The Queen of Palmyra (5 page)

Little Dan pulled his comb out of his pocket and stuck it in his mouth. He sucked on it a minute and then he pulled it out and said real fast and low, “A cake a week.” His eyes were gnats, flitting here and there.

I’m thinking a cake a week! What a nerve. Even we don’t get a cake a week! Even Miss Shirley Bishop doesn’t get a whole cake a week.

Mama cocked one eyebrow. I could tell she’d settled into hating him as much as I did. “How about half a cake? I usually have a half left over.” She smiled a thin, hard little smile.

“Every week?” He poufed his hair up with the slimy comb.

“Every week. Fifty-two weeks a year. No squawking about all this and no killing Florence. That’s the deal. And that includes May too. We’re all just going to forget this whole thing happened.” May had perked up over the cake deal and was drawing close. Little Dan’s nest had started to take shape and now my mother hated him so much she couldn’t even look in his direction any more. She had her eye on me now. “Now Florence, you pick up these shirts and see if you can shake the dirt off them. Dan, go in and clean up before your mother sees you like that.”

When Little Dan started for his back door, Mama’s shoulders slumped. She picked up her clothes basket, straightened out the clothes on top, and went into the house. In about two seconds, Daddy came out. He stormed right by me, on down the stepping-stone path. He was carrying his precious box under his arm like a sack of potatoes. I yelled out, “Bye, Daddy.” But he didn’t even turn around, much less answer, and a minute later I heard the Ford start up and then the tires yelp when he scratched off.

When I opened the front door, Mama was rummaging around in a bottom cabinet under the kitchen sink. She pulled out a bottle marked “poison,” with a skull and crossbones on it. It looked like it was half full of something clear like water and she was pouring some out into a glass.

“Mama! No!” I ran over and grabbed her hand. “That’s bad stuff. That’s poison! You could die!”

She looked down at me and laughed, and then she couldn’t stop laughing. It sounded like the laughing that folks do on the Whirly Dervish at the fair when they’re getting flipped and flopped every which way. It goes on and on like the person is going to die laughing before the ride’s over. Like the hiccups.

“Unfortunately,” she gulped a swallow between words, “it won’t kill me anytime soon!” She sloshed her glass and some of the stuff spilled on my hands. I teared up, and not just because
of the poison. First it was Daddy like to killing Little Dan. Then Little Dan calling Daddy a Negro, which I just didn’t get because Daddy was geisha-girl white. Then here Mama was giving out her good cakes like they were popsicles. And last but not least: my mother drinking poison. All of it my fault.

Mama put the glass down on the counter. It didn’t make a sound. “Oh honey, it’s not poison, it’s just a little moonshine. For when you have a bad day.”

“Well
I’m
having a bad day too.”

Her heart wasn’t in my bad day. She took up her glass and chugalugged. She looked down at me over the now empty glass. Her round hazel eyes had withered into hard little raisins. “Well, I think you ought to go right out into the yard and have yourself
a good swing
.”

After she said the words, they became yellow jackets. You know how yellow jackets will land on you and just sit there and you know that if you swat at them, they’re going to dig right in and sting the fire out of you? So you sit quiet and still until they take a notion to lift off. Then you shake yourself good and go on about your business. I stood there for a while waiting for Mama’s words to lift. She had turned her back to me and was standing at the kitchen sink washing out her glass with her fingertips. When she was done, she didn’t turn around.

So I just quietly quietly turned around and walked outside. I sat down on the front-porch stoop. No yellow jackets around, but real live bees in a frenzy of crawling and thrusting. The clematis was blooming to beat the band those little white flowers that make you feel swoony they’re so sweet.

The bees buzzed around my face. I knew I could get stung if I made a sudden move, but it felt right to be in danger, so I just sat there. Still as death. I squinted my eyes and put my hands up to the sides of them like horse blinders. I was a tunnel. I could see
straight ahead into what will be: there’s the swing set, now empty, stiller than still. No children in this yard. Me, and Mama, and Daddy, now long gone, though this little house still holds crumbs of us, behind the stove a measuring spoon, under the refrigerator that cap I dropped but could never find from a bottle of vanilla. The roaches have nibbled up all the droppings of icing and cake and on the strength of the sugar have had millions of babies and grandbabies and great-great-grands that stare and scurry when a light is turned on at night. Now that we’re gone, all they have to eat is somebody else’s nastiness and each other. They’ve gotten scrawny and mean-spirited. They’ve grown larger wings.

