The Queen of Palmyra (33 page)

She would say, “Oh look, Mama, I mistakenly brought Flo home in my suitcase. She was my best friend at camp. Can we keep her? Please?”

And the nice mother would say, “Of course, dear, any best friend of yours is like a daughter to us. We’ll adopt her and make her happy every day that she doth live. Welcome to our family, Flo honey.”

At night, though, I slept on the top bunk next to a window and watched the stars divide and multiply. I went right to sleep, but woke up in the middle of the night and stayed awake for long stretches. I loved the night sounds and the soft paddle of the other girls breathing softly in sleep. I loved my bunk. Room for one only. Up there, I could breathe in the cool mountain air and think about nothing but stars and night sounds. No trains to mark the hours. I began to think of myself not as bereft, as I had before, but somehow floating out there by myself in the darkness, not hurt or bothered, just hanging out there peaceful and quiet among the stars, like the moon. I wondered if this was what it was like to be dead.

I had a bunkmate whose name was Jennie. Jennie had worried about God ever since her brother Matt had gotten run over on his bike while delivering newspapers. She doubted God was really up there taking care of business, and if He was, she hated His guts because He obviously didn’t give a flip about Matt. When we said the blessing at meals, she looked straight ahead, her mouth in a determined hyphen. She slept in the bunk underneath mine,
and sometimes in the night she would push on the bottom of my bunk with her feet and whisper, “Flo, are you awake?”

I usually was, so I’d say, “Um hum.”

“I’m cold.”

“Pull up your blanket.”

“I did. I’m still cold.”

I knew what she wanted. Jennie was always cold at night. She wanted to crawl in with me, which was against camp rules. No sleeping together in the same bunk, that was the rule and fine by me. I’d let her do it just once and I’d held her tight the way she asked, but after she’d stopped shivering and gone to sleep, I’d crawled down to her bunk and its cool sheets.

At camp I learned to dive, though it made my head hurt. I made pot holders galore and leaf imprints out of crayons pressed with an iron. I learned the difference between poison ivy and Virginia creeper and how to saddle up a horse. On the move all day, and never a worn-out feeling. We all had our chores. I’d jumped at getting kitchen work, for two reasons. I couldn’t get enough to eat. Maybe it was the fact that I was running from one busy thing to another, maybe I was having a growth spurt. I ate all three of my meals but still wanted more. I figured if I worked in the kitchen, I could sneak a few bites here and there. Plus there were Negro ladies and girls my age working in the kitchen, and I liked the way they said some of the rich camp girls had their noses up their asses. The kitchen ladies were the only black people in the whole camp, and they didn’t live up on Lookout Mountain, the reason being, they said, that all of their folks who had moved up there had had their houses burnt down. They snorted and said either there was a serious problem with white people up on that mountain or those Negroes were the most careless smokers in the whole wide world. I impressed the ladies by showing them how to make Mama’s cakes. They were good cooks but they tended to
make big dishes of cobbler and banana pudding for desserts. At camp, cakes were too much trouble and didn’t stretch far enough. But the kitchen ladies wanted to learn the cakes for themselves. I told them how Mama had made a good business out of it before she ran herself into the train. They looked hard at each other and clucked like hens.

I watched the pie sliver of a moon get larger and larger each night until one night it was full. And when that happened, it was over. All of a sudden, we were standing around a farewell campfire holding hands and singing should old acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind. That night, after I’d packed my pot holders, which I planned to give to Zenie and Mimi, and the leaf picture, which I thought Eva might like, and settled down in my top bunk, I could feel Daddy’s heavy hand moving into place. It was a beautiful night with the moon so bright and full, but I had a taste in my mouth like metal. I could hear a raccoon getting into the kitchen garbage. I tried to count the stars, but I kept losing count. I whispered to Jennie to see whether she was still awake, but she didn’t answer.

Early the next morning, I hugged all the girlfriends I had made and would never see again. Jennie held me tight and whispered something in my ear I didn’t catch. Some of the girls cried when they hugged me good-bye. I would be their best friend for the rest of their lives, they said, but I just laughed and said come see me in Millwood, though I knew they never would; otherwise I wouldn’t have invited them.

Then my counselor, Sherry, as in “Sherry, Sherry, Baby,” put her pretty blond hair into a ponytail and drove me to the Greyhound depot in Chattanooga. She put me back on the bus for home with a ham sandwich. “Have a Great Year!” she said in her cheerleader way with a quick wave of her hand. And that was that.

When I got off the bus, it was dusk and Daddy was standing there waiting. I saw him out the window as we pulled into the station. He leaned against a post, his bad foot propped up behind him. He was taking drags off a cigarette and making puffy
O
’s in the air. A slice of light played on his arm. He looked small from the window on the bus, like a country boy just hanging around. Compared to the other parents who had picked up their daughters at camp in big Oldsmobiles, he looked common. I could tell by his face that Mama hadn’t come back. I went up to him and hugged him around the middle the way I’d seen the regular girls hug their fathers when they came to get them at camp. He didn’t hug me back but just petted me on the head.

“You getting big, Sister.”

I supposed that when he said big, he meant chunky. I had gotten thicker in the two weeks I’d been away. The shorts with the elastic waists were now tight around the middle, and Zenie had made them with room to grow. I was more interested in food than I’d ever been. I didn’t worry about getting fat; in fact, I figured the
more fat I had on me, the better I’d make out if suddenly I found myself without food. I was disappointed that Daddy had picked me up. The ham sandwich hadn’t gone far, and I didn’t count on him feeding me.

But he surprised me. “Let’s go get us some supper,” he said when we had wrestled my things into the backseat of the Valiant. The trunk on the Valiant wouldn’t open because it was bashed in on one side from an old wreck. “Let’s go down to Joe’s and get us a hamburger.”

I hated the idea of going to Joe’s Drive-In with Daddy worse than I hated going hungry. Now that I had a clearer idea of what nice parents were supposed to look and act like, I couldn’t abide the thought of being seen with him. There was something about Daddy, and it wasn’t just the rusty bashed-in Valiant. He drew stares and whispers, whether he’d stopped at a light in his borrowed car or was knocking on people’s doors. You could almost hear people saying to themselves, “That’s
him
.” He was the tough gun in the western picture show come into town to cause trouble.

“I’m not hungry,” I said in a meek little voice as he started the car. I sat low in my seat, not looking out my window, which was, thankfully, stuck shut and coated in dust and grime. The words weren’t out of my mouth before he caught me on the fat part of my left arm.

“You too good for a hamburger with your old daddy now you back from that fancy camp?” His hand squeezed my arm so hard my fingers froze into icicles.

I shook my head quickly. No.

“What’d you say?”

“No sir.”

“No sir, what?”

“No sir, I’m not too good.”

“All right then,” he said, and let go of my arm so fast that it fell into my lap like a bird shot dead from the sky.

It was Saturday night and boiling hot. When he pulled the car into Joe’s, there were high-school boys in shorts and girls in halter tops draped all over each other’s cars playing their radios. “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” was in the howling part, and some of them were dancing around and howling right along with the music, like a bunch of hungry coyotes clumped up. They all turned to look when Daddy pulled up to the voice box with a little jerk and cut the engine. I kept my head down. I held my arm close in by cupping my left elbow with my right hand. My breath had come back and if I didn’t move at all, it didn’t hurt so much. On the ride to Joe’s I’d decided I needed to go back to camp in my mind. I thought about weaving pot holders and diving into deep cool water and the quiet nights with stars and the living moon.

“Two hamburgers and two chocolate shakes,” Daddy said into the box, which was dead because he didn’t know he was supposed to push the button before he put his order in. That’s how ignorant he was.

I didn’t say anything. The teenagers were turning from each other and starting to stare and whisper out of the sides of their mouths.

Daddy leaned out the window again. “Two hamburgers and two shakes. Chocolate.” He said it louder than the first time into the dead box. The teenagers started to snicker.

I put my head down and tried to toss my hair over my face. I had my mouth open to say push the button, you have to push it before you talk. But the words didn’t come out. I just looked hard at the glove compartment. I sat there, my head turned down in a strange way. I could feel a funny little smile spreading over my mouth like warm butter.

