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

rain as stinging needles pricking my palm. I can’t deny that even then some of my hurt was self-inflicted and sought. Nana already sat at a kitchen table with a mug of black coffee in her hand, and she chatted easily with the seamstress, as she could with anyone.

“Can’t we go with something a little lighter? Maybe a pink?” Nana asked, after the seamstress held a deck of reds and oranges against me. Nana had the checkbook, willingly given over by her husband for a grandkid who didn’t belong to Mike. Mom and Nana went through yards of fabric. More tulle and lace. Opalescent polyester. Beading and sequins. I stood on a little box while layers of cloth were draped over each shoulder. Pins stuck into my sides, holding folds and creases together. I knew well by this fitting how to bear the discomfort of smiling politely when you’d most like to cry from fear or, more often, anger.

The morning before my last pageant, Mom and I picked up Nana from her house and we set out for Columbia. We passed the street famous in Conway for a fat oak tree that stands in the center of the road, unaware of its odd placement. As old as the Declaration of Independence. The city paved around its history rather than raze it. George Washington could have stopped here to unscroll a papyrus map and double-check his directions on the way to King’s Highway. When my dress had been finished, Nana arranged for a professional portrait to be made of me wearing it. A pink bodice and layer-cake tiers of marshmallow skirt. A matching pink bow for my hair. Lipstick and blush. Midnight the cat unseen in the picture purring away on my lap. This pageant was much bigger than the ones I’d been doing around town. Several hundred little girls were entered in this one, and there would be several phases to this competition. A swimsuit competition was tacked on, and little girls were expected to strut around more than half-naked for a bunch of grown men with nowhere else to be in the middle of the day. On the family piano, the one Nana bought from Uncle Jack for me to have lessons, there is a photograph of me in a white one-piece with a red rose and some rhinestones hot-glued up the straps. I’m all done up in paints and powders, posing with one hand on a not-yet-there hip and fuming behind a smile.

Though I would be judged on my appearance in a bathing suit the next day, it did not occur to me yet to worry about the shape and size of my body. Both Mom and Nana constantly dieted, and it became my brothers and me who reminded and sometimes begged our mom to eat. Most of my childhood she lived off saltine crackers with peanut butter and Coca-Cola. Even as I watched them shield themselves from the crude jibes of men and the sneering insults of other women by making themselves smaller, I couldn’t help but understand that they wanted some part of themselves to disappear. Nana claimed to diet more than she seemed to lose weight. She was always eating a piece of cake or white bread with butter. “I shouldn’t be eatin’ this, but it’s so good. It’ll ruin my figure,” she said but with a giggle and a wink. The joke was that she was fat already, which she wasn’t. Granddaddy liked her always thinner, as if he wanted to make her so small she’d shrink herself gone one day. She liked to share with me her happy memories of their marriage, as if trying to say that it wasn’t always all bad. To convince herself. Granddaddy would often promise her something new and expensive if she lost a certain amount of weight. Many of her most prized, most valuable possessions were acquired after weeks or months of fasting on grapefruit or cabbage-soup diets from women’s magazines she had in a pile by her rocking chair. She interpreted her prizes as appreciation for her body, though I cannot help but see them as packaging to wrap around his perfect-looking wife when they went out to business or family events, before going home and raising a hand. No wonder she loved these accessories that were shown off at public events. He treated her halfway better out in public.

“Now, one year, I lost fifty pounds, and he bought me a fur coat. Sometimes he’d say, ‘Jackie, if you lose thirty pounds by December, I’ll buy you a diamond,’ which he did,” she said with pride I couldn’t take away. “You know you’re always beautiful to us, Nana,” I told her. It was true. I saw in pictures how she’d aged, but they never seemed to reflect the woman I knew well. My memory replaces her white hair with flaxen blond, her hearing aid with big gold clip-on earrings.

At the pageant, I remember sitting backstage and sweating under the weight of heavy makeup. The dizzy sweet smell of hairspray so thick that the residue glued all the fallen sequins and sloughed-off powder to the floor. A scent oddly metallic that gave me a headache and brought me back to a scene from a hunting trip to Marion with Dora and her family. Miss Dorothy asked us to convey something to Dora’s father out in their shed, and we skipped off in obedience. Dora seemed not to notice the sprays and streams of red across the concrete floor, but I recalled watching little red shoe prints appear where she walked over to her father, who was dressing a deer he’d shot. The buck’s decapitated head hung from a hook on the ceiling. Drops of red dripped from the fur on what used to be its neck but was now only ragged, dangling skin leading up to open eyes. Blood dripped, and ended in tiny splashes on the floor that seemed as if they would be loud but