Kizzy Ann Stamps (13 page)

I feel a fool, Miss Anderson, but I’m also excited. Maybe this will be the answer. I know I haven’t said much about it in here. In fact, I’ve deliberately
not
said much about it in here. I spend nights looking at the moon and trying to figure out how I feel about my face, about my name, Moon Child, about my scar. Knowing my face will never look as it did before, I finger my raised skin. How is it when you know you will never be the person you were before? Does Keith dive into College Lake with the same abandon now that a bottle sliced into the back of his head? When Shag saved my life, I was not the same Kizzy Ann I was the day before. When my brother got into trouble in the woods, I was not the same as the day after, nor was he. When Caroline Kennedy woke up on November 23, she was not the same girl she was the day before, even if her face was as pretty as the day before — her life is a lot better than mine in a lot of ways, but it is also a lot worse.

I know people look hard at me. I’m not stupid. Pretty girls get things that ugly girls don’t. But smart girls get things too. And I am smart. Anyway, I pulled out the makeup to look at it, but I realized that I don’t know what to do with it — and I am smart enough to know that if you just put makeup on without knowing about it, you don’t end up looking good. You end up looking worse. This is not something I can ask my mama or my granny about. I plan to go to the library as soon as I can. Let’s hope Miss Anne Spencer has more books on makeup than she has on border collies.

I went to the library — not today, but I’m just getting to write today. There is a lot more to a poet than you think! Miss Anne Spencer had books on makeup, and she let me look at them, but then she invited me to her study for tea. I didn’t want to go, but how do you say no to a force like Miss Anne Spencer? You don’t. I pored over the books on makeup. I have to admit they were overwhelming. Lots of diagrams that looked like you need a degree in engineering to understand, at least it seemed to me. Who would think putting on makeup would be so danged hard? But the books she pulled for me were about masking scars, not just your basic makeup, and I started getting nervous. They were for people with severe scars. Like me. It seemed so complicated. I put the books on makeup back on the shelves and went to her study. She had tea things ready for us. She sipped her tea and then she “cut to the chase.” That’s exactly the way she said it.

“Let’s cut to the chase, Kizzy Ann. You’re looking at these books on makeup because you want to cover yourself up, am I right?” She took a delicate sip of her tea.

I nibbled a scone. At least I think it was a scone. I don’t really know. I’m not too knowledgeable about tea etiquette, as you might expect, Miss Anderson. “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

She tilted her head to the side and looked me over. “I don’t know if your scar will fade, but it doesn’t seem to dominate your countenance.”

Another new word.
Countenance.
Read it in the Bible before, but never heard it in everyday talk. I wrote that one down as soon as I got out of there, even if I had to put it on the palm of my hand, as I had no paper. I said, “Well, to look at the reactions of the people around Lynchburg, you’d think it dominated my countenance. If by that you mean it is the main thing they see when they look at me.”

She smiled. She has a real pretty smile. I don’t see it often, as I rarely make her smile. I am often a nuisance to her. She set her teacup down. “Kizzy Ann, I’m not in your situation: I have no scar. But I know two people who were scarred by life in . . . not dissimilar ways. Let me tell you about them.”

Hmm. My first thought was
Can she really know two people who had severe scars? That’s pretty many. But then I guess a librarian knows a lot of people.
My next thought was
I’ve probably missed some of what she is saying and that is rude, and Granny Bits would skin me alive if she could read my mind, so I’d better stop thinking and start listening.
Miss Anne must have known I wasn’t paying close attention, because she put a hand on my hand and looked into my eyes. Her voice was soft.

“My cousin was beautiful like the flowers in my garden, Kizzy Ann. When she was nineteen, she was trapped by a fire in her bedroom and though she escaped through the window, her neck and the right side of her face were damaged. Laura couldn’t recover from the sad fact that when she looked in the mirror, she no longer saw her own face but the face of a stranger. She retreated from people and wouldn’t be seen. She wrapped herself in scarves, even though her skin hurt to be touched by any fabric. Sometimes I think I revel in my flowers to be close to the beauty that was a part of her.

“I knew another touched by tragedy, but rather than letting it shape her life with sadness, she made her own way. She was burned differently. More of her body was involved, and so there was
more
scarring, but it was less severe. Still, when you looked at her, you knew she’d been in a fire. You knew she’d had . . . damage.”

“People stared.”

Miss Anne Spencer swallowed, then nodded slowly. “Yes, Kizzy Ann. People stared. A lot. But my friend just didn’t care. No, that probably isn’t right. I suppose she did care, although she never said. She just went ahead with her life. She didn’t wear lots of makeup. She didn’t stop doing what she wanted to do. She went ahead and lived her life. Because she had things she wanted to do. And she did them.”

Miss Anne picked up her teacup then and took a sip.

“I think you, Kizzy Ann, have a choice to make with your life. Do you want to be like my cousin, do you want to be like my friend, or do you want to fall somewhere in between? It seems to me you are a young lady with a whole lot of life to live and much to offer the world, but then I’m not the one living your life.”

I sat there a few more minutes, holding my tea. Then I put it down and stood. I didn’t know what to say, but then I thought of something.

