The Sweet Potato Queens' First Big-Ass Novel (23 page)

“I hope there's some goddamn fried chicken left,” Mary Bennett said, and I knew all was mostly right with the world.

“Lord's name in vain?!” Gerald cried, covering his ears.

“Sor-ry,” Mary Bennett said. “I hope there's some fucking fried chicken left.”

Both Patsy and I were so glad to see Mary Bennett and Gerald acting like their old selves, we smiled until our faces hurt.

“You know what's missing?” I said.

“I sure as hell do,” Mary Bennett said. “Red Jell-O with those tiny, mini marshmallows. It's not a proper funeral spread without it.”

“I was thinking of Tammy,” I said. “All the Queens are living back in Jackson except for her.”

“I have been studying on that very thing,” Mary Bennett said, snapping a napkin open. “Do you know how long it's been since the Queens have been out of pocket?”

I'd almost forgotten that expression. Back in high school, whenever we went on a road trip in the Tammymobile, we'd called it being “out of pocket.”

“It's high time for us to take a vacation,” Mary Bennett said. “We could go to England and pay Tammy a surprise visit.”

“Sounds great.” I grimaced. “Too bad I gotta earn a livin'.”

“I'm not sure this is a good time for me to be away from the Pink Panthers—those bitches are plotting something behind my back. I just know it's some kind of big drag show,” Gerald said, twitching his nose. “Here I'm trying to make a serious impact on the AIDS crisis in Mississippi and if I left for five minutes, I'd come back to find all of them prancing around in ball gowns, boas, and tiaras.”

“I'm way behind on my work,” Patsy said. “I could never get away.”

“None of y'all are so fucking busy that you can't spare a week to go on a free vacation to Great Britain!” Mary Bennett said, waving her fork. “Think of this! Four-star hotels and meals. Gorgeous scenery! Fabulous nightlife. And best of all, I did say ‘free,' right? This is my gift to you. I am footing the en-tire bill.”

“Well, if you put it that way,” I said. “I
suppose
I
could
do a little rearranging of my schedule.”

“Have y'all forgotten my fund-raiser?” Gerald asked.

“Of course we haven't,” Mary Bennett said. “We'll be back in plenty of time. This trip will give us some excellent rebonding time. Knowing your proclivity for groups with acronym names, I am proposing that we form a group in our own honor, and this trip to reclaim Tammy as our own, Q.U.E.E.R.—Queens United for the Evolution of Everlasting Relationships,” she said with a flourish. “I've already had the T-shirts made. Give it up—you're going.”

Gerald's face lit up at the mention of the T-shirts—the man clearly loved an acronym. “Well, I suppose an inaugural out-of-pocket trip is in order for the charter members of Q.U.E.E.R. I
love
it!”

“I'd have to find a babysitter for Mack, and I'd be too far behind in work when I got back,” Patsy said. “Besides, I'm seeing this guy named Earl, and he and I—”

“Don't make me play the dead daddy card, Swiss Miss,” Mary Bennett said, pointing a chicken wing at her.

“Well, I've always dreamed of going to London,” Patsy said, knowing it was pointless to argue further. “And of course, I'd love to see Tammy again.”

“It's settled then,” Mary Bennett said. “I'll just give my travel agent a ‘ringy-dingy,' or whatever it is that they say over there.”

 

Two days later we were at thirty-five thousand feet on a 747 bound for London.

“Do you see Big Ben yet?” Patsy asked, a few minutes after our pilot announced our descent into Heathrow. This was also my first trip to London.

“I can't see a thing,” I said, my nose smooshed against the window. The city below looked intricate and unusual, like the inside of a transistor radio. As the jet descended, things became intelligible. A series of tiny colorful squares became a full parking lot. A moving red blip turned into a double-decker bus.

The cabin came alive with the rustles and stirrings of the passengers in anticipation of landing.

“We're here!” Mary Bennett said as we jounced along the runway. I glanced out the window. This particular view of England didn't look altogether jolly. It seemed pretty wet and mostly gray.

Once we cleared customs, we picked up our rental car. Gerald had spent a little time in London so he volunteered to drive.

“Land's sakes alive,” Patsy said, opening the door to a blue Peugeot. “Someone has goofed up big time at the auto factory. This car is defective.”

Gerald chuckled. “That's not a mistake. In London they drive on the left side of the road, so the steering wheel is on the right.”

“That's four-plus crazy,” Patsy said, shaking her head. “I thought the only difference between England and America is England is run by a queen.”

“Which we approve of mightily,” added Mary Bennett.

“There's more differences than you would expect,” Gerald said. He opened the trunk and started tossing our suitcases inside. “The trunk is called a boot, and the hood is a bonnet. The British call gas petrol and they sell it by the liter, not the gallon.”

“What are these called?” Mary Bennett said, pointing to the wheels.

“Tires,” Gerald said, wiping his hands together. “Not everything's different.”

We arrived at our hotel just as the dining room closed for lunch.

“There's a pub 'round the corner, if you're feeling peckish,” the desk clerk said.

“We ain't peckish,” Patsy said. “We're starvin'.”

After we'd settled in our rooms and freshened up, we all met in the lobby and strolled to a pub called The Frisky Friar.

“I heard the weather in London was gloomy,” I said, shivering as we stood in the entryway of the cozy building, “but I'm frozen. I can't feel my toes.”

A waiter, holding aloft a tray of gold-hued ales, smiled at me. “Keep your pecker up,” he said brightly. “This beastly weather is supposed to take a turn for the better.”

Mary Bennett made a face and I shrugged.

We settled in a comfortable booth near a crackling fire and were offered menus.

