The School of Beauty and Charm (7 page)

“You don't want me to talk about Jesus, do you? Why does the Word of the Lord upset you?”

“There's a gas station,” said Roderick.

“He won't stop,” said Florida, and with a look of long-suffering resignation, she elbowed Puff onto my lap and pulled out her knitting bag.

I
DECIDED THAT
I didn't like anybody in the car. Mentally, I threw each family member onto the shoulder of the road and replaced them with my friends. An imaginary Drew St. John was riding beside me in the front seat, smoking a cigar.

Once, I had taken the real Drew St. John to Red Cavern. Three and a half hours into the trip, Drew announced calmly
that she couldn't remember what her mother looked like. Both of us found this interesting, but Florida was upset.

“You're kidding,” she said.

“No ma'am,” said Drew firmly. “I can't picture her.”

“That happens to me all the time,” I said. “It's really weird. I think
Mom
, and nothing happens. I don't get a picture.”

“I can see my dad,” said Drew. “Unless I try too hard.”

“Your mother is very attractive,” said Florida, determined to forge this broken link. “She's tall and slender and has short brown hair. She's kind of quiet. She plays golf, and she . . . she drives a blue car.”

“Eldorado,” said Henry.

“Do you see her now, Drew?” Drew squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them.

“No ma'am.”

“Her name is Katherine,” Florida said urgently. “She's . . . she's . . . oh, shoot! You can't forget your own mother. You've only been gone one day. You're playing.”

To close this discussion, she picked up her novel; from the glossy cover, I gathered it was about a man and a woman who couldn't keep their clothes on. After she'd read a couple of pages, she said, “If I had a picture of her, I'd show you.”

That was the beginning of Drew's breakdown in Kentucky. Drew was not a delicate child. Her hair, the color of honey, was cropped short and springing with cowlicks. She had three freckles on her nose; in the summer she had a farmer's tan. A thin silver scar, incurred while jumping down a chimney, circled one sturdy wrist like a bracelet. She was a lefty, and she threw a mean, sneaky punch with her devil's paw. She did not, under any circumstances, touch dolls. Once I saw her eat a
worm. Dr. Frommlecker claimed, with his characteristic lack of enthusiasm, that she was a genius.

All the same, Red Cavern did her in. Was it the landscape—mile after mile of monotonous tobacco, corn, and hay—everything growing to the same height inside rusty barbed-wire fences? Even in the middle of summer a gray pallor hung over the sky; nothing was bright and new. Dully painted trucks with dirty windshields rattled down the dusty roads. In the truck beds, cows stared morosely through weathered wooden slats as we sped by in the Galaxie 500, which Henry spritzed and wiped down at every gas station. In this part of the country, the gas pumps were antiques: big clunky things, once painted white, now dented and streaked with rust. These gas pumps had round heads; Henry stared into the glass face to watch the numbers creep by; it was like watching the hand of a clock. Everybody drank RC—there wasn't any Coca-Cola.

At the farm, Drew and I jumped from haystacks in the barn and taunted a bull in the field with a red tablecloth. We collected spearmint from the spring, locked Roderick in the chicken coop, and dissected the skeleton of a dog we found on top of a hill, but I knew she wasn't having a good time. Grandmother Deleuth gave us stained plastic coffee cups filled to the brim with cheerful M&Ms, but still, the gloom settled on us. Grandmother would cry, not so that you'd notice if you weren't looking right at her, but the rims of her eyes turned red, and small tears filled the creases of her skin like dew.

“You all don't know what goes on here after y'all go,” she'd say. “How he curses me.”

“Hush,” my mother would say, while Henry looked on with the face he wore at church. “Let's have a good time.”

Then Daddy-Go, sunk deep into his old chair, with his cane leaning against the wall, would lift his stubbled chin and look around with his bleary eyes, blue with cataracts, seeking sympathy for his life.

Both of them went through a litany of death; it was their main source of conversation. Sally Long—she was a Cartwright before she married—she fell on the front step and broke her hip for the third time, and her youngest stepsister, Mabel Brown, fell into the river, caught her hair on a branch, and drowned. Uncle Evange Lyle lost two cows in the electric fence when lightning hit, and the chickens all died of the feed.

“Reckon I'll be next,” Grandmother would say, and Daddy-Go would say, “Lord willing.”

