by Fannie Flagg
Then there were other times when he daydreamed he was really the son of Roy Rogers and Dale Evans who had been kidnapped at birth but found at last. There would be another parade down Main Street, only this time he would be riding on the back of Trigger with Roy tipping his big cowboy hat to all as they rode by. Dale and Gabby Hayes would be riding beside them smiling and waving to the cheering crowds. He would go to live with Roy and Dale on the Double R Bar Ranch and bring his Elmwood Springs family with him. His days would be spent riding the range for bad guys, nights sitting around the campfire listening to the Sons of the Pioneers sing cowboy songs, and they would all live happily ever after. “Happy trails to you . . . until we meet again.”
But for the time being, at least, he was just plain Bobby Smith. And unfortunately for Anna Lee, he was, as she always suspected, up to something.
Bobby knew of only one sure way to get even with his sister for telling his mother he had been out at Blue Springs, a betrayal that had caused him to get grounded and miss seeing Pals of the Saddle and Wild Horse Roundup the following Saturday. He and Monroe had been plotting and planning for weeks. “It” was to happen the night of the prom.
His mother and Grandmother Smith were chaperones and Doc always kept the drugstore open late on prom night so the kids could come in afterward and eat ice cream. Jimmy would be off playing Friday night poker with his buddies at the VFW. Bobby and Monroe had the house entirely to themselves, so they could put their plan in action without anyone seeing them.
After the deed was done they went back to Bobby’s room and waited. Anna Lee was the last one home and floated in on a pink cloud at around 12:29, only one minute away from her 12:30 curfew, still glowing from her romantic evening. She had danced all night under silver paper stars and blue and white crepe-paper banners that hung from the ceiling of the gymnasium with her date Billy Nobblitt, a Van Johnson look-alike, or so she thought. She dreamily undressed, still hearing the strains of “It Had to Be You” and “Polka Dots and Moonbeams” playing over and over in her head.
When she had put on her nightgown and brushed her teeth, she carefully placed her gardenia corsage in a glass of water and put it on her dresser. She crawled into bed tired and happy, a feeling of bliss that lasted about one second.
She immediately shot out of bed screaming, “Snakes, snakes,” over and over at the top of her lungs. She ran to her parents’ room, threw their door open, and screamed, “Help . . . I’ve been snakebit!” and fainted dead away in a heap.
After Doc and Dorothy had tended to Anna Lee and had gotten her revived and somewhat calmed down, and after Mother Smith, out in the hall in her hair net and clutching her robe, had announced, “If there are reptiles in the house, I’m not staying,” peace reigned briefly. Mother Smith would not go back to bed until Doc went over to Anna Lee’s room to check. But it was no nightmare. Anna Lee’s bed was crawling with about a hundred slimy, squirming red worms straight from his own worm bed in the backyard. He’d guessed correctly.
“I don’t know why she has to make such a big deal out of it. They’re just harmless little worms,” said Bobby as he was being pulled out from under the bed by his father. And to make matters worse, the minute Doc had opened the door, Monroe, his true-blue blood brother, had jumped out the window and run all the way home in his Hopalong Cassidy pajamas, leaving Bobby to face the music alone.
Anna Lee was furious at Bobby and said that as far as she was concerned, he did not exist anymore. She made it a point to ignore him. She did not speak to Bobby for quite a while, until one day she forgot she wasn’t speaking to him and asked him to bring her some milk from the kitchen.
He reacted by laughing and pointing at her, saying, “Ha, ha, I thought you weren’t speaking to me. Go get it yourself,” and ran off the porch and down the street. A disgusted Anna Lee got up and went to the kitchen and opened the icebox and asked her mother, “What I don’t understand is why you had to have another child. Why didn’t you just stop with me?” Dorothy smiled. “Well, honey, we thought we had.” Anna Lee turned and looked at her mother in surprise; this was the first she had heard of this. “What happened?”
“I guess the Good Lord just decided to send us another little angel down from heaven.”
