selectivememoir

[selectivememoir]

Selective Memoir

Thursday, January 20, 2005

Mozelle Called (1)

I’d meant to tell her Mozelle’d called.

Since I’d flimflammed Mom into ("just for a while") leaving her home two hours away, Mozelle kept up these days only by phone. If she didn’t get hold of Margaret as quickly as she’d like, she’d call me, all worried - thoughtful, on the face of it.

Mozelle Mason is a woman of means, self-made, with a will wound deliberately and excruciatingly round her slight but steely frame. Flinty and frugal, with a Pentecostal imperative, she amassed her fortune.

She’s at least 102 and in suspiciously Faustian good health. Against nature and reason, she still works and wields authority as the proprietress of her two stores, The Gold ‘n’ Comb and the Golden Gallery. Both are strokes of evangelical entrepreneurial genius and are identical in concept: in the front half, the tchotchke-obsessed can sate themselves with Precious Moments™, Hummel™, Lladro™, Swarovski™, et al, while waiting for a style–n-set in the beauty parlor at the rear: kind of a QVC meets PTL meets the Emerald City.

Mozelle’s disposition emphasizes the “mean” in means. As is the wont of the pious-vain, she could turn her convicting guns on any sinner / competitor / covenant sister – and annihilate prey with her damning and benign curse: I’ll pray for you. A peer and fellow churchwoman of my grandmother, Dell, who’d been deceased since before Watergate, (Dell’d called her Sister Mason, or really just Mason), Mozelle kept the circle unbroken in her praying fists.

Dell had a curious, but come to find, common, practice of referring to other women by their last names. This was a strategy that successfully deodorized the siren perfume of a beautiful first name. Ostensibly borne out of modesty, this practice eliminated other women as potential rivals and served as a sort of Church-of-God burka. This said, the point would be moot in Mozelle’s case, unless “Mozelle” sounds a lot more alluring to you, dear reader, than it does to my ears. There were no Lydias, no Dorotheas, no Thalias in her social orbit. This garden grew only sturdy Flerds, Lones, and Myrts. Perhaps referring to last names was a kindness. Here’s an RC Cola toast to Teagues, Marshall, Wise, Baker, and countless others.

In that roll I mentioned Baker. Two things about Baker: of course, if you put a gun to my head I wouldn’t be able to tell you her first name. Anyway, Baker’s son, Eugene, shot his father for raping and abusing her. Details are sketchy, due to the whole affair being buried in church gossip archives. Eugene did some time in a mental institution, got out, lived with his mom and remained unemployable for the rest of his days. The thanks you get.

Baker’s neighbor had entertained in vaudeville as a contortionist. At my expressed admiration of it, she gave me a photograph of him, costumed as a princely frog, in a split, chest flat on a Persian rug, and frog face to his certainly spellbound audience. It’s framed and hangs on my wall even as you read this.

Selective Memoir

Friday, January 21, 2005

Fried Green Stigmata

In the latter years of my mother’s defiant and reckless independence, Mozelle became an unlikely benefactress-at-whim for her. She’d come by with home-cooked southern specialties on days I couldn’t be there.

The meals themselves were the Three Faces of Betty Crocker (or Cracker?). From Mozelle’s kitchen came down-home real-deal fare: fried green tomatoes, savory pressure-cooked garden-grown green beans, and cornbread (to be crumbled into a tall tumbler of buttermilk, thank you). A “garden dinner” was as close as you could get to healthy: tomatoes, okra, corn, green beans and diced onions jumbled in a friendly mess on a plate, with the cornbread broken and smashed around in it. [If eaten at a church dinner-on-the-grounds*, a minimum of two Chinets are required.] These dishes were accepted with grace, genuine or feigned. You see Mom’d had the audacity to have fallen on, plummet into - Hard Times. And Hard Times, as everyone knows, is always the result of sin, so naturally punishment was to be exacted. This was a sternly smiling retribution, the pound of flesh extracted for my mother’s Jai-Alai debts, her dissipated, slovenly lifestyle, and the unbecoming depression borne from THE divorce some 25 years gone. There was no small amount of glee at the contrast between the condemned building that was now my mother and former red carpet-worthy glamour she’d possessed, the resentment it’d inspired, and which to both she was entirely oblivious.

Mozelle demanded and got my mother’s Social Security card for her own use at the local food pantry, on the premise of saving Margaret the trip, which had become too much. Impersonating Christian charity, Mozelle forged this ongoing ransom with Mom, very much against my wishes. Worth millions, mind you, Sister Mason thought nothing of stockpiling food, keeping the greater and preferred portion of the government cheese and canned peanut butter bounty for herself. Delightful as this was, Mozelle had an even darker side.

Monday, January 24, 2005

Mozelle Called (2)

Representing both a connection to the vanished churchworld Mozelle knew, and serving as an easy-commute missionary experiment, my mother drew by familiarity and some infamy. Mom had long since concluded that her keen sense of irony was a mutant gene. It’d been bad enough she’d made her living in a bathing suit.

Gratitude and dread were inexorably joined in the receiving of Mozelle’s generosity because the dutiful Sister Mason was in the infantry as God’s Rod of Judgment, as indicated by the downward skeptic's angle of her nose and chin, she was born insulted. Sister Mason knew, like a heat-seeking missile, where my mother’s deeper wound lay. She knew how to faithfully open and salt it. Mozelle knew when to inflict blame, alternate it with the comforting balm of familiarity, and revile again. Lather, rinse, repeat.

The meals came invoiced with guilt and shame. Mom insisted on enduring the indignities and soundly rebuked my objections; the proffered meals were not her incentive, but the connection they represented. As Mozelle considered it her mission, my mother likewise considered the mortaring of that historical tie hers. Job incredulously confronted his friends / accusers with the superficiality and cruelty of their counsel; Margaret elected to embrace her tormentor. It baffled anyone, including Mozelle’s own family - her daughter especially who had fond and glowing memories of kindnesses she'd received at my mother’s hand in those early years.

There is a point where exponential shame ceases to be shame and becomes merely a passageway which ends in a cul-de-sac of forgiveness. But whose forgiveness was being offered? Margaret’s forgiveness for Mozelle’s warped notion of an overdue vindication? Margaret’s for Dell’s abuse? Margaret’s for Margaret’s failures?

Wednesday, February 02, 2005

The steak's just a buck

And so where the cornbread elicited gratitude, Mozelle’s sadism began to express itself with curious offerings in her charismatic catering.

Duck and cover came with Deliverance-like experimental “chilies,” “stews,” and “meat loafs”, the central ingredient common to them being venison (“Just try it, Margaret! I swear it isn’t gamey”). The deer meat would make its way from the Buckeye state by way of Mozelle’s son. It was never clear if it came from the butcher, a hunting expedition, or just a lack of familiarity with how the snowplow worked, but graciously receive them she did, for the unthinkable alternative was to offend Mozelle and that really wasn’t an alternative.

But this arrangement was destined to wear thin, and so ensued Mom’s refusals, tacit and open, and subsequent attempts at cover-ups from both parties.

Mozelle, determined: “..enough beans and chili powder and she’ll never know.”

Mom, polite, in hopes of a return to standard fare: “Really, I’m full”

Mozelle with the bait and switch: “Margaret (all twinkly friendly) would you like me to bring you over a steak and some cornbread? Fresh Made!?!”

Mom: humphh “I-don’t-know-who-she-thinks-she’s-kidding”.

The score at the buzzer was just nod and amiably grumble.