At once he was banished to the bathroom, and there he stayed while we had Christmas dinner. Frankly, I was tickled to death he was there and had spilled his filthy words exactly when he did, for my parents had driven over from Memphis for the day and it was right after they walked in that Toulouse had yelled his stuff. It seemed to fit the whole damn situation.
My parents behaved as if they were good friends the whole time. They talked to each other like royalty on television. Over the past few months whenever they’d called me on the telephone, I barely listened to what they said. I usually just watched television while I was on the phone. And I hadn’t read any of their letters since that time I was afraid they were dying, and that was months ago. So during Christmas dinner if they mentioned anything to me about what I was supposed to know about, I acted politely surprised, as if what they did didn’t matter to me, anyway. We followed all the rules set out by Emily Post. And while we ate country-smoked ham, which Louella served—turkey was too closely related to chickens—Toulouse yelled his fifteen words behind the closed bathroom door.
Poor grandmother. Without knowing it, she had swapped a yardful of crowing roosters for one foul-mouthed parrot who had never read Emily Post and probably wouldn’t have changed his vocabulary even if he had.
My parents stayed there for Christmas night, my mother sleeping with me and my father staying on the couch in the living room. While Toulouse sat in the bathroom on his perch in his cage, his eyes half closed and glazed over, I kept mine half closed too, while my mother tried pillow talk and worked on my hair. She kept asking me about school and a bunch of other junk. When I answered her I wasn’t thinking about either her or Toulouse. I was thinking about Sam—me and Sam. It was strange how my mother and I could both be in the Man-from-Shiloh’s bed, no more than six inches from touching each other, and yet never get close.
It didn’t matter to me what my mother and father decided to do. I wouldn’t have to live with either one of them, or at least for very long. In two years I’d be sixteen, married, and living with Sam in the big old house at the Mill Pond. My mother and father would be driving over to spend holidays with me and Sam. What they did with their lives wouldn’t have anything to do with me.
By early morning of the next day they were ready to go. I went outside to see them off. My mother walked down the sun porch steps beside me. “You’re sure everything fit all right? You don’t want me to take anything back?”
“No. It’s all fine,” I said. “Thanks.” They’d each given me a bunch of loot for Christmas.
“Take care, Punkin.” My mother reached to hug me, calling me a dumb childhood name that made me think of Miss Pankhurst’s hat.
My father came over, too. They were each going to take turns coming over to reach and hug me. When they did they each whispered that they loved me and missed me. My mother’s eyes filled up with thick tears that glued all of her eyelashes together. My father kissed my cheek and looked at me as if I were the unexpected prize at the bottom of a cereal box. They said they’d call again that night and every week as usual, and would write a lot.
“How about writing to me, once in a while?” My father held on to my shoulder.
“Well, school work’s heavy. And now there’s exams and all.”
My mother: “Take care. And don’t study too hard. You remember what they say: all work and no play.…” She tweaked my shoulder, expecting me to finish it for her, making it seem as if we were in cahoots.
“Yeah, makes Jack a dull guy …” I said, pleasing her. But she didn’t know about all the stuff my grandmother insisted I learn in order to keep myself a fascinating woman.
They each got in different cars. We watched them drive off, my father politely letting my mother back out of the driveway first. My grandparents went inside. I turned and looked down the sidewalk in the direction of the Mill Pond. I half-ran to the corner, turning it and heading to Sam’s, blowing misty smoke out of my mouth in the chilled air like a cigar-smoking gangster. Frost was on the grass, as though webs had been spun on the yards during the night to lie like pockets of snow with dew making them shine in the morning sun. I stood in front of Sam’s house. The light was on in his study. I walked close, the grass cushioning my feet but getting them wet.
