The Book of Bright Ideas (14 page)

When the floor around Ma and Aunt Verdella looked like a matted rug, Freeda rolled their hair in pink, foamy curlers. Then we had to wait till they took turns sitting under the dryer cap, to see what they were going to look like. “Is this thing turned up too hot, or am I just having a hot flash?” Aunt Verdella said as she fanned herself with the fairy pictures Winnalee had given her for her fridge.

“Can you color my head red like yours, Freeda?” Winnalee begged. “Please?”

Freeda laughed. “You'll have to wait a bit longer before you start that shit, Winnalee.”

Winnalee crossed her arms. “But I want to play beauty shop too!” So Aunt Verdella, whose hair was dried but still in curlers, told Winnalee to get a couple rubber bands and she'd give her some braids. Winnalee ran to get the rubber bands.

“Button could use another hair trim soon,” Ma said, while Winnalee's footsteps thumped on the ceiling above our heads.

Freeda looked over at me, and I slipped my hands up over my ears.

“Jewel, why in the hell do you do that to her hair, anyway?”

“What?” Ma asked. Freeda pulled the pink cap up so Ma's ears would be sticking out.

“Cut her hair like that, and perm it. You ever ask her if that's what she wants?” My arms started itching like crazy the minute Freeda said that, because I was afraid Freeda would say that bad F-word, so I started making those noises in my throat, even though I knew that those noises would only make Freeda stare at me longer.

Ma shrugged. “Well, I, uh…”

“She hates her hair like that, Jewel,” Freeda says. “She
hates
it!”

“But it's easy to take care of. It stays neat,” Ma said.

“Yeah, well, your hair would be easiest to take care of too, if you shaved it off to your scalp, but I don't see you doing that. Jesus H. Christ, Jewel. Let the kid have long hair if she wants it. It's no skin off of your ass. She's old enough to take care of it herself.” Ma squirmed a bit, and Freeda told her to sit still.

Winnalee came in the room then, carrying a few rubber bands. “Winnalee, get your butt over here,” Freeda said. “Come on. Stand behind Button. There. Now lean your head right over the top of hers.” Freeda's hands started rearranging Winnalee's loops, tucking them around the sides of my face until they tickled my cheeks and my arms. “Look at this, Jewel,” Freeda said, loud enough to be heard over the hum of the dryer. “Just look at how cute your daughter would look in long hair. She's got the face of an angel, and she should have hair like one. Just look at her heart-shaped face. She's got your eyes too.”

My whole insides smiled when she said those things, then she leaned over and kissed my cheek. Then Freeda told Winnalee to move, and she started rubbing her fingertips in circles on my scalp. “Button, every day you massage your scalp good, just like I'm doing. It stimulates the hair follicles and will get your hair growing faster. Before you know it, you'll have hair as long as Winnalee's.”

The whole rest of the time we were there, even though I didn't get to play beauty shop, just knowing that maybe I'd get to grow my hair long now made me smile. And when I went into the bathroom, after I peed, I stood at the mirror and I rubbed my head, just like Freeda had done, while I looked for the heart shape on my face.

Freeda was busy taking the curlers out of Ma's hair when Mike Thompson yelled hello through the screen door. “Come in,” Winnalee shouted, and Freeda gave her a crabby look. We all hushed up when Mike came into the kitchen.

“I knew it was your day off, so I thought maybe you'd like to go for a drive, or a beer, or something,” Mike said.

“Sorry, Verdella and Jewel are here. We're doing their hair. Another time, Mike.”

“We're almost done, aren't we, Freeda?” Aunt Verdella called out.

“Another time, Mike,” Freeda said. Freeda didn't walk him to the door but gave him a wave and started talking to Ma about her haircut, as though he'd already left the room. “I really like Mike,” Verdella said.

“He's nice enough, I guess,” Freeda said.

“At least he puts the toilet seat down after he pees, so I don't fall in in the morning,” Winnalee said.

 

Me and Winnalee walked Aunt Verdella home before I had to leave, so we could help her show Uncle Rudy her new hairdo. He might not have noticed, but Aunt Verdella saw to it that he did. She marched right in front of his head, blocking his eyes from the TV, and she turned her head this way and that, so he could see her light red-brown hair, cut short and spicy-looking, like Freeda said. “Holy cow! Who's this standin' in my living room?” Uncle Rudy said. “She's a real looker. Boy, is Verdie gonna be mad when she sees the beauty queen Button and Winnalee brought home for me.” We all giggled when he said that.

