The Queen of Palmyra (35 page)

“Nothing’s wrong with me.” I pulled my elbow into my side and grabbed it to hold back the throbbing. “How you doing?”

“Staying alive, girl, that’s about it. Worn out though, I’ll tell you, worn out sure enough.” She pulled out a chair and plopped down.

Zenie looked down at Eva and made a sound in her throat.

When Eva sat down at the table, I didn’t get up to go to the living room the way I usually did to let her eat her breakfast in peace. Usually, if I were sitting at the table, Zenie looked at me a certain way when Eva came in for her breakfast, which meant I was supposed to go sit in the front room and not bother them while Eva ate fast and Zenie sat with her and drank coffee. But that morning there were so many people on the floor I couldn’t even get to the couch. I hoped she and Zenie wouldn’t notice I was still there and keep on talking. I didn’t want to go out on the front stoop again, and there was no place else to go, unless they wanted me to go hop in the bed with Miss J or Ray, which, to tell the truth, I wouldn’t have minded doing. My old tiredness had come back in spades, and my stomach was doing flip-flops. I felt dismal.

Eva eyed me. “So, Flo, don’t guess you did any studying at that fancy camp of yours?”

I grinned. After two weeks at camp where it was “Flo” this and “Flo” that, it was homelike to hear Eva speak the new name she alone had christened me with. To my mind it was snappy and smart and sounded like the heroine of a story. Zenie never called me anything but
you
or
it.
I said, “I read some books.”

“You lying.”

I was too tired to lie a second time so I didn’t say anything.

“Well, get your pencils sharp, girl. Your vacation is over,” Eva said with relish. “We start back to work this afternoon when I get home. Hope you didn’t let everything I taught you fly right out of your head.”

My arm throbbed as if the very idea of writing pained it. “Let’s start tomorrow. I’m worn out today.”

Eva’s eyebrows went up. “What time you get in last night? You look like roadkill. Smell like it too.”

“Late,” I lied for the second time.

Eva shook her head no. “Flo, we got to get the move on, girl. It’s now or never. You’re behind schedule and I’ve got to catch you up. It’s already July.” With that, she put her head down on the table and in a second was back asleep.

When the coffee was ready, Zenie poured herself a cup and finished the gravy and poured it over the biscuits. She made two plates. Over in the corner of the kitchen was her sewing-machine table and beside it the card table she kept for her sewing paraphernalia. The card table was piled high with braid and rickrack and blue serge. I knew she was up early making some Carver High School band uniforms because she did it every July about this time for the new children in the band. I wondered what it would be like to wear the scratchy material buttoned up to your chin and blow on a big instrument, maybe a tuba, and jive march
around a football field in a perfect formation. For me, it was like trying to imagine flying.

Zenie took one chair from the kitchen table and pulled it over to the card table and pushed her stack of stuff off to the side. She got one plate, steam rising, and put it in the bare spot. Then, wiping her hands on a dish towel, she cut an eye at me and whispered, “You. Come on over here and eat this before it gets cold. Don’t spill anything on my stuff.” I got up and went over.

Then she plopped the other plate down on the kitchen table in front of Eva and thumped her on the head. Eva rose up bleary eyed and looked at her plate on the kitchen table and mine next to it on the card table. Our chairs were so close they were almost touching, but we were back to back and eating at different tables. She looked back and forth between them. “If this doesn’t beat all,” she snorted. Then she hit the top of the table. “If this isn’t ridiculous, I don’t know what is!” She glared at Zenie and rolled her eyes.

Zenie ignored her and sat down at the sewing machine. “Five down, five to go,” she said, and started in on another uniform she had pinned up and laid out on top of the sewing machine. It wasn’t even seven o’clock, but already so hot I could see sweat bead up in the creases around her mouth.

Eva put a bite of biscuit in her mouth and got up and poured herself some coffee and sat back down. She looked over her shoulder at me. “You’re not much company this morning.”

I had biscuit in my mouth and was chewing fast because it was too hot. Otherwise I would have mentioned the fact that you can’t very well talk to somebody who’s asleep.

