Days of Our Wives

The sixth stop of my Southeastern road trip was the Katrina-ravaged coastal town of Gulfport, MS. My Aunt Teresa and Uncle Terry have lived there for years, and it had been quite a while since I had visited them.

Uncle Terry works at DuPont, and Aunt Tese always has been a stay-at-home mom, with a few occasional side jobs throughout the years. She’s the perfect homemaker, especially given that she can whip up a Southern dish that would make Emeril’s cooking look like an Oscar Mayer Lunchable.

Aunt Tese is the younger sister to my Aunt Linda, who lives in Mobile, AL, and who also has primarily been a wonderful homemaker while teaching piano lessons on the side. Her husband, Uncle Eric, works for Shell Oil. If Uncle Terry and Uncle Eric bring home the proverbial bacon, then Aunt Tese and Aunt Linda surely know how to cook it up like nobody’s business.

While my family members tend to brag incessantly about the triumphs which embellish the family name, often they keep quiet when it comes to gossip that might tarnish the Baptist reputation that our ancestors built so long ago. For example, one might often hear them brag to their friends, “This is my nephew, Ritchie . . . he’s a lawyer in Washington, DC.” However, they’d never utter something like, “This is my nephew, Ritchie . . . he likes to make out with dudes.”

Of course, although my family members don’t usually spread gossip about their own immediate family members, I can always count on one of my aunts to give me the lowdown on any of my cousins who are not their own offspring. Of course, a good housewife would never limit her gossip to just the family. If I want the dirt on anything scandalous going on in the world, all I have do is pick up the phone and dial one of the women in my family.

On this particular visit to see Aunt Tese, she suggested that we make the hour drive over to Mobile to visit Aunt Linda. Aunt Linda was in the hospital recovering from hip replacement surgery, and I agreed that a visit from her favorite sister and nephew is just what she needed to cheer her up. And since there was no Target in Gulfport, I asked Aunt Tese if we could stop at Wal-Mart before we left town so that we could put together a gift bag for Aunt Linda.

Aunt Tese mentioned that Aunt Linda liked Peppermint Patty and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup bite-size chocolates, so we each grabbed a bag of those sweet treats for her. We then proceeded to the magazine racks to pick out a couple items of reading material to keep Aunt Linda interested while she was bed ridden. Aunt Linda moved into a new house three years prior, and she still talks about how it’s not decorated to her liking. So, I suggested that we purchase a couple of house decorating magazines for her. We found one called Romantic Homes, so we agreed that she would enjoy such a literary delight.

After we had browsed most of the home décor glossies, my oh-so-Baptist Aunt Tese turned to me and matter-of-factly said, “You know, if it were me in the hospital, I’d just want some good ole fashioned smut to read. I mean, I’m dying to know about this supposed baby that Tom and Katie have had, and, -- Oh, look! Here they are, right on the cover of Us Weekly! Well, we’ll just have to get this one for your poor Aunt Linda!”

Well, I always like a good gossip mag, so I was game. In fact, I got so into it that I picked up an issue of People with Britney on the cover and threw it into the gift bag. I mean, I know most people don’t like Britney, but no one can argue that as bubble-gummy as the Southern sister is, she’s still got more cojones than Fabio does after a month of sexual abstinence.

When we had finished picking out our choice magazines to present to Aunt Linda as gifts of good tidings and well-being, Aunt Tese asked what else we should throw into the gift bag. My first response was, “Well, we’ve gotten her chocolate and magazines . . . what else could she possibly need?”

As we walked down the greeting card and party favor aisles, the gift ideas just kept flowing forth. While I grabbed a princess tiara and sparkling wand for Aunt Linda, Aunt Tese picked out a pair of pink-and-white pom-poms for her to attach to her walker. In the event that no one else in the hospital knew that Aunt Linda was royalty and the head cheerleader, they’d know it by the time we had arrived with our versions of frankincense and myrrh.

Aunt Tese and I arrived at the hospital in Mobile, AL, and we cheered on Aunt Linda as she put her physical therapist, Barry, in his place by stating that no, she would not be learning how to tie her own shoes using a grip extension rod because she had people to do that for her, namely her husband and oldest daughter, Erica. After several attempts, Barry finally rolled his eyes and gave up, at which time Aunt Tese and I crowned Aunt Linda with her tiara and celebrated the exertion of her queenly dominance. While Aunt Linda may have just been a patient at the hospital, it was quite clear that in her fiefdom, physical therapists were subordinate to her reign.

