The Queen of Palmyra (17 page)

“Mimi, I’m too tired to get my hair washed,” I said, and I heard myself sounding like a whiney baby, but she was already pouring the soapy water over my head.

“
Dirty
. This head is
dirty
.” It came out grit between her teeth as she started pouring water out of the glass over my head. Once she got my head soaking wet, she poured cold shampoo on it, which woke me up big-time. When she started digging her fingernails into my scalp, I could tell she meant serious business so I squinched my eyes tight.

“I can do it!” I yelped, but she didn’t even answer, just dug deeper and deeper into my nasty head. How dirty did she think I was? Then she took the washcloth I was holding over my privates and slapped it over my eyes, tilted my head back and poured bathwater over it. After the pouring business was over, she belted out, “Hang on,” like she was worried I was going to hop up out of the tub and run around the block. I couldn’t open my eyes because of the water in my face so I just sunk down into the water, which was by now barely warm, with the washcloth still over my face. I felt myself wanting to turn over on my side, like you do in bed when you’ve been in one position too long and part of you has gone to sleep.

After a while she was back and pulling on my arm to stand up and putting a towel around me. She brought in a satin slip of hers for me to sleep in. It was slick and didn’t cover anything to the north of my waist and was so long I had to hold it up to walk,
like a lady going to the ball. She got the slip on me and as I was standing there holding it up, she started rubbing my head dry with another towel. When that was done, she combed my hair, which was still wet, pulling my head this way and that. I felt like a doll that a crazy baby girl had gotten hold of.

My hair’s nothing to jump up and down about, plus it’s hard to comb wet because it’s kinky and clumps together. My mama’d taught me to always use creme rinse, which Mimi didn’t seem to know about, and to comb it out slow and easy starting at the ends. I was too tired for this business, and my eyes were starting to tear up again and I was thinking damn it the hell, this woman is killing me.

When Mimi started digging around in the bathroom closet, I wondered what was next. Then she came out with a new pink toothbrush in a little plastic case. I was afraid she thought I was such a baby she was going to have to brush my teeth, but she handed it to me, case and all, and pulled some toothpaste out of the medicine cabinet. “I saved this just for you.” She said it like she’d just brought me an Easter dress from Montgomery Ward when all it was was a dumb toothbrush. I knew she was wanting me to say thank you ma’am. I didn’t. I just pulled the toothbrush out of the case. “Rinse it off. It might be germy,” she said, and unscrewed the toothpaste and turned on the water. I put the toothbrush under the water and then held it out to her. “
Voila!
” she said and squirted a big wad of toothpaste onto the brush.

After I brushed my teeth, Mimi put me into my mama’s old bed in her old room like it was all planned. Sometime later Grandpops came shuffling up the steps in his bedroom slippers and sat down on the bed. I was long gone by then, but I knew he was there by the heft. Then he patted my damp head and walked out of the bedroom humming “This Is My Father’s World,” which is my favorite hymn, because it brings out the prettiness of the
world, all that’s fair. The birds their carols raise, the morning light, the lily white declare their Maker’s praise.

Sometime during the night I heard the phone ringing. There were windows on both sides of the bed. They were open and there was a cross breeze making the curtains curl at the edges like dark tulips. The straps on Mimi’s slip had slipped down over my shoulders so the slip was only covering me from the hips down. I tried to pull it up, but it was stuck under me. I was cold. So I grabbed at the sheet, but it wasn’t enough.

I could hear Grandpops talking into the phone downstairs. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but I could see his words. Bits of gravel he was throwing up against a wall. Then I heard Mimi get out of bed. “Shush,” I heard her say. Then he quieted down and I sank back into the cold.

The next morning I opened my eyes to Zenie looking down at me. Her face looked darker than it was really. It blocked out the bright sun coming through the window. It was hot already. Late morning, I was thinking. I kicked off the sheet. I’d slept a good long time. I opened my eyes wider. Her mouth opened like a long dark tunnel. What is she getting ready to say?

Actually, I don’t remember anybody in particular telling me about how my mother had gone and run the green Ford smack-dab into the right side of the Memphis-bound M & O passenger train. Maybe it was Zenie blocking the sun who said it, but likely not. Maybe when she saw my eyes open in the morning light, she called in Grandpops. For me it became a fact that seemed to have risen up out of the earth and made itself visible, just like the fact that she did it at Crosstown, where everybody in Millwood had to pass over to get where they were going. There were parts of the Ford all over the place. A boy found the car papers up in a tree a block away. By doing it there, at Crosstown, she kept herself in front of our eyes for always, for whose heart was so
closed they could not think of her as they bumped over the tracks on their errands and visitations? After she did it, they installed crossbars there, but it did not matter in people’s minds. Who did not taste hot metal when they heard the Frisco shriek through our dark town on its ten-thirty run north?

