The School of Beauty and Charm (16 page)

My head began to hurt from the wine. “I'm not going to wash the permanent out tonight, okay? Stop crying.”

“It's not that! I don't give a darn what you do with your hair. If you want to go around the rest of your life looking like a slob, that is fine with me. Next time, I just won't spend two hundred dollars on you. Plus the clothes. How much did you spend on those? Did you get the right size?”

“Yes, Mother,” I said haughtily, glancing in the mirror to see if my face had any expression.

“Don't talk to me in that tone of voice! Why are you so hateful to your mother? What have I done to deserve this? You used to be a sweet girl. When you were little, you were my sunshine. Always smiling, agreeable. Loving. Easy to please.” A note of coy sympathy crept into her voice; I braced myself for what was coming. “What happened to change you? Was it Roderick's death? I want to know.”

“I'm the same,” I said feebly.

“Oh no, you're not. You used to have Jesus Christ in your heart. You were a Christian. Now you've shut Him out. Rejected Him.”

“I don't want to talk about religion,” I said firmly, and this rankled her. What is it about Christians, I wondered, that makes them do the soft shoe and then take out the whip? Frommlecker could never understand my problem with the psychological sadism of evangelicism. “So don't go to church,” he said. “Sunday morning is a good time to run.”

“I am not talking about religion, young lady,” said Florida. “I am talking about your personal savior, Jesus Christ. You don't want to hear what I have to say because you know it's the truth. You don't want to hear the truth. That's why you ate the way you did. And now the smoking.” Her voice rose, became hard. “You are going down the wrong path, Frances Louise Peppers. I'm telling you that right now. Jesus is not pleased with you, and you know it. You can change your outside appearance all you like, but no amount of makeup or hair color will solve your problem. The problem is in your heart.”

“Shut up!”

“Don't scream like that!” yelled Florida. “Do you want me to have a wreck? I'm going to pull over. I've had it. You can walk home.”

“Keep driving,” I said quietly, as if she were a hostage I held at gunpoint.

“This is just what I'm talking about. I never in my life told my mother to shut up.”

“You should have.”

“I'm going to call Henry.” She took the next exit and swerved into a gas station.

When Florida returned from the phone booth, her face looked haggard. “He didn't answer the phone. I don't know where he could be. Sleeping. I let the phone ring twelve times. Called twice.”

“Maybe he went to the store.”

“Your father doesn't go to the store. You know that. Except for the hardware store, and that's closed. I have no idea where that man is. Well, we won't worry about it. Worrying doesn't help.”

We worried in silence for a quarter of an hour, then I said, “I'm sorry I upset you.”

“I'm not upset. I'm used to the way you treat me.”

Even though it was dark and there was nothing to see, I pressed my nose against the window glass. When a car swooshed past, its headlights made a brief arc across the front seat, as if someone were shining a flashlight into the window. I couldn't imagine what the author of
Looking Out for Number One
would do in this situation.

“T
HE HOUSE IS
dark,” Florida said as she pulled into the long driveway of Owl Aerie. “Why didn't Henry leave a light on? I bet he won't even recognize you. You don't look like the old Louise, that's for sure. Now you're feminine, sexy, more mature looking. People might even think we're sisters.” She kept talking as she unlocked doors and switched on lights. When we entered the dark kitchen, she called out “Henry!” in a frightened voice. “Henry! Puff! Where are you?”

He stood in the doorway of Florida's studio. He reeked of mouthwash, and he was so drunk he could barely talk.

“Well there you are,” said Florida. “What you doing with all the lights off? Where's the dog?”

He said, “Paintin'.”

“Painting? In the dark? Henry, you don't paint. What's wrong with you?”

His shirt was rumpled and untucked. It was the first time in my life I had seen Henry with his shirttails out; I would have been less embarrassed to see him in his underwear. He took a couple of steps toward me, with his arms outstretched, then he stopped.

“Well,” said Florida. “What do you think? Isn't she beautiful?”

He said, “Thasnoher.” His eyes grew wide. “You're differin'! Who're you?”

“Where's Puff?” asked Florida.

Henry hung his head. “Awwlgoteem.” He flapped his arms like a bird and made his face sinister.

