Windchill Summer

by Norris Church Mailer

  As he cooked, hustling from chopping board to stove, dicing and slicing so fast that it made his fingers a blur, Baby could feel Park watching her. He sensed when Jackie had hurt or neglected her, and tried to make it up in little ways. He would give her one of his special desserts to take home, or massage her neck with a special nerve-relaxing technique when she had a hard day. Though he never said a word, Baby knew that he was aware she was sleeping with Jackie. It embarrassed her a little. She could tell from their arguments that Park and Jackie had disagreements over many things, and she sensed that she was one more.

  By the following summer, 1968, she was promoted to working the dinner shift with Carlene, and her tips got bigger. The only nights that brought in more money were the special banquets, but Baby and Carlene were never included on the wait-staff list for those. It was always the older women and, oddly, several of the part-time girls, Rita Ballard was in charge of those evenings.

  Rita was thirty, she said, but Baby and Carlene pegged her closer to forty. At one time she had played around with the idea of going to Las Vegas and becoming a showgirl, but she never made it out of Sweet Valley. Still, she dressed as close to her showgirl ideal as she could, with lots of gold Lurex and sequins, and her hair was ratted into a stiff cloud. Her makeup practically glowed in the dark. Jackie never would have allowed her to work in the daytime, when the lawyers’ and doctors’ wives came to lunch, but on banquet nights, Rita ruled the roost.

  The banquets started as a thank-you party for Judge Greer, who had helped Jackie get the private club license and who had invested quite a lot of money as well, although that had to be kept secret. It was held late at night, after closing, just for men—no wives. It was such a hit that the banquets became a regular event—like the Lions Club, only with booze and friendly waitresses.

  As much as a secret can be held in a small southern town, the banquets were secret, like the Masons. Rita gloried in her role as hostess, and lorded it over the younger girls.

  “Doc McGuire gave me a hundred-dollar tip last night,” she’d say as soon as she saw Baby or Carlene the day after a banquet, flashing the bill under their noses.

  “Hmph.” Carlene glanced at it. “What’d you have to do to get that?”

  “Nothing. He just liked my looks,” Rita would say, smirking.

  She’d reel off the names of the local celebrities who’d been there the night before, too—people like Don Brandon, the weatherman from Channel 6 in Little Rock; Michael Wilson, the district attorney; and Roy Suggs, the state senator from Little Rock. According to Rita, they all were crazy for her, pushing money at her just for the pleasure of her company. Baby couldn’t figure it out, but the money was real. Hundred-dollar bills didn’t just pop up out of nowhere.

  Carlene tried to ignore Rita, but Baby was curious.

  “I wonder what Rita does. I mean, do you think there’s music and dancing or what? Don’t you want to go to one?”

  “Look, Baby, don’t get into it.” Carlene said, trying to sidetrack her. “You don’t want to go to those. It’s just asking for headaches.”

  But Baby thought she did want to. She asked Jackie about them.

  “Jackie, why don’t you ever let me work the banquets? I can take orders and bring out the food, even if I can’t serve drinks.”

  “No, Baby. Banquets are not the place for a young girl like you. You just learn how to be a good waitress.” But he softened the words by kissing her on the ear.

  She tried, but even the lunches were difficult for Baby, who was not—to say the least—a natural-born waitress. More than once, Park had to help her carry a heavy tray or rush out after her with a forgotten dish. People seemed to like her, though, and apparently they asked for her when she wasn’t there.

  During the lull after the rush, she often hung out with Park in the kitchen.

  One day she hopped up on the counter and crossed her legs. Park sliced her a piece of Peking duck, smoking and hot.

  “Sit on stool, Baby. Nobody like to eat food prepared from counter if people put their bottom on it.”

  Obediently, she slid down onto the tall stool. He handed her a second piece of duck and wiped the countertop where she had sat. Park was a maniac when it came to cleaning. He would have fainted and fallen over on it, Baby thought, if he knew what she and Jackie had done on that very counter.

  “What do they do at those banquets, Park?”

  “Nothing. Boring business dinners. It is too late for you, Baby. You have to be up early to go to class.”