The surprising thing was that she lived. The fact that the train was creeping along as it always did coming through Crosstown must have saved her. Also, there were skid marks right before she hit. Had she changed her mind? I like to think that maybe my face rose up before her eyes at that moment. That she saw a picture of me in her mind. Maybe I was sleeping, maybe I was looking at her head-on. I like to think that I looked dear to her, dear enough to produce some sort of jitter, the foot moving from accelerator to brake on its own, the way your stomach will grip up at the smile of the beloved one, even if you don’t want it to. Even if all that is in your heart is the next mimosa leaf.

Especially now, I can stand on the tracks and watch her face behind the wheel in the red glow of the Crosstown crossing lights looking toward the cyclops eye that is coming for to carry her home. But I can see her on the inside too, looking at me looking at her, my own true eyes shining through the night, saying
no no no no
.

Some stories are uneasy sleepers. They roam a dark house, gliding like silk from room to room. Touching a sleeping form here, tucking in a cover there. Maybe they will wake up on their feet and be confused as to their whereabouts. Or maybe they will unlock the front door without a sound and walk on down the street and out into the night, never to be heard from again. Because some stories can just up and leave. You don’t know where they went, or whether they’ll ever come back. Their leaving throws up its arms and leans forward into such an emptiness that the words rise up and say no.

It’s hard to say what happened next. There’s always the story wanting to live its life, whether you want it to or not. So it may wander off, leaving you to say all right then, I give up, let’s go ahead and just shut this book. Uncle Wiggily finally got himself eaten up and this story is plumb over. But just when you settle into thinking that, the story comes back from its wanderings and says why hello there, here I am again. Was I gone long? Did you miss me?

What I remember is that I was under the bed. I wasn’t thinking that I was under it. I was thinking how cool the wood floor was. How dark. Then I started looking at dust balls, how soft and colorless they were, like old ladies’ hairdos. I saw a dead roach. A big one, on its back with its little claw feet curled upward. I was still wearing Mimi’s slip. I could see it trailing below my feet. My top was bare, but I didn’t care. I felt good and cool.

I kept seeing feet. Not feet exactly, but shoes and ankles. At the time I didn’t attach them to anyone in particular, but they came and went with voices attached to them saying this thing
or that. But of course I knew them. The black wingtips topped off with seersucker cuffs were Grandpops’. And the silver brocade slippers with little jelly rolls of stockings on roller garters around the ankles belonged to Mimi. One set of shoes stood for a long time right in front of my face. They were huge white nurse-type shoes. The right had a good-sized hole cut for the side of the big toe. The left had a hole cut on the outside for the little toe. The shoes were scuffed up and the heels were wore down on the outsides. Upward from the shoes, thick white stockings covered elephant ankles.

“Will somebody please tell me right now what it doing under the bed when its mama going to be all right? What it think it
doing
under there? Its mama going to be
all right
. Hey. You hear me? You gone deaf and dumb, girl? Come on out of there and quit playing the fool.”

Zenie called me
it
when she was being extra nice or she wanted to talk me into something like helping her with the garbage. I wasn’t biting.

“Got one at home won’t get out the bed. Now this one won’t get out from under it. Got better things to do than pull folks out from under beds. Got enough trouble of my own to contend with.” Zenie sounded disgusted enough to spit.

I turned my face to the wall and went on off to sleep again.

When I woke up again, the first thing I noticed was that it had gotten to be late afternoon. There were long points of light on the floor. Pretty and peaceful on the dark wood. There were no thoughts in my head about anything except those points of light, how they seemed to lie still over the floor but really were inching along from the dresser to the door. You had to keep watch over them to see that motion.

I was lying there watching the points inch along across the floor when it began to dawn on me that someone besides myself
was breathing in the room. I didn’t see any shoes so I thought I was making it up in my head. But when I listened hard, there it was. In and out. A little
whoosh
, then a pause, then another little
whoosh
.

All of a sudden the monster in the bed above me shivered and shook itself. Then the breathing started up again.
Whoosh
, pause,
whoosh
again.

Then a giant sigh. Long and drawn out.

I wiggle-wormed myself over to the edge of the bed. I held up the spread and pushed my head out a little. Hanging off the side of the bed directly above me was my daddy’s own hand. I’d know it anywhere, with its little bunches of black spider hairs. Looking up at it, I could see the palms with lines crisscrossing back and forth like tiny little roads you’d take a trip up and down. I knew the little lines meant something because when I went to the State Fair on school day I had seen the gypsy reading palms. I didn’t have the fifty cents to get her to read mine, but I hung around and listened to her tell people about their lifelines, how long or short they were. Some of them had the true love line, some didn’t. I wished I knew how to read the story of my father’s hand lines. The truth was that his lines were all about the same, not long or short, just crossing and crisscrossing. Always coming back to one or the other. Not going anywhere in particular.

