To Come and Go Like Magic (4 page)

Ivan says
Chili, Chili, Chili
—always three times when I come in the door and again when I get up to leave. Miss Matlock says it only took a week to teach him my name. He’s a smart bird and not terrible at all.

“Perhaps I’ll bring Ivan to class one day,” Miss Matlock says. “If I can trust Mr. Mayfield to not annoy him.”

“Zeno annoys everybody,” I say. “He lives to annoy people.”

Miss Matlock smiles. “We must find a way to make this boy a bit more palatable,” she says.

“What’s that mean?”

She presses her finger to her lips and studies on this for a while. “More appetizing,” she says. “Like adding chocolate icing to a plain cake.”

Palatable
goes in my red notebook, but I sure wouldn’t put Zeno Mayfield in the same category as chocolate icing.

M
iss Hart, Queen of Homeroom …

“Do NOT smudge your paper,” she says, tapping my fingers with the ruler. “The machine cannot read the test if you’re messy.”

Miss Hart, queen of homeroom. That’s what Zeno calls her. She’s in charge of spring testing in the cafeteria for grades six, seven, and eight. We’re all bunched together under the fluorescent lights, half of them blinking and trying to go out, so it’s hard to concentrate.

“People in other places make really good scores,” she says. “We cannot let them beat us.”

The page is a dance of words.
Treacherous. Prudery. Gesticulate
. If I could write them in my red notebook, I could collect a million from this test alone. We don’t talk like this, so how can they expect us to answer the questions? How can we beat the people in other places?

At the next table Ginny winds a strand of blond hair tightly around her finger like this might stir up some brain
cells. Priscilla slips off her shoes under the table and taps her bare feet on the tile floor. Everybody’s moving, stretching legs, scratching arms, twisting from side to side. Everyone except Willie Bright, and he’s bent over with his face down close to the test booklet, like he’s having a hard time seeing the words.

Ginny and Priscilla were upset earlier because they got put at a table with Willie and two sixth-grade welfares. It will make them look like dummies, Ginny said. There ought to be rules. But Miss Hart didn’t make the rules. She says these are simply tests to show our strengths and weaknesses (whether we’re regular or talented or dumb is what she really means and everybody knows it) before we sign up for next year’s classes. Still, in the end, you can choose any classes you want; the scores don’t matter. I take a deep breath and keep working.

Don’t turn the page until the buzzer sounds. Read fast, answer
a, b, c
, or
d
. Two may be right, but only one is the best. Zeno Mayfield says 75 percent of the answers are
c
, so if you always answer
c
, you get 75 percent right, which is like getting a C on your report card. Pop does not like Cs.

Math and science in the morning; history and reading in the afternoon. I like the reading best, but I’m tired by the time we get to it. My eraser’s gone, too,
beaten down to the last bit during math. When I try to erase, the metal rim of the vanished eraser leaves a dirty smudge outside the box.

“Don’t go outside the box!” Miss Hart marches up and down the aisles, looking over shoulders, stockings swishing against her legs.

I try to keep my mind on a long passage from some book called
Pride and Prejudice
. It’s about a little village in England and there are five girls, sisters, all tangled up in some kind of love story. The questions are hard.
What is the hypothetical situation set up by the author?
If I only knew what
hypothetical
meant …
What is the author’s belief as indicated …?
I guess and go on.

Ten minutes before last bell we’re finally printing our names on the back sheet, filling in personal information—grade, birth date, school—and I put the post-office-box number on the wrong line and have to erase, making a streak across the whole address section. Miss Hart stops and taps my desk with her ruler.

“The eraser’s gone,” I say.

She grabs my pencil and breaks off the eraser end.
Snap!
Throws both pieces in the trash, takes my test, and strolls up the long aisle like she owns the school. All that work and no post-office-box number. My test will probably get lost and I’ll have to wait another year for a chance to beat all those people who make really good scores. I
feel the others turn in their chairs and wait to see if I’ll cry, but I clamp my teeth together, top to bottom, so not even a thread could slide through.

It’s a long time before the bell rings.

R
oscoe …

“Your uncle Roscoe died,” Momma says. She sits at the foot of my bed and wrings her hands till they’re red. She’s told Myra and Jack, and now she says she’s here to prepare me.

“For what?” I ask. I didn’t really know Pop’s brother.

She says they’re bringing Roscoe to our house for three days.

“How can Uncle Roscoe come to our house if he’s dead?”

Momma explains that this is how it’s done. The dead lie in the living room and all their friends and even some of their guilt-ridden enemies come to view them.

“Why’s he coming
here?”
I ask Momma. “Why don’t they keep Roscoe in West Virginia where he lived?”

