Bless Her Heart

You can fall in love with a rich boy as easy as a poor one. That’s what Mother always said. Even so, she married a poor city boy and began a life of blue-collar poverty, ending up with a houseful the likes of us. She shared plenty of motherisms she said I needed to hear growing up: “Boys don’t like girls smarter than them” and “Become a nurse—America needs more nurses.” Never missed a chance to outwit my dad. Never became a nurse either. Since she hadn’t followed her own advice about anything, I didn’t feel inclined to myself. I’d soon learn that preconceptions, hers and mine, about boys, rich and poor, were as useful as cauliflower in your pole corn.

According to her, I gave my heart away too fast. I did crush on at least a half dozen boys in high school. Lying in bed at night with the covers yanked over my head, I’d imagine their faces—all those smooth cheeks and crooked smiles, some with dimples, some as pretty as girls. Never gave a second thought as to whether they came from families with money or were “poor sorts”—Mother’s not-so-nice name for them.

If they were poor sorts, what were we? We bought all our furniture at auction. Whenever my dad picked off a varmint with his shotgun, groundhog and sometimes pigeon, we ate it. Every one of us wore hand-me-downs. Our ramshackle old farmhouse burned through too much heating oil during long Pennsylvania winters and sat on too much property to keep tidy during the summer. Nobody starved or went naked, but we were a hair’s breadth from poor sorts.

Mother hated hard-scrabble farm life. Hardly anything pleased her. Throughout my high school years, she seemed unhappy, which I never understood until much later in life when I went through the change myself.

By my senior year, I’d had enough of her carping about the front porch needing repair and the lawn looking like an Amazonian jungle. About rich and poor boys and what I planned to do with my life.

“Just so you know,” I told her the week I got a robe for graduation, “I have a plan.”

“No volunteering at Chestnut Valley this summer, Ginna. You need money for school.” She pointed to the kitchen chair. “Hop up there so I can see if your gown needs hemming.”

I hadn’t planned on working at Chestnut Valley, so it wasn’t worth arguing the point. Someday, I’d set my mother straight that working there had been good for me. I grew early varieties of plants like strawflowers, hollyhocks, and flowering sweet pea from Colonial times that might have disappeared forever if the farm museum hadn’t preserved them.

I hiked up my robe and climbed onto the kitchen chair, clutching the back to steady myself.

“Face me,” she barked, “so I can get a good look.”

Towering over Mother, I realized it was time to spring my plan on her. “I want to stay with Aunt Cille for the summer.”

My father’s older sister, full name Lucille, lived in a trailer park in the Carolina Piedmont outside Raleigh. Her son Ben had married his high school sweetheart Sara and moved out over the winter. I knew she had an extra bedroom in her double-wide if she hadn’t turned it into a sewing room already.

“You can’t go down there. Subject closed!” Mother said through several straight pins. She removed one and slipped it into the hem. “Don’t move.”

I didn’t bring up the Aunt Cille arrangement until a week later when we were picking early strawberries, which usually put Mother in a better mood. We were moving down the rows in a patch she planted herself. May had been rainy. Then we had a string of warm days and cool nights—perfect for growing fat, juicy berries.

“Mother, Aunt Cille wants me to move in with her.”

Her face flushed pink—a heat flash probably. “She doesn’t have the money to support you.”

Five years ago, Aunt Cille had moved out of a single-family home into a trailer park when she gave up her job as a prison guard to be a receptionist with the Baptist State Convention. “Who knows what she’s doing, leaving a good job like that?” Mother had said. “I guess she’s depending on the Lord to supply her needs.”

Since my fingers were occupied picking berries, I crossed my ankles for good luck. “I’ll use my graduation money for a bus ticket. I won’t be a drain on her.”

“She never bounced back after Uncle Edward cheated on her with a younger woman.” Mother wiped her forehead with the back of her hand. “She can be a pill, Ginna. Very set in her ways sometimes.”

“I know she’s had hardships. I’ll get a job.” Living with Mother for the last eighteen years was fine training for moving in with Aunt Cille.

“Ginna, you are so naïve about the ways of the world.”

