by Wally Lamb
In Shreveport, Vernon worked as a garage mechanic and a weekend banjo player on a popular country-and-western radio program called The Louisiana Hayride. But after a cypress swamp was drained in Metairie on the south shore of Lake Pontchartrain, cheap land and low taxes lured the Shoops back to New Orleans. “My daddy and my PawPaw Gautreaux built us a shotgun house and, the next year, put a camelback on the back of it. None of the other houses around had a upstairs, so we thought we was somethin’ special!” But just when things were looking up for the Shoop family, Verna says, her father was killed in an accident at the garage where he worked. “He was under a big ole Buick Roadmaster, patchin’ up the muffler, when the jack give way. We waked him in the front room of the house he’d built—closed casket since his face had got stoved-in so bad.”
At the time of her father’s death, Verna was fourteen, the oldest of three girls. Her mother had been a homemaker, but now she needed to earn a paycheck or else go on government relief, which she was too proud to do. She took a part-time job as a church secretary at Abide the Coming Baptist where the Shoops worshiped. “That wudn’t enough for us to get by on, but PawPaw built us a chicken coop behind the house so’s we could raise chickens and peddle the eggs.” Advised that leghorns were good layers, RuthAnn purchased seven hens and one rooster and put her eldest daughter in charge of caring for the brood and selling the eggs in town. After RuthAnn took a second job as a night-shift hotel desk clerk, Verna was obliged to look after both the chickens and her younger sisters.
When Verna was fifteen, without the knowledge of her mother, who would have forbidden it, she entered a beauty contest to become Miss Crawfish of Jefferson Parish. She won the swimsuit competition (“I had a shape on me by then and got more’n my share of wolf whistles”) but lost the crown when, during the interview portion of the program, she failed to identify “deadmen’s fingers” as the spindly, inedible lungs of a crab, and then incorrectly named dill weed as one of the seasonings employed for a crawfish boil. “I was a big dummy for not gettin’ that one right, cuz a crawfish and a dill pickle don’t taste nothin’ like each other,” she lamented.
Nevertheless, Verna’s beauty contest exposure parlayed her into a clerking job at the Pak-A-Sak, an all-purpose store famous for its takeout cheeseburgers and barbecue sandwiches. “My sister Nettie took over the egg business, but she was turrible at the peddlin’ part cuz she never smiled, and flirtin’ didn’t come natural to her. She told me she preferred the company of the chickens to the people who answered their doors when she knocked cuz the poultry was more polite. Mama had told me more’n once that Nettie had been a colicky baby and that was probably why she didn’t have my sunny personality.”
It was at the Pak-A-Sak that Verna met Yancey Hibbard, a recently discharged U.S. Navy man who liked barbecue and worked at the nearby Esso filling station. “He come struttin’ in like he was God’s gift to girls instead of a grease monkey in a filthy jumpsuit. But truth be told, I couldn’t keep my eyes offa him. First thing he said to me was, ‘How many meats y’all put on them double cheeseburgers of yours?’ and the second thing he said was, ‘How ’bout after work I go down to Fat Harry’s, pick us up a coupla rum-and-Coca-Colas in go cups, and you and me can go for a ride?’ Well, he was bold, but I was just as. My answer to his first question was, ‘You got a ’rithmatic problem, baybee? How many meats do you think double means?’ And my answer to his second question was, ‘Maybe yes and maybe no. Come by at six and I’ll let you know what I decided.’ Flirtin’ may not have come naturally to Nettie, but I was born knowing how to do it.”
Yancey was twenty-five and, by Verna’s standards, worldly. The two began seeing each other—Verna told her mother she was working extra shifts—and Yancey introduced his new sweetheart to the kinds of things devout Southern Baptists were dead set against: jitterbugging, gin rummy, gin rickeys, and heavy petting. When Verna’s baby sister Lucy Jean tattletaled to RuthAnn about what was going on between her sister and the grease monkey, RuthAnn went to her employer and spiritual counselor, the Reverend Galliehue T. Blevins. He affirmed what RuthAnn had always heard: that redheads and left-handed females were more vulnerable to the devil’s wiles than other women. Because RuthAnn’s firstborn was afflicted with both of these traits, Reverend Blevins promised that the following Sunday he would lead the Abide the Coming congregation in prayer that Verna’s soul be rescued from the devil who had taken the human form of one Yancey Hibbard. The day after RuthAnn told Yancey to his face that the devil had entered him, she found three of her best layers flopped over on the ground outside the coop. Their necks had been wrung. RuthAnn was adamant that Yancey had murdered the leghorns. Verna was just as sure that he was innocent.
