Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man: A Novel (7 page)

Jimmy Snow brought Daddy a dead bobcat and do you know what Jimmy Snow told me? He said that the finest perfumes in the world were made out of bobcat pee, especially Blue Waltz perfume. No wonder it smells so bad.

My momma only uses Shalimar, which is very expensive. I think Shalimar is made out of some other kind of pee. Momma won’t fix any malts or ice cream cones because she said all those dead animals in the freezer make her sick.

Momma doesn’t like Billy Bundy, Al the Drummer and Jimmy Snow much. She said Daddy was being friendly with people he wouldn’t even talk to if it wasn’t for that beer.

The worse thing that has happened is that the Jr. Debutantes have started and I have to go to the meetings with that white stuff on my face. There’s nobody good in the club, just Kay Bob Benson and a bunch of shrimpers’ daughters that won’t talk to me on account of they are real religious and found out that Daddy is a drinker.

The first meeting Kay Bob got to stand up and explain the charms on her add-on charm bracelet. Who cares? All we did is learn to pour tea and curtsy. I already knew how to do that. We have to wear plastic barrettes in our hair with the club colors, seafoam green and oleander pink, and make ashtrays and tea plates out of shells.

We are supposed to do good deeds. Next week we are going to clean up the debris at the end of Highway 3, weather permitting. I can hardly drink my tea and eat my cookies, that live bait shop smells so bad. Those shrimper girls are used to it, but I’m not.

Mrs. Dot always ends the meeting with a thought for the day. Mrs. Dot’s thought for the day was: “You can get through life if you realize at an early age that the only two books in the world that really mean anything are the
Memphis Junior League Cookbook
and the Holy Bible, in that order.”

Momma and Daddy are fighting a lot and they are always tired. A carnival is coming here soon. I don’t feel well. My neck hurts and my back hurts. My legs are real stiff. I probably have polio and will have to go in an iron lung and be a crippled girl, like Betty Caldwell, or maybe it is appendicitis or TB even.

P.S. I also have been exposed to elephantiasis!

I didn’t have polio, but I did have to have an enema.

Momma is definitely not happy with Daddy’s actions this summer. The other morning I was witness to one of the greatest temper fits of all times. Daddy hadn’t been home all night because he was running up and down the road with Jimmy Snow and Al the Drummer. It was about seven o’clock in the morning when he finally did come home, and Momma and Hank were trying to get the place ready to open. I myself was trying to have a quiet breakfast.

When Daddy did come in, Momma took one look at him and saw he was still drunk. On top of that, he was wearing someone else’s clothes. All hell broke loose.

Momma was holding a white platter known as a seafood platter, but they are good to serve breakfast on, too. She took that platter and smashed it on the floor, hollering at him she was sick of him acting like a horse’s ass. Then she broke another platter and another. Every time she said something, she’d break another one. She went through every platter we own and then started through the cups and saucers, breaking two or three of them at a time. Daddy ran out the door. I didn’t move. After all, she wasn’t mad at me and I sure wasn’t going to miss this fit
for anybody. I figured it was the best one I’d ever see in real life. Hank and I didn’t take a chance and say anything, though. You never can tell about these fits, she could have turned on us.

After Daddy ran out, she finished breaking everything, including the shrimp cocktail cups. She was starting on the display table and was smashing all our shell arrangements until she came to the ones with the crosses in them and she just stopped.

She went in the back and didn’t come out for a long time. The only person that can match her throwing a fit is Barbara Stanwyck.

Harper’s Malt Shop didn’t open that day or the next. It took us two days to clean up the mess and get more dishes.

The only thing left were some ashtrays under the counter that Momma didn’t see. Daddy said she cost him about $350 in dishes. I think he is going to behave himself from now on. It is too expensive otherwise. He explained to Momma why he had on someone else’s clothes. They had all decided to take a swim and had taken their clothes off. Sheila Ray, as a joke, had dug a hole and hid them in the sand, then couldn’t remember where she had buried them. It was true because we saw Sheila Ray on the beach all day digging up holes and crying.

Daddy said Sheila Ray was Al the Drummer’s fiancée. Momma doesn’t believe him. She thinks Daddy likes her. The only peace and quiet I can get is under the house.

Sometimes Momma forgets to put that white stuff on my face, but not often.

