Beauty Before Comfort: A Memoir

Beauty Before Comfort

A MEMOIR

Allison Glock

For Dixie Jean and Matilda Mercy Law

There’s something about the pottery. You build up quite a companionship, a comradeship, whatever you call it. You take a little bit of clay and mix it up with water and fire it and make something out of it—there’s romance in that. It just gets in your blood.

—ED CARSON, POTTER, 1985

No potter that ever lived can be overlooked, no ware, however humble, can be despised.

—SATURDAY REVIEW, 1879

Everyone has a story to tell. This is the story of my grandmother as she chooses to remember it.

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph (a)

Epigraph (b)

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

EPILOGUE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Copyright

About the Publisher

CHAPTER ONE

Bless her heart.

That’s what we say. It’s a catchall.

“Aunt Sue’s getting divorced.” Bless her heart.

“Velma lost her job at the bank.” Bless her heart.

“Crystal backed over the cat with her Cadillac.”

Bless her heart. Bless the cat’s heart.

And so that is what we say when we are told, “Your grandmother is getting worse.”

Bless her heart, we say, although really her heart has never been better. The problem is, as always, in her head.

CHARLOTTE, NORTH CAROLINA, 2000

The tiny nursing home bedroom is crowded with family. It is my grandmother’s eightieth birthday and we are trying to get her dressed. Though old, my grandmother is an able woman, so that is not the problem. The problem is style. We are dressing her for a party, her party, and so she wishes to appear festive, and the beige sweater, slacks, and boots her three daughters have selected for her are not cutting it.

“I don’t think that will do at all,” she says, tossing the sweater off the bed. “And no one is wearing those anymore,” she says, squinting and pointing a crumpled arthritic finger at the ankle boots.

She is right, of course. No one wears ankle boots anymore, but her insistence on looking in vogue draws eye rolls and heavy sighs from her girls.

“How about a nice skirt and sweater set?” she suggests. “Something in a yellow, my yellow.” Dutifully, her oldest daughter leaves to go fetch a new ensemble from the mall. Grandmother relaxes and leans back onto her bed. She eyes the group gathered around her, her daughters and their children and various boyfriends, girlfriends, husbands, and wives, and wrinkles her forehead.

“Where’s Glen?”

Glen is her second daughter Jody’s husband, an ex–pro football player prone to complaining.

“He’s at the doctor’s office,” says Jody. “Something’s wrong with his private area.”

“Bless his heart,” says Grandmother.

“He has bad balls,” says Jill, her youngest daughter, cutting right to it.

“Well.” Grandmother laughs. “That’s the saddest story I’ve heard all day.” And then: “Don’t you all have anything better to do today than sit around staring at me? Stay any longer and I’m going to start charging rent.”

Let it be said that there is nothing on God’s green earth my grandmother would consider better than an opportunity to stare at her. She has spent at least seventy of her eighty-two years cultivating stares and making damn sure she has warranted the attention. To gaze at my grandmother is not a passive exercise. She’s no Vermeer. She gives you bang for your buck—be it by making faces, cracking jokes, offering a peek at her undies, or any other shtick she can whip up for your amusement. She’s beyond a pro. To look at my grandmother is to be made to feel special. It’s an actress’s trick, but my grandmother was never an actress, just the daughter of a factory worker born and raised in hillbilly West Virginia (“West-by-God-Virginia,” she calls it), the proverbial coal miner’s daughter, minus the coal and the redemptive sparkly career in Nashville.

“I was born depressed,” she often says, only half-joking. Depression isn’t exactly rare these days in West-by-God-Virginia, as a quick drive through Grandmother’s old neighborhood confirms. Nearly everyone you see is overweight, stuffed full of triple burgers and seasoned fries, living on junk because junk is cheaper than a head of lettuce in most of West Virginia, and when you make shit money at the factory or the mine, you stretch your dollar as much as you can. Besides, a triple burger sure feels better in the belly than a head of lettuce, and most rural West Virginians take what comfort they can get.

