All the Finest Girls

by Alexandra Styron

  When my mother called me with news of Louise’s death, I’d been back at work, in a desultory daze, for two weeks. The information lit a fuse in me, one I was seemingly powerless to extinguish. I called Marva and shamelessly pressed myself on her. I spoke of my grief and expressed my condolences until she was nearly forced to make me an invitation. When she did, I accepted immediately. Of course I changed my mind the minute I hung up, but I knew that by then it was too late.

  I told Emmeline that an aunt to whom I was very close had passed away in the deep South, bought a ticket, and got on a plane. It’s likely Emmeline didn’t believe me, by which I mean she didn’t believe any relative of mine had died. I’m not a very persuasive liar. But she probably figured I was heading toward some place for deep psychiatric evaluation or intensive cure. If that’s what she thought, then she wasn’t entirely wrong. I guess I was making a bid for self-preservation, backing out like a mole from my tunnel of darkness. Whatever. I had to go, and so I did.

  11

  NEVAH MIND HER.”

  Lou squeezes my hand as we step off my grandmother’s porch, her fingers wrapped around mine in a brown-and-pink fist. The field that separates Further Moor, Edith’s summer house, from the Bay Shoals Road is parted by a long driveway of sand and broken clamshells. We walk quickly, Lou’s whole body pitched forward in a dark slant. It’s our second night in Bay Shoals, and Lou and I have plans to see a movie. But now we’re running late.

  August.

  Here’s the familiar long slatted shadow, like a picture negative of the widow’s walk, laid across the heather in the late afternoon. Here’s scrub oak, and goldenrod, and fat, goosey gulls cruising inward from beyond the cliff. Blackberries, thorns, halyards pinkeling against their masts, the briny intake of sea air. Here is Van Riper, your lunch is ready that comes like a yodel through the privet from the beach club just next door. Sand in my bed, sea monkeys growing like germs in a mason jar on the windowsill, Orange Popsicles, stacks of library books dragged back to Edith’s in a red wagon, the forever unfinished Self-Portrait under a curtain of dust in my grandfather’s studio.

  Further Moor is far enough away from Coldbrook to stop twice off the highway for bathrooms and lobster rolls. WELCOME TO MASSACHUSETTS! Miles and miles along Basket Alley, a two-lane highway strung together by shops selling saltwater taffy and wicker. A long road away from You imagine I don’t know what you think of me, but I do, I do know exactly and Darling, what are you saying and Your contempt is positively viscous; I do believe it’s choking me and You’re crazy; what are you saying and Fuck you or fuck whoever it is you’re planning on fucking, I’m sure

  My father almost never comes here I’d rather put a bullet in my head and now he’s too many miles away to think about. I imagine unweaving every basket until the brown threads are laid end to end. Unimaginably far, that’s how far away we are. We have arrived for August at Further Moor and I am with Lou.

  I have her.

  She is mine.

  The smell of summer berries in the warm after-dinner air hangs juicy, blue. Mom is in California, acting in a movie. She’s playing a mother. Don’t even have to try, she says. Neither do I. I’ve wished her away, and she is gone.

  Edith was in the kitchen and that’s why we’re late.

  “Good God, what is that?” she said, looking at my Mocko hat.

  “Keeps the Jumbies away,” I told her, running a tongue over and over through the hole where my two front teeth used to be. Lou and I had made the hat that afternoon. It was the Jumbies, Lou said, that had been at me. Evil spirits giving me badways. The hat would make me scary, like the Mocko dancers back home in St. Clair. The dancers dress to chase the Jumbies away.

  This will set yah right again

  The detergent box that makes the base of the hat sprouts two horns, branches from an apple tree on the back lawn. Seaweed hangs down in soggy strips from the crown, and a veil of moth-eaten lace we found in the attic droops down the back. I painted the sides yellow and brown and pasted macaroni on the front. In the hat I see myself toothless, smelly. It makes me feel strong.

  “Ugh,” said Edith, backing away from me, her lips stitched up at the corners. She was wearing her red dress, the one that makes her look like a fire hydrant. Edith was going to a party.

  “You’re not wearing that out, missy. Take it off.”

  I didn’t take it off. Edith’s dog, Constable, nudged at me, sniffed up my legs. I scratched a Jumbie in my armpit.