When Yancey asked Verna to run away with him and elope, she said yes. By then, heavy petting had turned into “man-and-wife love” without benefit of a marriage license. Sex was something Verna discovered she really liked. “When Yancey would put his thing inside o’ me, it was like two puzzle pieces was fitting together just right, except that makin’ a jigsaw puzzle on our rickety ole card table never felt anywhere near as good.” She wanted more of Yancey inside of her, and regularly, and she could have it, guilt-free, if she was Mrs. Yancey Hibbard. She might like to have a baby, too—Yancey’s baby.
Two days after Verna disappeared, she called her mother from the Plantation Motor Court on Route 17 in Savannah, Georgia, to let her know she was a newlywed. RuthAnn informed her daughter that she should consider herself disowned. “Now that I had made myself the devil’s bride, Mama told me, I was welcome to the hell I had brought down upon myself, but I was no longer welcome in what had used to be my home. And she meant it, too. From there on in, every letter I wrote to her and my sisters come back marked ‘Refused. Return to Sender,’ and every call I made to Metairie got hung up on. I heard the click in my ear so many times that I finally got the message that forgiveness wudn’t about to come my way, so I stopped calling. It hurt me somethin’ turrible, which I guess was what my mama was after.”
To cheer up his bride, Yancey began taking Verna to Le Bon Temps, a French Quarter dance hall and burlesque bar where they could drink, dance, and watch the nightly performances of the two resident strippers, Alouette the Tassel Twirler and Oona the Oyster Girl. One night, Alouette and her manager, Hubie, approached Yancey about Verna becoming a stripper. “I was standing right there and they was talking about me, but it was like I was somewheres else. ‘She got the figure for it and then some,’ Hubie said. ‘There’s brick shithouses that wish they was built as good as she is.’ Well, I didn’t take kindly to being insulted like that and was rearing back to slap his fat face, but Yancey grabbed my wrist and said that Hubie’d just given me a compliment. I didn’t see how, but I took his word for it. Alouette told Yancey that men would tip any girl on that stage who’d bump and grind and show her titties, but the biggest tips went to those who knew how to lift up their act so it became artistic. Then she turned and spoke right to me. ‘Here’s the secret, hon. It’s more about the teasing than the stripping. I can teach you how to get the fellas eating out of the palm of your hand. And when that happens, you can make thirty or forty dollars a night in tips.’ Well, Yancey got dollar signs in his eyes when he heard that. ‘I guess she can give it a try,’ he told Hubie. ‘Ain’t that right, honeybun.’ I didn’t bother to answer him because it wasn’t a real question. It was a decision he’d already made. Driving back to the room we was renting, he started talking about how, if I got real good at stripping, we might be able to afford one of them MG Midgets he was always jawin’ about—a red one with a convertible top, he figured. See, Yancey had a gnawin’ and a cravin’ for sportscars, let me tell you. He’d look at his Motor Trend and Hot Rod magazines the way other men looked at the girlie magazines we sold under the counter at the Pak-A-Sak.
“So I gave stripping a try, but just once. Back when I was trying to win Miss Crawfish, it made me feel like I was someone special, walkin’ all dignified past them judges in my
plaid bathing suit and the open-toed high heels I had swiped from Grumbacher’s and was fixin’ to bring back after the contest. But walkin’ around on the stage at Le Bon Temps in nothin’ much more than my birthday suit made me feel like cheap goods. They give me a fake name, Fanny Feathers, and a bunch of ostrich plumes that was dyed colors no natural-born ostrich woulda been growin’, not that I ever seed any ostriches. I was suppose to kinda play peek-a-boo with the feathers and shake my fanny at the customers cuz my name was Fanny. But I didn’t ’preciate the rude things those boozed-up jackasses was yellin’ at me, and neither did Yancey, who started lookin’ more and more like he was gonna blow during my performance. See, he liked the me-making-money part, but he hadn’t thought much about how I had to make it until he watched all those men eyeballing what was rightfully his. The Miss Crawfish judges hadn’t seen anywhere near this much of me and they had been classy people—a bank president, a guv’ment lawyer who worked for ‘Uncle Earl’ Long up in Baton Rouge, and Miss Luziana of 1946, Marguerite McCleland, who got third-runner-up that year for Miss America! But the audience watchin’ me was justa buncha drunken knuckleheads.