  “It’s summertime, Park. I don’t have classes.”

  “You still should not be up so late. You young. Need sleep.” He spooned creamy rice pudding into a bowl and ground fresh cinnamon onto it. “Here. Put some meat on those little bird bones.”

  Baby hated to be left out of anything, but she knew it was no use. Park was a Buddha when he wanted to be. She ate the pudding and vowed that sooner or later she would get to a banquet.

  22.Cherry

  “Hold still, Cherry, and keep that towel over your eyes!”

  Lucille was trying to chemically straighten my hair. Over the years, we had done everything we could possibly do to get the kinks out. We rolled it on great big brush rollers, which worked not at all well—they just made it pouf out, like a hand grenade had gone off on my head. Then we tried rolling it on bigger orange juice cans, and finally we tried wrapping it all around my head and clipping it with duckbills, using my head for a giant roller. At its best, it still looked like corduroy. Then we read in Glamourabout ironing hair, and we tried that.

  It was a total disaster. Lucille evidently got the iron too hot, and the article didn’t say that you needed to put the hair between layers of paper. Or at least if it did, we skipped over that part. And they didn’t say anything in the article about not using hair spray.

  What happened was, I kneeled on the floor in front of the ironing board and Lucille spread my hair out over it, brushing it as straight as she could. Then she sprayed it full of hair spray, to try and at least tame it down long enough to do the job, and licked her finger and sizzled it on the bottom of the iron, like you do when you iron clothes. My hair stuck to the bottom before she could make the first pass.

  She jerked up the iron, burned her finger, and knocked over the ironing board. I fell, taking the iron with me. It was still stuck to my hair, burning it to a crisp. Finally, she got the thing unplugged, but she couldn’t get my hair unstuck and had to cut a chunk out. The worst thing about it was the smell. Have you ever smelled burning hair? It’s like burnt . . . I don’t know . . . chicken feathers or something. Mama smelled it clear upstairs, and ran in and flung open the window. I bet we used a gallon of Tame creme rinse to try and get the smell out of my hair.

  When Mama saw what we were up to, she threw a fit. She loved my curly hair. That’s easy for her. She didn’t have to live with it.

  I know it is stupid and shallow, but I wanted straight hair so bad. All the models in Glamourand Voguehad long, silky hair, parted in the middle, that hung in a smooth curtain down their backs. And Cher! She had the best hair in the world. It was like Baby’s, long and black. She wore great big hoop earrings, and when she moved, her hair swung from side to side. I know it is not right to be that obsessed with your looks, but I wanted so much to be normal, not some pale, frizzy freak that always looms over everyone else like Frankenstein. I wanted to be glamorous.

  I studied the fashion magazines every month, trying to improve my looks. I finally got the knack, after weeks of practice, of putting on false eyelashes, and I didn’t even feel as bad as I used to about being so skinny, since most of the models were nearly as skinny as I was. Twiggy, in fact, might even be skinnier. Her legs were sure no better. She had those ropes-with-knots for knees, just like I did. But not a single one of the models had bushy white hair.

  After the ironing disaster, in a last-ditch effort, I got one of the black girls in our class, Queen Esther McVay, to get me some of the straightening cream the
y all used. It came in a big can with roses on the lid and smelled to high heaven of ammonia, or something else that eats out your sinuses. She thought it was funny, and I knew all the black girls would laugh about it, but I needed something heavy-duty.

  Queen Esther had been a friend since we integrated in the eighth grade. Before that, the black kids in Sweet Valley had to be bused twenty miles every day to a school in Marlon County, so coming here was a whole lot better for them. She and I had a lot in common, since she was as tall and skinny as I was, and was also a good artist. Our art teacher, Miss Polly, was cool and let us do pretty much anything we wanted to. Once I sat for a whole afternoon while Queen Esther cornrowed my hair, and then I did hers. We braided clay beads into it that we had made and glazed, and Miss Polly let us photograph it and count it as an art project. It was a great profile photograph of us with our backs together; we looked like each other’s positive and negative.