Ma didn't stand in front of Daddy to get him to see her new hair. She stood quietly at the sink when he came through the door and headed straight for the junk drawer. “Jewel, you see my Phillips screwdriver?”

“No,” Ma said.

“Well, damn it. I thought I left it on the table when I came in earlier. You sure you didn't move it?”

Ma patted her new blondie bubble-hair that Freeda had made stand high by taking a rat-tail comb and running it backward down strands of Ma's hair. Then she made it smooth by combing some hair over the top of it to hide the ratty parts. When Ma had stood in front of Freeda's bathroom mirror, she patted her hair as though it were a new baby puppy. But now her pats looked more like slaps.

“Jewel?” Daddy said. “You hear—” Daddy stopped the second he looked up and saw Ma. His eyebrows scrunched down, and his mouth fell open.

I held my breath, wanting—and hoping—that Daddy would say something funny and nice like Uncle Rudy had, but he didn't. Instead, he said, “What the hell did you do?”

“Freeda did it,” Ma said. “She did Verdella's too.”

Daddy shook his head, then went back to rummaging in the drawer. “I picked up a box of files last time I was in town, but I can't find those damn things either.”

The next morning, when Ma drove me over to Aunt Verdella's, she was wearing her best office suit and a sheer scarf, even though it wasn't cold or rainy outside. As she tugged the knot a bit so it wasn't so tight under her chin, I thought of how maybe that scarf was supposed to be like a pair of hands. Yet the farther she got down the road, the more I saw her glance in the rearview mirror, and by the time we reached Aunt Verdella's, I thought I saw a bit of a smile tugging at the corner of her lips.

After breakfast, when we ran to Winnalee's to get some different dress-up shoes for Winnalee because the ones she had on kept slipping off, I asked her if I could add another bright idea. Winnalee handed me the book, and I wrote,
Bright Idea #90: After you play beauty shop, your husband might say you look like a beauty queen, or he might just ask you where the Phillips screwdriver is. Either way, it doesn't matter, as long as your new hair makes you think nice things about yourself.

13

That week, Daddy took two days he had piled up from his vacation time so he could go with Uncle Rudy to a cattle auction somewhere or other. It was a hot day. One of those kind of days where your skin, your clothes, and everything you touch feels sticky. I could feel it in my guts that it was gonna storm. I didn't like bad storms any more than Ma did. Especially when Daddy wasn't home.

While we weeded the vegetable garden, every now and then Ma would stop chopping at the ground with her hoe and look up at the clouds that were piling up like giant marshmallows stacked on a white plate.

Ma was always quiet when she worked, but on this day there was something different about her quietness. There'd been something different about it ever since the day she said those bad things to Aunt Verdella and Freeda yelled at her. Now it was like her brain wasn't just empty when she worked, but like maybe she was thinking really hard about some things. Sometimes, I figured she was thinking about sad things, because her face would get all droopy. But other times they must have been happy thoughts, because her lips would tilt up just a bit, and her eyes would look softer.

We didn't get to finish the weeding before the thunder started grumbling in the distance, not loud, more like the sky was trying to clear its throat. “It's the calm before the storm,” Ma said, as she reached down and ran her hand through the leaves creeping across the dirt, to see what size the cucumbers were. She looked up at the sky, then said, “We'd better go inside.” She wasn't gonna get no arguing from me, even if I dared to argue, because the air was all foggy with those little black bugs no bigger than specks that always come out in the evening on summer nights. The ones called
nats
but spelled with a
g
in front. The mosquitoes were biting too.

We picked up the gardening tools and carried them to the shed, and by the time we put them away and cleaned our hands off with the hose, the sky was blinking like Christmas, and my stomach was swirling with scared. I wanted to go into the house and hide right then, but Ma spotted the clothes on the line and said we had to take them off first.

“Don't yank,” Ma called when I tried to hurry because the wind was kicking up. We barely got Daddy's work pants in the basket when the rain started coming down. As we ran to the house, the wind and rain pressed our clothes to our skin.

Ma stood by the dining-room window folding pillowcases as she watched the black clouds roll across the field toward us. I wanted to tell her not to stand there (because even Uncle Rudy thought that standing by a window when it was lightning wasn't a bright idea), but only noises, not words, came up from my throat.

When the storm came full blast, we could hear hail clunking on the roof. Ma and I ran to the front door and watched it come down, popping on the grass and pinging off the metal garage like bullets. “I think we'd better go down to the basement,” Ma said. “This isn't looking good.” She had to say it loud, because the storm was noisy with howling wind and lightning and thunder.

