“They didn’t build aircraft carriers.” Juts rubbed it in.
“They could have borrowed one from the Japanese. They were on the same side, you know.” Louise stared daggers at her.
“Yeah, they had an Axis to grind.”
Bunny giggled. “Juts, you never change.”
“Unfortunately.” Louise smiled stiffly. “Still my bad baby sister.” She put her hand under Julia’s elbow and pushed her right down the road, calling over her shoulder to Bunny, “You come on down and visit us. It’s been too long.”
Bunny waved. “I will.”
Out of Bunny’s earshot, Louise hissed, “If you ever even hint at what happened that night I will slit your throat.”
“Then you’d better be real nice to me.”
“I am nice to you. I am trying to avert a disaster down the road.”
“When I want your advice I’ll ask for it. Then again”—that malicious smile returned—“you are my big sister. You are having a birthday in the next minute and soon you’ll be fifty.”
“I will not!”
“That’s right. I forgot. You were born in 1901. You’ll only be forty-nine. Guess we have to wait another year for the Big One.”
“I am not forty-nine.”
“Well, that’s funny, Wheezie, because I’m forty-five.”
“You never were good at math.”
They rode home in silence. Louise, warned, didn’t want to further provoke Julia, but she was still so furious she didn’t trust herself to talk. Juts hummed the entire way home, interrupting her musical reverie as they passed familiar sights on Route 116. She adored having Louise in her power. She even made her stop in Spring Grove so she could buy a Co-Cola, knowing the smell from the nearby paper mill would turn Louise’s stomach.
When Wheezie pulled into Juts’s driveway, Juts hopped out of the car, grabbed her few packages, and said, “I have a new philosophy—‘Tell the truth and run.’ Forty-nine!” She shut the door of the car and dashed to the house.
67
Everyone invited to Louise’s birthday party had to keep up the fiction that she had only just nudged over the forty line.
Nickel, loving any kind of party, stood at the door taking coats. She threw them over the bed in Louise’s bedroom. After the bed was piled high she threw coats over Doodlebug’s bed because she figured it was the bed part that was important. The only bad thing about that idea was that Ramelle Chalfonte’s mink coat got fleas.
Extra Billy and Mary acted as bartender and server. Mary carried around hors d’oeuvre trays. She couldn’t believe how much people ate and drank.
Lillian Yost greeted Juts. “How about Natalie Bitters?” Natalie was a great-aunt of Billy’s. “Strong as a horse and then—gone so fast!”
“Popeye Huffstetler wrote the obituary. He said, ‘Natalie Bitters went to rest in the loving arms of Jesus.’” Juts giggled. “Well, that was a lie. Not even Jesus would want that bitch.”
If Juts had watched her back she would have realized that Natalie Bitters’s one friend in this life, Samantha Dingledine, was behind it.
“How could you say a thing like that?”
“She was about as attractive as goat pellets,” Juts replied, having liberally sampled the libations as she helped prepare for the party.
“I’m leaving!” Samantha pushed for the door.
Louise, not wishing to offend Samantha because she had a great big house to paint and Pearlie had put a bid on the job, rushed over. “Ignore Juts. She doesn’t have the sense God gave a goose.”
“Goose or geese?” Juts’s eyes narrowed.
Louise, sensitive to the hint, put her arms around Sam’s shoulders while winking at Juts, hoping that would make them conspirators. “Loose lips sink ships.”
“Are you talking to your sister or me?” Samantha wanted to know.
“Sorry, Sam. It’s an expression Juts and I use to calm each other down.”
As Louise approached the punch bowl, there was Nickel chugging a glass of punch.
“Put that glass down, you little lush.”
“Huh?” Nicky, startled, faced her aunt, noticing that her red lipstick was a little smudged.
Louise grabbed the glass from Nickel’s hand. Juts strode over to the punch bowl. “Wheezie, she didn’t know there was one bowl for kids and one for adults.”
“You might try disciplining her.”
Nickel took in this exchange as Samantha Dingledine backed away. Then she hastily dipped another glass cup into the punch, which tasted delicious to her.
“I do discipline her!”
Louise didn’t miss the second pass at the punch. She reached down and grabbed Nickel’s wrist. “Don’t you dare drink that punch.”
“Leave her alone.” Juts smacked Louise so hard on the back that her false teeth flew into the punch bowl.
Louise couldn’t scream because everyone would notice she had no teeth. She was hoping no one had seen her teeth fly out, which of course many had. She fished in the bowl for them.
Nickel thought this was a great party game, so she dipped her hand into the liquid too. Her nimble fingers located the uppers.
“Here’s your teeth, Aunt Wheezie.”
Louise clapped both hands over the offered prize and hissed through her gums, “These aren’t my teeth.” She clomped upstairs.
“Momma, what’d I do wrong?”
“Not a goddamned thing. Why don’t you help me clean out this punch bowl?” Julia picked up the bowl, careful not to slosh any punch. She carried it into the kitchen as Ramelle Chalfonte opened the kitchen door for her.
She poured the contents down the drain.
“Momma, why is Aunt Wheezie mad at me?”
“She’s cross because she’s an old bag.” Juts scrubbed out the bowl.
Ramelle joined them. “Need a hand?”
