Edgar Oliver - The Apron Strings of Savannah

 

 

[chuckles] Mother used to always say to us, “Savannah is a trap. It'll try to imprison you. Even if you manage to get away, it'll find a way to drag you back.” Mother also used to say, “Beware of other people. [audience chuckles] They won't understand you. [audience chuckles] We're different. We're artists.”

 

So, all throughout my childhood, it was just the three of us. Mother, Helen and me. And then, there was the world, as though we were lost in it. We were like three lost children. Mother, Helen and me. No one ever made it into our house, especially relatives. [audience chuckles] Mother was deeply suspicious of relatives. And if some old friend from Mother's past did dare to pay a visit, they wouldn't have been there very long when Mother would begin sobbing and screaming, "You've been listening to the vicious gossip about me. I can tell you've been listening to the vicious gossip about me," and she would advance on them and they would back out the front door [audience laughter] and flee, never to return, at which point we would all three run outside and jump in the car and zoom off, with Mother driving like a maniac.

 

All throughout my childhood, we drove obsessively, at least 200 miles a day, [audience chuckles] sometimes 300, anywhere, really. They were aimless drives, it didn't matter where we went, just so long as we were on the go. [audience laughter] Helen and I did our homework in the car, [audience chuckles] which to this day I believe deeply affected both my and Helen's handwriting, [audience chuckles] which no one can decipher. [audience chuckles] And at night, we would return to the house on 36th Street and lock ourselves in, and then we would plunge the downstairs into darkness, and all three make the terrifying journey upstairs together, where we would lock ourselves in upstairs for the night. 

 

We were all three so terrified of the dark that it never would have occurred to any of us to have a room of our own. [audience chuckles] So, we all three slept together in the upstairs front bedroom. The rest of the rooms upstairs were stacked to the rafters with chests of drawers, and trunks, and armoires, and boxes that were all locked and filled with Mother's secrets. [audience laughter] We'd all three lie on our narrow beds in the front bedroom and beneath dim shaded lamps, and Mother would shuffle her Gypsy Witch cards and Helen and I would read, which we did madly. [audience chuckles] And Mother would ask the Gypsy Witch things like what she should have to eat the next day. Eventually, the Gypsy Witch cards convinced Mother to go on a banana split diet. [audience chuckles] 

 

And invariably, at some point, Mother would beg Helen and me to rub her feet. So, Helen and I would take turns sitting at the foot of Mother's bed for hours, kneading and twisting and tickling and pulling at her feet. We played this little piggy with Mother's toes, deep into the night. [audience laughter] Often in the middle of the night, Mother would decide that we had to talk to the Ouija board. So, we'd all sit around the board with our fingers poised lightly on the planchette. When Mother was at the board, the planchette would fly around wildly, and the board would say things like, "Tonight is the night of the killer. Don't go to sleep, or you'll wake up dead.” [audience laughter] So, we'd sit in our beds waiting for the killer to strike. 

 

But sometimes the Ouija would say, "He's coming tonight. Get out now." So, we would all dash downstairs and jump in the car and go check into the Travel Motor Lodge on Bay Street, which Helen and I always loved, because we loved staying in motels. But the man at the checkout, the reception desk, always found it rather odd, because he knew that we lived in Savannah. Helen and I had almost never spoken to a grown-up. In fact, grown-ups used to wonder out loud what our voices sounded like. About the only times we would speak to grown-ups would be when we went to drive-ins, which we did a lot, since we were always driving. [audience laughter] 

 

Mother was so paranoid that she refused to place an order, she didn't want to speak to the people at the counter. So, Helen and I would have to go up and make the order. And invariably, the girl at the takeout counter would peer over the counter at us and say, "You all talk funny. You're not from here, are you? Where are you from? Are you from Transylvania?" [audience laughter] And then, she would say, "Come look at the two little Transylvanian children. Are you two twins?" If ever any of our friends from school ever did walk home with us, as soon as they saw what house we lived in, this look of terror would come over them and they would say, "You live in that house? How do you dare go inside? I wouldn't dare set foot on the front porch. That house is haunted." 

