The Queen of Palmyra (3 page)

After a while she looks down at me in the dark and says, like always, “Pop me a top, honey.”

I put my milk shake between my knees, squeezing it enough to keep it in place but not enough to squish the paper cup and make it overflow. I grope around on the floor for one of the soggy paper sacks that are starting to tear apart and bring out tall boy number one. “Ta da!” I hold it high.

“Put it down,” Mama says. “Don’t hold it up like that. Don’t go acting the fool.”

I reach into the glove compartment for the church key Mama keeps hidden in an envelope under the car papers. I puncture one
side of the top of the can just a smidgen the way Mama taught me so that the beer would come out nice and easy on the other side. I punch the other side down good and hard to make a nice
V
-shaped hole. I take the one sip Mama allows, cough because it burns my throat the way ice sometimes does. A little beer and my own spit spray my arm. The air blowing on it cools me down. I’m thinking what a good life it is that we lead in our own secret ways.

Of course, all of this except the milk shake at Joe’s is a secret. We are being girls together, and girls do things. And later on, when I got old enough to wonder why my mother would take her little girl to the bootlegger at all, and even later, when I found out that there was a white bootlegger for white people, I didn’t have her to ask. She’d flown the coop by that time. Back then I reasoned that she took me because she needed the beer, and she took me to the black bootlegger so she wouldn’t run into anybody she knew.

This was what I saw and nothing more than this. Us tooling down the highway, me sucking on the last of my milk shake now all melted, Mama’s scarf now slipping off her head, her bobbed hair blowing straight out to the sides, like wings.

That spring we’d gotten lucky when Mimi managed to get our little white house with the pretty trellis back. The previous renters had packed up and vamoosed in the middle of the night, leaving some moldy mattresses on the floor, roaches galore, and two months’ unpaid rent. Before we left for parts unknown, we’d lived in the house for three years, and it had been a step up for us. Then, out of the blue, Daddy had gotten it in his head he needed to find just the right job for someone of his talents. To this end, he dragged us all over the State of Mississippi and after that through parts of Texas that either flooded so bad he had to sweep the water moccasins off the front stoop of our apartment building or were so bone dry the earth had huge cracks, one of which Mama stepped into and broke her foot while she was hanging out clothes. We moved so much that there are places out there I lived whose names I don’t know to this day.

During our year on the lam, I came down with mysterious ailments. Coughs, earaches, fevers, swollen glands, sore throats, what have you. Except for a few weeks in a little church school
where each and every day began with singing, “The B-I-B-L-E, Yes, that’s the Book for Me,” etc., I missed the whole fourth grade. Mama worked for Kelly Girl here and there, but after a while they would drop her. In Houston, when they’d call at dawn on the pay phone right outside our apartment door on the concrete landing and say for her to go here or there, she usually had to say no, her little girl was sick again and she had to stay home and see about her. Sometimes, though, she shook me awake and whispered, “Honey, I’ll be gone for just a little while. I’ve just got to go. Go back to sleep and don’t mess with the stove,” and I would turn my face to the wall on my cot in the living room, which was also the kitchen and dining room.

When Daddy finally got fired from his umpteenth job, which happened to be at Brown and Root in Houston, my mother didn’t bat an eye. She blew her bangs up off her forehead. They had gotten longer and covered her eyes. Over the months she had seemed to be hiding behind them. The only way I could judge her mood was by the set of her mouth, which, at that moment, was even more pinched than usual. She marched out the front door, not even bothering to close it behind her. She called Mimi and Grandpops collect on the pay phone outside and told them to wire the money, we were coming home. She came back into the apartment, threw one baleful look at Daddy, who was sitting with his head in his hands on the couch, and then headed off for the bedroom. We heard her pulling the suitcases out from under the bed. There wouldn’t be much packing. Nowadays she kept most of our things in the suitcases. There wasn’t room in most of the places we lived, plus what’s the point of unpacking just to have to pack again in a month or two?

“Win.” Mama’s voice sliced through the wall.

Daddy sat there a minute; his eyes darted around the room like he was looking for something he’d lost. Then he got up and
went on into the bedroom like a dog ready to be whipped. He shut the door behind him. Mama started in on him the minute he walked in. She didn’t even try to whisper. He could come back home or not, but she wasn’t going to live like a gypsy anymore. They had managed before in Millwood, they could manage again. She had given him a year to sort himself out and now she had to get on home where there were decent doctors and people to take care of me so she could get back to baking cakes and making a living for this family if nobody else around here was going to put food on the table. We’d been dragged from pillar to post, and, like it or lump it, she was planting her feet back on solid ground. He could come if he wanted to, but she was going home and taking me and don’t forget that her daddy is a lawyer.

