The Queen of Palmyra (10 page)

The real problem was that Zenie didn’t like Gertrude from church. Zenie and Gertrude were both Heroines of Jericho at Saint John the Baptist, but they’d had a falling out over the communion glasses. Who was supposed to wash them. Zenie said Gertrude had agreed to do it for Sunday the fifth of March but hadn’t done it and had blamed it all on Zenie, telling everybody that she, Zenie, was supposed to have done it for that Sunday, which was most definitely not true. It was Gertrude’s turn to wash, not hers. The worst part of it was that nobody discovered the glasses were still dirty until the deacons were passing the trays and then the preacher held one up to the light in front of God and everybody and said
Humph.
Then people started really looking at them and saw they had purple streaks on the rims from the last month’s grape juice and red and pink from the ladies’ lipstick. Of course they drank from them. What could they do? Turn down Jesus’s blood because of germs?

“Prissy,” Zenie would hiss behind Gertrude’s back. I’d be helping the two of them, Zenie filling the plates in the kitchen and Gertrude going back and forth taking them into the living room. Gertrude had a nice shape and her waistline showed to advantage in the apron. She’d sashay in and out to get the plates and serve them to the ladies at the four card tables in the living room. Every time Gertrude would go out of the kitchen with her plates,
Zenie would make a noise in her throat like she was getting ready to upchuck, then mince her six-foot self around the kitchen like a poodle carrying an imaginary plate, and I would fall out laughing.

But Gertrude’s sashaying days were over. A week ago the doctors had to cut off her left foot on account of the sugar sickness and trying to work when her toes were crusting over with sores. It was a surprising case in someone so young. Mama was bringing a special plain white cake to Gertrude that had been sweetened with fruit juice and had no icing, which was the only kind of cake Gertrude could eat and only a little bit at a time. She’d also brought Gertrude some old magazines, some clematis from our front porch wrapped in a wet napkin, and a Sears and Roebuck catalog. Gertrude loved glamour magazines. Her little living room was stacked all around with old magazines that leaned here and there with ladies on the covers doing this or that in frisky dresses, their hairdos gleaming like golden halos.

First off Gertrude launched into telling us how her foot had looked like a burnt-out stump before it got taken off. Right then I started seeing flecks of cotton before my eyes and Mama took one look at me and shoved my head between my legs so I wouldn’t pass out or upchuck. My usually pinkish Mama looked very white herself especially sitting next to Gertrude, who was on the darker side and looked even more so in her white nightgown and the white gauze dressing wrapped around her ankle where her foot had been. The gauze had yellow spots sprinkled across it like the lemon zest Mama put on the tops of her white iced lemon cakes. Mama reached quickly into her purse and pulled out her Japanese folding fan and started fanning herself hard while she pushed up her bangs to wipe the sweat. They stood straight up and out, like those crab pinchers you see on big greenish beetles who are aggravated and ready to fight. Then she remembered me and started
fanning me too. Gertrude had a round fan made out of palmetto grass, and she was working it hard.

It was horribly hot. Gertrude had two windows in her front room, but they were both closed and you could tell they were sealed shut forever with paint globbed around the cracks. The air was so still in the room you felt that the words coming out of your mouth were making a breeze. Zenie had been over there that morning cleaning and the place smelled like Pine Sol. I was betting that Zenie was feeling pretty bad about her ugliness to poor Gertrude and was trying to make amends.

“It’s close in here,” Gertrude said. “Going to be a hot summer.” She was stretched out on the couch, her foot on a pillow. Her crutches were propped up beside her. This Gertrude was a different person from the woman in the lace apron.

“It’s awfully hot in here. If it’s like this in May, you’re going to roast the rest of the summer.” Mama started fanning Gertrude too. “Do you have an electric fan, Gertrude? Anything to cool you off?”

“Can’t say as I do. Till this happened, I was working this time of the day, so I didn’t need one. That’s all right. Heat don’t bother me too bad.”

