The Crowning Glory of Calla Lily Ponder: A Novel

by Rebecca Wells

  Mister Mason, my teacher, did not agree. “Calla,” he said, “this paper has nothing to do with the growth of civilization or the wars that made it possible or the march of progress—it’s about hair!”

  “Yes, sir. It is.”

  “Well, we are not in beauty school,” he said with a laugh. “We are studying the history of the world.”

  “Yes, sir, and hair is a part of the history of the world.”

  “Calla, hair is just fashion. Fashions come and go.”

  “Isn’t fashion part of civilization?”

  “Well, it is,” Mister Mason answered, “but it hasn’t changed history like the rise of Christianity or the Industrial Revolution or the world wars.”

  He gave me a C.

  That upset me. I asked Papa about it. He was in the South Pacific at the end of World War II.

  “Why is war more important than regular people’s lives and the way they want to look or feel? Why is war more important than things people care about in peacetime?”

  He looked at me and said, “Calla, for some reason there are a lot of people who find war more exciting than just about anything you can name.”

  Chapter 14

  1970

  It was our senior year, early autumn, and still hot. Tuck and I were walking out of school when we saw a beat-up pickup truck parked down the street. A woman got out and started walking toward us. At first I hardly recognized her, but then I realized it was Tuck’s mother. She looked so much older. Tuck looked at me and said, “I’ll be back in a minute, Calla.” Then he just dropped his books on the ground and went over to meet her.

  She took his hands and led him around the corner of the school, away from the pickup truck and almost out of my sight. I followed, watching from a distance. From where I stood I could still see the two of them, as well as the pickup. As Tuck’s mother talked, I could sense her urgency and watched as Tuck’s head began to slowly drop all the way down until it rested on his chest. Then he raised it and looked at her; he seemed to be pleading with her.

  Then the driver’s-side door of the truck lurched open, and Tuck’s father got out and made his way toward them. He was weaving so bad as he walked that it was clear he was very drunk.

  “I told you to go get him, not have a talk with him,” I heard him bellow. “Now get both your asses in the truck.”

  Tuck hesitated for a moment, then they all walked toward the truck, got in, and drove away. My heart was pounding as I picked Tuck’s books up off the ground. Then I ran all the way to the Tuckers’ house. I was terrified at what was happening.

  “Miz Lizbeth! Uncle Tucker!” I called out, hardly able to breathe. “Miss Charlotte and her husband came looking for Tuck, and he went off with them in their pickup.”

  “Oh, Lord!” Miz Lizbeth said, meeting me at the door. Uncle Tucker ran down the steps and over to his car without a word to head out to find them. I set Tuck’s books down and said, “Miz Lizbeth, is there anything I can do?”

  Miz Lizbeth looked up at me, trying to clear the worried look from her face. “Everything’s going to be fine, and Olivia’s here with me. It’s going to be okay, Calla. Uncle Tuck is already on his way over there. I want you to head right home right now.”

  So I got myself on home. As I walked down the path to our house, I tried to steady myself and take deep breaths.

  Papa was just hanging up the phone when I got home. He came over and gave me a hug and a kiss. “Come on in now and help me finish making this crawfish étouffée, what you say?”

  “What’s this? Something special?”

  “Naw, I just let the horn section go early and thought we might have ourselves a real special supper. You gotta admit—I’m a pretty good cook for a man.”

  “Papa,” I said, “you sure are.” I gave him a kiss on the cheek, and then I sat down and told him what I’d seen.

  Tuck called me later that evening and told me how Uncle Tucker had jumped in his truck and gone looking for them. Turns out he didn’t have to look far, as Tuck’s father had put their truck in a ditch less than two blocks from the school.

  “Tuck, are you all right?” I asked.

  “Yeah. The asshole was so plastered he couldn’t even get the truck out of first gear.”

  “What happened, Tuck? Why did they come for you?”

  “Calla, I can’t really talk right now. Papa Tucker is waiting for me in his study. You know what that means. I shouldn’t even be using the phone right now, but I didn’t want you to worry. I have to go.”