When I heard her lay down the law like that, my sinuses all of a sudden popped wide open, and I felt like I just had poked my head out from under a smothering blanket. I took the first deep breath I’d breathed in a year.

After that night there were days of nobody talking and a flurry of boxes to mail our things to Mimi and Grandpops in Millwood (C.O.D.). About a week later I woke up before light. Daddy was kicking the leg of my cot. “Get up, Sister, hurry up.” He spit the words out of his mouth one by one. They fell to the floor like stones. We took the Greyhound bus straight from Houston to Jackson, getting off only to eat nabs and drink Orange Crush and go to the bathroom in dusty depots with brown-stained spittoons. Mama and Daddy made me ride in the seat between them for the whole day and night that the trip took. Daddy sat on the aisle and closed his eyes. Mama turned her head away from him to the window and looked out over the passing fields and swamplands and monster oil rigs until her eyelashes touched the dark circles underneath them and she fell into a deep sleep. I was the only one with my eyes open, and I wanted the window, for the
air if nothing else, but knew better than to ask Mama. She and Daddy couldn’t have stood to be any closer to each other than they were. I was the fly in the ointment that kept them together, and I needed to stay stuck.

The land whipped by. It was the last day of April when we left, and the trees were forcing out their new leaves. Everything looked hopeful, even the warthogs standing in clumps in the Louisiana swamps. They rubbed their snouts up and down expectantly on the old tree trunks and vines as if they were polishing themselves up for a party. There’d been a rain, and the restoration fern on the swooping oaks had perked up and turned from brown to green.

We sat way up in the front of the bus because Daddy said he didn’t want to be close to Them. He said they stunk and their food stunk. When he said all that right out loud as Mama and I were climbing the steps onto the bus, Mama stopped short on the top step and turned around and looked down at him like she was going to kick him square in the face. I was on the middle step between them, and actually ducked. He shut up, but he shoved me into the second set of seats and then grabbed Mama, who was going on down the aisle, and told her to get in too. She jerked her arm away like his hand had burned her, but she turned around and, instead of making a fuss, climbed over me to the window seat. As the hours went by, I decided that the people in the back smelled fresher than I was beginning to and their little paper sacks with glistening grease spots made my mouth water. Their eyes flitted over us like lazy flies but never settled.

By the time we rolled into the Jackson depot on the second day, it was almost dark and the katydids were revving up. Sticky from the heat and leaden from the silent heavy journey, we tumbled off the bus into Mimi’s talcumed arms, at least Mama and I did. Daddy hung back and shook hands with Grandpops and
did a little bow in Mimi’s direction. In honor of the occasion, Mimi had on one of her more subdued hats, a little black straw number with a cluster of drooping strawberries and a red wisp of a veil that stood straight up so that she looked like a Roman soldier. Mimi’s hats were wild things. Grapes and feathers, cherries and ribbons and doodads. The top shelf of her closet was stacked with pretty-colored hat boxes, round and square, large and small, where all shapes and sizes and colors waited in their crisp tissue nests.

Grandpops squatted down in front of me, his bony knees popping, and asked, “Ready to read this old man some stories?” I answered, “Yes sir!” but when I tried to grin, my face split and then froze over again like a pond striving to come alive after a long hard winter. He reached over and took my hand and put it up against his cheek. “You’re sure a sight for sore eyes, girl. Your grandmother and I been moping around like two old ornery bears,” to which Mimi responded, “Don’t you call
me
a bear, old man!” Then we all laughed, rinsing the ice from my heart, and Mama, Daddy, and I piled into the backseat of Mimi’s Plymouth, me in the middle as usual, and headed for Millwood.

The little white house we’d lived in before was an unexpected surprise to us, at least the fact of it being there waiting for us with its lights glowing in welcome and beds freshly made, thanks to Zenie Johnson, who worked for my grandmother and helped her get it ready. Mama started crying when Mimi and Grandpops drove us up our old street. Daddy studied the other side of the street and looked bored. Mimi was thrilled with herself. About a week ago, right after Mama had called, Mimi had just been driving by when she saw the For Rent sign, which had just been put up that very morning. It was meant to be! She jumped out of the car and paid the first month’s rent on the spot. She knew my mother would love coming back home to our old house. The
moldy mattresses were gone, but Mimi had to get the bug man in to spray for roaches twice. Zenie’s husband, Ray, had painted the inside and pulled the weeds in the back alley. I’d loved the little house the minute I’d laid eyes on it years back, but now it looked like a meringue, white outside and in, light and airy with starched white café curtains and pretty little throw rugs.