Which is why they drink. And smoke. And sit very still on their porches, rickety slices of wood so worn, the nails snag your feet as you shuffle across. They sit very still in their folding chairs, the kind with the itchy plastic-fabric seat you buy at Wal-Mart for $1.99. They sit and they smoke and they pop beers with one hand, pushing down the tab with an index finger so the beer drains quicker from the hole and the cigarette butts drop in more easily once the beer is gone. They sit and wait until they forget what they’re waiting for, and more often than not, they fall asleep in those itchy chairs, the plastic pressing into their doughy legs and arms like cookie cutters.

Sometimes they sing:

Oh, the West Virginia hills, the West Virginia hills, Tho other scenes and other joys may come, I can ne’er forget the love that now my bosom thrills, Within my humble mountain home.

It wasn’t always so bad as now, but West Virginia has never really had it good. It is a hard place, founded on hard land—“The only thing it’s good for is to hold the world together,” goes the joke—and the folks who live there don’t expect any different. Those who do enter into a losing battle with Providence and go mad with the trying, as surely as rocks roll down the mountain.

“I ended up with my nerves,” says Grandmother, describing how her home state shaped her. My grandmother’s nerves are legendary, like Judy Garland’s.

“Bring me a Xanax, would you, dear? Bring me a couple.”

Time was, no one worked a room like my grandmother, Aneita Jean Blair. A slinky redhead with a knowing smile, she sailed through every doorway as if on a wave, ruffling each man and sending them sniffing after her like hounds in heat. In seconds, she would be surrounded. Drinks were brought to her. Cigarettes were lighted by a convoy of matches. She was fanned or draped with sweaters as the climate required. When she rose, all eyes stretched to watch her walk away, hypnotized by the tick-tock swing of her hips. My grandmother always found a reason to look back, and it filled her with a torrid joy to discover the men’s eyes focused on places they shouldn’t have been.

As a child, I lived with my grandmother now and again when my mother needed a break, which was often, being as she was in college and broke and rearing me alone in an attic apartment short on lightbulbs and food. A few hours’ drive through the mountains brought me to my grandmother’s house, a small white vinyl-sided two-story with a cement front porch big enough for a glider and a backyard big enough for a game of horseshoes, but not much else. I would run inside to see her, and she would grab my chin, tell me to stand up straight, then push me into the kitchen, where she’d prepared graham crackers and honey on a heavy white plate that felt cool when I licked up the crumbs.

“That’s low-rent, little girl,” she’d say as I tongued the plate.

“But I’m hungry,” I’d whine.

“Fine to be hungry. Not fine to act like it.”

I must have been around ten years old when I realized that my grandmother was not like other grandmothers. Men would call—plumbers, pastors, Boy Scouts—and she would work them into a lather. “Oh my! My robe seems to have fallen open. How embarrassing.”

When the other town ladies dropped by the house in their elastic-waist pants and plastic shoes, my grandmother greeted them in suede go-go boots and a miniskirt.

“Great color on you, Dottie,” she’d say as her neighbors stood speechless, eyeing her naked legs and chunky turquoise pendant, no doubt wondering why in heaven’s name she’d bought that.

“I swanee,” they’d cluck as they left the house.

“Bless their hearts,” Grandmother would say as the screen door slammed.

Her golden years changed her little. Grandmother stayed chic. She did not wear her hair in a bun (she preferred to cut hers in the impish style of a French ingenue). She did not coo at babies. She did not dress in housecoats and slippers. She did not fatten up and sit in a rocker, patting her ample lap, and rasp in a warm, creaky voice, “Come up here and let Grandma read you a story.” She did not, in fact, allow us to call her “Grandma” or “Granny” or anything as pedestrian as “Memaw.” She permitted “Grandmother” and only that, and that is about where her grandmotherly qualities started and stopped. That’s not entirely true. She baked.