“Truth to tell, I wudn’t no good at strippin’ neither. I only got three dollars in tips that night, plus a fake five-dollar bill that had Bugs Bunny’s picture on it instead of Lincoln’s. Alouette said I would get better at stripping if I kept at it, but I put my foot down and told her and Hubie that I might be headin’ to hell when my time came for the things I done, but I was durned if I was gonna arrive there wearing pasties and one of them skimpy G-strings. ‘It’s probably just as well,’ Yancey said. ‘You’re a banshee in bed, but up on that stage, you looked like you was imitatin’ a two-by-four.’ It was hurtful, him sayin’ that, but I kept my mouth shut. We hadn’t been Mr. and Mrs. for very long, but I already knew it didn’t do no good to act teary-eyed in front of Mr. Yancey Dale Hibbard. Cryin’ made him orneryer than a hornet with a headache.”
One night at Le Bon Temps, Verna said, Yancey began talking with a Merchant Marines recruiter who was looking to sign up sailors for a commercial shipping company—engine men, especially, which was what Yancey had been in the U.S. Navy. The catch was that the company was located in New London, Connecticut. Yancey hesitated; he’d been stationed in nearby Newport, Rhode Island, and hated the cold. But when the recruiter told him how much he could make on a ship bound, say, for Hong Kong or Singapore, he signed a contract then and there, probably because that recruiter had bought him two Obituary Cocktails, the strongest drink they served at Le Bon Temps. Verna had taken a sip from Yancey’s glass; it tasted like turpentine, and even that amount made her feel tipsy.
The newlyweds drove north on the first of November 1949. Yancey docked his bride at the Hewett City Hotel. He gave her an allowance of five dollars per week and paid in advance for the room where she would live and wait for him for the next four months. Then he shipped off for the Far East. Verna, who had never seen snow before, now faced an endless winter all by herself, cooped up in her second-floor room with nothing more to do than look out at sleet storms, squalls, and nor’easters.
To fill up the hours of the day, she took walks up and down the two main streets and usually ended up in the public library, reading movie magazines, ladies’ magazines, and magazines about true crime. “I was partial to stories that had murders in ’em, the bloodier the better, even though they sometimes scared me. Whenever the library closed for the day and I had to go back to the hotel, the lonesomeness would hit me hard and I’d sit in the lobby for a spell, just so’s I could listen to the music from the radio they kept going behind the check-in desk. I made groceries at the A&P twice a week—bread, bananas, and peanut butter mostly, but I got so sick of peanut butter and banana sandwiches that I started taking my evening meals at Woolworth’s—a bowl of tomato or vegetable soup more often than not, because it was cheap and came with crackers. Sometimes, though, I’d pay the extra and order me some pork sausages and lost bread—or as you Yankees call it, French toast. I was partial to a lot of syrup on my order, and if there was a puddle of it still left after I’d sopped up the rest with the bread, I’d look around to make sure no one else was watchin’ me, then pick up my plate and lap up the extra. ‘Waste not, want not,’ as my mama used to say.”
Back in her room after it got dark, Verna wrote love letters to Yancey that she would mail to the shipping company for forwarding. Yancey began to seem like the next thing to a stranger. Why had she done something as crazy as running away with him? “I took to my diary to answer that question, and the answer was S-E-X. I drove away with him that night because I liked the way his body made my body feel, plain and simple. Maybe he had bedeviled me into enjoying that kind of thing—turning me from a nice girl into a wicked one who was as full of sin as a carbuncle is full of pus, which was what Mama said had happened to me.”