  Now, Queen Esther was an art major at DuVall with Baby and me. She was the one who got all of us to start saying black instead of colored, like we had been taught when we were kids. She also gave me a book by a guy named Eldridge Cleaver called Soul on Ice,and I got a whole new insight into black people, I can tell you. The words just cracked off the page and hit me in the face while I read it. He said that a whole new movement had begun, dripping with blood, out of the ashes of Watts. He likened the police treatment of blacks in Watts to the treatment of the Viet Cong by the American army. Both were getting their heads blown off. They both were on the receiving end of what the government was dishing out.

  It made a lot of sense to me, and if it made sense to me, it was likely to make sense to a lot of other people. That’s what the protest movement was all about. Somewhere, the killing had to stop.

  —

  “I said cover your eyes! I don’t want you going blind!” Lucille combed the white, thick cream through my hair with a fine-tooth comb. Every few minutes, she had to run to the door and take a few deep gulps of fresh air.

  “Lucille? Where are you?” I couldn’t believe she kept leaving me. “It says that you have to comb this stuff constantly for twenty minutes. You can’t run off for minutes at a time like that! How long has it been?”

  “Seventeen minutes. I’m right here. It only took me fifteen seconds. I have to breathe! Cut me some slack. It’ll sour my milk.”

  She came back and kept on combing. I pulled the towel tighter around my face, and visualized myself with long straight hair. Tripp and I would be riding in Ramblin’ Rose, all the windows down, the wind blowing my hair straight out like a long, silky flag. He would look at me with eyes of love.

  “Cherry,” he would say. “You are the most beautiful girl in the world. Your hair is magnificent. It looks like . . . a shimmering brook all iced over in winter.”

  —

  “I think we better rinse this off. Some of your hair might be coming out.”

  “What!” I threw off the towel, ran to the bathtub, and stuck my head under the faucet. Great. I was going to be bald. It would serve me right for being so vain. Lucille turned on the water and it nearly scalded me.

  “Put some cold in it!”

  We frantically scrubbed the gookey stuff out. It took forever, and I thought I was going to turn blue and die before I got my head up out of the tub. The fumes were a killer. Then I stood up too fast, and all the blood rushed from my head. I was dizzy and lurched around the bathroom, staggered, and fell down onto the commode. Thank goodness the lid was shut.

  Lucille rubbed my head with a towel, hard, and finally took it off and stood back to view the results. At least it hadn’t all fallen out. But I was afraid to look in the mirror.

  “Well?” I asked. “Is it straight?”

  She puckered her lips and squinted. “Well . . .”

  “Stop it!” I couldn’t take it any longer. I looked in the mirror.

  “It is! It’s straight!” I started jumping up and down. “Let’s dry it and see if it stays straight!”

  I went and got the new blow-dryer I had bought. They had just come out with them, and it looked kind of like a gun, which you hand-held, and it blew the air directly on your hair—no hood or rollers or anything. If this thing worked, I would throw out my juice cans and all my rollers and get rid of the old hair dryer with the pink plastic bonnet that took forever and a day to dry.

  The blow-dryer was incredible. It dried the whole bushel basketful of hair in only a few minutes. And it was straight! Not too much had fallen out, just a little, which would never be missed, and it hung down in a white curtain on both sides. It wasn’t really shiny like Cher’s, and it sort of came down in an A instead of hanging straight, but that was okay. Maybe later I could put a treatment of hot olive oil or mayonnaise on it and make it lie down and shine. For right now, I couldn’t stop looking in the mirror.

  “I’m going to have to cut the ends. Now that it’s straight, the place where the iron took out a chunk looks really bad.”

  I didn’t even care. Lucille got out the scissors and cut off a good four inches, but it still went down to the middle of my back, the same length as it had been when it was all kinked up.

  “It looks pretty good, if I do say so myself,” she said. “But to tell you the truth, I liked the old wild hair better.”

  “Great. Thanks, Lucille. I don’t care. I’ve waited all my life for this moment, and I am going to enjoy it.” You’d think she would at least lie and say she liked it better. I would have for her. “You’re going to do great in beauty school, Luce. You might even get to like working on live people.”