Motherism number forty-two.

“If I don’t take chances, Mother, how am I going to learn anything?”

Mother snorted. “What are you going to do down there? Lay bricks? Be a surgeon?”

This seemed unfair. I'd only had babysitting jobs in high school because she wanted me to take part in activities like yearbook and plays, which is how I’d met all those boys in the first place. Since her father had died young, her mother was forced to be a domestic, cleaning summer homes in the Catskills. Throughout high school, Mother had to work for a chocolatier to help out, which actually sounded like fun, but it wasn’t my story to tell or my cross to bear. “I want you to have all the opportunities I never had,” she’d always insisted.

As I inspected the bottom-most leaves for stragglers, I prepared what to say next. “Aunt Cille said there’s lots of jobs in the Raleigh paper each week.”

She shrugged—she was weakening. “You’ll need a car to keep a job. Ever think of that?”

“Ben’s loaning me his. Sara’s not working this summer because she’s due in September.” I gave the plant a once-over. Definitely time to move on. “He wants me to come down. He says it’d be good for Aunt Cille.”

Mother wiped some dirt off the side of her nose. “Who’s going to do the mowing?”

This would force my brothers—the Rip Van Winkle twins—to help out more. “Boys can mow, too, Mother.”

“I’m glad you have all this figured out,” she said, sounding anything but glad. “I know the kind of summer jobs they have down there. Pea picking. How are you going to meet any nice boys picking peas?”

I couldn’t tell whether she was mad that I’d made plans behind her back or sad because she’d miss me. “I’ll wait tables.” I popped two berries into my mouth at once. Boy, were they sweet! “How hard can it be?”

“Ginna, don’t talk with your mouth full! How many years have I told you that?”

Not enough, apparently. And I knew full well what she meant by nice boys. I just never understood why my mother assumed that rich boys were nice. Hugging that berry bucket to my chest, I swore then I’d never date a rich boy—not even if he was the nicest, best-looking one on the whole planet—just to spite her.

“From Pennsyltucky, eh? That’s what we used to call it. When we were kids,” the manager of the Raleigh Waffle Shoppe said as he eyed my carefully-printed application. “You got experience?”

He leaned on the counter and gave me a no-tooth smirk, awaiting my answer.

“I waited tables back home.” The lie spooled like silk thread out of my mouth. It was really my friend Beth Ann who’d worked there. But I often stopped by after play rehearsals since the school bus dropped me off right in the parking lot. I’d watched her: all she had to do was write down orders, carry plates of food, and cut pie. I’d pretty much done all that at home. And acting had taught me how to make someone else’s story my own.

He narrowed his eyes. “If someone comes up to the counter and asks for pop,” he said, “what do you serve ’em?”

Today was my lucky day. Beth Ann’s family had moved to our town from Pittsburgh. “A soda,” I said like I heard people using it every day. “A soft drink.”

The smirking manager chuckled then. He hired me on the spot.

On weekends, I made real money at the Waffle Shoppe. I even made a friend, a divorcée named Tampa who called herself a mountain girl and said, “May I hep ye?” when she answered the phone.

That summer I needed someone to talk to, if only a little. The dishwasher was an older man that we would've called slow back home when we were being kind. He never talked to me. The smirking manager had greasy black hair and horn-rimmed glasses he tried to slide back up his nose by snorting and tossing his head. He sometimes bussed tables when it got really busy but mostly stayed in the back reading who-knows-what magazines. But Tampa was easy to talk to—as friendly as a cat with itchy ears.

She had coppery red-blonde hair, Titian #0437, which she pronounced Tahitian until I told her they were two different words. When customers complimented her hair color, she bragged about dyeing it herself, “In the kitchen sink, sugar.” Even when she wasn’t working, she wore it swept off her face, all teased up and shellacked into a wasp's nest. When she had a fistful of tips in her apron, she’d do a little step dance in the back and call out, “I’m flush y’all!” because it made the dishwasher laugh. She had three kids from three different fathers. Just when I was going to ask how she got her name, I overheard her tell a customer, “My mama allus wanted to see them racin’ dogs down thar. Our dogs jes’ laid on the porch, day in, day out—no-account hounds. Never did get to see them dogs runnin’. Named me Tampa anyway.”

