We Are All Welcome Here (9 page)

I hesitated—grandly, I thought. Then I said, “Well, I…I don’t quite know. But I do know that the loveliest faces are to be seen by moonlight.” I sat on the ground beside her and reached out to touch her face. “For that is the time when one sees half with the eye and half with the fanny.
Fan
cy!”

Suralee grimaced but quickly regained composure. The play went on from there, a conversation between the doctor and the patient that showed how much they had in common, despite their glaring differences. They talked about their favorite season, their favorite songs. Something we’d never quite gotten right in rehearsal worked flawlessly in the play—we said something at the same time, then at the same time said, “Jinx, you owe me a Coke.” We gaily laughed and then stopped suddenly, for we realized what we both were feeling. Suralee said, “This can’t be happening. It’s impossible. It’s like trying to measure the night.”

“The night can be measured,” I said.

Suralee laughed. “No, it can’t!”

I told her how—too mechanically, I realized; I was afraid of forgetting the lines.

“Why, that’s…that’s
beautiful,
” Suralee said, and she was so convincing she made up for my wooden presentation. I looked into her face, lowered my voice as much as I could, and said, “Very beautiful.” I made sure not to look away too fast, so that the audience would understand that it was she I found beautiful. Then, in a fine, tremulous tone, I admitted my love for her, and asked if it was possible that she could care for me, too. Could she, possibly? Yes, she breathed—we’d written that into the script,
Yes, she breathes.
In that case, I said, would she come to live with me? Again she breathed Yes, oh yes. Then our favorite part, the dramatic pulling back just as Suralee and I were about to kiss because another patient was in trouble and needed me. “Will you wait for me?” I asked, and Suralee said, “I know that the moon brings all things magical, but just where do you think I might go?” This was a tribute to my mother’s sense of humor, and I snuck a look to see if she was smiling, which she was. I ran offstage, concern for the next patient evident in my face, my cardboard stethoscope slapping against my chest. I disappeared behind the bushes again, and LaRue stepped forward and turned to face the audience, a piece of paper Suralee had given him in his hand. He cleared his throat, smoothed down his tie. “Love,” he began, then stopped, removed his hat, and started again. “Love does not have legs,” he slowly read, his finger moving along. “It does not have arms. But it move mountains.” He put the paper down at his side, obviously relieved, and Peacie leapt up and began wildly applauding him. The others followed, though I hoped some of their applause was for us, too.

We had cake afterward, Peacie’s delicious buttermilk chocolate, and everyone was saying how much they had liked the play, how imaginative we were, what good actresses. When I talked to Dell, he told me that Rose Trippett was his best friend Ben’s grandmother. “Ben Samson? That football player?” I asked, and Dell said yes, that in fact he himself had been a football player, too, on the same team as Ben, but had quit after the accident. He’d always promised Ben that he’d come with him to Mississippi to visit Rose sometime—Ben had told Dell how nuts he was about his grandmother—but Dell never had. But now he was staying with Rose for a while, making sure she was all right, and deciding what he wanted to do next with his own life. Noreen stood right next to Dell until he left—early, as it happened, because Rose grew tired. And then Noreen glued herself to Brooks, who was glued to my mother—and she left when he did.

I lay in bed, thinking about Brooks. It might not have been such a good idea to do a play about loving a woman in an iron lung; it might have given him ideas. Not that he didn’t seem to already have them. Tonight he had told my mother that he would like to take her out to dinner sometime. My mother had laughed. Out to
dinner
! she’d said. Brooks had said sure, how about it. My mother had said it would be pretty hard with all her equipment—she could frog-breathe long enough to get somewhere close by, but then she’d need to get plugged in again. Brooks had said his friend Holt would come, he would help carry the equipment, and they’d make sure the restaurant had an outlet near their table.