“What’s wrong with this stinking thing?” He reached out the
window and hit the box hard. “Ow, shit,” he hollered, “goddamn that thing.” The teenagers were elbowing one another and smirking. One let out a loud whinny.

That got his attention. He leaned out the window. “What you looking at, son?”

The boy tried to wipe the smirk off his face, but it didn’t disappear all the way. He started getting back into one of the parked cars.

“You answer me now, boy,” Daddy yelled out the window. “What the hell you so all-fired interested in?”

The boy turned his face away from us and got in the car with the others. Around us the radios started going quiet and the engines cranked up one by one. Daddy glared out the window. He looked like an old bear in a cage a man down in the country used to keep out by his store. You could look into that bear’s eyes and know he’d kill you if he got out, but you and he knew he never would. Of course, the difference between the bear and my father was that Daddy was on the loose.

Then the car with the boy in it slid out of its parking place slow and easy, and one by one, the others followed. In a few minutes, our car was the only one left sitting in the whole front lot.

“All you have to do is push the button,” I finally said. “You just push the button, see?” I leaned over toward his side and pointed. The way I said it was like the period you put at the end of a long wearisome sentence.

Before I knew what was happening, he had grabbed my left arm out of the space between us and wrenched it forward and backward so hard and fast that my shoulder gave a loud pop. It felt like a firecracker had gone off inside the socket. The burn it gave me exploded the breath right out of my chest.

I opened my mouth to scream and he pulled my left arm down with another pop. An arrow of pain sliced up the side of my neck
and down to my elbow. My breath wouldn’t come. I burst out in a cold sweat all over. Bits of white that looked like torn paper began to fall before my eyes. My arm dangled limp. He started the car. I tried to steady myself against the lurch I knew was coming, but when he threw the car in reverse and it jerked backward, I screamed.

He latched onto my knee and dug in with his fingers. “I don’t want to hear nothing out of you. Nothing. Thinking you so smart.” He rammed the car back from the box and into the street. Then he cut the wheels hard and headed for home.

After he scratched off from Joe’s, Daddy didn’t say anything else. He drove fast, taking the corners with a squeal of tires. I held on to my left shoulder and braced myself with my feet. He bent over the wheel looking like the thing he wanted to do most in the world was get me on home and get shuck of me. Riding next to him, I felt the giant hand of his anger pressing me to the seat of the car, not like I was precious cargo to save and protect, but like the crush of a wreck happening in slow motion. The lightness I’d felt at camp was gone. I’d been happily swimming in camp life where I was nobody’s bad seed, no weight to me at all, no last name of Forrest with two r’s. Now I felt the logginess of stepping out onto land. Daddy was back in charge of me. The Frisco was pulling out of the station with no stops planned.

The car was roasting. I could barely get a breath. The invisible hand on my chest pressed harder. I thought it might be God’s judging finger, my punishment for not loving my father the way I should. For liking to see him made fun of. Showing him up for a fool. I was pouring sweat. The car window on my side was broken and wouldn’t roll down. I pushed out the bat wing flap all the way to get some air. My shoulder burned.

When we got home, he carried my bag down the path and then told me to go to bed, he’d be late coming in. When he un
locked the front door and I walked into the living room behind him, my mouth dropped open. The place was a white sea of paper. Stacks and stacks of it piled up on the couch, the floor, the coffee table, Mimi’s backstabbing rocking chair. Mama’s drop-leaf table had been opened wide in the middle of the room and was stacked higher than I was tall with typing paper, so much of it that it made the place look like Spight’s Office Supply Store, which had been under Grandpops’ office downtown. Below the front window where the drop-leaf table used to sit was a rat’s nest of newspapers and magazines.

Daddy didn’t explain the mess, and I didn’t ask. He went straight to his room and I went to mine, holding my trembling left arm close to my chest. I could hear him rummaging in the bottom of his closet. Then he came back through the living room, and when I looked up, he was heading out the door with both of his boxes, the pretty old one and the plain new one, one under each arm. He had his headache stick in his hand. I heard him lock the door from the outside. He had put a deadbolt lock on the door, inside and out, no key in sight. It was the only door to the house. He had locked me in and Mama out. My first thought was of fire, since I was so good at starting them, but I knew I could climb out a window, thanks to Mama, who always made sure that wherever we lived, the windows opened and shut.