They are setting up the carnival across the street. I went over there and met a man named Mr. Kowboski, a Polish Gypsy. He said his wife and children are coming down in a week and I will have someone to play with. They will be Yankee children, but I am not going to let that stop me.

I haven’t been doing much. I have been digging my tunnels under the malt shop every day. I have about sixteen tunnels dug and I’ve been going on the fishing pier. I kick the fish back in the water. People ought not to catch fish they are not going to eat.

I go every morning and every afternoon. George Potlow, the man who runs the pier, gives me a cold drink for free.

We don’t have Mattie Mae as a dishwasher anymore. She got into a fight with another girl over her boyfriend, Jerry, and was bitten in the face. Her head swelled up like a poisoned dog’s. Daddy and I went to Beulah Heights to see her.

Peachy Wigham had the Elite Nightspot lit up with blue Christmas lights. She told us that she had another colored woman who didn’t have a boyfriend that would be a good dishwasher. Peachy said Mattie Mae was crazy about that Jerry and wouldn’t be any good for nothing now that he was back from Korea.

The new dishwasher is a little old skinny woman named Velveeta Pritchard. She is the blackest woman I ever saw, so black she looks blue, which is a sign of royalty among Mississippi colored people.

They hate albinos with a passion, which I don’t think is fair. I still am dying to see a real albino in person. I asked Velveeta if there was one living up there in Beulah Heights and she said no, there wasn’t and it was just a story someone made up. But I think she was lying. I just know there is an albino up there. I can feel it in my bones.

Velveeta has only worked for us a little while and she hates Daddy already. Momma is crazy about Velveeta and they talk and talk all day. Momma won’t let me say “jig time” anymore. I don’t like Velveeta at all. She is a one-woman person and will take Momma’s side against anybody.

One of Momma’s gold loop earrings got stuck in my nose and she ran in there and told her as fast as she could. She finds all Daddy’s hiding places for liquor and runs and tells Momma. She Knows she won’t get fired because Momma thinks she is wooonnnderfullll!!!!

Hank is having a terrible problem with women. They won’t leave him alone. He’s too sweet to say no. There is this one girl who is after him all the time, Tommie Jo Harris. Her daddy owns a truck stop four miles up the road and she hangs around here day and night.

Mrs. Dot said that her heart is just like the moon, there is always a man in it. Tommie Jo is a real wild girl and every local boy is crazy to get her to go out with them. They like her because she is so mean. She drives a convertible and goes every
place by herself. Mrs. Dot believes everybody wants to catch her and tame her, which seems silly to me if what they like about her in the first place is that she is wild.

The story I like about Tommie Jo is the one where she went out with this guy that thought he was a big deal with the women, a lady-killer in Mrs. Dot’s term. Well, he got her into a car and tried to sweet-talk her, not caring a thing in the world about her but just trying to win a bet he had made with the other guys that he could kiss her. And then she took her knee and pushed in the cigarette lighter and at the very moment he thought he had won the bet, she stuck the lighter on the end of his nose. She took the wind out of his sails! Now he doesn’t dare show his face too much and he sure doesn’t play with the emotions of any other young innocent girls.

Tommie Jo wears colored scarves around her neck, a real Jennifer Jones type. She doesn’t talk to me. I don’t think she likes young children. She sure likes Hank, though. I know this for a fact because the people that rent a room to Hank at the Hammer’s Christian Motel have a vicious grandchild named Gregg. He made me hide outside Hank’s room one night because he had seen Tommie Jo go in there. She turned out the lights and got into bed as a surprise for him when he came home from work.

All I can say is that I feel sorry for Hank because he works very hard and I know he was tired. But when he came home and saw her in the bed, he was a perfect gentleman about it. We could see in the window, he pretended to like her. I’m never going to act like that and throw myself at anyone, not even Cornel Wilde if I ever meet him. Anyway, they are going to get married.

Yesterday the Jr. Debutantes cleaned up the debris at the end of Highway 3 because weather was permitting. Mrs. Dot’s thought for the day was: “If you make friends with the phone and frozen food, then life will be a bowl of cherries.”

