Ya-Yas in Bloom

by Rebecca Wells

  “Sweet Lord Jesus,” Myrtis muttered to herself. “Basking in sin. That is all that woman is doing, basking in sin. To think that she is the mother of four precious little children.” Myrtis’s complete Singer Sewing Center joy, her perfect day, was pulverized in a single instant by Vivi Abbott Walker. All her happiness just melted down into the blacktop. That is what Vivi Abbott Walker could do to Myrtis. That is what Myrtis let Vivi Abbott Walker do to her.

  Shep Walker had not started dating Vivi until years after high school, after most of the other girls in Thornton had gotten married and had a yowling baby or two on their hips. Myrtis had heard from her mama that Mr. Baylor Walker and his wife were mortified when Shep started dating Vivi Abbott. Before Wednesday-night prayer meeting, when all the ladies stood outside the big double doors in front of the church to gossip, they would ask: Didn’t it mean anything to Shep Walker that Vivi and her gang of girlfriends had actually been arrested while they were still in high school? The four of them had climbed up the side of the City Park water tank and jumped in—actually took off their clothes and jumped into the tank that held the entire drinking water supply for all of Thornton. And it was only because Roscoe Jenkins happened to be passing by in his patrol car, cruising real slow, and caught a glimpse of somebody’s clothes on the ground that the whole thing was even discovered. Poor Roscoe had to climb all the way up there himself and see that every single girl was buck-naked. He instructed them under penalty of law to get their clothes back on. Then he herded them off to the police station, where their fathers were called. But because of who they were, they were only reprimanded and then sent home. Anybody else would’ve spent time in jail. At least this is how Myrtis heard it, and she was sure she was right.

  Roscoe had told Myrtis’s Uncle Parnell, who was a bail bondsman, the whole story over coffee at Rotier’s. Roscoe said that Vivi Abbott, when he asked her why in the world they jumped into the water tank, had replied that it was a full moon and they were instructed to do it. That alone was enough for Myrtis to know that Vivi Abbott was a witch. Catholics can be witches, Myrtis thought, don’t you go doubting it.

  Oh, Pastor Dexter Roy Bob Becker had preached about that event! She remembered his sermon title, taken from Job: “How much more abominable and filthy is man, which drinketh iniquity like water.” Pastor Becker had the Ya-Yas’ number. Even if the rest of Thornton did not.

  At the same time that Myrtis stood there appalled by what she saw on that parking lot at the Southgate Center, she began to fear for the safety of the Walker children. Poor little things, with that witch for a mother who was too busy flirting with young boys to notice the peril to her children. Myrtis could just imagine something horrible happening: all four of them, darling even though they were sassy and big-mouthed, lying splattered all over the hot blacktop, their storebought summer outfits covered with blood and elephant dung. After all, Myrtis thought, dark things can happen on even the sunniest day. She played the image across her mind several times. Then Myrtis gathered herself together and walked toward Vivi, who was still lounging on the hood of the Thunderbird, finishing her second thermos full of vodka and lemonade.

  Vivi was arguing with one of the teenage boys. “You must think I am some kind of backwater fool, Dahlin. There is absolutely no way in hell I would sell this car for anything less than five thousand dollars. Yes, that is correct, five thousand dollars. Because while it is virtually impossible to put a dollar value on what this vehicle means to me, five thousand dollars would at least fly the petits monstres and moi to the Riviera for the rest of the summer and set us up in a leased villa. Plus, there might be a little left over for Shep to come visit us when he has the time. I am a married lady, yall must remember.”

  Then, flinging her hair back out of her eyes, she turned to an especially virile-looking teenager and said, “James, I have told you a thousand times: take your sweaty hands off my rearview mirror!” At that, she reached down into her purse for another Lucky Strike.

  Myrtis could take no more. She marched right to the edge of the shiny chrome bumper and addressed Vivi as though she were an errant schoolgirl instead of a mother of four.

  “Vivi Abbott Walker,” she said, “you should be ashamed! Get yourself up off the hood of that car and go take care of your precious little children!”

