Biggie and the Devil Diet (4 page)

3

T
he next morning when I came down for breakfast, Biggie was sitting at the table drinking coffee. She was still wearing her nightgown and robe. I hadn't seen her do that since she had the flu last winter. Biggie always says she can't think straight unless she is dressed properly for the day. When she looked up at me, her eyes had as many red lines as a Mississippi road map. She managed to give me a half smile then shoved her cup toward Willie Mae for a refill.

I sat down beside Biggie. "You okay, Biggie?"

She rumpled my hair. "Sure, honey. Just a tiny little headache, that's all." She shook herself and sat up straighter. "Why don't we have chicken spaghetti for supper tonight, Willie Mae? It's been quite a while since we had that."

Willie Mae cracked an egg into a saucer and slid it into a pan of simmering water. "You want spinach salad or coleslaw with that?" She slid another egg into the water.

Biggie drummed her fingers on the table. "You know what I'd really like? I'd like some of that wilted lettuce you make. You know, the kind with hard-boiled eggs and bacon?"

Willie Mae took the eggs out of the pan with a slotted spoon and laid them on my plate, blotting them off with paper towels. Next she added a slice of country-cured ham and two fat fluffy biscuits fresh from the oven. She set the plate in front of me.

"Yuk," I said, looking down at my plate.

"How come you say that?" Rosebud asked. He was spooning down his poached eggs like they were good and sopping up the juice with a biscuit.

"I was hoping for some gingerbread pancakes."

"Put some butter on them eggs and they go down better." Rosebud shoved the butter dish toward me. "Uh-oh, there goes the phone."

Biggie got up from the table and answered the phone at her little kitchen desk. "Hello? Oh hey, Coye…. Um-hmm…. Say what?… Well, sure. We'd love to have her…. Fine…. Okay. We'll see you around two then."

"Was that Mr. Sontag?" I asked.

"Yep. He has to take Ernestine over to Longview to the eye doctor this afternoon. They won't be back until late, so they wanted to know if Monica could spend the night with us."

"Yeah!" I said. Monica and her family live on the farm Biggie grew upon. Monica is my best friend next to Rosebud even though she does only have hair on one side of her head on account of being left too close to the fire when she was a baby. Monica is the only girl in the world I can talk to and that's only because she's so much like a boy. She's not afraid of the devil himself. I know that for a fact.

About that time the back door swung open and in walked Mrs. Moody. She was dressed in a bright blue pantsuit with a black crocheted hat on her head. She carried Prissy under one arm. In her other hand she had a cloth shopping bag, which she set down on Biggie's desk next to the back stairs. She set Prissy on the floor by her feet and began pulling things out of the bag. Prissy leaned against her ankles, trembling.

Mrs. Moody dug down into the bag and pulled out a pottery bowl with PRISSY written in blue on its side. "This is her water bowl," she said. "The little darling knows it, too. Just don't bother trying to put her food in this bowl. She won't touch a bite of it." She looked at me to make sure I understood. I nodded. "And this is her Snookums." She took out a faded old rag doll. "She sleeps with her head on Snookums every single night. Oh, and here's her food bowl." It was identical to the water bowl with her name on the side and everything.

"How am I supposed to know the difference?" I asked.

Mrs. Moody knit her brows like she was thinking hard. "Well, I hadn't thought of that. They are just exactly alike. I got them over at Marshall Pottery. Here's an idea. Why don't you put her water in one bowl, and if she won't drink it, you'll know that's her food bowl. Well, I've got to scoot. I told Ace Redfearn to be at my front door with his taxi at eight-thirty. Oh, yes, and I've left her bed with her fuzzy blanket on the back porch." She came over and pinched my cheek. "I know I can count on you to take good care of my baby."

"Yes'm. I guess."

Mrs. Moody picked up Prissy and set her in my lap. "Now you be a good girl, hear?"

Prissy growled and I saw that Booger had come into the kitchen and was sitting by the stove licking himself.
This is going to be interesting,
I thought,
and might turn out to be fun.
As soon as I made sure Mrs. Moody was gone, I pushed Prissy off my lap. She immediately started in yapping at Booger, who looked at her like she was a gnat and went right on licking his bottom. After a while, I guess Booger got tired of it because, quick as a flash, he reached out his paw and boxed Prissy on the nose, then walked off down the hall with his tail high. Prissy crawled under the desk, lay down, and tucked her nose between her two front paws.

"J.R., go outside and make sure that pen you built for Bingo is still secure. If it isn't, fix it; if it is, put Prissy out there. Make sure you give her plenty of water and put her bed and a blanket in the little doghouse." Biggie held on to the table when she stood up. "I think I'll just go up and rest a little longer. I didn't sleep too well last night." She looked at me again. "You might want to put Snookums out there, too. Poor little thing; she's going to be lonely for Essie."

