The Dollar Bill Incentive, Or, Being Good For Nothing.

I was always an “A” student. I had a memory like an elephant. I never needed a curfew, and I went to church almost more than I went home.

Yet, I was terribly, awkwardly naive. A bookworm straight out of the solid core of a ripe apple, I didn’t read people as well as words, not until I was much older – and oh how I wish you could shut people up the way you do a book, one flick of  your wrist and back they go on the shelf. 

But me, no, I never questioned authority, and let me tell you that came to backfire on a lot of children in my generation, in the mid-1980s; pedophilia was nearing an epidemic – remember when Snuffleupagus finally became “real?” There was a sad reason for that  – still, I respected my elders, continued to watch Sesame Street, and…

…I never, never put my elbows on the table.

But, as tends to happen, things change.

First, we had a bumper crop of babies in the family.  And as they continue to grow older, some things must necesssarily fall to the wayside (last Sunday, Wynn Chandler, 1.5,  and Connor, 3,  threw a wooden banana back and forth across the dinner table until it hit A.K.’s, 4, very full plate of spaghetti, causing it to fall into his lap and set off an alarm of some sort, a siren, buried in the back of his gut. Poor A.K., who for once wasn’t causing trouble, screamed loudly enough to make up for it). 

But, for years, it had only been me, in my adopted family. I was the baby, I was the absolute center of the universe. Careful attention was given to me, like alms and written prayers offered at the Wailing Wall. And I responded to this positive reinforcement.

Nana, for instance, was merciless in her insistence that I be well-bred, especially at the almighty dinner table. Each week I was taught with precision and focus a rule of etiquette. I could set a table for six, for a five-course meal, with formal attire and RSVP’ed regret cards (food allergies to be listed in the space provided on the back of the card) in under ten minutes. When it came to grace and civility at the dinner table, I stood alone. And above. All others. Well, at least other children.

The test came every Sunday. If I mastered the rule from the previous week: placement of water glasses, descending order of forks, the importance of balling a napkin, especially linen, at the end of the meal, as opposed to folding it (a sin!) and laying it in the center of the plate, etc. I would receive a dollar bill, magically slipped under my plate in the interim between the meal and dessert (in my family, we have a sort of digestive purgatory during this interim where we offer coffee and discussion before actually getting to dessert – well, we used to before the, you know, babies. The last time we did this ended up in a clotted mess of coffee, Berber carpet and mashed potatoes).

This went on for years, this Dollar Bill Incentive.

And I can, to this day, clearly remember the Sunday that I Decided I Would Showcase All Rules of Etiquette Learned Ever. I made a huge to-do about it, as well, telling everyone from that Wednesday night on, that Sunday would be the day. I would get absolutely everything right. That table would look ripped from the pages of Southern Living. 

We were never served pizza. So, this is a pure lie.

As a matter of fact, it wouldn’t just be set with the Sunday china, or the crystal tea glasses, it would be set with Intimidation. They might not even be able to eat, so crisp would be the napkins, so pristinely placed the plates. Instead, I told them, it might “behoove” them (yet another word I’d picked up from Aunt Maudy) to bring cameras.

Oh, how I practiced in my bedroom, drawing out diagrams, using flash cards – I know, it seems like a lot of unneccessary subterfuge just to set one table, and I know it is, shall we say, for something so truly insignificant in the greater scheme of things (like surviving a recession) but times were different then, and I was a lonely child, so cut me some slack.

I wasn’t entirely innocent, though.  No, I had a plan.

I wasn’t just diagraming the etiquette rules I’d been taught by Nana. I was busy inventing new ones, cleverly cloaked in similarity to real, authentic rules.  They’d never be the wiser, and when all was said and done, under my plate, that Sunday, would be well over $50. I was about to become the richest 12-year-old in the Wess Chapel community.

That morning I was at church so fast, I wasn’t entirely sure I’d taken a bath.

And God, how church dragged on and on…finally, we stood up for the Benediction. I knew my patience was wearing thin; I could barely, just barely, make it through this, I told myself: the song was “Just As I Am,” the uncut version, and I could already tell we were going to sing every last verse of it. I sat there praying that no one would take the altar.  I didn’t have time for that, they could just go find a closet, like the Bible said, and pray on their own time…I had a table to set. Much to my chagrin, two women, the Usual Suspects, strode down the aisle. I thought, fine, get it over with, lay your sins at the foot of the pulpit and get back to the pew…but the heavier of the two women, the one who was solely responsible for introducing Tupperware to the Social Ladies League, did a sneak-around and went to the pastor instead.

The Lord! I thought, This is going to take forever. You don’t walk down the aisle to speak to the pastor, during Benediction, to ask him how’s he doing, or where he got his suit. No, you’ve done some horribly guilty thing if it requires pastoral counseling at a quarter to one, in a Baptist church.  I was hoping it’d be about the Tupperware, personally.

I'd pray about Tupperware, too. For forgiveness of it.

