Back from Carolina I drove there on Thursday, to hang out with my grandma, who is the coolest person in the eastern part of that state. Highlights:
The drive there It’s seven and a freaking-half hours, no matter how you cut it. During the first part of the trip there, I always forget exactly what this means. I’m never prepared for the five hours or so on I-20 East from Atlanta, all of which looks ex-act-ly the same (flat, straight, car dealership and Jesus billboards), then about an hour on I-95 (South of the Border), then – finally - the most soul-crushing of all: I-70: The roughest only because you think you’re almost there: You do, you really do! Oh, how the arse, it aches. The lower back, strained and sweaty. The t-shirt, stained with coffee from six hours ago and the left pantleg, reeking of Regular Unleaded dribbled back in Columbia, South Carolina. Only: Nope. And no, my friend. You still have about an hour and a half. An hour and a half more of Jesus and cars, an hour and a half more of flat and straight; and if it’s nighttime, you can’t even see the Novelty-To-You-and-Hence-Pretty cotton-fields and old falling-down barns to your left and right. (Hell, I think they’re pretty, period, by the way.) Then it’s onto another, smaller highway, and then, finally, you turn off and into my grandma’s town, which is when you open your driver’s-side window and breathe in - *AH!* - because for some reason, no matter the time of year, the air there smells like the smell you’ve associated with her forever and ever. Like the air inside the bedroom your aunt and mom once shared that you sleep in now when you come. Something clean and earthy and musty all at once. It’s good to arrive.
Friday night = Pancake supper! Methodist Church Style. Here, I meet people who knew my mother “since she was younger than you!”, “since she married your daddy!” and “since before she was born!” I want to pull them all aside and grill them for an hour on the particulars of my mother and grandmother’s history as they know it. I’ve felt this almost insatiable hunger for that particular past, recently. A few years ago, I went to visit my grandma a couple times and interviewed her on tape and learned things I’d never known: stories of murders and suicides and elopements and crazy relations – just like any other family, I guess; except, with the settings right there, before me: (Outside a tiny, one-room church in the middle of a field: “This is the tree that Mama hitched our horse to every Sunday.” And, in the middle of nowhere, a nondescript white house on a highway on the way to barbeque near Hookerton, “That’s where that murder I told you bout took place.”)
She’s lived in Pitt and Greene Counties her whole life and is happy there, but my mother left to go to school at Chapel Hill, married a Yankee and intentionally lost her accent. Everything she has ever told me about her childhood has contained at least an implied eye-roll. So Friday night with my grandma in that fluorescent-lit basement, sopping up my Bisquick in Piggly-Wiggly Brand syrup, I am all eyes and ears and question-marks.
Saturday afternoon: Fiddle Dee-Dee. My aunt and uncle and mom got together to buy my grandma a high-definition t.v for Christmas along with some of her favorite movies on DVD. Chief among these is the Ultimate Four-Disk Set of
Gone With the Wind, her all-time favorite, “except for the end, where it gets sad.” So we watched it, and I’ve drawn the following conclusions:
1. Principle drawback: Well, of course, it’s racist as all get-out. Gotta love that part after the war where the menfolk have to go out and “scour” the woods of carpetbaggers and the bad, bad black men they’re abetting, because two of them assaulted Scarlett. Hello, Birth of a Klan!
2. Principle Draw: Goddamn, but: Vivien Leigh for four hours. Can you say “Hot Tamale”? Jeezle-pete.
3. I kinda like the enthusiasm with which my grandma insists she’s “just like” Scarlett, the whole time we’re watching the movie. My grandma’s the sort who takes dares but no crap. She’s had a rough history but now she speaks her mind and laughs a lot. “I like to be with the young people,” she says. (She’s ninety.) Last week apparently, the preacher at church had her neighbor wake her up when she nodded off. “Fell asleep, Elizabeth?” he said to her there in front of the congregation. “No,” she replied. “I was waiting for your sermon to start before I have my nap.”
But Scarlett? Puh-lease. Spirited, yes; and I like her a lot more than mealy-mouthed Melanie. But I hate that my grandma’s role-model choice for this movie was selfish, hysterical shrew or weak, wan, selfless mother-figure when she beats both by a long-shot.
4. Ashley? Lame.
5. Rhett? Well, he makes a good point. About midway through the movie’s first half, he says to Scarlett that she’s only hanging out with him because he’s the only man under 60 and over 17 who’s not off to battle. I guess I’d probably break down and do the same, but actually, he looks kind of like a ferret.
Saturday night, we stayed up drinking pink wine and my grandma called the guy I’m dating. She caught him in the pet supply store, buying cat litter. “Hey!” she said, trying not to laugh as I cackled beside her. “This is Alice’s crazy grandmama! Next time she’s here, I wanna see you, too! So, c’moan!” Far as I’m concerned, any guy who did not like my grandma would be kicked to the curb faster than you can say the phrase, “Carolina barbeque.” (That’s the good kind: Vinegar, no red sauce.) My last boyfriend, Hunter, she called the first time I visited her, shortly after moving in with him. “I’d better see a ring on her finger next time she comes!” she told him. She didn’t say that to last night’s guy, since we’re not living in sin. I haven’t talked to him yet since I’ve been back. But I’m sure it brightened his evening. She has that effect on people.