She was an expert baker, and she swore that the day she used a box mix for a cake was the day they might as well put her away. She also baked pies, splicing the butter into the flour with two knives, instead of using a mixer. While she baked, my grandmother sang. Her voice was lilting and sweet, which nearly overcame the raunch of the lyrics, songs of her own creation, which inevitably referenced the scatological.

“Ah lasagne, piss on ya, shit on ya,” she’d wail in full-on opera mode. I was young, but I was pretty certain that the other grandmothers I knew never sang phony arias about elimination while kneading pie dough.

No, my grandmother was different, had always been different, and, though she had paid dearly for it, had chosen to remain different, if one can choose those things.

Aneita Jean Blair was born and raised in Hancock County, West Virginia, same as me, until my mother found herself a decent fellow (from Kentucky), remarried, and moved us to North Florida, a dog’s piss away from the Georgia border. (In predictable hillbilly fashion, my birth father flew the coop when I was a toddler, leaving my mother and me to scrap for ourselves.) Although Florida offered more amusement for a child—The beach! Orange trees! Alligators!—I preferred West Virginia, in no small part because my grandmother lived there and she was amusing enough for anyone.

I begged to go back, and my mother was happy to comply, shipping me off every summer until I was in high school and the lure of West Virginia gave way to other, more hormonal yens.

I remember the drive to West Virginia from the Pittsburgh airport, the impossible corkscrew of the roads and the dented iron railings that lined them. I remember how dense the leaves of August were, how dark it could look in the holler even at noon. I remember the metallic scent of land raped by industry and how it rattled your teeth. I remember bony dogs running free down the highway, clotheslines strung heavy with overalls, the sound of gravel under the tires, the cool of the air, the supple dapple of the light, and how my grandmother’s voice rose and rang like a bell above it all as she sang on the drive home, the piercing white clarity of her song lending the whole worn scene a delicious flavor, a purpose.

“What’ll I do with just a memory to tell my secrets to?” she’d sing as the road rumbled by. “What’ll I do?”

Her voice sailed out the window, a stream of silk. Ka-chump, ka-chump went the road, and I would feel my body loosen with each mile, stretched open by her song and the exquisite melt of coming home.

As a child, West Virginia was my world. More specifically, Newell, West Virginia, a sad hump of a town paralyzed by poverty. I loved Newell with an inexplicable ferocity, the way a mother loves a screaming baby.

“You want to go where?”

Well, I wanted to go anywhere my grandmother was, because my grandmother sang songs and made men blush and fed me graham crackers with honey and showed me how to walk in heels and how to braid my hair and how to be more than I thought I was in the world.

“Grandmother, my braid is uneven!”

“A man on a flying horse wouldn’t see that.”

From her, I learned how to tell when a cake is cooked, how to cock my head to appear interested in someone else even when I wasn’t, how to make macramé plant holders, how to tell a joke, and, during one brash moment in a truck stop ladies’ room, how to smoke gracefully.

“Exhale like you’re bored. And look up. Always look up.”

The first lesson she ever taught me was that dancing matters. Grandmother felt that a person, especially a gentleman, who did not dance was not a person with whom one wanted to spend much time. When she did come across men she fancied who didn’t dance, she sent them away until they did. They always learned, because my grandmother was bitingly beautiful, and that is the second lesson she taught me—that beauty inspires, all of God’s beauty, but especially hers.

I can still see my grandmother sitting at her dressing table, looking into the mirror. It wasn’t much of a mirror, just a round fist-sized lens screwed atop a metal base painted to resemble gold. The base was wobbly, and to get an accurate reflection, she had to duck and bob around a crack in the lens. Still, it had the necessities: You could, with effort, still see yourself, there was a magnifying side (for plucking concerns), and it was portable, so should the house catch fire from some act of God, the mirror could be snatched up and carried to safety along with, should there be time, a handful of lipsticks and an eyeliner pencil. Children like myself, it was assumed, would fend for themselves.