She smoked cigarette after cigarette on breaks, sometimes during her shift when the manager was doing office work. A lot of people in North Carolina smoked. I began to think it was the state pastime.

“How come ye don’ smoke?” she asked me a few days after I started.

It was a disgusting habit. “Never tried it,” I told her instead.

“Lemme teach ye!” she offered. “Don’ wanna be a baby all yer life, now do ye?”

I passed on the smoking lessons. Instead I learned all about Hickory, North Carolina, where she grew up. It was halfway between Raleigh and Asheville and had a string of furniture stores where rich people from Asheville bought their dining room sets.

“Why’s it named Hickory?” I asked.

“How in hell should I know?” she said. “After the hickory switch Mama buried in my white ass.”

She was sassy with her male customers, too—the sassier she got, the bigger the tip. Once a trucker ordered some strawberry pie for dessert. “Lordy! Look at the size of them berries,” he said when she slid the plate in front of him. “Where do you get ’em, girl?

“Looka here,” she said, cocking one hip and sticking out her lower lip in a pout. “I just serve ’em. I don’ grow ’em.”

And he left her a ten-dollar tip!

Tampa and I might not have been friends back home. We might not have even liked each other. But in that Raleigh Waffle Shoppe during the summer of 1977, we were true pals.

After a month of waitressing, I’d saved one hundred and fifty dollars, enough to buy books for my first term at college. I hadn’t told Mother, but more and more thought I’d probably attend North Carolina State in the fall rather than come home. I could claim to be a resident by living with Aunt Cille and get in-state tuition.

One day, I drove myself around campus. It looked like a place I could be happy—tidy lawns and brick buildings, nice bushes and trees but no pretentious ivy-covered walls. Kind of plain Jane and kind of just right. They had a big horticulture program, and that’s what I wanted to study. I’d ask Aunt Cille about moving in with her for the duration of my college career that evening.

She’d arrived home before me—her car blocked the gravel driveway, and she had locked the front door. I let myself in with my key just in time to see her slam down the telephone receiver. “Ginna! Come here.”

Who’d she been talking to? Was it something I’d done? “Why was the door locked, Aunt Cille?”

She held out a prescription bottle. “What is that?” she whispered as if we were under FBI surveillance.

I took the pill container and glanced at the label. It said tetracycline, prescribed for Ben. The little seeds inside didn’t look like any acne medication I’d ever seen.

“Are they—” She choked out her next words. “Mary-jew-wanna seeds?”

The less I said here, the better. “Maybe.”

Aunt Cille’s face turned a purplish-red. Then she punched out the screen from the kitchen window and hurled the seeds into the backyard.

An ex-prison guard should have known to flush them down the toilet. You didn’t have to be a horticulture major to realize that seeds needed two things to grow and one of them is dirt. I could see the headline in the News and Observer now: BAPTIST NABBED FOR BACKYARD POT FARM.

She’d have to buy a new window screen. She needed stitches in her hand. I guess you lose all perspective when it’s your son’s mary-jew-wanna seeds.

I decided to ask her about staying in North Carolina another time.

Meanwhile, I set my sights on making more scratch at the diner. It was almost all I could think about. I worked extra shifts, filling in for Tampa when she had a family emergency, keeping so busy, I didn’t have time to spend any of it. I certainly didn’t have time to think about boys—rich, poor, short, tall, country boys, city boys—none of them. Until one Saturday evening in the middle of summer, when a certain stranger strolled into the Waffle Shoppe and slid into a booth in my section.

His face looked wind-burned like he’d been out in a tempest all day. His sandy blond hair fell into his eyes like an unclipped sheepdog’s and curled in wisps over his ears. When I came over with the order pad, he said he was ready. “Don’t need a menu. I want a butterscotch sundae, a waffle, scrambled eggs, and coffee. In that order.”

“Dessert first?” I said. But he didn’t even smile.