I stood on tiptoe and peeked in the window. He was sitting in a big easy chair. Beside him on a table were photographs. There were some framed snapshots and a big picture of Ellen. She was leaning against a tree. I’d never noticed before how much the shape of her shoulders and the way that she stood was so much like my mother’s and B.J.’s. In Sam’s hand was a glass of something that I knew had whiskey in it. He seemed to be just staring into space. It was a good thing I’d come to keep him company. I tapped on the window, grinning. He looked up; his glasses fell a little onto his nose, and he smiled and took them off. He came to the window and motioned for me to come to the back door. Then he let me in and offered me a cup of coffee. That made me laugh.
Coffee drinking was just another secret we had from my grandmother, since I’d taken it up with him and Gill in the afternoons on our jaunts. I told him about Toulouse, and we laughed till the coffee jiggled over into the saucers. Then I gave him the Christmas present I’d picked out in the jewelry store and asked B.J. to get engraved. It was a key ring with Sam written on it on one side, and on the other, Sally. I’d wanted to put love or forever or part of a poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, but there wasn’t room. I watched him look at it, holding it in his big hand, rubbing his thumb across it, and this nice smile came over his face and he was looking at me.
I realized then I’d sort of embarrassed him. Maybe he hadn’t gotten me anything. But surely he knew that didn’t matter. He loved me; and I knew that. It didn’t have to be shown how much by what something cost. He thanked me, whispering it almost, saying it low. Then, “Yours isn’t quite ready yet,” he said. “I had to order it, and B.J. said it’d be in soon. It’ll be a New Year’s present—if that’s all right.”
It didn’t matter, I told him. The sun was coming in the windows of his study now. It was going to be a beautiful cold and clear day. I wanted to reach up and kiss him just as I’d seen B.J. do when I’d been hiding under the railroad trestle that day I’d fallen in the Mill Pond.
If lust was not supposed to get confused with love, it sure stumped me on how to keep them apart.
He stood there, grinning at me. I seemed to tickle him every second of his life. I felt disgusted because my hands were as good as paralyzed. I just couldn’t figure out how to put my arms around his neck and bend him down to me. It was obvious I was going to have to find out things.
We stood in silence a minute. Neither of us could think of a thing to say, but it didn’t matter. We were comfortable and antsy—both at the same time. “I guess I got to go feed Toulouse,” I said. We both laughed at that. “My grandmother doesn’t like to touch him,” I said. “If I don’t do it, I guess he’d starve.”
Sam waved to me as I walked ladylike out the front door to the sidewalk. Then I sprinted down the side street home.
Short of washing Toulouse’s mouth out, my grandmother was handling him the only way she knew how. There in the bathroom our showers gave Toulouse the humid air of the tropics. And he thrived. He seemed excited to see us whenever we popped in, and he chatted away the whole time we were there.
“I’ve been taken advantage of,” my grandmother said. “Do you think those dealers did this to me on purpose?”
My grandfather pshawed. “How could they have done it on purpose? They don’t know you. How would they know you wouldn’t like a parrot who cusses? Some people’d pay extra.”
“Ha!” She twisted up her mouth and bit the inside of her lip. “What am I going to do?”
“Give him away,” my grandfather suggested. “Sell him. Get him a speech therapist.”
My grandmother stared at him. “It’s the child’s present. I can’t take back a present.”
Then she asked me point-blank. “Do y
ou like the bird? I know he’s got a problem. But do you like him?”
“Yessum.” I really did.
Whenever we went into the bathroom, Toulouse always greeted us with: “Up yours.” And whenever we left, he always said, “See ya later, queer.”
I taught him to say certain things about where he was. Now he said, often and with disgust, that the room smelled like a wet poodle. And when I noticed that he’d learned the jingles to my grandfather’s advertisements for his medicines, a few weeks later he began adding: “You’ve ruined my life; you’ve ruined my life. Quack and Nincompoop, Nincompoop.”
In some ways having Toulouse was hard on us, but I always thought of him as mostly educational.
18.
Writing For B.J.
Not long after Christmas B.J. came to the back window of my room and tapped on the glass, calling, “Flea.” I would hate to think what my grandmother would have thought about B.J. if she’d seen her. But B.J. had ways of carrying off everything.
