The First Nudist
by Janice Daugharty
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2010 Janice Daugharty
First published in The Distillery, Summer 1996
It could have been the summer after the spring that my younger sister and I went to visit Gransallie in Florida and almost starved to death on one of her low-calorie diets, which I prefer to remember as a kind of pre-Easter fasting, rather than admit that my grandmother had once again failed.
To me, she was proudly stout and old-seeming in her fifties, corseted and caustic, a state grandly lending to authority that today would earn a woman the title of loud-mouthed slob.
I know it was several summers after Gransallie hauled us off to South Florida on a hunt for kin and happened up at the house of strangers and, out of stubborness, pretended for three days straight they were our cousins.
When remembering Gransallie, what marks time in my mind is usually some disaster--car wrecks and getting stomach-aching lost and tactless remarks made to people who wouldn't speak to her again if she told them they'd just won the Florida lottery.
Family-reunion time. Southeast Georgia. Wrights Chapel. Better times ahead but enough good times behind to warrant sweating out one whole, hot, gnat-swarmy day trying to out-talk and out-eat all the Walkers and relations to Walkers in the screened dining shelter overlooking the Walker graveyard (graveyard: humbler than a cemetery).
Gransallie, in one of her flower-sprigged dresses and silver set hair, was always more congenial, less apt to hurt feelings, before she ate and while she ate. I watched her gaily parading the aisle between two lunch-room style tables, scooping cake and pie slices that would end up puddled on her plate in the gelatinous gravy of chicken and dumplings, a dish now having been thoroughly tasted and tested--dumplings overcooked--and wondered how long it would take her to find out that her favorite niece, Ophelia, from Miami, Florida, who she'd long held up as an example of clean living and industriousness, had been caught swimming naked with her boyfriend in the baptism hole of the Alapaha River, located a short Sunday walk down a woods path east of the little country church.
News of the scandal was spreading like spilled Jello, and my cousin Mary Grace and my sister Maggie were helping it melt.
I should go ahead and tell Gransallie, before she got full and cross, that her favorite niece also was living at a nudist camp. But to tell Gransallie now, I would have to speak too loud over the chiming of metal, glass and ice, and jabbering like hail on a brush arbor tent. Besides, I didn't want to be in the line of spit when Gransallie found out. And, have no doubts about it, she would find out.
Soppy paper plate bowed with sugary desserts, she picked her way among the plague of Walkers--pious men in starched shirts and plump women with babies on their hips--headed for the bench on the north end of the dining hall where Ophelia sat with a plate on her lap and her long auburn hair over her eyes.
Fork raised to her mouth with a nervous sliver of chocolate cream pie, Gransallie wedged between one of her sisters and famished Ophelia in a sheer green puckered shift and gold earrings peeping from that screen of hair. Between bites, Gransallie would pleat Ophelia's skirt on her knee or pat her hand or tuck her hair behind one ear.
You could figure when Gransallie was getting on to Ophelia for being too skinny, because she would lean left and gaze down at Ophelia's snake waist and shake her head--I guess Gransallie couldn't tell Ophelia wasn't wearing a bra. Then she was up and off to get some more banana pudding for Ophelia.
Like Christ bestowing blessings on the multitudes, Gransallie would wave her fork over the heavenly throng of Walkers, sometimes singling out and signaling one over to kneel before Ophelia--former Christmas angel in coathanger wings for the church play--while behind her, Ophelia's boyfriend, in hacked off denim shorts and Jesus sandals, picnicked alone under sacred shade of the great liveoak.
If Gransallie should turn, if she should look through the screen, she would behold the boyfriend with hair a little longer, a little stronger than Ophelia's, but with the same oxblood ruff and brownish roots. Centered on his hairless, muscle-bunched chest, like a surgeon's target, was a vein-blue heart tattoo. He looked eyeless behind the lens of his sunshades that bounced off warped images of sunned tombstones and pines, Uncle Bud in bib overalls and Aunt Hilda in her church dress.