Little Dan’s grown, but he’s not selling used cars for his father. He’s sitting in a hard chair in a long room full of hard chairs, a stocky young man whose face is now more square than round. He’s weary from a long bus ride. His mouth is a little open and he’s about to fall asleep as he obediently tilts his head toward an Army barber with a buzzer in his hand, like a little boy whose mother waits with a comb. In a blink, the little nest is a pile of feathers on the floor. Then it’s barely three months and Little Dan’s being pushed out of a helicopter. Lost and hopping around a leafy jungle floor. Now he’s fluttered into the bamboo. Now I can’t see him anymore. He’s nowhere in sight.

Through the screen I could hear Mama in the kitchen opening a cabinet door again. I hoped she was reaching for the pots and pans, not the poison bottle, but then there was only silence instead of the clatter of cake baking.

The second Saturday morning after we returned to Millwood, Mama came into my room with a carpet sweeper, which she propped up against my bed. “Okay, now, get on up and clean your floor. Make up your bed nice. Put on some decent shorts. It’s pickup day.” She sounded briskly cheerful and smelled like cough medicine. She’d trimmed her bangs short, drawn her eyebrows in perfect crescent moons. She was wearing a pressed blouse of white cotton so thin you could see the scallops of her slip under it and a little blue checkered skirt that had the look of a nice clean dish towel wrapped over the points of her sharp little hip bones. Her three-inch-wide black patent-leather belt was pulled in tight at the waist. She’d ratted her bob and sprayed it down so that it looked like a little spaceship had landed on top of her head.

Cake orders had been coming in hot and heavy all week since Mama put out the word that the first pickup would be Saturday. Over the past two nights she’d been up to all hours rattling around in the kitchen. Sunday pickups were nothing special with everyone in a hurry to get to church, but a Saturday pickup was
something of an event. A flock of what Mama called her Cake Ladies came clucking in like pigeons. Usually they roosted awhile, and Mama had a big pot of coffee ready. They stood jammed up against one another in our tiny kitchen, holding their coffee cups and saucers high so as not to spill. They leaned over their cups into one another’s faces and said things in half whispers.

This Saturday the cakes were lined up on the kitchen table. They rested on neatly cut pieces of cardboard with the edges of doilies peeking out from underneath like the wings of angels. The wholes on one side and the still breathing halves with their waxed-paper bandages on the other. From my bed, I could look across our little living room and see their iced tops hovering like puffy white clouds over the kitchen table.

In the kitchen Mama handed me a glass of orange juice and a piece of buttered toast and commanded me to eat over the sink. She didn’t want crumbs on her nice clean floor, which she’d mopped at three o’clock that morning. In the past it had been my job to open the door when I saw a lady coming up the path of stones Mama had put down when Miss Kay Linda complained that the grass was getting tromped on. So I took my toast out on the front-porch stoop.

Directly I spotted the first lady questing up the path, and soon they all arrived and were carrying on in Mama’s kitchen like she was hosting a family reunion. How much they had missed her! They were ever so happy that she was back in her rightful place as Millwood’s cake lady. Nobody’s cakes could get within a country mile of hers. Don’t they look pretty all lined up like that? Martha, next week I think I’ll have a lemon. It looks so nice and cool. This one’s mother’s gallbladder getting taken out or that one’s baby’s cough has turned into scarlet fever or now the outside agitators are trying to stir things up over in Clinton, which was only upsetting the colored, who desire only to be with their own
kind just like we do. We’ve been blessed with good colored people in Millwood. Lord, down in Shake Rag, the
last
thing anybody wants is trouble.

When I heard them start on the colored, I opened the screen door and sidled on in, just in time to hear my mother say the word
Negroes
. She murmured it so lightly that at first I wasn’t sure what she had said. She was leaning up against the kitchen sink, one hand on the long row of ridges. The first time she said the word it sounded like a little breeze sashaying through the two rooms. It wasn’t “Negroes” really that she said, but “Nig-ras,” with a kind of rasp to it. Once she’d said it, it did some business in the house, blowing out little chats here and there like candles on a cake. The ladies’ eyes folded over their cups as if to keep the coffee warm. They seemed to be holding in one big breath. Then Mama said it again, this time spreading it thicker. “
Negroes
. What I mean is, they appreciate being called
Negroes
.”