The house was oddly placed. It didn’t sit on the street like other houses, but was tucked in behind another house, the Chisholm place, which was nicer and bigger with a long porch and rocking chairs that didn’t pinch like the ones up at Mimi and Grandpops’. Our house was a little square box, high off the ground, the Chisholms’ a lower extended
L
whose tail went almost up to our front door.

Perched up like that in the big house’s backyard with a shaded path of small stepping-stones leading from the street to our doorstep, our place looked more like a little rich girl’s playhouse, white-washed and clean and innocent. It was hidden and secret. You could barely see it from the street, and then only from an angle. When Mama would give directions to her new cake customers, she’d describe the Chisholm place, and then say we lived behind it. Ours came to be known as the house behind the house.

The house wasn’t much on the inside, but we ended up paying $60 a month to live in it. Big Dan, who owned the Big Dan Ford place and who had gotten Daddy the radio-less car for next to nothing, rented to us. His wife called herself Miss Kay Linda, which she said meant “How pretty!” in Spanish if you pronounced the
Linda
as “Leeenda.” Miss Kay Linda did not live up to her name. She was short and pudgy, and her hair was the color of the sky when there’s a tornado coming, a sickly yellow. Her elbow fat crawled down her lower arms like melting lard. Mama and Daddy got funny little twitches around their mouths and looked straight
down at the ground when she told us what her name meant and how to say it right.

When we’d lived in our little house those three years before our year on the lam, Miss Kay Linda had planted some clematis vines next to our front door and attached them with clothespins onto the lattice on either side of the front stoop. Soon after we moved back that May, Mama asked Miss Kay Linda if she could take down those clothespins, seeing as how the clematis was climbing just fine, and those old moldy pins looked like big brown warts up against the pretty whiteness of the flowers, but Miss Kay Linda said no, she wanted to keep the pins there, just in case. She had gone to a lot of trouble to get that clematis to climb and she didn’t want to have it falling down all straggly with folks coming and going all the time. She was referring to Mama’s cake business, which she didn’t like being conducted in the house, and had raised the agreed-upon rent $10 a month to accommodate for the wear and tear that Mama’s cake customers would cause with their comings and goings, plus adding a $50 deposit to the whole deal. “Which I’ll never get back,” Mama said.

Besides Little Dan, who started the rumor about me having leprosy, the Chisholms had a girl, May, and those two had a new swing set in what was their backyard and our front yard. There were two swings and a little ladder and slide. It was right in front of our living room window, and I would watch them swing on it. The spring we moved back, Little Dan was twelve and May my age. They might have been my playmates, but they’d always thought they were better than we were and treated me worse than dirt unless they wanted something, which was usually a piece of one of Mama’s famous cakes since that was all we had of any value.

In the past Mama and a lady named Mrs. Polk had divided up Millwood’s sweet tooth between the cake people and the pie
people. The two of them had an agreement. Mrs. Polk would make the pies and Mama would make the cakes. When you wanted a pie for a Saturday Matinee Club meeting or a bridge party, you called Mrs. Polk and ordered chocolate, coconut, or caramel, the latter being my personal favorite. One of Mrs. Polk’s five fulsome daughters would show up at your door several days later with a pie puffed up like a sail full of wind, meringue riding high on the breeze. And then whenever you wanted the best cake you could imagine, you called up my mother and put in your order: lemon, caramel, or devil’s food cake with angel icing. Mama said the devil’s food with angel icing should be a lesson to me about how both bad and good could look pretty and taste sweet. How they could get so mixed up, each with the other, that sometimes you couldn’t tell which was which. What a danger those kinds were.

Mama said things like that while she was baking. Hard things that meant other things. Then she’d stare at me like she was a hundred-year-old oak tree and I was the ax that was going to bring her down. So I’d say yes ma’am, soft and easy, and when I spoke the words, they folded back the hardness in her eyes. Then she’d tell me to bring her a measuring spoon or the sugar or the shortening. I’d scurry for what it was that she wanted, and the commotion of my reaching and touching would unclasp us from the spell of her dark thoughts.

When we first got back to Millwood that May, people had turned to pies in Mama’s absence. At first, Mrs. Polk was doing a better business than Mama. One problem was that Mama’s cakes were so big. If Mrs. Polk’s pies were sails, Mama’s cakes were battleships. When you’d hand one over, the person you were handing it to would always go “Oh!” and have to lean back to adjust to the weight. In the past, ladies had ordered Mama’s cakes more for birthdays or anniversaries or Easter when they were having a crowd of people, but right after we came back home, Mama got
the bright idea of selling half cakes. When the word got out, the orders started coming in left and right.