  The next day after school Tuck told me the whole story. When Papa Tucker reached them, his father—his no-count father—had threatened both of them with a pistol. He’d threatened to kill Tuck if he ever tried to take Miss Charlotte away from him again. “He was out of his mind,” Tuck said. Luckily, his father was so drunk that Papa Tucker quickly got the pistol away from him.

  Then Papa Tucker and Miss Charlotte got into it. They were screaming and yelling at each other. She wanted Tuck to come home after he graduated and get a job in Bossier City. Papa Tucker had told her she no longer had any claim to her son. He’d said, “Charlotte, you broke your mama’s heart, and now you’re trying to pull your son down in the gutter with you. I will not let that happen. My grandson is going to be somebody. So I’m telling you now, if you ever come around here again, I will go to court and get a protective order to keep you away from Tuck. You have never been a mother. You have never been anything but trouble to him.”

  Tuck took a deep breath and let it out.

  “Papa Tucker put his arm around me and walked me away from that truck. Calla, I could feel his whole body shaking. He looked straight ahead and his face was like stone, but tears were streaming down his cheeks. He didn’t say another word until we drove home and got inside the house. By then he had composed himself and you’d never have known what had just happened by looking at him.”

  Then I asked Tuck what had happened in his grandfather’s study. He just looked down. I asked him again. He stood up and looked off toward the river and held out his hand. I took it in mine and we walked home in silence.

  He never answered my question.

  After that, Tuck wasn’t the same. I mean, we still went out together, just not as much. He studied for hours every day, and I hardly ever saw him. He started applying for every scholarship there was. He was with a guidance counselor at least twice a week, and you better believe it wasn’t because Tuck was in trouble. He was asking her for advice about schools and how to apply.

  “Aw, no,” he’d say, “I can’t go with y’all to the Shop ’N Skate, I’ve gotta study tonight. See y’all tomorrow, okay?” Then he’d kiss me on the cheek, and walk on home alone to study.

  Sukey was the one who said it first. “Goddamn, there isn’t a thing wrong with studying, but Tuck, you’re taking this thing too far. Where you want to go to, Harvard or something?”

  “Yeah,” Tuck said. “That’s one place I want to go.”

  We all laughed. “Yeah! ‘La Luna Graduate Heads to Harvard!’” Tuck laughed along with us, but I knew it wasn’t a real laugh. And he kept mentioning little things to me, such as what I planned to do about college. Where had I applied?

  “Nowhere,” I said. And I sat quiet. Since M’Dear had died, I hadn’t really known how to talk about the future. I still felt like I needed M’Dear to be around to make any plans. And somehow, I thought Tuck and I would plan everything together. The past and the present and the future were all mixed up in my mind since M’Dear died. But he got me thinking.

  Soon after the semester ended, and finals came. As I expected, Tuck didn’t just do okay on his finals, he aced them.

  I asked him, “You happy with your grades and everything?”

  He said, “I got what I went for. Got just what I went for.” And then he smiled.

  One day around Christmas time, Renée, Sukey, and I were driving around in Renée’s mother’s car when Sukey made an announcement. “I decided what I’m going to do aft
er we graduate. I’m moving to New Orleans. I’m going to dance; I’m going to sing. I’m going to meet thousands of boys—and I’m going to kiss them all! I think I’m going to get me some kind of job that’s really fun—something that’s not really work, but you still get paid money.”

  “I’m going to marry Eddie,” Renée said. “He’s going to be a policeman. And I want to have children. I already have names for them.”

  Sukey said, “Ohhhh, you never know! You might meet somebody else.”

  “No,” Renée insisted. “I’m going to marry Eddie. Just y’all wait and see! And what about you, Calla?”

  “Well, I’m going to do what I’ve always wanted to do—become a beautician! I’ve been looking into different beauty colleges, and have been corresponding with L’Académie de Beauté de Crescent in New Orleans. Anyway, that’s my dream.”

