Ya-Yas in Bloom

by Rebecca Wells

  Shep and Lulu and Baylor and I danced around, singing. We were going to Houston to see the Beatles! Aunt Jezie would get the tickets and arrange motel rooms, which wouldn’t be easy because the entire world would be flocking to Texas to see the Fab Four along with the Walker family.

  I called Joanie right away, and she was weeping with excitement. Of course, Mister Ogden went berserk. Necie had to apologize to Mama for the letter he wrote to Daddy and her on his Knights of Columbus stationery.

  When Daddy read the letter, he said, “George is jealous of those longhairs. There’s nothing he’d love better than hundreds of girls crawling all over him. There are Catholics, and there are nuts. George is a nut.”

  The fact that Aunt Jezie was getting us tickets to see the four greatest men in the world made me look at her in a whole new light. I wrote her letters every week, telling her that she was the most wonderful aunt in the world, signing them all with tons of XXXXXs and OOOOOOs.

  She wrote me back and said that she remembered when she first saw Elvis on Ed Sullivan and then live onstage. She said she cried tears—real ones.

  Oh gosh, it seemed like ten years from the time we saw the Beatles on television and the time that August came. It was all we talked about. Lulu, Little Shep, Baylor, and I were celebrities at Divine Compassion that spring, once people heard we were really going!

  When the time came, Teensy and Uncle Chick insisted on loaning us Chick’s brand-new 1965 Lincoln Continental. It was huge and luxurious, and we felt like movie stars when we rode in it. And there was so much room compared to being crammed into Mama’s T-Bird.

  When Daddy got in it, he said, “Look at this country boy, he is driving dee-luxe!”

  We had a blast the whole way from Thornton to Houston, Texas. Mama smoked with her cigarette outside the vent window and would blow the smoke out the window so Daddy wouldn’t get asthma. She made faces while she did it, sometimes acting like Lucille Ball getting sucked out the window. It tickled us so much that even Daddy had to laugh. Getting to Houston was a short enough trip that nobody got on each other’s nerves too bad. Things don’t usually go this good for us. It was the power of the Beatles.

  Mama didn’t have to reach her hand into the back seat and pinch or slap us one single time. Daddy kept pointing out Massey Ferguson on the road, and finally Mama said, “Shep, that Massey Ferguson must be going to Houston, too. Where do you know him from?” And Daddy cracked up. He had to explain to her that Massey Ferguson was a brand of farm equipment, like John Deere tractors. Mama had thought we were passing a man Daddy knew all the way to Houston, and he was really talking about tractors and combines. Massey Ferguson was high-grade stuff. You couldn’t buy it in Thornton.

  Lulu and I sat in the back seat, wishing we looked more like we were from London. We had brought every Yardley product we owned with us—mainly little soaps and perfumes, since Daddy refused to let us wear our Mary Quant eyeliner in public. So we busied ourselves with deciding exactly what we’d say to our favorite Beatle when we met him personally. Which we knew in our hearts would definitely happen. Lulu said she would ask John if he’d like to come out to Pecan Grove for gumbo sometime. I tried to explain to her how you just couldn’t expect someone famous to come over to your house, and all you feed them is gumbo.

  She said, “All right, then what are you going to say to Paul?”

  I thought for a long time, and then I replied, “I will simply hand Paul one of the poems I have written about him and let him take it from there.”

  We stopped at an A&W on the outskirts of Houston and got out and stretched our legs while they were cooking up our order. They had little picnic tables you could sit at, and we did, all of us putting the big frosty mugs of root beer against our faces before the ice melted off.

  Daddy said, “Mama, I’m feeling good. This Texas air is good for my sinuses.”

  The hamburgers came, and Mama made us say grace. After we said “Amen,” Daddy did his “Amen/Brother Ben/Shot a goose/And killed a hen,” and we all laughed.

  Little Shep followed with “Rub-a-dub-dub thanks for the grub.”

  Mama tried not to laugh, and then Lulu said, “Dear God, thank you for the cheeseburger and for the Beatles.”

  We were having fun. It was good to be away from Pecan Grove.

