The School of Beauty and Charm (23 page)

“You are driving me up the wall!” I raised my eyes. In her shoulder pads and sunglasses, she looked like a giant black hawk. “You're all take and no give,” she said, flapping her arms angrily. “It's gimmee, gimmee, gimmee, what can you do for me? Jesus Christ tells us not to be selfish. What does that book say about Jesus?”

“‘The world is sacred. It can't be improved.'”

Florida's face turned gray. That's when I knew she hated me, and hated herself for it. She ripped off her jacket and swirled it in the air. For a moment, I thought she might jump. She would rise into the sky with a thunderous clap of wings and swoop down on me. But she remained on the deck. The black jacket fluttered in the air and then sank slowly down until it caught on a low branch of the hickory tree beside my chair. It hung there like a flag.

Despite my resolve not to become entangled with religious people, my heart was pounding. I couldn't remember anything else from the
Tao Te Ching
, so I blurted out a bumper sticker
slogan: “Jesus save me from your followers!” The door slammed; she'd gone inside the house to make lunch.

Henry came out of the garage holding the weed eater he'd been repairing. “What's all this fussing out here?” he asked.

“Religion is man's defense against God,” I said.

“What?” He looked up at the jacket hanging in the hickory tree. “How did your mother's coat get in the tree?”

“She threw it.”

He stared hard at me, then shook his head. “You all have lost your minds. I'll have to get a ladder.”

When he went back into the garage, I studied the black flag hanging on the twisted old tree. The hickory was proof that lightning does strike twice. Last year lightning had hit the tree then run down the edge of the roof and zapped the intercom system. To me, this was an explicit request from the universe that the Pepperses stop talking to each other. However, Florida didn't need the intercom. She'd holler through the house, “This family is not communicating!” The first time lightning struck was during the tornado, which led to my salvation and all the trouble I'd had since. Life is hard the first time around; why prolong the agony by being born again? As anyone could see, by looking at the black coat hanging in the hickory tree, Christ did not bring peace to the human heart.

A
T THE NEXT
stop, a black woman wearing a red wig sat down beside me. “Rain's a-coming,” she said. “This ole knee lets me know every time.” I offered her a drink.

“Don't mind if I do,” she said, taking the thermos cup. “A toddy for the body. Oh, my bones get to aching, honey. Don't you get old—you young and sweet.”

“I won't.”

“Sure as the devil has horns, we gonna get us some rain.” Together we looked out the window at a cloudless blue sky. Any minute now, I expected to see the pouf of Florida's hair and Henry's bald spot inside a blue Ford Taurus pulling up beside us. Somehow, they would stop the bus.

She'd say, “I knew this would happen. I just knew it.”

He'd say, “Your mother has been a nervous wreck. Do you have any money?”

I had $48.16 plus the credit card in my name that was billed to Henry. I had a set of gym clothes, a new notebook, a new copy of
King Lear
, an empty thermos, and half a bottle of paregoric. I had a vague plan to kill myself.

“Where you going?” asked my companion.

I shrugged. “I had a fight with my mother.”

“Is that right?” She had the face of a warrior, mapped with battles. When she drank from her cup she screwed up her face as if bracing herself against another enemy.

“Yes ma'am,” I replied.

“What y'all fuss about?”

I pushed my glasses up on my nose and tightened my pony-tail. Then I shrugged again. “People never really fight about what they're fighting about. It's always something else.”

“Ain't that the truth. You hear about that man went and shot his wife after forty-five years of marriage? Said she burned the cornbread. Shot her right at the supper table.”

“In the face?”

“Lord yes, honey. What make a man go and do that evil thang?”

“I don't know.”

With a grimace, she finished off her toddy. “That be the devil,” she confirmed. “The devil hisself. Lord have mercy on us.”

After my blowout with Florida, Henry called me into his study. Over the years, Florida and Shirley had been gradually redecorating Owl Aerie, stripping hallucinogenic wallpaper, replacing beanbags with Queen Anne chairs, and rolling up shag carpets, but some vestiges remained. Henry's study was still done up in relentless brown with chrome accents and track lighting. Shirley had tried to compensate for the monochromatic color scheme by varying patterns; the result was a dark confusion.