“Well, I’m going to try to find you one. A fan. I’ll call the church and see if anybody has one they’re not using.” Mama sounded determined.

“Don’t worry yourself about it.” Gertrude looked over at her bottle collection on the windowsill. The little bottles were all shades of blue glass and whistle clean so the late afternoon sun sliced through them, spattering blue over the bare floor like little pieces of sky had fallen into the room. “Look how pretty my bottles look there in the sun. Well now. You tell your mama I’m sure sorry I can’t come back to work for her.”

Mama rose. This was her cue and she was grateful for it, plus
I could tell she felt bad that Mimi wasn’t there visiting with Gertrude too. Mimi had a good heart but a weak stomach; she didn’t visit Uncle Nash, her own brother, in the VA hospital until his war wounds healed. “I’ll tell her, and I’ll be back with that fan.” Mama looked hard at me. I scrambled up, dim-witted from the heat.

Gertrude shifted her leg on the couch and smiled politely. “No, don’t bother nobody about that fan. Johnny down the street is coming up tomorrow to put me in a screen door. If that doesn’t cool me off, I’ll order a fan from Sears.”

When we got into the car, Mama sat behind the wheel breathing hard. “Lord, that place is an oven,” she said. I could tell she was scheming. When Mama was trying to figure out a scheme, she would rub the tip of her nose and run her finger down over her mouth to her chin. Then it would go right back up to the nose. After a bit of rubbing, she started the car, the tip of her nose now flaming up against her still pale face. She didn’t say anything else, just drove straight over to Mimi’s and parked in front under the big oak tree that had uprooted the curb and the sidewalk it grew between.

“Stay.” She said it to me like I was a dog. In less than two minutes she was marching back down the walk with one of Mimi’s electric fans and a big glass of ice water. Before she could stop me, I stuck my hand in the glass and grabbed an ice cube out of it and shoved it down the front of my shirt.

I eyed the fan. “She said don’t worry about a fan.”

Mama looked at me in exasperation. “Well, she couldn’t have possibly meant
that.
”

In another few minutes we were back up in front of Gertrude’s place. I didn’t have to be told to sit tight. In another minute, though, Mama came dragging back to the car with the fan. She threw it onto the Spanish moss backseat and got back into the
car. She turned to me with a stunned look. “She doesn’t want it. I tried to talk her into it. I told her Mimi had sent it. She said she was
fine
. Can you believe that?
Fine.
I told her it was hot as Hades in there, and she said no it wasn’t. It was
fine
. Don’t trouble myself or my mother.”

“Maybe she didn’t want charity.”

Mama looked at me, shocked. “This wasn’t charity. It was just a
fan
, for God’s sake.”

“Maybe it felt like more than a fan.”

Mama looked down at the steering wheel. “Well, maybe so. Maybe I came on too strong. I guess I should have introduced it more casually.”

“Like, hey Gertrude, I got an extra fan in the basement. You want to use it? Or something like that.” I stuck my head out of the window to get some air.

Mama nodded and gazed over at Gertrude’s house. “I bet I hurt her feelings. Damn it the hell, I could kick myself.” Her voice sounded like it had gotten caught on something ragged.

We tooled around awhile after that. Mama pulled out a half-pint bottle of Old Crow in a paper sack from under my side of the front seat. She took a sip and starting driving around and singing in her cracked off-key voice about how in the sweet bye and bye we shall meet on that beautiful shore. Up and down the highway, then out into the country, raising clouds of dust on some back roads that kept turning into dead ends. I could tell Mama was down and out. She didn’t want to go home. After a while, though, she perked up and started in on “Mack the Knife” and I gave her some much-needed backup to try to keep her in tune.

