We Are All Welcome Here (4 page)

“You don’t think it anymore, though, do you?” I asked her.

She smiled at me.

“Do you?”

“No,” she said. “I don’t think that anymore.” But she was lying. Denial was not a bad thing, in her mind. And I have to say, I think it served her well.

She talked very little about the time she spent in the lung. Over the years, I’d learned bits and pieces of information: that there were many iron lungs, all in one large room, and the only privacy was curtains that were sometimes drawn between them. That her iron lung was a mustard-yellow color and her neighbor’s a muddy green. That one Christmas Eve, the patients had sung—with difficulty, of course—“O Holy Night,” and it had made the staff cry. That the sound the bellows made with their rhythmic squeaks and thunks reminded my mother of windshield wipers. That when someone died, the patients’ overhead mirrors would be turned so that they couldn’t see the now silent iron lung being pushed past them. That my mother read three books at a time from her overhead rack so that the page turner wouldn’t be needed so often. That the women patients wore their hair in topknots, necessary because of lying flat in the iron lung, and the style was called a “polio poodle.” That a psychiatrist once asked my mother, “How does it feel to realize your daughter will never know your touch?” (To which my mother responded, “How does it feel to be an incompetent asshole?”) That a patient once complained of feeling cold and his caregiver put a blanket over the lung rather than him. That the patients who couldn’t talk made giddyup sounds to call for help, or clicked their teeth together, or made a popping sound with their lips. That there was a ward newspaper to which my mother contributed poems and short stories. She learned, in occupational therapy, to write with a pen held in her mouth; it took an hour and forty-five minutes for her to write one page.

I asked once if people ever cried, and she hesitated, then said yes. “Did you?” I asked, and she said yes, but rarely. And only once had she cried hard and for a long time. It happened after she overheard a conversation between a doctor and a patient a few lungs down from her. The patient, whose name was Sam, asked, “So when will I go home, Doc? I want to drive my new car. Got a new convertible two days before I came in here.”

The doctor asked for a chair and pulled it up so Sam could see him, eye to eye. Then he said, “I’m sorry. But I have to tell you that you won’t be able to walk again. Or even breathe on your own.”

There was a long silence, and then Sam said, “What do you mean?”

The doctor told him again, saying that the time for recovery had passed.

Sam said, “Well, you’re wrong. I’ll drive to your house. And when I get there, I’ll take you out for a ride so fast it’ll blow the hair off your head.”

“I hope you will,” the doctor said. “But Sam, I want you to start thinking about what it will mean if you can’t.”

It was the night after that incident that my mother had sobbed, at least to the extent that she was able: She said it was more like highpitched squeals, really, and that that had frustrated her as much as anything, that she couldn’t even really have a good cry. But when she had finished crying, she decided that if this was her fate, she would use what she had left. “I could still taste and smell and hear and see,” she said. “I could still learn and I could still teach. I could still love and be loved. I had my mind and my spirit. And I had you.”

W
e have to start charging more than a quarter for our plays,” I told Suralee. I had taken her through the hole in the latticework at the side of my front porch for what I considered a staff meeting. We were sitting in the dirt, leaning against the foundation of the house.

“Can’t,” Suralee said, scratching her arm. She looked around. “I don’t think we should sit under here. I think there’s chiggers under here.”

“Listen,”
I said. “We don’t charge enough! We could charge fifty cents and make so much more money!”

“Nobody’s going to pay fifty cents to see us.”

“That’s not true! I’ll bet we could charge a
dollar
! It’s live entertainment!”

Suralee looked at me. “How many people came to our last play?”

I shrugged.

“Four? Counting our mothers and Mrs. Gruder?”

“Well, we need to get more people to come, too,” I said. “We need to advertise.”

Now Suralee’s face changed from thinly disguised contempt to interest. “We could,” she said. “We could put up signs all over town. I could make a really nice design.”

“See?” I said. “And we could charge more!”

