Mamie Johnson Comes Undone
“¾Ah, Misirlou, magical, exotic beauty.
Madness will overcome me, I can't endure [this] any more.
Ah, I'll steal you away from the Arab land¾”
Madness will overcome me, I can't endure [this] any more.
Ah, I'll steal you away from the Arab land¾”
from Michalis Patrinos’s Misirlou, Athens, Greece, 1927
Both scientists and end-times fanatics were in a dither over the anticipation of the approaching celestial events of May, 2011. Astronomers, working for NASA’s Space Center, in Cape Canaveral, were following the rare, impending alignment of six planets including Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Jupiter in the eastern sky just before sunrise, the week of May 9th. They were practically biting on metal with impatience for the month-long show of six worlds in the sky, constantly changing planetary positions, virtually “dancing” amongst themselves¾ a celestial version of grab-your-partner-an’-do-si-do visible in the pre-dawn; but just down the coast, a few miles from the Kennedy Space Center, something far more astounding was about to happen under the stars.
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The big blue sky, above the little town of Cocoa Beach, moving its puffs of white across the horizon with the help of coastal breezes, and the scent of orange blossoms on the afternoon winds went unnoticed as Mamie Johnson fussed over a current source of irritation. Mamie had many sources of irritants, such as mismatched table linens, scuffed shoes, snowbirds from the north (whom she endured every winter season), and uneven window blinds. The cause of her penciled eyebrows knitting together, like two upside-down parentheses, was the neighbor’s dog, a muttley thing, doing its afternoon business on her perfectly manicured lawn. It was a Tuesday, and Mamie just returned from work to her home on Bougainvillea Drive. She wasn’t about to tolerate such an indignation¾she walked up the Sneed’s walkway instead of her own and rang the bell. Mrs. Sneed, with an exasperated expression, came to the screen:
“Yes, Ms. Johnson (Mamie was inevitably irritated by Mrs. Sneed’s insistence on calling her “Ms.” Instead of the proper “Miss”), what can I do for you?”
“Mrs. Sneed, your dog…your dog is loose again, and has just defecated on my lawn…I would sincerely appreciate it if the deposit made was collected back, and you’d try, please try to keep that thing, your dog, in your yard¾”
“I’ll send Scotty over with a baggy when he gets home” Mrs. Sneed said, with an air of finality, to which Mamie, who considered herself genteel above all others, imparted a “thank-you” and turned on well-polished heels.
Mamie was a woman who just did all things in a particular way, and she never, ever, slacked on either her personal appearance or her standards for everything else. But Mamie didn’t know that something strange was going to happen to her; that in her very DNA, her tightly packed neurons, her closely-coiled double helixes, a permanent unraveling was about to occur. Unlike the imminent, unusual planetary alignments (which she’d been vaguely aware of on the news), where the heavenly orbs would eventually carry on in their pre-determined paths, the revolution in Mamie’s electrons would be permanent; she’d been invited to a party, for one of the ladies at work, and, for once she’d decided to attend.
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Mamie was the only darling child of her devoted, albeit bigoted parents, who were also only children, and, except for her great aunt, Aunt Mamie (who’d lived to be 112 and had fought off a wayward band of Yankees with a flintlock), her namesake, she’d never know another relative. Her parents married early, but to their vexation had remained childless for nearly two decades until Mamie’s birth in 1950. Mamie considered her mama, Eldora, a proper southern woman, of noble Pensacola birth, who emulated the style of Jackie Kennedy (but none of the Kennedy’s liberalism), and her daddy, Lee Jackson, had held steadfast to the Southern gentleman’s opinion that all born north of the Mason-Dixon line were an ill-mannered and motley lot, and had interfered with the natural order of life in the Old South. Their traits and opinions had passed along to Mamie, who’d never entertained a reason to question her parents.