It was still hot as fire but getting toward suppertime when we high-stepped it into the house. We were both singing at the top of our lungs about scarlet billows starting to spread. Mama stopped short in the doorway, and I bumped into her. Directly in front
of us Daddy was sitting on the sofa looking peeved. His brick foot was up on the rickety coffee table, which came from Mama’s grandmother on Grandpops’ side and which Mama said was the only decent piece of furniture in the house. He was smoking a Lucky Strike and had the newspaper wadded up and was hitting it over his knee.

“Where you girls been?” His voice was light and heavy at the same time.

Mama hesitated. I could see she was weighing her options. Tell the truth and get Daddy mad. If he’d told her once, he’d told her a million times, he didn’t want her going to take people things up in Shake Rag. Let them alone up there, folks don’t want to mix. Or tell a bald-faced lie and run the risk of getting caught and making him madder.

Mama was eyeing Daddy. Lately he’d been especially ornery and jumpy; something was gnawing at him, like those chiggers that dig into your tender flesh and stay alive for weeks by taking bites out of you every so often. The night calls had been coming hard and fast, and I’d been burning up the basement stairs bringing the box up to him night after night. One of his eyes was twitching as he looked up at us; a lock of hair, heavy with Mr. Holcomb’s oil, fell in his eyes.

“Messing with a fan up at Mother’s,” Mama finally answered, looking hard at me.

I smelled trouble and took off for my room. Shut the door like a whisper. Sat down on my bed, crossed my legs Indian style and started picking at the nubs on my spread. There were only four rooms in our house, and mine opened onto the living room. So I heard Daddy when he said, “Yes ma’am, I know that much. Just now called over there and your mama told me you took a fan of hers up to some woman in Shake Rag. Didn’t I know that?” His voice went high. “I said, no ma’am, I did
not
know that, but
I found it very interesting since I told Martha not to go visiting around up there. Messing with a fan my ass.”

Mama answered hard and quick. “If you know so much, what you asking for?”

Daddy came back hissing low. “Asking because I’m the husband and you my wife. That’s what I’m asking for.”

“Don’t go bothering with me, Win. I need to get supper on.”

All of a sudden there was a scramble, then a dead silence. In that silence something shifted like a sigh. Mama started honeying her voice up. I could hear only snatches because she’d started talking real low and fast. “The poor woman…so I thought…don’t worry, honey…sorry to worry you…all right…I won’t, I promise.”

Then I heard the
clump clump
of Daddy’s shoe. Then the front door slammed and I knew he was gone and I could come out. Mama was sitting on the couch. Tears rolled down her cheeks though she didn’t make a sound. She was rubbing her wrist, which had a thick red line around it like when you give someone an Indian burn. When she saw me standing in the door, she put her arm behind her back. “All right now.” She cleared her throat. “Let’s get supper on so it’ll be ready when he gets back from his errands.” The
he
sounded like a stone on her tongue.

She snatched me up with her good hand and dragged me into the kitchen and grabbed a paper sack full of speckled butter beans she’d gotten down at the Curb Market at Crosstown. Then she shoved the sack at me and pushed me down in her chair at the kitchen table. “You shell,” she said, and I said, “Yes ma’am,” and picked out the first bean.

The next day was just another ordinary Friday at Mimi and Grandpops’. Wash day. Though it was still not yet June, the greedy heat had already snatched any pleasure from the day. Grandpops read his almanac and said it was one of the hottest Mays on record, now getting to 90 by noon. Even the mimosas were blooming early. Zenie complained that her legs, wrapped in the elastic hose she wore, felt like they were going to catch fire and burn. “What June going to bring if this what we got on our plate for May?” she muttered balefully. “Guess we just be going up in flames.”

“Don’t forget to put the sheets out for Uldine,” Mimi calls out to Zenie on Mimi’s way out the door. She’s headed over to the Curb Market to get some strawberries. Uldine, the grandmother of Earl Two, who left town on the run from Mr. Wilkins, washed white folks’ clothes for a living. She had long limber arms and a way of tying the wash tight and putting it up on her shoulder in one easy swing. She picked up the dirty wash on Friday morning and brought it back clean, starched, and pressed on Saturday
afternoon. She came in a beat-up old car that she kept running while she collected the wash.