“An owl got him? Oh honey, no! I knew this would happen. What time? Why did you let him out without watching him? Did you see it? Was it—” Her face crinkled. “He was alive, wasn't he? When the bird carried him off? Oh my God. I can't think about it. This makes me sick!”

“Chased him,” said Henry sadly. “Gottaway.”

“Henry,” said Florida. “You are drunk.”

He made a sudden turn, flung out his hand. “Yamsnot!” His face turned dark red. Then he said something that sounded like, “You look nice,” lurched backward, and fell down.

C
ROUCHING BEHIND MY
bedroom door, I heard Florida's voice over Henry's muffled protests. “She knows you're drunk. Look at you. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. She knows. You've scared her. Disgraceful! You're going to be just like your brother, Earl.”

“Yamsnot!”

“Oh, yes you are. Alcoholic. What got into you? Are you worried about the dog? I guess he's gone. There was nothing you could do about it. I've been letting him in the yard without watching him, too. Sitting here in the dark drinking like a bum. Is it Roderick? You're dwelling on that, aren't you? We can't live in the past. What's done is done. What's gone is gone.”

I touched my stiff, strange new hair, which smelled like diesel oil, and let the tears run down my face, washing off a fifty-dollar paint job. When I had finished crying, I dialed a national help line in the dark.

“Do you want to hear a dream I had about my mother when I was five years old?” I asked the voice.

“In the dream, my mother and I are walking across a field to a shack with smoke coming out of a crooked chimney. A man with a black handlebar mustache, in a black top hat, steps out the door and begins walking toward us. He's a bad man.”

“I'm listening,” said the volunteer.

“My mother screams, ‘Run!' We turn around and run as fast as we can. He chases us. I run as hard as I can, but I fall behind. My mother keeps looking back over her shoulder, yelling, ‘Run Louise! Run!' I can feel her panic, then I can feel him at my heels. ‘Hurry!' she cries. ‘We're almost there! Run faster!' We're
trying to cross the invisible line that runs across the field. Once we cross it, he can't get us. My mother gets across, but I don't. She spins around, reaching out for me, but the man already has me.

“Are you there?”

“Go on,” said the volunteer. So I did, with my head bowed in prayer.

S
OMETIMES
F
LORIDA SAID
bitterly, “Henry is married to the plant,” and I would imagine him entangled in the embrace of an overgrown kudzu weed. When she was proud of him, she called the plant by its name. “Henry is the general manager of Southern Board,” she told strangers in a velvet voice.

Every pen, notepad, and calendar at Owl Aerie bore the name Southern Board. It was printed on windbreakers, penknives, and clocks. When Roderick was alive, he told people that Southern Board was stamped on the behind of each family member. During a confused period in my early childhood, I had used Southern Board as my last name. When I turned sixteen, Henry gave me a Southern Board key chain imprinted with the company's motto: the best way is the safe way and the keys to a hand-me-down Pontiac Bonneville. The Bonneville, originally a company car, had smelled new for the entire year Henry drove it. When it he gave it to Florida, it picked up the odors of lipstick, Kleenex, and acrylic paint. In
my hands, it had acquired the aroma of a saloon and was known about Bridgewater as Partyville.

During the long summers, I cruised Partyville up and down Front Street with all the windows down. I slurped Tanqueray and tonic through a straw while the B-52s crackled from cheap speakers. If Officer Fitzpatrick saw me, he paid no mind. Sometimes I put on a tennis skirt and drove to the Three Bears Country Club where I smoked a joint in the powder room with Drew. When I got really bored, I climbed around on the girders of the Meshack Bridge, daring myself to jump into the muddy waters of the New Hope River. Florida thought I should get a job.

“The clothing stores would want you to fix your hair every morning,” she said, “and they don't pay anything anyway. I'd let you help me out with my Special Art class, but you don't like retarded people. They get too personal with you. Henry always meant to put Roderick to work at the factory, during the summers.” Tears welled up in her eyes, but she brushed them brusquely away. “Southern Board pays good money, but your father wouldn't let you work out there. With all those men.”

“A corrugated board plant is no place for a young lady,” Henry said, first looking me in the eye, then bending down to the newspaper in his lap to let me know the discussion was over. I appealed to Florida, but she was in menopause that year, and half mad.