  Vivi didn’t bat an eyelash. She stared through her Foster Grants at Myrtis, who stood before her wearing the most hideous example of a sewing machine gone mad that she had ever witnessed. There should be a law, Vivi thought. Vivi didn’t have to lower her eyes to know that Myrtis would be wearing matching Keds Grasshoppers tennis shoes with white socks turned down in a little weenie roll.

  “Why, Myrt, you are Fashion Incarnate,” Vivi said, loud enough for the teenage boys to hear and break into loud honking laughs.

  Vivi Abbott Walker was the only person in the world who had ever called her “Myrt.” Myrt. So it rhymed with dirt.

  Vivi lit her cigarette, French-inhaled, and added: “And Dahlin, those clip-on shades of yours are positively signature.”

  She blew the cigarette smoke out slowly straight into Myrtis’s face. Then she leaned back against the windshield.

  “Vivi Abbott Walker, those children are going to be killed by that elephant any minute now!” Myrtis said, her mouth opening no wider than was absolutely necessary to get the sounds out.

  “No, Myrt dahlin, I believe my boys and girls are still in line. It is almost five o’clock, yes, I can tell by my Indian Guide instincts that the sun is very near the five o’clock mark. My dahlins must get on that animal before five, because that is when the elephant and his beloved trainer must pack up and get on down the road. I’d love to stay and chat Myrt but I have to make sure my little dahlins get their elephant ride!” And with that, Vivi slipped down off the hood of her car and dashed off through the crowd.

  “Oh,” Myrtis muttered under her breath, “Dear Lord, help me keep my temper. Suffer the little children to come unto me.” Then Myrtis turned away from the Thunderbird and slowly pushed her way toward the line of children.

  She could hardly have been surprised by Vivi’s response. It was exactly the sort of thing Myrtis expected. Why had she even bothered? Vivi Abbott had no shame, she never had. Vivi Abbott, who didn’t even sew a stitch! Myrtis had seen, all of Thornton had seen, how Vivi actually stapled the hems of her children’s pants and then laughed about it when the staples fell out. “They just don’t make staple guns like they used to,” Vivi would say as her children’s pant legs dragged in the mud.

  Myrtis never completely got over the fact that Vivi refused to learn to sew, can, or make jam. One time, when Shep and Vivi were newlyweds and seemingly strapped for cash, Myrtis had gone over one Sunday afternoon and offered to help Vivi make drapes for that little rental house they lived in back then.

  “Thank you, Dahlin.” Vivi had tossed her head and laughed. “My grandmother always told me that stores make those things much better than you could at home. But isn’t it just too cute for you to offer, Myrt!”

  Sure enough, even when the price of cotton was only pennies for a bushel and all the farmers were hurting, including Shep Walker, Vivi Abbott kept on ordering from Neiman Marcus like she was a European heiress. Vivi went four times a year to Dallas or Houston for big shopping trips, instead of taking the trouble to make clothes herself. And at Calvary Baptist, it was whispered that Vivi told her mother-in-law, Mrs. Baylor Walker, that she’d rather starve than spend her days canning tomatoes and corn—and the Walkers with some of the finest farms in the parish!

  Vivi seemed to believe that Shep and his family and neighbors were ever so slightly beneath her. They were country people. Granted, they were country people with blue blood, and more acreage than anyone else in Garnet Parish, but still, there was something of the farm about them. They were 4-H people: head, heart, hands, health. But none of it was good enough for Vivi Abbott Walker.

  Vivi always laughed at Myrtis, treated her like she was an old joke or s
omething, not the kind of person who the Abbotts and their friends would invite to house parties in the Garden District in New Orleans or what-have-you.

  Myrtis reached the roped-off section where the children stepped onto a wooden platform before climbing a rope ladder winding up and over the elephant’s enormous belly and onto its huge gray back. She saw Vivi and three of the Walker children about to settle down onto the elephant saddle. The oldest daughter, Siddalee, seemed to be frozen. Maybe, thought Myrtis, just maybe one of those Walker children has more sense than the mother!

  Of course Vivi would bring those horrid girlfriends of hers, Myrtis thought. There they were, standing farther back in the line with their own poor little children. That ghoul Caro Brewer, wearing black clothes and sunglasses like she always did. That dreadful Teensy, who always looked like a little monkey or something. And Necie Ogden, who was the most normal of all of that bunch. She was the one who Myrtis hated the least, and she could not conceive of how such a nice lady got hooked up with the rest of those Jezebels.