“This is his home,” Momma says.

“Our
house?” I ask. Uncle Roscoe’s never lived in our house, and I can only recall him visiting us twice.

“Mercy Hill,” Momma says. “This is his true home.”

“What’s a true home?” I ask. How can a true home be one you never even visit? I sit up in bed and twiddle the fringe on the blanket. I’ve heard stories that Uncle Roscoe’s wife, Big Nan, is bossy. She spanks the kids, Little Nan and Humphrey, with a yardstick every time they do the least thing wrong and refuses to even accept Lenny as a family member. He’s Roscoe’s oldest kid, by some other woman. Big Nan runs a tight ship, Pop’s always said. Now she’s casting Roscoe overboard, sending him home in a box.

“A true home is where you started out,” Momma explains. “That never changes.”

I look around at my blue curtains and peacock bedspread and dark wood floor. I look out the window where the bare sycamore branches shiver in the morning breeze. Momma’s shivering, too, and I reach over and pat her on the shoulder.

“I’ll help clean the house,” I offer.

“Yes,” Momma says. “We’ll make it pretty for Roscoe’s homecoming.”

When Momma’s gone, I picture myself in a far-off country living amongst strangers. I’m from Mercy Hill, Kentucky, I’ll say, knowing that no matter where I go, that will never change.

R
oxy March …

The undertaker backs his long black car up to the front porch and brings in Uncle Roscoe with baskets of white roses and yellow gladiolas and tiny pink carnations. Momma places vases on the coffee table and the mantel and the television set. Blooms are everywhere, blossoms and green leafy ferns smelling up the house.

People will be coming and going day and night, so I have to wear a good dress and my patent-leather shoes. It’s like church around the clock.

I see a fancy-dressed woman walk through the door looking like she’s lost.

“Uncle Roscoe’s in the living room,” I say.

“He’s not
really
here,” she says, shaking her head. She’s wearing a green suit with sharp-toed, high-heeled shoes to match, like the women on television. I picture myself in a suit like that, walking into a fancy office building with windows all around. But I wouldn’t have that purse she’s carrying. It looks like animal hide. Some poor alligator or
crocodile or a bunch of lizards had to die so she’d have a place to put her lipstick.

“He’s right over there,” I say, pointing to the casket sitting in front of the window. It’s brown and shiny with silver handles and a satin lining. From where Uncle Roscoe is perched, he could see the sun rise above the maple trees if he were alive.

“That’s nothing but a cold body,” the woman says, dabbing at her eyes with a Kleenex. She tells me Roscoe’s gone, he’s flown away, like a pretty bird that sits on a telephone wire and sings for a while and then takes off.

“What’s your name?” I ask, wanting to know more about any woman who could imagine my pale-faced, plump uncle Roscoe as a pretty bird.

“Roxy,” the woman says. “Roxy March.”

“I’ve heard that name,” I say. She’s the one Roscoe loved before he went off to the war. But then he came back and took up with a foreign dancer—Lenny’s mom—who died and left him to marry Big Nan and ruin his life. That’s how the story goes.

A bunch of women from church descend on Roxy March, fussing over her green suit and shoes and animal purse. They say Roxy is better off without Uncle Roscoe…. He would have kept her in the hills…. Now she’s a legal secretary in Cincinnati and that’s almost like being a lawyer, even better than being a lawyer in Mercy Hill.

“Look at her!” A blond woman’s head bobs up and down above the others. “Would you just look at her!”

They’ve come to view Uncle Roscoe but can’t keep their eyes off Roxy March.

71
Beech Street …

Strangers sleep in my bed. Old men curl up with their hats over their faces, women stretch out in their stockings and pretty dresses, and little snotty-nosed kids snuggle under my covers.

“I wouldn’t dream of sending anybody to a hotel,” Momma says. She gives my room to Big Nan and Little Nan, and Jack’s to Humphrey and Lenny when they get to the house.

“Let’s go to my house,” Myra offers, even though she’s not been back to that house since Jerry Wilson disappeared.

All the way down the interstate highway my sister taps on the steering wheel like it’s a drum. Finally, we whirl round and round beneath the overpass and pull up in front of 71 Beech Street. We sit in the car and look at the front-porch chairs turned over on their sides and the
storm door standing open. The house looks creepy or sad. I can’t tell which.

Myra makes me a bed on the couch in her living room, but I can’t sleep. I hear her sniffling in the bedroom and don’t know if she’s crying about Uncle Roscoe or Jerry Wilson or about being back in this lonely little house again. Maybe she’s just tired of carrying the baby-to-be around all day and night.