Ma pushed the front door closed, and we hurried to the basement. We sat on the bottom stair. Out the basement window, I could see the ground, and a tree was bent so far over that it was almost lying down. I crossed my fingers, hoping me and Winnalee's magic tree wouldn't get blown over or struck by lightning.

When the storm ended, Ma and I went upstairs. “A tree must have gone down over the electrical wires,” Ma said when the lights inside the house wouldn't switch on. We went outside then. The ground was white with hail the size of peas, and there were broken branches strung across the yard.

After we got back inside, Ma paced around for a bit, then said maybe we should go check on Aunt Verdella.

Aunt Verdella was just coming out of her house when we pulled in. She had her fists propped on her fat part. “That sure was some storm,” she said. “You're out of electricity too, I suppose. Freeda's not. Course, they're on a different line than us.” She looked out over at the field where the oats—still a lemony green—stood about doll-high. “The oats look fine, but they're gonna grow mold in the low spots now with this much rain. Corn's okay. It could have been worse.”

Aunt Verdella rubbed the top part of her arms, which were goose-pimpled because the air was chilly after the storm. “Let's take a hike over to Freeda and Winnalee's,” she said.

It was Freeda's idea that we should have a sleepover. Ma laughed a bit at first, like she thought that was the silliest idea she ever heard. “Well, why not? What are you three gonna do, anyway? Stumble around in your dark houses all night by yourselves?”

“Oh, stay, Jewel!” Aunt Verdella said. “It'll be fun! I always wanted to go to a pajama party.”

So that's what we did. We had a pajama party!

Me and Winnalee made ourselves bologna sandwiches. I made mine just like Freeda did, with bologna and mayonnaise, and lettuce, and pickles and gobs of potato chips crushed over the whole mess. I made it so big that my mouth could hardly fit over it. Ma looked at me like she wanted to tell me to eat like a lady, but then she closed her mouth.

When we got done with our sandwiches, Freeda made us all a banana split. My tummy hurt by the time I scooped up the last bit of banana, floating in a white, pink, and brown swirl of mixed-up ice cream and Reddi Wip.

Aunt Verdella said she almost needed a nap after that, but Freeda said, “No such thing as sleeping tonight!” Then she got out a case as big as a tackle box and opened it. It was filled with makeup and nail polish. “I used to sell cosmetics,” Freeda said.

“She lies,” Winnalee said. “She bought those at a garage sale.”

“Sit your butt down here, Jewel,” Freeda said. “You've got the good-hair thing going on now, but we gotta do something about that pale face of yours.”

Winnalee grabbed a bottle of nail polish and shook it. “Let's do our faces too, Button,” Winnalee said. I looked up.

“I don't think that would be a good idea,” Ma said.

Freeda, who was taking out compacts of this and that, and tubes of lipstick, and lining them on the table, looked over at Ma. “Why in the hell not? What, you think the kiddie police are gonna crash our party and arrest you for letting a nine-year-old wear makeup? Loosen up, Jewel. For cryin' out loud.” She looked up at Ma for a second, then she sprung up from her chair. She went to the cupboard and took down a big bottle filled with something that looked like water, though I didn't think it was. Then she grabbed the pitcher of orange juice from the counter, where me and Winnalee had left it.

“What are you doing?” Ma asked, as Freeda pulled down three tall glasses.

“I'm fixing us a little drink. Something to help you loosen up enough to let that rod slip out of your ass.” Freeda clinked ice into the glasses, half-filled the glasses with the water-colored stuff, then poured orange juice up to the rims. “Ah,” she said, as she took a big gulp of hers. “It's hotter than hell in this house. It cool off outside any?” she asked, and Ma said it had.

Winnalee unscrewed the bottle of pinky-red nail polish she'd been shaking. “You paint mine, Button, and I'll paint yours.” I looked over at Ma, but I couldn't see her eyes because she had them closed so Freeda could yank out her eyebrow hairs with tiny metal pinchers. “Ouch! Ouch!” Ma said, and Freeda told her to stop flinching.

“Go on, Button!” Freeda said. “A little nail polish ain't gonna hurt nothing.”

Aunt Verdella giggled every time Ma cried ouch, and Freeda said, “You just wait, Verdella. You're next!”

Freeda took another gulp from her drink and made Ma do the same, then she smeared some stuff the color of skin on her face. When she had her face all covered, she started drawing lines along Ma's eyelids with a tiny paintbrush. “You keep still too, Button,” Winnalee said, as she brushed pink color on my fingernails. I liked the way the polish looked, all pinky and pretty, and I liked the way it felt too, all cool and wet.