  You would not have believed the motel that Aunt Jezie booked us into! It had Greek statues all the way around the swimming pool and little twinkly lights in the bushes. Music played outside on the walkways all day and all night. There were thick bathrobes hanging in the rooms for us to wear when we got out of the pool. The robes had the monogram of the motel on them. We never stayed in places with bathrobes. Aunt Jezie said this place was the top of the heap.

  Aunt Jezie met us at the motel. Her hair was cut like Barbra Streisand’s, the way it hung down on the sides and framed her face. And her hair was a whole lot darker than when we had last seen her, almost black-black. She was so skinny, and wearing a little black linen shift with double spaghetti straps and black sandals with little French heels. Her sunglasses made Mama jealous, I think. But that is only my opinion. Aunt Jezie had already picked up the keys from the front desk and acted like she owned the motel. When we got to our rooms, there was a basket of fresh fruit waiting for us and a bottle of champagne iced down for Mama and Daddy. It must have cost a fortune!

  “Oh, Jezie, you shouldn’t have gone to all this trouble,” Mama told her.

  Aunt Jezie said, “Well, you only come to Houston once in a blue moon, and besides, I charged it all to the room.”

  Then Aunt Jezie looked at Daddy and gave him a big smile.

  Mama looked at Daddy for a minute, and I was afraid people were going to start getting mad like usual.

  But Daddy finally said, “What the hell? This is a vacation.”

  The grown-ups popped the cork on the champagne, and the four of us kids ran down the hall to get ice and Cokes from the machine with the pocketfuls of change Daddy had given us.

  God, did we love motel rooms! We had a room all to ourselves. Boys in one bed, girls in the other. Our own television set, and sliding glass doors that opened out onto the pool. Little Shep and Baylor ran into the bathroom to be the first to break the seal on the toilet lid—one of their rituals. Lulu and I grabbed all the little shampoo bottles and hand creams and tiny sewing kits and stuffed them into our suitcases. We always did that, then ran and found the maids and told them we needed more.

  Daddy let us take anything we wanted from motel rooms, including sheets and bath mats. He said, “They expect you to take that stuff home with you. That’s why the bill is so high.”

  It was getting kind of late, but we were jacked up. Mama and Daddy let us put on our swimsuits, and we jumped in the pool. It was dark, and the pool lights made everything feel exotic, like we were in a foreign country. Aunt Jezie and Mama and Daddy sat out on their room’s patio and drank while they watched us. The water was warm and a little breeze blew on us. We practiced our surface dives and did cannonballs and hollered for Aunt Jezie to come see how good we had learned to swim. Finally she just came over and jumped in with her clothes on! That was just like something Aunt Jezie would do. She said she’d just wear one of the motel bathrobes home. Mama couldn’t stand to be left out, so she ran in and put on her suit and came on in. And then even though Daddy doesn’t like swimming—if he gets cold, his asthma flares up—he got in too.

  “The temperature is just right,” Daddy said, imitating the story of the Three Bears. “Not too hot. Not too cold. Jusssst right.”

  We had it all to ourselves, a family pool. And we just splashed and laughed and jumped off Daddy’s shoulders and laughed at how funny Aunt Jezie looked with all her clothes wet.

  Daddy said, “We should travel more often.”

  And we all agreed.

  By the time I got in the bed, I was so sleepy I fell right off, instead of lying awake the way I did at home. It was real quiet in the room with only the sound of the air conditioner hummi
ng, blocking out all the other noises. Lulu slept next to me and I was glad to have her there, to smell the slight odor of chlorine on her skin. I liked us all being in the same room like that, all protected. I smiled over at Shep with his white T-shirt on before I turned off the light, and he smiled back and said, “Check, Sidda, this is great.”

  The next morning we had a huge breakfast in the motel dining room. The waitresses just fell in love with us. Daddy made friends with them and they introduced us to the cook. We got to go on a tour of the kitchen and watched while they took some coconut cream pies they’d just baked out of the oven. They said we could come back and have some later. I had never thought about coconut cream pies actually getting cooked. I thought they just happened.

  We walked around every inch of the grounds of the motel.