 

And then, their look of terror would transfer itself from the house to us, and they would back away from us and say, "Your mother is a witch," and then they would run off without even saying goodbye to us, over their shoulder. Helen and I always wondered why other children reacted that way. We decided that maybe it was because sometimes when Mother's sorrowful rages took hold of her, she would go into the backyard and climb a ladder onto the roof of the shed, and she would stand on the roof, and claw the air, and curse the sky in her rage. [audience laughter] 

 

When I was 13 and Helen was 14, we began to study French obsessively. It became our secret language that Mother couldn't understand. We would speak French to one another madly, for hours, while rubbing Mother's feet. [audience laughter] Those conversations with Helen in French were some of the most passionate conversations I've ever had in my whole life. We dreamt of being poets, and painters, and wild bohemians, and rolling drunk in the gutters of Paris. Even when I was in high school, it never occurred to me that I would ever learn to drive. Helen never learned to drive either. I think that we somehow thought that Mother would always be there to do the driving. We did, however, both get bicycles, which we kept in the downstairs hall.

 

At this point, Mother had begun to practice self-hypnosis. Helen and I would sit beside Mother as she lay on the upstairs couch and put herself through a series of hypnotic auto-suggestions. Mother would tell herself that she would feel full of self-esteem and really good about herself, and that she would no longer be driven to eat banana splits. [audience chuckles] When Mother had placed herself in a deep, sound, hypnotic sleep, Helen and I would rise quietly and sneak downstairs. Mother kept a folding chair wedged under the front door knob with two long strands of camel bells dangling from it. Mother said that the ringing of the bells would warn us in case a burglar tried to get in. But Helen and I had become convinced that Mother kept the camel bells there, so she would hear us if we tried to leave in secret. 

 

Very slowly and carefully, we would move the chair out from under the front door knob without making a single one of the camel bells ring. Then we would grab our bikes and run outside and quietly shut the door, and zoom off on our bikes alone, without Mother, together, the most wild, adventuresome feeling. But invariably, no matter how far we'd gotten into what godforsaken stretch of town, we would look back over our shoulders and there would be Mother's blue Chevy too bearing down on us at top speed, with Mother at the wheel, biting her lip and driving like a maniac, [audience chuckles] trying to drive us off the road. [audience laughter] It seemed like Mother didn't care whether she killed us, so long as she stopped us going off without her. Our longing to get away from Mother began to grow very deep. 

 

When I graduated from high school, we all three took the train up north to Washington. Helen and I were going to attend George Washington University, and we were all going to live together in that room on the top floor of Mr. Schwoyer's rooming house in Georgetown. It would be the three of us, like it always was, like it always would be. But Helen and I knew that that summer would end differently. We were going to run away together to Paris. We had made our plane reservations in secret. We had some money in trust from our father, who had died before I was born of a morphine overdose. We wrote to the bank in secret, asking that the monthly checks be sent in our names and no longer in our Mother's name. By running away, we were pulling the financial rug out from under Mother's feet. At the end of the summer, I began to pretend to go to my classes at GW, but instead I would go every day to the Greyhound bus station to put quarters in a locker where we had our luggage kept. 

 

The day came for us to fly away. Neither of us had ever flown before. But what concerned us was getting Mother to go to the National Gallery alone, without us. I think I said that I had to go to my classes at GW, and Helen said that she was feeling sick. I kissed Mother goodbye, and I walked downstairs, and I waited in the alley that ran along the side of the house. Helen was going to pull one of the blinds down in the top-floor bay window as a signal to me that Mother had left. I was waiting in the alley, waiting to betray Mother. I peered around the side of the house. Mother had just walked out the front door. She was walking away. Her back was to me. 

 

She was walking away downhill to catch the bus at the foot of 30th Street. She was wearing her big Harris tweed men's overcoat, like she always did, and her crocheted hat that she had made herself that was shaped like a ziggurat, and her loony boots that she had ordered from the Meshulam's shoe catalog that had fur tongues and that looked like boots a bear would wear. [audience chuckles] And her wild hair was poking out all round from under her crocheted hat. She was swinging her arms as she walked. She looked like a clown walking away.