The School of Beauty and Charm (21 page)

“Do you know John Keats?” I asked T. C. that afternoon in the parking lot at Smartt's Gas Station.

“Does he work at the plant?”

“No, he's dead. He was a poet. He wrote this poem, I forget the name of it, but the last line is, ‘Oh for a Life of Sensations rather than Thoughts.' “

T. C. opened a Heineken with his fist and handed it to me. “You know what I like about you? I like it when you bite your
lip, like you did just now. You did last night in bed. That was real cute.”

I looked into the rearview mirror to see how I looked when I bit my lip—then I screamed.

“What the hell?” said T. C., slamming on the brakes.

Silently, Henry's LeSabre pulled up beside the Monte Carlo. A hard white ray of sun flashed off the silver paint, throwing a glare over Henry as he stepped out of the car. He was wearing a pair of golf pants and a white polo shirt from Kmart. His face was bright red, and his eyes were wild. He opened T. C.'s door, leaned into the car with his hands clenched on the doorframe, and said, “I will kill you.” The tendons in his neck were stretched taut, and his voice was choked, as if he were being strangled. “If you ever,” he said slowly, tearing each word off, “ever, ever see my daughter again, I will kill you. If you touch her—if you so much as look at her again—
Do you understand
!”

T. C. said, “Yes sir, I understand.”

Then I got out of his car, and T. C. drove away. When I climbed into the LeSabre, I stayed as close to the door as possible. Henry drove to the meager shade of a pine tree at the edge of the lot and turned off the ignition. From inside the gas station, a chain-smoking cashier watched us with one hand on the phone, in case someone pulled out a gun. The car was hot. The backs of my arms stuck to the vinyl seat. Sweat ran down my legs. Henry would not turn on the air. He sat with his arms gripping the steering wheel, staring straight ahead, as if he were driving through a storm.

Finally, he said, “I should fire you. I knew it was a mistake to hire you in the first place, but I didn't listen to my better judgment. I trusted you.”

I almost prayed, in case there was a God, but didn't. Then, because I knew that Henry could sit in a hot car ten times longer than I could, without eating or drinking or going to the bathroom, would sit here until the end of the world, I said, “I'm sorry.”

Henry turned purple and again began to talk as though there was a rope squeezing around his neck. “Do you realize that it's between baseball and football season and those men have nothing to talk about but you? Every single minute of every single day they have watched every little move you made. Every single one! Did you know that? Do you know what those men were thinking? Do you!” He slammed his fist on the steering wheel. He began to shake it, rocking back and forth in the seat. His knuckles turned white.

“Answer me!” he cried.

“No sir,” I said truthfully. “I never thought about that.”

He looked at me for the first time. His face was misshapen— mouth stretched out, eyes bulging.

“You never thought about that,” he said in a soft, stunned voice. He shook his head in astonishment. “It has taken me twenty-eight years to earn the respect of those men, and in one month, you threw it all away. Twenty-eight years of my life, and you never thought about it. Not once.” His eyes grew wide and clear like the eyes of a child. “He isn't even handsome. He isn't even a good worker.” Behind the window, the cashier blew smoke through her nose.

“What goes on in your head?” asked Henry. “You don't have good sense, do you?” He sighed. “Maybe I just don't know you.”

A tear ran down his cheek, and then another, and another.
They came down hard, breaking over the lines in his face, falling into his open mouth as he made dry, choking sounds. He kept a firm grip on the steering wheel as his body shook.

“I love you,” I said. “Please turn on the air conditioner.”

“You don't act like you love me.”

“I do!” I cried. “I do love you!” When I began to cry, he stopped and pulled an ironed white handkerchief out of his pocket.

“Your mother is torn up,” he said. “I took her to the house.” Thinking of Florida's pain gave him strength. He let go of the steering wheel, wiped his eyes, blew his nose, and sat up straight in his seat. “She's just sick about this,” he said. “And boy, oh boy, did you pick a fine time to pull it off. Both of her parents just died, and now this. You hardly waited until the bodies were cold. Don't you care about anyone? I don't think you even give a darn about yourself.” He shook his head back and forth. “I just don't understand you. I really don't. What goes on in your head?”