After I heard the Valiant take off down the street, I experimented with my hurt arm, moving it this way and that just to see if it still worked, which it did. If I held it close, it didn’t hurt too bad. I thought Daddy had pulled it out of the socket and then jerked it back in. At least that was what I was hoping for. I went looking for Bayer and found some in the bathroom. I took three and started looking around through the stacks of papers all over the living room. The papers in each stack had something different printed on them. One had little pictures of different people’s
faces on it. They looked like school pictures of boys and men, white and Negro. Some of the pictures had an
X
through them. One was of a light-skinned Negro boy named Emmett. One was a darker man named George Lee, whose features I couldn’t make out. The only one I knew was Medgar, just because I’d seen his picture in the paper and his grieving wife and little children in
Look
magazine. I remembered his neat mustache and the way his eyes looked like they knew something important. His picture had an
X
through it too. Another stack had papers with the same letter typed on them. It said:

I didn’t know what
miscegenation
and some of the other words meant until I had looked them up in the dictionary later that night, but the whole letter and the pictures made me feel scared about Daddy in a way I hadn’t been before. Yes he could be mean and ill tempered and hurtful when you aggravated him, and yes I was sick of him coming into my room at night, and yes I knew it was him that Mama was running away from. But this was somehow different. Seeing those papers was like being the lady biologist who’d discovered the new breed of spider, the brown one, the reclusive one. Something poisonous lurked under all these mountains of papers. A poison disguised as love. Who was that love for? It seemed it was for me. My skin. My girlhood. But I knew it wasn’t for me. If it was, would he be hurting me on purpose? It was for something I stood in for, and that thing wasn’t me but a picture of me in his mind. Not
X
-ed out like the Emmett boy or Medgar Evers, but glorified with an angel halo and wings, made into something I wasn’t and could never be.

I backed out of the living room into my room and shut my door to what I’d seen. All of a sudden I felt queasy, but it wasn’t just from my shoulder hurting, or even from fear and disgust. It was from being mad. I felt such a train wreck of madness plow right through me that it made me want to rip my own self to pieces because I couldn’t live inside the girl he saw me as. I was so stretched between what I had been thinking I was on the inside and what I meant to him that I had to sit down on my bed to keep from fainting. I wanted to cut myself open and step out of my skin and leave it like a pile of dirty clothes on the floor. Then I could say to him, here, take it and give me the rest, give me the inside part and let me be.

I sat on my bed in the dark holding my arm in place. When I heard the ten-thirty M & O in the distance, I started to cry. I cried hard and loud for the time it took the train to come and
go and call out to me. I drowned out its
no, no, no, no
s. Then I turned on the light because the train had come and gone and a person can’t cry forever. After a while you just flat run dry. I wiped my face and blew my nose on my shirt and looked around. I hadn’t unpacked from camp because I had in mind taking my dirty clothes up to Mimi’s for Uldine to pick up with the sheets. The pajamas in my duffle bag smelled moldy so I pulled an old shirt and a pair of ratty shorts out of my drawer to sleep in. My bag was a mess, everything wadded up and damp from the wetness in the mountain air. I dug down to the bottom and found a loose Kotex and the belt and tried to put them on. All this I did with my one good hand, which wasn’t easy, especially hooking up the Kotex. I finally took the belt off and put it in my lap, hooked it on the pad, then put the whole thing on at once, in one piece. I hadn’t been wearing it at camp, so it felt like a lumpy pillow between my legs. I was too tired to read or brush my teeth, just turned the fan on and got into my bed. The sheets stank and felt slick. They hadn’t been changed since Mama ran herself into the train. At camp we’d had to strip the beds once a week. We piled the sheets up on the front stoop to our cabin. Then, like magic, in the afternoons when we came back to our cabins after a long hot day, our bunks were made up all nice and fresh with cool white sheets and light cotton blankets. I had gotten used to clean sheets. I made up my mind that first thing tomorrow I would get my stinky numbers off the bed and take them up to Mimi’s too. I thought about going to the Laundromat the way Mama did, but it was too far away to walk.