“But you’d have to feed me and everyone would stare,” my mother had said, and Brooks had said he would pick a corner table and she would sit with her back to the people. I’d been sure she’d refuse him, but she didn’t. “Well, maybe,” she’d said, and she was smiling. Dell had overheard this conversation—it took place just as he was getting ready to leave—and had come over to look more closely at my mother’s equipment. “Seems like you could hook that one box up to a battery and then build something onto the back of your wheelchair that could carry what you’d need,” he’d said. “Just a plywood extension would do it.”

I loved that he wasn’t afraid of my mother, that he seemed to see past everything and acknowledge her as a person. It was a rare thing. Brooks had gotten all excited and said yes, that was right, he’d thought about that himself, he’d get to work on a design for it at the store tomorrow. “I’ll help you,” Dell had said, and Brooks smiled uneasily and said okay.

Suralee and I had been watching this, and I’d said, “Ugh! Look at him! See what I mean?” Suralee had said she thought it might be good for my mother to have a boyfriend. “Yeah, if it were someone like Dell,” I’d said, and Suralee had said she didn’t really think Dell would be interested in my mother. She’d stared straight ahead when she said this, and I’d seen that she wanted Dell for her own mother.
That’ll be the day,
I’d thought. Noreen had no more chance than my mother did. At least my mother was pretty. At least she was smart and funny. And Dell had liked her, I could tell. You could tell these things. She’d invited him to come back to visit, and he’d said he would.

I got out of bed to stand at the window and look out at where our play had taken place. I was eager to do another one and make more money, but Suralee said we had to do a different project first, one that could net us far more than our plays did. There was a sweepstakes she’d seen in one of her mother’s magazines. All you had to do was collect Sweetnuf cookie and cracker labels and send them in. Send in as many entries as you like; you could win five thousand dollars and a trip to the World’s Fair—that was first prize. Twenty-five hundred was second prize, five hundred dollars was third.

There were five days left to enter. We were always entering sweepstakes, and we had never won anything. But I agreed to help her find as many labels as we could. We’d go door-to-door, begging, as usual. Then we’d get started on the next play. It would be about Noreen—she herself had requested that.

I climbed back into bed and lifted up my pajama top so that the fan would blow on my skin. It was so hot and humid. Other kids would be out on the lawns, sleeping on mattresses they’d dragged outside. But I was not like other kids, as my mother was not like other mothers. Forever and ever. This I would tell
Photoplay,
too. To their great admiration, I was sure.

“W
e plumb out of everything,” Peacie said, shaking the nearly empty cereal box. “You didn’t get half what I done told you to get last time.”

“We didn’t have enough food stamps,” I said.

“Well, we got more now. I want you go back to the store. And I’m gon’ call LaRue help you, make sure you do it right this time.”

“Can’t,” I said. I was at the kitchen table, looking through the
Seventeen
Mrs. Beasley had given us. I had to give it to Suralee later on—my turn was up.

“What do you mean, you cain’t?”

I didn’t look up. “I made plans with Suralee. We’re going to go somewhere. She’s coming to get me in half an hour.”

“Oh, I see. You just went right ahead, lay out your day, never mind checking with anyone else.”

I turned to look at her. “That’s right. And I can’t go to the store.”

“Well, you gon’ surprise yourself, because you will.”

“Suralee and I are entering a contest, and we need to collect box tops! We need the whole morning to do it!”

Peacie was quiet for a moment, wiping a plate. I knew she was reconsidering. Peacie liked sweepstakes, too. She herself would often enter, though never more than once. She put the plate in the cupboard, then said, “Did I
say
you going to the store this morning? No, I did not. You can collect box tops this morning, but you be back by noon. Or your behind meet up with a certain wooden spoon.”

“You can’t spank me anymore, Peacie,” I said. “I’m too old.”

“You too old, you say.”

“Yes, I am.”

“Well, I’ll tell you what. If you so old, you don’t need no one beg you to get groceries that is mostly ate by you.”

“I said I’d go!”

“That’s what I said, too. We in agreement, ain’t that something. Now see if your mother done with that bedpan.”