Then, in a calm, distant voice, Henry began to talk about God. God, Henry said, had given me certain gifts and talents, which I should use for His glory and not in the wrong way, not in a cheap way. Maybe God had made me a little different—I had a different way of looking at things—but that wasn't necessarily a bad thing. God had given me Free Will. I should use my Free Will to make the right choices, good decisions. “I don't want you to be some man's tool,” he said. “You have a good heart. You're a good girl, a good . . . woman.”

“Can we go home?”

“In a minute. I'm talking to you.”

“I don't want to work at the plant anymore.”

“Now listen here, young lady. You're a Peppers. We don't quit our jobs. You're going back into that plant on Monday morning. You're going in there with your head up. And if you speak to that man again, he'll lose his job. How would like that on your conscience?”

“I have to go now.” I put my hand on the door.

“There's one more thing.”

“Dad, please stop!”

“Listen to me.”

“What?”

“I forgive you.” He leaned over and kissed me on the head.

All they way home, he kept the bumper of the LeSabre on the fender of the Bonneville, even running yellow lights to stay with me, in case I took a wrong turn.

At Owl Aerie, Florida was sitting on a straight-backed chair by the kitchen door, holding my journal in her lap. Her hair was bright orange, but her face was gray and drawn up in wrinkles. As soon as Henry shut the door, she said, “You found her.” She looked at me as if I were a big ugly earth worm. “Where was she?”

“She's home now.”

“She was with him, wasn't she? Across the river.” She spat out his name, “T. C.”

“That's enough,” said Henry. “I talked to her.”

“I showed your diary to your father.” In the stark kitchen light, her hands looked like Grandmother Deleuth's hands. The spotted, gnarled fingers with their swollen knuckles and broken nails spread like thin roots over the blue cover of my spiral bound notebook. “Repulsive,” she hissed. “In our bed.”

I wanted to lose my mind. I wanted to charge through the
window, fall to my knees and bark like a dog, swallow my tongue. I tried, but sanity held me in place like a chain.

“Give me my journal,” I said, but she gripped it tighter.

“I pray for you,” she said. “I pray you will let Jesus back into your heart. That's what God wants you to do. He saw all of this. He saw you.”

Nervously, I laughed. “How do you know what God thinks about me? Does he tell you?”

“Hush,” said Henry. “Go to your room now.”

“God certainly does speak to me. And I listen.”

“Maybe he talks to me, too.”

She snorted. “Did God tell you to fornicate with T. C. Curtis?”

“Stop it, both of you,” said Henry. “This discussion is over.” The buzzer on the dryer went off, and Florida stood up. “I'm washing the sheets,” she said.

With my hands shaking, I poured two inches of orange juice into a glass and took it to my room where I filled it with vodka. All night I lay awake on my bed with my vinyl brogans laced tightly around my ankles, planning to run away.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
at the plant, Raymond Patch assigned me to the slitter. I trudged over there with my hands in my pockets, ignoring Polecat when he called out, “Watch you don't trip over that long face, Experiment.” When I reached the slitter, I looked up and saw T. C. There he was, in a clean white T-shirt with a fresh pack of Marlboros rolled up in his sleeve, ready to catch slit boards. Never before had we been assigned to the same machine.

My voice fluttered as I said good morning. I wanted to rush into his strong arms, press my face against his chest, hear the now familiar wheeze.

“I have a bad heart,” he'd said in bed. “That's why I don't breathe so good.” I lay with my head on his chest, listening to the struggle inside him, thinking of Roderick with his inhaler.

We could go away somewhere together. Wyoming, or even Alaska. Somewhere dark and cool. We'd build a log cabin. He'd find another factory; I'd be a waitress. Or maybe we wouldn't work at all; we'd plant a garden and hunt. All night long, we would hold each other.

“Good morning,” I said again, thinking he hadn't heard me.

He nodded curtly, looked away.

Stung, I pulled on my gloves and picked up a short stack of boards.

“Ready?” I asked icily. When he nodded, I shot the boards one after another, catty-cornered under the blades, making them fly over his shoulder. He caught each one, threw it away, and instantly resumed his stance: legs spraddled, palms open to catch the next whizzing board.

