The Crowning Glory of Calla Lily Ponder (7 page)

There are doctors who sew up cuts. There are people who know how to lead marches. There are leaders who sometimes do what is right. I want to be a beautician. I want to heal hair that’s wounded or maybe on people who are wounded. And bring out some beauty in a world that can sometimes seem ugly. Because we are one family, really. Like M’Dear says, We are all brothers and sisters under La Luna’s sweet healing light.

I
remember the day that I began to feel that Tuck was okay. It happened one day when we were playing on the cotton truck, jumping down into the high truck bed full of cotton, and Tuck said, “Look! Look, Calla, this boll of cotton feels like a Christmas tree.”

I said, “Tucker, what do you mean? That does not feel anything like a Christmas tree.”

“I think it’s what country people put under their trees. But we never really had Christmas, so I’m pretty dumb to even talk about it.”

“Then you haven’t ever had a Christmas tree,” I told him.

He didn’t say anything for a while, but just as I was fixing to shimmy up the wooden side of the truck to jump down again, Tuck said, “We never had a Christmas tree when I was growing up.”

That made me feel bad. “I promise you can come to our house and see my tree decorated and all.”

“Don’t tell me you promise,” Tuck said. “People who say
promise
are always just lying.”

“Who told you that?”

“Didn’t need anybody to tell me that.”

Then I knew he’d had buckets full of things promised to him that just never came true.

“Well, now you’re in La Luna,” I told him, “and none of us are gonna lie to you.”

Again, Tuck got real quiet, then finally said, “Well, okay.”

I decided that was good enough and threw a handful of cotton at him. I just wanted the puffy whiteness of cotton to touch him, to make Tuck see that at least cotton didn’t lie.

After that we became friends.

Sonny Boy and Will were so different. Sonny Boy had kind of reddish blond hair, and he was strong and muscular. He could still lift me up, just lift me right up. And M’Dear—he could lift her up too! We’d be dancing, all of us just kind of hanging around in the kitchen, and he’d just pick M’Dear up at the sink and lift her right up in the air.

And Sonny Boy would do anything, anywhere! One day he got in trouble for riding his Stingray bike off the flatbed cotton truck at Papa Tucker’s. He just rode his bike
with himself on it
straight off onto a gravel road, rolled over, and got brush burns all up and down his body. M’Dear had to put Mercurochrome and Band-Aids all over him. And I told him he was an idiot.

When I went to his bedroom, M’Dear had a fan blowing up on him. I said, “Sonny Boy, how are you doing, you crazy thing?”

He said, “Well, it hurts, but it was worth it.”

That’s just the kind of boy he was.

And Will, he was so quiet and sweet. He always dressed nice. I don’t know how he came up with his clothes, but he’d find things at the swap shop like a white linen jacket and a little cotton vest that cracked us up whenever he wore it. And his music playing was getting to be known even outside our parish. He was happy to dance with the rest of us but didn’t get wild.

Sonny Boy would sing and dance like James Brown, and his routine was pretty darn good. Now, it turned out that Tuck didn’t mind pulling out the stops. He got so carried away his loafers barely stayed on his feet. So he kicked them off and danced in his bare feet to polish off the number! We all clapped and stomped. He was so shy afterward. It was two people inside of him. Now, Eddie
tried
to dance like James Brown, and he did give it his all. But his all wasn’t very much as far as I was concerned. But Renée clapped and said, “Oh! You’re just like James Brown—except you’re white!”

Then Sukey said, “Renée! Gosh! That was a stupid thing to say.”

Well, I guess Renée could be really kind of sissy and slightly dumb at times. That’s just Renée. My brothers and my friends can be goof-balls sometimes, but I still love them.

Anyway, we all hung out together. Of course, we went to Nelle’s Shop ’N Skate.

It was so much fun to skate there! I became a better and better skater all the time. In fact, I was so smooth that if they had a roller-skate Olympics down here, I would have been in it.

Tuck turned out to be a pretty good skater. I mean, right off the bat—that shocked me. He put on a pair of skates, and he was around and around that rink before I knew it!

“Hey, Tuck!” I said. “How’d you get so good?”

“I don’t know. I guess it just comes natural to me.”

Well, everything comes natural for you
, I thought. “Well, goody-goody for you.”

Then Nelle came and chimed in, “I don’t want to just see y’all drinking Coke without having a bite to eat.”

So she went back to her kitchen and threw something together—some good fresh Holsum bread, mayonnaise, a little mustard, if you wanted it, and ham. Maybe some tomatoes if she had them. You’d cut that thing in half—mmmm! It was so good! “If you eat this with your Orange Crush,” Sonny Boy said to Renée, “it is a full meal.”

Renée looked horrified. “Well, I don’t know. For me a full meal is supposed to be hot, like shrimp and rice with salad or something like that.”

“Renée,” Eddie said, “that’s just what I like to eat!”

Brother. Those two lovebirds should just go out of my ear’s reach for a while.

“I think that just Cokes are full meals,” Sukey said. “They’re filled with everything. Mama doesn’t care if I have a Coke for breakfast. In fact, whenever I wake up and it’s hot outside, I drink a Coke. My mother’s got the whole refrigerator just filled with Cokes.”

I started drinking Cokes, just a little. M’Dear allowed us to have one Coke a day. But Cokes for breakfast?

But we were allowed to have belly-wash, which is what we called the drink you make out of these big bottles. You’d pour the liquid inside into water, and it made it all orange, which was called “orange belly-wash.” Or you could get it in different flavors like raspberry, depending on what Nelle ordered.

Grape was my favorite. The grape drink in the purple bottles it came in—I loved to see it! It was like grape bubblegum, it was so dark. And then once Nelle mixed it with water and poured it over ice, it was perfect! She used it straight for her snow cones.

Sonny Boy and Will and Tuck would skate with their arms touching each other at the waist. They just skated all the way around the rink as a trio, and none of them fell. Then they spun away from each other and started skating alone, practicing skating backwards.

They were taking over the whole rink. I hated it. So I got in there and said, “I’m skating too.”

“No,” Sonny Boy said, and Tuck backed him up. “Come on, Calla. This is for boys.”

“What do you mean, it’s for boys?”

Tuck piped up, “We mean
it’s for boys
, not for girls.”

And then I couldn’t help it. I kicked him in the leg. He grabbed on to the rail, or he would have fallen.

And the next day was when Nelle made Tuck and me start selling snow cones together. We had to stand together at the end of the rink where the snow cone machine was and pour different flavors over the shaved ice. For hours and hours at a time Tuck and me had to stand there and take kids’ and big teenagers’ money, make change, go back and forth between the shaved ice, the little paper cones, different flavors, and that whole time, not kick each other.

After a while, we couldn’t help it, in order to bear it, we started cracking jokes till finally I was laughing so hard at something Tuck said, I accidentally dropped some shaved ice on my bare feet, which felt very good. So, I threw some ice on Tuck’s feet and we stood there with our hot feet all cooled off, looking out at the other kids skating, something we could not do. He looked at me and said, “Ponder? You’re not a bad snow cone maker.”

“Neither are you,” I said, and smiled.

“Maybe we could ask Nelle if we could borrow this machine and set it up and travel all over the state of Louisiana with it.”

I laughed. “You are crazy!”

He looked at me and winked. “Yeah, I know.”

After that, I did not want to kick him in the leg anymore.

Wouldn’t you just know that it was Sukey who came up with the idea of playing Spin the Bottle?

Me, Tuck, and Renée were at Sukey’s house, and then Eddie joined us. If you could have seen the look on Eddie’s face, you would of just gotten sick. All he cares about is being a boyfriend. What is the big idea?

So we all sat down in the garage and Sukey got an empty Coke bottle. She was just about to do the first spin when I remembered that Renée had never played Spin the Bottle before. I hadn’t either, but I heard about it from my brothers.

“Wait a minute, Sukey,” I said. “Let’s explain to Renée how you play.”

And everybody started to kind of laugh.

“C’mon, y’all,” I said. “Not everybody has played every game in the universe. So, here’s how it goes. You take an empty Coke bottle, okay? You put it down on a flat surface, like here on the garage floor, and you twirl it with your hands—right there in the middle of the bottle. And you just spin it around. Now, the person who spins it has to go and
kiss
the person who the bottle lands on. And it’s just up to Fate, as to where the bottle will land. So,
no faking
it. Some people have been known to fake it, so the bottle will land on a certain person.”

“Right,” said Sukey.

Renée said, “Thank you, Calla. I appreciate you for telling me the rules.”

“It wasn’t just for you, Renée. I wanted to sort of, well, clean up the rules for all of us.”