  Daddy said, “You should always get out and know where you are in a new place. That’s what the Indians always did.”

  We went into the lobby and bought some postcards of Houston. Daddy got to talking to the man at the desk, who had some relatives in Lafayette that Daddy thought he knew from the farm co-op. One thing about us when we traveled—we came away with new friends.

  Then we went back to the room to rest because it was going to be a long day. Aunt Jezie called to say she was on her way to come get us. She was not about to let us drive to Sam Houston Coliseum where the Beatles were playing. She said we’d get lost forever. Daddy said that was just fine with him. We laid on the bed and watched some Houston, Texas, television shows and just took it easy until Aunt Jezie came.

  We were all real excited, wondering if we’d brought the right clothes for a Beatles concert. I was wearing an orange miniskirt with a purple poor-boy short-sleeved pullover. Lulu had on a little lime green shift with huge pink flowers all over it that she looked real cute in. Little Shep wore a paisley shirt with a dickey (for that turtleneck look) even though it was hotter in Houston, Texas, than in Thornton! Mama told him he was going to burn up wearing a dickey in August, but he would not listen. Little Shep didn’t say it, but I think he wanted long hair. I think he wanted screaming girls fainting when they saw him.

  The best-dressed one in our bunch was Baylor. He had talked Mama into buying him a brown Nehru jacket that he just adored. It had gold buttons and was just a hair too big for him so that his little head floated inside the collar. He looked like a turtle from India. The brown looked great against his skin because Baylor had a gorgeous tan. Mama, Lulu, and I just broiled and had to slather on Noxzema for weeks afterward. Baylor loved that Nehru jacket, and I wonder if he knew how outstanding the whole effect was. He wore it with white pants and brown huaraches with no socks. The kid looked too smooth for words.

  But Aunt Jezie! She showed up looking like she’d stepped straight off the pages of Mama’s Neiman Marcus catalog. She wore a black-and-white polka-dot linen minidress with black heels and a matching polka-dot scarf in her hair. A wide black bracelet was on her arm, and her eye makeup looked like Jean Shrimpton. Oh, I was so proud! It gave me shivers to be around her, she was so beautiful.

  We got into her beige Riviera, and she drove like the city of Houston was hers alone. Daddy used to criticize Aunt Jezie’s driving, but now he just sat back and gazed out the front passenger window as she glided through traffic so fast our heads spun. We weren’t used to this much traffic or the superhighway ramps that wrap around like macaroni. Aunt Jezie used her horn a lot and cussed at other drivers and laughed and hooted whenever she managed to cut someone off.

  “Just call me Aunt Mario Andretti!” she said, blowing the horn.

  We got to the Coliseum area early. You had to. Parking wasn’t easy, but with Aunt Jezie at the wheel, you didn’t have a thing to worry about. She had even thought to bring a bandanna to tie to the antenna so we could spot the Riviera after the concert. I had never seen so many people—not at the Louisiana State Fair, not even at Mardi Gras. Aunt Jezie surveyed the situation, then decided we needed to get out of the sun and have something to drink.

  “Not too much—we have to keep our wits about us,” she said, “but we need just enough to wet our whistles and take the edge off.”

  We followed her three or four blocks until we got to a Hawaiian restaurant that was dark and cool inside. We had never been to Hawaii, our fiftieth state. Stepping into this place, we thought we had crossed the Pacific Ocean! There were Hawaiian hostesses and Hawaiian waiters and coconuts on the walls. They put leis on you the minute you set foot in the door! Don Ho’s autographed picture was above the cashier’s desk, and there were about eighty-four thousand different drinks you could order with little umbrellas in them.

  And oh my God! You would not have believed the people in there! These were not regular people from Texas. The men all had long hair. There were women with long straight black hair all the way down to their bottoms and white lipstick smoking long brown cigarettes. They wore leather skirts, and the men they were with wore ruffled blouses and jewelry. Boots, oh, they all had on boots. Tight pants and Beatles boots, zip-up boots, dress boots, suede boots, cowboy boots, and any other sleek pair of boots you could imagine. Ladies with short short miniskirts with boots that laced up to their knees, with eyes so black with makeup they looked like Cleopatra. Daddy said they must be awful hot in the middle of the summer wearing all that leather. But you could tell he was interested. Two women with their arms around each other stood over by the telephones, both of them reading books. A man with a goatee was speaking a foreign language to the hostess.

