Nana Faye

In the days after my great aunt’s death, I became Nana’s only friend. I didn’t carry the mantle very well. I didn’t enjoy the position. A glorified maidservant; a disrespected shopping serf. That’s all I was. And I wasn’t very good at it.

On our funeral shopping day, the pools of sweat on my red, splotchy palms caused our plastic bags to split, letting cans of asparagus spears loose on the parking lot. A dingy, strip mall parking lot, where police cars cruised in anticipation of future crime. Its unfortunate downward slope ensured that, if you ever dropped anything, it would roll towards the highway into a stream of passing cars.

And that’s exactly what happened that day.

The sacks laid like empty skins at my feet, but not for long. When the wind picked up, it rushed inside each one and carried them off, white jellyfish over a concrete sea. Lips pursed, my Nana watched them go, and then craned her neck around like something from The Exorcist. The blunt edges of her bob sliced the air.

“You need to act like you got some raisin’.”

At twenty years old, I had gotten twenty years of raising, and none of it seemed to be working very well. Especially not according to Nana Faye. The early morning sunshine bounced off the lenses of her black sunglasses, like a laser beam leveled at all my inadequacy. To avoid the burn, I started collecting cans.

She belonged to a mean generation. Spilled milk didn’t make her cry, but it certainly made her angry. The free-range cans of asparagus had a similar effect. One of the cans, dented and covered in stray cigarette ash, peeked out from behind the muddy wheels of a truck, like it was hiding from her wrath. I knelt to grab it. From the corner of my eye, I saw the edges of a crimson trench coat flare around her bony ankles. A backwoods Anna Wintour. Her fabulous wardrobe made her all the more terrifying.

“Great, now your knees are all dirty.”

“It doesn’t matter, Nana, no one will notice.”

“I don’t want to run around with you looking like an idiot.”

The mouth of her gigantic leather purse swallowed her frail hands. They emerged clutching a Tide pen. Oh god, no. She knelt, fully intending on scrubbing my pants in the middle of a parking lot. My knees were already damp with cleaning chemicals. The smell of peroxide floated up to my face.

“We need to go back to the car, Nana.”

“You’re filthy.”

“I don’t care.”

I stepped back, forcing Nana to reholster her weapon with a gravelly, smoker’s sigh. Good lord, we were already mad at each other, and it wasn’t even noon yet. We still had to go to Belk. Arms full of tin cans, I watched her turn and march back to the car, clutching her keys with a familiar determination. Nana Faye had never once ended a shopping trip early, even if her eyes shot daggers at you the whole time.

Her heels scattered gravel across the pavement. I’d never seen someone so unbothered by rocky terrain. I trailed behind her, wondering if she’d sold her soul to the devil for perfect balance.

My sister was better at this stuff. Better at being nice. In moments like these, she told me to rely on my conversation sweet spots. Nana Faye had only talked about five things since 1999. She loved Elvis Presley, Steak n’ Shake, Bill Clinton, Southern Living, and Mary Kay beauty products. I rolled the dice.

“So, where did Elvis meet Priscilla, Nana?”

“Germany. She was fourteen. He was twenty-four.”

“Ew, Nana.”

“Oh good grief, Charlotte. It was a different time.”

“Fourteen has always been fourteen, though.”

“Your Aunt Barbara got married at sixteen.”

Our conversation flopped like a fish on the pavement. It’s absurd, but I hadn’t expected her to mention Aunt Barbara. It just wasn’t our style. Talking, I mean. In our family, people shoved grief down the fleshy linings of their throat, through sizzling stomach acid, all the way to some dark pocket behind the belly button. It sat there, mostly alone, but occasionally joined by sexual repression. And that’s just how it worked in the Robertson family.

She was being unusually expressive. It was odd. Nana Faye didn’t hearken on the past. She also didn’t speculate on the future. One night, after I’d worried aloud about who would host Wheel of Fortune when Pat Sajak died, she’d told me that was Vanna White’s problem and nobody else’s.