  Mr. Wilmerding was sending Lucille to beauty school to get her license, and she had been in classes for a week already. Jim Floyd had left for morticians’ school in Dallas. Although Mr. Wilmerding was paying for the schooling, he couldn’t afford to pay Jim Floyd his salary as well, so he had gone a little early to take a job as an orderly in the emergency room at Baylor Hospital. Getting them coming and going, so to speak. So far, he liked it really well, although he missed Lucille and Tiffany LaDawn like crazy and wrote to them nearly every day.

  “I got a letter from Jim Floyd this morning,” Lucille said as she started scrubbing out the combs. “The night he wrote, they had three stabbings, a shooting, and a bad car wreck. And another one that I couldn’t hardly believe. Apparently, a man caught his girlfriend in bed with this Mexican guy and pulled a gun on them. She jumped out a two-story window to get away from him and landed on a wrought-iron spiked fence. Impaled herself. The spike went up her you-know-what and out through her liver. She didn’t even pass out or anything—just hung there on the fence screaming until the fire department came. There was no way they could get her off of it without killing her, so they had to cut the post off with a blowtorch. They carried her into the emergency room like that. Naked, with an iron fence post sticking out.”

  “Lucille! My Lord! Ooh! That makes me want to cross my legs! Did she live?”

  “Oh, yeah. But they had a dickens of a time getting the spike out. It was in at such an angle that they couldn’t lay her down, so they had to shove two tables close together and stretch her across the gap, and a doctor got underneath on the floor and worked it free.”

  “That is so gross! Lucille, you are making that up.”

  “No I’m not, either. You call up Jim Floyd and ask him. And the whole time they were working on her, the old boyfriend and the new boyfriend were yelling at each other and got into a fistfight, right there at the hospital. Before the law finally came and calmed them down, they wound up treating them both, too, one for a busted hand and the other for a broken nose. Jim Floyd said he would much rather work with people after they’ve passed on. It’s a lot quieter.”

  I couldn’t get over Jim Floyd and the jobs he picked. I’d rather sack groceries at Kroger’s. It was less than a couple of weeks until Baby’s and my senior year of college started, and this was my last week at the pickle plant. I couldn’t wait.

  After Carlene’s funeral, I was a
little hurt by Baby, I must say. It felt like we weren’t the same old friends we had once been. I mean, there was this old guy with a Cadillac that Baby seemed to know real well, and I had no idea who he was or anything. I always felt like we told each other everything, but now it seems maybe we didn’t. I guess I just get paranoid sometimes. I tell you, with everything that has happened in the last few weeks, it is enough to make anybody paranoid. Like that movie star Sharon Tate and her friends getting murdered out in California. She was pregnant, and it was a bloody slaughter. The whole thing just unnerved me, coming right after Carlene. If a whole house full of people can be butchered, who is safe anywhere?

  Also, there was the writing on the walls. The killers had written in blood all over the walls of that mansion, which I think belonged to Doris Day’s son, or he lived there before or something. It reminded me of the writing out at Fat Man’s Squeeze. We hadn’t gone back out there again. Frankly, I was afraid to, even in the daylight. I’m pretty sure it was paint, but now that I think about it, it might have been blood. It definitely was red. It has gotten to the point that I hate to pick up the paper in the morning. Between the war and the assassins and the maniacs, who is going to get slaughtered next?

  The only good thing that has happened is that concert they had up north at Woodstock, a few days after the Sharon Tate murders. We saw it on TV, and it looked like so much fun, everyone rolling around in the mud and all. I wish we could have all gone up there for that. I would have loved to see all those great groups in person at once—not to mention Janis Joplin, who I loved, because she was not beautiful, with hair as uncontrollable as mine, but she had such a heart; she poured it into her songs like she cut her wrist and dripped into the microphone. Maybe we’ll have one of those here in Arkansas, up at Eureka Springs. That would be a great place to have an outdoor concert.

  —

  While I primped in the mirror, Lucille finished cleaning up the mess and went into the living room and got the baby. Tiffany LaDawn had gained a lot of weight in the last few weeks and was just a little round butterball. She had more blond fuzz, too, although she still had to wear her pink headband, since there wasn’t enough hair to hold in a ribbon.