I was used to seeing men at reunions, or any other gathering, go out and stand around their trucks, kicking tires to check for air leaks, or cleaning their nails with their pocketknives, while the women inside gabbed and worried with babies. But Ophelia's fellow wasn't doing any of that; he was propped proudly on the trunk of his red Corvette with his long baked legs turned out and his hook nose turned under, eyeing us all as if we were the freaks.
Knowing Ophelia and her boyfriend were nudists, which could bear up under just about any definition, I seemed to see more skin folds than were showing, to smell ripe musk rinsed with sweat, and hear alien whispers I couldn't give source to.
Ophelia had covered her nudism pretty well, I supposed, but her boyfriend reminded me of one of the circus people who stopped off in Cornerville each summer and set up on the vacant lot in front of the Baptist church. People we ogled while standing in line before marching in for Bible School. People we prayed for but didn't mean it.
Why had Ophelia brought him? (It was obvious why she hadn't introduced him.) What would Gransallie say when she saw him? Why, on one hand, did Gransallie seem to see everything, then on the other hand seem to miss what was right before her eyes?
No matter. I could rest now. Glass bowls of field peas and butterbeans were filming over with pot liquor; rose crescents on bone platters were peeking through eyes of roast beef fat. Fried chicken wings and necks were scattered on dishes of crust bark. The women were boxing up leftovers to take home for supper. Babies fussing, fisting gnats from their eyes; boy cousins wearing wood buttons of watermellon seeds on their bare bellies. And Gransallie and her sisters were strolling toward the graveyard for their annual cry-in over the graves of their mama and daddy, strolling right past the nudists folding into their slooped red Corvette and circling the sin-christened oak.
Gransallie didn't know. She would never know. I would never know. The nudists were gone. We were going. While Gransallie was kissing her sisters, Mary Grace, Maggie and I carted cardboard boxes of empty dishes from the dining hall to Gransallie's bunged-up green Belair.
Waking that morning, I'd seen my daddy out checking Gransallie's car for signs of her latest wreck. An odd lift to the lip of her front bumper, a new ding like an eye in the left door, a curious dip in the roof that didn't figure unless she had rolled the car.
Did he plan someday to confront her with all the evidence, maybe take away the car that symbolized her independence, her striking out from the farm to work as a practical nurse at the Florida East Coast hospital in St. Augustine? Maybe he intended to present the tally sheet of accumulating dips and dings the next time she started loading us up for one of her "educational trips" to Florida.
We could be half-dead from some wreck, walking dazed and bleeding through the streets of Orlando or Tampa, but we wouldn't tell. Long as we could catch a ride past the city limits of Cornerville, Georgia, long as we were going, we didn't care where or what shape we would be in when we got there.
Hot wind batting through the windows of the Belair, Gransallie with her beauty-parlor set hair drove up the wooded lane to the fork of the next dirt road, turning right along fields of heat-wrung green corn, and augering east into the flatwoods of Swanoochee County. Talking, talking, as if she'd been left switched on: Reunion Station. Rehashing the day--whole conversations replayed between her and Ophelia, complete with sign language--the fodder she would feed on till next July.
Aunt Wannie Mae could rest in peace knowing she'd raised such a fine daughter: first-grade school teacher for Dade County public schools, choir member at the First Methodist Church, engaged to an anthropologist.
Gransallie was big on "firsts": first man on the moon, first woman to fly; Florence Nightingale was the first nurse. Historical tidbits garnered from Readers Digest and TV. She'd just bought us a TV, our first.
"You girls," Gransallie said, especially addressing Maggie and Mary Grace in the rear view mirror, "let Ophelia be an example of how you could turn out. Hear?"
"Yes ma `am," they said.
Her brown eyes turned on me. "Yes ma`am," I said.
Then she told us why again, letting the Belair turn where it would. Just keeping it between the ditches, you might say. How come my daddy didn't come to the reunion was a "mys`try" to her.
I could tell her. I could tell her he would have liked to, he said. Nothing he'd have liked better than spending his only day off in Walker hell! Then she would say he hated her for leaving the farm, then she would cry, then she would start in on how he should have made something out of himself, gone to college--any degree would do, any title other than "farmer"--which would lead back into talk of the reunion and who among the Walker clan had gone away and made good since last year.