Unsure of how to respond to her sudden chattiness, I sank into the passenger seat of her tiny green Sedan and turned on the radio, flipping through stations to find something to fill the silence so I wouldn’t have to. The rapid-fire voices of one car salesman after another shot out of her speakers. The crackle of radio static made their nasal-y tones even more excruciating.

“Wait. Go back to that last one,” Nana ordered as she pulled the polyester fabric of her seatbelt over her frail, birdlike chest.

Obediently, I flipped back a couple stations, finally landing on the slow, resonant twang of an old guitar. My Nana looked at the dash and then back at me, her glance full of silent expectation.

“What?”

“Do you know who this is?”

“No.”

I’ve never received a look quite so full of disgust.

“It’s Hank Williams.”

I knew that name was supposed to mean something to me. Growing up in the South, there are cultural figures that you’re just supposed to know and love. But I could never conjure up any memory of these icons in time to nail a social interaction.

“Forget it. Here, look in my purse. I think I have a Belk coupon in there somewhere.”

She plopped her heavy leather handbag in my lap before leaning up to turn off the music. The lining of her purse smelled like spilled, sacred drops of Chanel #5, with a hint of Aqua Net hairspray thrown in to really overwhelm the senses. It was also full of coupons.

Nana Faye shopped the way other people attend church. She had always been that way. In the South, lots of grandmothers guard signature pews, but Nana waged war for a parking spot outside the mall. The other matriarchs hauled their grandchildren out of bed for Sunday School, where I suppose their squeaky voices rose in cute renditions of “Kumbaya” and “This Little Light of Mine.” Not for me. Nana Faye hauled her granddaughter to Sears. While she shopped, I always wound up slumped on the gray benches where people try on shoes.

That summer, I had read a self-help book on setting boundaries. During the school year, I didn’t have much time to help myself, so I confined any personal improvement to the hot, swampy afternoons that seem endless when it’s July in Alabama. The author of my book, a silver foxish man with pearly white teeth, claimed that if you respect yourself other people will respect you too.  He hadn’t met my Nana Faye. That day, I tried his method. As she zoomed out of the parking lot, I told my grandmother that I couldn’t possibly continue our shopping trip.

“I’ve got a bunch of reading to finish, Nana. I don’t think I can keep shopping.”

“You work too much.”

“Well, I was gonna go meet Clara for coffee later too.”

I knew her eyes were rolling behind those dark sunglasses. I just knew it.

Well, that sounds boring. Tell her to come shopping with us.”

“I don’t think she would want to, Nana.”

“You waste all your time sitting around and talking. It’s antisocial. You should go to parties.”

A defensive lump rose in the back of my throat.

“Well, maybe we were planning on it. Maybe we were gonna go do a keg stand or something. You wouldn’t know, because you don’t ask about my plans.”

“You’re not the keg stand type,” she replied, looking like she might have respected me more if I had been.

And so, after that escape plan failed, I found myself trailing behind my grandmother in a Belk. The clean yet contrived smell of department stores hit my face in cold, luxurious waves. At sixty-five, Nana Faye still found the strength to practically sprint down each aisle. She divided the air in front of us, and I could almost see it parting like water, rushing to her right and left, then collapsing back into the space she once filled. I stayed close behind, like a car trying to draft behind a semi-truck. Her frame shielded me from the artificial breeze, and still, not a stiff, gray hair budged from her helmet head. Its rock-hard gloss made me think I could bounce a football off it.

At the height of our speed-walking, Nana Faye’s thin figure halted to a full stop. A bullet train pulling into its station. I was like a bird hitting its window. A smart car rear-ending a tank. I careened into her, and she yowled, spitting and hissing in the way of felines and old women.

“Good God, Charlotte, why don’t you just run me over?”

“I wasn’t trying to Nana, you just stopped really soon.”

“Did you think we came in here just to walk around?”

Sometimes it seemed that way. Nana Faye felt the urge to circle her prey before nabbing it. Still, she was a mission-oriented shopper. She didn’t linger. She didn’t do the leisurely shoppers’ shuffle through racks of clothes. She sprinted, caught, and killed her prey in one sweep, and this was thoroughly exhausting to me.