You could have cut the tension in that church with a communion wafer – of course it’d have to be on the fifth Sunday of the month, that’s the only time we do Communion. Point is, everyone started praying for that woman, right then. And not in a good way. She was all the time taking advantage of the altar, something that is frowned upon at the church unless your aging mother whom you put in a nursing home even though you knew better has recently died, or your husband has left you for Brenda who up until last Monday had been the secretary at the elementary school, or your neighbor is that crazy woman who everyone knew “drove her husband to the grave with her constant migraines and other things always said in a whisper around children” had started sneaking out to her car, in her own driveway, and kicking the back fender in, and then calling the police and blaming you for it, poor Ms. Ada Lee – she had a walker for crying out loud…those were the only acceptable reasons to take the altar. 

Anything else just got you bad-mouthed.  They weren’t praying for her, they were praying about her: mainly to shut up and sit back down.

Finally, I guess, the Good Lord took her call and she got what she needed, and if not, we all knew she’d be back next Sunday. Although one time she took the altar on a Wednesday evening service, which just looked bad…no one ever did that, and also she’d worn knee-highs. The minute she kneeled to pray, it was, well, plainly unfair for the rest of us to have to look at that.

I was already out of my seatbelt, the car rolling to a stop, U.L. hollering at me “to quit doing that every blame time until he was fully stopped,” I could see him mentally adding yet another thing to the List of Bad Habits With Which He Blamed My Mother For. It was a long list and I knew, in time, it’d break him and he’d find himself at the altar, too.

I calmly stepped into Nana’s house and began the task that would make me rich and able to ruin the lives of all other children in my grade; so few at my school could afford the food in the cafeteria at the Academy. Which wasn’t really good food anyway.  But, after today, I could buy chicken baskets and shrimp boats and pizza slices for everyone.

Dinner passed by quietly, a few stunted mumbles of approval. I could tell that I’d done it, I’d pulled it off, this great heist of etiquette. Not a fork misplaced, not a napkin ring turned over, no water glass unfilled. I could barely eat, even though it was meatloaf, which was, like, number 7, in the secret diary I kept, where on the cover in glowing, loops of letters I’d written in the black magic marker: Favorite Things In Life. Coffee Time couldn’t come quickly enough, but come it did, and as we waited, and waited, so did dessert.

I got up and left the dining room, as was the customary method by which the money fairy would come; she didn’t like to be seen, and I can understand that. I walked into the front den and down the hall to wash my hands, something we all did before dessert (I like to think we did it before the meal, as well). I came back, nonchalantly, not as if I were expecting anything, and took my seat.

I don't know where Heaven is, but I know what ingredients you need to make it.

Dessert was Scotch Chocolate Cake – in my diary, it was number 11.

This was the moment. I picked up my plate, One slice please, took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and I could just about make out the corners of the at-least-fifty-dollars that I knew was lying under the plate. I could see those corners of that money flat through my eyelids. That’s how sure I was.

I opened them and there was not one single dollar bill laying there. None.

I couldn’t hide my disappointment. I looked at Nana, just shy of pitching a fit the likes of which had never been thrown in this family since Pam got a speeding ticket for missing her curfew (she had curfews; they were well deserved) in front of the old Buckstove in the front den. That was a fit for the record books.

But, I bit my tongue and asked, “What did I do wrong? I thought I did it all right.”

Nana, with those large, Merle Norman eyes, said, “You did, honey. It was perfect.”

“Well, then, where’s the money?” I mean, why beat around the bush, at this point.  And in that way that all the wizened women in my family have, she put forth a small smile that had both love and understanding and sternness in it and said,

Kris, you’re almost thirteen. You shouldn’t do things because you expect something in return. You should do them because it’s the right thing to do. You should learn to just be good for nothing.

It was a slip of a cliche, probably not intended. But, when she caught herself, she laughed, a beautiful laugh, and then we all laughed, and it was all ok. It was a good lesson to be learned.

And, it’s a lesson that’s stuck…because I’ve been good for nothing ever since.

You can go home again…it’s just frustrating.

Thomas Wolfe wrote, “You can’t go home again.”  (At least, I think he did).

But you know what: you can.

I do it every Sunday. Mainly because I don’t want to miss Nana’s cooking; it’s in a class of its own…and I love going home, I do, but you want to know a secret:  It’s also quite often very aggravating.

Why is that?  Why is going home such a frustrating experience?

I've lost my keys...and the doorknob.

Sometimes, I think, it’s because as soon as I open that front door and step inside, I’ll see that nothing has changed, and I’ll feel like I haven’t changed either. And I hate that feeling.

Despite the unusuality (I’m creating this new word right this second; I think I am, anyway) of my family circumstances, I had a fairly conventional upbringing: a solid home life, food each evening, love, and church. But, I was reared by a great uncle, in Mississippi, and so…like many families in the Deep South, change was avoided, and at our most hospitable, conveniently forgotten when wedding invitations went out, or when pressed, allowed to sit at the table but thoroughly ingnored and not given a linen napkin or salad fork.

