The Book Sense 76
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Chapter 1 - Auletta

First of all, let me say that I am not now, nor have I ever been, a voodoo practitioner. That allegation was one of the less attractive charges made by my ex-husband during a past custody skirmish. It is true that I did read a few palms in college, along with about two million other fellow-traveler hippies. So? Maybe sometimes, during those later difficult years I spent caring for my mother down in Auletta, I looked the part. When I'd glimpse my reflection in the glass of my mother's garage window when I took out the garbage, I saw the face of a disgruntled crone. I'd smile at myself until the illusion went away, because it certainly was not fair that I should appear so used up from the front. After all, I had lost a lot of weight, and male drivers would honk their horns at me from the rear whenever I found enough time to walk up the highway in my cutoffs. And me in my forties.

Actually, there were no men in Auletta except the married, the stupid, and the dead. In Auletta this worked out to be basically the same thing. Old widowers in the back woods of the north shore got frog-marched down the chapel aisle by the first of the women quick enough to make eye contact with one of them over potato salad at a dead wife's wake.

The decent men were minimally divorced Baptist Sunday-school teachers, used-car dealers, gas-station owners, or high school coaches with wedding-ring grooves worn into their beefy pink fingers. The indecent drank beer and ran around on their wives, although I could not imagine with whom. Big beer stomachs, tattoos, and bumper stickers reading "God, Guns, and Guts Made This Country Great" just did not attract me. A man's IQ and the number of individual gun racks in his pickup truck seemed inversely proportional. Why some fat yahoo might suppose I'd go right into heat at the sight of armpit hair sprouting between sweaty layers of adipose tissue was a mystery. I say, if you don't have actual well-defined biceps, it ought to be against the law to wear a muscle shirt.

"Hey, sweet thang," I'd hear at the bait shop when I'd stop for gas, my mother in the front seat with me complaining about the heat and wanting to know who I was talking to. "Nobody," I would say, and mean it. Fat girls with too many curls and too few teeth snagged these princes, and acted like they'd won the lottery. Aulettans enthusiastically paired up, even though the mutual attraction seemed mysterious to a witch like me. Fat and stupid children got happily born.

We had absolutely no common ground, Auletta and I. The town had none of the sense of place and rural hospitality of nearby Pearl River, and it was smaller, uglier, and less diverse than Slidell. I saw no black people in Auletta. The jobs or amenities that might have made it worthwhile to African Americans to tolerate Auletta's ingrained KKK mentality were absent. In fact, nobody lived here voluntarily, except my mother. Aulettans proper just got born here, grew up here, dropped out of high school and got married here, and were too incurious to travel and discover just what a hell-hole this place really was.

You'd never know there was a gigantic perpetual party -- the city of New Orleans -- going on just south of the lake, because Auletta was a constant Fundamentalist funeral. That's all they discussed, those neighbors of my mother's: who had died; who was just about to drop dead; who was getting married to whom, so that they could have a miserable life together and then die. No wonder I had these bags under my eyes like an old hag. I would lie awake during those hot nights that first summer back home, trying to reason with myself and talk myself out of such energetic hostility towards my fellow man. I wasn't proud of my excessive contempt for all things Aulettan. I'd try to think things through. I'd attempt to pat myself on the back for having done The Right Thing in relocating to this pus-pit. The choices I had made in regard to my parents were noble ones, I told myself. Voluntary ones. I should be proud of myself. As a matter of fact, my own sainthood should just be knocking me out in breathless admiration for myself, every day in every way. Whatta gal.

"Every day in every way, I'm getting better and better"...I'd repeat that shopworn old affirmation to myself each morning before my mother could awaken and instigate the daily chaos. However, what I'd notice in the mirror as I brushed my teeth was that what I was really getting was older.

Every morning that I woke up in Auletta and realized that I had not yet poisoned her, nor put my head in the oven, I figured that I was doing okay.

That was the summer that I picked up the scissors and cut all of my hair off. It was 97 degrees outside, and close to that inside my mother's humid laundry room. There were no men around worth attracting, anyway, so I might as well make myself as ugly as I felt. Lighten my load. Get rid of this blanket of heat that grew from my scalp and weighed me down. There was too much gray in it. It took me too long to get it shampooed these days, with my mother banging on the outside of the sliding glass shower door like this and calling, "Where are you? Where is everybody?" My mother had always hated my hair.

Copyright © 2001 M.A. Harper

Read an essay by M.A. Harper

The Worst Day of My Life, So Far

A May/June 2001 Book Sense 76 pick:
"It's hard to imagine someone writing a novel about Alzheimer's, but Harper has done it beautifully. Ultimately a heart-warming story of family commitment, this book reveals the totally bizarre world of both patient and caregiver."
- Molly Beck, Quail Ridge Books and Music, Raleigh, NC

M. A. Harper, a farmer's daughter, lives in New Orleans and enjoys a few other things besides reading and writing, like parties, NFL football, friends and family, the movie "Ghost World," and cats.

Further reading:

• Fergus Bordewich
• Elizabeth Inness-Brown
• Sandra Steingraber

Author photo by Pat Jolly

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