“I may be sick,” said Anna Lee and left the room.
Mother Smith came in. “What’s the matter with her?”
Dorothy laughed. “She wanted to know why we had to have Bobby.”
“What did you tell her?”
“I blamed it all on the Good Lord.”
“Well, that’s as good an excuse as any. According to the Presbyterians, everything in life is preordained, or at least that’s what Norma’s mother says.”
“Ida? How would she know, she’s a Methodist.”
“Not anymore. As of last week she claims she’s a Presbyterian.”
“What?”
“Oh yes . . . right in the middle of the bridge tournament she announced it.”
Dorothy, amazed, cracked three eggs in a tan bowl with a blue stripe and stirred. “But there’s not a Presbyterian church within a hundred miles around here. Why would she want to be a Presbyterian all of a sudden?”
Mother Smith poured herself a glass of iced tea. “I suppose it’s all part of her plan to move up in the world.”
Dorothy was baffled. “Well . . . I just don’t know what to say. . . . There’s a lemon in the icebox. I just hope she’ll be happy.”
Mother Smith reached into the icebox. “I do, too, but I don’t think anything can make her really happy unless, of course, Norma marries a Rockafella and she can at last take her rightful place in society.”
High Society
WHAT MOTHER SMITH said was true. If there was such a thing as high society in Elmwood Springs, Norma’s mother aspired to be it. After all, Ida Jenkins’s husband, Herbert, was the town banker and as such Ida felt she had a certain position to uphold and it was her civic duty to set the standards of genteel behavior. To light the way. Set an example. She was in charge of all the refinements of life and in her relentless pursuit to bring culture and beauty to the community she nearly drove Norma and her father crazy.
Even though she was living in a small town in the middle of nowhere, she subscribed to all the latest women’s magazines to keep abreast of the times. In the late thirties she took to spelling the word modern “moderne” and referring to their house as a “bungalow,” her clothes as “frocks.” She used the word “intriguing” as much as possible, had her hair styled just like Ina Claire, the Broadway star, and she never cried when she could weep or have “wept.”
Too, Ida was a club woman from tip to top. She was the grande dame of the National Federated Women’s Club of Missouri and had spearheaded the local Garden Club, Bridge Club, the Wednesday Night Supper Club, the Book Club, and the Downtown Theatrical Club and was never seen on the street without a hat and white gloves. She never served a meal in her home without having an individual nut cup at each place setting and a clean white tablecloth. “Only heathens eat off a plain table,” she said.
On Norma’s sixteenth birthday she had given her a copy of the new and enlarged edition of Emily Post’s book on etiquette, in which she had inscribed:
If everyone would read this we would certainly be spared a lot of unpleasantness in this world.
Happy Birthday
Love,
Mother
Ida was even on a first-name basis with the author and often wondered out loud, “I wonder how Emily would handle this?” Or she would sometimes preface her remarks with, “Emily says . . .” Ida’s life goal and, she assumed, all of America’s was to bring enlightenment not only to Elmwood Springs but to the entire world until even in the farthest igloo at the North Pole and the wilds of the deepest darkest jungles in Borneo people everywhere would know that the fork belongs on the left and that fresh flowers on a table supply a delightful treat for the eye, that a clean house is a happy house, and come to embrace the fact that raising one�
��s voice in anger is rude and uncalled for on any occasion.
Ida always said, “Remember, Norma, in America a person of quality and class is not judged by aristocracy of birth but by his or her behavior.” Norma figured that by that standard her mother must have thought she was the duchess of Kent by now.
Norma loved her mother but, as Norma said to Anna Lee, “You try living with her twenty-four hours a day. You just don’t know how lucky you are to have your mother and not mine.” In fact, Norma spent the night at Anna Lee’s as often as possible, as did Monroe. The house was always full of people and fun things to do and the food was delicious. And most important, over at Neighbor Dorothy’s house you could actually sit on the living room furniture, something Ida never let Norma or her father do. In Ida’s house the living room was only shown to people as they passed by and was called the formal room. It was so formal that nobody had been in it since she had decorated it eighteen years before.
On one of the numerous occasions when Norma was spending the weekend over at Anna Lee’s house, she helped Anna Lee pull a good one on Bobby and Monroe. One Saturday afternoon, Bobby and Monroe were in the parlor with the blinds and shades drawn, sitting in the dark eating peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches and listening to their favorite scary detective shows on the radio. They had just heard Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar; Boston Blackie; and The Whistler and now a new show was just starting.
First strange and weird chords played on an organ, then a voice came through:
WOMAN: There he goes into . . . that drugstore. He’s stepping on the scales.
(Sound: Clink of a coin.)
WOMAN: Weight, two hundred and thirty-seven pounds.
(Sound: Card dropping.)
WOMAN: Fortune. Danger!
Organ: (Stinnnng!)
WOMAN: Whooo is it?
MAN: The Fat Man!!!
As promised, this week’s program was chock-full of suspense and mystery. Near the end both boys were literally sitting on the edge of their seats. Just as the strange man in the raincoat was being followed down a wet, dead-end street, with the sound of footsteps following behind him, growing louder and louder . . . click click . . . footsteps . . . closer and closer . . . louder and louder . . . nowhere to run . . . nowhere to hide . . . just at the very moment when the terrified man, his heart pounding, turned to face his fiendish killer, suddenly two figures wearing hideous rubber masks popped up from behind the couch with green flashlights shining under their chins, shouting BAAA! BAAA!
It scared them so badly that both boys shot straight up in the air and screamed like two little girls. They almost knocked each other down trying to get out of the room, falling over the coffee table and chairs while they scrambled for the door and ran down the hall.
Norma’s boyfriend, Macky, had rigged the flashlights with green bulbs and the masks had come from last Halloween. The girls had been hiding behind the couch all afternoon, just waiting for the right moment. When Anna Lee gave the signal, all the waiting had been worth it.
The Winner
Neighbor Dorothy started with a great big “Good morning, everybody! Well, I could hardly wait to get on the air this morning because as Gabriel Heatter says, ‘Ah, there’s good news tonight!’ or in our case, today, and we are just tickled pink and chomping at the bit to tell you about it. But first let me ask you this: Does your soap powder make you sneeze?
“Mrs. Squatzie Kittrel of Silver Springs, Maryland, says, ‘Rinso washes my clothes fast in rich soapy suds and it’s so easy on my hands and on wash days it does not make me sneeze like all the others.’ So remember, Rinso white, Rinso bright, the only granulated soap that is ninety-eight percent free of sneezy soap dust. And also, are you looking for checked, striped, or polka-dot material for that bedroom, den, or kitchen window? If so, Fred Morgan of Morgan Brothers says come on in and he’s also got a big bolt of dotted Swiss material he’s going to discount by the yard, so if you have been thinking about making curtains, this is the time.
“And now to the big news of the day . . .” Dorothy picked up the letter with the good news and beamed with pride. “You know, usually we don’t like to blow our own horn but we are all so excited we can hardly contain ourselves, so we just had to tell you about it.” Mother Smith played a fanfare on the organ. “Yesterday it was announced that Doc has won the Rexall Pharmacist of the Year Award for proficiency in dispensing drugs for the second year in a row. And he’s to receive it in person at this year’s Southeastern Pharmaceutical Convention in Memphis and I plan to be right there to see him get it. So if you are listening at the drugstore, Doc, we are mighty proud of you.”
Down at the Rexall, Thelma and Bertha Ann, the two gals in the pink-and-white uniforms who worked behind the soda fountain, had the radio sitting on the shelf behind them. Thelma was washing a glass banana-split dish and Bertha Ann was making the egg salad for the lunch crowd when they heard the news. They both stopped what they were doing and whistled and clapped and yelled to the back, “Yeah! Whoopee! Great going, Doc. Congratulations! Our hero!” Doc, who had just finished filling a prescription, handed a customer a bottle of paregoric for her baby who was teething. When she asked Doc what had happened, he said, embarrassed, “Oh nothing, those two are just acting crazy. You know how they are . . . just silly.” He continued, “Now you don’t need much, just a few drops in a glass of water, and that should do the trick.”
