The Queen of Palmyra (4 page)

After that, the house was burning up hot every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night with the stove on from after supper until long past midnight. I slept with the windows pushed as high as they would go, a fan blowing right on me, no revolving, and my pajama top pulled up. Mama would be mixing and baking and icing and talking back to John R on WLAC. I knew all of Mama’s cooking sounds.
Brush, brush
was the grater when she did the lemon rind, the loud scraping was the rack in the oven when she’d pull it out to adjust the height for the cake pans. The soft hen scratching was the wire whisk for egg whites.

The problem with half cakes was that you wanted to sell both halves, so the orders had to line up just so. Timing was important. When the phone rang with an order for a half, Mama might say, “Hi, Darlene. Well, let’s see here. I have half orders for the lemon and the caramel for tomorrow, so I can give you one of those. Just not the devil’s food.” She would hang up, write
Darl
for Darlene, and beside the
Darl
put another mark the shape of half a cake in the spiral notebook she kept by the phone. A half cake looked like this: (. A whole like this: ( ).

The trick was to have the two halves make a whole on the same day or following day. Otherwise you were dealing with a stale half, which was no good to anybody, except me (within reason) and Little Dan and May. If you had a half order of, say, lemon for Friday pickup, then you could take another half lemon for Saturday, though not for Sunday, because by then it would be too far gone and Mama had her reputation to think about.

We divided the cakes at the last possible moment before a pickup. My job was to cut out waxed paper to fit the side of each cake to the exact inch. Mama had made me a cardboard model, and I kept a supply stacked up under a small plate on the kitchen
counter. After Mama had sliced the cake in half, she pulled the halves apart, put the waxed paper up to the side of each half, and pressed with a gentle but firm hand, as if the cake had been a set of Siamese twins and she needed to stop the bleeding fast without damaging any cut vessels, so that both sides could bid adieu and go their separate ways.

The icings were the thing. They had to be timed to the split second, or else they would turn into wet sugar grit. When that happened, Mama would get mad as fire and start yelling her worst curse word, which was “Damn it the hell.” She said icing was like some folks’ lives: Timing is everything and when things go bad they go really bad. They settle into sludge. They cannot be undone.

Timing works only if you know your flame, which my mother did. She set her little white timer to four minutes for the caramel and five for the angel icing (two minutes with the top on the pot, three with it off) and the timer would go
tick tick tick BING!
throughout the night, though when the weather was stormy, timing would fall by the wayside and she had to use her thermometer instead. Even then, icing was finicky during thunderstorms. It could crystallize on a dime or just refuse to thicken up.

The icings required double boilers so that they wouldn’t scorch, and there were mixing bowls and cake pans stacked up like skyscrapers all over the kitchen. Mama didn’t believe in compromise when it came to her cakes. The devil’s food had to have four layers. The caramel was a heavy white cake with three thick layers and between them a quarter inch of caramel fudge icing that tasted like velvet feels.

The lemon cake was the most challenging. It had six thin layers with clear lemon filling in between. It was iced on top with a divinity icing that can turn grainy on you in a split second if you’re not careful. Don’t even bother trying to make it if the
weather’s bad. Even if the divinity icing comes out perfect, your troubles aren’t over. Sitting there on the table in front of you is a cake with six thin layers iced between and on top with the lemon jell. Your job is to spread the divinity icing right on top of the top layer of lemon jell
without blending into the jell
and making a globby mess! You have to have a feather hand and nerves of steel.

Mama did not deliver unless it was right down the street and then she’d send me. Daddy needed the Ford to collect policy money from his burial insurance clients, plus you can’t have your week’s income riding on a bed of chigger-infested Spanish moss. “Now be careful,” she always said. “Watch where you step. Don’t trip over the tree roots.”

Some ladies, I won’t mention names, snatched their cakes from me, patted their pockets, and said ever so sadly, “Oh dear, honey, I don’t have the correct change, I’ll have to bring it by later.” And then they wouldn’t. So Mama filled me up like a walking bank. I could easily whip out whatever change was needed. No excuses for you, Mrs. Have-Your-Cake-But-Not-Pay-For-It. Florence can change anything! I relished walking out our front door, pockets blooming and drooping with dollars and quarters and nickels and dimes, breasting one of Mama’s masterpieces in full view, past Little Dan and May, past bony-hipped Mrs. Gardner on the corner, who looked like she’d never had anything good to eat in her whole life and told people the neighborhood was going down because of us. You knock on some nice lady’s front door, like Miss Shirley Bishop, who has a sweet tooth and orders a half caramel almost every week. No need to say a word, just hold out Mama’s cake and you’d make anybody happy to be on the receiving end. It was the best job I ever had. I never dropped a one.