In her opinion, Alexander Graham Bell and Clarence Birdseye are the two greatest Americans that ever lived excluding Robert E. Lee. She believes we never lost the War Between the States, that General Lee thought General Grant was the butler and just
naturally handed him his sword. Her family in Memphis had some heirlooms from General Lee, but the only thing General Grant left behind was empty whiskey bottles.

Momma got a call from Jackson today. Grandma Pettibone hit the jackpot at bingo and had a heart attack. They took her to the Baptist Hospital and told her not to smoke because of the oxygen tanks in the rooms, but Grandma hid one of her Camels in her hair and smoked one after everybody left. She blew out all the windows in the right wing of the Irondale Baptist Hospital. She wasn’t hurt, but the explosion made a lot of people on the other floors go into heart failure. Anyway, Momma has gone to Jackson and put her in the Methodist Hospital. Grandma says that’s just fine with her because the Baptists are too strict.

Mr. Honeywell and his all-girl army got a bazooka gun, but none of them are strong enough to hold it up. They put it on a wheelchair, but the wheelchair won’t roll in the sand. Too bad, I wanted to see it shoot

At the Jr. Debutantes’ meeting this week Mrs. Dot said we are going to adopt a poor child overseas and be foster parents. Whoever it is will write us every week and thank us. I hope it’s a girl. Imagine growing up and coming over here to meet its parents and seeing me and Kay Bob Benson and the shrimpers’ daughters!

I tried to talk them into adopting an albino child, but Kay Bob Benson had a squealing fit. She gets whatever she wants. She is always having baby-doll-pajama-spend-the-night parties. I sleep in my swimming trunks and I don’t want to go anyway.
Mrs. Dot’s thought for the day was: “Nothing endures like personal quality.” Next week we are going to have a talk on accessories, whatever they are, from a woman from the Magnolia Springs Dress Shop. If Momma is still in Jackson, I’ll miss that one for sure.

Angel Pistal is getting to be a pain. I have to put paper sacks on her hands because in her sleep she pulls the tape off her ears and she wants to hear a story every night.

Mr. and Mrs. Pistal are getting their money’s worth. Momma doesn’t like to go to the Blue Gardenia Lounge, but even she couldn’t resist seeing Pegleg Johnson’s act last week. He was wonderful.

There was a singer on the bill named Ray Layne and he was good, too. You should have seen Momma’s face when Pegleg Johnson came over to the table after his act and asked her to dance. She looked so funny. They danced to “Dance, Ballerina, Dance” by Nat King Cole. They did twirls and dips and everything. He picked Momma over everyone in the room!

I wondered if the leg that Kay Bob Benson’s mother found washed up on the beach was Pegleg Johnson’s. Momma said for me to hush. She was sure it wasn’t, but I think maybe it was. It’s too bad they didn’t save it so he could see. I wanted to ask him where he lost his leg, but Momma said she would kill me if I did, it’s not the sort of thing you ask.

That singer, Ray Layne, came over to the table and sat with us for a while. He is real lonesome, being down here by himself. I found out he is only seventeen years old and he’s from Hattiesburg.

Momma likes Mrs. Pistal a lot, but she’s never going back to that place because there were sleazy people there, lounge lizards she called them. Claude Pistal and all his friends looked like criminals to her. I didn’t tell her that those were the men I had played poker with.

The next day that boy Ray Layne, the singer up at the Blue Gardenia Lounge, came to the malt shop and asked Daddy if he could see me. Daddy came and got me out from under the house where I was digging tunnels.

He asked me if I could go swimming with him and I said sure.
He is so handsome and has curly hair. He has a girlfriend named Ann who wears glasses. He has gone with her for a long time and misses her. I sure wish he was my boyfriend. I would never let him go anywhere without me. I think he is wonderful and the best singer I have ever heard in my whole entire life.

And guess what? He kissed me good-bye and said he had enjoyed meeting me! He should be a movie star, a real Rory Calhoun type. Momma has got to get my tooth fixed.

The Kowboskis are here with their carnival. There are seven of them and two are my age. They have a big school bus they live in, that is better than Roy Grimmett’s trailer. At the carnival they have a penny arcade and a Ferris wheel and a machine that takes your picture four times for a quarter, and they sell cotton candy and caramel apples. Momma told me never to eat any candied apples because those carnival people buy rotten apples and put candy on them. I know I shouldn’t eat them, but I can’t help myself. However, I do make it a point to look for worms.