  Little Shep stood next to him and said, “Wow, Maynard G. Krebs!” Mama had to pull him away.

  On our way to our table there was a couple tongue-kissing. Right in front of everyone! We had to pull Baylor away from standing at their table and staring at them. Whew!

  Oh, it was all just incredible! These people were not just pretending. They were not just dressing up. This is how they really were, and they didn’t care who knew it or who gawked at them or what people said. I didn’t know where they came from, but they were magnificent. They held all the keys to my future! That’s how I wanted to be: different! Just leave it to the power of the Beatles to draw us all here.

  For the first time in my life I realized that I could just make myself up! Like these people! Not like when I was a little girl and made everyone call me Madame Voilanska, but for real, for when I grow up. I could be whoever I wanted to be. I could be a different kind of person from Mama and Daddy or the Ya-Yas or anyone in Thornton or the whole state of Louisiana. I could be strange and exotic, like nobody who had ever come before. I could do things and make up things, just like I made up my “Beatles and Us” stories. I could wear flowered pants with legs that flared out. I could do anything. People would see me walking down the street, whip their heads around, and ask: Who is she? How did she get to be such a free bird? It gave me shivers thinking about it. Of course, it was probably a sin to even have such thoughts. But I was in Houston, Texas, so it didn’t count.

  By the time we sat down, we were just about overwhelmed. I thought Daddy might say something about how trashy it all was. But he just shook his head and said, “I guess it takes all kinds.”

  My father sure was surprising me on this trip.

  We ordered Rob Roys and Shirley Temples with umbrellas. And I vowed I would keep this umbrella forever to remind me of the Beatles. We ordered some little pork appetizers because we were just passing the time more than anything, not really eating. It was so nice and cool in there. You couldn’t believe the hot Houston streets were right outside.

  Lulu and I went to the ladies’ bathroom, which had bamboo everywhere. We stared at the women in there, spraying their hair and smoking handmade cigarettes that smelled like hay or something in the fields. We couldn’t take our eyes off them. We wanted to be them so much. We put some of our mad money in one of the machines and got some Tangerine lipstick that kind of stung our lips when we put it on. It didn’t look like its name at all but more like if you’d put Quick Tan on your lips. We had t
o wipe it off before we went back to the table, or we’d be in trouble.

  There must have still been a little left at the corner of my lips, though, when I sat back down. Daddy said, “What is that on your lips?”

  Uh-oh: here it comes. I was afraid he was going to go into his thing of calling us whores if we wore the slightest smidgen of makeup because he believed we were too young. He could ruin my whole trip to the city of Houston.

  But Mama jumped right in and said, “Oh Shep, leave her alone. That is just color from sipping on her Shirley Temple.”

  Everything stayed fine. The grown-ups had some kind of drinks called mai tais. Mama and Aunt Jezie were both flirting with Daddy, and Daddy said, “Well, I believe one of these days I’m going to take yall to Hawaii, our youngest state. Including you, Miz Jez.”

  We left the restaurant of Hawaii and headed back out into the hot sunlight again. Aunt Jezie pushed her way through all the lines to get into the hall. She told us to just be quiet and follow her. In that black polka-dot outfit and huge sunglasses, she just elbowed her way through the crowds, and if anyone tried to stop her she said, “VIP coming through! VIP coming through! Out of the way, please, VIP!” Mama’s mouth was just hanging open. Daddy doesn’t like crowds, and he let Aunt Jezie take over. I was scared I’d get separated from the rest of them. I held on to Baylor’s hand. He squeezed mine so tight I could tell he was frightened. The seven of us held hands, Aunt Jezie taking the lead, and we somehow managed to cut through that throng like we were all one person. I could not believe this was happening to me, that I was actually going to see the four greatest men on earth. M’lain Chauvin, my best friend, will be pea-green jealous! I will be the most popular girl in Thornton.