The Improper Life of Bezillia Grove (2 page)

With my sister and Baby Stella neatly tucked in the backseat, Nathaniel took his position behind the steering wheel and carefully guided the car onto the main road. And while my mother drank her morning coffee and made phone calls from her bed, I’d press my nose against the car window and try to melt into the world on the other side of the glass.

My mother, Elizabeth Mabel Morgan, was the only child born to Mabel and Macon Morgan, simple people whose family tree was rooted as deeply in the Tennessee dirt as the Groves’. But since none of the Morgans had shared a bottle of whiskey with Andrew Jackson or hunted bears with Davy Crockett, no one cared about their family tree, which had been thriving on the same small spot of earth about thirty miles outside of town. Some years ago now, the Army Corps of Engineers had dammed the Cumberland River, turning their family homestead into valuable lakefront property. And almost as quickly as the water filled that valley, leaving my grandparents’ house sitting on the southern edge of Old Hickory Lake, my mother’s disdain for her childhood home grew into a much more treasured respect.

Mother never said much of anything nice about her parents until the first of every August, when she announced that my sister and I would be spending the month with Nana and Pop. We ought to be by the water during the hottest days of the summer, she’d say, trying to sound as though she was genuinely concerned about her daughters’ welfare. It was good for our lungs and our complexions, she’d say and then hold my chin in her hand, searching for any imperfections. Mother must have truly believed in the healing powers of the water, because the minute Nathaniel loaded our suitcases into the trunk of the car, she packed her own bags and headed to Sea Island, alone.

Actually, I could not imagine my mother, who taught us to recite the rules of etiquette more fluidly than the Lord’s Prayer, ever running barefoot in the grass and catching lightning bugs with her bare hands, all the things Nana claimed her daughter did when she was a little girl. Before, my grandmother would say, she turned angry and bitter. All I knew was that my mother ran away from home when she was barely sixteen years old. Nana said she left nothing but a shoe box filled with old letters from her boyfriend and a tearstained note taped to her bedroom door. She said she was going to Paris or Hollywood, but she got only as far as Nashville.

Apparently she was working as a salesclerk at the Vanderbilt University bookstore when a fourth-year undergraduate with a handsome smile and an expensive watch on his wrist came looking for a chemistry book. My mother quickly added it all up and told him that she had taken the semester off to pursue an independent study in Renaissance art and that the chemistry books were on the top shelf in the back of the store. My father bought the book, but I’m not sure he ever looked past my mother’s hazel eyes and generous bustline. They were married only seven months later in an elaborate ceremony attended by hundreds of Nashvillians eager to meet the beautiful girl with a supposed interest in art and an obscure past who had mesmerized the future Dr. Grove.

And while my father went to medical school, my mother joined the Junior League and the garden club and anything else she deemed worthy of her new position as Mrs. Charles Goodman Grove V. Nathaniel told me that when Mother first came to Grove Hill, she didn’t even know how to set the table properly, hadn’t even seen a real cloth napkin. He showed her where to put the fork and the knife and how to sit at the table like a real lady. And in no time at all, she learned to host the perfect luncheon, write the perfect note, raise the perfect children, and all the while, maintain the perfect smile. In the end, she probably worked harder than my father.

At some point along the way, Mother exchanged her afternoon coffee for a gin and tonic, served with a fresh slice of lime and freshly crushed ice that Nathaniel hammered into small pieces on the back porch. He guessed that my mother’s volunteer work was real demanding and that she needed a little glass of relaxation in the afternoon. But we both knew that Mother with a coffee cup in her hand was not a particularly kind or attentive person and that Mother with a gin and tonic in her hand was simply mean and withdrawn. I didn’t really care for either but learned to tolerate both.

Late at night, when the gin had fully consumed my mother’s heart, she would scold me for merely walking past her on the way to my bedroom. She said my feet were too heavy on the floor, and I needed to walk like a lady and not one of those
damn
horses loafing about in the field. I’d tiptoe to my room and throw myself across the bed, pretending to be a beautiful princess waiting for some handsome prince to rescue me from the wicked witch who slept down the hall. But the prince never came, nor did my father, who stayed at the hospital long after dark, preferring to save people he knew very little about.