“What kind of fancy camping things did you do? Have yourself a bonfire and cook up some weenies on a stick? Tell ghost stories? You sleep on the cold ground? What they feed you camping?” She gave me the once over. “Look like plenty, whatever it was.”

Zenie stopped sewing and gave Eva the evil eye. I looked down. Below my dirty shorts my legs were spread out and lumping over the sides of the chair like blobs of bread dough. Between them was the now-sweaty lump of Kotex, which I needed to get rid of now that it was morning. I shoved another mouthful of biscuit and gravy in my mouth and chewed.

“Gone to camp a chatting fool, come back the Sphinx. You too full of yourself to tell some camping stories? Man alive, must be nice to get out of this place here. Got yourself a nice change of scenery.”

The questions were darts and I was the board. “It was nice,” I said. “It was better than nice. I wished I could have stayed there forever. I didn’t ever want to come back here. I hate this place.”

Eva and Zenie both looked hard at me and blinked.

“Well, it’s delightful knowing you too, girlfriend,” Eva hissed. “And I expect that’s your way of saying thank you so much, Zenie, for the delicious breakfast.”

Zenie looked hard at Eva. “She tired. Leave her be.”

“
She’s
tired. She doesn’t know the name of tired. Walk in my shoes all day trying to sell knowledge door to door in this heat and you know tired.”

“Maybe tired folks ought to stay home nights and get some rest for their tiredness.” Zenie’s mouth went thin and tight. “Maybe then they not get out of bed on the wrong side.”

Eva took a big slurp of coffee. “Maybe those ones that got some backbone need to get out at night and work for them that don’t. Maybe that’s what’s making the working ones so tired. They’re carrying all of the rest of y’all on their shoulders.”

“Nobody carrying
me
. Nobody carrying
me
no place. Truth be told, if anybody’s getting carried around here, it sure ain’t
me
.” Zenie stood up straight and tall from the sewing machine, knocking over the stool she was sitting on and leaving part of a half-sewn
uniform hanging by a thread on the needle. She turned to me. “Come on, you.” Then she stormed out of the kitchen, stepped over a couple of pairs of legs on the living-room floor, opened the front door, and looked back at me. “Come
on
.”

I shoved the rest of the biscuit in my mouth, grabbed another, and followed. Here I had to get up from eating a perfectly good breakfast! Meanwhile, the cause of it all, Miss Ugly, fell back to her breakfast and ignored the fact that we were walking out on her.

“Bye, Eva,” I said under my breath to the blue rollers as I went past the back of her head. She didn’t turn around and she didn’t answer. Maybe she didn’t hear me, or maybe she was too mad at Zenie. Whatever she might have said, could have said, she didn’t say it. She didn’t say a word.

I was half out the front door when I looked back one last time at Eva sitting in the kitchen. In that moment she turned her head and eyeballed me dead-on. “You. Flo. Miss Smarty Pants. Don’t think you’re getting out of that lesson this afternoon.” She wagged her finger in my direction. “I’ve got some sentences that are going to knock your socks off. You’ll be diagramming till midnight.”

I smiled and waved with my good arm, relieved that she wasn’t mad at me too. Maybe I could diagram with my right hand.

By the time I got out the door, Zenie had already headed for Mimi’s. She was huffing and puffing. Her nurse’s shoes kicked up dust in the street. I followed along but stayed a good house length behind her. I didn’t want to get mixed up in her fuss with Eva. I was back to being worn out.

My stack of dirty clothes was still sitting on the front porch. Zenie sighed. “Sheet day,” she said under her breath.

“I’ll do it,” I said. Zenie would think it strange if I didn’t help with the sheets. I was already wet in my head and under my arms. Way past needing Mum. “Let me get a drink of cold water first.”

Sheet day wasn’t much of a to-do anymore. Just Mimi’s bed and a few of her clothes and towels. No shirts for Grandpops to come back starched and stacked and folded just so, one for each day of the week except Saturday with an extra for a wedding or a funeral or if he spilled something at noon dinner.

