The Sisters Montclair (15 page)

“Let’s roll,” Stella said.

As they passed the library, Alice stopped in the doorway, surveying the room. “Who’s been moving my books around?” she said.

“I don’t know, Alice. Has someone moved your books?”

“Of course they have! Look!” She pushed the walker ahead of her and Stella followed her into the library. Several piles of books were stacked on a low cabinet but the library looked much the way Stella remembered it always looking.

“These were not here before,” Alice said indignantly, pointing at the stack of books. “Someone’s been moving things around.” Her hair, fine as a baby’s, stood up in wispy curls around her face. “Why do people do that? Why don’t they leave my things alone? I have everything the way I want it and someone comes in and decides my way is wrong.”

“I’m sorry, Alice. I haven’t moved anything.”

“I didn’t say you did. It was someone else.”

Stella had no doubt that someone had moved things around. But it could have been done twenty years ago, and it could have been done at Alice’s instruction and she had simply forgotten.

She said, “Do you want me to move everything back? Just tell me where you want this stack and I’ll put it back.”

Alice sighed. She shook her head. “No, don’t do that,” she said in a tired, discouraged tone. She stared at one of the framed photographs on the shelves. “I have no idea who those people are,” she said.

They went on and did their five circuits. By the time they got to number five, Alice had forgotten about the library. She stopped in front of the French doors in the dining room, and stood looking down at the valley.

“Soon it’ll be time for the kudzu to grow,” she said.

“Do you get kudzu on top of the mountain?”

Alice chuckled. “Tell me where in the South we don’t get kudzu,” she said. “They say it grows up to two feet a day. Nothing kills it but frost.”

“In East Rige, they’ve brought in goats to eat it.”

Alice said, “Goats?”

“The city paid some guy last summer to bring in a herd of goats and stake them to the side of the ridge cut. Only after awhile the goats started disappearing and no one knew why.”

Alice’s eyes, in the slanting light, were a pale, milky blue. She snickered sofly at the idea of goats in East Ridge. “I remember when I was in the Garden Club,” she said. She rolled her eyes and said “Gah-den” Club like a Southern aristocrat and it occurred to Stella that Alice did not see herself as an aristocrat. “The President of the Garden Club at the time was a very snooty woman. Very high and mighty. She liked to talk about her great-great-grandfatha’s slaves. The woman was full of happy darkie stories.”

“Now Alice,” Stella said.

“Well, she was. Anyway, come to find out, it was her grandfather who first brought kudzu to Chattanooga. Can you believe someone actually thought kudzu would be a good idea? He went over to the Orient with a delegation of businessmen from Atlanta and they brought it back to use for soil erosion. Well, when it got out that Aurelia Hunt’s grandfather was responsible for bringing kudzu to the South there was quite a scandal. The rest of the Garden Club mutinied. They nearly revoked her membership.” Alice chuckled, shaking her head and rolling her eyes like a wicked child.

Stella grinned. “And you enjoyed that, didn’t you?”

“Immensely.”

They stood in the dining room, grinning at each other. Behind Alice’s shoulder, Stella could see the portrait of the beautiful blonde woman. She had a slight smile on her lips as if she, too, was enjoying the Garden Club story.

Stella raised her hand and pointed at the portrait. “Alice, who is that woman?”

But Alice had already turned and started off across the wide dining room, and she obviously didn’t hear her.

Alice’s friends arrived promptly at eleven o’clock to pick her up for lunch. Stella and Alice were waiting for them in the foyer, and Stella opened the front door and said, “Hello!” She and Alice walked out onto the bricked stoop. Ann, the sister-in-law who was driving, jumped out of the car and came around to help Alice with her walker. She was a small woman with a dowager’s hump and a brisk manner. Behind her, Adeline climbed stiffly out of the passenger’s seat and stood beside the car, holding the door.

“Hello,” Stella said again, trying to be friendly. “Alice is really looking forward to this.”

Ann looked at Stella with the same expression of cold dismissal that Adeline had displayed earlier. Stella shut up. She tried not to let it bother her. She decided that from now on, she would ignore both Adeline and Ann. From the backseat of the car, Weesie leaned over and waved.