Actually, I was never really sure if my parents loved or hated each other. One New Year’s Eve, I saw them kiss fully on the lips, but most days they merely lived side by side, sharing the same space and nothing more. Father seemed almost awkward around my mother, never quite certain of what to say or do. So he usually said and did nothing. And when he died, I couldn’t help but wonder if my mother’s tears were from knowing that she would never feel his touch again or from missing the daily habit of disliking him.

Had it not been for my cousin Cornelia, who was three years older to the day, I would never have learned anything about true and lasting love. By the time she was twelve, Cornelia was wearing lipstick and mascara to school and had already kissed several boys behind the coatrack. She didn’t have a mother—well, not one that really cared about her. In that way, we were very much alike. She said that she learned all she needed to know about being a woman from reading
Seventeen
and that I would surely benefit from her wisdom and experience. My cousin never threw away an issue of that magazine. It was like some sort of Bible that was specially delivered by the United States Postal Service, one chapter at a time, every word sacred and holy.

Fortunately, Cornelia and her father lived just five miles from my house on ten acres of land that my grandfather left his younger son when he died. It may not have seemed as grand a gift as Grove Hill, but the land came with no liens or judgments attached, leaving some to wonder if Uncle Thad had truly been his favorite. Our fathers were brothers but only thanks to a similar genetic code. Uncle Thad was strong and broad-shouldered with rough, callused hands just like Nathaniel’s. He wore his hair long, almost to his shoulders, and laughed and cried freely, never once worrying what somebody else might think.

He went to college in the North Carolina mountains, spending most of his days writing poetry and walking in the woods, searching for the earth’s inspiration—at least that’s what Cornelia told me. Mother said all he was doing was living in some filthy commune and wasting his father’s money. Either way, he met a girl and fell in love, and nine months later Cornelia was born. But Cornelia’s mother was an artist and had already planned to study painting in New York with Rothko and Motherwell. She wasn’t sure she could care for a newborn as long as her artistic spirit was yearning to be nurtured. So after Cornelia was born, her mother and father parted ways, and Uncle Thad brought his baby girl back to Tennessee, genuinely believing that someday the great spirit of the universe would see fit to reunite the three, who were always bound by a never-ending love—at least that’s what Cornelia said.

Uncle Thad always seemed to have plenty of time for his daughter, reading to her at night, taking her on long walks through the woods, catching frogs in the creek. Nothing ever seemed more important to him than being with her. But a man’s got to make a living, he said. And before long, he started raising some kind of fancy chickens with a funny name. Buff Orpingtons, I think. Cornelia and I called them Buffy Orphans because they acted more like wayward children, wandering all over the place, even in the house. When they started laying these big brown eggs, Uncle Thad called them his golden geese. At first he gave more eggs away than he could sell or scramble, but before long he was shipping cartons of them all over the country, mostly to California.

A few years later, he started keeping bees and harvesting honey. He called that liquid gold and mixed it into fancy soaps and pretty-smelling lotions. He said he learned that if he could put the word
organic
on the label, he could find some overindulged fool to pay top dollar for it. People called my uncle strange. I knew they did. But I thought he was wonderful. And when Cornelia wanted to wear makeup, Uncle Thad said it wasn’t his place to limit his daughter’s creative expression, although he always added that she was beautiful just the way God made her.

So needless to say, when I kissed a boy for the very first time behind the coatrack in Mrs. Dempsey’s sixth-grade classroom, it was Cornelia I trusted with my secret. Oh, it was not a passionate kiss or an enduring kiss. It was not much more than a quick peck on the right cheek, stolen between recess and reading. But it was the first indication that I would lead my life guided by my heart and a fierce determination to know something other than what circumstance surely would have allowed me.

“Bezellia Grove, I am so proud of you,” she said as she leapt onto her bed. “You’re becoming a woman right before my very eyes. You’ll be starting your period before you know it. You will. Just wait and see. Now that you’re kissing and all, it’s bound to happen soon.” I honestly did feel more like a woman, even if I hadn’t started buying pads and tampons.