I saw nothing odd in any of this, but Drew was uncomfortable. During that entire week, she couldn't conjure up her mother's face. Finally, the ghost in the upstairs bedroom got her.

The ghost was Frances Deleuth, Florida's little sister. Frances was killed, I explained to Drew, on the night of her high school graduation, after she'd been voted Most Popular and Best Looking. Florida had been salutatorian of her class, but Frances was valedictorian of hers, which was a shame because whereas Florida applied herself, Frances spent most of her time looking in the mirror. When her suitors came to call, she'd play the piano and laugh until the cows came home. On graduation night, Frances fell off the back of a pick-up truck. She'd been drinking, with boys.

“Her dress got caught in the tailgate,” I whispered to Drew. We were sitting on the sinking edge of the high feather bed in the musty, darkened room, our bare feet dangling. “She kept rolling back under the wheel, until she was dead.”

Drew put on her poker face while checking the facts. “Why didn't the boys in the truck bed tell the driver that she fell?”

“They did,” I whispered. “They kept banging on the window, yelling, ‘Frances fell off!' but the driver thought they were kidding.”

We sat quietly, swinging our tanned legs, breathing softly. We faced two long windows, drawn with yellowed shades. Motes of dust hung in the narrow band of light beneath the door.

“Do you want to know what else?” I asked. “My father dated Frances before he dated my mother.” Suddenly I jumped to the floor and padded across the scratchy wool rug to the cedar chest, where I rummaged through stiff black dresses and an assortment of black hats—some decorated with artificial fruit and flowers—until I found a pair of black elbow-length gloves.

“These belonged to Frances,” I said, trying one on. There were no tips to the fingers of the gloves; I poked my hand through to show her. I put on the other glove and pulled them both all the way up to my shoulders. Then, feeling like a black widow spider, I waved my arms slowly back and forth.

A few minutes later, during a game of hide-and-seek, I pulled the crocheted tab of the window shade and found Drew flattened against the glass like a moth. Tears ran silently down her cheeks. Afraid to touch her, and not knowing what else to do, I pulled the shade back down. At suppertime, she was still there.

“She'll fall right through that thin old glass!” cried Henry, hurrying up the stairs to the bedroom. “You all know better than to play in windows!” Florida and Roderick ran outside, as if they meant to catch her. Grandmother Deleuth, dusted with flour, shuffled out of the kitchen and hung by the foot of the stairs saying “Lawd a mercy!” and leaving her mouth hanging open so that a thin stream of spittle dribbled down her chin. In the parlor, Daddy-Go slowly brought his cane around to the front of the chair. Then, bracing himself with both hands on the cane, he stood up. He was a tall man.

Henry stayed up there with Drew for a long time. No one would let me go upstairs, but we could hear him through the vent in the ceiling by the parlor woodstove. Roderick and I sat as close to the woodstove as we could, on the love seat. It was a cruel piece of furniture, too large for one person, and too small for two, without arm rests or pillows, designed to shift its occupants onto the floor. The only way to stay seated was to continually press oneself into the back of the love seat, which was upholstered in horsehair. There we sat, staring up at the dusty grate in the ceiling. Through the grate, Henry's voice rumbled down over our heads, singing “Home on the Range.”

Being tone-deaf, I had no idea if Henry was hitting the right notes, but I knew it was music. It was Henry's one song, and he sang it beautifully. Squinting up into the black squares of the grate, I arched my back against the stiff, scratchy love seat, careful not to touch Roderick, who was cranky when his asthma kicked in and liable to strike. As Henry sang, I felt the familiar vibration of his voice, one wave lapping gently over the next, following the deep, strong current of his heart.
Eventually, still standing in the window, Drew fell asleep and Henry carried her downstairs to bed. She never accepted an invitation to Red Cavern again.

“H
ENRY
,” F
LORIDA SAID
as we passed an Exxon. “What was wrong with that one?”

“Too high,” he mumbled.

“How much was it?”

“Eighty-eight cents,” said Roderick. “I hope everybody is looking forward to a nice long hike up the Appalachian Trail.”

“For law's sake,” Florida sighed. “We can afford that. You're looking for eighty-seven cents, aren't you? Yes, you are. You do this every time. It just burns me up.”