As I scribbled it all down, I stole a glance at his arms—long, muscular, browned but not burnt, the fine hairs bleached the color of white Karo syrup.

I came back in about fifteen minutes and laid the bill on the table. “How was your backwards meal?”

He smiled then. Maybe just to show me those teeth, straighter than fence posts. Or to show off the dimples that framed them, the one on the left cutting higher and deeper into his smooth-shaven cheek.

“Sit down for a minute.” He glanced at my nametag. “Ginna.”

I bit my lower lip. “I’m on duty.”

He cocked his head as if a thought just came to him. “What’re you doing tomorrow?”

“Uh, well—” I began. I had to go to church and Bible school with Aunt Cille unless I planned on rooming somewhere else for the summer. My cousins Ben and Sara expected me to “visit” on Sunday afternoons, which meant rocking on the front porch, playing guitars, and drinking sweet tea.

“Want to go sailing?” he asked.

I couldn’t think of anything I’d ever wanted to do more in my whole life than go sailing with the beautiful boy lounging in my booth. “I have plans.”

“Ever been sailing?” he asked.

I glanced over my shoulder and slipped into the opposite bench, the vinyl sticking to the backs of my bare legs. “I’m from Pennsylvania, a big farm. I’d have to go a long way in any direction to take out a sailboat.”

He smiled again. “That’s a yes?”

I stalled for time. “I don’t even know your name.”

“It’s Perry. I’m an architecture major at Chapel Hill.”

The way he said Chapel Hill implied I ought to know where it was and what it was. I nodded, to disguise my ignorance.

“We have this summer place on Lake Gaston. And a thirty-foot Catalina sloop that we moor at Morningstar. It sleeps six. I took it out this morning.”

Lake Gaston. Morningstar. A sailboat that sleeps six. The words rich boy popped into my head as if Mother had erected a billboard there. “Where’s your winter home?”

“Asheville,” he said. “You been there?”

“Heard of it.” I knew where people from Asheville bought their furniture, anyhow, thanks to Tampa.

“You have to see it in the fall. I miss it when I’m away at college.” Right in the middle of describing the turning leaves of the Blue Ridge Mountains, I got another table. After I put in their order, Perry caught my eye and pointed to his coffee cup. While I refilled it, I couldn’t decide which I wanted to see more—his summer home or his winter home. He’d just have to invite me to both.

“How about next Sunday?” he asked.

I didn’t want to like him. He was wealthy, or his parents were, and I'd promised myself never to date a rich boy because my mother insisted I should. “I’d like that,” I said.

He stood and picked up the bill from the checked oilcloth. “Pick you up around one. Where d’you live?”

I couldn’t let a boy with two houses and a sailboat pick me up at a trailer park even if it wasn’t my trailer. I moved in closer, so the other table wouldn’t hear. “I’ll meet you here instead.”

He let his fingers trail down my forearms until he found my hands, and tucked his bill and some money in them. He squeezed them, sending a jolt back up my arms and through my whole body. As he held my eyes in his, my body felt like sunlight, the way it glimmered on the water. Then he was gone as quickly as he came, through the glass doors, pouring his lean body into a little blue convertible. Through the dusty glass, I watched him drive away.

All week long, I thought about my date with Perry. I had to buy a swimsuit. I’d left my tank suit at home but hadn’t got up the nerve to sneak a new two-piece past Aunt Cille yet. On Tuesday, I asked Tampa what to wear to go sailing because I wanted her to ask me why. When she did, I sang like a mockingbird.

She frowned for a moment, considering. “Get on up to Belk’s and find ye a cotton top with big blue stripes that go this-a-way,” she instructed, drawing her hands across her chest. “It’s what them Frenchy magazines has when the models is draped all over boats and such.”

For about fifty dollars, I bought a boat-neck striped shirt, a matching bag, and a new bikini because Tampa told me, “If’n ye got it, flaunt it. And without a doubt, ye got it!” I thought I’d die parting with all that money earned in dimes and quarters. But how could I spend a hot summer day on a thirty-foot Catalina with a boy I dreamed about for four days without a bikini?