  “Take. It. Off.”

  A fat fistful of the creatures wriggled in my ear and laughed. I trembled, smacked my head.

  “Stop that Addy. She can’t wear it out, for Christ sake.”

  Edith looked at Lou, standing behind me. I felt the hat lift from my head. Edith sighed and popped a handful of peanuts in her mouth.

  “It’s for your own good,” she said, looking down to rub salt off the front of her dress. “You’re no Shirley Temple as it is. Really. Why add insult to injury?”

  Lou tugged at me and we slipped out the kitchen door.

  “Nevah mind her.”

  She looked back over her shoulder.

  “Ol’ pissy ting.”

  At the foot of the driveway, we turn onto the rutted sidewalk of Bay Shoals Road. Lou’s chin juts out of her sweater, the chain on her glasses swinging as we navigate the street signs and stout lampposts. In the morning when we went downtown to do errands, Lou stopped short in front of the town hall. Up the outdoor stairs and beyond a small landing, movies are shown on summer weekends. Lou gazed at the poster on the sandwich board and lifted her hands to her cheeks.

  “Yesss, I’ve got to see dis flim.”

  “Film. Not flim,” I said, tugging at her skirt. I had my eye on Ben Franklin’s at the end of the street, had been waiting all year to cruise the bins of licorice and jawbreakers, Matchbox cars, plastic pranks, needlepoint kits, and rubber animals. I’d been telling Lou about the five-and-dime for months. How could she stop to read a movie poster?

  “I’m wanting to see dat flim tonight, Addy,” she said when she finally caught up to me, down the block. “Yah gonna love it.”

  I didn’t look at the poster. The evening didn’t matter to me as long as we got to Ben Franklin’s.

  I’m glad not to be wearing my Mocko hat when Lou and I are in sight of the movie theater. The sidewalk is jammed with people out for the evening. Tourists with sweaters tied like necklaces tilt their heads, smoothing ice cream paths around the rims of soggy cones. Ladies push strollers. Old couples lean forward, shuffling slowly, while big boys in bell-bottoms lean back and amble just as slow. I keep close to Lou’s side as she gently threads the traffic.

  The ticket seller is getting ready to close the theater doors. In a circle of light at the top of the stairs, a group of kids is in conversation with two grown-ups. Beach club kids. Elizabeth Dalley, Sarah Conway, Danny Leahy, who hasn’t grown an inch over the winter. There’s another boy too, older, with hair black as coal. He’s hanging off to the side, apart, and I can’t place him. But it is Sarah, in braces and barrettes, whom I have my eye on.

  Sarah Conway is hard and shiny, like the center of the tires on a brand-new bike. Everyone else moves around her like a spoke on her wheel. She keeps Elizabeth Dalley beside her, tells her what to do, how to walk and what to say. On the beach, Sarah instructs Elizabeth to keep her back to me. She commands the other kids too. Except for me, whom she doesn’t talk to at all. I have not minded. Until now.

  I think of Coldbrook, of the Wyant boys, and I fall a step behind Lou, who is bounding up to the box office. I don’t want her to see, don’t want her to know it’s the same in Bay Shoals as it is in Coldbrook. While she buys the tickets, I lean over the railing and look at the brick sidewalk below.

  “You just buy them and we all walk in together, like we’re with you,” Sarah is explaining to the man and woman.

  “No biggie,” interrupts Danny. “Our parents know it’s rated R and everything. They’re just busy tonig
ht.”

  “Really,” Sarah says, her voice with a touch of boredom now. “We do it all the time, just about every night. So … OK?”

  “Addy!” Lou calls. I cringe when I hear my name.

  Pulling my sweater slowly over my head, I turn around. Through the fabric’s loose weave I can see the kids following the couple inside. Lou pushes a ticket into my hand and leaves me. Within an instant, she has disappeared, nothing more than the corner of her skirt left to follow into the darkness.

  Lou sits forward in her seat, looking as though she’s been shot through with electricity.

  A red eye fills the screen.

  The face of a woman, as dark as Lou, is lit beneath by fire. She stands and dances, flames covering her nakedness. Her head melts and becomes a skull.

  A man in a suit aims a gun at us.

