Kissing Cousins: A Memory Read Online Free Page B

following my brother’s birth, had been ordered by the doctors to “rest cure” at Atlantic City, with seven-year-old me along to cheer her, and Katie to oversee. “We were there for three months,” she’d said at the time, “—don’t you recall?”
    What I recalled was that I hadn’t cheered. My mother, exhorted to the beach, stood fixedly at the hotel window, I behind her, at her waist but ignored. “Come away from that window, child,” I’d heard Katie’s voice back then say—had she said the final d on “child” or not? Even at seven I’d known that her anxiety about the high window was for my mother, not for me. “No,” I’d said carefully, when reminded of that time, “I only remember the pony rides.”
    Now Katie said musingly, “Shirley. How you hold on to things. Forgot I told you ’bout that.”
    I heard how she got more Southern when she talked of the South, just as my own accent came back on me when I talked to anybody from down there. “I could tell you about your whole visit. Except”—I hesitated—“what did you shoot?”
    “Rabbit,” she said dreamily. “And once a woodchuck the field hands cooked and I had a taste of. Ugh. Was it fat! ‘Supposed to taste like shoat,’ I told Mahma when I got home, ‘but it don’t,’ and Mahma laughed ’til she crah’ed. ‘Don’t ever tell your poppa you ever tasted shoat,’ she said. Alright to tell him you shot one, though, ‘case you did.’ And then she laughed some mo’.”
    Katie had rosied, the way she always did with stories, and looked younger, as always when she spoke of her adored mother. She drank deep of the coffee I had brought her.
    “What’s a shoat?”
    Civil War Richmond, when my father was born, had been not too many steps above a country town. He had left it early and, so far as I knew, had never shot anything; his sports as a young man were going to cockfights and to boxing matches in the days of brass knuckles, and, until he had married my mother when in his fifties—women.
    “Pigling.” Katie’s mouth quirked. “Tastes right good, way the dawkies at Shirley cooked it.” She had spent nearly as much time with them, she’d once said, as she had with the ladies.
    At home we had observed no dietary laws. Until I was grown I hadn’t even known that the shellfish we consumed in such quantities was forbidden the orthodox—until an acquaintance happened to allude to it. Yet my father, who had eaten everything in his time, professed to disdain pork more as lower class than as a religious sin, and we had never had it.
    Now she sighed—the remembering sigh that purled like an undercurrent from all the elders in my father’s family, and that I sometimes thought of as the voice of the deserted South speaking through them. Katie, I thought, had learned it too young.
    “Those black people were practically keeping the place together for the old ladies. Better nigras I’ve never seen.”
    I held very still. I found myself holding my breath. In the new living room there was now a big transformer attached to our radio-record-player, to convert our electricity from direct current to alternating. The apartment house, owned by Columbia University, was among the last in the city still to have DC. I felt like that transformer, my two currents interchanging.
    “Arnella—she has a degree.” My voice cracked. “She talks like you and me. I mean—like N’Yawk.” I heard the tape. When I was with Arnella I talked like she did: I said Noo Yaw-uk.
    I felt myself turn red. I did this so seldom that when it happened the whole family rushed to see.
    Katie stopped dead. Like a brook stopping. This was another thing I learned—at that instant. Real Southerners ran on, yes, like a brook, detouring round a bad moment like water round a pebble, filling in the chinks of confrontation with a babble, murmuring to a pause. Hollering was a different thing entirely; it was like healthful exercise. It was only Northerners who stopped