A makeup counter caught her eye. The cheerful tips of pink lipsticks spread down the shelf and darkened into shades of red, purple, and brown. A ruddy rainbow of color. As I swatched some “Ruby Woo” on my wrist, Nana Faye pawed at black compacts of blush. She looked like an otter, honestly, holding each container against her chest as she struggled to break the clear seals. One by one, the stubborn plastic oysters popped open. None of the colors were good enough.

“I sort of liked that one, Nana, the peachy-pink shade.”

“Nah, that would look tarty.”

“Well, what about this rose color?”

“That would make her look too dead.”

Robertson women could never look tarty, even in death. We couldn’t even look dead in death. And so, we pried open blush containers, weighed their merits, and discarded the shells. The reddish purple would have been fine, if we’d wanted her to look like a Tim Burton character. A pop of pale pink would have sufficed for Dolly Parton, but tomorrow’s funeral was a serious affair.

“What about this one?” I held up a disk of a shade called “Hot and Bothered,” really just to watch her get mad about the title. Nana blew her bangs above her thinly plucked brows.

“It has to look good, Charlotte. People are gonna be there.”

“Don’t you think I know that?”

“Uncle Vince is gonna be there.”

“Who?”

A blank, yet somehow still outraged look spread across her face.

“The one who couldn’t keep it in his pants.”

“Oh.”

The vulgar choice of words was effective. I knew exactly who she was talking about. Decades ago, Uncle Vince cheated on Aunt Barbara after she came down with pneumonia. I guess the wheezing wasn’t a turn on. So now, Nana Faye planned to help her sister spite him from beyond the grave.

To be honest, it’s hard for me to get invested in funeral arrangements, or any funeral for that matter. I mean, the person’s already dead, and no amount of melodious, deep voiced Southern preaching will change it. At these events, family members feel obligated to sit on wooden pews and listen to an old man compare life to a tunnel or marathon or whatever, and it’s all just very lackluster. If I had my way, we would use funeral money to take time off from work and cry. We would all go to woodland cabins and cry for a while, and that would be that. No awkward interactions with strangers. No ostentation. Just grief, and a socially sanctioned way to deal with it.

So yeah, it’s hard for me to get invested in funerals. I do, however, love a good revenge scheme, and any funeral that facilitates one is okay in my book. If Nana Faye thought that making Aunt Barbara look nice would make Uncle Vince feel bad, then I believed her, because she was better at silent guilt trips than anyone else I knew. I had been the victim of her expertise for twenty years, and now it was time for someone else to suffer.

“Now, this one’s pretty, and it’s not too dark either.”

Her lips spread into a self-satisfied smile as she brushed a rosy shade on hands that bulged with veins. I suggested the color nearly twenty minutes ago, but kept any “I told you so’s” to myself. After all, it’s hard to find a blush that straddles the line between tarty and prudish, and I wasn’t ready to spend another half hour looking.

***

The pale, fatty skin of my thigh bulged from a hole in my black pantyhose. It was huge. And there was no hiding something like this from Nana Faye. She sniffed out wardrobe vulnerabilities like a bloodhound working for Vogue. It was the day of the funeral, but that didn’t matter. She would know. She would just know.

I started Googling solutions. A Cosmopolitan author recommended Krazy Glue, but why the heck would I have that in a funeral home bathroom? A needle and thread might also work, but I’m not a 1950’s housewife, so I obviously didn’t have that either. No, my options were slim. I was gonna have to find another solution.

Peeking out the bathroom door, I checked for snitches in the hallway. Nana Faye’s friend group functioned like the secret police. A powerful cabal of ornery grandmothers. The pantsuit clad old women would sell me out for a free haircut at her salon. The coast was clear. I darted across the hall and yanked a cold, heavy door open, slipping into the room before anyone could see. As it swung to a close, the sturdy metal hit my back with a soft thump.