  Myrtis was surprised that the oldest Walker child didn’t break into a fit. Myrtis had seen these hissy fits before. All the Walker children were famous for occasionally throwing themselves into such frenzies that they eventually became exhausted and had to lie down in a dark room and sleep it off. Vivi said it was good for them, got it out of their little systems.

  “Here’s what you do,” Vivi whispered to Myrtis once, on a Sunday afternoon in winter when Myrtis and her mama had gone over to see Mrs. Baylor Walker and found Shep and Vivi there with their four children. “You give them a little snort of bourbon,” Vivi whispered, “lay them down in an air-conditioned room, shut the door, walk out onto the porch, lay down in the swing, and put on a Johnny Mathis record. When they wake up, they are as sweet as angels. That is how you get through being the mother of four.”

  Myrtis knew this was against scripture. There was no telling how those poor children would turn out. They would probably grow up to become ax murderers. They would end up in the Garnet Parish insane asylum, where Myrtis would have to bring them pecan pies at Christmas.

  Myrtis leaned down close to Siddalee to find out what was wrong. But Siddalee would have none of it. She broke away and pushed through the hot crowd. Myrtis tried to follow her, but the crowd was so heavy that she lost sight of the young girl within minutes. She went back to tell the other Walker children: “Wait a minute, don’t do it! Get off that beast and go help your sister.” But just then she saw Vivi Abbott Walker climb up there on that elephant and heard her call out, “Ride ’em cowgirl!” The elephant began to lumber away with three little Walkers and Vivi perched on top, bobbing up and down precariously.

  Myrtis realized that in her zeal to save Shep Walker’s wife and children, she had misplaced her new fabric and patterns. And she was getting a headache. In fact, she was well on her way to a migraine. Fine, she thought. Let Miz High-and-Mighty Vivi and those Ya-Ya queens sort it all out. You try and you try to help them, but all they know how to do is to be snooty, ungrateful, and rude. Myrtis was running late now. She’d have to skip that cup of coffee with her mama and hurry right on home to make dinner for Harlan and the children. She got into her car and could hardly work the key into the ignition, her hands were shaking so bad. When Myrtis got angry, she shook because her body could not hold all her anger.

  That afternoon, as Myrtis was confronting Vivi Walker, two young men had put away their tools, collected their pay from Shep Walker, and climbed into an ancient green pickup truck. Eddie and Washington Lloyd were proud of this truck that they’d bought with their own money—earned doing long hours of hard and sweaty work for Mr. Shep. Right now, that same sweat shone on their dark skin so heavy that the backs of their shirts were wet and stuck against their skin. Their Uncle Chaney had helped them get hired at the Walker plantation the summer after their Daddy died. Chaney was Mr. Walker’s right-hand man, and he’d persuaded Mr. Shep to take them on, even though they’d been real young then. They’d been working at the Walker place for years now. They lived several miles from the Walker place, and it was a long way to walk to work every day, then back at night.

  Washington and Eddie had been discussing whether they should go home and change first or head straight over to the new shopping center. They’d just spent ten hours working in the fields under the hot sun, and their shirts were filthy and their overalls were streaked with dirt. Normally, Eddie and Washington didn’t like to be seen out looking like this. They liked to look sharp. And their Aunt Willetta always fussed at them about this: “Don’t you be going out looking nasty! Won’t no girl ever kiss on you, if you all sweaty and smelly. Don’t you be acting like a ten-cent self. You good handsome men. Act like it.”

  But today, Eddie and Washington decided to skip their usual cleanup and head straight out to the Southgate Center before everything closed up. They wanted to see that elephant. They’d joked about how the animal and them both came from Africa, and so maybe the elephant might recognize them somehow.

  All of Thornton had been talking about the elephant. The ads had been on the radio for months. When they heard about the Grand Opening, the black kids had been just as amazed as the white ones. Bringing an elephant, all the way from Africa! Like us, they said, all the way from the other side of the ocean! Uncle Chaney had shook his head when Eddie repeated this. “Sure, just like us. Brung to haul the white peoples around,” he said. The gossip in the black community was that, of course, blacks would not be allowed to ride the elephant—it was for white children only, as was the shopping center. It had not been lost on folks that the minute downtown Thornton had started to integrate, this shopping center on the outside of town had sprung up. The white people still wanted their own place to shop. But Eddie and Washington had thought about it and talked about it, and they decided that even if they could not ride the elephant, they could at least see it. Surely the white people would not mind if they just looked at the wild animal.