Wearing the orange smoking jacket Florida had given him last Christmas, Henry paced the plaid carpet with his hands clasped behind his back while I struggled to sit up straight in a brown-striped mamason chair.

“You want to be different,” he was saying. “You want to go way, way out there.” He raised his arms in the bright silk sleeves. Everything she bought for him was orange, to bring him out, and everything he bought for her was blue, to calm her down. “Way out!” he cried, “into . . . into . . . outer space.” His eyes widened when he looked at me. “Don't you?”

“It appeals to me,” I said.

Shaking his head, Henry dropped his arms. “What do you think is out there?” We tried to stare each other down. “Honey, let me tell you what is out there. Nothing.” I blinked. “There is nothing out there. Absolutely nothing. You're going to get out there . . . to . . . Mars, or somewhere”—he waved angrily at Mars—“and you're going to find yourself alone.” He smiled sadly. “And what are you going to do then?”

Before I could answer, Florida's house shoes gave a warning
clack, clack, clack in the hallway, and the door clicked open. Her face was smeared with cold cream, and her eyes were swollen from crying.

“What are you all doing in here?” she asked, but she hung back in the doorway as if we might chase her away. Henry and I remained silent. “It's late,” she said sharply, taking a determined step forward. “You all need to be getting to bed. What are you talking about?”

As much as I feared Florida in her blaze, I preferred her fury to this. In the thin black nylon robe, with the white cream on her face, she looked scrawny and obscenely naked, like a plucked bird. I wanted to cover her, to hold her. She wasn't much of a hugger, though. She always twisted away, leaving me with my arms hanging, feeling foolish. Henry hugged. He held me until my blood ran smooth and warm, and once more, I belonged to the single body of the human race. So I didn't touch Florida. I saw her hovering there by the door, white-faced, plucked, and scared, and I lashed out with my tongue.

“We're plotting your death.”

She jerked as if she'd been hit; then she began to bawl. I mumbled an apology, but it was too late. Turning to Henry, she said flatly, “Either she goes, or I go. Choose.”

When she had gone to her room, weeping, Henry paced the floor. “If I had to choose,” he said with a sigh, looking as if he were already drifting behind the gently rustling pages of the
Wall Street Journal
, into the relative calm of the stock market, “I would choose your mother.”

W
HEN THE BUS
pulled into Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, my friend was sleeping. Her wig had shifted, revealing a gray braid beneath the red wig.

Outside the bus station, the rain beat down on my head. Water splashed across my espadrilles, bleeding red dye into my new white socks. A sign with a neon palm tree advertised a room for all the money in my pocket. I was dizzy with hunger. In the window of a bar, a neon lady in a bikini flashed back and forth, swinging her hips. What Henry said about me was true: “You just don't think!” I was not good at thinking. Before I reached the logical conclusion to an argument, an obstacle always appeared: something fast and dazzling, something so wild it made my heart jump, made me want to live!

This time it was a Ferris wheel. I saw it at the edge of the strip—a ring of colored lights rolling majestically through the gray sky like a wheel on Ezekiel's chariot. I stepped to the edge of the road and, for the first time in my life, raised my thumb. A red truck with an umbrella opened over the roof, spoke hubcaps, and the head of a baby doll stuck on the bumper screeched to a stop and backed up. One of the back lights was missing, but the other one shimmered over my path as I splashed across the wet pavement.

“Jim,” said the swarthy, toothless little man behind the wheel. “Which way?”

“Louise Peppers. Forward.” Between us, a chimpanzee strapped into a child carrier held the umbrella that opened through a hole in the roof. “Hi,” I said.

For a moment, she gawked; then in a flash, she reached a long arm over my lap and pulled my shoe off my foot, waving
the wet espadrille and hooting. She herself was smartly dressed in striped overalls and yellow rain boots.

