The Queen of Palmyra (20 page)

“I’m just getting ready to get some.” I heard Daddy clumping down the basement steps.

“Have you got anything to eat over there?”

“Enough to sink a ship,” I said. “How’s Mama?”

“About the same. She’s going to be all right, don’t you worry, honey. She is just having a bad time right now. Now you go eat something. We need to keep up our strength. Let me speak to your daddy, honey.”

I turned around and saw that Daddy was back upstairs from the basement and standing behind me. “It’s Mimi,” I mouthed. Mama always liked to know who it was before I handed over the phone.

“Good,” he said, louder than he needed to, and took the phone. “Miss Irene, listen, you right about Florence. Can y’all watch her for me? I got to get to the hospital and then I got to talk to Big Dan about another car and get back to work.” He paused. “I don’t know what to do with her. I mean you got to watch her every dadgum minute. She almost burned the house down last night.” He was eyeballing me while he was talking. Then his eyes froze solid on my face. Not a blink. My arms started to burn like the lighter was at them again. I held them straight down. “Burned her arms pretty bad too. No, I just put Ungentine on them. They’ll be all right. Yeah, I’ll bring her on in a little while.”

He stopped talking and listened for a minute. “I don’t know.
Silly fool thing to do.” Now his eyes were little mice running over my face and arms. “Something about baking cakes for Martha. Lord knows nobody’s thinking cakes today.”

That’s when I got it. You can make up what happens and it can
be
that. Smooth as eating a piece of lemon meringue pie. Whatever story you want is yours as long as you can think up the picture you want to see and make somebody else want to see it too. Then the story you make up can take up a long and happy life that you and everybody else can watch happening over and over in your head, forever and ever, amen. Uncle Wiggily taking up his trusty valise and his crutch and setting out to seek his fortune through thick and thin. Bomba swinging through the trees. Queenie and the lady slave. It’s yours, and you can say, Here it is, ain’t it a sight to see? And somebody else can say yes siree bobtail, it sure enough is.

Now Mimi had this picture of me in her head. Dumb silly little Florence pretending to cook, starting a fire some fool way. Maybe catching the sleeve of her shirt on the flame, before she even got started good. No greasing the pans, measuring just right, using a broom straw to check doneness. No pretty cakes lined up just right on the table, all ready for the icings. No double boiler. No careful stirring. Now, right this minute, Mimi was telling it to Grandpops, the poor child so silly on top of all this that she caught the other sleeve on fire too, instead of turning on the water in the sink. “Lord help us all. What next?” she was saying to him and heaving a big sigh. “We sure enough got our work cut out for us.” Stupid little Florence was the story they all hatched up.

They worked it out so Zenie had me daylight hours part of the time at Mimi’s and part of the time at her house; Grandpops picked me up at Zenie’s on his way home from work in the afternoon, on Friday reaching into his pocket and passing her some folded bills. They watched over me like hawks watch a field full of
rabbits. Daddy came and got me from Mimi and Grandpops’ right after they’d fed me supper. I’d sit on the swing outside on their front porch waiting for him. He’d told me to be out there. He and Grandpops weren’t speaking. They had had a falling out about Mama. Grandpops wanted her to come stay with him and Mimi for a while. Daddy wanted to send Mama to Whitfield, which was where Zenie used to say she was going to send me if I didn’t behave.

Daddy had gotten himself an old Chevy with tail wings. It made popping noises. When you heard it the first time you thought somebody had tied firecrackers to its underside. When I was sitting waiting on the swing and I heard it pop-popping up the street, I’d think, “Swing low sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home,” and go on down to the curb where Mama had dropped me off that night she ran herself into the train.

While I went from this one to that one around town, Mama was supposed to be getting rested. It wasn’t long at all before she was out of the hospital, insurance run dry, Daddy said, and he’d taken her down to Whitfield in Jackson, broken bones and all. He told me she was going to visit the people there for a while, nobody knew how long. She was going to get electric shock treatments. It reminded me of stories Zenie told about the Chickasaws getting removed. They just drifted away from home because everybody said that was what they had to do. I wanted to see my mother before she left. I was thinking Daddy could’ve let me ride with them to Jackson in Mimi’s Plymouth, which he took Mama in because Grandpops said Daddy’s piece of trash wouldn’t make it to the county line. But Daddy said no, Mama was sicker than sick and she needed peace and quiet, that’s all, for a good long time. She was not good company.