Abashed, Henry said, “I saw eighty-five cents a gallon just a while back.”

“Why didn't you stop then?”

“We didn't need any gas at that time.”

Florida blew her top. “Git out of my way!” she hollered at Puff as she reached over him to pull her knitting bag from the floor. Puff sat up, digging his painted nails into her legs as he tried to catch her eye with a woebegone stare. The ribbon in his topknot had worked its way to the end of a curl and hung fetchingly over one big brown eye. “Dad blast it!” she yelled, waving a fist of long, sharp knitting needles, and then with her free hand, she lifted the poodle into the air and sailed him into the back seat, where he landed on top of Roderick with a yelp.

“Mom!” Roderick screamed, “You're crazy!” Tears filled his eyes as he clutched Puff to his chest. With daring ferocity, he hissed, “Don't you ever touch my dog again.”

Wedged into the middle of the front seat, I felt the muscles
twitch in Henry's arm, but he didn't swing his hand into the back seat. Instead, he looked at Roderick through the rearview mirror. It was a look I knew well. When Henry had that look— it was a long blue stare—I felt the shock of seeing him as someone other than a father. At these times he would have looked perfectly natural holding a machine gun, with bodies littering the ground around him. No other human had ever looked at me that way, but once a German shepherd had given me that same cold, still eye, right before he bit me. Roderick whispered a sweet nothing into Puff's ear, and then shut up.

Henry's arm relaxed as he drew deeply on his cigar. On my other side, in Florida's lap, two metallic pistachio knitting needles, each as long as my arm, shot in and out of a tangle of red yarn until something resembling a sleeve began to emerge. We had started the long, lonesome climb up Lookout Mountain with the needle veering off of e. Florida pursed her lips and said, “Knit, pearl. Knit, pearl.”

There was only one gas station on Lookout Mountain, a Mom and Pop grocery that charged an arm and a leg, and Henry, with a defeated half-smile, pulled right up to the tank, but the store was closed, it being Sunday.

Florida's needles went click, click. In the back seat, Roderick held his palm to his mouth and swished the small green inhaler, once, twice, and then a third time. His wheeze sounded like a light snore. Gently, almost tenderly, the Galaxie 500 crested the mountain, and at the top, right before a gravel track posted with the sign runaway trucks, Henry shifted into low gear and stepped off the gas. Although Henry did not actually speed, he went easy on the brake pads, gathering speed after each hairpin curve, flying down the straightaways.
F
ALLING ROCK
signs and waterfalls flew past our heads. A deer jumped for his life.

Florida prayed, “Oh Lord help us,” and I began to compose my obituary.

M
Y DEATH WAS
for my English teacher, Mr. Samuel Rutherford III. I loved him. In my school locker, away from Roderick's prying fingers, I kept a notebook of love letters addressed to My Darling Mr. Rutherford (I couldn't bring myself to call him Samuel). How painful it was, each week when I scribbled out the five-hundred-word essay he required, to erase the concluding sentence, “I love you, Mr. Rutherford.”

He did not look like an English teacher. He drove an orange VW bug that seemed comically too small for him, like Charlie Chaplin's hat. When he wasn't teaching, he coached football, and he often came to class in a pair of long tight gym shorts and a jersey, clacking his cleats across the concrete floor. He was short and wide, barrel-chested, with thick hairy arms and legs, and a lion's mane of yellow hair. A scar ran down one side of his face, inciting rumors. He had a booming coach's voice, and when he was angry, he threw chalk so hard against the wall that it shattered into a puff of dust. Once, when Celeste Humphreys tried to hide in the broom closet, he locked the door and left her in there for forty-five minutes. I wished it had been me so that we could have looked at each other when he finally opened the door. When he was happy, he whistled.

He had a fondness for the dingbat and the aardvark. “When the aardvark ate the dingbat's new shoes,” he'd write on the board, a stub of chalk clenched in his fist, “she threw her Danish
on the floor and called the fire department.” Then he diagramed the sentence, making it look like a rocket ship. He taught us compound sentences: nose-to-nose rocket ships, and compound-complex sentences, nose-to-nose rocket ships with shuttles riding on their wings. Nouns, verbs, and prepositional phrases became part of a twinkling galaxy filled with blue moons and shooting stars.