When I finished up all my deliveries, Mama said her thank you by putting me out on the front stoop with a big slice of what she
called her mistakes: cakes that didn’t rise because of the weather or came out of the oven with a monster crack because someone, usually Daddy with his bad foot, stomped around on the floor. She put slices of her mistakes in the freezer, nicely wrapped in waxed paper. While I was out delivering cakes, she took out a slice, peeled off the paper, and put it on a little saucer up on the kitchen counter. By the time I got back, it had thawed out. If it was warm outside, she set me up on the front stoop with a glass of tea with ice and mint. No sugar because the cake was sweets enough. “Got to watch those teeth of yours with all this sugar,” she said whenever I got a piece of cake. It was always Here’s the cake and, for a little added treat, a lecture on tooth decay.

After we’d been back in Millwood about a week and Mama had started sending me out on deliveries, I was sitting on the front stoop with a piece of caramel cake and a glass of tea when Little Dan and May came sidling up to me like ants at a picnic. Little Dan’s hair was wet-combed into a little mud-colored mound at the forehead like a dirt-dauber nest. Mama called him Mr. Smarty Pants Hairdo. She said he was going to lose his little mound one day and turn into one of those men who grow out the last straggly piece of hair left on their pitiful heads and plaster it down on top like a run-over baby snake. She said one day I’d go to buy myself a car at his daddy’s place, and Little Dan would walk out onto the lot with a pot belly and a big old spit curl on his ugly bald dome, and I’d split my sides laughing.

“That one of your mama’s good cakes?” Little Dan pulled out a comb from his back pocket, sucked on it like it was a popsicle, and then began to comb his little mound straight back like he was hot stuff.

“Um hum.” I dug for a big hunk of caramel icing, held it on my fork and eyeballed it like I couldn’t decide whether to eat it or throw it on the ground and stomp on it.

Little Dan stuck his comb back in his pocket and came closer. “You want to take a turn on my swing I’ll hold your cake.”

I snapped to. I’d been eyeing those swings since we’d been back, hoping to get an invitation. I passed over the cake plate and fork with the icing still on it, knowing it was the last I’d see of the cake, and headed for the swing set.

Little Dan and May grabbed at the cake, cramming big chunks into their greedy mouths and getting into such a fracas over the icing I’d left on the fork that it ended up in the dirt. What a waste, I thought, as I pushed myself off. I was barely getting going when Little Dan ran up behind me. He grabbed the swing, lifted it high in the air, ran behind it until it was over his head, and, last but not least, gave it a giant push that sent me to the moon. Then he settled in behind and started pushing me higher and higher. By the time I realized I’d been bamboozled, I was too high to jump and getting higher by the second.

“My mama says y’all are nothing but white trash,” he hollered at my back. “Your daddy can’t even hold a job he’s so trashy.”

I yelped for my mother, but she was hanging out clothes in the back. So I was riding air, screaming bloody murder, and Little Dan was running under the swing, making me fly. He seemed bound and determined to kill me, for what reason I don’t know.

Then something happened I didn’t expect. It started out good and ended up bad. You know when you’re looking through the camera and you have the perfect picture and you’re just getting ready to snap it? That split second when everything curls up like a cat? Just when I was ready to arc over the swing set and baby-bird it out, squash flop, none other than my own father rounded the back
L
of the Chisholms’ place and took in the scene. Glory be, I thought. Daddy never comes home in the middle of the day, but here he is. Here he is! Galloping to the rescue like the brave men in the olden days Daddy was always
telling stories about. Saving the day. In my mind’s eye, I saw myself as a damsel in distress, my golden locks fanning out behind me as I flew through the air. I was a beautiful sight to behold.