After she left Doc walked over to the soda fountain shaking his finger in mock anger. “You girls, what am I going to do with you two?”
They laughed. Bertha Ann said, “That’s what you get for not telling us.”
He sat down on a stool. “I guess I’m just going to have to put a muzzle on that wife of mine.”
But he was secretly pleased. “Fix me a lemon ice-cream soda, will you, Bertha, and fix something for yourselves. Now that the cat’s out of the bag we might as well celebrate.”
Meanwhile, back on the show Dorothy made another announcement. “The other winner today of our What Is the Biggest Surprise You Ever Had Contest was sent to us by Mrs. Sally Sockwell of Hot Springs, Arkansas. She writes, ‘Last year I lost the diamond out of my ring and I was so despondent because my husband, now deceased, had bought it for me when we were first married and now both were gone forever. So you can imagine my joy and surprise three weeks later when, frying an egg, I noticed something shiny in the white part and lo and behold it was my lost diamond. One of my hens must have pecked it out when I was collecting eggs. The Lord works in mysterious ways.’ Yes, he does, Mrs. Sockwell, and thank heavens you weren’t making an omelette or you might never have seen it.
“And speaking of missing objects, Leona Whatley called in and said that someone must have sold her sweater and purse at the school rummage sale. She says she put them down on a table for just a second and when she turned around they were missing. So whoever bought a blue woman’s beaded sweater and a black purse with a small box of Kleenex that had not been opened inside please call Leona, as she would like to buy them back. We have a lot more coming up on the show this morning. Beatrice is going to be singing one of your favorites, ‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles.’ And yes, unfortunately, it’s that time of year again. Next Saturday down at the Elmwood Theater they are having the annual Bazooka Bubble Gum Bubble Blowing Contest . . . well that’s a mouthful . . . so mothers, get ready. I know Bobby is about to drive us insane over at our house—pop, pop, pop, chew, chew, chew, night and day. Also don’t forget every Wednesday night is dish night at the Elmwood Theater, so go on down . . . and let’s see . . . do we have anything else I’m forgetting, Mother?”
Mother Smith played a few strains of the funeral march and pointed to a jar on the desk. “Oh, that’s right, thank you, Mother Smith. Last week we told you about a new instant coffee but we will have to take it off our list of recommendations, and I am just as sorry as I can be about it but it’s just not up to snuff, as they say, is it, Mother Smith? She says no and made a face but as I say to all my sponsors,
Keep trying because we are behind you one hundred percent.
“And remember our motto: If at first you don’t succeed, try again.”
Unfortunately for Bobby, his mother’s motto was one he was to hear from her firsthand the very next week, when he dragged in the door having lost the Bazooka Bubble Gum Bubble Blowing Contest for the second year in a row. It didn’t help him feel much better. He had practiced long and hard until his jaws were sore but he came in sixth. Rats, he thought. Everybody in the family is always winning something but me.
The Boy Who Cried Wolf
DOC WAS HOME for lunch and Dorothy stood by the kitchen table waiting for an opinion about the new hat she had just bought for their upcoming trip to Memphis. He studied the object perched on her head for a long moment and then said, “Oh, I don’t know, Dorothy. As far as hats go, I’ve seen worse.”
“Well, thanks a lot,” she said.
Mother Smith jumped in and offered, “I like it,” and gave her son a dirty look.
Dorothy blinked hopefully. “Really?”
“Oh, yes, it’s very stylish. Don’t ask him. He doesn’t know anything about hats.”
Doc readily agreed. “That’s right. Don’t ask me. I can’t tell one from the other.”