the habit of being

“Maybe I could just wear some nice pants,” I gasped at my mother on the plastic cell phone I had lodged between my shoulder and my chin, while my fingers worked the clasp of a black Calvin Klein skirt that had been her mother’s. Betty’s waist had been the size of my smallest rib when she had the skirt taken in.

“To a Southern funeral? Nooo, Ma’am! Are you out of your head?”

It wasn’t so bad if I stood up all the way.

I was standing up all the way at five o’clock the next morning, in the Betty skirt, the silk shirt I’d actually ironed, the pearls, the hose, the Ralph Lauren Safari spramped in my collar and wrists, waiting for the M60 bus to the airport.

At Laguardia, I bought a Seran-wrapped muffin, but threw it away before I boarded the plane. I sat up very straight through two flights. No one asked me why I was so dressed up, but I was ready to tell them, I was even eager. I walked down the terminal in my funeral shoes (surprisingly less painful than they’d been at Betty’s funeral), the Henry bag tucked under my arm. I walked down the stairs next to the escalators at the Savannah/Hilton Head International Airport, and my good posture and I approached a man with a baseball cap and a ponytail and a piece of printer paper with my last name and first initial. I held my hand out to him, knowing that his name was Hugh and that my mother had had to call every taxi service in southeast Georgia, after my father assured me that someone would be happy to pick up Katharine Allen Tillman at the airport, he just didn’t know exactly who it’d be yet, and he started making calls, leaving messages, being a burden on my behalf. I’d responsed to this by saying “okay” and then called my mom crying about not wanting to be an imposition, and she reassured me that she knew I’d never be an imposition on purpose, she knew I just wanted to pay my respects to Mother Doll, not to be a problem. She’d handle it, she said, and tell him it’s already paid for. When I told him it was all figured out, my father, who is currently in the stage of his bipolar drugs-jail-religion cycle where he’s employed, rather than court-mandated to stay, at a treatment center for men looking for Bible-based answers to their problems, said “you’re just like your mother.”

Hugh had individually wrapped mint-o-green Lifesavers tucked in between the driver’s and passenger’s seats of his van. I took one when I handed him the MapQuest directions I had printed out in New York, and I never told him that it was too cold, even though he had told me to tell him. I did tell him I hadn’t been back to Statesboro in two years, and that Tillman Road, which we crossed, had been named after my great-grandfather. I have gave him $100 when he let me off at my best friend from high school’s mother’s house; It wasn’t really already paid for.

JuJuan, Marlon’s mother, who hadn’t changed at all since the last time I’d seen her, which was I don’t know when, answered the door with a yappy orange dog at her feet.

“What’s his name,” I asked, trying to protect my hose from his toenails.
“Love,” she answered, as my phone began ringing.
“Good name.”

The phone was lost somewhere in my coat, and Love was jumping, so I just let it keep ringing. JuJuan asked what I needed her to do for me, and I told her they were feeding the family at First Methodist at 11:30, so if she could give me a ride, but that’s all. There was enough time before 11:30 for her to tell me about her recent marriage and divorce, which had all taken place in the span of a month, and now her business was in trouble because her ex hadn’t wanted her to massage males, and it was a transition period for her, is what it was.

“My boys went to preschool here,” she told me, as she pulled into the back entrance nearest the Fellowship Hall at First Methodist, where the members of an assortment of women’s groups were laying out the lunch. “So did I,” I said, and she said “oh, right.”

I was right on time, which is to say early, and no one I knew was around. I only stood in the hall, upright but awkward, for a few minutes until the first old lady recognized me, and they just passed me off to one another, introducing me or letting me do it myself (Joe’s middle daughter, Katharine Allen). “And where are you now?” they’d ask, and I’d say “New York City” and they’d say “Well I’ll be.” I got interrupted quickly when trying to explain my job, by a “and so smart!” They looked at one another said, “Can you believe?” They petted my arm and told me how pretty I’d grown. They’d lean down to hand-gesture how high I’d once been, and hopefully they wouldn’t ask me if I remembered them, because I never did.

When I next resurfaced, the room was full, my cousin Ginny Lee waved at me, there were people to attach myself to. My father looked like a hundred-year-old scarecrow in a suit. I’d talked to him more over the phone in the last two days than I had in the last four years, and on normal circumstances wouldn’t particularly want to attach myself (I’d be reminded of this when he had some breed of limping crack whore snapping pictures of me with a disposable camera at the steakhouse that night), but he was, after all, sober, and he was polite and he knew people’s names. His side seemed to be my appropriate place, where people came by to tell me how sweet it was that I’d come all this way.

My younger half-sister, Emma, arrived suddenly 14 and prettier than me. She was dancing 5 times a week, in possession of the coveted Arabian Variation in this year’s Nutcracker, in which she had to wear a two-piece costume, and according to our father she looked damn good in it. When she asked if she could sit with me, I said “Absolutely.” She’s the only one of us to have taken her stepfather’s name, but that’s probably partly because my father and her mother (a ballet teacher) were never actually married. In any case my father is not the one she calls “Dad,” and I’m not completely sure if she’d include me in the tally of her siblings if a teacher asked at school. But she told me her favorite subject is English, that when she’s not dancing, she likes to read and write, and, desides, she’s so pretty, so I, like the rest of the Tillmans, claim her.