Grandmother probably spent more hours in front of this mirror than she did the television. She didn’t gaze into it willy-nilly, but she believed in presenting herself well, and that required a healthy time commitment. It required devotion. It required ritual.

Every morning, Grandmother would don her robe and sit at the dressing table, her makeup brushes laid out beside her like surgical instruments. She started with moisturizer, a thick yellow cream she applied generously from scalp to neck. Then she dabbed on concealer, under the eyes and around the nostrils. On top of that came liquid base to even out the skin. She shook the bottle as if making a martini and then smudged the pale beige goo down to her throat, taking care to prevent a tide line at the collar. Then she brushed on blush, a dusting on both cheeks and the nose. Then eye shadow, two shades, and eyeliner, one shade. Then mascara, top and bottom lashes. Then lip liner, around the edges and then coated over the entire lip. Then lipstick. Then blot, on a tissue. Then more lipstick. Then blot, on a second tissue. Then more lipstick. Then a once-over of loose powder to “set” the face. She finished with a self-administered pinch on each cheek for color.

This routine did not change for sixty years. The shades and the products stayed the same, and when fads like contouring and brow thickening happened along, my grandmother was not tempted. As a child in West Virginia, I watched my grandmother do her face almost every morning. I sat on the floor, silent, while she executed the same movements, brushed the same strokes, never skipping a day, never rushing through it, never, ever smudging lipstick on her teeth. To Grandmother, a woman who didn’t bother to make the most of what God gave her was displaying a lack of fortitude. As far as she could tell, the only women who didn’t make themselves up were lesbians and lunatics, and while she had nothing against either group, she certainly strove to differentiate herself.

“Beauty before comfort,” she would say as she trimmed her brows and cinched her belts corset-tight. My grandmother is so beautiful that she has never once been comfortable, a cross she bears with the subtlety of Liberace. Even now, at the age of eighty-one, she has her hair colored weekly and doesn’t descend the stairs without full makeup. If an opera spontaneously broke out at her nursing home, Grandmother would be appropriately dressed.

It is a legacy she has passed down to her own daughters, and they to theirs. Generations of women painting themselves to perfection, ramming their feet into tiny shoes, sucking in their bellies, dousing their hair with enough spray to gag a horse, girl after girl learning the value of being “as pretty as you can be.”

As family legacies go, beauty before comfort is a particularly cumbersome inheritance. For my mother, it necessitates a minimum full hour of prep time every morning, time that lengthens as she grows older. For my youngest sister, it requires an arsenal of beauty products—enough to fill a second suitcase when she travels. For me, it meant coming to terms with the fact that in a long line of great beauties, I was not a great beauty, and that I’d better start honing my sense of humor.

For all of us, it means living with a low-grade anxiety, a murmur in our brains fueled by our collective self-consciousness and our compulsive sizing up of our place in any room—Who’s prettier? Who am I prettier than?—as if our very survival depends on our ability to seduce.

For Grandmother, the pursuit of beauty meant something deeper. Born as she was in a factory town, tiny and blinkered and perched precariously on the banks of the Ohio River, beauty meant nothing less than freedom. Ugly girls didn’t escape to Hollywood and sit by the pool in leather mules. Ugly girls didn’t marry up and fly away on airplanes. Ugly girls got left behind and never knew any better.

Grandmother believed that there are people who tell stories and people who inspire the telling, and she intended to be the latter. “A pig’s ass is pork,” she would say when the local men pecked after her, wanting to know her heart’s intentions. Or maybe, “It ain’t lying if it’s true.” When the boys would confess their desires, daisies in trembling hand, Grandmother would smile and weave the flowers into a halo for her hair. Before it was all over, she would have seven marriage proposals and a body like Miss America and her share of the tragedies that befall small-town girls with bushels of suitors and bodies like Miss America, girls who dare to see past the dusty perimeters of their lives.