Everybody started to laugh. I told them, “Oh, hush up, y’all!”

Renée sometimes doesn’t hear if people are laughing at her, or else she doesn’t care, which is the same thing.

Tuck spun the bottle next and it pointed right at me! Oh, God! I got up and started to walk right off.

“Calla!” Sukey grabbed me by the shorts and pulled me down. “If the Coke bottle points at you, you don’t walk off, you stay and get kissed. People don’t just walk away. That’s the rule, and you can’t break it.”

“Oh, I’m going to
get
you one of these days, Sukey!”

“Just try!” she said.

So I sat back down, and Tuck was just standing there. “Now I’ve sat down,” I said. “Do I have to stand up again to get this stupid thing over with?”

Then Tuck knelt down and looked at me, and I could tell he was thinking the same thing I was.
Cooties
, that’s what he was thinking,
cooties
. But he gave me a kiss, then he jerked back, and I jerked back too. I was dying to tell him, “Get out of here! Don’t you ever try that again.”

But I got a sense, for that second, that maybe he liked it. And maybe I wanted him to.

The next day after school, Sukey taught me how to kiss—really kiss, and not jerk back like I did with Tuck.

“You have to
practice
kissing,” she told me. “When you start kissing, you don’t want to be a dumbo.”

So we went to Sukey’s house because her mama was at work. Her mama had to go to work. She’d get all dressed up every day, and always wore her hair, which was black like Sukey’s, teased up into a beehive. I couldn’t believe that could be good for her hair, so I asked M’Dear about it.

“Well, the beehive’s hard on the hair shaft,” she told me. “But a lot of women think it’s a sophisticated style these days.”

Sukey’s mama always left food for us, peanut butter sandwiches wrapped up in wax paper in the refrigerator. We each ate a sandwich and then went to Sukey’s room to practice. Sukey said, “I’ve got an idea. Let’s go put on some of my mama’s lipstick.”

So we got into her mama’s lipstick. She had probably sixteen different colors, all lined up in a plastic divider in her drawer. We pulled out different colors, and Sukey went, “Here, Calla, you take Mocha.”

I said, “Mmm—I like that! That’s good.”

Then she said, “I’m going to take Dreamgirl.”

We each put lipstick on our lips and started practice-kissing on the inside of our arms.

Sukey said, “I don’t think that’s good enough, Calla; I think you need to press harder.”

So I kissed my arm harder till Sukey said, “Maybe that’s good enough. But we need more lipstick.”

We put on more lipstick and went into the bathroom to do the mirror kiss.
“Mmmmm,”
Sukey said, as her lips touched the mirror.

“Nooo, Sukey! That’s not a kiss! That looks more like a smear. Try it again. Look, watch me.
Mmmmwah!
”

“
Mmmmwah!”
Sukey said. “Better. That is a little better.” I was faking it, but I was tired of Sukey bossing me around. I couldn’t really tell if her kiss was better than mine, but Sukey knew a lot of things that I didn’t know. We kissed the mirror a few more times till Sukey went, “Okay. Now, put on some more lipstick.”

We both did, and then Sukey told me, “Now we’re going to practice on each other.”

“What?”

And she said, “Yes, that’s the next step. There is no other way.”

Then Sukey leaned over and gave me a big kiss. She didn’t even give me a moment to prepare. She just upped and kissed me!

“There,” she said. “How does that feel?”

“I don’t know.”

“Okay, well, I’m going to do it again. Sit down!”

“All right. But let’s put on more lipstick and blot a whole lot.” I sat down on the bathroom stool, and then Sukey gave me another kiss on the lips and just stayed there for a while.

“Now, how does
that
feel?” she asked.

“That was pretty good, Sukey.”

“Good. Now you try kissing me.”

I gave her a kiss on the lips. Sukey said, “Calla, I don’t think you will ever,
ever
become a good kisser. That was a ‘
mmm
’ kiss, not a ‘
mmmwah!
’”

Oh, God, what if I can’t become a good kisser?

“Put on more lipstick,” Sukey said, “and give me a real kiss. Give me a ‘mmmwah.’”

So I kissed Sukey hard on the lips. Then I thought, What the heck Calla! I kissed so hard that I just bent her backwards over the sink. We kissed like you see in the movies. We kissed until it kind of felt good. Then we cracked up laughing.