Free Ugly Ways by Tina McElroy Ansa

no one pointed out her compulsions. Mudear was the only one who ever said, "Girl, what in the hell are you doing tapping your foot five times on the doorjamb? I have raised a fool." It never dawned on Emily that she had been doing these routines so long, touching a curl in the front of her hair five times, brushing down the hairs of her right eyebrow five times before checking a file, that they seemed part of her makeup, not some alien neurotic compulsions. Just how Emily was.
    This evening, just as it had begun to rain again, Emily had headed instinctively for the banks of the Ocawatchee River when she left Mudear's house. It was where she liked to be when she had something to figure out as well as when she considered suicide. And now, with the news of Annie Ruth's pregnancy—a pregnancy that her younger sister had the nerve to think of letting go to completion—on top of Mudear's death, Emily knew she really had something to ponder.
    She had only been pregnant once as far as she knew and that pregnancy and her reaction to it had helped to end her second marriage. She never was any good at lying so when her husband, Ron, had asked her if she had really fallen down the steps of their garden apartment or if she had had an abortion, she had told him the truth.
    After that, no matter what she said to him, his reply was the same: "You flushed
my
baby down the toilet stool."
    When she had told her parents her marriage was over, Mudear had said to her, "It's no surprise to me."
    Besides the fact that Mudear thought Ron was crazy, she had been told by Annie Ruth that when he had come to the house the first time for dinner—Mudear, of course, didn't come downstairs for the meal—he had stirred his iced tea with his fork. He had simply slipped it in his mouth to wipe off the few grains of long-grained rice and brown fried-chicken gravy, stuck it in the tall glass of tea, and stirred. Mudear was not forgiving.
    "Daughter, if you marry some man who don't know how to use a simple eating utensil right," Mudear had told Emily at the time, "then you a bigger fool than I been saying all these years."
    Mudear never fully forgave Emily for marrying Ron. Emily didn't think she really cared whether or not one of her girls married what mothers in Sherwood Forest called a "professional man." But she had overheard Mudear's only friend, Carrie, whom she called "Cut," bragging to her over the telephone about a niece of hers marrying a "pharmacy" from Xavier University. And Emily had always felt in her heart that Mudear might have been a bit more generous if Ron had not worked fixing cars for a living, whether or not he knew how to use a knife and fork.
    But his table manners were not the problem for Emily in their marriage. Ron, they all discovered too late to save Emily, was as crazy as his wife.
    "He can't seem to let it go," Emily had told her sisters on one of their regular telephone conference calls of Ron's experience in Vietnam. When he began wearing camouflage fatigues to his job as a mechanic, no one paid much attention. But when Emily finally told Betty and Annie Ruth that he was wearing the things day and night, even to bed, she knew she was really in trouble. And so was he.
    "I got to wash the dishes every night, not just scrape and stack 'em. He can't stand the smell of rotting anything. He says it reminds him of death and of rotting flesh. And the sound of the dishwasher reminds him of the whir of Huey helicopters twirling overhead to spray him with red-hot tracers. So, I got my hands back in dishwater just like when we were girls."
    "Bless her heart," Annie Ruth told Betty on the phone later, "I guess it's like the shrinks say, we do all marry our mothers."
    Mudear had insisted that Emily do the dishes for the household the whole time the girls were growing up. Emily's long slender model's hands slipped in and out of the soapy Lux suds with grudging efficiency as Mudear held forth from her perch on the sofa. "Now, Emily