That was when Gracie perceived that her mother was a perpetually disappointed woman, and that she, Gracie, was more or less a contented one. She did not desire the same things as her mother, and she also possessed a certain assurance that what she did desire would come without a lot of striving.
She looked for an excuse to move as far away from her mother as she could manage at the time, which turned out to be the opening of one of the company stores in Dallas. There, she gave in to following her own natural inclinations, which resulted in an amazing happiness. When she moved to open the new store in Oklahoma—even farther from her mother in terms of travel—and met Johnny Berry, she recognized in him someone who was also quite happy and whose desire was the same as her own: namely to be happy, and to be so with her. She knew she had found the man of her dreams.
As a gift for Mrs. Berry, Gracie bought a pot of daisy mums in a basket. She held it on her lap on the drive down to the Berry home.
“I don’t want to get into my mother’s objections to our marriage with your mom and dad,” she informed Johnny. “My mother will eventually come around, and there’s no need to mention anything about it now and get feelings hurt.” She was not at all certain that her mother would come around, but she was a lot happier to hope so.
Johnny said, “Okay.”
“We’ll just say that my mother is really busy at this time, and that you and I want to do the wedding ourselves—that’s the truth, anyway.” She saw a wilted daisy bloom and pinched it off.
“Okay.”
“And we’ll ask your mother to help. She’ll like that, don’t you think?”
“Uh-huh,” Johnny said, with a nod.
She rather wished he would speak in more than one-word sentences. Then she took his hand, very grateful for his smile in return and for his pleasing nature.
Spying another small broken bloom, she pinched it off and thoroughly examined the entire plant, pinching off any f lowers that were not perfect. Maybe she was a lot more like her mother than she’d realized.
Gracie volunteered to set the table. The silverware was real silver, handed down through five generations of Emma’s family. The china and crystal were silver-rimmed and handed down through three generations.
There was an arrangement of f lowers as a table centerpiece, the napkins were linen, and a silver coffee and tea set sat ready on the polished sideboard, where Gracie’s gift of daisies also sat. Emma had raved over them. They really did look pretty there, especially with the window blinds that were arranged so that light filtered through.
The entire effect was like something off the cover of a Better Homes and Gardens magazine, and Gracie almost sent Johnny off to locate a camera in order to take a picture to send to her mother.
Although her mother was likely to say, “Good grief, have you ever seen so much old clutter?”
As she carefully placed the table settings and filled the crystal water glasses from an iced pitcher, she could hear the drone of the television in the adjacent family room, where Johnny and his father sat with eyes glued on the television set and the broadcast of a car race. Once or twice a shout went up.
Gracie loved the sound. She felt delighted that her man liked to be at home and to enjoy something with his father. That he had a father, a real family.
She kept an ear tuned toward the kitchen, as well, listening to Emma and her mother, Mrs. Jennings. The two women were physically so different as to not look at all related. Mrs. Jennings’ voice was deep, from at least fifty years of the cigarettes that she stepped outside to enjoy every so often, and her accent was a very long Southern drawl. Emma sounded Southern, too, but her voice was lighter and often laughing. Mrs. Jennings was a good head taller and thicker all around than her daughter, with dark eyes and steel-gray hair, while Emma was blue-eyed, fair and petite. Both women had really nice complexions, although Emma wore a lot of makeup. In Gracie’s opinion, Emma could have done without.
Mrs. Jennings was apparently not as inclined to domesticity as was her daughter. The entire time Emma was preparing the meal, her mother sat on a stool in the kitchen, drinking coffee and talking about an incident at a writers’ conference that she had attended the previous week. Her upset appeared to be with a woman who had told Mrs. Jennings that she could not be from the South because she lived in Oklahoma.
“And it wasn’t so much what she said, it was her attitude, standin’ there with her hand on her hip, sayin’, ‘Oklahoma? That’s not in the South.’ Like she was the last word.”
She was now in about the third full telling of the tale. The first time, Emma had said, “Did you tell her you were from North Carolina?” and that was when Gracie learned that both Emma and her mother were from way over on the East Coast. The information aroused the somewhat unsettling realization that there was so much she did not know about this man with whom she intended to join her life.
This time Emma said, “What did she say when you told her you were from North Carolina?”
“Not really anything. Perhaps she didn’t believe me…or has no concept of the fact that people move around. Bless her heart, she apparently has no idea that the Five Civilized Tribes that made up Oklahoma in the beginnin’ were all from the South. She’s from Georgia. She ought to know how her bunch pushed the Cherokees out here and stole their land, then Sherman sent half the inhabitants of three states runnin’ out this way.”
She spoke with the correcting tone of a history teacher, which she had been. Now retired, Mrs. Jennings wrote essays on social and historical perspectives that were carried in several small-town newspapers.
“I always thought Oklahoma was in the South.” This was Mr. Berry’s mild voice. Gracie looked through the entry to see him standing in front of the open refrigerator. “Maybe she has us confused with Nebraska on the map. Where’s the Coke I put in here a while ago?”
“Well, I don’t think many people know exactly where Oklahoma is,” said Mrs. Jennings. “The weathermen all stand in front of it when givin’ the national weather. And with the sorry state of education in this day and age, no one seems to know that Oklahoma was Confederate during the Civil War. They just rewrite history all the time.”
“That was a long time ago, Mamaw. Western’s the style now,” came Johnny’s playful voice. He called his grandmother Mamaw.
Observing the two through the doorway, Gracie tried to imagine one of their future children calling her mother “Mamaw.” That would happen once.
There was so much food. Sliced ham, potato salad, a vegetable gelatin salad arranged on the salad plates, lima beans—Mrs. Jennings called them butter beans—and corn, candied yams, a cold plate of sliced tomatoes and broccoli and celery sticks, a basket of rolls and rich cornbread of a sort Gracie had not before seen, and several saucers of soft butter and something called chow-chow. Johnny leaned near her ear and whispered that she wouldn’t like it.
“Good mercy, Emma, you cooked like it’s Christmas,” said Mrs. Jennings.
“Well, it is a celebration,” said Emma, with a smile at Gracie and Johnny. Then, to Gracie, “Now, honey, anything you don’t like, you just don’t eat.”
Emma was up twice to get things from the kitchen for Mr. Berry and Johnny. Whenever Johnny ate over at Gracie’s apartment, he got up and got his own salt and pepper and whatever else he might need. She made a mental note to speak to him about doing the same at his mother’s home. She would need to teach him before he got to his father’s age.
Then Mrs. Jennings was addressing her, saying something about knowing a family of