Today's Reading
ONE
May 2002
Good pimento cheese is a reason to live. It tastes like everything just might turn out fine after all. Somewhere between New Orleans and the Mississippi line, I had stumbled onto some.
I pulled into one of those great old stores with clapboard siding and a tin roof, where the entrance is a cantankerous wooden door pinned shut with a wobbly metal knob, the parking lot is more dust than gravel, and the two Texaco pumps out front have been there since sock hops were all the rage. What made me hit the brakes was a wooden sandwich sign right at the edge of the road: "Cold Drinks. Good Tomatoes. Aunt Letha's P.C." In this part of the South, "p.c." stands for pimento cheese, a down-home delicacy I have loved since childhood. Not just anybody can make it. Too much of this or too little of that, and it'll taste as sorry as a mushy Better Boy. But I had high hopes for Aunt Letha.
Standing in the old store, with frosty air blasting from a couple of duct-taped Sears window units that looked older than I am, I placed my order and watched a woman behind the counter lightly smear mayonnaise on two thick slices of white bread, then add a generous slathering of unadorned pimento cheese.
The woman looked about seventy, her gray hair bobby-pinned into a French twist and a pencil stub tucked behind her ear. "That gonna be all for you, cher?" she asked as she put my sandwich in a paper sack and filled a Styrofoam cup with a fountain Coke.
Have mercy, I had missed that accent. "Could I get a basket of tomatoes too, please?"
"Sure can." She began ringing me up.
"Are you Aunt Letha?"
"Naw, dahlin'. That was Mama's sistah. I'm Rema—Rema Guillory. But I try to do Aunt Letha proud when I make her pimento cheese."
"Nice to meet you, Rema. I'm Edie."
"It's good to meet you too, Edie. That'll be fifteen dollahs even. Five for your sandwich and Co-Cola, then another ten for the tomatoes. Just pick you out a basket over there by the door."
I slid a twenty onto the counter. "You keep the change."
"Thank you, honey. Travel safe—and don't forget your tomatoes. Folks are forever doing that, and then I have to chase 'em down in the parking lot."
"I won't forget," I said as I headed for the door and grabbed a basket. Rema's tomatoes smelled like rich black dirt and hot Louisiana sun and green leaves just rained on. A brass bell on the door jingled as I went outside, back into the kind of heat that makes you wonder how the cicadas have the energy to chirp. It was only May—usually a mild month—but summer had come early this year, and I had the sweat to prove it.
Getting situated in the dullest car I'd ever rented, I took a bite of my sandwich. Bless Aunt Letha, she knew what she was doing. She and Rema just might cure my faltering appetite, with a little help from Punk—that's my grandmother.
About a month ago, Punk called and said, "Sweet girl, why are you up there hurting all by yourself in New York City? Come on down here and let these gulf waters heal you." Punk believed there was no wound the Gulf of Mexico couldn't salve.
Once I made up my mind to leave the city, I sold what little furniture I owned, packed my biggest suitcase with summer clothes, and shipped the rest of my belongings to my parents' house in Birmingham. Then I caught a flight to New Orleans, in part because I wanted a few days in a city I had always felt way down in my bones, but also because I wanted to savor the coastal road I was on—every salty, windy, hot, humid mile of it.
Eventually, the marshes, bayous, and fish camps of Louisiana gave way to a string of coastal towns fronting the gulf in Mississippi, where the humble byway I had been traveling transformed into touristy Beach Boulevard. From Pass Christian to Ocean Springs, live oaks stood like sentinels guarding grand old Southern homes, their massive branches protectively spread, daring the water to come one step closer to the azalea bushes and the family silver.
Stealing occasional bites of Rema's p.c., I at last made it to the final leg of my journey, a narrow, southerly strip of pavement snaking toward Punk's tiny waterfront hamlet of Bayou du Chêne, home to so many Louisiana transplants that locals call it Little Lafayette.
...