Upstairs, the door to Grandpops’ bedroom lay open just a crack, but not so you could see in. I touched the door to open it more and saw the dark bed with its knobby white spread. The bed seemed to stretch out longer and wider than it did when he was alive. I pulled the door back to where it had been and went on into Mimi’s room. She’d left a note saying she had gone to school for a summer teachers’ meeting. Her bed was unmade because of sheet day, so I just pulled off the sheets and pillowcases with my right hand. I went into the bathroom and got her laundry basket out of the closet. There weren’t as many clothes in it as there used to be. Since Grandpops had died, Mimi dragged around the house in the same old blue polka-dot brunch coat. Zenie said she was sick to death of that ugly-as-sin brunch coat. She said that Mimi was so attached to it, she wouldn’t be surprised if Mimi wore it when she went back to teaching school in September. I pulled the towels off the racks, laid the sheets out on the bathroom floor, put the rest of the stuff inside and, taking care with my shoulder, tied it up like a picnic sack. I kicked it down the steps and out the front door. I untied the knot and put my camp clothes inside with Mimi’s things and then tied it back.

Zenie appeared behind the screen door. Her arm came out with some cup towels. “Here, put these in too.”

I untied the knot again and stuck them in. The white pile stood ready for Uldine to pick up. She’d be getting all my stinking camp stuff, more than she bargained for. All wrapped up like a bad surprise in the lavender-scented sheets from Mimi’s bed.

While Zenie was fixing midday dinner, I went upstairs and
started rooting around the bathroom for more Bayer. Nothing on the lower shelves. I got a stepping stool from Grandpops’ study and brought it in to stand on so as to reach the top shelf. Behind a bunch of cough syrup and, glory be, the Bayer, was a little row of empty paregoric bottles. Somebody had spent time lining them up just so. They were so neatly lined up, they looked like they belonged in a communion tray. Somebody had been doping, the way Uncle Nash, Mimi’s wounded brother, used to do before Mimi and Grandpops sent him back to the veterans hospital, where I guessed he still was. In his heyday, Uncle Nash specialized in drinking from little brown sacks in public, lolling about with the other dopers under Nathan Bedford Forrest’s horse on the town square. If he recognized you, he’d holler your name at you when you walked by. This was a secret doper, though, and I wondered why he or she hadn’t thrown away the bottles and how long they had been there.

My shoulder was hurting worse plus my stomach was turning over in an odd way, so I snatched up the Bayer. I munched three down, ran some water from the lavatory into my hand and swallowed it with the grit. Then I ran water in the tub and got in. I scrubbed myself from stem to stern and then, surprise surprise, went right to sleep in the tub now full of brownish-gray water. I dreamed something was coming. It was coming sure enough and soon. I saw the word
Apocalypse,
which, thanks to Eva and Phonics, I could sound out, blazoned across a dark sky. I saw fiery furnaces and misshapen monsters and terrible renderings. Then all at once my mother appeared before me in an angel getup, wings and all. She looked silly but she wasn’t smiling. She was saying something about packing my bag. “Hurry. Get ready,” she said, “there’s a terrible storm coming.” Then I heard it roar, then it was upon us, calling out for Medgar Evers’s blood and then for my blood too, and I knew we were all lost forever in the storm.

I’d slept in the tub awhile, I don’t know how long. I woke up to Zenie standing over me hollering Lordy Mercy, which made me wonder if I was dying like Grandpops had. Mimi was just coming into her bedroom next door with a stack of books and she dropped them with a crash and came running. She burst in on us, me just waking up in the water and wondering what Zenie was having such a fit about. I’d woken up in a shiver. The water had gone cold.

Mimi took one look. “It’s her shoulder. Look at her shoulder! She’s knocked herself out! Don’t let her go under!”

Zenie hollered back at her, “Call the doctor! Call the doctor!”