  The numbers 007 zoom into view.

  “BAYAAAH!” shouts Lou, her face lit up like a sparkler. I hear a chorus of laughter in the back row and slide down low in my seat.

  The movie is strange, sinister, the first grown-up movie I’ve ever seen. The story has lost me, so I watch Lou instead. She grins and rubs her hands together, rocks back and forth in her seat, warns people on-screen of danger they can’t see. Yah! Watch out for Mr. Big. Catch him, Bond! She laughs, slaps her head, thrusts her fist in the air. When I crawl into her lap, she wraps a tight arm around me but keeps her eyes riveted ahead.

  We are the last to leave the theater, Lou and I. Slung back in her seat, she watches the screen until the projector stops. The lights of the house make my eyes hurt. Outside we walk slowly up the street, wet from passing rain. Lou has my hand and is swinging my arm.

  “Yes, Addy, I’m telling yah dat was a different James from de other one me seen. Me cyaant wait to tell Errol, for he won’t be getting dat flim for a while now.”

  At the end of the block, Sarah and the others are clustered around a bike rack. Elizabeth wrestles with Danny, who is sitting on her bike and pulling the spangles on her handlebars. When we cross near to them, Sarah begins to giggle. I catch Elizabeth’s eye.

  “Hi, Addy,” Elizabeth says.

  Two summers ago, Elizabeth and I took swimming lessons together. Afterward, we collected periwinkle shells beneath the dock or raced in our wet suits for milkshakes and BLTs. But that was before she fell in with Sarah. When she greets me now, I am stunned. Before I can respond, Sarah thumps Elizabeth on the back.

  “What?” says Elizabeth, turning to Sarah and rubbing her back. “What?” she says again, and begins to laugh. Sarah whispers something in her ear, but Lou is dragging me away now. She stops abruptly and turns around.

  “What yah laughing at? Yah bunch of jackasses. Y’all pass stupid.”

  There is no sound at all, it seems, though the street is still alive with people. No sound except the crickets scratching in the elms above our heads.

  We are well up Bay Shoals Road before Lou speaks again.

  “Bayaah! Damn nasty chilren! Should have smacked dem up deir backsides.”

  It is Lou who is upset, I think, a crease furrowing her brow. I’m not upset. I don’t care because I have Lou.

  “Bayaah!” I say, trying to make her laugh. “Watch out for Mr. Big!”

  Lou pats me on the behind and dances away, her gold tooth glittering in the lamplight.

  “Yah naughty ting!” she says, wagging a finger in the air, as the crickets sing another chorus.

  “Jes’ remembah, yah no Shirley Temple.”

  That night, I take my Mocko hat to bed with me and sleep a long and dreamless sleep under a blanket of stars.

  12

  SOMETHING LIKE ROUTINE appeared to be in full swing when I entered the Alfreds’ kitchen for dinner that evening. Cyril and his great-grandfather were both seated at the table, napkins tucked into their collars. Derek moved between the two of them, cutting up stewy pieces of meat and potatoes, while Marva, rooted at the stove, spooled out her thoughts in a punctuationless monologue. She seemed to have been talking for some time.

  “Yah and also me ordered a hearse car for taking her to de church a big one to drive slow tru de town me tinking she would have liked dat.”

  Marva’s family took no more notice of her words than of the radio playing softly in the background. Cyril was making nonsense sounds, driving up the volume when he saw me come in. Derek glanced up from his grandfather’s plate. I smiled and in return got a civil nod. Outside the screen door, Floria and Philip stood in the glare of an outdoor bulb having a quiet exchange. The air was redolent, the evening in motion.

  “Sit down Addy dat coffin is nice,” Marva said without turning around. “Me wanting one of you to check in at Roger’s parlor before tomorrow night because me plenty busy. …”

  Philip and Floria came in, he with a rusty milk crate and a folding chair in his hands, and began helping Marva pass out plates. They made a remarkable-looking couple, I thought, the kind that turns heads. There was about them both an aristocratic quality. Their bearing wanted a much grander room than that fatigued, decrepit kitchen. It seemed to me that Philip and Floria didn’t really belong there any more than, for utterly different reasons, I did. The idea comforted me and inclined me again toward Philip. Still, I hardly felt at home, and took a seat in the corner, making myself as small as possible.