I looked out the window on my way to the dining room. Trees moving in the wind. Wide blue sky. Miles of it. Birds soaring obliquely on an updraft.

My mother was done with the bedpan all right. “Get Peacie, honey,” she said. “Don’t you do this one.”

There were these small mercies.

“How are we going to pay for the envelopes and stamps?” I asked Suralee. We were walking home, carrying the amazing number of box tops we’d gotten. It seemed as though everybody liked Sweetnuf brand, and almost no one else was entering the sweepstakes. Suralee said it must not have been advertised in many magazines. In just under four hours, we’d collected 186 box tops—12 of which had come from one house alone.

“I’ll get some money from my mom,” Suralee said. “You can get it from your mom.”

“Right,” I said bitterly.

Suralee grabbed at a passing bumblebee. I jumped back, saying,
“Don’t!”

“Relax,” she said, and smiled at me sideways, the way she sometimes did.

“One of these days you’re going to catch one and get stung,” I said. I hoped for it, actually. It seemed she deserved it. I didn’t wish her pain, only consequences.

“You need to come up with about ten dollars,” she said.

“Ten dollars!”

“We need good envelopes,” Suralee said. “Real thick ones that will just leap into someone’s hand.”

“What if we won first prize?” It hurt my chest to think about it.

“I
know,
” Suralee said.

We silenced ourselves—with our respective visions, I was sure. In mine, my mother’s caretakers were white registered nurses. They wore white uniforms and white nylons and caps. And they were there all the time, day and night. All night. I had my canopied bed, I had a wardrobe full of clothes, and I went to a fancy school. Not in Tupelo.

When Suralee and I got to my house, we saw Dell’s car pulled up in front. We looked at each other, understanding immediately what we needed to do. We tiptoed up onto the porch and looked in the front-room window. No sign of anyone. Then we heard voices coming from the backyard, so we crept alongside the house, behind the bushes, until we could see Dell sitting on the ground beside my mother. Peacie was a distance away, hanging sheets on the line. My mother was in her turquoise bathing suit, her back to us.

Suralee pointed toward the upstairs of the house. She meant that we should go into my bedroom, which was directly above my mother, so that we could hear their conversation better. “The screen door’s locked,” I whispered. Suralee rolled her eyes. She motioned for me to follow her, and we went back to the front-porch door.

“Now watch,” Suralee said. She pulled the screen door outward the short distance it would go, slid a box top into the small crack, and then quickly jerked it up, lifting the latch. We went inside and locked the door behind us, then raced up to my room.

We sat cross-legged, directly beneath my window. Suralee closed her eyes to hear better; I pressed my hand over my mouth and stared hard off to the side, my own way of concentrating. “No reason it won’t work,” Dell was saying. “Couldn’t be easier. After I bring Brooks back the measurements, he’ll finish building the platform today. I’ll give him a hand attaching it.”

“I can’t believe I’ll be able to go out, just like that,” my mother said. “And to a restaurant!”

“Are you nervous about it?” Dell asked, and I liked it, the ease with which he asked this rather personal question.

“I guess I am,” my mother said, laughing a little. “I know everyone will be gawking at me. But you know, I
should
go out once in a while.”

“’Course you should,” Dell said, then added, “Hell, I’ll take you somewhere. You want to go somewhere with me sometime?”

There was a thrilling pause. I looked over at Suralee, but she wouldn’t open her eyes. Then I heard my mother say, “Of course I want to.” And this I did not like. There was a tone I did not recognize in my mother’s voice. Things were all of a sudden moving too quickly for my taste. And too oddly. My mother, going out, with a man. With two!

Suralee stood up. “I gotta go.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.” Suralee pulled the box tops from the waistband of her shorts, made two even piles, and handed me one. “Mail these tomorrow,” she said. “Buy envelopes and stamps and mail them. Be sure you enter in your mother’s name—you’re not old enough to win.”