Queen of October

by Mickle, Shelley Fraser

  With the cape draped over my head, I had to breathe like a fish, opening my mouth for a gulp of air near the floor under my knees. Then in a moment I began to hear sounds that at first I couldn’t understand. Then I did. And I couldn’t believe they were doing that on my bed!

  From inside the closet, I listened to them make love. I could hear them panting and groaning, rolling around as if they were in these death agonies and at the same time, going outright crazy with something too delicious to name. Making love seemed to be a strange business. My neck and head were sweating as if I were squatting on the equator. I kept my eyes closed because all I had to look at were the dark underside of the cape and the hairy stubble on my knees. I kept moving my eyelids, squeezing them tight, then letting go, because they were the only things I could move. Unless my ears, straining forward like fly-eating orchids and then shrinking like the fly, were moving; I didn’t know.

  Now B.J. and Ron were silent, and I wondered whether they had fallen asleep, and maybe I could sneak out unnoticed. But I was afraid to try it, and then I heard Ron say something and walk out of the room. B.J. started moving around. She turned on the overhead light, and the closet door opened. She pushed the coat hangers on the rod, humming something. Then she picked up the cape that was covering my head.

  She sucked in her breath. Then she laughed. “Well, damn!” She offered her hand to pull me up. “How long you been in there?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I thought I’d die from embarrassment. B.J. was a little flushed too. Then she looked closely into my face, her hands on my shoulders. “A while?” she said, raising her eyebrows, shaking her head yes and smiling. I shook my head yes in reply, and we did the whole shebang all over again:

  She: “A while?”

  Me: “Yes.”

  She: “Yes?”

  Me: “A while.” And then like a force we couldn’t hold back, we hugged, laughing—me to her, and her to me. I grabbed her at the waist; she was holding me with my head pressed to her shoulder, laughing, laughing, sweating and laughing.

  “You must have been burning up,” she said, brushing back my wet bangs and unwrapping the cape from me and laughing again. She hung up the costume. “How does your room look?”

  “Fine,” I said.

  “Not different?”

  “Not really.”

  “Bet it will now.” She smiled and rubbed her tongue through and over the chip in her front tooth, then turned to the closet, thumbed through the costumes and pulled one out. She used the cast on her thumb like a tool, and I saw she had drawn red stars on it. She was wearing an old robe that my mother must have left behind. I recognized it when she turned around and I saw the circle of paint my mother had gotten on it when she accidentally backed up to a wet chair she’d been redoing. B.J.’s hair was pinned up, and she was twisting the parts that had fallen down.

  “Come on in the kitchen,” she said, reaching for my arm. “Ron and me drove down to colored town and got the best ribs you ever put in your mouth!”

  Ron was sitting at the kitchen table; and as we walked in, he looked surprised at seeing me. But B.J. put both hands on my shoulders, nudging me with her cast, and pushed me forward. “Sally’s come over to see her old room.”

  She and I laughed again a little, but not so much that anybody would think anything about it. For all Ron knew, she could have just let me in the back door.

  B.J. reached in front of him, hugged him quickly across the shoulders and picked up a rib off a plate on the table. She handed it to me. “See if that’s not the best thing you ever put in your mouth.”

  While I ate the crisp meat, the sauce stuck to my lips and fingers. Ron was drinking beer, and he picked up a rib, too. He smiled, saying: “Nobody else can make ribs like this. “Then he got up and reached into the icebox and set a grape soda on the table for me. His upper arm tightened—his shoulders were heavily muscled from outdoor work—as he took a bottle opener and popped off the cap. Underneath the short, creased sleeve of his shirt, his arm was pale, as white as flour; and the line where it had been protected from the sun was as sharp as if it’d been drawn with a pencil. His hair was curled, with the ends lighter; and he’d wetted it to hold it down, with the comb leaving traces like a plough on a field. His face was so evenly balanced—the features like whittled hard wood—it reminded me of the face of a statue. But the whiteness of his skin where it had been covered from the sun was what stayed in my mind; that, and the definite lines in his still-wet hair before they dried and could no longer be seen. They made him seem so desperately eager to do things right. But the fact was, he was the sexiest man I’d ever seen. In some ways he even had Sam beat.