“Miss Anne?”

“Yes, Kizzy Ann?”

“When you’re reading your poems . . .”

“Yes?”

“People stare, don’t they?”

“Why, yes, child, yes, they do.”

I don’t agree with Miss Anne Spencer that her cousin and her friend had scars from similar circumstances to mine. In my opinion, a fire is nothing like a scythe that slices through flesh. Maybe a fire that is set on purpose, but what she described was accidental fire, the kind of flame that rises out of dying embers left smoldering in the fireplace kicked up by a sudden gust down the flue, embers that dance and catch a curtain and climb quick and wild. That kind of fire you can feel sorrow for, you can feel sadness seeping into your bones, but I don’t think you would feel the raw anger I felt toward Frank Charles Feagans.

I know you’re surprised to read that. I’m surprised to write that. I’ve never even told myself that, so how could you know? I’ve been friendly to him — I’ve shared my dog with him, for Pete’s sake — but I was so mad at him . . . well, angry, which I think of as a much
bigger
emotion than mad. But Granny Bits says anger is wrong, especially when things are accidental.

And it
was
an accident. Frank Charles had no intent in his swing. His movement was distracted by the agility of my dog, my amazing, incredible Shag. And I can admit to you, here in my journal, I feel such guilt still feeling my raw anger toward him — and I do still feel some tiny bit of anger toward him, Miss Anderson — even though I think of him now as my friend. I am amazed to think he is a friend to me. I suppose I haven’t truly forgiven Frank Charles. I don’t honestly know how people forgive and forget, as we are told to. I
say
I do — Granny Bits insists on it — but I seem to hold on to my grudges and remember who said hurtful things. In fact, I can quote them back, almost verbatim, sometimes months after they happened. And that’s just little piddly conversations . . . so how in the world will I ever shed this ugly thing filling my heart?

Today I ate with Omera and Ovita Stark. They have started to talk a little to me, if no one else is around. Shag ate over by my side, since Ovita in particular is a little scared of her. They sounded like chickens, clucking on softly to each other about this and that, about nothing really. But then they started talking about clothes. You know I don’t care a fig about clothes, Miss Anderson. But Ovita said, “I hate going to try on clothes.”

I admit I hadn’t really been listening for a few minutes. I’d been feeding sandwich scraps to Shag and just half listening to the sound of their conversation. But it was clear they were waiting for me to say something, so I said, “Yeah, when Mama pulls one dress off and I’m standing there by my bed with chill bumps on my arms, hoping James doesn’t get the bright idea to walk in on us, I just want her to hurry up and get that next dress on! Good thing my granny can’t make but two at a time!” I laughed, nervous like, because they were staring at me like I was talking about weird things.

“Oh, that’s right,” Ovita said. “You don’t get your clothes at the store. You don’t know what it’s like.”

I just looked at them.

They looked at each other. Omera took a deep breath, looked at Shag (I don’t know why), and then said in a whisper, “It’s humiliating, Kizzy Ann. Folks like us aren’t allowed to try on clothes in a dressing room. The owner of the store doesn’t want the clothes to actually touch our skin. He says . . . he says he can’t sell the clothes we don’t buy if they’ve touched our skin. So, we either have to just pick something off the rack and buy it or we put it on over our own clothes, right there in the middle of the store, and you have to wear long sleeves and gloves to try things on, so your skin and ‘body oils’ don’t ‘soil’ the clothes.”

Ovita made a face. “Like our blackness will rub off on the clothes. Like we’re dirty.”

I have never been so glad that my granny makes my clothes. I have never been so glad that my mama accepts hand-me-downs.

Okay, you have to promise not to tell anybody anything about this, Miss Anderson. I shouldn’t tell you, I don’t guess, but this journal has sort of become where I put down everything I think, everything I work through in my head and my heart. Today I was working Shag and practicing commands like always, and I heard this voice, little at first and then desperate, calling for help. And I knew, not at first, but then I knew, that it was Frank Charles. Shag had already started running toward the voice, but then I kicked up and ran too. We’d been over toward that edge of the property, the Feaganses’ side — we are neighbors, after all. I guess they were collecting kindling or something. I think I noticed some firewood, but really, all I remember seeing was Frank Charles kneeling next to his mother, who was lying on the ground and shaking like Sassy, our cow. Remember how I told you she’d started having seizures — epilepsy, you know? Well, there Mrs. Feagans was, shaking, and Frank Charles was screaming at her, and he took her shoulders and I guess he was going to pull her to sit up.

I don’t know why, Miss Anderson, but I sort of took charge. I put my hand on him and just told him no in a calm voice. I told him to leave her be, and I turned her on her side and talked to her in a low voice, like I do with Sassy. I think I might have seen this at my church once, when I was little, now that I think on it — a girl in my Sunday school class who stopped coming when her seizures got so bad, but before she stopped coming, the teachers just made us all sit quiet and treated it all very matter-of-fact and rubbed her forehead and talked her through her spell. I remember they told us that people in a seizure often spit up or wet themselves and they might need to sleep afterward and might not remember things for a while.