Rachael, the oldest daughter (28), showed up characteristically late and trailing perfume from table to table as she worked the room, hugging people. She’d driven down from Atlanta, stopped in Macon for a dress, and beyond that was now living with a man named Clark whose people were from Birmingham. She pulled off the sirring and ma’aming with a warm grace Emma and I couldn’t touch, and it wasn’t until the three of us were waiting in line for the processional to start that she confessed to us that it was all an act. She didn’t know anyone either, and that made me all the more impressed.

The gossip in line was that since the funeral had been put together in such a hurry, most of it had been copied from Ginny’s, but they knew that she liked it since she had picked it all. Ginny was my father’s mother. Mother Doll was her mother, my great-grandmother. Her real name was Lavinia. Miss Lavinia, everyone outside the family called her, everyone who didn’t call her Mother Doll, or Doll, or even Doll-Doll for the very young. She was called Doll because she was beautiful. The pastor pointed out in the service that her mother had taught her to look her very best every day of her life, and that she really had. She was almost 98. She called earrings “ear bobs” and everytime you saw her she complimented you about something. For me, it was that I was so ar-tistic and cre-ative, and that I had such pretty curls. She played the organ at First Methodist for well over a decade, and when you went over to her house she’d play the piano for you and want you to sing, even if you couldn’t. She’d tell you stories about how she came to Statesboro from Alabama when she was 16, with her mother who taught piano lessons. She always had homemade divinity and sweet tea, and all the cabinets in her kitchen were covered with photos of her family. I used to count the ones of me.

She played the piano part when I practiced my flute solo, “Night Gypsy,” for Solo & Ensemble competition one year, but she didn’t actually play with me at the competition. She said she wasn’t feeling well, so I got Jessica Mutter’s mother to do it. Later I overheard the middle school band director, Miss Frey, telling someone that she thought the reason Mother Doll dropped out was because when I played I went off into my own little universe and didn’t really stay where I should have been on the score.

I remember Mother Doll telling me at Ginny’s funeral that it was the saddest day of her life. And after Ginny died, she made these big scrapbooks of her life, huge books of photos and newspaper clippings and wedding invitations, and I liked her to show these to me when I went over to her house. She said maybe I’d be the one to keep up with them after she was gone, but I didn’t mention anything about that to anyone. My dad kept telling on the phone, before I got down to Georgia, that Uncle Waldo had already been over to the house and into the jewelry box, and I kept telling him that that was the last thing I was thinking about, but if he came across one, I’d like one of those photographs of her in the 20’s. Besides, she had sixteen other great-grands.

Rachael and Emma and I sat together in the second pew. I hadn’t been in a church since the last time I wore my funeral shoes, and I hadn’t been in this church since Ginny’s own funeral, which was when I was about 10. I didn’t remember it well enough to know how much had been repeated. The room was much smaller than I remembered, the stained glass windows were less impressive, all the wood seemed a lighter shade.

All through the service I noticed myself, how good I was at this, how easily I recited the bold verses in the book with the proper words emphasized, how confidently I sang the hymns even though I can’t sing, how remarkably easily the Lord’s Prayer, unused for so long, could still be summoned up from some cavern in my brain, dusted off and recited on cue. Maybe it’s like riding a bicycle, but I wouldn’t really know, since I never learned how to turn.

Rachael had the ball of Kleenex, and she passed them down the line as needed. She rubbed my back when I started crying, which happened a lot. She has that amazing Southern ability to touch people she barely knows in a comforting, not at all awkward, way. I wasn’t expecting to be very emotional, since I hadn’t seen Mother Doll in several years, but I just cried about that too. When the pastor talked about the “difficult times” she’d gone through, we all knew he meant Ginny’s suicide. When the ballbearers walked by with the the casket, Rachael collapsed into her Methodist Prayer Book, sobbing, and I tried to reciprocate her backrub, though I was sure it wasn’t the same. The three of us walked back down the aisle arm-in-arm (Rachael, in the center, all but dragged Emma forward into formation, and I couldn’t help but wonder if anyone could tell we only played sisters once a year or so), and we stood together afterwards, saying things like “she lead such a long, full life” and “what else can we really ask for?” and “no more tears, I know.”

It was pouring out, so we didn’t go over to the cemetary. I went back to JuJuan’s, where Love nipped at my heels while I changed out of the funeral clothes. Then I slept for an hour before going out to dinner with my grandfather Sam (Ginny’s ex, he hadn’t sat with the family group at the funeral) and his wife and about 10 other relatives. I thanked Sam for some stock he had given me, to which he replied that it wasn’t a “universal thing” and not to mention it if I didn’t want to, this not ten minutes after my father slipped me an envelope, to open later, that turned out to contain $300 and note saying if I had any respect for him, I’d keep the gift a secret. The sisters and I exchanged email addresses, knowing we wouldn’t put them to use. My dad told me to let my mother know he had sat at a table across from an undrank (by his sister-in-law) martini for two hours without touching it.