After Aunt Linda’s political coo had been established, Cousin Erica pushed her mother’s wheelchair upstairs while I ran to the vending machine to fetch some coffee for myself and a Diet Coke for Aunt Tese. Cousin Erica is a housewife herself, and a damned good one at that. The oldest of three children, she has two school age children of her own and lives in a large house with her husband right around the corner from Aunt Linda’s estate. While Uncle Eric worked during the day, Erica dutifully tended to Aunt Linda during her hospital recovery.

As we sat by the upstairs window staring out at the view of the cloudy sky, Aunt Linda proceeded to give me the grim details of how she had broken her hip and of the events that ensued as she called for an ambulance and made her way to the hospital for emergency surgery. As I sat with concern on my face, Aunt Tese and Cousin Erica had fetched the smutty magazines and were flipping through them, offering their opinions on Tom, Katie, Jessica, and Britney with reckless abandon.

“So, just where is this baby Suri? I’m beginning to wonder if she even exists!”

“Well, you know Tom is keeping Katie locked up in that house and won’t even let her leave to go out in public!”

“Would you just look at Jessica Simpson? I want to know how she lost all that weight for her role as Daisy Duke! I’d like to lose a few pounds myself. I can’t believe she looks that good after having two children!”

“Jessica hasn’t had two children! That’s Britney! She’s the one on the cover of this other magazine here! We don’t really like her, though, since she married what’s-his-face.”

I hadn’t heard such a flurry of gossip since my days as a nine-year-old when Mee Maw used to promptly call Aunt Diane – who was also her next-door neighbor – to discuss the facts that Marlena was possessed by demons, Bo really wasn’t coming back to Hope, Roman had been accused of shooting someone whose last name was Brady. Upon hearing such harrowing details, I would crawl under the dining room table and quiver in fear, believing that no one was safe in Mee Maw’s sleepy little community of Sumrall, MS. Because Mee Maw and Aunt Diane would discuss such details with the passion of a Harlequin novel, I had always assumed they were recounting the daily news report of their small community. It was only afterward that my innocent mind was set at ease when Mee Maw let me know that they were simply rehashing that day’s episode of Days of Our Lives.

Of course, no Southern housewife is content discussing the drama of other people’s lives. She has to convey the drama in her own life, with the ultimate goal being to out-dramatize anyone else who might be in the room.

And, without a doubt, what housewife could ever visit a hospital with hunky doctors and evil nurses running around and not have drama to share? This occasion was certainly no exception.

Aunt Linda told us of the dramatic events that had unfolded that very morning at the Mobile Infirmary General Hospital. Although she had been visited by all her children, it was Cousin Erica who typically stayed with her each day of her life there, since the hospital setting was another world and aroused passions in Aunt Linda that she simply couldn’t cope with on her own. As the world turned, Aunt Linda had been trapped in her room, helpless and defenseless, by Nurse Taylor. While Aunt Linda didn’t claim to be young, she certainly had been restless and was not going to stand to be treated that way by a hospital employee.

To fully appreciate a story spun by a Southern housewife, one has to understand the gravity of certain words that are used in telling the tale. One such word is the adjective that. It is always used derogatorily as a way to put distance between the storyteller and a character or object of ill repute.

Aunt Linda recounted the harrowing tale of how that Nurse Taylor had entered her room earlier that morning and had barked at her for not being ready for a physical therapy appointment she didn’t know she had in the first place. That Nurse Taylor had barged in and had tried to take her blood pressure while she was brushing her teeth, and then that Nurse Taylor proceeded to knock her lotions off the bathroom shelf.

Cousin Erica then picked up the story and continued with it seamlessly: "We don’t like that Nurse Taylor, who, by the way, we now call 'Miss Piggy' because she obviously has a weight problem. We do not talk to that Nurse Taylor, nor do we even make eye contact with that Nurse Taylor."

It was quite evident that Cousin Erica’s limitations on any contact made with that Nurse Taylor were not simple statements, but instead were a code of conduct to be followed by anyone making a social visit to Aunt Linda’s hospital room.

After one episode of Aunt Tese’s pulling that Nurse Taylor back into the hallway for a tongue-lashing after the wayward nurse had tried to take Aunt Linda’s vital signs while Aunt Linda was using the bedpan, we watched one TV episode of Paula Deen cooking some “chicken fried steak, y’all,” to settle us down before Aunt Tese and I hopped in the car and made our way back to Gulfport.

After that dramatic episode of visiting Aunt Linda in the hospital, it became evident to me that while in other parts of the country, housewives may be desparate, this is not the case in the South. Here, our housewives are just downright rampaging.