Along with the insular values she inherited, and her mother’s strict adherence to wearing only beige after Memorial Day, and black after Labor Day, she also received a large inheritance, including her beloved flamingo pink home with its white-tile roof along the Banana River (her parents had died within two years of each other, when Mamie was in her early twenties), due to the cumulative wealth and frugality of her ancestors, who’d always esteemed to the doctrine, “never touch the principle.”
Mamie’s daddy, a physicist and a “big-wig” at NASA in its glory-days, had encouraged Mamie to view potential husbands with a particular skepticism, and Mamie, being a finicky, devoted daddy’s girl, she felt all the men she’d met in her youth were either sub-par, or worse, Northerners recruited by NASA, and she rarely accepted dates. The years slipped by, and the pretty woman Mamie had been transformed into a handsome, but xenophobic, 62-year old behind her pancake make-up and lacquered platinum blond, bouffant-style hair.
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As the sun slipped behind bottle-neck palms and gardenias outside the bedroom window, Mamie finished dressing for the evening. The invitation had read: “Come celebrate Arletta’s 50th birthday, 7p.m., May 10th, at ‘Coconuts on the Beach.” Mamie, who’d never had to work, long ago prudently decided she must do something productive with her time; she had a profound love for jewelry, so she forgave the Northern origins of Macy’s at the Merritt Island Mall and took a position in the jewelry department in the mid-70’s; it had simply never occurred to Mamie to change.
She didn’t, as a rule, usually go out with the “girls” from the store (most of them were far younger than her and really northerners anyhow, she reasoned), but Arletta had worked in the accessory department almost as long as she, and was able to lay ancestral Alabamian claim to several distinguished civil war heroes. Arletta was the closest Mamie had to a person she might consider a friend.
Her ensemble finished off with her favorite Miriam Haskell Greek coin jewelry set, a spritz of White Shoulders, she headed to the garage to her ‘68 Cadillac (a graduation gift from daddy) and off she went, blissfully unaware of the transformative forces at work in the cosmos above her¾ if she knew was about to occur, she would have plunked down on her couch, its upholstery untouched under its plastic protective cover, and re-organized her jewel box.
Within minutes Mamie was in the company of her co-workers at the open-air, beach-side restaurant, and after the usual hellos and air-kisses were exchanged, she settled in to indulge in a series of piña coladas and daiquiris. Mamie felt an unusual flush begin to rise; while she was aware that the other girls went out often, without inviting her, it didn’t bother her when she stood behind her glass counter at Macy’s, keys to the jewel safe secure around her wrist, but now she felt uncharacteristically irritated in a most peculiar way¾
Arletta leaned in close, “Mame, does me good to see you here¾we never see you outside of work…”
“Well, Arletta, now I couldn’t very well let you sit here all alone with these Yankee transplants and miss you’re birthday, now could I? Besides…”
Now, at this moment Mamie had no idea that Venus and Jupiter were swiftly approaching each other, or that the band had begun playing a mix of old surfer tunes…they were playing Pipeline now…but she was aware that a dark, swarthy-looking man continued to gaze at her from the bar¾when she’d look his way, he’d grin at her; she felt, like he thought she could be his chicken leg for the night¾the audacity!
“Besides what?” encouraged Arletta, as she followed Mamie’s gaze to the man at the bar, “oh, now he is a handsome thing, my-oh-my, charm’s runnin’ like a sugar tree from him…Mame, he’s smiling at us…at you I think¾”
“Rude…positively mannerless…and what, handsome? Well…maybe if you like a simian-type of man…”
“Oh Mame, oh…oh Mamie, he’s getting up…don’t look, oh my…oh Mamie, good Lord, he’s walking this way…”
“Excuse me, ladies¾” He held the collective attention of the women at the table …what, they all wondered, including Mamie, was that accent ? Maybe Italian? Or Greek ? Fixated on his pearl-white teeth embedded in a mature, but beautiful, golden face…his hair, they thought, akin to smoothly tarnished silver?