As crazy and awkward as all of this may sound, when I called my mother that night and told her I was really glad I came, that it was nice to be back in Statesboro, I really meant it. I went to bed at about 9 and had one of the best night’s sleep I’d gotten in months. JuJuan’s house was big and homey and familiar-feeling, and I realized it had been a really long time since I’d stayed anywhere with any real space. Even my parents live in an apartment now; when I visit them I sleep on the couch. The next day the weather in Georgia was beautiful and a snowstorm hit New York. Somehow my flight wasn’t delayed.

When I got back home, a friend asked me how I’d dressed, and I replied, righty, “very appropriately.”

Our house, piled high with used books
and used dishes and ketchup-stained paper plates
in frayed straw paper-plate holders,
smelled of cigarette smoke and cat pee.

We sat on a Tom-sprayed couch
with crumbs down the cushions,
scatching our flea-bitten calves
and our flea-ridden kittens under their chins.

We read Emily Post and Miss Manners;
We knew everything there was to know about
what you can and can’t do with an American flag;
We knew how to address a priest or a Pope or a president;
We knew how to have an audience with the Queen.

When I answered the phone, if I could find it
under the dirty clothes pile,
and they asked for me,
I said “this is she.”

I still say that.

I watch a neighborlady in a $3.99 housewife smock from the dollar store, hosing off her air conditioner on the sidewalk, husband standing by. The heat wave is over. No more $200 electric bills. An American flag flaps. My bedroom door slams on its own. The breeze makes my cell phone fuzzy, and my mother says “Step away from the window.”

“Well, if you’re going to read a book about a retard,” she says, “you should just read The Sound and the Fury.” It’s too hard, of course, for my little brother, for whom I’d recommended The Curious Incident… He has to read a novel for school, and we’re appalled but not surprised that his teacher gave him Left Behind. Half the girls in my high school English reported on one book or another from that series when the dreaded Oral Presentation came round. Me? Atlas Shrugged. “My little heretic,” laughs Mom. We settle on The Catcher in the Rye for Wayne.

Watching the sunrise on ephedrine, my fingers tremble. Watching The Decalogue on Tootsie rolls, my mouth sweats. I take my camera out looking for things that look like photographs to take pictures of.

At the museum, I’d rather look at the people looking at the art.

These pills are big and purple and they make me feel like I’m going to have a heart attack or a panic attack any second. Apparently a lot of people have had heart attacks, and that’s why it’s illegal. I probably would’ve thrown away the bottle a long time ago if it hadn’t been for the ban. It’s not like I think they will actually work. Taking pills that make you feel sick is nice, because then you feel justified in taking more pills. Faking an addiction you don’t actually have: on the edge, over the edge, off the deep-end.

A better approach to losing weight without working out. For breakfast, lunch, and dinner: EAT COFFEE.

Little Asian girls with pigtails are the cutest thing. Saw one in a blue cotton dress with a balloon in the DMV, where I waited for five hours for the ID with my misspelled name. Now they are springing up everywhere.

I was in Soho, taking pictures of graffiti and windows, two of the most chickenshit things to take pictures of that there are, when I decided I would Buy Something, even though I don’t have any money on account of the new iBook that I can’t play the finale of Six Feet Under on. I hadn’t bought new clothes since I moved here. So a window saying Sample Sale emerged with an arrow, which I followed to a door. Somehow I tried on and bought a gray dress that was a size or two too large for me. Maybe the extra space in the dress was filled up by how huge I feel, but in any case it is hideous. It looks like the silk version of the $3.99 housewife smock, only I paid a lot more for it, only to ball it up and toss it up on the top shelf of my closet, disgusted.

I went to the Photography section at the bookstore to look at The Ballad of Sexual Dependency and Closer, which are both soft and losing hold of their bindings thanks to people like me and our pilgrimages. We sit cross-legged on the industrial carpet in the middle of the aisle, not caring if we’re blocking people as we flip through, slowly. Only once, then put it back. They’re in such bad shapes, these books, that no one would ever actually purchase them, which is good because I’ll know where they are when I need them, and actually having them at home might just wear them out anyway.

When Uncle Lane gave her a bushel for free, my mother’s first thought was “there ought to be some way to get drunk off all these peaches.” That’s how Sharon and Kathy’s devastating les peaches anodynes got started, and she’s reviving them for my visit home. Apparently she and Kathy spent a long time perfecting the recipe, but never wrote it down. One important factor is that the peaches be ripe, so she’s got them on the windowsill, and maybe by Sunday. They were so good that she and Kathy had to not tell people about them. They were so popular there’d be four blenders going at once. Kathy is the one from the photos who got her period in my mom’s favorite jeans. Or else she got her period in her own favorite jeans and mom convinced her it was worth hand-washing them for a date, on account of how skinny they made her. Something about blood and demin. Anyway. In addition to the peaches, she’s also got the blackberries-to-die-for, the squash-for-days, greenbeans, and watermelon. She already went to the very-best-cookies, homemade butter, and cream farmers market on Monday. She’s got new ingredients for the pimento cheese, which she’s roasting her own peppers for instead of buying the pimentos in a jar.