yet.”
I don’t remember making any defense of my shoe-tying disability. I just stood up from the toilet, pulling up my white underpants, which had little red apples printed all over them. Leciahad learned to tie at three. Grandma had even taught her how to tat lace by the time she was five. (Tatting is an insane activity that involves an eensy shuttle, thin silk thread, and maniacal patience. Belgian nuns are famous for tatting, it turns out.) Lecia had immediately generated half a dozen doilies, which Grandma had draped over worn spots on the sofa. In my hands, even the simple Jacob’s ladder that any kid in Vacation Bible School could make went all tangled. No matter how many times I was shown, my brain refused to hold on to the pathways necessary to tying a shoe bow. I was thought not so much boneheaded as stubborn on this point.
Mother lay soaking in the tub with a mint-green washcloth over her face. Her mouth made a dark spot in the terry cloth as she breathed. I always associate my grandmother’s house with Mother’s silence and the old woman’s endless bossy prattle. “Now this here is Crisco,” she said, cold-creaming her face. “You should never let anybody sell you anything else. They squeeze a couple of eye-droppers of perfume in it, and Charlie Marie will buy a tablespoon for a dollar. She just wants to throw money away! Do y’all still have those clay banks I got you down in Laredo?” At some point, Mother said the water was like ice, and would I hand her a robe.
The next morning, we drove out to visit Mother’s cousin Dotty, whose husband, Fermin, ran a cotton gin in Roundup, Texas. She had a sprawling white ranch house with so many bedrooms that none of us had to double up. Lecia and I had never been inside a house so fancy. There was a pool in the back and a storm cellar that a cleaning lady kept swept clean and stocked with jars of vegetables Dotty didn’t have to deal with till she forked them up to eat. Her daughter, Tess, had a pink Princess phone by her bed and kept her toenails painted frost white. Dotty’s son, Robert, wore a tie to his church school.
When you have relatives who farm, the first thing that always happens on a visit is a tour of the crop or the livestock or what-have-you. Other people trot out photo albums or new patio furniture or kids’ trophies. With relatives who farm, it’s almostimpolite to ask about any of these things first. You get to them after lunch.
We took the farm road down through acres of cotton. The field was in full bloom. It almost made me dizzy the rows of plants rushing by. Each row ticked past as if marking time, and yet they all seemed to come together at one still point on the horizon. Dotty said it was a miracle that the locusts didn’t bother them at all this year. The same way tornadoes cut narrow paths—so an outhouse would be left standing alongside a house blown to splinters—the locusts chewed up fields at random. They’d left this one alone.
Grandma told how her daddy had farmed her out to chop cotton that looked just like that by hand when she was still a teenager. Her sister Earle had to go to work in the fields too, but the three other girls stayed home and took singing lessons. They were pretty and expected to “make good marriages,” which didn’t mean they’d be happy, only that they wouldn’t have to farm. The sepia portrait of all five sisters in Grandma’s parlor photo shows five wispy blondes. Their seeming frailty made it nearly impossible to believe that the two youngest had been rented out to sharecroppers. They wore eyelet-lace necklines and had those loose-blown Victorian roses pinned to their slouchy Gibson girl hairdos. They were pale, translucent, and somebody had tinted the picture slightly so that their cheeks and the roses were a faint peach color.
In the middle of the cotton field, we stopped Dotty’s Cadillac and climbed out of the air-conditioning. Up close, the plants were near black and
I don’t remember making any defense of my shoe-tying disability. I just stood up from the toilet, pulling up my white underpants, which had little red apples printed all over them. Leciahad learned to tie at three. Grandma had even taught her how to tat lace by the time she was five. (Tatting is an insane activity that involves an eensy shuttle, thin silk thread, and maniacal patience. Belgian nuns are famous for tatting, it turns out.) Lecia had immediately generated half a dozen doilies, which Grandma had draped over worn spots on the sofa. In my hands, even the simple Jacob’s ladder that any kid in Vacation Bible School could make went all tangled. No matter how many times I was shown, my brain refused to hold on to the pathways necessary to tying a shoe bow. I was thought not so much boneheaded as stubborn on this point.
Mother lay soaking in the tub with a mint-green washcloth over her face. Her mouth made a dark spot in the terry cloth as she breathed. I always associate my grandmother’s house with Mother’s silence and the old woman’s endless bossy prattle. “Now this here is Crisco,” she said, cold-creaming her face. “You should never let anybody sell you anything else. They squeeze a couple of eye-droppers of perfume in it, and Charlie Marie will buy a tablespoon for a dollar. She just wants to throw money away! Do y’all still have those clay banks I got you down in Laredo?” At some point, Mother said the water was like ice, and would I hand her a robe.
The next morning, we drove out to visit Mother’s cousin Dotty, whose husband, Fermin, ran a cotton gin in Roundup, Texas. She had a sprawling white ranch house with so many bedrooms that none of us had to double up. Lecia and I had never been inside a house so fancy. There was a pool in the back and a storm cellar that a cleaning lady kept swept clean and stocked with jars of vegetables Dotty didn’t have to deal with till she forked them up to eat. Her daughter, Tess, had a pink Princess phone by her bed and kept her toenails painted frost white. Dotty’s son, Robert, wore a tie to his church school.
When you have relatives who farm, the first thing that always happens on a visit is a tour of the crop or the livestock or what-have-you. Other people trot out photo albums or new patio furniture or kids’ trophies. With relatives who farm, it’s almostimpolite to ask about any of these things first. You get to them after lunch.
We took the farm road down through acres of cotton. The field was in full bloom. It almost made me dizzy the rows of plants rushing by. Each row ticked past as if marking time, and yet they all seemed to come together at one still point on the horizon. Dotty said it was a miracle that the locusts didn’t bother them at all this year. The same way tornadoes cut narrow paths—so an outhouse would be left standing alongside a house blown to splinters—the locusts chewed up fields at random. They’d left this one alone.
Grandma told how her daddy had farmed her out to chop cotton that looked just like that by hand when she was still a teenager. Her sister Earle had to go to work in the fields too, but the three other girls stayed home and took singing lessons. They were pretty and expected to “make good marriages,” which didn’t mean they’d be happy, only that they wouldn’t have to farm. The sepia portrait of all five sisters in Grandma’s parlor photo shows five wispy blondes. Their seeming frailty made it nearly impossible to believe that the two youngest had been rented out to sharecroppers. They wore eyelet-lace necklines and had those loose-blown Victorian roses pinned to their slouchy Gibson girl hairdos. They were pale, translucent, and somebody had tinted the picture slightly so that their cheeks and the roses were a faint peach color.
In the middle of the cotton field, we stopped Dotty’s Cadillac and climbed out of the air-conditioning. Up close, the plants were near black and
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