Then a skitter of ladies snatching their cakes and putting their money on the coffee table. I held the door as they bustled out, their mouths pursed. Out at the curb they clustered, hissing and quacking. Only my mother’s friend Navis stayed behind. Navis typed the town’s tax roll and knew what everybody in Millwood was worth. But in every other way she kept herself apart. She was shy with the other ladies. An oddball. She told Mama she hated to see the summer property tax season come around because her left shoulder ached unmercifully from throwing the oversized carriage on the manual typewriter down at city hall. In the summer she spent most of her spare time curled up on her Duncan Phyfe couch with a heating pad, her venetian blinds always tilted to the ceiling because of the glare on her eyes, which burned from all those little numbers. With no husband and children, which she said would have been horribly boring, she was different from Mama’s other cake ladies. Mama had always said she liked Navis
because she said anything that came into her head. They wrote letters back and forth the year we were away. Before we’d left Millwood, Navis had had a standing order for half a cake a week, just anything left over, darling, she’d say. After Saturday pickups she outstayed the other ladies and had a second cup of coffee with Mama. They would take their coffee out on the front stoop and sit shoulder to shoulder with the canopy of clematis hanging over them and bees and wasps buzzing all around.

Navis folded her arms over her chest as the ladies scuttled down the stone path with their cakes. She stood there looking out until they’d all driven off. Then she ran her hand through her short red hair. “What a bunch of nincompoops!” she said. She came up behind my mother, who was now standing with her back to us at the sink, put her arms around Mama’s little waist, and pressed her head up against Mama’s shoulder blades. “Martha girl, don’t think twice about it. They haven’t got a brain in their heads, not a one of them, and they’ll be right back on your doorstep next week. They wouldn’t miss coming over here for anything in the world. They’d miss the gossip, much less the cake! What else do they have in their miserable little lives in this hellhole?”

Mama laughed a little. The two of them stood there for a minute. Then my mother’s body drooped and she leaned back and Navis held her weight. After awhile Navis patted her shoulder, pushed her forward a little, gathered a half devil’s food off the kitchen table, and slipped out the front door.

After Navis left, Mama went into the living room and collected a handful of dollar bills and some change from the coffee table. A piece of her blouse had come out of her belt. She undid her belt by pulling it with one hand and then releasing it. She threw it on the couch. Mama loved that belt. It showed off her little waist, and she pulled it so tight that the hole had
become a slit. Then she tossed the dollars and some coins on the couch. Some fell on the floor. She didn’t pick them up but turned around and looked down at me. She had a fan blowing across the floor, first one side and then the other, the way she always did on pickup morning, so the dollars began to flutter here and there. I snatched them up.

She caught my arm and made me stop, so I just stood there until she said what she was so bound and determined to say. “Florence, listen to me,
we
say ‘Negroes’ in this house. I talked to Zenie
and
Uldine
and
Gertrude about this, and that’s what they all said they like to be called. Negroes. Never ‘colored.’” She grabbed at my head to make me look up at her. “Do you hear me, young lady?”

“Yes ma’am.” I met her stare and we both froze solid for a minute. A heaviness landslid over me and I felt buried under it. Then some meanness rose up in me. From whence it came or why I do not know, but there it was, as full of itself as a peacock. “You going to make Daddy say it too?” I asked in a quiet little voice. I looked down at a knothole in the floor when I said it. I was expecting her to say in return don’t sass me young lady, go get in your room. Which would have been fine with me. I was getting more and more nervous about making up the fourth grade. Mimi had given me a list of states and capitals and state birds and trees. I had plans to settle in and learn them all that very day.

What my mother did instead of fussing was slap me right across the face. Not too hard, but hard enough to make me miss a breath. Hard enough to make my eyes tear up, which made me hate her guts even more.

Then she said what I thought she’d say, but when she said it, her face looked like somebody had snuck up behind her and pinched her. “Don’t sass me, Florence! Go get in your room. Right now.”

I could see she’d added the slap into the deal because I’d added something else into my badness. An extra ingredient, like the broken pecans Mama mixed in with her caramel icing at Christmas. Except that they were good. What I’d added was gravel. A mouthful of it.

I wanted to say I was sorry, but something in my mother’s eyes stopped me. She was trembling a little and looking down at me with both fear and surprise. I could see my reflection in her eyes, but it wasn’t the same girl I saw in my father’s eyes, the one with long blond hair that flowed like a river of gold. It wasn’t a girl at all. It was the serpent crawled out from under the rock. The old poison come home.