May took one look at Daddy and yelled at Little Dan to stop. Little Dan had already seen my father bearing down the stepping-stones Mama had put out for her customers, so he’d stopped his shoving and walked away real fast like he had nothing to do with me or the swing just happening to be up in the clouds, but not before Daddy saw what he’d been up to.

Before I could drag my feet to slow down the swing, Daddy was mincing toward Little Dan like a crab toward a dead gull. One of my father’s legs was shorter than the other and the foot on his short side tended to flip under. Not only did he walk with a limp, he couldn’t run or even walk at a good clip. His short leg and the brick-high shoe he wore on that foot kept him off balance at the speed he was traveling across the yard. He said this was why he never went off to fight the Koreans, because he couldn’t chase them down. If Little Dan had had the good sense to light out, Daddy wouldn’t have been able to catch him.

“What you think you’re doing, boy?” My father snatched up Little Dan by the right arm and flopped him back and forth like he was using Little Dan to swat a fly. Daddy had on a short-sleeve shirt, and you could see the veins popping out of the muscles in his arms.

By that time Little Dan was screaming bloody murder, his dirt-dauber nest of hair unraveling all the way down to his nose. “You quit it!” he yelled. “Mama!” he yelled, but Miss Kay Linda was nowhere in sight. She’d gone grocery shopping. May sounded like she was singing, but it was really a moan, and then, all of a sudden, I was making a noise too because Daddy had gotten Little Dan down on the ground and looked like he was getting ready to stomp Little Dan flat like you’d do a roach.

Just then Mama rounded the back corner of our house, covered in clothes. Mama always took our clothes to a Laundromat down the street to wash them, but she brought them home wet and hung them out on the line. She had Daddy’s shirts across both shoulders and my pants under her arms. She was carrying a laundry basket piled so high I couldn’t see her mouth. Her eyes, which are round anyway, were two big
O
’s.

“Win! My God in heaven!” My mother dropped her basket and ran for Daddy and Little Dan. Daddy’s starched shirts flew from her arms and stood up straight like little white soldiers in the dust. Mama jumped in front of Daddy and pulled Little Dan up out of the dirt.

I was still up in the swing dragging my toes in the dirt, tearing them up trying to get out of the clouds, but nobody was interested in my situation. They were playing tug of war over Little Dan. Daddy wanted to kill him. Mama wanted to save him.

“He hurt me!” Little Dan grabbed the arm where Daddy had him. “Broke my arm!” He scrambled to his feet and hid behind Mama’s back. Just as she turned around to look him over, he jumped out from behind her and yelled at Daddy, “You, you, you
nigger
!”

Mama spun around like Little Dan was a viper she’d just come upon in the grass. “You! Dan. Shut your dirty mouth!” No such talk was allowed in our house. I knew this because once when Daddy said that word on the phone to Big Dan, Mama had gotten cool as a cucumber and sat him down at the table after he hung up and told him if he ever said it again in her presence—those were the words she used,
in my presence
, and she struck the table with her first fingernail three times, once for each word—she was leaving to go back home to live with her mama and daddy. And take me with her.

Now Daddy started to circle. He was half smiling as he crab-dragged around behind Mama’s back, where Little Dan was hid
ing out. “Call me a nigger. I’ll flat out snatch you bald headed, you little son-of-a-bitch.” The words rolled out of his mouth like whipped cream.

“Win!” Mama’s voice could have cracked a tree trunk. “Get in the house!”

Daddy was still circling and growling, so Mama leaned over and grabbed him by the belt. Little Dan scuttled up behind her so as not to get caught out in the open. Mama grabbed Daddy’s belt and said his name over and over: “Win. Win, Win, Win.
Win
!” until he finally looked her in the face instead of trying to get around her to Little Dan. When his arms drooped at his sides, she spun him around, still holding on to his belt, and pushed him toward the front door. Then Mama turned to Little Dan, who was by this time brushing himself off and planting his nest back on top of his ugly head.

Little Dan looked hard at Mama. “He almost kilt me.”

“No he didn’t. Now listen to me, Little Dan.” Mama put on her Kelly Girl voice. “Let’s you tell me what I can do to make you feel better, and I’ll tell you what’ll make me feel better. What’ll make me feel better is for you and May to let Florence swing on your swing every so often without half killing her. What’ll make you feel better?”