Ugly Ways Read Free

before all the Lovejoys were seen running up and down the streets of Sherwood Forest half-naked with their hair standing on top of their heads. Some said the whole family had "walking insanity" like other folks had "walking pneumonia." They still went about their daily routines, but as far as people in Mulberry were concerned all the Lovejoys were walking-, talking-, working-, shopping-crazy.
    Some townspeople swore you could see it in the way Emily talked ... through clenched teeth. She also had, even as a child, the habit of unconsciously biting her bottom lip while she thought something over. These habits lent everything she said—even the most mundane statements—an intensity that she rarely wished to express.
    Some of her grammar school teachers grew to hate her for her wild eyes and lip biting. "Look at her back there, looking wise and otherwise," Miss Leslie, her second-grade teacher, had muttered to herself at least twice a week for one whole school year.
    Emily never went so far as to live up to her mother's epithet of a "raving, ranting maniac." But she came as close to it as she dared and still have enough of an edge to back off. In one of her recurring dreams, Betty saw Emily flitting on the precipice of craziness, an actual ravine. "What an unbelievably insane, foolish thing to do," she remembered saying in her dream. Even awake, when Emily talked, sometimes, Betty could see her just flouncing up to the fanged monster image of craziness and shimmying her shoulders at it. Then, jerking away at the last minute just as insanity reached out its claw for her. She flirted with it.
    It was Emily of the 4:00 A.M. long-distance calls. "Now, tell me, Betty, now tell me. Now, if a woman loves a man and she does all she can for him and she tries to make him happy, then, shouldn't that man love her back? Now, tell me, now, isn't that the way it should be?"
    Betty would be so sleepy. "Well, Em-Em," Betty would say, trying to speak as if it were noon straight up and she didn't have to rise in a few hours and open up her beauty shop and do some heads. "You know it doesn't always work out that way."
    "But if you love him, if he's married or not, it doesn't matter, does it? If you love him and you do all you can for him and you're there for him. Now, tell me, shouldn't that man love you back?"
    Betty would even fall into the soft, calm manner of speaking she had used with Emily since childhood, using the pet name for her middle sister, "Em-Em." Her use of it sometimes forced Emily into seeing that she was just talking to her sister Betty, not to her psychiatrist, Dr. Axelton, or to a palm reader or priestess who professed to have all the answers.
    It was Emily who drove around her neighborhood in Southwest Atlanta at various hours of the day and night, looking for all the world like a wolf clutching the steering wheel of her red Datsun, her eyes darting dangerously here and there, always in search of something. Atlanta was not so far away. The stories got back to Mulberry.
    But it wasn't Emily who went first. It was Annie Ruth. Two years before. Everyone called it a nervous breakdown. Mudear called it a heart attack.
    Annie Ruth, an anchor at a television station in Washington, D.C., at the time, checked into an expensive private clinic in Virginia for a rest. Then, when she checked out two weeks later, she took the anchor job at the Los Angeles station that had been trying to hire her for nearly a year.
    The word of Annie Ruth's breakdown spread quickly in Mulberry. Mudear went right to work. Over the phone she told Carrie, the one woman she still talked with in town and who still talked with her, "Cut, my baby done gone and had a heart attack. Working in that fast-paced northern city, all that stress and overtime and all that. You know, Carrie, all my girls are working women."
    Mudear couldn't help it. She went with the strength. That had been her life's philosophy, at least since her youngest was five, and she much