  “So,” he was saying, waiting for my answer as I licked the sauce off my fingers and the rib bone. “You ever had anything that good?”

  “No sir,” I said. “I guess I haven’t.”

  He threw his head back with whoops of laughter and glanced at B.J. “Hey, hon, you hear her call me sir?” He sat down opposite me and looked at my face.

  “I told you she was sweet.” B.J. was dancing around, holding a rib and pouring wine into a big glass. She turned on the record player and the opening song to West Side Story filled the kitchen softly. B.J. sang along with it, punctuating the words every once in a while with a dance step or a fast move. Then she turned the music up and did a fast mean dance waving a table knife in her good hand and holding up her cast like a shield, whirling around the kitchen and sticking her legs out of the open slit of my mother’s old robe. She tossed the knife to Ron, and he caught it. Holding it like a sword, he lunged at her a few times and then, as though they had rehearsed it, he stood with one leg bent, offering his thigh as a springboard as B.J. danced to him, stepped up over his knee, and sprang off. She did it again. He caught her, twirled around, holding her by the waist, and then she leapt off. Just as the record ended, she ran behind me, grabbing me across the chest to use me as a hostage; and then she stuck her cast out toward Ron from beneath my arm like it was a weapon, daring him to come near. When the record ended, we all leaned over, catching our breaths, laughing. B.J. and Ron were sweating, breathing heavily, and they each opened a beer. “Shoot! I’d give anything to be in a musical like that.” B.J. reached over and kissed Ron on the cheek. “If I am, you going with me?”

  He caught her hand and held it, rubbing his mouth against it, setting the edge of his teeth against the ridge of her knuckles while looking at her silently. His look held me almost hypnotized; watching such a show of feeling I felt embarrassed and turned away. “You know I am,” he said, his voice low, almost a whisper.

  B.J. licked her hand where Ron’s teeth had left a thin red line. She didn’t act this way with Sam; she wasn’t this free. “Come on,” she said, touching my back. “You can help me get ready.”

  Until then I hadn’t really thought she’d still be dancing at the Silver Moon that night. “Could I go see you?” I said, getting up. “Dance, I mean.”

  She stopped where the hall opened into the kitchen. “She could, couldn’t she, Ron?”

  When he looked at me, I wasn’t able to keep my eyes still. He was sizing me up, his eyes going over my face and then my body, traveling down to my feet and then back up to my face. Finally he said, “I don’t think we could pass her off as eighteen.”

  B.J. looked at me, chewing the side of her lip. “We ought to be able to come up with something.” She wiped her face with a dish towel. “I hate to admit it, but the Silver Moon’s not a place my own mother would want me in. But it’s the only chance I’ve got to dance. I sing a little. I don’t do nothing indecent. I know people think I do, but my dances are clean. Aren’t they, Ron?”

  He laughed. “You don’t even have to move to have people look at you. But even so, you’re good. Anybody can tell you’re the only one there with talent—real talent.”

  She smiled. “You’re laying it on thick. But I like it.” She reached for his wrist, turned it over so she could read his watch, and th
en she kissed the back of his hand. “Come on,” she said to me, touching me at the same time. “You can help me get ready, or I’m gonna be late.”

  I followed her into my parents’ bedroom. “After that horsing around,” she said, slipping off my mother’s robe, “I gotta take another shower.” She went into the bathroom. “Why don’t you go to your closet and get me the pink robe with the green top? Thanks.”

  When I came back with the costume, she was just coming out of the bathroom, her hair damp from steam and her face red with heat. She sat down at the dressing table that went with my mother’s bedroom suite and started making up her face. As she saw me watching her, she told me to go get a kitchen chair and set it beside her. Ron carried it in for me, and as B.J. put on her makeup, she’d reach over and put the same stuff on me.