One time, just one time, in all the years Zenie worked for Mimi, Zenie just flat forgot to put out the sheets and laundry. When Uldine came by for her pickup, Zenie had already walked on home to the Shake Rag end of Goodlett Street, and Mimi was at the beauty shop getting a permanent. Uldine I bet sighed a big sigh when she opened the front door and there was no nest of dirty sheets right inside on the floor. She sure wasn’t going to go traipsing through some white lady’s house, so she went back out onto the porch and looked around. Sometimes Zenie left the sheets out there. Still she found nothing. That’s when she decided to ring the doorbell but nobody was home so nobody came. What a humbug! And the car out there barely running! Against her better judgment she peeked inside the front door again, but then some busybody white woman came driving down the street and gave her The Look that said What you doing peeking into white folks’ houses.

Uldine was so aggravated that she charged Mimi for the extra trip to show she didn’t have the time to come by white folks’ houses for the fun of it. Meanwhile Mimi and Grandpops needed their clean sheets and clothes. Mimi said it was only fair, since the whole thing was Zenie’s fault, that she do them herself. So when Mimi says don’t forget the sheets, Zenie curls her lip and says under her breath she wishes she
could
forget the damn sheets but she knows she’d end up having to wash them herself for free. She says this while Mimi is backing her gray Plymouth out of the garage without bothering to look behind her though it’s doubtful she would’ve seen anything anyway had she bothered to turn around and look; she was so short she could barely even see what was coming straight at her, much less what was behind. When Mimi got behind the wheel, her head resembled a party favor hanging between the top of the steering wheel and the dash.

The minute the Plymouth bumps out of the driveway, Zenie takes off her apron—she always took it off when Mimi left. She goes down deep in her chest and raises up a big sigh, which sounds more like a cough, and says, “All right, come on.” We head for the hall and the stairs. She drags herself up, step by step, stopping at the landing to get her breath. I help her with the beds. It’s a friendly thing to jerk and pull on the sheets and huff and puff and growl along with her, though I know I should be studying the social-studies lesson Mimi has left for me about the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of the state of Mississippi and how they balance each other so nicely. Social studies is boring; how Mimi could teach it day after day, year after year, I do not know. Though truthfully, I hadn’t made any progress to speak of with any of my studies. Mama seemed to have lost all interest in my education, as well as everything else except her cake baking and poison drinking; Daddy thought public schools were run by communists and worried about integration coming to Millwood. Though Grandpops meant well, he was still buying me little children’s books. Mimi was struggling to finish up school herself that May. Though it was hard to imagine that this summer would come to an end, I knew in my heart of hearts that the earth would turn and September would show up as bright eyed and bushy tailed as Uncle Wiggily himself. The thought that the day will come when I’ll have to face the music gives my stomach a big hard kick.

There were three beds, one for Mimi, one for Grandpops in his smaller room off Mimi’s bedroom (his for sleeping only, hers for sleeping and sitting), one for overnight company, which was usually me. Zenie and I pile up the sheets and pillowcases. They make a big puddle of white in the upstairs hall. Then the two of us together hoist the pile up and carry it over to the banister, trying not to lose any pillowcases on the way, and drop it over the railing to the hall below. When the sheets hit the air, they puff out like parachutes. Then Zenie and I both push our breath
out and say, “Whoo!” Zenie because she’s huffing and puffing, relieved to get that part of it over, and me because I like to see the shapes the sheets make when they land. When I was little, I’d get on the banister and ride it down as fast as I could to see if I could beat some of those flying sheets to the bottom. I had to turn two fast corners, and it all depended on how fast I could whip around them, coupled with how fast the sheets were falling. Some days they fell like rocks; others they took their own sweet time, just making a slow sweet slide off the banister and then floating for the time it requires to take one long breath of air before landing
whop whop
on the dark oak floor below, like cooked divinity icing plopped down on the top of one of Mama’s cooled lemon cakes.

Back then, when I’d zip on down the banister, Zenie would lean over and holler at me. “What you doing now? Trying to kill yourself like a wild Indian, then I be blamed and Lord knows what happen when you-know-who come home and find out I gone and let you kill your sorry self. You too old to be playing the fool. Don’t get paid enough for this kind of monkey business.”

Today I turn back to help Zenie put the clean sheets on the bed. My job is to change out the pillowcases. This is better than me helping her with the creases and tucks, because I’m sloppy and Grandpops and Mimi in their next-door bedrooms both like a tight corner. Then we carry the dirty pillowcases downstairs, pick up the sheets off the hall floor, lay one of them out on the living-room rug, a dirty one for sure but still white as anything from Uldine’s laundry bleach, and pile the rest of the sheets and laundry on top. We bring the corners together and tie them up like a napkin lunch for a giant.

After we finish with the sheets, Zenie goes back into the kitchen and takes her apron off the door hook. She puts it back over her head like you’d harness an ox to the plow. The apron isn’t part of her; she hates it. It covers most of her bosoms and lap in white, though the white is stained with grease and juice and
smears of something that looks like blood. She brings in a paper bag of corn from the back porch, and sets me to shucking it, and when I’m done, starts to cut the corn off the cob. When she has her pile of cut corn in a bowl, she heats up bacon grease in the black iron skillet so dinner will be ready at twelve sharp, when Grandpops will come walking home from his law office down the street and Mimi will get back from the market. Meanwhile, my mother has called and said she’s going to the store for some sugar and will run in for a bite if Zenie has enough. Do we need anything? In this heat she’s going to be dying of thirst for some ice water when she gets there. Could I please get a pitcher ready?

When we are all assembled around the table, Zenie brings the food in. Her breathing is heavier than usual, and there are big wet half circles under her arms. A small glass of buttermilk for my grandfather, who puts his corn bread in it and mushes it up. While the corn bread gets soft, he bows his head and says all in one breath Lord thank you for these and all our many blessings in Jesus Christ we pray amen.

While we eat, Zenie sits at the kitchen table in the ladder chair fanning herself with the bottom of her apron because the kitchen is as hot as blazes. She isn’t leaning back or starting in on her own meal because in a minute she’ll have to pass out some more corn bread, then collect the plates, then serve the strawberries Mimi got and angel food cake. When I was little, she’d come out to sweep under my chair. “Need to tie a chicken to your chair to eat up this mess,” she’d say under her breath, and I’d giggle at the sourpuss look on her face, then reach out and pat her shoulder while she bent over the broom. Her shoulder would twitch my hand away like a fly that was bothering her.

At the round oak table I have the best view, straight out a row of windows with old-time nandina bushes. In the winter there are red berries and in the summer the little white syrupy blossoms pressed up so tight to the screens you can see all kinds of things.
Wasps with drapey legs, tasting and thrusting. A brown spider munching on a fly that trembles for its head, which is pretty much gone.

We don’t talk much at the table. My mother carries a grudge against Grandpops she doesn’t bother to hide, the reason being that he did everything but tie her up to keep her from marrying my Daddy. Zenie’s lips are sealed. All she knows is that my mother was her Grandpops’ baby who left the nest too soon. She was a smart girl. He wanted her to grow up slow and steady. Go to college. Learn how to make a living for herself. Find a man who could hold his head up in the world. Plus something about the whole thing didn’t sit right with Grandpops. The way my father didn’t ask; he just took. The way Mama let herself be snatched up like a chicken for the pot without anybody talking to anybody. Nobody saying I’d like to marry Martha, sir, I love your daughter and I’d like to ask for her hand in marriage. It was just up and go to the JP, and like it or lump it, we’re man and wife. All this from a high-school dance!

