mart.)

  (Stein Mart has brand names at discount prices, which means I satisfy both sides of my gene pool at the exact same time.)

  (What can I say? I’m a people pleaser.)

  (If that’s okay with you, of course.)

  So.

  As Mama and I watched the interview, she acknowledged that Daddy was doing a great job even though his clothing selection, in her opinion, left something to be desired. And several moments later, she noticed an unexpected sweater complication: the fox that signified that This Sweater Is a Fine Utilitarian Garment from JCPenney seemed slightly askew. Sort of like the fox decided to make a run for it and, as he attempted his escape, accidentally caught his back left leg in a loose thread.

  As any good Southern woman worth her smelling salts would do, Mama immediately decided she had to rectify the situation. When Daddy got home later that night and changed his clothes, Mama picked up the sweater and carefully removed the injured fox, only to find a hole behind it. There was talk of trying to reattach the fox, but since one of his back legs was past the point of rehabilitation, we had to put him down.

  Life in the animal kingdom can be brutal, y’all.

  Most people would’ve probably thrown away the sweater, but my mama is a child of the Depression and therefore doesn’t throw anything away until she is completely and utterly convinced that the item in question can’t be repurposed in any way whatsoever. No kidding—when Mama and Daddy moved a few summers ago and I was helping them unpack, I discovered she had moved a pint of expired buttermilk from the old house to the new one. I found it on ice. In a cooler. Because until that buttermilk is curdled, it’s pretty much fair game.

  But I digress.

  After some brainstorming, Mama and I decided that there was a simple solution to the problem—one that would significantly increase Daddy’s fashion IQ and save the sweater. Mama would simply cover the hole by performing an emblem transplant. She would carefully remove an alligator from one of my brother’s tattered Izod shirts and then introduce the alligator to a new habitat: Daddy’s sweater. It required some careful cutting and stitching on Mama’s part, but in the end she was able to salvage the blue sweater. I was tickled by Mama’s ingenuity, and while Daddy was none the wiser, he was destined to be so much more stylish. Or so we thought.

  Two weeks later Daddy was on TV again, this time to explain the proper way to root a cutting from a hydrangea or fertilize an azalea or whatever. Naturally he was wearing The Sweater, and Mama and I were understandably relieved since it was now sporting an alligator instead of the much-maligned fox. The emblem switcheroo had been so simple—sly as a fox, you might say—until the camera zoomed in for a close-up of whatever Daddy was holding.

  Then we saw it. And we froze.

  Because the alligator, you see, was upside down, plain as day and larger than life on the six o’clock news. It was simultaneously hilarious and mortifying, especially since it halfway looked like some sort of Cooperative Extension Service gang sign, warning all the 4-H agents who favor polo players on their shirts that the county agents who wear alligators DON’T MESS AROUND.

  All I could do was gesture in the general direction of the TV screen and say, “Mama. Mama? MAMA!”

  When she realized that the alligator was about 180 degrees off its target, she just shook her head and said, “Well, that figures.”

  And she was right. It did figure. Because designer brands and Daddy just don’t go together. The upside-down alligator taught us that lesson once and for all. And I have to admit that life has been better and easier since we all accepted that Daddy’s idea of high fashion is a sweater with an ailing fox or, perhaps, the wrinkle-resistant khakis from the George collection at Walmart. Daddy doesn’t need the latest from Tommy Bahama for his golf outings, because he would just as soon wear a line from Sears called Jimmy Barbados.

  Not that Jimmy Barbados is an actual fashion line. But if it were, Daddy would be all over it, especially if the most expensive item in the collection was somewhere in the vicinity of $19.99.

  So yes, Mama and Daddy had weathered the occasional sartorial storm, but it didn’t seem like Daddy’s clothes were the real problem in the article about him and Mrs. Cunningham. There was something deeper. And after I’d listened to Mama vent her exasperation to Chox for several more minutes, I finally got a clearer picture of what was really going on.

  “Well,” Mama continued, “I cannot believe that my husband would go outside of this house . . .”

  As she searched for the right words, she twisted the phone cord and sat down at the desk chair in the kitchen.

  “I cannot believe that my husband—my husband—would go outside of this house to learn how to make biscuits. The very idea! The very idea that I couldn’t teach him to make biscuits! I’ve been making homemade biscuits since I was knee high to a grasshopper, but has he ever wanted to learn from me? Nooooooo. And now it’s in the paper? And there are pictures? And people will think that he couldn’t have just stayed home and learned how to make biscuits from me? Quite frankly, I don’t appreciate it one bit.”

  And there was the rub. It wasn’t that Daddy didn’t pay attention to what clothes he was wearing. It wasn’t that Daddy didn’t tell her about the article beforehand. It was that after thirty years of marriage, after thirty years of dishing out three hot meals a day, Mama very rightly considered herself a fine Southern cook, and by golly if Daddy wanted to learn to make biscuits, he should have come to her for the privilege.