“You know,” Patsy said, as she perused hers, “when I was looking at guidebooks, there was not a single mention of the English's obvious obsession with penises. First someone asks if we're peckish, then the waiter tells us to keep our peckers up, and now they're serving spotted dick on the menu.” She tossed it aside. “I do believe I am losing my appetite.”

“What in the world's a toad in the hole?” I said with a frown. “I have a powerful hankering for a big wad of bacon, but I don't see it here.”

“Bacon is called rashers and French fries are called chips,” Gerald said with amusement. He almost seemed like his old self.

“I don't understand why these Brits don't speak American English,” Patsy said, shaking her head. “We whupped their butts in the war, after all.”

“Try to keep that keen observation to yourself,” Mary Bennett said drily as the waitress returned with pints for everybody.

 

“So what's the plan of action?” I asked.

“I'd like to stay in London for a couple of days, then drive to the Cotswolds to Belmont Manor and pop in on Tammy,” Mary Bennett said.

“I hope to hell she and James aren't off jet-setting somewhere,” I said. “It would suck not to see her.”

“She
has
to be around,” Patsy said. “We've come all this way.”

The next two days we toured London. We visited Harrods and found it to be far grander than Macy's ever thought about being. We took in a Mary Cassatt exhibit at the National Gallery, and saw the crown jewels at the Tower of London. While Gerald gathered info on the local gay activist groups, the girls had high tea at our hotel, where we discovered that the tea was Earl Grey instead of Luzianne and the biscuits definitely weren't the kind you served with flour gravy. Buckingham Palace wasn't open to the public because it was winter (we were hoping for a glimpse of Di or, at the very least, Fergie), but we did walk around Kensington Gardens.

On the third day, with Gerald at the wheel, we made our way to the Cotswolds region.

“It's like a postcard around here,” I mused, as we passed through scores of tiny villages filled with stone cottages, cobbled courtyards, and tidy gardens.

“We're looking for a town called Upper Slaughter,” Gerald said to Mary Bennett, who had the map unfolded on her lap.

“Better Upper Slaughter than lower, I suppose,” Mary Bennett said with a smirk.

We took a wrong turn, so Gerald stopped at a petrol station to find our bearings. I spotted a telephone and said, “I'm going to try Tammy one more time. Maybe we'll have better luck now that we're in her neck of the woods.”

I got out of the car and slipped some coins into the phone. After a few rings, there was a click, and to my delight, Tammy answered.

“Tammy!” I said, excitedly. “This is Jill. It's so good to hear your voice.”

“Jill? Oh my goodness! It's been so long. I know I haven't been very good about writing lately. I'm been so incredibly busy.”

“I've tried calling, too. This is the first time I've been able to get through to you.”

“Yes,” Tammy said with a sigh. “We're in a very small village, and the phones aren't always reliable.”

“You aren't going to believe this! The Queens and I are HERE—we've been in London and right this minute, we're only about an hour away from you. We hadn't heard from you in so long, we decided to just track your ass down and surprise you!”

There was a long silence on the other end, and I wondered if I'd lost the connection.

“Tammy, are you there?”

“I'm here,” she said in a faint voice. “I'm afraid you've picked a dreadfully inconvenient time to come. James and I were just on our way out the door to visit Lord and Lady Amherst in Derbyshire. They're having several couples in. We've planned it for weeks.”

My heart sank. “We've flown all this way just to see you. Couldn't you put off your trip for a couple of hours?”

“I can't. James would be in a snit, and we're supposed to ride with friends because our Bentley is on the blink,” Tammy said, with a little bit of an English accent.

I was so stunned and so deeply disappointed I could scarcely speak.

“Have a good time,” I managed to choke out. “We really have to keep in better contact. All of the Queens miss you so much.”

“I'm terribly sorry, Jill,” she said, curtly. “But I really have to ring off now.”

I hung up the phone and trudged back to the car, where the Queens had the map spread out, plotting their route to Upper Slaughter.

“Might as well forget the whole thing. Tammy won't be there,” I said as I got back into the car.

“What's going on?” Mary Bennett said, craning her neck from the front seat.

“She's flitting off to some party with a bunch of lords and ladies. She didn't seem the least bit pleased we were here,” I said. “The only reason she hasn't been answering our letters is because she's been too busy social climbing. I was worrying for nothin'.”

“Are you sure?” Patsy said, practically in tears. “I can't believe she wouldn't want to see us.”

“Tammy always wanted to be one of the beautiful people,” I said, pierced through the heart by her dismissal of us. “Now that she's finally gotten it, she doesn't need us anymore.”

I tucked the gift I'd brought her under the front seat so I didn't have to look at it. It was a photograph album filled with the pictures of the Queens I'd collected over the years.

“I'm with Swiss Miss on this one,” Mary Bennett said. “That just doesn't sound like Tammy. Maybe we pissed her off.”

I didn't want to believe it either. I'd spent more time with Tammy than any of the other Queens. I'd saved her life when she'd taken sleeping pills, and she'd stopped me from losing all my money to Ross. I'd ridden out all her affairs over the years. I'd assumed the bond between us was invincible, but apparently I was wrong.

“She was so cold on the phone, I'm surprised the receiver didn't sprout icicles,” I said. “We might as well head back to London.”

“We don't have reservations in London,” Gerald said in a dejected voice. “Why don't we stay the night in Upper Slaughter like we planned? We'll just have a nice time without Tammy. It's supposed to be a quaint village.”

“Whatever,” I said, staring out the window and wiping away tears. What I really wanted to do was to head straight back to Jackson.

The drive was quiet. All the Queens were brooding about Tammy. I alternated between fury and despair.