“Oh honey!” She looked stricken, as if I had asked to be a stripper. “Oh baby, no. No, no, no! You're too spoiled to work. You'd have to get out of bed in the morning. You know your father won't put you in that dirty factory.”

In the end, Drew St. John paved the way by taking a job at
Sweetheart Bakery, owned by her father. Mr. St. John, who owned a good chunk of North Georgia, was a gentleman and therefore, Henry deduced, must be making a lady out of Drew.

D
REW AND
I had been best friends since we were five years old, and we were as different from each other as real sisters. When I told her that I planned to have an affair with a factory worker at Southern Board, letting the word
affair
trail off my tongue, she was shocked. She widened her eyes, then narrowed them, letting her lip curl in disdain. She said, “Gross!”

She had had a similar reaction when I began listening to country music. I tried to keep it a secret, but occasionally Drew overheard me singing quietly to myself “Good Hearted Woman” or Johnny Paycheck's hit “Take This Job and Shove It.” Once, she found a Merle Haggard tape in my car.

“I don't believe you,” she said. She held the tape away from her as though by merely touching it, she might become a redneck. “How could you possibly like this shit?” I rattled off a comparison between rednecks and the pastoral world of Thomas Hardy, but she knew I didn't mean it. How could I explain the warm, happy feeling I got when I listened to Loretta Lynn sing about birth control?

That summer, no one wanted to know what I was thinking. “You don't listen to me!” I screamed at Florida during one of our fights. “You've never listened to me for ten minutes in my entire life.”

“All right!” Florida yelled. “I'm listening!” She set the oven timer for ten minutes. The kitchen was silent. “Well, I'm listening. Talk.”

I tried to say the things I had wanted to say, but I couldn't, so I threw up my hands and screamed, “Stop it!”

“See,” said Florida when the buzzer rang. “You don't have anything to say.”

I started a diary. Everything I wrote was stupid, but I forced myself to scratch out the words without stopping for ten minutes a day. It was like trying to dig my way out of the ground with a teaspoon.

I
N
J
UNE
, I entered the plant. On that first day, when Raymond Patch, the foreman, led me on a brief tour of the factory, I was terrified. Ceiling lights shot streaks of yellow through the iron rafters while the Georgia sun bore through high green windows. The heat itself was green. Gigantic machines slammed metal against metal, penetrating my soft Styrofoam ear plugs with a rhythmic, churning roar. The hot air was thick with paper dust and smelled like a skunk. As I followed Mr. Patch deeper into the plant, the odor become so intense I thought I would vomit.

Raymond didn't seem to notice the smell. He was a skinny man with a pointed face and small green eyes fringed by pale, almost invisible lashes. He wore a baggy polyester suit the color of tobacco and an unfashionably wide tie of similar material in a lighter shade of nicotine. He smoked so much that he had to fight for every breath. The expression of concentrated will had become permanent on his face. Apparently, women unnerved him.

“This here is the corrugator!” he yelled, stopping in front of a long ream of rolling brown paper. “Stay away from it. Two years ago, a fellow fell on that and burnt like a piece of bacon.”
Staring at my new boots, he asked me if I had read the safety booklet. When I said yes, I knew that he knew I was lying. He rubbed his ear, then pointed to a hunk of metal whirring with blades as big as hubcaps. “Slitter!” he shouted.

I nodded. On the wall next to the time clock hung a calendar marking the days of continuous safety in the plant. When I came to work, Southern Board had gone 212 days without an accident.

All of the men, except Jeremiah, looked at my feet. Henry had refused to buy me Red Wing boots. “You won't be working in a factory for the rest of your life, I hope,” he told me at Pay Less Shoes. Then he laughed, patting me too hard on the back.

Jeremiah Stokes was a strong, handsome man, smart as a whip, with a great noble heart and plenty of horse sense. Had he been white, he would have been Henry's closest friend. The best Henry could do was promote him every year until he was in charge of all the other black men in the plant and had his own office in the back, next to the bailer. He was the only employee at the factory taller than five foot nine, Henry's height, but like all the other men Henry had hired, his hands were huge.