  Washington drove out of Pecan Grove and turned on the road that ran along the bayou. He was driving as fast as their old truck could go—he had to keep it at thirty-five, because at about forty, the transmission began a metallic whine. Eddie fidgeted with the door lock on his side and looked over at Washington. “We gonna miss the elephant.”

  As Myrtis made the turn off the highway onto the two-lane blacktopped road that wound along Bayou Latanier toward her home, she was driving fast, replaying the parking lot scene in her head over and over, so furious at Vivi Abbott Walker that she could hardly see. She compulsively counted all the sensible Christian things she should have said, all the scripture she could have quoted at Vivi Walker. Myrtis’s body pulsed with anger and humiliation. It was a beautiful twilight, but she did not notice. She came around a curve and was dumbfounded to see another vehicle on the road headed straight for her. In her lane. Or what she thought was her lane.

  At the sight of the Bel Air, Washington was stunned. “Sweet Lord, have mercy!” he screamed as he veered to the right, grazing the other car on the front someplace. Hard to tell even color or model, it was over so fast, and the car was gone, almost as though it had never been there. And then Eddie and Washington were screaming: “Tree! Tree!” as the truck slid to the right toward a big old live oak at the edge of the road. Washington swerved left and slammed on the brakes. The truck went into a skid, and the back end of the pickup boomed as it slammed into the tree. To look at the truck, it was a miracle the two young men escaped with only minor injuries. The bed of the truck was wrapped around the tree, and the rear axle was broken, with one tire rolling off into the neighboring field.

  Washington looked around him and realized that their truck was angled into the road, its back end crumpled against the big tree, its front end sticking out into the lane they’d been driving in. He climbed out of the truck, steadied himself, and whispered, “Shit.”

  Eddie had to work to get his truck door open, and he got out cautiously, not yet sure all his body parts were working co
rrectly. He looked up and down the road and did not see the other car. He wondered if it had just disappeared into thin air. He noticed that his forehead was bleeding some, and his neck and shoulder didn’t feel right. Then he walked around the back end of the truck.

  There was a deep dent and scrape along the front on the driver’s side. And in the back, the right side panel behind the back door was crumpled and twisted and the back bumper was off-kilter. This poor old warhorse of a truck didn’t just have a few more scars—it was undrivable, and unlikely to ever be drivable again.

  Eddie looked like he’d taken a hard punch to the side of his face. But when he spoke he sounded okay, like he wasn’t feeling it yet. “Man, where’d that other car go to?”

  Washington, with blood dripping from his nose, looked at Eddie in the road and said, “Who care where that car at? We alive. Dear Lord, thank you. One fine-ass miracle done happened in the state of Louisiana today.”

  They both liked to have cried. Their truck, the thing that made it possible for them to get to work, was demolished. They were still standing, but hoofing it would be their only option now. You didn’t get a truck easy if you were a black man in Thornton, Louisiana. Washington hated to remember how he’d had to grovel in front of a fat old white loan shark just to get the money for this truck. No, you didn’t get you a truck easy. Nuh-uh. They didn’t want to give you the loan they collected on every Friday afternoon. They didn’t want you driving your own truck any more than they wanted you to ride an elephant. To them, a nigger on an elephant was a wild animal on a wild animal. Too much wild.

  Myrtis’s Bel Air had left the road and become airborne. It passed between two of the live oaks that lined both sides of the road, sailing out into a field of sugarcane. For a minute, there was astonishment and terror as Myrtis felt suspended in air, without being completely aware of how any of this had happened. Was this the Rapture? All she could see was blue and green flashing faster than she could even look at it, and a loud swishing sound all around her. Then there was a hard thump when the car landed, and she felt her head hit against something. But it didn’t hurt, not yet. In fact, she felt completely numb. The car bumped along now, and all around Myrtis everything was intensely green and swatting at the sides of the car.