I went outside to meet her and we walked into the yard of my old house, where B.J. asked me to sit down in a glider swing under the pecan tree. “I want you to help me write this,” she said. She laughed and smiled, and looked excited as she spread out a paper on her lap. She had written, or tried to write, an engagement announcement. It was for her and Ron, and half the words were misspelled or placed wrong.
“I’d be embarrassed to show this to anybody else.” She looked at me. “But you know how to do this, don’t you? Doesn’t your grandmother teach you how?”
I looked at the paper. I could fix the spelling. But she was asking me for more. And, strangely, what she wanted was the sort of stuff that my family wanted me to know, but that I didn’t especially want to use. In my opinion, if manners were supposed to help people get along, I didn’t see them working. They covered up what was important. I could see nothing worthwhile in knowing which fork to use, except that by knowing it I might not be talked about after I left a party. Even my grandmother, with all the rules she knew and judged others by, lacked what I thought was probably called tact. Her pshaw certainly wasn’t outlawed—or even mentioned—in any of her etiquette books, but it wasn’t exactly nice. And even if B.J. and Ron’s engagement was announced in just the right words, that was still no guarantee it would come out right.
But I did know that the rules mattered a lot to Coldwater and to people like my grandmother, and that with the proper announcement B.J. would become more proper. Besides, I was just as glad to have B.J. get married, so there wouldn’t be a chance that Sam might leave me for her. I went inside and got the copy of the etiquette book that my grandmother had given me.
The afternoon was mild, a warm late December day with leaves on the ground and the grass the color of tea. In the kitchen of my parents’ house B.J. and I worked out an announcement. We wrote cover letters to the Arkansas Gazette and the Coldwater Gazette, and along with them we put in beautiful photographs of B.J., her face hopeful and open on a background of swirling mist.
We hand-delivered one envelope to Mr. Rankin at the newspaper office, mailed the other, and then walked slowly up the alley to the back of my parents’ house. As we passed the outhouse we stopped to examine the lilies Ezekiel had left in cans beside the dirt mound. B.J. turned on the hose at my grandfather’s clinic to water them.
In my parents’ kitchen B.J. fixed us hot chocolate and said she had a surprise for me. But she got sidetracked while she thought again about what we’d just done: sending out her engagement notices. While we stirred the hot liquid, dunking marshmallows with spoons, she warmed her hands on the cup and lifted her fingers while she talked. I watched the edge of her finger tap the rim of her cup, then lie quiet for a second. The level of her voice changed, as though signaling the sharing of something only she and I would have.
As she talked she looked at me directly, never moving her eyes, the green of them rimmed in a thin line of gray and flecked with yellow. “It’s funny, you know. I wanted to be a famous dancer everybody would know about. But the truth is, I’m not really suited for that.” She rubbed the back of her neck and laughed lightly. “What I need is a house full of kids.” She stood up and pulled my head against her, hugging me in a funny way. “Shoot, Flea, you know, I’m going to be happy. I really am.”
She walked to the stove and began pouring another cup of chocolate. “I told Sam today that I’m marrying Ron.” She stared out the window. She came back to the table. Her eyes moved toward the door and she bit her lip. “I thought I saw Sam walking from the cotton office to the Weiss’s pool hall. Did he go there—do you know?” I shook my head and said I didn’t know. Then she touched my shoulder. “Good Lord, Flea, I almost forgot what I wanted to tell you.”
She did a quick little pirouette on the linoleum and held a dish towel across her face except for her eyes. “Guess where you’re going New Year’s Eve?” She laughed. “The Silver Moon! Sam’s going to take you.”
I turned the empty cup in my hand. “But won’t I have trouble getting in, especially on a night like that?”
B.J. shook her head, handing me a cookie. “No one cares who Sam takes where. As long as you’re with him, age won’t matter.” She grinned at me. “Besides, the place will be so crowded no one will notice you.” Then she sat down and told me about the dance she’d made up, and how Ella Jenkins had taught her to sing one certain part low in her throat and say some of the words.