When Daddy left me off at Mimi’s that first morning after the fire, Zenie was already there. She was in her chair leaning back
and fanning herself with one section of the paper while reading another. Mimi had gone back to the hospital to visit my mother. Zenie’s face looked like it had gotten longer since I’d seen her. She wasn’t just reading the paper at her leisure. She was combing through the pages like she was looking for something in particular. Daddy had dropped me at the front, so I slipped in the front door. The living room was dark and still as a pond, so I hightailed it to the back of the house. Zenie stopped reading when I came into the kitchen. She looked hard at my arms.

“Come here, you.” She flicked the paper. I came on over and stood in front of her. She took up my left arm and turned it from side to side. She looked at the top and then she looked at the underside. Then she took up the right one and did the same, like she was looking for ticks on a dog.

“Ow,” I said. The turning back and forth was like getting an Indian burn.

She raised one eyebrow. “What you gone and done to yourself? How come you trying to bake cakes in the dead of the night? Don’t you know how to light a stove, girl? I made sure and showed you a hundred times. How come you to go get yourself in a fix like this?”

She took a deep breath and started back in. “And what you doing cooking in long sleeves for anyways, with it hot as fire? Don’t you know no better than that? What you wearing get you all burned up like this?” She reached out and grabbed my hand and started pulling at the tape on my arm to undo the gauze. “Where them burns at? Top or bottom?”

“Don’t go hurting it!” I jerked my arm away. “It’s all right the way it is. Don’t go undoing it all.”

“Might need changing out,” she said, grabbing at me again. She was on her feet and coming at me. “I’m going to get the scissors. Take a look at it.”

“No! Let me alone!” I’d never hollered at Zenie before, but I did now. “Don’t touch it. Don’t touch me!” My voice sounded odd to me. I was mad as fire and giving orders to Zenie like she was being the bad baby and I was the grown-up. I was expecting her to stop short and whap me good for giving her sass the way Mama would have done.

But she didn’t. She just stopped short with the scissors in her hand, and gave me a look that was a river long and deep. A look that said she had been waiting for this very moment, for me to be bad like that. Just like Miss Josephine’s look three days back had said she’d been waiting for me to bust through the front door yelling for Ray. Zenie knew it would come someday, and here it was, a vileness in me that she knew was there before I did. She’d been waiting for it to pop out, an evil just waiting for the right time and place to be born, and here it was at last, rearing its ugly horned head.

When I saw that look, all I could do was stop talking. I could not say Zenie, I beg your pardon, Zenie, I’m sorry to have hollered at you, disrespected you. Because I saw in her face that I had set something loose. It could not be taken back, or even slowed down. Not for even a minute. It wasn’t a story that had a beginning and an ending, it was a fire that licked its way out into a bigger and bigger circle. No, no, stop, I didn’t mean it that way, you could say, but it always moved beyond your watery voice. It did not hear you.

She looked but she didn’t say a mumbling word. Then she just turned heel and walked over to the drawer and put the scissors back and then moved to the sink slow and tired, and started up washing the breakfast dishes.

At first I thought she’d get over it, that it was just another humbug, but she didn’t, at least not for a while. Oh, she’d be nice enough, but it wasn’t the kind of nice that meant I like you. It was the kind that called attention to its niceness, the way Mimi
called attention to her too-loud hats. Do you want some more strawberries? Eggs or waffles this morning? Are you ready to go home now? A niceness like the decorated cakes at the grocery store. It had nothing to do with whether the ingredients were pure and right, whether it was butter not Oleo or real vanilla not imitation; it was just on the outside.

That afternoon I sidled along home behind Zenie for the first time since Eva had gotten hurt. I was hoping I could help Zenie with some sewing or cleaning to get back in her good graces. She didn’t say a word to me while we were walking from Mimi’s house to hers, she was so busy nursing her grudge. Every now and then she’d mutter something under her breath about people being ungrateful.

When we got up to the house and went in, Miss Josephine was back in her chair. She wasn’t talking to anybody either. She was through with her counting. The mimosa tree was stripped bare up as high as she could reach. She’d tried to get Ray to bring her a ladder, but he said he wouldn’t because she’d fall sure enough and then he’d have her on the bed too.