When I opened my eyes and sat straight up in the tub and said “What’s the matter? What are y’all yelling about?” they jumped back like I was Lazarus rising from the dead. The water in the tub was still a brownish gray and, when I looked down, what I could see of my shoulder was a deep purple with red streaks running down my arm like blood.

When I saw them staring down at me, I covered myself as best I could with the washcloth.

“Oh Lord,” Mimi whispered.

“Get on up out of that bathtub,” Zenie said. She took a towel off the rack and handed it to me. They trooped out in single file.

When I came out of the bathroom in Mimi’s brunch coat, they were waiting for me in Mimi’s room. She was rocking in her rocker hard and fast. Zenie paced the floor in front of the little fireplace. Their mouths were one thin line with no subject and no predicate.

“Come here, Florence,” Mimi called to me from the rocker. “Come in here to me.”

I walked into the room and stood before them. The way they looked at me made me sweat.

“Come on over here by me,” Mimi said. She was rocking so hard her chair was moving across the floor and making the rug pucker up in its path. Zenie kept on pacing. I went on over and stood beside Mimi, keeping my toes back from her rockers. Zenie walked over to us.

“Let me see that shoulder again,” Mimi said.

“It’s all right,” I mumbled, backing up.

Zenie moved in behind me. “Let her see it.”

I unbuttoned three buttons of the brunch coat and let down the side over my hurt shoulder. Zenie reached out and took the brunch coat down farther in the back. I held it over my chest while they looked.

“Turn around.” Mimi’s voice was like ice on my bare skin.

I turned around and there was a deep silence. Mimi stopped rocking and stood up and walked around to my front again. Then she went back around. She touched a place in the middle of my back and I flinched. Suddenly Zenie came up on my left side and took hold of my left arm and held it out for Mimi to look at. On
it the marks of my father’s hand were outlined finger by finger in bluish red.

Then the two of them started up. Mimi started it with clicking her tongue; then Zenie started humming, not a song but just a low hum like a motor. They stood there for a minute like two strange insects tuning up for the long night ahead, clicking and humming. Then they stopped all at once. Zenie smoothed down my hair, which was drying every which way, and Mimi took my arm between her two soft hands. She took it in the careful, even way you’d take a little baby from another person.

“Honey, does it hurt when you move your arm?” Mimi asked.

“Not too much.”

“Can you move your shoulder around all right?” She touched the front of my shoulder with her fingertips. I moved away from her hand. “It’s not broken, is it?”

“No ma’am.” I was as quiet and gentle with my answers as she was with her questions. I moved my arm in as much of a circle as I could stand. “It’s all right.”

I was holding my breath for the big question. I had my story ready to roll out the way they rolled out the Bugs Bunny cartoons down at the Lyric Theater. It was exciting and funny. I’d heard a scary noise in the night, so I got up to see, and then,
bam
, I ran smack-dab into the door going to the bathroom in the middle of the night. So hard I almost knocked myself down. It was so dark. No moon at all. As to the imprint of Daddy’s fingers, I’d say he grabbed my left arm in the car when he had to slam on the brakes.

But they didn’t ask it. They just looked at each other, then back at me. “All right now,” said Mimi finally. “Go on and find something to put on. I’m going to call the doctor.”

I whipped around and glared at her. “No! I said it’s all right! See?” I gritted my teeth and wiggled my arm around to show her.
“I…I’ll run away if you call the doctor.” I knew that Daddy would kill me sure enough if a doctor got into it.

I went on out, and Mimi shut the door behind me. There was a rise and fall of voices, Mimi’s unraveling like a ball of yarn, Zenie’s firm and steady. Then they came out and Zenie went downstairs to finish up dinner, which was going to be late because of all the commotion.

Mimi hardly said a word during the meal, except, “Thank you, Lord, for these and all our blessings, amen,” leaving out, I noticed, the
many
in front of
blessings
and the
In Jesus’ name
in front of
amen
. She said the blessing all in one breath. The words ran together so that they seemed like one long drawn-out word. We ate fast, chicken and dumplings, which was one of my favorites, but Zenie’s dumplings seemed to have too much Crisco. They fell heavy in the well and seemed to swell once they hit bottom.