"Yes'm."

It took me a whole hour to get Prissy situated because the hog wire we'd built the pen out of had stretched in places. I got some wire out of the garage and mended the holes and filled what I hoped was her water bowl. I threw in a couple of Bingo's milk bones along with her stupid rag doll.

When I got back inside, Prissy wasn't under the desk where I'd left her. Rosebud was still at the table enjoying a second cup of coffee, and Willie Mae had joined him.

"Did y'all see where Prissy went?" I asked.

"Nope." Rosebud set down his coffee cup and began cleaning his fingernails with his pocketknife.

"Don't be doing that at the table," Willie Mae said. "That's nasty."

Rosebud grinned and put away his knife.

"Willie Mae, did you see which way she went?"

"When do I got time to go keeping tabs on a dog?"

I searched the house for Prissy. I looked under the couch in the parlor then behind the piano. I looked behind all the doors and under all the beds. She wasn't anywhere. I even looked in all the closets and up in the attic. Prissy was nowhere to be found. Finally, I went out in the yard and yelled my lungs out for her. I even checked the neighbors' yards on both sides of the street. No Prissy. Now I was getting pretty worried. Even though she was, to my way of thinking, a poor excuse for a dog, I didn't want anything bad to happen to her.

It was after eleven when I finally gave up and came back in the house. Biggie, dressed and looking much better, was talking on the telephone in the hall.

"They want us to come today? That's pretty short notice, isn't it?" She listened for a long time. "Umm… you forgot…. Is Butch going?… He is…. How about Ruby?… Oh, well, I guess. I'll meet you at the square at three then. Okay. Bye." She hung up the phone and saw me standing there for the first time. "Oh, J.R., some of us are invited out to the Barnwell ranch for tea this afternoon. I want you to go along."

"Me? Why? I don't want to go, Biggie. There's nothing but a bunch of fat girls out there. No guys or nothin'."

"J.R., I want you to go."

"No, ma'am, I'm not going. I got better things to do than tag along after you all the time." I was scared and shaking all over. I had never disobeyed Biggie before, but now was the time to take a stand. Biggie needed to realize that I was a teenager and not just a little kid anymore.

"It's important to me, J.R." There was a tremor in her voice.

I almost gave in. It wasn't going to hurt me to go with Biggie. I'd done it all my life and had some pretty interesting adventures doing it. I opened my mouth to say okay when something stopped me, something strong that seemed to be pulling me away from being a kid and into— something else. "NO!" I ran up to my room and slammed the door. I flung myself on my bed and lay there shaking all over. It seemed the walls might come tumbling down on top of me— my whole life might be breaking apart. What was wrong with Biggie? Why had she acted so funny last night? Did it have to do with all those fat girls at the tearoom? How could it? And what was wrong with me? I had never behaved like that in all my days with Biggie and Willie Mae and Rosebud— never ever wanted to.

I was still trying to figure it all out when I heard a tap on my door, then the door opened and Biggie peeked in. "May I come in?"

I was surprised. Biggie never asked that. She usually just walked right in.

I sat upon the bed and nodded. "Am I in trouble?"

"No." Biggie sat on the edge of the bed and patted my leg. "I have a story to tell you. I never thought you'd have to know, but now I guess you do."

I sat up against the headboard pushing a pillow behind my back. "Yes'm."

4

J
ob's Crossing was a whole different place when I was a girl than it is today." Biggie crossed her legs Indian style and sat facing me on the bed.

"How's that?"

"For one thing, there were four cafés downtown and a shoeshine parlor and a newsstand."

"No foolin'?"

"No foolin'. And every Saturday night, the stores stayed open until ten o'clock so that all the farmers could come into town to do their business."

"Way cool." If anybody had asked me, I would have said the town was quieter in the olden days, not livelier.

"Not only that, we had two picture shows on the square— two! One was old and dirty and showed mostly cowboy movies and serials, while the other, which was just a little nicer, showed the first-run movies. Every Sunday afternoon, my friends and I would wear our church dresses to the matinee."

"You dressed up to go to the movies?"

"Well, yes, but only on Sundays. That's the way everybody did things back then. And the ladies all wore hats and gloves even if they were just going to the grocery store. Everything was more formal in those days."

"That's lame."

"It's just the way things were. People set a greater store on their reputation in the community and who their family was than how kind they were or how honorable." Biggie looked out the window for a long time until I began to get uncomfortable. I wondered why she was telling me all this.

"What kind of movies did they show?"

"Oh, you know. You've seen old movies on television. When I was a child the war was on, and we mostly saw movies about that. People were very patriotic."

"I've heard that word, but I'm not real sure I know what it means."