“When you get a little older, guess what?” my cousin asked as she always did, never waiting for an answer. “You’re going to kiss Tommy Blanton with your mouth wide open, tongues touching and everything. It’s called French kissing and for a very good reason. You know why? It’s very passionate, like everything French. But for now, keep that trap of yours locked tight. You don’t want to get a bad reputation before you even get started. Trust me.”

I couldn’t imagine kissing a boy with my mouth wide open, nor did I understand why opening my mouth would lead to a bad reputation or a love of anything French. What I did know was that Tommy’s cheek had felt so soft under my lips that I wanted to kiss him again and again just so I could memorize the touch of his skin. I remembered pulling my head back from his face and standing perfectly still in his presence, afraid to open my eyes, afraid I had scared the boy who had seemed, until now, more interested in playing tetherball than in kissing a girl. But just as that moment of uncertainty lingered into awkwardness, I had felt something warm on my cheek. It was Tommy Blanton’s lips, his rough, dry, cracked lips.

“Tommy and Bezellia sittin’ in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G. First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes …,” sang a chorus of classmates who had suddenly swarmed behind the coatrack, not giving either one of us time to acknowledge the other.

Tossing my hair behind my shoulder, I turned and walked away, ignoring both the song and Tommy’s embarrassed plea to them to stop. I took my seat at my desk and opened my arithmetic workbook.
Underline with a red pencil every equation on the page that contains a remainder
. Red. The color of passion and love.

At the end of the day, Nathaniel was patiently waiting for me at the front of the hookup line, reading the afternoon newspaper with one eye and watching for me with the other. Today I desperately wanted him to be the last car in the driveway so I could jump rope with the other girls and whisper in their ears about love and Tommy Blanton, the remnant of his kiss still warm on my cheek.

“Miss Bezellia,” Nathaniel cried, his voice dragging me from deep within a cluster of girls gathered on the sidewalk. “Sweet Jesus, child,” he hollered as I walked toward the car, “you not see me sitting right here? What’d you learn in that classroom today anyway?”

“Same old stuff,” I snapped as I climbed into the back of the Cadillac, slamming the door behind me.

“Uh-uh. Not believing that. You learned something new today. I see it in your face,” he said as he leaned into the front seat, all the while studying me real hard like he was trying to break some secret code.

“Nathaniel! Stop looking at me like that!”

“Oh, Lord, I got it now. You’re a girl in love.”

“I am not.”

“You know I’ve got three girls of my own, Miss Bezellia. I know the look. C’mon, what’s his name?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Just drive the car, Nathaniel,” I ordered, my tone suddenly sounding shrill and cutting, just like my mother’s.

“Miss Bezellia, there’s no harm in liking a boy or him liking you back for that matter,” Nathaniel said, gently reminding me that he deserved more respect than I had offered. Then he turned his attention forward and steered the car toward the road. He let out a slow and steady breath and settled into a familiar position—one hand firmly on the steering wheel, the other relaxed by his side.

I had spent a lot of time studying the back of Nathaniel’s head. He had thick black hair cut real short. But right on top he had a small bald spot, not much bigger than a quarter. He said it had always been that way, even when he was a little boy. His mother told him that was the very spot where the angel had kissed her son before delivering him to earth. So from where I was sitting in the back of the Cadillac, I wanted to believe with all my heart that this was a head that could be trusted.

I grabbed the edge of the seat with both hands and pulled myself forward and let my secret slide right out of my mouth. “It’s Tommy. Tommy Blanton.” There. There it was. Now my secret was floating out in the heavens for anyone to know it. I rested against the hot leather seat, feeling proud and breathless all at the same time, waiting for Nathaniel to recognize my truest confession.

He looked surprised at first, as though the name rang a bell. He put both hands on the wheel and drove all the way to Hillsboro Pike, squinting his eyes and occasionally tapping his left hand against the wheel. He must have studied that name backward and forward for three or four miles before nodding his head in revelation.