When Zenie was clearing the plates, Mimi turned to me at the table. “Florence, I want you to carry you down to New Orleans with me for a week or so to see my sister Mabel. She’s sick and she may need our help. I need you to go with me.” The way she said it, the way it was a song she already knew by heart, made her sound like the little wren that sang to Grandpops and me on our way home from Zenie’s. Busy and cheerful and full of vim and vigor. The hop, skip, and jump of her voice didn’t go with the mouth it was coming out of, which looked like Mama’s when she tasted a bad egg in the batter.

I knew what she was up to. She wanted to fly the coop with me, get me away from Daddy. The shoulder had had its own story to tell. I was all for the Mabel idea, except for Mama. What if she came back to Millwood for me and I was nowhere to be found? How would we ever find each other again? I was opening my mouth to ask those questions when they glided unsaid back
down my throat like Zenie’s burdensome dumplings. What did I care? Mama was the one who’d gone on the lam, left her only child with a batch of greased cake pans and no ingredients left in the kitchen to make so much as a simple pound cake. I’d like to be a fly on the wall when she came tiptoeing back in to find me absconded, lock, stock, and barrel. I’d take all my books, so she’d know I was never coming back.

While Mimi said her little speech about going to New Orleans, Zenie had been standing in the doorway to the kitchen, Mimi’s dirty plate in one hand, mine in the other. I looked at her, then back at Mimi. They were waiting for my answer. My throat closed up, but I nodded. All right. All right.

“Good,” Mimi said, “I’ll talk to your father and I’ll go out this afternoon and get the tires checked. How does tomorrow morning sound?”

I nodded again.

“All right. We’ll start out right after breakfast. We’ll have our clean clothes back by then and we can pack up here.” She paused. “You stay up here with me tonight. I may need some help getting ready. Is there anything you need from your house you can’t do without for the next few weeks? We can go get it right now, right this minute.”

I almost said my books, but then I shook my head no. I could leave the books. There were other books and other stories. There was nothing there that I hadn’t read a million times. I was sick to death of those stories. I felt like a leaf before the wind. I took a breath. It came out a sigh.

“All right, then. All right,” she said. Then she looked over at Zenie. “And Zenie here is going to get her first paid vacation.”

“Be my first and probably be my last,” Zenie said scornfully, and then turned and took the dishes into the kitchen.

Mimi went on upstairs and I could hear drawers slamming
and her voice on the phone. She was calling her school, saying she had urgent business in New Orleans, she couldn’t do the summer civics workshop next week, get a substitute. No, she didn’t know how long. It was a family emergency. She’d let them know. Then she called the bank and told them she’d be coming by later and wanted to get into Grandpops’ safety deposit box. She needed to cash out a bond. Then I heard her rummaging around in her closet.

In the kitchen Zenie had started washing the dishes. Unlike Mama, Zenie was a good dish washer. She didn’t mess around. She used a rough cloth and lots of detergent and steel wool when necessary. I never had to send a dish back. I got up from my seat and went into the kitchen. I took up a dish towel to dry, but Zenie shook her head. “You better favor that shoulder for a while,” she said. I sat down in her chair and watched her work. After she was done, I ran some water in a glass and took two more Bayer and headed for Grandpops’ velvet chair in the living room. The chair held my imprint now. I turned to my right, curled up. I shut my eyes and the minute I did, I got a picture in my head of my mother in the kitchen baking. She had on her sweetheart rose apron and it wasn’t burned and her bangs were standing straight up like she had been sweating and wiped her brow with the back of her hand the way she used to. She was watching a double boiler of icing that was almost ready to take off the fire. When I opened my eyes, Zenie had come into the living room and was standing in front of the fireplace. Behind her was a picture of a field of goldenrod in a scalloped gold-leaf frame. The way she was standing, her head was right in the middle of the picture. When I gazed up at her, her head looked crowned in gold.