My mother is telling Mimi about a lady she met at the grocery this morning. A new wife who, when she found out Mama used to work for the Welcome Wagon, just burst out crying that she’s lonesome lonesome, nothing in this town looks right. Even the angle of the sun is wrong.

Mama looks through Grandpops like he’s not there. He’s mashing down his corn bread into the curdled milk and taking up his spoon. He curls his long straight face down around the glass of buttermilk as he listens to her story. I see how his hair is parted straight down the middle in one thin line.

My grandfather never meant harm, and word of his good deeds fell on our ears like manna from heaven. It made me proud to hear the stories people told. He had a knack for knowing what people needed. A suit of clothes for a funeral. A loan for college.
A job. Zenie told me that back during the Depression when nobody had a pot to piss in, he lent Mr. Lafitte Sr. the money to set up his grocery down the street from her. The store is still going strong, and Mr. L has paid back every cent. Today Grandpops wears a blue-striped seersucker suit, and his stick elbows make parentheses that keep him from toppling over into a pile of bones. He’s all bone, just as Mimi, with her drapey arms and sausage-roll bosoms, is all flesh. He wears glasses with lenses so thick they make his eyes look like a big catfish’s, and he can’t be without them. He has a lazy eye too. It goes toward his nose and makes him see double. The left side of his specs has little lines across the glass, so you can barely see his eye behind it. Mimi says if there’s a fire and he can’t find his glasses, they’ll burn up for sure.

I smile at Grandpops to try to make him feel better, but he’s used to Mama’s cold ways and is preoccupied with getting the last of the corn bread out of the bottom of his glass. In a minute he’ll put down his napkin and ask us to excuse him and pop his head into the kitchen and say, “Real good, Zenie,” and she’ll say, “Thank you, Mr. T,” the T being for Taylor. A nice first name. If I’d ever had a child, boy or girl, I would’ve named it Taylor. Then he comes around behind my chair and puts his pointy fingers on my shoulders, and asks me if I’m ready for a story. I know this is coming so I’m thinking ahead while I polish off my strawberries. I am reviewing my options. Grandpops needs perking up, so I’m trying to decide between two of his favorites:
Uncle Wiggily’s Airship
, where the old gentleman rabbit flies all over the place having just one big adventure after another with giants and lions and what all, and Grandpops’ Uncle Remus book, which is also about one smart rabbit who’s always getting into scrapes but wiggling out of them somehow or other by fooling everybody who wants a piece of his flesh.

I follow Grandpops into the cool dark living room. I’m ex
pecting him to say all right, what’ll it be, when he reaches into his briefcase and pulls out a new Uncle Wiggily book.
Uncle Wiggily’s Travels
. “Christmas gift!” he says, though it’s not Christmas or my birthday either. I try to act enthused. Uncle Wiggily is my old favorite too, but I’m worried that I should be reading books with smaller print about people in the real world instead of animals who talk in words that nobody would say in a million years. At least this is a new story; maybe there are some regular words I can learn from it. I get up next to Grandpops on the slippery satin couch and feel his hip bone clamp into my side so that I feel like a little boat that’s been anchored fast. There is a picture of the gentleman rabbit on the book cover. He is a big old jackrabbit who limps along on long, lean back legs. He has rheumatism so he uses a crutch. He wears round specs and a bow tie like Grandpops.

Grandpops opens the book to the first clean page, the color of sand. I tuck my head against his skinny old arm and draw close to the smell of new paste. I start in. Grandpops and I have a way of reading books. I read what I can, which isn’t as much as it should be, and he reads the rest. Over the past few weeks, I’ve read more and more of everything he throws at me—
The Saturday Evening Post, The Christian Observer
, Mimi’s book of myths and legends—and he’s read less and less.
Uncle Wiggily’s Travels
I breeze through, stumbling only a couple of times when the letters don’t line up and I have to sound them out.