Ya-Yas in Bloom

by Rebecca Wells

  Stars in my body, Baylor thought. He pictured them dancing inside his head, shooting through his legs, stars falling out of his mouth.

  “I’m made of stars? Mama, are you making this up?”

  “No sir, I am not. There are those that might say I am, but do not listen to anything they say.”

  “All of us are made of stars?”

  Vivi hesitated.

  “Well, I know all of us here on Pecan Grove are. I know all the Ya-Yas and Petites Ya-Yas are. I suspect every single person in the world is.”

  Baylor stood, still gazing at the sky, letting this soak in.

  When Vivi took his hand to lead him up to the house, he felt shiny inside, and he could feel warm little sparks coming from his mother’s hand. He thought of his Daddy, Sidda, Little Shep, and Lulu and all their dogs and cows and every animal on the plantation. He thought of them with stars inside. When that thought was strong enough, giving up the globe did not hurt so much. He thought only of shining people all over the world, in Greece, in Peru, and in countries he didn’t know the names of yet, continents that hadn’t even been discovered.

  PILGRIMAGE

  Sidda, December 1965

  God, Mama and Daddy can be so cool sometimes. What other parents in the city of Thornton—heck, in the state of Louisiana—would take their four kids all the way to Houston, Texas, to see the Beatles?! The second tour the Fab Four made on American soil, and we were there to see them! We were a part of history! We saw legends! Mama and Daddy knew that, they recognized that. That’s why they did it.

  It all started on Sunday evening, February 9, 1964. I was eleven years old, and Necie and her husband, Mister Ogden, and the seven Ogden kids were visiting at Pecan Grove. They had come over after noon Mass and had Sunday dinner with us, and we played all afternoon.

  It was almost seven o’clock in Louisiana, and Joanie and I were already parked in front of the small black-and-white TV screen, waiting. We had that television set warmed up and ready to go. Every Sunday Daddy and Mama and the four of us always watched Ed Sullivan and then Bonanza, but this evening was special. Ed Sullivan had announced that he was going to have the Beatles on his “shew,” and finally the day was here!

  Mainly it was Joanie Ogden and me who were really excited about seeing the Beatles. Joanie was one year older than me, but we were good friends. We had been on pins and needles all day, just counting the minutes for that night’s “shew.”

  There were eleven of us kids in the den. Daddy had a fire going, and Mama and Necie set out leftovers from dinner on the table in the den, along with some of Necie’s special knock-your-socks-off brownies. Baylor wore his Superboy costume, left over from Halloween. He changed into it before Ed Sullivan. I sat in between Joanie and Lulu on the rug right in front of the television set.

  The other kids gathered round, the boys acting all rambunctious until I said, just like Mama, “Quiet! Or I will knock yall upside the head if you don’t shut up right now!”

  When Ed introduced the Beatles, he was very complimentary. Of course, I didn’t care what Mr. Prune Face himself had to say. I just wanted to see the Fab Four. There had been such a buildup in the past week. The Beatles were all we could think about. I had actually prayed at Mass that nothing would happen to make me miss them. I had saved my allowance to buy the 45 rpm of “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” In the past month, I had grabbed up every magazine that I could afford or beg Mama to buy. Just to stare at their four faces.

  Finally, Ed Sullivan uttered the words, “Ladies and gentlemen: The Beatles!”

  How could I ever forget that night?! On our black-and-white TV screen appeared four guys like I had never laid eyes on before! John, George, Paul, and Ringo! I had never seen men with long hair before except in pictures of knights and Sir Galahad and stuff. Their hair came down over their ears, and swung from side to side when they sang. I just loved that! They were all wearing matching suits with no collars and tight, tight pants! And they had on these pointy-toed ankle boots, which were out of this world! The Beatles were just from their own planet. Men like the Beatles did not live in Garnet Parish.

