Wyllma Phillips was a southern gentlewoman, a tiny little
sprout of a woman with pure white hair, oversized dentures, and a voice as
sweet as tupelo honey. She lived in one of those small apartment complexes that
proliferate in small towns and older neighborhoods, just a few units tucked in
between single family houses. Her apartment was always spotlessly clean, and if
I remember correctly there were doilies. Also cookbooks. Cookbooks were like
porn to Wyllma; she had colorful hardbound ones on the coffee table and a shelf
of them next to the couch. She loved to cook, loved to have friends over, loved
to feed people. Her tiny apartment kitchen had almost no counter space; I don’t
know how she made more than a boiled egg in there. She drove a beige VW Bug,
and I can remember driving with her to the grocery store to get some
ingredients for another one of her feasts.
When my parents were first divorced and we abandoned our
house in Celina to move to Denton, we stayed in Wyllma’s apartment for a few
nights. She was out of town visiting one of her two daughters. She had a
Victorian bedstead that was so high off the ground you needed a
step stool to climb up into it. She had one, of course, with a floral needlepoint
pattern on it.
There were two bedrooms in Wyllma’s house, and the back
bedroom was sort of her den. There was a small square TV, what we used to call
a portable TV, a daybed, magazines, some games. This was where she sprawled
out, relaxed, got casual. For some reason the triangle peg game became an
obsession for us. I would come over to her place and we would spend hours
working out the pattern until we could solve it every time. (Unfortunately, I
have since forgotten the pattern and cannot amaze my kids with my genius.)
I didn’t know until years later that Wyllma had once been
married to a man who was brutally abusive. How she extricated herself, raised
her children and supported herself at a time when southern gentlewomen
were supposed to be nothing more than decorative, I’ll never know. I’m sure there
were some fascinating stories behind her gentle façade, but I didn’t know I was
supposed to ask the questions until long after she was gone.