She keeps a memory book from this time, her youth, before she was tired and widowed and old, when she was cream-fresh and believed her life was as open as the road. All women kept scrapbooks back then, hoping somehow that their history would mean more than most. My grandmother’s is a three-ring brown plastic binder with black construction-paper pages holed out at the edges and snapped inside. The pages have worn through the years and many have Scotch tape bonded to the seams. In the book are newspaper clippings and birth announcements, ticket stubs and good-natured platitudes cribbed from local papers, bromides along the lines of “Though you have but little or a lot to give, all that God considers is how you live.” (I can only figure she found these snippets ironic, as my grandmother has never shown the least bit of interest in God or any of his considerations.)

For the most part, there are photographs. Black-and-white images of her and her boyfriends, sitting on cars, standing on fences, the men smoking cigarettes in World War II uniforms, Grandmother fanning out her dresses to best advantage. On many of the shots of the men, there are love notes penned in the corners, hungry scrawlings declaring their affection for the girl behind the camera.

There must be more than one hundred of these pictures, I know because Grandmother and I have often looked at them. Every Christmas or Fourth of July, out comes the memory book and the stories.

“Now, that boy sent me a big bottle of Chanel Number Five from boot camp, I saved the bottle. And that boy took me to the Kentucky Derby; I had a mint julep. And that boy raised greenhouse roses. And that boy took me roller-skating. And that boy died in the war.”

She tells me which boys she loved and which loved her. She tells me about her brothers and her sister and her mother and father. She tells me about her house and what went on there and how it was to be young in West Virginia, to be a skinny, eager child with disobedient hair and bottomless longing. Certain pictures are like songs, making her cry no matter how many times she sees them. Almost every snapshot is labeled neatly with the subject’s name—including each photograph of my grandmother: “Aneita Jean Blair” tightly jotted in the white border at the top, a nod to the future she dreamed she’d have, one where strangers knowing who she was would matter.

CHAPTER TWO

The state of West Virginia was born in conflict and has retained lo these many years a mulish attitude problem. The people born there are chippy. It’s a birthright.

The state came to be in an act of war, when the western half of the state broke off from its eastern parent, Virginia, in 1863. The two sides disliked each other with familial intensity. The western half envied the wealthy eastern half. The eastern half was ashamed of the western half. The westerners saw the easterners as idle slave owners. The easterners saw the westerners as boorish rednecks.

“What real share insofar as the mind is concerned could the peasantry of the west be supposed to take in the affairs of the state?” said easterner senator Benjamin Watkins Leigh on the floor of the 1829 Virginia legislature.

“Screw you,” said the peasantry of the west.

Western Virginians were sick of the ridicule, of being overlooked when it came to building schools, of being dismissed as “woolcaps” by the richies who lived in the pampered south of the state. Then, around 1850, the state of Virginia borrowed $50 million for improvements and the construction of roads, canals, and railways. The only money spent in what would become West Virginia was $25,000to build the “Lunatic Asylum West of the Allegheny.”

It was not a promising precedent, and the two regions formally went at each other’s throats. The rivalry played out in the legislature for years, until finally President Lincoln stepped in and pressured Congress to push Western Virginia’s independence through. This decision “turns so much slave soil to free,” he said. It was “a certain and irrevocable encroachment upon the cause of the rebellion.”

Thus was born a state and the lasting tradition among its people of giving whomever they please the finger. “Mountaineers are always free,” declares the state motto. This history was not lost on my grandmother.

Aneita Jean Blair was born at the foot of her mother’s bed on September 30, 1920.

“I was born ugly,” my grandmother says. This is a lie, but it is a lie she believes.

In the album, there is only one photograph of the infant Aneita Jean. It was taken on the Fourth of July and she is roosting on her father’s knee, a lump in white cotton, with a black wick of hair falling down her forehead. Beside her, her two-year-old brother, Petey Dink, rests an American flag on his shoulder, his free arm raised to shield his eyes from the sun. A horse and buggy is parked behind them. It is impossible to tell if she was in fact ugly, but, given the gene pool, it seems unlikely.