  Girls in the television audience were screaming and crying and reaching out for the Beatles. They were fainting and just going crazy. When the Fab Four started singing “All My Lovin’,” Joanie and I just lost it and stood up and started screaming too, flailing our arms, stumbling, knocking over our Cokes. I felt like I was seeing something that was all mine. Something new, something different from what my parents and nuns and priests and anything and everybody had ever known. The drumbeat really got me. I couldn’t tell why, but my body was just pulsing! Even with all the screaming, the drumbeat came through, and I could feel it in my bones! The Beatles were wild and bad and sweet and clean all at once. Soon Joanie, Malissa, Lulu, and Rose started screaming and jumping up and down, and all us girls were like a pack of dogs that couldn’t stop from howling at the moon!

  The boys started being stupid and making fun, swinging their heads from side to side and going “Wooooo!” Then Little Shep ran and got a mop out of the cleaning closet and held it up behind his head and acted like it was his hair and acted all crazy. They made fun of us girls for screaming and everything. Baylor had his ukulele and was pretending to play the guitar. He was the only one concentrating real hard on watching the Beatles.

  Pretty soon, the grown-ups came into the room with their drinks and cigarettes and stood with their hands on their hips.

  Mama said, “Well, what have we here?!”

  When Paul began to sing “Till There Was You,” that’s when I knew that he was the one I loved. I loved everything about him. How big his eyes were, how perfect his skin was, how he was gentle and really meant every single word he sang. He was so, um, sensitive compared to all the boys I knew. How there were bells on a hill but he never heard them ringing, how there were birds, but he never heard them singing till there was…me. Till there was me. He was singing to me. He was singing the right words in the exact way I wanted to be sung to, but I had never known until that very moment!

  Then there was bad news about John. They ran the words underneath him while he was singing: “Sorry girls, he’s married.” Well, at least Paul—my Paul—wasn’t married. Oh, I went wild when they showed close-ups of their faces—even Ringo’s, which was a goofy face, but in a good way.

  Mister Ogden mumbled, “Those no-good beatniks should get a haircut and a decent job.”

  The Beatles then launched into “She Loves You.” By this time even the boys were jumping around singing and yelling, too. The girls on television were tearing their hair out and puckering up their lips, and we saw two girls actually faint!

  And that is when Mister Ogden walked over to our television set and turned it off! Just turned it off like he owned the place! He said, “If this isn’t a Satan serenade, I don’t know what is. I refuse to stand by and watch while innocent babies are sucked in by vipers of vice. I put my foot down.”

  My father walked right up in front of Mister Ogden and turned the television set right back on. “George, this is my house,” Daddy said. “I’ll turn off my goddamn Motorola when I see fit. Calm down. Fix yourself another Scotch.”

  Necie said something, but the grown-ups were nothing but background noise to me. They didn’t matter anymore. Not when the Beatles were in front of our eyes.

  “Am I the only voice of morality in this room?” Mister Ogden said, raising his voice. “This is the kind of thing that leads to the corruption of culture. Not just our American culture, but, far more important, our Catholic culture.”

  “I didn’t realize Catholic was a culture,” Daddy said, giving a little laugh. “I thought it was a religion.”

  Daddy had taken instructions to become a Catholic so he could marry Mama, and swore an oath that he would raise us all in the Catholic faith and pay to send us to Catholic schools. But when it came to Confession, Daddy backed out of the whole thing. He said, “I’m not going to sit in a hot little booth with a priest
who has bad breath and tell him what I’ve done that I’m ashamed of. That’s between me and the Old Padnah.” That is what my Daddy called God.

  “Well, if you can’t have respect for all that is holy,” Mister Ogden said, “then what about all that our generation fought for? In the trenches, in the air, on the sea? Democracy, decency, respect for the American way of life.”

  “Dammit, George, you can sure be one sanctimonious SOB,” Daddy said. “Relax. I’m not too impressed by all this singing or the long hair. It’s a craze. The kids love it. The more you shout Satan, the more they’re going to love it.”

  “It’s no different than the way we were with Frankie Baby. Old Blue Eyes.” Mama sighed. “I remember when Caro and I lived in New York City before we got married. We were modeling designer outfits at Saks. Caro and I—and every other girl in that store—went home sick one afternoon from work because Frank Sinatra was performing and we had the chance to see him. Well, we got caught because the floor lady from Saks decided to check out the line in front of the theater where Frankie was and found all of us there! We were all fired, but then they hired us back. Can you believe it?”