“I’d like the permission of the table to steal away this radiant beauty (some of the girls giggled)…for a dance¾”
He was looking only at Mamie, who was about to repudiate such brashness in her opinion; but when his hand slid around hers, as he stood just to the left of her seat, and as Jupiter edged achingly close to Venus, she felt a tingle of the most unconventional sort begin in her cupped hand and travel, blossoming outward, then down her suddenly too tightly supportive Hanes Control-Top pantyhose.
She, like all hesitant goddesses before her, was unable to resist, giving in to the inevitability of myth’s progression and pure chemical reaction¾ the band was playing Out of Limits as they took to the floor; he introduced himself, Palaemon Stranipolus (Pali, please, he’d said), in his youth he’d been a sponge diver in the Aegean Sea, but traveled to America in the 50’s and established his own sponge diving fleet in the Keys. Mamie was breathless, her thoughts were coming at her from somewhere else…what did he say? He was Greek? Sponge diving? Jackie had married that Greek, something Onasis…he’d owned boats too…what did he ask? Her necklace? Yes, she said, (was she speaking or was he reading her mind?) they’re Greek coins…he pulls her in as Jupiter and Venus merge closer than they’ve been for decades, and Mamie feels she’s like a pearl being knotted to a match on a honey-warm, glowing strand…
The band under the tiki hut became the additional catalyst for the eruption and melting away of what had constituted Mamie Johnson for 62 years; they struck up Misirlou as the heavens unfolded their own celestial dance. The silver-haired couple on the dance floor shook and shimmied, Mamie’s hips gyrating to the beat as Pali snapped his fingers and danced sideways, Greek-style, first left, then to the right…then closer and closer they came…
Pali knew when a woman needed to be unloosened, to come undone, to be freed, to return to a natural state, to unfurl like the frond of a new fern…and something in Mamie did begin to shift and unravel like an awful knot finally released. She began to sweat from chemical changes occurring in her body as the tension of the Miserlou chords heightened; the moon rising high over the warm Atlantic surf. Mist crept in off the sea and worked at the layers of Aqua Net in Mamie’s hair and it softened, becoming loose and curly…the pancake makeup and Maybelline eyeliner evaporated leaving her skin dewy and her eyes bright and clear—the hooks in her Maidenform support bra gave way, along with the snaps of her Playtex girdle, freeing her breasts to slap and swing as she shimmied her unbound waist and hips; lips filled out in generosity and tolerance, and her voice, when she moaned with pleasure, lost it’s brittle inflections.
The riffs of Misirlou slowed, but their pulses continued to rise; he led her from the dance deck and out to the sand into the dark at water’s edge. The surf lapped at their feet, their own music escalating in their heads¾and he lay her down in a sheltered valley of sand, among the sea oats and purslane, softer than any man-made bed. Without a word he explained the world, to Mamie, with roving hands and appreciative eyes like obsidian in the moonlight¾ that the Greeks had studied astronomy, wrote poetry and conjured mathematical formulas; but they didn’t claim to own anything; they knew all knowledge belonged to the gods who moved among the planets and the stars¾and above them, in the pre-dawn sky, Jupiter converged onto Venus, within half a degree, as close as one planet could get to another without claiming its orbit for its own.
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Mamie left Pali slumbering under the arms of a fruited sea grape, and went for a run along the surf; she, at 62, thought that she’d lost something heavy and unwanted in the early morning hours, something far more relevant than her post-menopausal maidenhood. She was feeling exquisitely, naughtily beautiful as she ran naked under the sinking moon; the surf’s swell at her calves slapped at the sponge diver’s milky-way contribution to her transformation as it slipped down her wiggling, blue-veined thighs into the salty seawater that might very well have traveled all the way from the Aegean.
She didn’t know the planets were beginning their shift away from each other, that she’d been kidnapped from herself by the world and reclaimed, then freed again; she didn’t know the words to Misirlou mentioned magic, madness and stealing away; but she did know that in that early morning hour, that moment, that final crash and explosion, her life changed with the touch of a hand, and just one plummeting kiss.