“That there is Daisy. Apple of my eye. Daisy, reach in the back and get her my flannel shirt.” Daisy crossed her arms and stuck her lip out. “Don't give me none of your sass, girl. Get that shirt.” Turning her small, elegant head away from him, the chimp bared her teeth at me in an enormous leer. Then she spit. “Don't make me stop this car,” said Jim. “Shit. Rain's really coming down now. Louise Peppers, open your window there and reach for that string. When I pull my wiper, you wait a second, then pull yours.” I was glad to open the window because the car smelled rank, as if Daisy had needed a diaper change for some time, but I had some trouble pulling my wiper in synchronicity with the other one. Jim didn't seem to mind. He steered with one hand and pulled his wiper with the other, talking all the while. He was missing some fingers and teeth, but he didn't seem dangerous.

“My Christian name is Jungle Jim. Mother named me that ‘cause I kept her house filled with strays. Down in Louisiana we had alligators in the bathtub, snakes in the potty, and a panther in the parlor. Not to mention the cats and dogs—had up to thirty-seven at one time. Once I got me a black bear cub— cutest damn thing you ever saw. He'd eat a whole jar of peanut butter at a time. Then one day his paw got too big—he couldn't get that jar off to save his life! Tore the house up, trying to—Daisy, get a s\hirt for the lady ‘fore I have to take your head off. Ain't she cute? She's got a little brother back at the house. Spencer. Now he's shy. Ain't like her. But smart! Personally, I think he's ready to read. I'd teach him myself, but I never went past the third grade. Tried to get him a tutor back in Mississippi,
but they were all too stuck up. I'll tell you one thing—a chimp, and most animals for that matter, is smarter than most people I know. And a hell of a lot nicer. But I pick up strays, can't help it. Saw you standing there wet to the bone and said to Daisy, ‘We got to pick her up.'”

Afraid that he was going to offer me a warm bowl of milk, I smiled and said, “I'm not really a stray. I'm traveling.”

“You a carnie?”

I had some vague notion that
carnie
meant carnivore, and feeling that meat eaters might be repugnant to this die-hard animal lover, I said I was not. He looked disappointed. Daisy chose that moment to hand me the filthiest, smelliest rag I had ever touched in my life. “You put that shirt on over your dress,” said Jungle Jim generously. “Don't want you to catch a chill.” Miserably, breathing through my mouth, I jerked my arm back and forth in the rain, trying to see out the window. I was about to ask the driver to let me out when I saw the Ferris wheel in front of us.

“This is us,” said Jungle Jim. “You want I should carry you on down the road some, or you want out here?” I hugged his dirty shirt closer around my shoulders, shivered perceptibly, and gave him my best sad eyes.

“Aw, hell,” he said. “My show ain't for another hour, and this rain will keep most of the rubes at home tonight. Come on over to the trailer and let me get you a cup of hot chocolate.”

I jumped out of the truck into the back lot of the Arthur Reese Traveling Show. Hoarse shouts broke through a rollicking circus tune: “Three rings for a dollar, whose the next winner! Step right up! Step right up! Popcorn! Hot popcorn!”

“You know that song?” asked Jungle Jim. “That's the carnie
song, ‘Le Sabre.'” In the rain, Daisy did a brief dance. A clown walked by, holding an umbrella over his head. On his heels walked a dog with a wet cat perched on its back. A faint strain of Frank Sinatra crooned beneath the lighted Ferris wheel.

“Party tonight, Warren?” Jungle Jim asked the clown.

“If you say so. Who's the new addition to your menagerie?”

“This here is Louise Peppers. Louise, this is Lollibells.”

“Lord have mercy on us,” said the black man in white face. He waved a white-gloved hand at me. “Watch out for hair balls,” he said.

“You ain't funny,” said Jungle Jim.

“You, however, are a gas,” said the clown, and walked off with the dog and cat behind him.

Slogging through the mud, I pondered what a remarkable thing a college education was turning out to be, and then, with a cramp in my heart, I thought about poor Florida and Henry, worrying themselves to death.

I
N THE MORNING
I woke up beside a snoring man. I tried to recall his name by going through the alphabet, but this gave me a headache. Afraid that I would throw up on him, I got out of the narrow, rumpled bed and found a bathroom. The water from the faucet made me gag and the orange juice I found in a battered refrigerator scorched my throat, but at last I found a single can of beer hidden behind a rotting lump of lettuce. The drink cleared my head; when I looked around again, I saw that I was in a trailer.