  “The Ya-Yas are no strangers to swooning,” Necie said. “Even if this music does not quite have the—shall we say, smoothness—of Frank Sinatra.”

  “Besides,” Daddy said, “those boys are certainly no worse than Elvis.”

  “Well, he’s the one that started it all,” Mister Ogden said. “Playing all that nigger music in front of white children. It’s a disgrace.”

  “George,” Necie said, embarrassed. “Please do not use the N word around the children.”

  “Oh, excuse me for living,” Mister Ogden said. “Colored. Negro. Jungle Bunny.”

  He turned away as though he were going to leave. But then he turned back around and said: “This mocks even the laws of basic decency. The Catholic Church does not approve of rock music, sexual promiscuity, or the occult—and that is what this music is all about.”

  “Well, George,” Daddy said, “have you ever considered that this ragtag group of longhairs has more to say to your children than the Catholic Church could ever dream up?”

  “Shepley Walker, I hate to say this, but you are a pagan, heathen anti-Christ!”

  With that, Mister Ogden stormed out of our house and sat in the Ogdens’ Country Squire station wagon until the party broke up.

  Which was not until after the Beatles sang five songs. It’s a good thing Mister Ogden did leave, or he would have just died if he’d seen Joanie and me kiss the television screen when they showed close-ups again! We kissed everyone but Ringo. We didn’t like his nose.

  After The Ed Sullivan Show, Joanie and I and all my other girlfriends at school were feverish, just taken completely. Even Lulu and her little friends were starry-eyed over the Beatles. We wanted to go out and get every song the Beatles ever sang! We were afraid we might never hear or see them again, that they were a onetime miraculous thing that came into our house only once and then would be taken away from us forever.

  After buying all their singles as soon as they were available, Lulu and I finally bought their first album sold in the U.S., called Meet the Beatles. We bought it in March and played it 84,000 times. I loved every single song! There was not one bad song on it. It was definitely worth every penny of the $1.98 that Lulu and I saved to buy it.

  The Ogdens weren’t allowed to play Beatles music when their father was in the house. In fact, they had to hide the fact that Necie had even let them buy Beatles records. Joanie and I began writing long, fictional stories in which the Beatles and our friends all played major roles. We wrote cratefuls of those stories, which we thought we could turn into a real book called The Beatles and Us. We tried to hand them in at school for book reports, but the nuns gave us F’s. So we had to stop.

  Throughout the year, we learned every word to every Beatle song. Cenla Bop Record Shop downtown became a regular hangout for Lulu and me, with Shep and Baylor sometimes tagging along. We studied everything we could get our little hands on to read about the Fab Four. About how they came from Liverpool and started in that little hole in the wall called the Cavern. We had no idea where Liverpool was. We thought it was a really cool part of London near a pool.

  We scoured Teen Magazine for pictures of John or Paul or George or Ringo to cut out and tape on the mirror in our bedroom. Lulu even had a photo of John standing next to his mother. She taped it on her side of the bedstand, where it was the first thing she saw when she woke up. His mother was kind of fat and looked like somebody’s housekeeper. But just imagine! She brought him into the world. John himself credited her for being the first one to bring an Elvis record into their house. That is what got him hooked on music.

  Little Shep, Lulu, Baylor, and I each decided who our favorite individual Beatle was. It was a litmus test for your personality.

  I declared, “Mine is Paul because he looks romantic with those eyes.”

  Lulu said, “Mine is John because he looks bad.”

  Little Shep said, “George is the only one who looks like a man.”

  “Ringo,” Baylor said. “I like him, even though nobody else does. I want to know why he wears all those rings.”

  Lulu and Joanie and my friends M’lain and Sissy and I bought every newspaper and magazine that had Beatles pictures. We made scrapbooks and hung the pictures in our rooms.

  Mama said, “You can flip over those mop tops, but I do not want to see anything about the Beatles outside of your bedroom. I will not have you redecorate my entire home because of this craze. Do you hear me? No Beatles plates, no knickknacks. Do not even ask for me to order you a Beatles potholder, for God’s sake. There is being a fan, and then there is being a nut.”