  “Derek!” Marva suddenly barked, a serving spoon raised in the air. “Me talking to yah.”

  “What?”

  “Me saying yah gotta clear up in yah room tomorrow for Denise de lady dat usually be a friend of yah mumma’s from over in Priest’s Bay Addy’s in yah mumma’s bed so me taking Cyril in wit me and yah cyan have de sofa.”

  Philip took several beers from the fridge and handed me one. I didn’t want a beer. I’m a terrible and infrequent drinker. Besides, I thought I’d done enough damage for one day. But I didn’t dare to speak, so I took the bottle and poured slowly into my glass. Philip winked at me, the flirt in him irrepressible. Floria took a seat at my side.

  “Yah hear me, Derek?”

  “I hear yah,” Derek replied calmly, precisely working the knife and fork across his son’s plate.

  Marva came to the table, and the conversation ceased temporarily as Derek shushed his son. We linked hands for the saying of grace.

  “For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly grateful,” Derek recited. His voice was tired, gray.

  Before amen could follow, Philip broke in.

  “And we pray for Louise up in heaven, who made this circle complete.”

  I glanced up and saw Derek’s eyes lingering on the crown of his brother’s bent head.

  “Mmhmm. Amen,” said Marva. “Me pass by Cora Pond’s today, and she say enough flowers like to choke a horse arrived at Roger’s parlor today. And dem come wit no card. Can yah imagine?”

  This strange fact was met with complete silence, save for the sound of clashing silverware. Marva might just have announced a clement weather prediction. I couldn’t tell whether everyone but me, and perhaps Cyril, knew who had sent the flowers, or they were all just too tired to care. When Marva didn’t get a rise out of the others, she moved on to another subject.

  “Me gonna fret about de headstone since yah haven’t got it chosen today.”

  “Bobsled, down at the movie house, said him and his wife were sending flowers,” Derek said, putting a slice of bread on his son’s plate. “Did they come?”

  “Don’t know, but dese weren’t old frupsy Bobsled flowers. Yah boys ought to know what dat head marker’s gonna read. I’m not good wit dat kind of ting, yah know, but me told yah me wanting it to be pink.” Marva hadn’t touched her food. “But it’s costing more, I know.”

  Derek looked at Philip, challenging him to respond.

  “Whatever you’d like,” Philip said quietly.

  “When Mumma died, me wanted a pink stone, but dere weren’t none in Pville. And for my Josephus me wanted one too. So. Now me getting my pink stone.”

  Marva’s face too
k on a happy look, as though she were picturing not a grave but a double hot-fudge sundae, and the mood about the table seemed to brighten. Relaxing a little, I listened to Mr. Alfred’s teeth clacking along and thought again of Coldbrook. I remembered how at dinnertime, Lou would sit with me while I ate and listen to my stories about school. Only after I was finished would she have her own meal, alone at the kitchen counter. Invariably, it seemed, she made herself a pork chop drowned by a pungent hot sauce. Smelling it, I would grab at my throat in exaggerated disgust, though dinner was Lou’s quiet time and I usually left her alone then. If I entered the kitchen to ask her a question, she would put a hand to her mouth and nod or shake her head, unwilling to prolong the exchange. I was nine or ten before I figured out what made her so shy — when she ate, Lou removed her two front teeth, the ones banded together by a strip of gold, and clutched them in her palm. I stopped dead in my tracks the first time I saw her do this. I wasn’t frightened or disgusted, but I felt I’d walked in on something utterly private, practically seen her naked, and I made sure never again to interrupt her at mealtime.

  “Floria and me were speaking about the service,” Philip said, glancing quickly over at his wife. “She’d like to sing something, a hymn. We could all pick it out or talk with Reverend Taylor.”

  Marva clapped her hands together.

  “Yesss!” she said. “Dat would be nice.”

  “I thought Denise was singing already,” said Derek, without looking up from his plate.

  “She is, but just de one song. And Floria has a real trained voice. We should have two hymns, me tink.”

  No one said a thing.

  Dat was Marcus “Taxi” Bickford wit “Paradise Riddem” in de numbah four spot dis week, boomed the DJ from the crackling radio. Catch ’em next Saturday at Foxy’s!