  Sukey said, “Calla, maybe we’ll end up in New Orleans at the same time!” She took both my hands. “I love your dream. Sometimes I used to see you and M’Dear out on the pier at sunset, and you would be brushing her hair. That was something so beautiful; I used to hide out sometimes, just to watch y’all.”

  That night, lying in bed, after Sonny Boy cooked us pork chops for supper, I closed my eyes and pictured all those moments on the pier with M’Dear. I remembered when she said I had healing hands. I thought back to the conversation with Renée and Sukey in the car, and started to see my plan forming. I would get a job and save up some money. Then I’d go down to New Orleans and go to beauty school. I was going to become a professional and have a career. I was excited.

  Tuck wasn’t all that happy about my decision. He wanted me to go to college.

  “Have I said one word,” I asked him as we walked around town, looking at the Christmas decorations, “one single word against you going to college?”

  He shrugged. He knew that I hadn’t.

  “So you can do whatever you want, and I can’t? I want to know why you are all hot and bothered about me not going to college.”

  “Calla, you’re so smart. Look at the scores on your college entrance exams. You only took them on a lark, and you were in the top ten percentile. You could get into a school just as good as Stanford, where I’m hoping to go.”

  “Well, whoo-wee.” I wiggled my finger in the air. “Big deal.”

  “Do you know how many people would kill to have your kind of scores?”

  “No, not really. Eleven? Maybe eleven people give a poot about it?”

  “Stop it, Calla,” he said, raising his voice. “I just don’t see why someone as smart as you would be dead set on going to beauty school, of all things.”

  “Don’t say ‘beauty school’ like it’s something idiotic to do.”

  “Well, it’s something an idiot woman could do. You know how Papa Tucker is always saying that we’re supposed to aim high. Well, this is your chance to aim high, Calla.”

  My jaw dropped. Tuck had been bugging me about the college thing for a while, but this was the first time he had up and told me why.

  “Look, I’m sorry I said that. I take it back.”

  I just stared at him.

  “Please. Let me take it back. All I meant, Calla, is that you could rise up in the world, make something of yourself.”

  “Don’t give me that! You’re the one all worried about making something of yourself.”

  “That’s right, I am.”

  “Why, Tuck? You have already made something of yourself. You are somebody.”

  “Maybe I need to do more,” he said, so softly that I could hardly hear him.

  “We said a lot of things this year, didn’t we?”

  Tuck looked at me and rubbed his left hand under his eye. He didn’t answer, so I did it for him. “Yeah, we said we loved each other.”

  Tuck didn’t say anything for a while. He just closed his eyes and lowered his head.

  Then, “This year was not the first time I felt I loved you, Calla. I started loving you that time in the barn.”

  “If you’ve been loving me that long,” I said, “then why are you going so far away? Why are you making my dream sound like it’s stupid? This is about the most cowardly way of breaking up I have ever heard of.”

  “Who said anything about breaking up?”

  “I did.”

  “Calla, I didn’t mean we should break up. I never wanted that.”

  “Oh, there is a lot you didn’t mean, isn’t there, Tuck? Like maybe you didn’t mean a thing when you said, ‘I gave you my heart.’”

  “Calla, please, let’s don’t do this. Let’s don’t talk like—”

  “You started it, Tuck, by not letting up on how I needed to go to college to meet your standards. Go to California, go wherever you want. Just don’t expect your idiot girlfriend to be waiting for you.”

  Tuck folded his arms across his chest. “Well, then, go ahead,” he said, “go ahead and be a beautician. Take a job even my mother could get if she could ever scrape her alcoholic self up off the floor. Somebody in my family has to make something of themselves. My mother sure didn’t.”

  I clenched my jaw so tight my teeth could have cracked. “Don’t put this on your mother, Tuck. This is your life, not hers. And this is good-bye as far as I’m concerned.”

  Then I turned and walked away, past the pharmacy, past Our Lady of the River Catholic Church, down to the path that led across Uncle Tucker’s land and onto our place.

