ONE STEP BEHIND
By Emily Bowles
 

When my Mama was little, she always wanted to be just like her sister, my Aunt Susie.

Mama succeeded only in aping her, winding up with her own interests only by default, only when Aunt Susie either convinced my Grandma that Mama was following her around too much, or when Mama herself decided that Aunt Susie was too mean, pinching her too much and telling her too often that she was fat, ugly, a brat.

That’s how Mama wound up preferring the Monkees to the Beatles.  That’s how she wound up marrying her high school math teacher instead of a professor at the community college like Aunt Susie did.   

A little less directly, I guess, by seems the same in terms of metaphor, that’s how Mama wound up in Georgia while Aunt Susie made it a little farther North, to North Carolina and how Aunt Susie’s kids were born, each of them the year before each of us.

Grandma never forgave Mama for making us crackers, not with us coming from respectable stock in South Florida.  She teased us when we were little, interchangeably referring to us as her little crackers or peaches or goober peas, but there was always an implicit critique, an awareness that Mama’s marriage took us away from her and transformed us into Southern children, children hardly capable of behaving at the continental breakfasts Grandma liked to go to at hotels on the beach in Pompano or at the Bingo games she lived for once she moved into a retirement community. 

I don’t know how much time Mama spent, once she was away from Grandma and Aunt Susie, trying to figure out how to be a woman on her own terms, without copying herself almost exactly from Aunt Susie’s actions and dress, from Grandma’s rules of gender, race, and class.  

The one thing I do know now is what happens when all of that breaks and what’s left of a woman who can’t figure out who she is at all.  I learned this when I was five, and I learned then that it was my fault.  Looking back now I understand the difference between being at fault and just being there, but it’s hard for a little girl wearing jelly shoes and under-roos to understand how her Mama works.   

We had only been living in Between (the city between Athens and Atlanta, if city is used loosely to mean any Southern town with a Waffle House, a gas station, a Piggly Wiggly, and a traffic light or two) for a couple of weeks when Mama left us.  

Mama had been nervous about going to Church without bringing something and so the Saturday before our first planned visit to Sunday school and services at Between United Methodist, she grabbed me and my brother Danny by the hands and shooed us toward the van.  We drove to the Piggly Wiggly with the windows open and John Denver pouring out of the radio, Mama’s alternative to Aunt Susie’s innuendo-laden balladeer of choice, Bob Dylan.

Danny and I trailed behind Mama a bit, pointing at things we wanted and sighing as Mama ignored our desire for Twinkies like the other kids had in their lunch boxes, instead loading the cart full of bread and peanut butter and saltines and spinach.  

Things got a little more exciting for Danny and me, though, when Mama slowed into the cake aisle and started examining Devil’s Food, Mississippi Mud Pie, Chocolate, and German Chocolate cake mixes.

“Mama, we could have this for breakfast and this for lunch and this for dinner!” I squealed, pig-like and thrilled about the prospect of meal upon meal of dessert.  “I want this kind, Mama.”

“Me too, me too,” Danny jumped up and down as he said it.

We started running up and down the aisle, pointing from one box to another and grabbing the ones that looked especially good. “Mama, mama, this one!”

An older woman with frosted hair and a mile-wide smile, its edges unfaltering because of the thick cake of red-orange lipstick that separated her lip from her gums, teeth, and face, approached Mama.  Smiling so wide, so deep.

Didn’t seem at first that she’d make Mama run away, not someone with a smile like that.

“Dear,” she said, “You must get control of your children if you want to shop here.”  

Mama just stared at her for a second, then apologized.  “I’m so sorry.  We’re new in town.  The kids don’t have anyone to play with.  We haven’t got out much, so they’re a little wild.  Normally good kids.  Perfectly behaved.  Love books.  Really they are.”

Even now I’m not sure how Mama fit so many words into such a small amount of breath.   

She wanted that lady to know we were all right, but then I wasn’t sure that she believed it herself and when we were leaving without the cake mix, when Mama heard the lady telling another customer how of course someone buying cake mix and dressing her kids in garage sale clothes when they’re out in public can’t be much more than trash, I think I felt like something clicked for Mama.

Mama left that afternoon, left us with a babysitter and when Daddy came home he didn’t know where she’d gone anymore than we did until Aunt Susie called eight hours later.  “She’s with me, Chuck,” she told my Daddy matter-of-factly over the phone as Danny and I listened without breathing from the upstairs phone.  “She may be here for awhile.”    

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EMILY BOWLES grew up outside of Atlanta, Georgia and attended the University of Georgia, where she received a B.A. and an M.A. in English.  Currently, she's completing a draft of her dissertation at Emory University, where she's worked on eighteenth-century British women writers.  She lives in Auburn, Alabama with her boyfriend and dog.