  Mama stood in total agreement with the county-wide assessment that Mrs. Cunningham was a wonderful cook—there were no arguments from her on that count—but what troubled her was that some people might assume Daddy had to learn how to make biscuits from Mrs. Cunningham because Mama didn’t know how.

  By all means, let me err on the side of being exceedingly clear: my mama is not a petty woman. She’s not a drama queen. I’ve watched her politely hold her tongue in situations where the good Lord Himself would have been tempted to read someone the riot act. But over the years I’ve realized that marriages are the sum of thousa
nds of symbolic parts, and Mama’s disappointment about the biscuits was no doubt about way more than, well, biscuits. So when you combine whatever subtext was going on with the mathematical reality of how many times Mama had proved her biscuit-making skills over the course of their marriage, the end result of that equation was a wife with some hurt feelings.

  And now that I’m older? With fifteen-plus years of marriage under my own belt? I absolutely get it. Sometimes a perceived slight stings more than an intentional one ever could. If you don’t believe me, then remind me to tell you about the time when David and I were on the way home from the hospital with our newborn little boy, and I thought David asked me what I was going to cook for supper.

  I’d never been angrier.

  I’d also heard him wrong, but the deficiency in my listening skills did not negate the fact that I THOUGHT HE ASKED ME WHAT I WAS GOING TO COOK FOR SUPPER.

  AND I WAS RECOVERING FROM A C-SECTION.

  AND THERE WAS A THREE-DAY-OLD IN THE BACKSEAT.

  But I’m totally over it.

  I recently asked Mama if she ever brought up The Biscuit Ordeal to Daddy, and she assured me that she hadn’t. “Sometimes,” she said, “you just have to ask the Lord to help you make your peace with things and move on. Your daddy didn’t mean anything by it, and it didn’t make good sense for me to hold a grudge.”

  She’s right, of course. Occasionally in marriage you have to pick your battles, and ultimately Mama decided the biscuits weren’t worth an argument. As C. S. Lewis once wrote, “Love . . . is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit; reinforced by (in Christian marriage) the grace which both partners ask, and receive, from God.”

  Mama could’ve given Daddy a hard time, but instead she gave him grace. I looked over at Mama, and just as I was about to ponder the blessing and the legacy of Proverbs 31:10, of “an excellent wife . . . [who is] far more precious than jewels,” I remembered one more pesky detail I wanted to ask her about.

  “Mama?” I asked. “Remember the Christmas after Daddy learned to make the biscuits? And remember how he got up early on Christmas morning and made biscuits for everybody?”

  “I do remember that,” she replied.

  “Well,” I continued, “I may have the story mixed up, but I don’t think you ate any of those biscuits. You smiled, and you talked about how delicious they looked, but you didn’t touch so much as a crumb. You made sure everybody had jelly and syrup, but you didn’t take a single bite. Why was that?”

  Mama grinned. “Honey, I knew your daddy didn’t mean any harm. Mrs. Cunningham did a wonderful job teaching him, but you and I both know he could’ve learned to make those biscuits from me if he’d only thought to ask. I just wanted to stand on my principles a little bit.”

  “And besides,” she added, “your daddy was so proud that he’d made biscuits for y’all on Christmas morning. It never occurred to him that I didn’t try them. And we had such a merry Christmas that year—whether I ate those biscuits or not.”

  She was right, of course. We did have a merry Christmas.

  And even though Mama didn’t eat the biscuits, she didn’t have to cook breakfast, either. Which meant she only prepared breakfast 349 times that year as opposed to her normal 350.

  I think she’d consider that a win.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  When the “Immeasurably More” Pretty Much Rocks Your World

  WHEN I WAS GROWING UP, I was a fairly typical little Southern girl. I wore pretty dresses that were trimmed in lace or rickrack (sometimes both); I played outside for hours with my neighbors; I always let Mama wash and roll my hair on Saturday nights so it would be extra clean and curly for church on Sunday mornings. I took piano lessons; I performed in dance recitals; I learned to say, “Yes, ma’am” and “Yes, sir” and “No, ma’am” and “No, sir” to my elders. And even when they didn’t know it, I paid attention to every move the women in my family made when they were getting ready for big Sunday dinners.

  Oh, listen. I’m pretty sure I earned a degree in Southern Table Setting just from watching Mamaw Davis, Mama, Chox, Sister, and an assortment of cousins carefully place china, crystal, and sterling silver on the dining room table of whoever happened to be hosting dinner that week. When Paige and I were finally old enough to be trusted with setting the table ourselves, we had the routine down pat. We knew where Mama and Chox kept their silver chests, we knew how to put the leaf in Mama’s dining room table, we knew where to find the pressed linens, and we knew to be extra careful with the good china.