  I waited until I got upstairs and into my bedroom before I started to cry. This is an important tip for my future customers: Don’t believe them when they tell you that mascara is waterproof, because it’s not. And that’s a tip that is not idiotic.

  Chapter 15

  1971

  The class of 1971 was getting ready to graduate! So much had already happened since Christmas. For one thing, Tuck and I had made up on Valentine’s Day. I had refused to talk to him, though it was hard to avoid him since he lived next door. But when he showed up on Saint Valentine’s Day with a big bouquet of roses and a little gold bracelet, dropping to his knees and saying, “Calla, I beg your forgiveness,” my heart melted. I had missed him so much!

  But before graduation, of course, there was the senior prom. This one will go down as the first time in La Luna history that one girl went to the prom with two boys. And you can guess who that was: Sukey. As she explained it, “Well, I dated them both, so why not go with them both? I didn’t want to turn one down for the other.”

  So it was Sukey and Peter Robertson and John LaCroix. She wore a black dress that was cut on a slant and had a single white ruffle down the back. And it was short. Even I couldn’t believe it. Sukey wore a short gown to the prom.

  I said, “Sukey, did you see this dress in a magazine or something?”

  She sniffed and turned up her nose. “Are you kidding? They wouldn’t think of having this in Seventeen magazine.”

  Sukey had designed the dress herself, and Aunt Helen had made it. Again and again, Aunt Helen asked Sukey, “Why don’t we just make it a long dress, with the ruffle running down to the ground?”

  And Sukey kept saying, “Because I want a short dress.”

  Aunt Helen had bought the extra yardage anyway. “By the time I’m through fitting this,” she said, “I’ll break her down. It’s going to be a long dress.”

  Sukey won that fight, of course.

  Renée, who was the opposite of Sukey in so many ways, wore white. Her dress was organza, with an empire waist, with long sleeves that you could see through and little pink flowers here and there. It was such a sweet dress, for a sweet girl.

  And my dress—oh! I will love it till the day I die. My inspiration was the beautiful flowing dresses that M’Dear used to dance in, and I showed Aunt Helen a picture of my favorite one. “Remember this dress?” I asked.

  “Ohhhh! Oh, yes, I do,” she said.

  So she copied it in lavender chiffon. The delicate top came down in little scallops to just below my collar-bone. Then there was lavender
chiffon to my waist and, below that, a lavender skirt with purple chiffon flounces.

  I did my hair myself. I just brushed it out, then leaned over, put a rubber band around it, and wound it into a bun. Then I pulled out some strands and curled them so they would billow around my face.

  Tuck was talking to Papa when I came down the stairs. He looked up at me where I stood on the landing.

  “Wow! Calla,” he said, “you’re beautiful. It seems like each year you’re becoming more and more beautiful. What will we do, Mister Will? She’ll have the other guys knocking me over to get a dance with her.”

  “Gotta be brave, son,” Papa said. “But you knew that a while ago, didn’t you?”

  I smiled to hear them talk like that. It helped ease the pain of M’Dear not being there.

  Tuck leaned in to kiss me. “I love your scent,” he said.

  We all met before the dance to head over together, and wouldn’t you know it, Sukey pulled out a bottle of bourbon. She was always the one to provide the booze for almost every event we’d go to. We all mixed it with Coke except Sukey, who drank hers straight in little sips. I couldn’t believe that she could stand the taste. By the time we got to the prom, we were all pretty giddy, especially Sukey, who was already screaming and having a ball.

  The Get Down Boys, our band for the night, knew all the songs we loved, like the Youngbloods’ “Get Together” and Janis Joplin’s “Piece of My Heart.” It was a woman’s song, but the band was all men. It wasn’t the same with a guy singing it.

  We all headed out to the dance floor, and I loved seeing my best friends moving around Tuck and me as we danced. I had done both of their hairdos, so I checked to see how they held up. Renée’s hairdo worried me, and a trip to the ladies’ room for some extra Aqua Net seemed to be in order.