Ophelia, of course.
Winding down now, though the Belair was winding up on the same dusty lonesome roads, Gransallie began eyeballing the sun wallowing low over the pine tops. Should we be heading south? Shouldn't we have reached the highway by now? Twenty minutes coming this morning, and an hour going this evening?
I could almost hear her mind clicking off questions, questions that would reveal her main weakness--confusion--questions never to be asked out loud.
I looked back at the powdery roll of pinkish dust, at Mary Grace, on the left side, dozing with her sheer lips parted. Maggie with her fawn hair fanning--childish ringlets now relaxed into spiral waves--was snapping gum and gazing out the other window. Cardboard boxes crammed between them. They were wearing identical navy print dresses with gathered skirts and frothing white crinolines.
Long as they were going, they didn't care where or what shape they would be in when we got there.
Gransallie was silent now, thinking, and after a couple of miles, braked and backed into the right ditch, spun out and pointed the Belair north, plowing through her own dust.
At the next fork, she turned west, backtracking over the Belair's tracks and meeting the sun now slanting lazily through the pine needles. A low white house with a hog pen on one end of the front yard. A fat man in a white t-shirt watching the lone car as if it were a flying saucer.
"I think we oughta stop, Gransallie," I said. "Ask that man..."
"Huh!" she said, driving. "What would he know?"
We had already juddered past him anyway, beating up the road rough as a railroad track, toward a deadend wall of blackgums draped in vines. Right or left? Right. Shooting straight east through stripes of sun.
"Uh huh!" she said, sitting high behind the wheel of the Belair. "I got it now. This is where I oughta turned in the first place."
Ahead, another dust ribbon unraveled from a side road and curled behind another automobile, indistinguishable in the dust cloud making up and parting and powdering the palmettoes and myrtle bushes where katydids stashed their shrieks.
Gransallie stepped on the gas with her square-toed bone shoe. (She owned three pairs of the same style of shoes: black, for winter; white for spring and summer; and bone for autumn--a true sign that summer was turning to autumn when she began wearing the bone shoes on linking weekend visits to Georgia.)
She was either trying to overtake the automobile ahead or follow it out of the woods. Getting closer, close, dust furling like smoke over the hood of the Belair, sifting inside and coating the lens of Gransallie's blue-plastic framed glasses.
"Move over, Buddy," she said, peering into the dust. So, she was trying to pass. Out to show "Buddy" that she knew her way around, that this woman behind him was no stranger to these woods, that this woman-driver was no average woman-driver. Daddy's fault.
Suddenly, with one swift inward-driving whoomp and a series of rattles, like Coke bottles dumped from a crate, all motion ceased except for the dust and bodies shot forward like dummies from cannons and cardboard boxes pitching dishes while remaining right side up.
Gransallie's glasses rocked to the tip of her nose, and Mary Grace sprawled across my lap, like a dog cooling its belly in the dirt.
Gransallie's important triangular bone pocketbook, on the hump of the front floor, was spitting up change and pens and receipts and letters.
The back of my head throbbed from being cracked like an egg against Maggie's forehead; my tongue stung, tasted of orange Kool-aid. A white platter, sheeny with chicken grease, was shelved neatly between my seat and the right door.
In the dust scrim through the windshield, I spied a man materializing behind a red Corvette, like the devil wading through the sulfur fires of hell: long broomed hair and raisin skin, the shade of which carried seamlessly down to a flare of dark hair. That bruise-blue heart tattoo, center chest, like a Swastika.
"Hey, lady!" he yelled, heading for Gransallie's side of the car. "Anybody hurt?"
"I...uh...," said Gransallie, dazedly gazing down at her pocketbook, then at us. "You younguns hurt?" she asked.
Mary Grace, with her hand capped over her nose to catch the blood, shook her head no. We all said no, and when the dust cleared, Gransallie said "No!" and threw up her hands as if the man had a gun.