Free Isle of Palms by Dorothea Benton Frank Page A

Don’t talk about it in front of me!
    I took off and ran upstairs to my room. I wanted life to be normal as fast as it could and listening to funeral plans wasn’t normal. I didn’t want to hear about it and I didn’t want to go to it either. I had lost my mother. Wasn’t that enough?
    It wasn’t long before Grandmother stuck her head in my room.
    “What you are doing? Why you don’t clean this room?”
    “I hate my room,” I said, “it’s ugly.”
    She looked around at my single bed, turquoise walls, and flowered curtains and didn’t disagree. She said, “Be glad you have a bed for sleeping, missy. Plenty of children in this world sleep on hard cold ground with raw turnips for supper. Your daddy slept in box for keeping apples, you know.”
    “A crate,” I said. I didn’t really mean to correct her English. It just came out of my mouth.
    “Yes,” she said, “crate.”
    I just looked at her. She was on the verge of another story of her personal suffering. My angry jaw dared her to tell it. Didn’t she know how I felt? No, Grandmother Violet was not a geyser of healing warm waters for me, her only granddaughter. Or anybody else. She skipped the lecture but for the rest of the day, at every chance, she would remark in a whisper how frightened she was that I looked like my momma. Her thoughts hung in every room like a dreary dampness brewed with dangerous herbs.
    “Before God, I tell you, she is looking just like Mary Beth, Douglas,” she said. “You better do something or she is winding up just like her!”
    In her mind I was guilty of some genetic sin, like Eve’s child. I knew from the start that I would be well advised to stay out of her way. However, may I just say that despite my anxiety over her arrival, I was completely surprised that she thought I looked like my mother. I had never been told that and thought it was a wonderful revelation. To her it was anything but a compliment.
    My mother’s looks were how she had met and snagged my daddy. They were introduced at the Water Festival in Beaufort and started dating. She was the Assistant Queen or something and Daddy had been invited to some party for the Queen’s Court. Even though he was a lot older than she was, they fell in love. If I would ever remind Daddy of my momma it was okay with me. He loved her like mad, even if she didn’t love him back. You see, I was born in the Land of Beauty Queens. There was a Peach Festival, a Watermelon Festival, and a festival to celebrate everything we grew, including azaleas. All these festivals had parades, parties, Queens, and Queen’s Courts. Beauty was highly valued by most adults I knew, whether it had to do with their yards, their dogs, or their daughters. When it came to daughters, they were expected to be, at the very least, well groomed and without vanity. That was one difference between Momma and me. I was groomed; she was vain. Early on I had made a vow to never become vain because in my young mind I had somehow linked it to self-centeredness, which led to loving yourself too much and not having any left over for others. I wasn’t stupid; I was dejected.
    Unfortunately, I had to face it; there was still the matter of my momma’s funeral the next day. All I remember is that I went and that the church was very hot and crowded. And that I was wearing my yellow dress, which I would never wear again.
    I just couldn’t get it through my thick head that Momma was really dead, even though there was a brass-handled, mahogany coffin right in front of me. I didn’t cry one single tear, until we got to the cemetery. Then I wailed like a baby. The minute I saw that box go into the ground, I started screaming.
    “Momma! Momma! No! Momma, please, no!”
    I was terrorized and out of control. I wanted my momma back. How could she ever become the mother I wanted and needed her to become if she was dead? For the first time in my life, I was hopeless.
    Daddy, and even Grandmother, put their arms around me and