There were only two beds to go around for the four of them, and Eva had been spread-eagled on Miss Josephine’s bed for a week. Miss J was having to sleep with Zenie, and Ray had ended up on the couch. I knew all this by hearing Zenie talk to her friends on Mimi’s telephone when Mimi wasn’t in the house. The day before, I’d come out of the bathroom and caught her crying into the phone, not saying a word to whoever was on the other end, just holding it up to her cheek and crying.

The minute we got inside the front door, Zenie pushed me in the direction of the green leaf curtain hanging in front of Miss Josephine’s bedroom door. “Get on in there and tell Eva a story. Tell her about how you almost burned down the place, she’ll get a kick out of that.”

I went over and peeked around the curtain. Eva didn’t look like she was about to get a kick out of anything. She was propped up in Miss Josephine’s bed like a stuffed toy you see in rich white girls’ houses. Sometimes they prop a bunch of them up on the prissy little pillows on their beds. She looked a sight. Her hair had lost its puff and was slicked straight back. If it’d been long enough, she would have had it in a bun in back but it wasn’t, so the ends stuck out behind, like an ugly ducktail. Her face was ashy. The burnt circle on her cheek had made a big light brown scab. Around the scab was a perfect pink circle, the beginnings of a scar. She looked like she had in mind that she was somewhere else, that she wasn’t propped up in Miss Josephine’s nice soft bed in Zenie and Ray’s Jim Walter Home in Shake Rag in Millwood, Mississippi, but somewhere much worse. She was just staring into space. She had on a blue nightgown with lace at the neck and was covered up to the waist with a white sheet. Her hands were on top of the sheet. She looked down at them like they were a puzzle she hadn’t put together yet.

Zenie was standing right behind me on the other side of the curtain. I could tell she was ready to give me a big push right through it, so I piped up and said, “Hey, girl! How you doing?” kind of peppy and frisky, like I was talking to a sick dog. I almost clapped my hands the way you’d do to get a dog’s attention. I was trying to perk her up some, hoping that if I could get her talking and being happy again, Zenie would stop being mad at me. I was prepared to make a fool out of myself.

I started off with some advice. “You ought to put some Ungentine on that place on your face. Daddy put Ungentine on my arms and it cuts down on the sting.”

Eva twitched her head a little. I took the twitching for a good sign. She might have been struck dumb, but at least she wasn’t deaf to boot. Then the twitching turned into something
else. A snicker, then a giggle. “
Daddy
says put Ungentine on it!” The words came out of her mouth like the dry heaves. Then she started cackling like a witch, mean and nasty.

I decided to ignore her. I held onto the edge of the curtain and started in on The Story. “Hey, Eva, you won’t believe what I gone and done. Set the whole dadgum kitchen on fire. Almost set the whole house on fire. Almost burnt Daddy to a crisp.” I said it all in a rush. I almost believed it myself.

By the time I got to the end of the story, her lost eyes had come running back home to her ashy face. She still didn’t say a word, but I could tell I had gotten her attention because she turned and looked over at me. So I kept on, trying to get her interested in the details. “Yes siree, I’d just got my three devil’s foods out of the pans just fine and they were out there on the table cooling and then there was the icing all cooked and ready and I couldn’t find a pot holder so I got a cup towel to get it off the fire…”

“
You
burnt your arms?” The question came as a thief in the night. Her lips moved so fast and she said it so soft I almost missed hearing it. After she said it, she turned her found eyes toward me. She had the look of a statue that had decided to say a word or two. No more.

I opened my mouth then shut it. My tongue felt thick and muddy, a creature in a swamp that was trying to rise up through the muck and roots and bog. It couldn’t, it wouldn’t. I just sat there thinking I needed Bomba right then to grab ahold of a vine and swing over and rescue me in this story. No Bomba, and my mouth was full of the jungle.

So I changed into the statue, but not a speaking one. Eva looked hard at me, and something fierce leapt up between us. “I know how Flo got burnt, I know how Flo got burnt.” She made it into a soft singsong that one little child would sing to another. It
didn’t sound a bit like Eva, but it was a blessed relief to me when she sang it. She didn’t have to say anything ever again as far as I was concerned. I loved her for singing it. I loved her for knowing The Story wasn’t true.