On Friday night, I painted my toenails red like my mother did when she planned something special with my dad. Then, on Saturday, between split shifts, I dashed off to the library to read about sailing. So many strange terms! I decided I could only remember a few. To “come about” meant to change course and put the wind on the other side of the sail. To “bear up” referred to steering a ship into the wind. To “make fast” meant to secure the lines. I’d have to help make the boat fast at the marina after our sail tomorrow.

Driving home to Aunt Cille’s, I imagined lounging on the front deck of the sailboat—the bow— in my new striped shirt, dreaming that Perry might touch my hands that way again, or even kiss me, while the wind off the lake whipped through our hair, cooling our overheated bodies.

Sunday school dragged on like a three-day tent revival. I had asked Aunt Cille if we could drive separately. I told her why.

Aunt Cille glared at me. “Does he know Jesus as his personal Savior?”

I suppose she had to ask that, being a Baptist and all, but I certainly hoped not. I just spent a week’s tips on a brand new bikini.

Finally, we said the closing prayer, and I was sprung. I hurried to the Waffle Shoppe and parked the old Maverick in the rear, grabbed my boat bag, and waited in one of Tampa’s booths, drinking sweet tea.

Tampa slid into the booth across and lit a cigarette. “Are ye ready for yer big date with Daddy Warbucks’ tow-head chile?”

“Tow-head?” I asked, slipping my hand over my nostrils. I knew about Daddy Warbucks. Who didn’t in the summer of 1977? “What’s a tow-head?”

“A blondie-haired boy. I don’t go for ’em. Don’t trust boys with light hair.”

I made a face that said, Of all times, please don’t tease me today.

She took a drag of her cigarette. “Get that stripey shirt I told ye ’bout?”

I nodded. “And a tote to match.” I lifted the boat bag off the seat, reached in, and pulled out my new suit, waving it like a flag of surrender.

She snatched it out of my hands. “Hoo-whee, that’s purty. Be a lot of places fer him to nibble on, ye wearin’ that teeny-tiny thang.”

My face felt like someone had put a match to it. I began wheezing like the Rip Van Winkles when they caught the croup.

“Look like yer gonna pass out.”

This happened once before when I ate too much birthday cake on an empty stomach.

“Ye need to go lie down?”

I shook my head, still gasping for breath.

“How ’bout a cigarette?” She took one from her apron pocket and offered it. “Allus calms my nerves.”

The thought of inhaling that smoke made me feel even sicker.

“Don’ tell me yer a virgin?” Tampa asked.

All I could think about was being alone with a college boy on a sailboat that slept six. Bile from my stomach rose into my throat.

She stubbed out her butt in the ashtray. “What’ye eat tidday?”

I groaned softly. “Nothing.”

“Acid stomach. I’ll put in an order of eggs.”

I groaned louder.

“Let me get ye some fresh tea,” she said, picking up my glass. “And settle yourself!”

Settle myself. I couldn’t let Perry see me all worked up like this.

Why was I so worked up? Because I nearly died waiting all week to see those dimples again. If that’s how love felt, I loved him.

Mother once said she knew the night she met my father that she was going to marry him. Now wouldn’t that be ironic, telling our children, Perry’s and mine, that I'd had the same experience as their grandmother?

If Perry proposed today, I wouldn’t agree to marry him right off. I’d say, “I’ll think about it,” even though I knew he was the one for me. If I’d known his last name—maybe it was Poindexter; he looked like a Poindexter—I’d have written “Mrs. Perry Poindexter” on the back of my order pad all week long in different ink colors. I wanted to marry Perry Poindexter. At that moment, I'd never felt more certain of anything in my life.

Tampa set a fresh glass of iced tea on the tabletop. “He’ll be comin’ soon. Maybe he had to go to Bible school jes’ like ye.”

Around two-thirty, Tampa lit another cigarette and blew a rope of smoke at the ceiling. A greasy exhaust vent sucked it up like a snake charmer’s trick. “Popeye the Sailor Man ain’t gonna show.”

