VI: Helen Has a Hissy Fit
As mother’s go, Helen was okay in terms of the panicky stuff, but in this case she really didn’t have to go that crazy. I know seeing a horse in your dining room can send one into a tizzy, but she shrieked and fussed and hissed so much, that Prince began to rear, his eyes rolled back in that way that horses have when they fear God Himself, and he reared back and actually chipped a side of one of the Chippendale dining chairs. I don’t think that got her. She seemed to know more than I did about the ease with which to get an ornery horse up some brick stairs and through the double screen doors and on into the dining room, and what I believe she was yakking about was how god-awful hard it was going to be to get the suddenly donkey-like beast to budge to walk back down the stairs. That seemed to be the jump she was making suddenly when she saw my prized white horse in her huge dining room, with the ancestral mahogany table magnificently displayed in the center of the hall-like room – a room with a ping-pong table at one end. This is where we picked crabs.
Prince would not budge. He would not go down the stairs. I had visions of mucking the dining room every day like his stall, as he bedded by the ping-pong table and we fed him his oats and hay while we were properly served à la table, my friends poking fun at me because I couldn’t go riding anymore except in the dining room. I had visions that Prince might be offended as I was by the horrid smell of crab shells left on the floor after a good round of picking.
Then Dad came home. That is when Helen had her for real hissy fit. As if she hadn’t gone crazy enough, she yelled out to the driveway from the upstairs window in that voice that signaled real trouble: “Dick, come up heah. You won’t believe what Kathy has gone and done. If Ah’ve told those girls once, Ah’ve told ‘em twice to leave those dayum horses where they belong….” She actually said that. As if this had happened before, or could be in the hopper as a plan. I mean, in South Carolina in the fifties, didn’t everyone’s horse end up somewhere in the house?
The rest of the event is a blank, but I believe, Dick, the other half of the Original Dynamic Duo, somehow coaxed my horse down the stairs and back to the stables, and I probably was minorly excoriated for this infraction, because it was weird enough as to not be that bad, and we were Southern after all, and at least the dogs hadn’t got the ham off the table and gone off with the silver monogrammed fork and knife again.
This was only a horse in the dining room, and Helen had only a minor hissy fit, as hissy fits go. Nothing like the day after we peed down the furnace grates on the heads of the guests at Helen and Dick’s cocktail party. That warranted one hell of a fit. Helen almost got the vapors and I believe she may have fainted. My best memory is of one ridiculously over-dressed guest, a soused woman in a brocade gown, standing innocently in the living room on the first floor of our old plantation house. She seemed genuinely bewildered by the wonders of the heavens opening inside the house that evening: “well ah nevah in all mah bow-un days! Can you believe this? How can it be rainin’ for God’s sake, and ya’ll aren’t getting’ wet ovuh theah?” She stood like a stupid drunken mule as we urinated on her head and martini glass. I have never wanted a bigger bladder in all my life, and the fact that the kidneys and bladder in both Rennie and me were limited organs was a damned depressing fact that night. Oh, yes, peeing on Mom’s guests through the furnace grate was up there. It was up there with feeding shit to Mister.
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