Low Country by J. Jones (books to read in your 20s .txt) 📕

rabbit-fur coat and matching muff, as if I were Natasha Rostov. Nana only gave me what she must have dreamed of herself as a girl, and I was luckier than Chris and Brian, for whom Granddaddy cussed at the thought of buying milk for their cereal. That there was family money floating around out there somewhere just out of reach was like a life raft in the deep end of a pool, and that helped us sleep most nights. Riches that were out of place among the spare treats my parents afforded for us, after months of layaway at Brendle’s and Roses. At birthdays and Christmases, Nana gave Mom money and directed her as to what to buy for her, so that her pride would not suffer at having no gifts to give. Palm-size compacts in enameled and bejeweled shapes hid waxy Estée Lauder scents. Leopards and carousels like the one at the Pavilion, sea turtles and sea-shells, and butterflies and cabochons remind me always of White Diamonds and White Linen. If she smelled like Elizabeth Taylor, she could be more like her in other ways. “You know,” Nana would say of Taylor, “she’s had eight husbands.”

Comparing, comparing, always I was comparing. A pedagogical device picked up from homework, coloring books, magazines for children. Spot the differences in these pictures, these stories, these bodies, these lives. The feeling that I was out of place continued to grow the more I compared. I was a quiet and responsible child, but bossy and bookish enough to inflict concern. It was me and not a brother or cousin who led our way down the line of hotels on Ocean Boulevard, in and out of pools at the oceanfront hotels. Yet I was the only one told to cross my legs or sit quiet, but also stick out my chest somehow. To put down my homework and help fix supper. “You’re the most responsible,” Mom said as a compliment when I complained that I’d rather be participating in pine-cone throwing or freeze tag. An assessment of truth, but only because responsibility was foisted upon my little suntanned shoulders. Responsibility was never, ever expected from the boys, most only a year or two younger. A different shade of anger, the silent resentment that smolders in all women, was beginning to rival the fear and hatred that I saw in Granddaddy. At least the anger of men counted.

Where my new friend took to the pageant life with the same fearlessness that propelled her to jump into the Waccamaw, I was becoming an anxious child. In addition to dresses and bows, I needed professional photographs taken for some pageants. I cried so much at the prospect, Mom had to sneak my cat into sessions inside her pocketbook. Midnight, I called her. A black stray taken in after a neighbor ran over our ginger tabby and left it in a black garbage bag with a note of minor apology. My brothers teased she would be bad luck, or that I must be a witch to have her devotion. She followed me around and slept curled up beneath Bandit’s chin under our kitchen table. My mom was brought to fits of sneezing by her presence, along with a bill from the pediatrician when my brother Jason caught cat-scratch fever from her tiny sharp claws.

On mornings before local pageants, Mom lifted me to sit on the bathroom counter and have my hair bound in thin heated rollers. The bathroom door was left open so we could hear the morning TV we usually watched in bed. In the mirror, I could see my hair in sideways loops that made even rows of steaming pink rubber, each bubble of wispy brown resembling hollow circles of the cool brass knuckles my dad kept on the dresser. The sharp stink of burning hair and a cloud of Aquanet hovered under the vanity lights. “Being beautiful is painful. It’s work,” Mom said. Most of what I retain about particular pageants comes from pictures of me with numbers pinned to the hem of a dress. In what would have been one of the first, my dress looks borrowed and too big. I cannot tell if I am really smiling or if the lipstick has smeared. I can feel my mom and Midnight out of the frame. What sticks out to me is the getting ready and the embarrassment of walking around afterward in all that makeup. In a dress made to draw attention when I wanted it the least. The feeling of deep shame heating my whole body, as if there were another me filled with fire standing right beside me like a red shadow. We usually went to Nana’s house afterward, as we did after everything, and it was a favorite thing, even all dressed up, to walk in and find the living room full of my dad and his brothers in the mood to tell stories. These stories were recollected among the brothers over and over, as we asked them to repeat the stories of Drunken Jack, Alice Flagg, Blackbeard. And just as we asked them, they asked their mama for her stories. Nana was the ultimate keeper. Her sons were freer in their telling, but she knew everything.

I remember walking up her patio after one pageant, stepping on the fallen pink of crape myrtle petals, and hearing for the first time one particular story. The squish of the teal shag under my shoes, the smell of coffee, butter beans, Nana’s perfume. My brothers playing under nobody’s supervision, as Dad and Uncle Les debated something only Nana could clarify.

“Mama, I wanna know more about this trial,” said Leslie, her middle son, blond and blue-eyed like her. It must have been the year the TV movie came out about it, but that would place it on the edge of too late. In 1978, Nana had been a juror on the trial for one of South Carolina’s then most-famous murderers, Rudolph Tyner. A made-for-TV movie that