“If your mama come back before you do, I’ll tell her where you gone to,” she said after a minute. “I’ll tell her you down in one of them honky-tonks in New Orleans and she better get herself
on down there and carry you home before you get yourself into trouble.” She smiled at her own joke.

I sat up in the chair. “I ain’t worried.”

“Worried or not worried, I’m going to tell her to go down there and get you and carry you on home. Or maybe she just stay down there and keep you out of trouble.”

“She ain’t coming back I don’t think.”

“Some do and some don’t, but your mama’s the kind that do.”

I couldn’t see how Zenie would bet on Mama coming back. The way she was so sure made me want to smash a wall. Nancy Drew needed evidence to say something was true and so did I, and there just plain wasn’t any. Not even a clue one way or the other.

“You tell her then, and we’ll see what she does. We’ll just see.” I shut my eyes tight and curled up in the chair. I could feel tears slinking out of the corners of my eyes, clotting the velvet. I turned my face into the corner of the chair. It felt good and cool on my cheek.

“There lot worse things than taking a nice trip down to New Orleans,” Zenie said. “Wish me and Ray could take a nice trip like that. Have us a second honeymoon.”

I tucked myself back into the chair and shut my eyes. After a minute, I heard her go back into the kitchen.

Then I started seeing strange things in the golden field of flowers over the mantel. There was a jungle in it and the jungle was on fire. All the trees were burning. Everywhere there were people and poor frightened animals running before the fire, dangling from burning branches, until the glittery gold blaze took them and made them curl up like dead leaves.

The next thing I knew my eyes popped wide open and there was Daddy full blown before me in the middle of the living room
pacing and stewing. I heard the back screen door squeak and close and I knew Zenie was long gone without so much as an all right now, good-bye until tomorrow, slipping out like a cool breeze before the storm.

He smelled like smoke and fried fish. His voice was hoarse, like he’d been talking nonstop. He said, “Come on, Sister, roll out of that sack. Don’t you ever do nothing but sleep? Lazy as they come. I’m going to put you to work. I need you to fold some letters and put them in envelopes.”

I didn’t even try to imagine folding letters and getting them into envelopes with one hand. I hopped up like a chittery bird and sang out, “Mimi wants to talk to you, Mimi wants to talk to you.”

He was halfway out the front door. “What for?”

I hopped around him and went for the stairs. “I don’t know, but she does. I’ll go get her.” I said it as I headed up. These days Mimi was getting harder and harder to wake up, so on my way up the steps I hollered out, “Mimi, Mimi,” just to get her started. I grabbed my arm to my side and ran on up the rest of the steps.

When I burst into her room hollering, she was curled up in her usual way in her slip, with a bit of the spread pulled over her fin feet. She had on her white hairnet. “What, what!” She rolled over and glared in my direction, her eyes pinkish and mean.

I was huffing and puffing. “Daddy’s here! He’s downstairs. I told him you wanted to talk to him. He wants me to go on home with him right now. Come on downstairs. You need to come on down and talk to him and tell him about taking me to Aunt Mabel’s.”

“All right, all right, go on down and tell him to wait. I’ll be down in a minute, when I get dressed. Where’s Zenie? Is she still down there?”

I shook my head no. I backed up but didn’t leave her room.

She sat up and shuffled around with her feet for her bedroom shoes. “Go on now. Shut the door. Let me get some clothes on.”

I shut her door and stood outside it for a while. I could hear Daddy pacing the floor downstairs. Then he hollered for me to come on, he didn’t have all day. I came down the steps slow. I was trying to buy Mimi time to get dressed and get on down there.

He was standing at the bottom of the steps looking up. “Come on,” he said, “she can talk to me another time. You got work to do.”

“She’s coming in a minute.” I stayed on the midway landing where the stairs changed direction. “She said for you to hold your horses. She said to tell you it’s important.”

“If it’s so all-fired important, why don’t she get on down here?” He shifted from one foot to the other as he looked up at me. Then he clumped on over to the front door. “Come on. I’ll call her on the phone.”