"It means they talked a lot about how great our country was— and how bad our enemies were. We had to, you know, support our soldiers in the war. We grew Victory Gardens in our backyards and saved tinfoil and cooking fat for the war effort. And the ladies all knitted socks and gloves for the soldiers. My daddy served on the draft board."

"Well the town sounds neat. I wish it was still that way— except for the dressing up part. The war sounds cool."

"The war wasn't cool at all. People were killed, J.R. And there were other bad things as well."

"Like what?"

"Well, for starters, the colored people all had to sit in the balcony when they went to the picture show— and they couldn't go in any of the cafés on the square."

"Why?"

"That's just the way things were in those days. And something else, you know that water fountain on the courthouse lawn?"

I nodded. "It doesn't work anymore."

"I know, but that's not the point. The point is there used to be two there, and they were marked with signs that said COLORED and WHITES. They tore the colored fountain down sometime in the seventies."

"Yeah, I know all about segregation. We studied civil rights and Martin Luther King Jr. in school. I know one thing, I'd a darn sight rather drink after Willie Mae than Cooter McNutt." Cooter McNutt lives in a cabin out on the banks of the creek. When he's in town, you can smell him coming a block away.

"I doubt if you know all about it. You had to be there. Someday, I'll tell you more. But that's not what we're here to talk about right now. Today we're going to talk about me. Did you know my father was once mayor of Job's Crossing?"

"No, ma'am. I thought your daddy was a farmer like Mr. Sontag. Didn't you grow up out on the farm?"

"Where did you get that idea, honey?" Biggie patted my knee.

"Because you're all the time talking about what fun you had out in the country."

"J.R., it was my
grandparents
who lived on the farm. I did spend a lot of time out there, but I grew up in this very house." She looked at the crepe myrtle tree covered with pink blooms outside my window. "In fact, this was my room. I used to look out at Ruby Muckleroy's house from this very window. She was Ruby Morris then, and we grew up together. Now you can't see the house anymore because this tree has grown so much. I remember when my daddy planted it here. It wasn't more than six feet tall…."

She continued to look out the window not saying anything. Finally, I cleared my throat, and she looked at me like she'd just come back from somewhere far away.

"When I entered high school the war had been over for a number of years, but the veterans, those who made it through, were still coming home. Some had signed up for extra hitches in the service; some were injured and had to stay in service until their wounds healed. A few, those who quit school to join up, tried to go back to high school, but that never worked very well. How can you go by high school rules when you've seen people die on the battlefield?"

I shrugged my shoulders, wondering what this had to do with her wanting me to go out to that ranch with her.

"By the time I was a sophomore, most of the veterans had drifted away to go to college on the G.I. Bill or to take jobs at the steel mill. One stayed though." She smiled. "A good-looking fellow with coal black hair and light blue eyes. He had one little curl that kept falling down over his forehead no matter how much he combed it back with the little black comb he kept in his shirt pocket." She looked out the window some more then shook herself and spoke again. "He seemed so glamorous to all us girls. Most everybody had a crush on him at one time or another, even though our mothers had told us to steer clear of him. They didn't need to worry. He didn't pay any attention to us at all. I guess we seemed like babies to him. Some said he was dating a girl from Center Point."

"Biggie, Monica's going to be here pretty soon." I was hoping to speed this story up. Biggie ignored that remark.

"I had always been something of a tomboy, so I never paid as much attention to him as the other girls did. I was too interested in fishing and hunting and, most especially, horseback riding with my grandpa out on the farm. Then, between my sophomore and junior year, a funny thing happened."

"What, Biggie?" I was hoping this story was going to get interesting again.

"My skinny little body that had always been mostly elbows and knees changed. I began to get curves. Mama said I was a late bloomer, and I guess I was. Suddenly, I started thinking there might be more to life than horses. I began to pay more attention to my clothes and my hair. I went to the dime store and bought a powder compact, some Maybelline mascara, and a tube of bright orange Tangee lipstick." She smiled, thinking about herself at that age. "I wanted people to notice how I looked; but when they did notice, I squirmed and blushed."

Now I was really getting bored. I snuck a look at the clock beside the bed. Only fifteen minutes had passed since Biggie started this story. She saw me, of course.

"I know, honey. All this must seem pretty dull to you, but
you have to know.
I never thought you would, but now… well, circumstances have changed." She shifted to a more comfortable position on the bed. "That's when the boys started treating me differently. Where before we had played ball together and ridden our bikes out to the creek and climbed trees, now they wanted to ask me out on dates. And I liked it— a lot. I learned to dance the latest dances and to toss my head and flirt."

I tried to imagine Biggie flirting, but it was impossible.

"One night our crowd had gone as a group to the state park. The moon shone down on the dance pavilion. We were having a great time until someone played 'Star-dust' on the jukebox."