“No,” Suralee said. “I’ll advertise, but if we charge more, nobody will come.”

I sighed. “The trouble with you is, you don’t dream big enough.”

“I dream big,” Suralee said.

“Not big enough.”

Suralee scratched her arm again. “I’m getting out of here. We can’t be under here.”

“But I was going to make it nice for us! I thought we could write under here.”

“Let’s go and get some ice cream.” Suralee disappeared through the hole.

I sat still for a moment, unwilling to follow her command. She was always issuing commands, and I was always following them. But then I decided she was probably right. First we needed to get more people to come. Then, gradually, we could charge more. It aggravated me, how slow fame was in coming.

On our walk to town, Suralee told me about two boys she wanted me to meet. They were brothers, aged thirteen and fourteen, sons of a woman with whom her mother worked. Suralee had met them last weekend at an office picnic. They were blond, Suralee said. Baseball players. I imagined myself in a skirt and blouse and necklace, sitting beside one of them. “Did you ever hit a home run?” I might ask. You were supposed to ask them about themselves.

When we got to the drugstore, Suralee and I headed first to the magazine rack stationed at the front. We sat cross-legged before it, facing each other, the better to share things we would find in the magazines, new styles we favored. Ads for things we would admit our desire for only to each other: Wigs. Nair. Frederick’s of Hollywood lingerie.

Mrs. Beasley shuffled over to us. “How is your dear mother?” she asked in her thin voice. I was obliged to answer—these were, after all, her magazines and we were in her store. But I wondered what Mrs. Beasley was looking for, asking me this question every time I saw her. Was she waiting for some story of high drama to add interest to her own life? Was she waiting for my mother to die?

Mrs. Beasley wore a cardigan over her shoulders even in this heat, and her sweater guard was decorated with little pearls. She seemed to fear things getting away from her; she wore a chain on her glasses, and the pen at the counter used by people to write checks was chained down, too. Suralee, her back to Mrs. Beasley, rolled her eyes and grimaced, but I smiled pleasantly. “She’s fine. She’s going to sunbathe today.”

“That girl always did love her tan. How’s she fixed for baby oil?”

“Okay, I guess. She didn’t ask for any.”

“Iodine?”

“No, ma’am, we’re just here for ice cream cones. Do you have butter pecan today?”

She looked behind her. “I surely do. And I’ll come over to the counter and fix y’all’s cones in just a minute.”

She moved over to Mrs. Quinn, standing with her new baby in the next aisle, and spoke quietly to her. “Well, thank the Lord, that’s a relief. Look yonder, you see Clovis Carter heading out of here all shame-faced?”

Suralee and I rose up to look, too. There was a young black man, accompanied by a white man, leaving the store. They stared straight ahead, not ashamed-looking, it seemed to me, but stony-faced.

“What did he do?” Mrs. Quinn asked. She hiked her baby up higher on her shoulder, held him closer.

“Well, I’ll tell you,” Mrs. Beasley said. “He came in here with that white boy and they sat themselves right down at the lunch counter. Clovis sat
right next
to the widow Henderson, like to give that old woman a heart attack. She left, of course, didn’t even finish her pie. And then they just sat there, even when I asked them nice as can be to please leave. My husband came over and told them they could sit there all day but they wouldn’t get so much as a nod. Still didn’t move. Finally, Sally came out from the kitchen and spoke to them. I think she told Clovis his hanging around would only make trouble for her. Can you imagine, one of his own asking him to leave! Anyway, after almost two hours, well, they’re finally gone.”

“It’s a shame, all these things happening,” Mrs. Quinn said. She shook her head and moved down the aisle, and Mrs. Beasley turned her attention to us.

“Look here, now,” she said quietly, “the new
Seventeen
just arrived, and I’m going to give y’all a copy. Free of charge.”

Suralee turned around quickly to face her.

“You’ll have to
share
it,” Mrs. Beasley said, looking pointedly at her. “But I’ve got to ask y’all not to tell my husband I did that. Can you promise me you won’t tell?”