I felt sharp pangs in my stomach. This time it was hunger. I ordered a tuna on toast and a glass of milk. Before I left, I slipped five dollars under the ketchup bottle since Tampa let me hang out in her booth all afternoon. But once I reached the county line, I had to pull over, because the tears made the yellow line on the road look wavy.

Why did I tell him I'm a farm girl? Didn’t I look like a one-house, no-boat, berry-picking yokel parading around the Waffle Shoppe in a cheap polyester uniform with no pantyhose and K-Mart shoes? Letting a complete stranger stroke my arms and squeeze my hands. I wiped the tears away with the back of my hand.

It wasn’t right, what he did. Perry Poindexter needed to know he couldn’t go around standing up girls just because Mummy and Daddy have two houses and a big boat.

I yanked open the glove compartment and rifled through it. A pack of stale cigarettes, some single-ply napkins. As luck would have it, Sara had a state map hiding at the very bottom. I unfolded it and found Raleigh, and then Lake Gaston. If the legend along the side was accurate, one of my knuckles meant a sixty-mile trip up Route 401. I’d be there in two hours.

By six-fifteen, I was just south of the lake. I wandered around Littleton in vain, needing directions to the marina. No matter. If I drove due north, I’d be in the middle of the lake. I had to hit a marina soon. When I did, I’d hang out and wait. Perry would have to bring his boat in before nightfall. Waiting for him to dock, I’d think of just the thing to say to shame him so he’d think long and hard before hurting another girl’s feelings.

A sign appeared that said, “Morningstar Marina,” with an arrow pointing right. Morningstar? He mentioned that place back at the diner last Saturday.

It was just like Pastor Cornell always said, Good luck favors the righteous.

Within minutes, I was parking my Maverick in the gravel lot. But no blue convertible in sight. Maybe Perry was driving another car—his family probably had a whole barn full of them. About a hundred sailboats were moored to several floating docks that jutted into the lake like flat-planked fingers. If I plopped myself on a bench dockside, I’d see everybody who came and went.

An older man, his face tanned to wallet leather, emerged from the clubhouse and strolled over. “You waitin' for someone?”

“Yes, I am.” The raw disappointment I felt leaving the Waffle Shoppe had churned itself into a white-hot anger.

“They expecting you?”

I wondered why it mattered to him who I waited for. “I’m a guest of Perry’s.”

He looked puzzled. “Perry?”

This guy was beginning to annoy me. “Perry, who docks his thirty-foot Catalina sloop at Morningstar when he’s not out on Lake Gaston,” I said. “He’ll be heading in soon. I need to help him dock his boat. You know, make it fast.”

The man smiled gently as if he knew a secret. “This Perry. What’s his last name?”

“I—I don’t know.” I struggled to my feet, face burning.

“Could you describe him?”

“He’s tall and tan and has blonde hair that curls around his ears,” I said, using my hands to demonstrate. “He drives a blue convertible.”

He winced. “The boy you described is named Kem. Kemmert Perry. He works at Marina Fuel and Supply, pumping gas. He doesn’t own a Catalina. Nobody in his family owns a Catalina,” he said, in a tone that sounded like he was talking to the dishwasher at the Waffle Shoppe. “Kem’s a storyteller. He goes on about his thirty-foot sloop, inviting girls to go sailing. There ain’t a shred of truth to it. Bless your heart. Best be heading home now.”

“Thanks,” I said with as much dignity as I could force into my voice. I turned back to him. “Just so you know, I had him figured for a phony all along.”

I learned a lot the summer I stayed with Aunt Cille. That I could always wait tables to support myself and get me through college. That sweet tea in the North was nothing like sweet tea in the South. That hundreds of marijuana seeds could fit in the same pill bottle that holds thirty tetracycline capsules. And that sitting out on the porch on Sunday afternoons, especially when Ben hauled out his guitar, was sheer pleasure. Life didn’t have to be fast to be fun.

But the hardest lesson I learned was that I was naïve about the ways of the world. Thereafter, I decided on three things: That I’d always use my full name, Virginia. That I'd buy my own house and boat someday, instead of just dreaming of someone sharing theirs with me. And that I’d never fall for a boy with dimples, rich or poor, ever again.