Charms for the Easy Life Read Online Free Page B

pound her fists on the dashboard, and my grandmother would snap, “This is a new automobile ! Don’t ruin it!” My great-aunt’s son had escaped Pasquotank and gone to Richmond when he was thirteen, and by twenty he was working as a doorman at a swank hotel. The few sightings of him that made their way back home had him prancing up and down in front of the hotel between patrons, checking his bearing and demeanor in the big brass doors, hissing at people who stopped to stare at him. My grandmother had to trick his mother into leaving the room while she bagged the sad scrapings of a depraved and lonely life and flushed them down the toilet. “Drugs and pills of every nature,” she told me. When his mother came in and opened a dresser drawer that my grandmother had somehow skipped, she said, “Oh, Charlie Kate. He had a girlfriend. Look at all her things here. I always knew what people said about him wasn’t so.” Think of this! Think of a mother so desperate for a normal son that in 1928 she was not only ready but eager to excuse his dalliance outside the bounds of marriage. My grandmother had read journal articles pertaining to “aberrant behavior,” and while his mother sat on his bed and successfully wished herself into seeing her son row some pretty girl across a moonlit lake, my grandmother stuffed the dreamland girlfriend’s things into a paper sack and marveled that a man could cram his feet into shoes so high and narrow.
    On Saturdays when no patients showed up, when no calls came in, when the three of us didn’t drive to Pasquotank, my mother and grandmother would write and send out birthday cards to children in Wake County. Once a week, my grandmother called the office where birth certificates were registered, and thus her wooden file box was always up-to-date. Names of children she had delivered were denoted with stars, and she would tape a nickel inside their cards, and children who were turning thirteen received another gift, instruction in sexual hygiene that a legislative committee had praised as the true reason for Wake County’s modest rate of illegitimacy.
    For the boys, she ordered ready-made pamphlets from a distributor, and then wrote at the top of the cover page: “On the occasion of your thirteenth birthday. Read and hide from Mama, Papa, Sister, and Brother.” Inside, she would correct the hygienic instruction however she saw fit, as with the scalding condemnation of what was called “self-love.” She would type out her own warning and paste it over the original. Hers read: “Better to handle yourself than some girl. You do not know where she’s been. You will not become a blind lunatic nor a rabid dog-boy. In fact, it may improve your attitude and render you less likely to get in scrapes at recess. You may be a more pleasant fellow all around for following your instincts in the PRIVACY of your room.” All but one of the county’s seventh-grade teachers were thoughtful and alert enough to ask boys who were poor readers to bring their pamphlets to school, and they would keep the boys inside during recess and read my grandmother’s instruction aloud.
    There existed no similar tracts for young girls, but my grandmother broadcast information anyway. On the girls’ birthday cards she would write the time and date she would arrive in person and tell them, literally, what was what. She took each of them a package marked “Moon-Time Things,” and inside were little muslin sacks marked “False Unicorn for Cramps”; “Evening Primrose Oil for Moodiness”; “Goldenseal for Itching”; “Horehound for Bloating.” She explained girls’ bodies to them, corrected ruinous impressions created by the Baptists, and always ended her discussions with the same message I was to hear more times than a few: “Kiss all you want to. Kissing’s fine, nothing more than uptown shopping on downtown business. But if you suffer him to put that ugly thing in you before you’re married, do not come to