Suralee and I nodded together, and with a sarcasm Mrs. Beasley didn’t grasp, Suralee crossed her heart. Old Mr. Beasley with his hairy knuckles and pee stains and bent back and stale breath and toilet paper stuck to his face every day from cutting himself shaving! Who cared what he said? But we would honor our promise.

Mrs. Beasley had never given us a magazine before, and it seemed to me that her generosity was in direct proportion to her unease about what had happened with Clovis Carter. But I didn’t care—we were getting a new magazine free of charge.

When Shooter began viciously barking outside, we stood and looked out the window. A man we’d never seen before must have tried to pet the dog, and now he was recoiling, hands held up before him, surrender-style. “Whoa! Message received!”

Shooter didn’t bite, but he was not friendly. He lived for Suralee, listened to her exclusively and devotedly. She never put him on a leash, and he followed right behind her and waited outside any place she went in—including school—for as long as it took her to come out. He would doze and snap at flies, stare with intense, tight-muscled concentration at things going by that interested him, but he would never move until she told him to. Most people in town knew him, and they also knew to leave him alone.

The man stepped inside the store, took off his black cowboy hat, and headed for the counter. Mrs. Beasley walked quickly toward him, and Suralee and I exchanged glances. He was very handsome—tall, lean, a nice head of black hair styled in a high pompadour. “Elvis!” Suralee and I said together, and then I smacked her, saying, “Jinx; you owe me a Coke,” before she could. Not that either of us ever delivered on our debt. Both of us had a great interest in Elvis Presley, Suralee for the more common reasons, me for reasons a little less ordinary.

When my mother was a twenty-year-old student nurse, she had cared for Elvis’s mother, Gladys, when Gladys was admitted to the hospital after becoming ill at the Tupelo garment factory where she worked twelve-hour days as a seamstress. Elvis had visited his mother there, and my mother had met him. Gladys had told her son what a sweet girl Paige Dunn was, how much kinder and more intelligent than the other nurses. My mother said she had been a bit tongue-tied in Elvis’s presence—unheard of for someone as fearlessly outspoken as she. It had not been because of his great fame, which had yet to happen, but because of his looks and his smoldering sensuality, even at that young age. She told me he had been very much taken with her, too. “He’s crazy for black hair,” she’d said, “and he loved mine—he touched it. He himself had blond hair—he dyes it, you know. He couldn’t take his eyes off me. And it was more than my hair he liked, too. I’m sure he’s never forgotten me. I expect I’ll marry him someday.”

She told me this for the first time when I was seven years old, and I believed her. For a few years after that, I told everyone who would listen that my father was going to be Elvis Presley. Oftentimes in the evening, after supper, I would sit out on the porch steps waiting for a baby-blue Cadillac to pull up. How sorry he would feel about what had befallen my mother, how tender! He would swoop her up in his arms and put her and all her machinery in the front seat of the car, and I would sit in the back. On the way to his house, we would sing his songs together and he would comment on my mother’s and my ability to harmonize. I figured he had enough money that surely he could find a doctor somewhere who could heal her. My bedroom in Elvis’s mansion would have my heart’s desire, a canopied bed, and I would be lying in it when my mother, able to walk again, would come in and kiss me good night. “He took so long to
come,
” I imagined saying, and I imagined my mother answering me, “Never mind. We’re all together, now.” Even after I realized she was kidding about marrying him, I still felt as though my mother—and therefore I—had a special bond with him.

“Elvis” asked for Band-Aids, and Mrs. Beasley directed him to the proper aisle. Then she leaned over the counter to call after him, “I’m Opal Beasley.”

“Dell Hansen,” he said, turning around.

She straightened and stepped back, fingered her top button. “Oh, my goodness, really?
Handsome?
Well, I guess it fits.” She tilted her head and smiled at him. Her glasses were all crooked, as if it weren’t hopeless enough.