When Daddy’s hand came down and touched my face it felt so feathery and nice I shut my eyes and enjoyed it even when the place where it touched me started getting wetter and wetter. We lay like that for a while, me on the floor under the bed with only my face out, him on the bed with his hand hanging down touching my face, which just got wetter and wetter. Then I got to crying so hard that my back was thumping the hard floor making a racket. That’s when he rose up, making the bed heave and quake, and clumped his feet on the floor, shoes and all. He’d
been lying there with them on. In one long gathering motion he leaned down and got me up under the arms and pulled me out, the drowning one, naked on the top with Mimi’s wedding train slip trailing behind me. He picked me up off the floor, and I buried my face deep in his neck. I didn’t look at him, just went to him like he was the last one on earth. One of those brave and true men on the white horses who rescue you from harm and drape you over their steeds like a lily and ride off with you into the night because you are Precious Cargo.

“Come on, Sister,” he said into my hair. “Let’s us go on home.”

He went clumping on down the stairs with me, slow and loud. There was a bustle below, but I didn’t move my face out of his neck to see who was there. I heard voices talking about a car. Daddy needed one.

Then I heard Grandpops say, “Win, leave her here with me and Irene and Zenie. You got Martha to worry about in the hospital. How you going to take care of them both?” And Daddy saying back between his teeth, “I been at the hospital all night. Then come up here and find my baby girl under the bed. What kind of taking care is that? Best thing you can do for everybody right now is let me have the damn car so I can take my girl home.” I had my ear right next to Daddy’s throat. I could hear a growl behind the words, coming up deep. He was the dog and I was his bone. Nobody was going to take me away from him without a killing fight.

Next thing I knew he was carrying me out through the kitchen. I looked over his shoulder. There Zenie sat in the ladder chair. It was tilted back against the wall like always. But something was different. She looked at me dead-on, but with a bored look that didn’t know me anymore. I was a ragamuffin she had nothing to do with, getting taken through her kitchen, an orphan girl Daddy had found on the street and was just carrying
through, the way the salt man carries the bags over his shoulder to the basement to clean the running water. Daddy’s head didn’t turn in her direction. She didn’t speak to him or he to her. After we passed, I heard Grandpops come into the kitchen and tell Zenie to go on home, take the rest of the day off. Then he said he was going to go down to the sheriff’s office and talk to him about the hooligans who hurt Eva, to which Zenie said, “Maybe you do better than Ray.”

Daddy carried me out the kitchen door and onto the screened-in back porch and out the back screened door, then down the steps to the driveway, his shoe scratching gravel, and on into the open garage. He opened the back door of Mimi’s Plymouth and hoisted me headfirst onto the backseat, facing rear. I pressed my face into the cloth upholstery and settled into the smell of the backseat. Mimi’s White Shoulders and Grandpops’ pipe rolled into one smell that was sweet but also sharp and bitter. Then Daddy took Mimi’s slip, which probably was dragging ground right outside the car door, shook it off, and laid it over me like a sheet. I felt tucked in good and comfortable. Precious Cargo.

He got into the front seat and backed out the car and drove us the ten blocks home. After he parked the car and got out, he opened the back door and said, “Sister honey, come on now and get on out of the car. You about to break my back.” He didn’t say it mean or anything. Just old-man tired.

So I crawled out backwards, hoisted the slip up over my chest, and picked up my train. I put it over one arm and started walking down the path of stones Mama had made. I looked up and saw Big Dan and Miss Kay Linda standing like statues behind their screen door. “Y’all need anything, Win?” Miss Kay Linda called out. “No, we’re just going to bed,” Daddy called back. “All right then,” she said, “but just let us know.” They kept standing there and watching us through the screen.

I stopped on the path, but Daddy came up behind me and pushed me on. We went on into the house. When we got inside, I couldn’t look at anything. Just kept my head down so I wouldn’t trip. It was almost dark. For a minute both of us stood there in the living room with the shadows starting to play on the walls. We stopped right inside the front door. What were we waiting for? The voice that would call us out of this nightmare? “Y’all home? Wash up for supper”? The clatter of a beater in the kitchen? A sigh from the bedroom and ice cubes in the glass?