Verna began to wonder if Yancey had wrung the necks of those poor chickens. And if he had, did he also have it in him to murder her? There were plenty of wife killers in those true crime stories she was always reading. One crazy so-and-so had ax-murdered his wife, chopped her to bits, and put them in their Frigidaire so they wouldn’t stink. Yancey would never do something as bad as that, she figured, but he did have a mean streak; it had shown itself twice on the long drive up from Louisiana. At that diner in Pennsylvania where they both ordered the meat loaf special, Yancey had shoveled down his own mashed potatoes and gravy and then had moved his fork across the table and started in on hers. When Verna told him mashed potatoes was her favorite food and she would just as soon eat them herself, he had sulked and said okay then, fine, but he sure hoped his wife wasn’t going to turn into a fat cow like her mother. When she started to cry, he laughed at her, so loudly that the waitress stopped right in the middle of pouring someone else’s coffee and stared at them. After Verna gathered herself, she scraped her potatoes onto Yancey’s plate and he gobbled them up without so much as a thank you. And so, she ended up having her feelings hurt and not getting to eat her mashed potatoes either.
The second time his mean streak had shown itself was when he told Verna she was “dumber than a retarded mule” for asking him if New Jersey was part of New England. Well, now she was in New England, stuck in some boring Connecticut town where she had no friends, no family, and nothing to do but watch snow fall or, after it stopped, people down there on the sidewalk shoveling it. How in the world had she ended up in this cold, unfriendly place where people talked funny and everyone seemed so grouchy? Was her Lord and Savior Jesus Christ punishing her for the ungodly things she’d done? She got down on her knees beside the bed and tried praying but got distracted by the fact that the mattress smelled funny and a doodlebug was scooting across the wall on the other side of the room. Praying seemed useless. She could almost hear Jesus saying to Himself, That one wants forgiveness? After she dishonored her mother and the Shoop family name so that she and Yancey could rut like a couple of animals? Verna got up off her knees, picked up her shoe, and slammed it against that doodlebug, splattering its guts against the wall. It was no use asking for divine forgiveness because she didn’t deserve the Good Lord’s grace. She deserved what she had gotten: Connecticut.
By mid-February, Verna was suffering bouts of panic and crying jags that could last for hours. Some days she couldn’t get out of bed until afternoon, except to go down the hall to use the toilet. She had to do something or she’d go crazy. Or had that already happened? Her money was dwindling because, even though she tried to be careful, she had trouble staying within the weekly stipend that Yancey had left for her and had to keep borrowing from the weeks that hadn’t happened yet. Maybe he should try living on what he expected her to live on. She was sick to death of waiting for his letters back, and sick of Woolworth’s junky old canned soup. Fat cow? That’s how much he knew. She was hungry half the time and skinnier than she’d ever been. Her dungarees felt baggy on her now and her bobby socks, instead of staying up where they belonged, kept drooping down past h
er ankles. If this kept up, she’d start looking as scrawny as the blank-faced models she saw in the fashion magazines.
THIRTEEN
One afternoon, despite her financial situation, Verna decided to splurge by going to the picture show up the street from her hotel. A Life of Her Own was playing and its star was Lana Turner, her favorite actress. Feeling defiant, Verna bought a box of gumdrops and a Hershey bar at the candy counter and got charged twice what she would have paid at the Pak-A-Sak for the same two items. Everything was more expensive up here! Either that or these Yankees were out to gyp her.
Verna liked the movie at first; Lana Turner played a small-town Kansas girl who moved to New York and became a glamorous fashion model. Shortly into the story, however, it got depressing. Lana’s friend, another model, jumped from her apartment window and killed herself because she was a has-been. Then the married man Lana had fallen in love with (Ray Milland) left New York and went home to his wife. Lana missed him the same way Verna sometimes missed Yancey when she wasn’t thinking ill of him. When Ray Milland finally returned to New York, he brought the wife back with him. “And she was a cripple! I like a good sob story as well as anyone, but A Life of Her Own had enough gloomy stuff for three different movies. After a while I just sat there not even watching it.” Instead, Verna began to scare herself about how much she had spent on this outing. . . . And about how, when Yancey got back to port—if he ever got back—he might tell her he’d had an affair with some beautiful Lana Turner type. Would Verna seem as pathetic to him as Ray Milland’s crippled wife? A Life of Her Own made her feel so sad that she walked out before it was finished, forgetting that, filled up on gumdrops, she had put her Hershey bar on the arm of the empty seat next to her for later and then had left it there. She cried herself to sleep, woke up an hour later, and then stayed awake half the night, convincing herself that Yancey was an unfaithful cad or, at the very least, a chicken murderer.