“Hello, I’m Weesie,” she said.

“Hi, Weesie. I’m Stella.”

She was unsure what she was supposed to do to get Alice to the car. She had seen a wheelchair in the guest bedroom but when she suggested using it, Alice had looked offended.

“I don’t need a wheelchair!” she said. “I haven’t needed a wheelchair since I got back from Cantor ten, five, oh I don’t know how many, years ago.”

Stella watched nervously as Alice navigated the steps with her walker. She put out her hand several times to steady her. “Are you sure you can do this? Do you need me to help you?”

Alice’s face flushed a dull red. She was breathing heavily. “Young lady I’ve been walking by myself since long before you were born! No, I do not need your help.”

The rebuke stung. Alice’s expression was cold, contemptuous. Stella glanced at Adeline and saw a look of secret satisfaction pass swiftly across her face. Alice settled herself on the front seat, and pulled her legs in. Adeline closed the door and climbed into the backseat beside Weesie.

“Fold that walker up and put it in the trunk,” Ann said to Stella, walking back around to the driver’s side. “We’ll be home in an hour and a half. Watch for us.”

She got in and started the car, letting it idle while Stella folded the walker, placed it in the trunk, and closed the hood. As they drove off, everyone inside the car was laughing.

Stella walked back inside, slamming the door behind her. Her throat prickled; she felt bruised. Ridiculous to let her feelings be hurt by a group of old rich bitches. Stella walked an endless loop through the house, berating herself. Where was that tough exterior shell she had worked so hard to build? People couldn’t hurt her because she wouldn’t let them. She gave up before they did. She turned away before she could see the disapproval in their faces. She moved on. It had seemed a good enough plan up until now, but somehow, without being aware she was doing it, she had let her guard down with Alice. She had felt something growing between them, maybe not friendship exactly, but something intimate, personal. She had misjudged their relationship entirely and now she felt raw, wounded in a way she had not let herself feel in some time.

Inside the house she and Alice were one way with each other, but outside in the real world when Alice was with her own kind, it was something else completely. She saw that now. What she had mistaken for companionship and mutual respect was an illusion.

She was a paid servant, nothing more. She would do well to remember that.

She was in the fourth grade when Stella realized for the first time that she and her mother were poor. There was just the two of them in those days, traveling through Lower Alabama (
L.A.
, her mother laughingly called it.) Her mother’s name was Candy. She was a Hamm from up around Maynardsville but she had not burdened Stella with this name, instead listing Stella’s father’s surname on the birth certificate. Earl Nightingale was a studio musician with
Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show
who came through Maynardsville on his way to Muscle Shoals to record an album. He would, no doubt, have been surprised to find that his night of tequila-hazed bliss with Candy had resulted in a daughter. Candy saw no reason to inform him, as he had no money, and everyone knew it was easier to squeeze blood out of a stone, than child support out of an itinerant musician.

Candy, in those days, weighed one hundred ten pounds and had a mane of thick red-gold hair, but over the years she put on weight, so that by the time Stella started fourth grade she weighed close to two hundred and fifty pounds.

Stella used to try to imagine her father. She saw him as a tall, stately man with a ready laugh and a loving, protective manner. Sometimes she imagined him with a guitar strapped to his chest, and sometimes she saw him as a fireman or an astronaut or a fighter pilot. She practiced saying,
My father says
, or
My father always lets me
, or
My father bought me a pony
. There were other children without fathers, she wasn’t the only one, but they seemed a pathetic, slightly disreputable group and not one that Stella wanted to be part of. There was something precarious about her and Candy’s rootless existence, their sad female undergarments hung out to dry in rented bathrooms, their old car always breaking down and requiring the kindness of strangers. Without a male presence in their lives they seemed diminished, vulnerable. There was a void at the center of their small world. And yet the men Candy brought home were dull and useless imitations; they did little to fill that void.

Stella knew what poor people were, she had lived among them all her life, but with the innocence of childhood, she had never actually considered herself to be one of them. She had no one else to compare herself to. Traveling around L.A., attending schools in small dusty towns, she was simply the smart girl who did her homework and didn’t cause trouble in class. She never stopped to consider the socio-economic pecking order because L.A. was pretty much a level playing field – everyone subsisted on food stamps and welfare or, for the more fortunate, paycheck to paycheck.