  Ron had gone into the living room to wait. “He won’t stand for me wearing any of this except for my act,” she said, drawing on my eyes until they seemed dark, sunken pools. “He’s jealous as a hornet,” she whispered. “He thinks makeup causes me to get stared at, and he doesn’t like it.” She pancaked all my freckles away, and when she finished I looked as if I’d been tanned on a foreign beach. As she touched me, the easy way that she did seemed as wonderful a gift as waking up and looking like the real Elizabeth Taylor. B.J. never held back from anybody.

  “What do you think of this?” She sprayed on my wrist the perfume my mother always wore.

  “My mother uses that.” I said. “Sam—I mean Mr. Best gave it to her.” We looked at each other in the mirror. She whispered: “Sam,” and watched me when she said it. I wasn’t sure what I was doing, except maybe fishing. I certainly had no desire to hurt or upset her in any way. If I sounded a little accusing, as though I wanted to protect Sam’s interest in my mother—for whatever reason, and even more, his interest in me—B.J. picked up on that.

  “You’re right,” she said. “He gave it to both me and your mom. He likes me to use things she uses. He even has me dress like her sometimes, fix my hair like her.” She stopped and put her hand to her face. “I shouldn’t be telling you this.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I know.”

  Her face moved, letting go, seemingly relieved and viewing me a little differently. “Sam’s really hurt about Ellen and Julie moving out. He won’t say it, but he is.” Looking in the mirror she smiled slightly, running her tongue down the edge of her chipped tooth and watching me. “Your mother’s really been a good friend to Sam. She must be wonderful. He talks about her all the time.”

  I knew that wasn’t true. Sam might be in love with my mother, but my mother was a version of B.J. and I was a smaller version of both of them; and I didn’t know why or how we went together.

  She put her arm around me, and we looked at ourselves and each other in the mirror. Then B.J. began to cry. I didn’t know what to do. We looked at each other in the reflection of the mirror while tears washed off the makeup B.J. had just put on, leaving her eyes like smeared holes. She reached for a towel and began wiping her face. “I had someone like you once.” Her words caught in her throat. Then she pushed her hair away from her face and looked back at me. “I’d have her now, sitting here just like this.…” She bit her lip and laughed. “Shoot. Look at me. I got to do this whole stuff all over again. Get up.”

  She sat down as I stood and started drawing on her eyes and mouth again, then covering up the red under her eyes. Her voice found a steadiness, and she tried to sound even and in control. She began telling me about being in New Mexico, fourteen years before. She would glance in the mirror at me standing behind her. She must have seen me as someone who could understand. She turned her face away from mine and aimed her voice into the space of air between us.

  “I was eighteen.” There was a tilt to her smile. She glanced into the mirror to meet my eyes while telling me how she looked—in calf-length skirts with stockings drawn on her legs. “Because, you know, during the war no one could buy stockings. I made seams up the back of my legs with mascara.” She laughed, showing me the back of her calves under my mother’s robe and using her finger to trace a line. “I wore my hair in a pageboy like this.” She rolled her hair under, watching me in the mirror. “And I worked in a munitions plant in Texas.” She put one hand on her hip and slung a leg out. “I made great bullets.” She grinned.

  I laughed. B.J. couldn’t stay away from a joke any more than my mother could drive without changing lanes.