  Watching and learning from Mama and the other women in my family gave me a deep love for home and hearth and taking care of people. I knew from a young age that there was eternal value in those things, and I treasured the moments when Mama let me help her look after our guests. I vividly remember the first time Mama asked me to make a pot of coffee for her and her friends, just as I remember the first time Chox asked me to serve at a bridal tea for a family friend. Like Scout Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, I saw the effortless grace and elegance of the women around me and realized that “there was some skill involved in being a girl,” and I knew I didn’t just want to grow up and be a woman.

  I wanted to grow up and be a lady.

  Given all of that, it strikes me as sort of interesting that despite the fact that I was a girly girl who loved bows and frills and makeup and clothes, and despite the fact that I couldn’t wait to grow up and get married and take care of my husband and have a house of my own, I never really dreamed of being a mother.

  Certainly I admired and esteemed mothers. There’s no question about that. And I loved my own mama beyond all comprehension.

  I just didn’t, you know, want to be one. Maybe it was because I was the baby of my family by ten years and never experienced taking care of younger siblings. Maybe it was because I tended to gravitate to adults instead of kids when I was a child. Maybe it was because, on some level, I felt like Mama had sacrificed a lot of her own dreams to make sure that my sister, my brother, and I had the opportunity to pursue ours. Or maybe it was some combination of all three.

  Regardless, I just didn’t have the expectant enthusiasm about eventually being a mama that many girls feel when they’re young. I did enjoy dolls in the sense that they were nice to look at and all that, but mostly I just liked to have my dolls nap in my room while I sat with Mama on the couch in the den and watched Guiding Light and Match Game.

  Call me crazy, but that tendency didn’t necessarily scream SOLID MATERNAL INSTINCTS.

  Even when my childhood best friend, Laura, and I would talk about what we wanted to be when we grew up, mothering rarely entered the conversation for me. I loved to dream about being someone who operated a cash register in a cute store or someone who answered a push-button phone and then transferred calls with great efficiency or someone who typed with urgency on an IBM Selectric and then filed lots of important documents.

  Later, when I was a teenager, I just wanted to be Jane Craig from Broadcast News and scream, “Lay it in, Bobby! Back it up!” before handing a news segment tape to Joan Cusack as she barreled down the hall on her way to the control room.

  So basically I think what we’ve established is that all my dreams involved mashing buttons.

  SHOOT FOR THE STARS, YOUNG PEOPLE.

  My only concession to Thoughts of Motherhood was a fairly significant obsession with children’s names. Even now I’m fascinated by why people choose certain names for their kids—why they name a daughter Kaitlyn or Katelin or Catelyn, why they name a son Robert Hughes Von Pritchett IV and then elect to call him “Bo.” And when I was younger, every once in a while I’d think about hypothetical children and wonder if it would be better to name a little girl Mary Margaret or Lucy Katherine or Emma Paige or Anna Clair (a double name was a given; the fact that I didn’t have one myself was, in my opinion, one of life’s great injustices).

  What I never thought about, though, was what it woul
d be like to mother those children. I guess the bottom line was that I didn’t really have a desire to be a mama, but if a friend or two would grant me naming privileges when they had kids of their own, then that would probably work out really well for everybody. Especially since I would try my best to come up with a universal spelling of Caitlin and thereby provide a valuable public service to frustrated schoolteachers everywhere.

  I’m leaning toward Keightlynne, but I’ll keep you posted.

  During my college years I definitely warmed up to children in general, but when I’d hear my friends talk about how they’d love to have two or three or six kids one day, I didn’t get it. AT ALL. Didn’t they want to be Jane Craig? Didn’t they want to travel? Didn’t they want to be able to stay up half the night watching old John Hughes movies without having someone who, like, depended on them?

  My reasoning was totally flawed, of course. I saw a life with kids and a life that was fun and fulfilling as two separate entities. In my mind it was an either-or decision. I had no idea it could be an also-and choice. We can unpack this idea more extensively when we meet at my counselor’s office next week. You can just add it to our discussion list, right after “ongoing issues with repetitive circular textures” and “profound fear of clowns.”

  But.

  (You knew it was coming, didn’t you?)

  (OF COURSE YOU DID.)

  When I was twenty-three or twenty-four, I think, smack-dab in the middle of the ickiest phase of my whole life, one of my very best friends, Elise, gave birth to her first baby. I’ll never forget talking to Elise on the phone, standing in the middle of my parents’ kitchen, and marveling at the pure, unadulterated joy in her voice. After I told her how thrilled I was for her and her husband and how I knew they were going to be the best parents any little boy could want, I hung up the phone, stood in silence for a few seconds, and then I cried my eyes out.