On baking nights in the days to come, Mama would plop her poison bottle out on the counter like another one of her ingredients. As she mixed and sifted and clattered her way through the night, she’d commence to singing. She had a sleepy voice, or maybe I was just sleepy while I listened to it. Sometimes she turned on the radio and sang along. Other times she just spooned and crooned her own way through the soft May nights. Her favorite song was “The Wayward Wind,” and she’d sing snatches of it over and over, how old Wayward was a restless wind that yearned to wander and how he’d left her alone with a broken heart. When she sang it, she belted out the “Now I’m alone with a broken heart” and then hum a few more bars before starting all over again. Every time she sang it, it sounded a little different and a little sadder. It brought tears to my eyes, but it made me happy too because when she sang it, I could tell she was shooing her sadness out of the house and into the night.

Not long after we returned to Millwood, Daddy started coming into my room and lying down with me while my mother baked. When he opened my door and stood a minute getting his eyes adjusted to the dark, he smelled like man sweat and cigarette
smoke and sweet oil. The oil was in a hair balm he bought every other week from a door-to-door man named Mr. Fred Holcomb. It came in a clear jar with a piece of paper taped to it that said “Sweet Hair Oil.” When Mr. Holcomb showed up in the early morning every other Saturday as May got under way, Mama kept him out on the front stoop because he couldn’t be trusted around her cakes, which were lined up on the table and ready for pickup. If she didn’t offer him a piece of something and she turned her back or went into the bedroom for some change, she’d return to find a poke here, a corner sideswiped there. The first week he came she didn’t notice a finger hole in the side of the angel icing on a devil’s food, and Mrs. Bell Leake called to ask what on earth had happened to her cake, it looked like somebody had poked it with a cigar.

I confess I didn’t like the smell of that hair oil. Of course I didn’t tell my father that. It was a sweet smell but not like Mama’s burnt-sugar lightness from the baking, which came and went like a breeze when she moved. Or the sour bite of the cloves she chewed to cover over her poison breath. Mama had aromas that fluttered by your nose every now and then like pretty yellow butterflies. Daddy’s hair oil smell reminded me of a swamp that was deep and muddy and got into everything. What I know now is that seeing and even hearing can confound you. Not smell. Smell is true. A body has to smell right. Of course, that was not my father’s own true smell, but he took it as his own and the hair oil seemed to seep into his pores so that when he sweated, it came on stronger than ever.

Groping his way in the dark, Daddy would come sit on the side of my bed and take off his shoes and socks. Because of his short leg and turned-in foot, Daddy had to wear his shoes everywhere all the time. His brick shoe clumped when he walked and its weight made him tired. When he got his shoes off, he’d groan
and stretch out next to me in the space I had left for him. Then he turned on his side and put one hand flat on my stomach right over my belly button. His hand was heavy yet light. Cool to my bare skin at first, then warming, then like fire. I was strung tight like him, he said, so I needed something to calm me down, like you’d put a gentle hand on a horse and say now whoa up. Just a pressure to pin me to earth so I wouldn’t fly into pieces. That hand and my hidden parts all mashed up underneath. Liver, gut, bladder washed in the blood. It was like Daddy was the preacher and I was the offering and praise God from whom all blessings flow.

I would lie quiet under his hand for a long while, but then I would start to toss and turn.

“Sister,” he’d say, “settle down now.” I don’t know why Daddy called me Sister. I was nobody’s sister, nor would I ever be, since Mama had barely made it out alive from having me on Lou Ellen Chauncey’s living-room floor.

This was before Mama came into her true calling of the cake business, and she was still the one and only Welcome Wagon lady for Millwood. Her water broke right there on Mrs. Chauncey’s door stoop one dusty hot September afternoon, after she’d knocked on the door and Mrs. C had opened it wide. What a welcome! It was a precipitous birth, at least that’s what the doctor called it. I was coming on strong when he and the ambulance men came bursting in the door, so they let me keep on, seeing as how I was so bound and determined to be born that I was tearing up my poor mother stretched out on Mrs. C’s Oriental rug cursing my father—who was at that very moment getting fired for being surly to customers at Holcomb’s Hardware—for having planted me with his Big You Know What. She rued all the stories she had read about girls and princes. She rued the night she’d seen him across the dance floor at the fall mixer. She rued that lock of hair
that had fallen over his left eye and made her yearn to smooth it back. She rued the unaccountable way her feet took her across the room to him and the way her heart shifted in her chest when she saw his poor ruined foot. So this was why he wasn’t dancing! She rued the way she’d followed my daddy right out the front door of the Millwood High School auditorium and into the sound of the cicadas. Now she rued it all, every last bit of it, right down to her toenails, which was the only part of her that wasn’t hurting.