  “You see,” she stood up and walked to the bed where the costume was laid out, “I came from a big family—farmers, Texas cotton farmers whose cotton got eaten up by boll weevils or worms or drought and.… Well, I picked so much cotton from the time I was four, my fingers started growing like this.” She made a cone with her hand and sucked in her lips and laughed. Her laughter was so wonderful, so deep, so full, like the whoops a pot-bellied man would send up, yet they came out of a middle section that was so slight I thought of balsa-wood gliders covered by tissue-thin paper. And her guffaws could taper off like the light sound of spilled coins. She went into the bathroom to put on the bikini, the first layer of her costume, and began talking to me through the propped-open door. “I had six brothers and two sisters. We were Catholic.” She stuck her head out, pulled at her hair, pointing at what she meant to be the color: “Red-headed Irish Catholic. And,” she laughed again, “Italian. My grandmother fell for a dark-skinned, black-eyed cotton farmer from Rome. Who wouldn’t?”

  She came back into the bedroom, wearing a one-piece swim-suit in bright red satin, so shiny it looked like Christmas wrapping paper. And while she began telling me about how she had left home during the war, she began doing a very curious thing. She grabbed a lipstick brush and sat down on my parents’ bed. Propping her legs up and carefully positioning my mother’s old robe over the bedspread, she began to dip the brush into the mascara and paint fishnet stockings on her legs, with seemingly hundreds of stars and a line up each of her calves, like the seam she had just explained to me she had drawn during the war. Luckily her right hand wasn’t the one with the cast on it, and she could draw well. B.J. must have used her past, comically blending it into an act she was both proud and ashamed of. She told me how she moved to Austin, had gotten a job in a factory near there and spent three years. She lived in an apartment with two other girls, going to the U.S.O. on weekends, learning that she wanted to dance from seeing a New York troupe who came to entertain the men stationed near there or passing through.

  “And I started, you know,”—her voice hesitated a moment while she tested my face in the mirror; I sat so still. She looked away from me, talking fast, glancing at the bedspread, concentrating on painting the stockings, which now went all the way up her thighs to the edge of the red satin where her skin was tender and pale. “Well,” she went on, “I started going with this boy from Wisconsin. He said he loved me. Shoot! Any sailor from Wisconsin’s going to love a girl from Texas every chance he gets—to get warm if nothing else. And, well … I just hadn’t been raised like that. I got to where I couldn’t sleep, I kept seeing my mama’s face.” She laughed, then quickly stopped. “She would have killed me. And it, I knew, would have killed her. I went to confession. I told the priest what I was doing. He said repent, say so many Hail Mary’s, and stop doing it. Well, I repented and said the Hail Mary’s—but I didn’t stop. And I knew I wouldn’t.” She laughed and looked at me. “You have to imagine what it was like! Every boy I went out with had a chance of being killed, of never living to have anything, not a wife, a child, … another year! They were going to die! I don’t know if you can understand that.”

  She looked up. I guess her insistence embarrassed her. She giggled. “Shoot, that year the most popular song was”—she tilted her head and sang softly—“Give Me Something to Remember You By.” She stood up. “Anyway, this boy said he’d marry me.”

  With listening to her own voice, maybe she felt she had to convince me; I sensed she wanted me to approve of her. She smiled in the mirror and
then looked down. “He said if he lived he would come back and make me his wife. And that’s when he started messing it up. Because then he told me about his family, how he had lived, how he wanted to and would, if he came out of the war alive.” She laughed, sending the infectious sound into the room but with a bitter, sad tone to it as she rammed the brush into its case. “It turned out his father owned a whole damn cheese factory! Imagine me, wife of the Big Cheese!” Her voice was so full-blown, so funny when she said it, her eyes wide and rolling, I laughed. She seemed relieved. “For a while I thought, why not? I know cows as well as anybody—probably more.” She laughed again. “But if I could seriously think about it, he couldn’t. When I found out I was pregnant, I hinted I might want to marry him before he left. I didn’t tell him why. I just suggested it. The war was about over then, at least in Europe. He didn’t think anything, by then, would happen to him. But after a day of thinking it over, he said he couldn’t. He couldn’t marry until after the war. And from his face when he was saying it, I knew that after the war wouldn’t be any different than that second he was looking at me and seeing that no way could he and I go back to Wisconsin and make cheese together!”