She took me into my old room and opened the familiar closet, thumbing through the costumes hanging there to show me the new one she would wear. Laughing, she pulled it out and held it up. The whole skirt of it could unwind like a cocoon in reverse. As she slid it over my fingers, it reminded me of the color of a new leaf—tender, yellow-green. It seemed I had touched something as thin and fragile as an insect’s wing. I was thinking of seeing B.J. in it at the Silver Moon. Then in my mind came pictures, my whole head filling up with me and Sam watching B.J. and being together on New Year’s Eve. And what is it that everybody does at midnight, unless they’re dead or blacked-out or too strange to even mention? Kiss. Kiss! We’d sure enough now just have to get on with it.
B.J. sat down on my old bed and patted a place for me beside her. “I don’t guess your grandparents have said anything about what I told them yesterday?”
I looked at her steadily. I hadn’t even known she’d come to our house yesterday.
“Ron wants to leave. He wants to go right away. He had me settle the lease on this house.”
I stared at her a minute; and then, as though naming what she had said would help me understand it, I said like a little kid pointing to something in a book: “Moving?”
She nodded. “He’s got a job in Oklahoma starting in two weeks. We’re getting married out there.” She smiled and touched my arm. “You can come visit. I’ll write and you can come out and see me. Maybe this summer, after school.”
“Why?” I said, not meaning anything about visiting or me, but why she had to leave. She knew what I meant, and I knew that she wouldn’t answer, but I had to ask her anyway. Ron didn’t want to stay where Sam was. I had seen him look at B.J. and Sam when he had come to the dancing school to pick up B.J. on Saturday afternoons. I had seen the jealousy in the way he watched them. But I hadn’t thought that he would want to leave.
B.J. was talking about some job, telling me about it like she was a commercial coming on right in the middle of some program so fine that you could have shot the damn man selling Campbell’s Soup or whatever.
The thought of B.J. leaving was like a hard and heavy weight I would have to pick up and take out the door with me. She would write me letters, yes. She might even call me. I could even ride the bus, going for days and nights through flat dry land to visit her. Maybe once. Maybe twice. The letters could pile up and sit under the Man-from-Shiloh’s bed with the unopened ones from my mother and from my father. And like them, too, B.J. would not be there. She would not be there for me to mess around with, to fix my hair or tell me I wa
s going to turn out beautiful. She would exist only on flat, dead paper, with words she couldn’t spell or think up going back and forth between us. Pretty soon I wouldn’t open her letters, either. We would die. B.J. and I—the two of us together like we were now—would no longer be in the world. We would change.
I got up to go. If she loved me, it wasn’t love enough for her to make Ron stay in Coldwater. I was someone who could be thrown away. I could be left and written to and called. I was like those chickens who got ordered and were sent and then were forgotten to be picked up. Sam was the only person in the whole world I could count on.
The backyard of my grandparents’ house was empty except for leafless branches and sticks lying on the ground as I walked home. I went in the back door and lay down on the Man-from-Shiloh’s bed. I hadn’t yet gotten used to the long silence in the chicken yard.
I would still have Sam. I would have him now all to myself.
I pulled the suitcase out from under the Man-from-Shiloh’s bed and took out the tight skirt I’d bought at the Mercantile. I put it on and stood on a chair in front of the dresser mirror so I could see my middle. I thought about how I would appear with Sam at the Silver Moon. I rolled up my collar and padded the hips of the tight green tube. It was terrible. I looked awful.
How could what I had once thought looked grand seem so ridiculous now? It was crazy—thinking one thing one minute, then changing my mind the next. I didn’t care about looking bad, sloppy, or wrong. But I couldn’t stand the thought of appearing ridiculous.
I could buy something else to wear. Money wasn’t an object; I’d come out of Christmas loaded. But what could I buy that could make me grow ten years, or look like something besides a fourteen-year-old girl Sam Best was going to get special permission for?
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