What kind of funeral home keeps their dead people across from the bathroom? A white coffin sat in the middle of this dim, windowless room. At the sound of the door, Nana Faye glanced over her shoulder, but soon went back to smoothing the box’s pink lining. The solemn occasion didn’t distract her from my wardrobe.

“What the hell happened to your panty hose, Charlotte?”

“I’m not sure, I was looking for something to cover it up.”

Nana Faye yanked a hefty purse from the ground and pulled out a Belk’s bag.

“Go find a Sharpie. Color in the skin where the hole is.”

She popped the blush compact open and swirled a black brush around the palette. The glossy plastic, free of any fingerprints or stray glitter, caught my eye.

“Nana, why couldn’t we just use some of her old makeup? What was the reason for the shopping trip? I mean, the old makeup was probably just as good. Why’d you wanna spend money on the new stuff?”

As she glanced back at me, the silver roots of her hair caught the light.

“I just wanted to take care of her. To give her something nice. To make up for all the times when she was good to me and I was just my surly old self.”

A twinge of guilt squeezed my chest.

“I’m sorry about Aunt Barbara, Nana. Really, I am.”

A smile shifted the wrinkles on her pale face.

“She’s in a better place, I guess.”

I hate funeral cliches. These phrases are slippery, nonspecific, and not all that comforting. After all, the world sucks. It wouldn’t take a whole lot for someone to find a place better than here, but that didn’t mean I could stop worrying about them, that I would stop missing Aunt Barb’s terrible pageboy haircut and walker with the fuzzy tennis balls on its legs. Still, if cliches made Nana Faye feel better, I could offer up a few of my own.

“I’m sure she is, Nana. I bet she’s looking down on you right now.”

Nana Faye snorted. It was odd to see the prim point of her nose turn up in such a way.

“No, I don’t think she is. I hope she’s with Elvis now… And Jesus too, of course.”

In the moment, I didn’t think to be offended by Jesus’s afterthought status. He was the king of the world, but Elvis Presley was the king of rock n roll. It was easy to see which one Nana Faye valued more.

“Well, then she’s probably having a much better time than we are.”

“Oh, I’m sure. She had a knack for being happier than I ever was. I don’t need to tell you that.”

Her raspy sigh pierced the still air.

“She always pulled me out of my sadness.”

A tear slid down her face, clouded by powder and concealer, leaving a tunnel in her cakey complexion. She jerked her head back to her sister’s body. The edges of her gray bob spun through the air.

“Go find a Sharpie, Charlotte.”

I didn’t know what else to do, so I listened. Maybe a little too well, for once. While my Nana cried, I just slipped, wordless, out of the room.

***

For the next few weeks, a black, lopsided circle stained my right thigh. It looked like an amoeba, really, or a poorly crafted frisbee. No one noticed the hole, though, so I guess Nana Faye’s illusion did the trick. We went shopping again that summer, but not for more funerals. It was just regular shopping. I heard the infamous phrase twice, maybe even three times a trip.

“You need to act like you’ve got some raisin’.”

I thoroughly agreed with her. At twenty, I was already a freakish old woman. I smuggled ketchup packets out of restaurants and kept them in my car for months. I spent hours smudging lipstick samples on my thin, bony wrists. Sometimes, I liked Elvis a little more than Jesus too, and would probably spend a lifetime praying away my heretical tendencies. A mean, irreverent woman. I’d never had a sunny disposition. No, I had a decidedly cloudy one. It used to bother me, but I’m starting to be okay with it. My Nana didn’t act like she had any raising either. Not really, anyway. Strutting around in that red trench coat. Skipping church to catch a sale at Kohl’s. Helping her sister spite a cheating man from beyond the grave. An ill-tempered shrew, through thick and thin. People seemed to love her for it. Sometimes, when I think really hard about it, I think I might too.

*****

Photography Credit: Jason Rice (detail)

Carli Moses studies creative writing as an undergraduate at Union University in Jackson, TN. Her works wrestle with life in the Southern United States, taking place in rural settings with larger than life inhabitants.