“Jesus, I'm hot,” Freeda said. She stopped what she was doing and pulled the front of her shirt out to blow at her boobies. She opened the back door wider. “These old houses take forever to cool down after a storm. I need to get a goddamn fan,” she said. She peered outside. “Looks like more rain's coming.”

When Freeda had Ma's eye lines drawn, she moved over to Aunt Verdella's chair and started drawing lines on her eyes too. “Oops,” she said when her hand slipped and she drew a zigzag almost to the soft spot on the side of Aunt Verdella's head—the spot you aren't supposed to whack, because it could kill you or make you mental. Freeda giggled as she dabbed at Aunt Verdella's eye with a wet cotton ball.

After Freeda outlined their eyes in black, she started painting the lids up with eye shadow—green for Ma, and blue for Aunt Verdella. She brushed those colors on until she bumped into their eyebrows, which she'd already plucked into tipped-over half-moons.

Freeda picked up this funny-looking metal thing with finger holes like scissors and clamped it over Aunt Verdella's eye. “Ouch!” Aunt Verdella cried.

“Sit still, for crissakes, so I can get ahold of your lashes to curl them. And stop that blinking.”

“What eyelashes? I haven't had eyelashes for fifteen years! You might not be able to see that, in your drunken state, but trust me, all you're curlin' there is my skin!”

“Oh, Verdella. Stop pissin' and moanin',” Freeda said. “You gotta suffer to be beautiful. Now sit still so I can get this mascara on without smudging it, or I'll have to start all over.” Freeda dabbed at Aunt Verdella's bent eyelashes with a teeny black brush until they looked like stubby black spider legs.

After she was finished with their eyes, Freeda stood back to admire her work, and me and Winnalee joined her, me keeping my fingers spread and my hands in the air, like Winnalee told me to do so I wouldn't mess my nails. “Now we'll color up your lips and cheeks,” Freeda said. She did that, then dusted their faces with powder. “There! Done! Now go take a look, girls, but don't blink hard until your mascara dries.”

Ma and Aunt Verdella raced into the bathroom, and Winnalee and me followed. They crowded in front of the mirror, blinking at themselves and each other. “Good Lord, Freeda!” Aunt Verdella said. “Whose makeup did you think you were doing, anyway? Cleopatra's?” We giggled.

“What? You two never looked better in your whole lives! Don't they look gorgeous, girls?”

“They look like movie stars!” Winnalee said, and Aunt Verdella added, “Godzilla, maybe!” then she ha-ha-ed hard.

“All I have to say,” Freeda said, “is too bad the Peters men are out of town. Look at the two hot tamales they're missing out on tonight! Owee!”

“Oh my God,” Aunt Verdella said, as she braced herself against the bathroom counter. “I keep laughin' like this, and I'm gonna wet myself!” This made Ma laugh all the harder.

When things settled down, me and Winnalee played checkers and hula-hooped in the big part of the living room, while the ladies talked about hair and clothes, and dropping-down boobies and fat bellies, and all that other stuff I guess ladies talk about when they have a pajama party. After we hula-hooped, Winnalee wanted to play movie stars.

“Let's have a TV show for them!” Winnalee said, as we were clunking down the stairs in high heels that flopped at our feet. I didn't want to, though, because that would mean that Ma would be sitting in the audience. “I'll be an audience lady tonight,” I told Winnalee. She didn't argue, because she thought she had a good story.

Downstairs, Freeda had the lights out and candles lit, even though the electricity wasn't out. In the candlelight, Ma's eyes looked like two pieces of coal and her skin ghost-white (but for those two dark stains on her cheeks). “Look at me, Button. Not your ma,” Winnalee said right after she started her show, about a dancing, singing saloon girl.

Winnalee kept flashing her painted fingernails and fiddling to keep the balled-up socks in the pointed part of her too-big blouse. When she yelled to the cowpokes to watch her dance, then did that butt-shaking thing I knew meant sexy, I cringed. I glanced over at Ma, expecting her to be all crabby-looking, but she wasn't. She was laughing in slow motion, just like Freeda and Aunt Verdella.

Ma put her glass—which was almost empty—to her mouth and some slopped down her blouse. “Good grief,” she said, “I think I'm drunk!”

Aunt Verdella giggled. “I
know
I'm drunk!”

When there didn't seem to be much left to Winnalee's story, Freeda stood up and threw a pillow at Winnalee. “Go play like a normal kid,” she said.

Freeda went to the front door and flicked on the porch light. There were sparkles in the trail of rain dropping off of the eaves. “Okay, that's it!” she said. “I'm gonna cool off one way or another.” And out the door into the rain she went.