"Huh?"

"It's a song, J.R. I was sitting outside watching the moon's reflection in the lake when I heard this voice asking me to dance. I turned around and it was
him,
the veteran. I hadn't even known he was there that night." She closed her eyes and continued to speak. "We danced that number, then another and another. I fit just right in his arms, and even though I wasn't such a good dancer, I could follow him perfectly."

I wanted to get up and run out of there. Why was Biggie telling me this?

"Finally my friends got ready to leave," she continued. "He asked me to stay with him, said he'd take me home when I was ready. I stayed even though I knew Papa would be furious if he found out. Papa needn't have worried. That boy was a perfect gentleman, taking my arm when we left the dance floor (the other boys just walked away and left you standing there), offering to buy me a Coke, pulling a chair out for me to sit down in. That night I fell in love, honey."

"Biggie, do I need to know all this?" I was getting more embarrassed by the minute.

She reached forward and squeezed my ankle. "J.R., you do. Now, you need to be patient. I'll try to make it shorter." She took a deep breath. "After that, we saw each other every chance we got. Of course, I had to sneak around. My daddy would have had a conniption fit. By the time this all happened, the young man had left high school and taken a temporary job at Mr. Brown's garage. He had plans to take a test to finish high school then go on to college and study mechanical engineering. He loved cars, but he didn't want to be a mechanic for the rest of his life." She smiled. "I saw him all that spring. We would slip off and go to the movies at Center Point or Gilmer. Sometimes he would take me over to Gladewater to the honky-tonks where we would dance. I felt so grown-up. He would have maybe one beer, but he never let me drink."

"And nobody found out?"

"The other kids knew, of course. The girls all thought it was great and used to cover for me, but the boys were different. They teased me a lot, and once I found a nasty slur written on my locker at school."

"Why?"

"Because they were jealous, I guess. I don't know. Maybe they thought I was, you know, having
relations
with him. I wasn't, though. That came later."

"Biggie!"

"My stars, J.R., you hear worse than this on TV every day!"

"I know, Biggie, but you're my grandmother. Give me a break!"

"Just be quiet and listen. In June, he got a letter saying he had been accepted to Texas A&M in the engineering department. I was glad for him but heartbroken that he would be leaving town. How I was going to miss him! I even thought of running away and finding a job in College Station just to be near him."

"Biggie! That was crazy!"

"I know. It was foolish, but someday, honey, you'll know how it feels to be in love for the very first time."

"Not me. I don't even think about girls."

She gave me a look then continued. "One night after we'd been to a movie, he asked me to marry him— later, he said, after he finished college. Well, when you're sixteen, four years is a lifetime. I burst into tears and said I couldn't wait that long. I was young and in love, and I wanted to be with him right then. We talked for hours that night. He tried to convince me that we could wait, that he could come back for visits, maybe even bring my parents around. I wasn't having any of that. I told him it was now or never, that I wouldn't wait for him."

"I guess you haven't changed very much, huh, Biggie?"

She smiled. "Well, I've always been hardheaded. Anyway, finally he agreed. But he said he wouldn't take me with him unless we got married."

"Biggie, even I know you can't get married when you're sixteen."

"At that time you could in Arkansas. One day, we slipped off to Texarkana and got a marriage license. The next week, we were married by a justice of the peace. We went to Paris for our honeymoon— Paris, Texas!"

"And your parents didn't know?" I sneaked another peek at the clock. It was almost two.

"No. I had told them I was spending the night with a friend."

"So what did they say when you got back?"

"They never found out. After the honeymoon, I went back home and slept in my room just like before."

I looked around at my room with its solid green walls and sports posters and imagined what it must have been like when Biggie was a girl. In my mind, I saw flowered wallpaper— maybe ruffled curtains and a lace bedspread. I sighed and wondered if this room would ever feel the same to me again.

"Finally," she continued, "it was time for him to leave, and I was determined to go along. I packed my bags one night and slipped out of the house while Mama and Daddy slept."

"So what happened? Did you move to College Station?"

"Yes— for four days. That's how long it took my daddy to find me and bring me back. He threatened the boy with jail if he ever tried to see me again, and he could have made it stick because I was a minor."

"And that was it? You just came back home?"

"Almost. Daddy made me get divorced from him. I cried myself to sleep every night— wouldn't come out of my room for weeks. And I couldn't hold down food anymore. I lost so much weight, my parents threatened to put me in the hospital and have me fed by a tube. My parents arranged a marriage for me to Albert Wooten. He was the son of friends of theirs. I had always liked Albert, just not in
that
way, doncha know."

"Why, Biggie? Why'd they have to go and do that?"

"There was reason enough."

"And Albert? He agreed— just like that?"