I bit my lip.

He ignored it.

I was a tool. I stacked fresh boards against the edge of the table, packing them like cards and sent the top one over with a clean shove under the blade, so the corners wouldn't turn. He caught it. He was a tool. I sent another one, and another, and another. We were tools.

In a gray suit, with his hands folded behind his back, Henry walked through the factory. A hush fell over the men. Without
their voices, the whirring blades, the rip and slap of hot board, the crunch and grind of the bailer grew into a deafening roar. At the slitter, Henry stopped to watch us.

For the rest of the summer, I was assigned to the slitter with T. C. We grew to hate each other. At a different time each day, Henry would appear and then disappear. Every morning, the numbers on the wall declared another day of safety. All around us in the hot green light, metal slammed against metal, fires burned, forks lifted bales, whistles blew, and buzzing all over with the sad songs of men as small as ants, the plant grew.

I
F A CIRCUS
had come to Counterpoint, not the three-ride gig that went up in the Sears parking lot, forbidden to the Peppers family because of insurance liabilities, but a real cotton-candy-stinking, clown-smirking, two-headed-baby, maiden-stealing, rip-your-last-dollar-off, old-fashioned show, I would have been on the first caravan out of town. I wanted to be a clown.

“What kind of clown?” asked Henry in a steady voice. He had begun saving for his children's college education when he was twenty-one. The share I had inherited from Roderick, combined with my own, would send me to college for fifty years. However, like most rich people, Henry watched his pennies. He was not eager to finance a clown.

“A funny clown,” I said. He put on his patient face. We were in the garage. He had been vacuuming Florida's car and was now taking apart the forty-two-year-old Kirby Lady Deluxe vacuum cleaner to see what on earth it had sucked up to make
it start smoking. There was no telling what it had swallowed in Florida's car.

Now, as he set his wrench down, I could almost hear him praying. Please Lord, not a clown or a beautician or a floozy. Make her a doctor or a nurse or a news anchorperson.

“You know,” I said. “A clown-clown. Like Marcel Marceau.”

“A professional,” he said, having never heard of this person. Biting his lip, he got down on his knees and peered into the Kirby's innards with the penlight of his Southern Board key chain. Then he stuck his hand in there. Five minutes later, he pulled out a small red plastic monkey whose tail was looped around a piece of dried muscadine vine.

“It's part of her flower arrangement for the Garden Club show,” I said. I decided not to mention that another dozen monkeys were involved.

Henry knitted his eyebrows, shook his head, and switched off the penlight. “I guess you get your creativity from your mother,” he said sadly. He rubbed his chin. Then, tentatively, he suggested that I could be a clown on the weekends, working at the mall or renting myself out to parties, juggling and whatnot, while studying something practical at college.

“Clowning would make a good hobby,” he said, smiling hard.

“I don't have hobbies,” I snapped, bristling at the word. I had been ready to tell him my deepest feelings about being a clown.

“Well, you don't have to bite my head off,” he said.

That year, when I was seventeen going on eighteen, I realized with a shameful thrill that I had a brain. “Bright,” said my teachers at Bridgewater. In Mr. Rutherford's Advanced Placement English class, when we read Plato's The Cave, I burned
in my desk, bright all over. English was easy for me because there were no correct answers to Mr. Rutherford's questions; one only had to be Mr. Rutherford—a pleasant task for a girl in love. It was the same with the authors we studied. I pitied students who had to read
Light in August
line by line; I somehow drank the pages, and when I looked up, I was William Faulkner, dead drunk in Mississippi. I sank into the minds of Flannery O'Connor, James Joyce, William Blake, and wandered there among the ghosts and shadows and patches of dazzling sunlight. There were themes: Man versus Man, Man versus Nature, Man versus God, and questions at the end of the chapter, but these were unimportant. How do you get inside another human being? This was the question. I saw signs everywhere: in the untied lace on Drew's moccasin, the warm red bricks of wall, the white curve of Mr. Rutherford's hand as he raised his thumb at me, but still, love eluded me. Then one day, walking off demerits around the lake, I watched a swan dip her long neck, raise it, and glide, and a verse from Blake came to me all in one piece like an egg: