Queen of October

by Mickle, Shelley Fraser

  “You’re green,” Joel said.

  “No, I’m not.” I hadn’t heard a thing he’d been saying. I pulled my knees up under my skirt and put my head on them, dizzy from cigarettes.

  “Well, anyway. You want to go next Saturday to the Ritz with me?”

  Joel was smoking fast. I stubbed out my cigarette and buried it with the toe of my shoe. I thought Joel was interested in me because of my family. Not because of who we were but because none of us were normal—at least at the moment we didn’t live in a normal state. And from all my grandmother had told me, and as far as I knew, maybe abnormal families were attractive to Jews. Then, too, what if Joel thought I was a fast woman? What if Bobby Watts had pumped up his story and blabbed it around town? And, besides, I couldn’t go. I was Sam’s.

  I threw back my head. “Nope,” I said. “I can’t.” I told him I was going to be busy at the dancing school.

  Joel hid the cigarettes and got up and went into the back door of the Mercantile Co. He bought Listerine. We used it, spitting it on the dust of the alley. Then we laughed. Since now I’d missed the beginning of the show at the Ritz, I went back to Main Street. Joel went to deliver the Arkansas Gazettes.

  I walked in the Mercantile Co. and used my birthday money to buy a tight green tweed skirt with a slit up the back that was the shape and size of a tight, open-ended tube. In it, I felt sexy and slick.

  I was going to wear the skirt home, but chicken that I was, I went back in the dressing room and put the skirt my grandmother had picked out over my tweed tube and walked home.

  In my room I knelt down beside the Man-from-Shiloh’s bed and from underneath, I pulled out my suitcase. Inside it, I kept all the latest letters from my parents. I hadn’t opened any more of them since that time I’d been afraid my mother and father were dying and I’d wanted to see if they were all right. I hid the green tube skirt on top of the unopened letters. I ought to be out at some nightclub in that skirt, living it up with Sam. But he was away. I opened the window behind the bed and lay down to listen for sounds of B.J.

  12.

  My Grandfather and the Lone Ranger Liver

  Louella had just cleaned up and gone home after serving Sunday dinner. My grandparents were both lying down when I went into the kitchen to get another piece of Louella’s pound cake. As I was taking a dish out of the cabinet, I was startled by my grandfather, who’d come up quietly and was standing behind me. Patting his hair down, he smiled. His face had sleep prints on it.

  “Do you know anything about coenzymatic dismutation?”

  I held the empty cake plate. I told him I’d never even heard of it.

  “How are you in math? Do you pass?”

  “Barely.”

  “Have you had any chemistry?”

  “Photosynthesis.” In Memphis, I’d taken biology and learned how plants made food, but I wasn’t sure if that counted as chemistry. Since Sputnik there’d been a run on science, but nobody in Coldwater could teach it.

  My grandfather leaned back against the kitchen table, staring at me. He was often quiet. But occasionally something would come over him and he would let loose thunderous chains of words, with opinions on everything. When he did that, my grandmother accused him of drinking. But I suspected that when he was quiet he was just retrenching. Silence wasn’t his normal state, though he liked to sit in it a lot. He reached onto the middle of the kitchen table beside the salt and pepper and the sugar bowl where he kept a bottle of his Inside Medicine. He poured some in a glass.

  “Go ahead,” he said, handing it to me.

  By then I didn’t especially need it. The fist inside my chest had let go, and I suspected that me and Sam loving each other had more to do with my good health than my grandfather’s medicine, but I drank it anyway.

  Through the bottom of my glass, I saw him watching me. “Doesn’t taste good, does it?” He looked wistfully at the half-full bottle. He reminisced about how it had gotten Mrs. Hobbs’s son through the Korean War and brought Turly Caine sleep. He laughed. “I’ve known this to help homesickness, lovesickness, nighttime headaches, and worms. Even your grandmother’s liked the money it’s brought.” He leaned the bottle over, watching the liquid slide up into the neck. “What bothers her now is that she thinks the world has proved me to be the fool she’s always suspected me to be.” He laughed a little, but sadly. “She hates going public.”

  He motioned for me to follow him into the living room to the corner where he had a big leather-top desk. He pulled a chair out beside it and, right away, I got sleepy and felt my brain ooze into the shape of Swiss cheese. I thought that whatever he said would slip through my mind like water being poured over it. But a lot of what he told me stayed. And it did, I think, because the more he talked the more I realized, with growing horror, that he was preparing me to be the next medicine-maker in the Maulden family.

  He started in the 1800s and worked himself all the way up to the importance of the liver. He explained that a hundred years ago, everybody thought food had one nutrient that kept life going—so overeating became a national habit. My grandfather laughed. “Shoot! anybody who sold a cure for indigestion could become a millionaire.”

  Outside, some kids whizzed by on bikes, and down the alley, from the direction of the Second Baptist Church, somebody was rehearsing her voice for a Sunday night solo.

  He said that even the Civil War was financed by a tax on medicine. But it was repealed because doctoring yourself was considered a national right, guarded by law. And that was fertile ground for medicine-makers. “Did you know that even Benjamin Franklin’s mother sold a remedy for Itch?”

  I shook my head, no. And scratched my arm. The Baptist soloist had missed the note and started over. I thought about Sam and tap dancing and Hershey bars.

  He went on, telling me about vitamins being discovered in the early 1900s, then germs and miracle drugs. He picked up another bottle of the Inside Medicine from the back of his desk and made the liquid whirl against the thick, greenish glass. He said miracle drugs made everybody think health was something that could be bought. We’d always believed in a right to do-it-yourself healing.

  “Someone would come to me, you see, and he’d want penicillin, or sulfa, or streptomycin, or God-knows-what-else the drug companies were coming out with and advertising in magazines and newspapers. Right now there’s a market for a drug before it even hits the shelves. The drug companies are the biggest industry in this country. Over 500 tons of tranquilizers were prescribed just this year. And it got to the place where I couldn’t tell anybody they didn’t need sulfa or penicillin or whatever; they’d get well without it. They wouldn’t believe me.”

  Outside, a newspaper plopped against the front screen porch and through the sheer curtains, I saw Joel go by on his bike.

  “You see, I began practicing medicine in 1920. By the time I was thirty-three the Depression was coming; I didn’t have sulfa, penicillin, or any wonder drug. I made this.” He nodded toward it, then glanced at me. “Or my first version of it. But now.…” He got up. “I want to show you something.” He rifled through the stacked papers on top of his desk and showed me a picture of the human liver. “There’s something happening now that’s made me revise my formula—and my intentions.”

  Stacked up on the floor were copies of the Atlantic Naturalist, Hearings from the 81st Congress dated 1950, Sport Fishing, Public Health Reports, and Journals of Agriculture and Food Chemistry.

  “I want you to understand this.” He handed me the book with the liver picture in it. I set it on my lap—it must have weighed ten pounds. I sensed that even though he was looking at me, he wasn’t talking to me alone. My round freckled face was the focus of his concentration like a yogi who’ll stare at anything when he sits on nails. Pretty soon, I understood that I represented the whole world and posterity to him. At his trial the judge had said that the Maulden Medicines had been labeled and sold to treat conditions that medical science did not recognize. And I guess he thought that if he
couldn’t make me understand, no one else ever could.

  He pulled out a yellow legal pad and drew circles on it. He explained that the Germans during World War II tested chemicals for killing men, on insects, and found out their man-made formulas were terrific on bugs. “Now watch this.” He made circles on the yellow paper rain onto a liver he drew beneath it. He was a pretty good artist, and I followed the liver spots on the back of his hand as he drew circles. “You with me?” he asked, looking at me. I blinked. Around the liver he drew a man. “These are synthetic insecticides,” he said, giving the raindrops names.

  “You see, their intention is to destroy enzymes. Their target is the nervous system, inside a bug or wherever.”

  He drew a line inside the man’s arm. “This man’s arm moves because a chemical goes from one nerve to the other. But if the chemical doesn’t disappear very quickly, the nerve keeps firing.” He drew the arm waving and gave it the shakes with squiggly lines like in a cartoon.

  “Now,” he said, “here comes the Lone Ranger.” He drew a horse with a man on it running up and down inside the body. “This is an enzyme called cholinesterase. If this nerve-firing chemical decides he likes the limelight and wants to hang around, cholinesterase shoots him out. That way our fellow here never gets the shakes or acts drunk or has a seizure, or worse. And guess where this fellow lives?” He pointed to the Lone Ranger, who now held a gun my grandfather had drawn in his hand. Before I answered, he penciled a barn right in the middle of the liver.

  “These new insecticides are just like the poison found in a deadly mushroom. They kill the enzymes that keep the firing chemical under control.

  “So,” he said, “think about this. What if the insecticide is used only strong enough to kill bugs but not men?” He drew a whole new set of balloons floating in the sky over his man with a Lone Ranger Liver. “There’re things all in our world that can make these have stronger effects.” He pointed to the insecticide bubbles. “That’s what’s hard in my line of work. It’s already known that these poisons make some drugs more powerful. For instance, sleeping pills will last longer. Somebody could spray the earth with malathion and send down sleeping pills and we’d wake up like Rip Van Winkle in a new century. And,” he smiled, “our wives’d be gone.

  “You think I’m crazy?” He looked at me hard. He flipped up pages of articles onto his desk, pointing out passages he’d underlined. “You know what the farmers are pouring on our crops? You know who’s breathing air from the bomb we dropped on Japan? Did you know people in New York would buy fans to blow all the pollution south, if they could?” He laughed. “Nobody’s ready to admit there’s poison around us, so how can they admit my medicine will fight it? DDT right now is in milk, in eggs, in the feed fed to cows. Mosquitoes sprayed with DDT for several generations have turned into strange creatures called gynandromorphs—part male and part female. One of the special things the liver does is keep a balance between male and female hormones and prevent one getting the better of the other. What do you think that means?”

  I stared at his face and said nothing. All I knew about DDT was that it was said all the time in junior high as a cool way to tell someone to drop dead twice.

  “If the next generation isn’t dead from cancer or lung disease or something else because of synthetic insecticides, they might be half-women, half-men, good for nothing. And nobody knows this. People don’t even know the tobacco they’re smoking was probably sprayed with arsenic.”

  He got up and put his legal pad down. “My medicine now includes agents for supporting the liver. And if the U.S. government insists on not letting me sell it, at least you’ll be made aware of what it’s intended for. And then,” he looked at me, “who’s to say years from now, long after I’m gone, the government won’t be trying to make something like what I’ve got already here. So it’s important that if I’m beaten—if in my lifetime I can’t repeal my case and make people see and use this—well … we’ll just have to get around what you don’t know about chemistry.” He grinned. “Least if your mother and father can’t get things straightened out, you and I can.” He patted my shoulder and turned toward the den. He walked slowly, his height hunched somewhat by the downward curve of his shoulders. “In a little while, we’ll go over to my office and start a batch. But right now, you want to see this TV program on Chinese bears?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  I walked onto the front screen porch. For a second I stared at the crepe myrtle bushes that grew against the house, seeing the picture of the future my grandparents wanted for me: a ballet dancer who mixed chemicals in a secret laboratory somewhere. On weekends I’d have to drive into some city and come out at debutante balls. That’s the thing about a family that can drive you absolutely nuts—how they can wrap you up in their dreams and their lives and shoot you off in directions you don’t especially want to go. I sure didn’t want to be a doctor, a pharmacist or anybody else connected with medicine. Frankly I cared about as much for the Lone Ranger Liver as I did for my grandmother’s silver dessert forks. But I loved my grandfather—I’d sure never want to do anything that would disappoint him. Or hurt him. So just how the hell was I going to turn down this family business?

  13.

  B.J.’s Story

  That next Saturday, B.J. taught me and half a dozen other kids at the dancing school. When it was all over, Ron, the guy from the pipeline who B.J. had supposedly taken up with, came to pick her up. It was the first time I’d seen him up close. I got the idea that he didn’t like B.J. being connected with the dancing school. Or at least the Best Dancing School. He hadn’t spoken very nice to any of us. And he’d escorted B.J. to his pickup and barely nodded to Sam.

  Sam and I drove out to one of his farms and on the way back stopped at a café. When I ordered coffee, he didn’t say anything like maybe I shouldn’t do that; and we sat in a booth while Gill told us stories he’d heard when he’d been a pilot. I played a bunch of songs on the jukebox that had words I wished I could say straight-out to Sam. Then he dropped me off at my grandparents’ house in time for supper.

  That night I sat in my room listening to my chickens changing roosts in the dark. The whole house seemed full of my grandparents’ snoring. When I got old, I wasn’t going to snore like that. I looked out the window at my parents’ house.

  B.J. still had a cast on her thumb, and I figured she wasn’t going to be dancing at the Silver Moon that night. But Ron’s truck wasn’t parked in front of the house. She’d probably gone to be with the band, anyway. I thought of how nice it’d be to just walk through my old house, to see it again. So I slipped out of the back door and went over there, taking care not to be seen by anyone who might be passing by.

  The spare key was still taped to the bottom of the water meter, and I let myself in the back door. The few pieces of furniture my parents had left were mixed with B.J.’s. My mother hadn’t taken the end tables, and we hadn’t taken our beds either. Mine had been my grandmother’s when she had been a child. Anyway, we’d bought new single beds in Memphis, for fear the old ones might have gotten scratched in the move. Since my parents had been after a new life, I guess they thought that new beds might help. But they hadn’t.

  I walked down the hall. Empty houses always feel spooky. In my bedroom, I stood by the door and turned on the light. Except for the junk I’d packed away or taken with me, the room was just as I had left it. The bed had been my grandmother’s when she had been a girl, and it stood in the center with cherry posts pointing toward the ceiling like raised arms. My mother had sewn a bedspread and curtains to match. B.J. was right; the room was still pretty.

  Under the bed I’d always kept a sack of sardines, along with a flashlight, a few books, and some toothpaste. I guess being born when I was—near the end of World War II—put war on my mind. If the Russians came or the Koreans or anybody else I heard Walter Cronkite mention as a possible enemy, I planned to hide under the bed and wait it out. Now I lay down on the floor and slid up unde
r the springs near the headboard. My war sack was still there. It was old and frayed, but it was still stuck in between the springs. Little did I know that the main battle I’d be in the middle of was the one between my parents. And no damn sardines could help with that.

  I left the war sack where it was and went to open the closet. Some of my boxes of old school work were stored on the floor, but they had been pushed aside to make room for hanging a row of brightly colored capes and robes. I pulled one out—a purple job with sequins on the sleeves and neck. There was enough material in it to drape a horse. But underneath were bloomers, a striped pair with a puffed-sleeve top like women wore on the beach in old photographs. When I peeled it away, there was a one-piece swimsuit like Miss America wore. And underneath it was a two-piece affair women wore now. A bikini was tied to the coathanger under that. Apparently B.J. hung her costumes here, and she did some sort of dance that showed the history of the bathing suit. A clever strip, I thought. Some night I wanted to sneak into the Silver Moon and see it.

  Putting on the cape, I did a few dance steps up and down the room, then twirled until the hem spread out like a dark puddle that I was in the middle of. Suddenly through the open window I heard a sound, and I reached quickly for the light switch.

  Ron and B.J. came into the house, laughing. Lunging for the closet, I closed the door and balled myself up in a knot on the floor. I draped the costume over my head and leaned against the back wall of the closet, my legs drawn up under my chin and my nose propped there, smelling my own knees and the mixed sweetness of B.J.’s costumes. I could hear the shower running and then voices in the kitchen. They scraped chairs around. And every once in a while I stopped worrying about getting out. I thought maybe I could just stay there until B.J. and Ron went to sleep or left.

  Then I heard them come into the bedroom where I was. I could feel my stomach move as though crawling up into my throat, and my skin was so wet with sweat that my hands slipped on my knees. I couldn’t even imagine what they’d say if they found me. Now I could hear them teasing each other and messing around, and then the closet door opened. I jumped and was sure I’d given away my whole damn hiding place. The cape I was under probably looked like a giant heap of dirty clothes, moving. But before B.J. could rake the costumes around and find me, I heard Ron come up behind her, calling her Babe and telling her to come to him, and a bunch of stuff like that that thank goodness B.J. listened to, so that she pushed the closet door half-closed and moved farther away from me into the room. He must have hugged her, pulling her onto the bed. I could hear the old springs creaking just as they’d sounded through all of my childhood whenever, before I went to sleep, I’d lean over to check under the bed to see if my war sack was still there. Giggling and laughing, B.J. and Ron rolled around on my and my grandmother’s childhood bed, then got quiet.