  We kept waiting for Mama or Daddy to say, “All right, enough is enough.” But they never said anything! We had found something we adored, and they didn’t try to take it away! The only rule was that we couldn’t play the music as loud as we wanted. Mama took a marker and made a big arrow that pointed to exactly how loud we could turn up the record player. If we obeyed, there wasn’t any trouble. That is how wonderful and powerful the Beatles were. When things seemed hopeless, a familiar Beatles song would come on the radio, and everything would be okay. No matter how bad things got, I could go in my room and be with the Beatles, especially my darling Paul.

  With all our reading and writing our “Beatles and Us” stories, by the next February I felt I knew and understood each one of the Beatles personally. I fantasized that I could predict what they would say or do in any circumstance. I meditated on their pictures. I believed that they had no secrets from me. And then Ringo came out with “This Boy.” Well, you could have knocked me over with a feather! I had no idea that Ringo was so sensitive! He just shocked me. That is the kind of song you would have expected Paul to sing. Not Ringo!!! But he sang it and wrote it, too. That was a real lesson for me: not to always judge a book by its cover. I started looking at boys differently. Like Phil Rabelais in my class, with the big forehead and all the pens in his pockets. Maybe inside he was really a poet, really a Ringo. I started being a lot deeper after that song.

  At Our Lady of Divine Compassion Prison, the nuns made us wear uniforms. But when Mama was in a good mood, she would let me wear my John Lennon hat and Beatles boots. This really got the nuns going.

  Leave it to the nuns to try and ruin something you like if your parents already haven’t. Sister Mary Agatha, who had already separated the fifth-grade boys from the fifth-grade girls into different classrooms, now decided that the Beatles were a mortal sin. Once when I sassed her and she slapped me in the face, she announced to the class, “Siddalee Walker and the Beatles are both mortal sins.”

  I went to the principal’s office and called Mama and told her what happened. She drove up to Our Lady of Divine Compassion with her stretch pants on, smoking a cigarette, and she walked into the office and said, “No one lays a hand on my children but me.” Instead of whipping me, she put me in the ca
r and we went to Bordelon’s Drugstore for a Coke and some new magazines. She didn’t make me go to school for three days after that. We had a ball. It was the miraculous force of the Beatles. For once in her life she admitted that Sister Mary Agatha was an old warthog, and we made fun of the way hairs stuck out of that nun’s face moles.

  For a whole year and a half, we lived mesmerized by the Beatles and their music. Then our fantasies came true!

  In March 1965, over a year after we first saw the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, Aunt Jezie called and told us she could get us tickets for their show at the Sam Houston Coliseum in Houston that coming August, part of their second U.S. tour.

  “I’ve got connections,” she told Mama.

  We hardly ever saw Aunt Jezie. She was Mama’s little sister, and she would come home for Christmas, but that was about it. And most of the time she and Mama would get in some kind of argument. I don’t think they liked each other much. One Christmas Aunt Jezie came, and she danced so nasty that my Uncle Pete asked her to stop doing it in front of us kids. She also got in fights with Uncle Pete and Mama over a pool game after Christmas dinner at Uncle Pete’s house. Started yelling and screaming and hit Uncle Pete on the shoulder with her pool stick. Finally Uncle Pete, who was always nice to everybody, said, “Jezie, you are pushing it too far. Either behave or leave my house.” She roared out of his driveway blowing the horn, and no one saw her again for another two years.

  She had been in Houston since she finished college, but none of us knew exactly what she did. We heard she had a job that paid a lot of money, maybe something in real estate, but we were never really sure. One Christmas she brought home a lady with her who was older than her, but very nice and well dressed and classy. Having this lady there made Aunt Jezie act not so crazy as usual. It was this lady, named Louise, who had the connections to the Beatles concert and could get us tickets.

  We cornered Daddy when he got home. We thought we would have to sell him on the idea, but he just said, “Yeah, why not? Why the hell not?! Yall spend so much time locked up with those penguins, it’s time to see something different. Stop being sheep led to the slaughter. If the Beatles are anti-Catholic, then I think yall should see them. Be sure to tell Saint George Ogden. Drive the man nuts.”