You Girls

We were almost there. After we crossed Fish River Bridge, then passed the migrant workers hauling burlap sacks of potatoes out of the dusty fields and onto flatbed trucks, it was only ten miles to Mama Dot's. Usually, when my mother, sister, and I arrived, Mama Dot would be sitting in the green straight-backed chair beside the piano, listening intently as she finished up a lesson with Susie or Trudy or Anne-Marie, or she'd be in the kitchen scraping carrots or mixing organic flour with milk and blackstrap molasses for her molasses cookies, the ones we craved at recitals.

But today—the day I'd slip free of my ordinary life—we raced up the steps, across the screen porch, and through the open door to find Mama Dot slumped on the rattan couch with its faded tangerine cushions, her legs crossed at the ankles, one arm crooked behind her head of cropped gray hair. "You girls come on in," she said, raising her head but not sitting up. She closed her eyes as if retreating to her afternoon nap. "There are cookies in the kitchen, girls. Go on and get yourselves a plate."

From the kitchen we heard Mama Dot talking with our mother, murmuring about stomach cramps and aching breasts, about soiled morning sheets, all things that happened on her "female days," symptoms that made her take to the couch, more resigned than resentful, her face pale, exhaustion circling her eyes with deepening shadows.

As I ate my cookies, I had no premonition that today would be any different from other lessons. I simply stared out the window at the rough woven baskets perched on the mossy brick wall perpendicular to the back door—baskets often full of dried cotton bolls, gray-white hairy pods that were oddly beautiful, or bunches of yellow and purple wildflowers, or old machine parts that Uncle Kenny, Mama Dot's husband, collected. Beyond the wall, pecan trees and fig trees and apple trees rose beside a sprawling vegetable garden and a clothesline strung between two jack pines. And beyond that, a mystery of live oaks and brush known as "the woods."

I knew when we came back into the living room that Mama Dot would be sitting with her knees bunched together and wearing her uniform of olive or khaki Bermuda shorts (earth tones, though we wouldn't have used that word back then) and a knit shirt—not a T-shirt—with a small rounded collar that lay limp against her collarbones. Always she wore brown, lace-up orthopedic shoes that made her look sturdy and sensible, as if she'd cast aside frivolous things—high heels and open-toed sandals and even flip-flops—for more solid footing. Though I wouldn't have said so back then, it seemed to me she'd cast aside femininity as well—or at least the florid femininity that held sway in the 1950s South, where women favored dresses that revealed a swell of breasts and hips, tapered skirts that fit snug over firm, girdled buttocks (I almost wrote "butt," but we wouldn't have used that word either). Mama Dot never wore girdles or stockings or plunging necklines, never put on lipstick or mascara or rolled her hair. Her hair, cut short with a thicket of bangs like Mamie Eisenhower's, accented her high cheekbones and fierce hazel eyes. And yet I knew she was beautiful, not because of her fine, chiseled features—the aquiline nose, the clean arched brows beneath a high forehead, the small bud of a mouth—but because of the intensity of her gaze: those alert, penetrating eyes that said, "I see you. I see what no one else can see."

After our mother left, Mama Dot made a cup of tea, and we started our lesson as if the "female days" had never been, as if only music and pleasure held sway, the downstairs windows opened wider, the smell of honeysuckle and lemon in the air, the small piano light turned on. I know this can't be so . . . and yet in my memory the adult...