Leaving Eden Read Online Free PDF

Martha Lee’s.
    It wasn’t because she was lazy. She was an LPN and didn’t mind taking on the dirty jobs. Anyone who would change an old lady’s diaper and bathe old men wasn’t shirking work. Mama always used to say Martha Lee was a saint. And maybe she was, though my piddling knowledge of saints made it hard to picture a holy person drinking and smoking and leaving a week’s worth of laundry heaped on the floor.
    While I was waiting, I put a load of wash in the machine, wiped down the counters, then swiped myself a beer and went to sit on the steps. Most of the yard was as run-down as the house, but off to one side was just the prettiest patch you could imagine, where Martha Lee had planted hydrangeas and zinnias and hibiscus with blossoms as big as a meat platter. There were tomato plants I had to look up to, and bush beans with marigolds laced between each plant. Nothing was neat or in rows like most people’s gardens, but it was so pretty and rich it looked like the Garden of Eden. Lush is what Mama used to call Martha Lee’s garden, and the word set exactly right.
    Whatever Martha Lee did with her yard would have been perfectly fine with Mama. They had been best friends since second grade, although no one in Eden could figure how two girls so different could be tighter than the knot on a noose. Daddy called them the original odd couple, and I had to agree with him there.
    Martha Lee Curtis was, Jesus forgive me, the plainest woman in Eden. The kind of homely that was hard not to stare at, even if you’ve seen her all your life, which I had.
    Mama was nothing if not delicate. She was the kind of woman who could put a gardenia in her hair and not look foolish. The flower sat there like it had spent every moment of its short but flawless life just waiting to be pinned in that bed of dark curls. For a fact, no one on earth would even consider fixing flowers in Martha Lee’s hair. A flower would just up and shrivel at the prospect of landing anywhere near her head. I think men felt pretty much the same. Even Mama, who had a kind word for every drunk and fool in Eden, even Mama didn’t protest very long when Daddy said Martha Lee’s face would stop a blind mule dead in its tracks.
    Martha Lee was a big woman. And she didn’t hold much truck with personal grooming. Half a block away you could tell she cut her own hair. And she didn’t know about things like using the juice of a lemon to bring out the shine. Mama used to encourage her to pluck her eyebrows and give lipstick a shot, but Martha Lee couldn’t be bothered. My personal theory— which I’ve given a lot of thought to—is that if you look like she does, early on you give up even trying.
    I was maybe seven or eight when my mama began her earnest campaign to get Martha Lee to pluck. She used her own eyebrows as the example to which Martha Lee should aspire. I would sit in the corner of my mama’s bedroom and watch her working till the brows of her arches were as neat and perfect as Greta Garbo’s, an old actress Mama greatly admired, along with Carole Lombard, who died eight years before Mama was born and, like Garbo, had pencil-line brows.
    When Mama attended to her own, it was a precise and perfect ritual. Her eyes would narrow against the stream of smoke curling up from the ashtray on her dresser and she would lean in close to her reflection, smooth a fingertip over the patch of skin beneath her brow and then, with a sharp jerk, yank out a stray hair. She never so much as winced, although I know for a fact that it had to hurt. I myself tried it once, and I want to tell you it made my eyes water something fierce. I can see why Mariel Hemingway chose not to pluck, although I know Mama would have believed it would advance her career if she thinned them just the littlest bit. This was a theory she employed to explain the acting career of Joan Crawford, who, Mama said, was beautiful early on when she waxed her brows, but as soon as she let them grow out