Moving to Tuscaloosa in the fourth grade changed all of that. Stella attended a new elementary school in a high-achieving district she was not zoned for. Candy drove her every day to the edge of a prosperous-looking neighborhood and dropped her off, and Stella walked three blocks to catch the school bus. The school was large and bright and clean, and there were new textbooks and maps of the world in every classroom. The school library was a treasure trove and Stella immersed herself in
Mary, Queen of Scots
and
Black Beauty
, coming home every Friday with a backpack full of clean, shiny books so that Candy slapped her playfully on the rear end and said, “Lord, girl, you’re going to wear your eyes out.” She met a dark-haired girl in her class named Donna Shelby, and they became good friends.

In October, Donna invited Stella to her birthday party. It was to be held on a Saturday afternoon at Donna’s home. When Stella gave her the party invitation, Candy looked at the address, squinting her eyes against her drifting cigarette smoke, and said, “So you’re friends with a rich girl, huh?” They were living at the time in an unpainted Victorian house that had been cut up into four apartments, the kind of sad, bedraggled-looking place that had Stella driven by, she would have thought,
Poor people live there.

In honor of the prestigious address on the invitation, Candy took Stella to the Wal-Mart and allowed her to spend more than a few dollars on a birthday present. Then she walked next door and borrowed a party dress from their neighbor, a divorced mother of three whose daughter had been appearing in pageants since she was two. Their apartment was crammed with trophies and sequined tiaras and pink sashes that read,
Miss Celestial Queen
or
Miss Southern Belle Glitz
. The daughter, the current reigning
Miss Tallapoosa Depot Days
, was named Madalyn and she had a closet filled with over four thousand dollars worth of pageant dresses and it was one of these, a blue satin number with a frilled, sparkly underskirt that Candy procured for Stella.

On Saturday morning, Candy drove Stella to the party. The neighborhood was even more impressive than the one where Candy dropped Stella off to catch the school bus. Looking out the streaked window at the two-story houses set on perfectly manicured lawns, Stella felt a tremor in the pit of her stomach. Although imposing, the houses were alike in their facades so that after a few minutes of driving and turning, Candy became hopelessly lost.

Two women were walking down the street toward them, and Candy leaned out the window and flapped her hand. “Excuse me! Woo-hoo, excuse me!”

“No,” Stella said. “Don’t.” She slid down in the seat. Her stomach hurt from the expansive quiet of the neighborhood and the realization that she and her mother didn’t belong here. The two women approached cautiously. Stella was acutely aware of Candy’s massive stomach swelling her
Redneck Woman
t-shirt, and their multi-colored Chevy Chevette, shaking and panting against the curb like an old dog.

The two women approaching were thin. They wore tennis shoes and jogging clothes. “Can we help you?” one of the women said in a tone indicating that she would rather not.

“Hey, y’all, we’re lost,” Candy said cheerfully. She held the birthday party invitation out the window and waved it. “We’re looking for 212 Persimmon Lane. The Shelby house. My daughter here, this is my daughter, Stella. Sit up and say hello, Stella. Well, anyway Stella’s been invited to the little Shelby girl’s birthday party and we’re just trying to find the house. Y’all wouldn’t happen to know the Shelby’s would you?”

The woman pointed at the end of the street. “Last house on the left,” she said.

Candy thanked them and they drove on. In the distance, the subdivision ended and Stella could see a series of wide, rolling fields and a lone chinaberry tree standing beside a small white house with a green barn out back.

Stella looked down at her blue-satin-encased lap. The frilled underskirt was beginning to raise a rash on her legs.

“I don’t feel good,” she said. “I want to go home.”

“Oh, no you don’t,” Candy said. “I paid good money for that birthday present. I drove you all the way out here. You’re going to the damn party.”

The girl who opened the front door had long blonde hair and a vacant, bored expression on her pretty face. Her eyes traveled from Stella’s shoes to her face and back down again. “Who are you?” she said.