The couch had been the family couch since before I was born; the curtains had cost a fortune when purchased, pre-Depression, and so they were tolerated with their heaviness and coatings of dust and memory. The chairs at the dining room table had been in the family since before there was a family, they weren’t going anywhere…so much had been sacrificed for the minutiae and detritus, if you will, that we lived in, and splendidly, and all those little things that went into making the home a home…well, it’s understandable that it became a necessary security to make the home remain that way – unchanged.

It wasn’t a coffee table; it was a story. It wasn’t a piano; it was religion. And it wasn’t china, it was our history. We were curators as much as members of a family, and you don’t become a curator in a day. And a curator has great responsibility.  (They’re not exactly a docent, for godsake).

To ignore that is a wide sin.

I’ve thought on this for quite awhile, as a means to calm myself from frustration.  It’s not so much the expected conversations: you need insurance, check your tires, stop putting things on the credit card; any child, I think, would feel unloved without these petty nitpickings.

No, what it is, at least for me, is the lack of understanding about major things…at least the reciprocation of it.

But, I think I realize now why. 

I look around the house and see things that I didn’t have to work for; things I expected to always be there: plates, sweet tea, arm chairs. My uncle looks around and sees things he’s given a life up to get, to take care of me when no one else would. He lives in a house of prior burden, and in it, he’s carried everything over and worked hard to deserve it, to keep deserving it. For me to turn a nose up at that is an insult, of course. He’s living in his major things. So, the reciprocation is difficult to measure. And, truth be told, all I really want, is a house like his…of my own.

But, here’s what the makes Deep South, deep:  guilt.

We don’t grow up to move away, we’re not supposed to…even within the state, it seems, sometimes. We are “grown up” to be representatives of our people, our church community, our neighbors; it’s one reason we make great politicians, those of who do get away.

Down here, everyone has a vested interest, I guess, which is a great support but not the most Platonic of ideals. It takes a village, Hillary Clinton has remarked, and yes it does, but this village has a drawbridge.

They are scared because they can’t imagine another village, or why in the world, after all they’ve done for you, you’d want to go there, and stay, and trust me: no suitcase in the world is big enough to pack that kind of guilt.

There’s also no way to explain this need, which many of my generation have, on a routine, clockwork Sunday afternoon…and so what happens is you begin to talk about anything else under the ecclesiastical sun to steer the bulk of conversation away from “where you’re going” and you just talk about “where you’ve been, and what that was like.” You avoid the future, because it must involve the unknown and the unknown is built on change, and that avoidance takes so much energy that you leave home each weekend exhausted…and a weekend spent in exhaustion is aggravating. And you know, next Sunday is not that far away. 

You keep squirreling away your privacy and plans and realize that the only way this will work is to jump ahead, make the move, then a U-Turn, then an announcement on your way out of town, and then you put your seatbelt on and drive and drive and drive until you realize you hadn’t packed anything, and that’s ok, because nothing is still better than guilt. Shock is the only salvation we still possess.

 Yet, we keep going home, don’t we? Either to prove Wolfe wrong, or dig a deeper hole in the front yard. Ironically, you can’t dig a deep hole anywhere hear a magnolia.  The roots are too hungry.

I guess the biggest frustration, really, in going home again, is that of expectation.  Because buried beneath the heart in all of us is a fear of meeting that expectation: I’m sure parents, even great uncles, know this – the dreaded what ifs – what if my child is that rare breed who can’t wait to be kicked from the nest?  I was that child. What if my child is the one who thinks he can make a difference? I was that child, too…still am. What if my child is a dreamer, a writer, an actor, a singer, a lover, a mover? What if, what if, what if.  I am, I’m all of them, and everyday I try to decide just which child I am, was, or want to be, still.

I love my uncle more than anything else in the world. But, I’m also not through with the world, yet. The other side of the problem is that I’m too ready to move. The timing’s not right, then. But, the need, the desire, the drive is.

Still, I stall on the idea of expectation.

I’m supposed to be working on one of my new plays, right now, for instance, and even though I argue with editors and friends and workshoppers on my slow progress(es) with anything I write, strung out over a strange array of “valid excuses,” the truth is I’m scared to death I won’t meet their expectations. Just like I keep straddling the fence on my next move, literal and meta, because I’m scared not of what I can’t see ahead of me, but of what I’ll see when I look back.

And for the record, I rarely use salt in my cooking; the last thing I need is a pillar of it.

So, for the time being, I keep going home.  Out of respect, which some in my life never understood, and to learn a little more before heading out again. There’s something, I suppose, that seems regressive about keeping a finger on old roots; but, for me, there’s something so necessarily alluring about the roughness of those old roots that I’m not sure I could remember if I let go of them just yet.

It’s what writers do. And that’s what I am.

At least, today.