Then Daddy pushed me on through to the kitchen. When he turned on the light, we both jumped. There was food piled up everywhere, plus a big mess of day lilies on the kitchen table in a vase I’d never seen. I was used to seeing all of Mama’s cakes lined up, so at first I thought that was what I was seeing. But it wasn’t. Instead, it was food of all shapes, sizes, and colors. My eyes popped. I’d never seen so much food all there together at once, especially in our house, where it was usually slim pickings except for cakes and moonshine. Mrs. Polk had been there with one of her caramel pies. There were loaves of bread long and round, some of Miss Kay Linda’s famous iced cinnamon rolls, a ham cut in little diamonds and covered with brown sugar and mustard with pineapple circles with cherries in their middle all over it. A casserole with French-fried onion rings on the top.

Each piece of food had a card or a note attached to it. Daddy picked the cards up like they were breakable. I could read enough to see that they all had the same word in them.
You.
They said, “Thinking of
you
” or “Praying for
you
” or “God Bless
you
” or “We’re here for
you
.” I never thought
you
could be on so many people’s minds at once.

When I opened the icebox to get a drink of cold water, we got another shock. It was packed full. Bowls of potato salad, one with bacon, one without. A plate of stuffed eggs with a half a
little green olive on top of each and every one. Chicken salad with grapes, of all things. Casseroles with aluminum foil on top with little notes that said, “Heat for 30 minutes at 350. May be frozen. Keep your strength up. We’re praying for you each and every day.”

I held the door and we stood there looking at it all. All of a sudden my mouth started watering the same way my eyes had done when Daddy’s hand had come down from on high and touched my face. There was no stopping it. I was drowning in it.

“Whooee,” Daddy said, and rubbed his eyes like you’d do when you saw something you didn’t believe. “You hungry?”

“Don’t know” was what I said, not because it was the truth but because it didn’t seem right to be hungry as a horse when your own mother was lying up in the hospital with a broken this and a broken that, and
under observation
, whatever that meant, for having just run herself into the side of a train accidentally on purpose. But I just stood there beside Daddy holding the tail of Mimi’s slip over my arm because I couldn’t bring myself to close the icebox door. If Mama had been there, she would have said, “Close the door, Florence, you’re just running up the electric.”

Daddy looked down at me. “Go get that thing off and put on your pajamas. Wash your face. Then see how you feel. Your mama would want us to eat.” Which I knew was an out-and-out lie, but I went and did what he told me and put on my pajamas with the daisies and washed my face, which made me feel more like myself, except I started tearing up again when I spied Mama’s little plastic comb-and-brush set with some of her hair still in it on the back of the commode. I didn’t brush my teeth.

When I came back into the kitchen, Daddy had pulled the stuffed eggs and one of the potato salads out onto the kitchen table. He was standing over the table taking hunks out of the ham with a little paring knife. When I came into the kitchen,
he reached over and waved a hunk of it with a cherry in front of my face and I opened my mouth and baby-birded it. It leapt up in my mouth, alive and excited to be there. All I wanted in the whole wide world was another bite of that ham. Then he opened a drawer and got out another little knife and spoon. He handed them across the table to me so that I could dig into whatever I wanted. Mama would have said, “This is no way to eat. Fix yourself a plate and sit down,” but of course, Mama wasn’t there, and if she had been, there would have been next to nothing to eat anyway. I started sawing on my side of the ham, then I ate six stuffed eggs, one right after another, in what seemed like two seconds. Then I started scooping up the fried onion rings off the top of a casserole, which turned out to be French-cut green beans and mushroom soup. Given my options, I passed on the potato salad.

We stood there for a long time under the one bright overhead light in the kitchen. Daddy’s head and shoulders cast a deep shadow over the table. The more I ate, the more I wanted to eat. The kitchen was the only lighted place in the house. The other part was getting darker and darker, which made me feel like I was being watched by the darkness in the rest of the house the way a cat watches a baby rabbit just out of the nest. If Mama had been there, she would have gone around pulling the curtains closed and turned on the lamp in the living room. Fussing about how, no matter how much she dusted, the bangles on it were always a mess.

All at once, thinking about Mama dusting made a piece of ham get bigger on its way down my throat. Plus something was tickling the back of my throat. A praying-for-you stranger’s hair in the stuffed egg? The thought made my chest seize up and my stomach take a jump. Then my mother’s long-goneness filled up my whole throat and it was Katy bar the door because what had gone down had just taken a U-turn and was coming right back
up. I ran for the bathroom and barely made it in time. The ham came out of my mouth whole, then the rest all sour and mixed up. I knelt down and leaned over the commode for a long time. I’d take a break and just lie on the cold tile, then set to it again. Daddy came to the bathroom door, which was open, but he didn’t come in and hold my head and put a cold washcloth on my head, the way Mama would have done. He just stood back from the door, turning his head in the other direction, and chatting me up while I was busy upchucking.