The Angry Woman Suite Read Free Page A

olive-colored skin instead of Grandma and Aunt Rose’s alabaster skin, and she had a look: “Like majesty,” Papa described it, or as Grandma put it, like Mother would prefer choking to death on her own spit before hollering. Mother didn’t actually say she was Queen of the Nile (what Aunt Rose called her): she didn’t have to. Mother’s disdain for the way we lived had a whole life of its own, needing no words, reverberating throughout our kitchen louder than any yelling, shining straight through those fancy outfits of hers she sewed together late into the night.
    “Diana,” Grandma would sniff between pinochle hands, cigarette dangling from her lips, this salvo saved for right after Mother was out the door for work, “is a lady. Her shit don’t stink.”
    My mother was also a great magazine reader, but Grandma and Aunt Rose read dirty books (Mother said), like “Tropic of Cancer , ” andMother said I was not to go anywhere near their reading material, nor was I to say “damn” just because Grandmother and Aunt Rose did. It was a poor choice of words. And neither was I to go outside without getting dressed first. Until Mother laid down that particular law, it had never occurred to me that getting dressed was a prerequisite for the day. Papa hadn’t mentioned it, and Grandma and Aunt Rose thought nothing of being in bathrobes when people dropped by. In fact, my grandmother was never fully dressed, with brassiere, stockings and shoes on, until she put on her starched nurse’s uniform for work, just as I was going to bed. But ladies, Mother whispered behind our bedroom door, did not get their days and nights mixed up even if it was—no, especially if it was work-related—and neither did they entertain in bathrobes with no lipstick on and hair up in pin curls and bosoms jiggling. They did not smoke standing up, or, God forbid, while walking. They did not pick their teeth with toothpicks, laugh loudly, or drink whiskey out of jelly glasses the way Aunt Rose did, or talk about men all the time, also like Aunt Rose. It said so in those magazines Mother read aloud to me and Bean, as if Bean understood any of this, the same magazines that stipulated the arts of keeping one’s voice well-modulated, the wearing of hats and gloves, what constituted attractive color schemes and table settings, and how many fingertip towels were to be in a well-stocked linen closet. I was pretty sure we didn’t have a linen closet, let alone fingertip towels, but I thought my mother the smartest thing on God’s green earth, knowing so much.
    “Not to say your grandmother and Aunt Rose aren’t the real McCoy,” Mother would say, tossing her head and making her dark hair ripple. “Because they are the real McCoy, Elyse. But they show a certain lack of rearing. Now don’t ever tell them I said that,” Mother warned. “It would only hurt Grandma and Aunt Rose’s feelings and that’s not the point. The point is, Elyse, we are not trash.”
    My mother told me she’d met Francis before he met her. When I said that sounded silly, Mother said it wasn’t, cross her heart. Francis Grayson had been the country’s most famous bandleader, and everyone in the world had known who he was.
    “Uncle Francis, er, Daddy Francis … was famous? Like Santa Claus, you mean?”
    “Just ‘Daddy,’ Elyse. Not Daddy Francis. And, yes, pretty much like Santa Claus. Your daddy was very, very famous. Daddy was a star, Elyse. A huge star.”
    One night, Mother said, she and Aunt Rose had gone to see Daddy’s orchestra play at the Memorial Auditorium, and it was there, after the show, that they’d been introduced. Properly introduced, Mother stressed. Daddy had invited her and Aunt Rose to dinner, but something had come up and instead of dinner, Daddy had left town.
    “Well, then, how’d you and Daddy meet again?”
    Some years later, Mother explained, Daddy had joined the Air Force to avoid the draft and he’d been sent to the air base in