“A foot, too,” Juts joked. “Nicky, shake up the Hawaiian Punch, will you?”
Nickel grabbed the big can and shook it. Juts finished wiping out the bowl as Ramelle looked for a can opener or a church key.
“Here we are.” She perforated two holes on opposite sides of the can. “I think we need two of these. Nickel, how about shaking up another one?”
“Okay.” As Nickel shook and shook the blue can, she asked, “What birthday is this?”
“What she says or what she is?” Juts stopped herself. “Never mind, honey. Aunt Louise is thirty-nine. She’s been thirty-nine many times. She will be thirty-nine when you are thirty-nine.”
Nickel, oblivious to her mother’s sarcasm, placed the can next to the punch bowl. She watched as Juts poured in a bottle of cheap vodka. When Juts turned to wipe her hands on a red-and white dish towel, Nickel poured in a second bottle. Ramelle started to say something, then giggled behind her hand.
The two women called in Pearlie to carry out the heavy bowl.
The party picked up after that.
“Hey, Wheezie,” Julia called to her when she reappeared, “drink to your birthday.” She held out a cup.
“Now you know I don’t drink.”
The group stopped and people called out, “Come on.”
“Enjoy yourself. It’s your birthday.”
“Well, just a smidgen.” Louise knocked back the drink. As the night wore on she needed more smidgens.
Millard Yost danced close to Louise, very close.
Pearlie tapped him on the shoulder to cut in. Millard wouldn’t let go. Pearlie tapped him again as the music filled the room. Millard still wouldn’t let go. Pearlie then pulled him away from Louise but Millard, who’d partaken freely of the punch, reached for his partner and grabbed her bosoms, perhaps not unintentionally. Pearlie hauled off and decked him.
Lillian, mortified at her husband’s behavior, stood over his inert form. “You can have him. I’m going home.” She stormed out of the house, slamming the door behind her.
Chessy, a little high himself, said, “Let’s move him, boys.”
The men picked up
Millard, depositing him in Maizie’s old bedroom.
Nickel, past her bedtime, pulled on her mother’s dress. “Momma, what’s wrong with Mr. Yost?”
“He’s snockered.”
“How come he wouldn’t let go of Aunt Wheezie?”
“Uh …” Juts thought a minute, then repeated something Celeste used to say: “The bonds of matrimony are so heavy it takes two, sometimes three, to carry them.”
Nickel fell asleep upstairs next to Doodlebug, both of them stretched out on the mink coat, but not before she told anyone who would listen to her that she was never going to get married.
Meanwhile, Louise hauled Juts into the kitchen, both of them unsteady on their feet.
“Now, Julia, you can’t make jokes about my age.”
“I haven’t made one joke this evening.”
“I don’t trust you.”
“I’m your sister.”
“Exactly.” Louise crossed her arms over her chest. “See, you have to realize that we sleep eight hours a day.”
“So?”
“Eight is one-third of twenty-four. Right?”
“Right.”
“I don’t do anything when I sleep. My whole body and mind are at rest.”
“Right.” Juts leaned against the counter, glad for the support.
“Well, then, I don’t really live for those eight hours, so they can’t count toward my age. You can only count those hours when you know what you’re doing. I am two-thirds of the age on the books. See?”
“Yeah.” Juts was confused, but it sounded reasonable.
“Well then, Julia, I am really only thirty-two point three years old, but I can’t say that because it’s too difficult for people to grasp. So I just say that I’m thirty-nine. When my age catches up to thirty-nine I really will be thirty-nine because I’ve got six years to go. I know what I’m doing. You should listen to me.”
68
The summer of 1950 sparkled with robin’s-egg-blue skies and low humidity, a glorious contrast from the usual. The occasional sultry day brought out folks fanning themselves on their porches; old men in Panamas gathered at the square to sit under the shade of the cooling trees.
Juts, with an unenthusiastic Nicky tagging after, strolled through the park. Unlike her sister, who favored large flower-bedecked chapeaus, Juts was bareheaded. This gave her ample opportunity to demonstrate there wasn’t a gray hair on her head. As she didn’t resort to the dye pots, she was proud of this, doubly proud since a stunning silver streak was showing on Louise’s widow’s peak.
Mary Miles Mundis cruised by in a brand-new Cadillac, so big it hogged the two lanes. Mary Miles waved, setting the flab on her underarm to jiggling. Fattening up the family bank account had fattened up Mary Miles, as well.
“Momma, when’s Mrs. Mundis’s pool going to be ready?”
“Right soon.”
“Will she allow children in it?”
“Only good children.”
Nickel squinted up at her mother, clamped her lips shut, and cracked an imaginary whip.
Juts laconically told her, “You’ve watched too much Lash LaRue.”
Lash LaRue, a popular cowboy star dressed in black, could snap a cigarette out of an enemy’s mouth with his whip.
“Momma, is it true you served Daddy a dog-food sandwich?”
“Where’d you hear that?” Juts’s gray eyes brightened. “Did my esteemed sister tell you that?”
By now Nickel had learned that the best way to get a reaction out of her mother was to tease out information. “I forget.”
“You did not forget, you little shit, you’ve got a mind like a steel trap. Now you tell me who told you that or you can’t go to Mrs. Mundis’s pool party.”
That did the trick. “Aunt Wheezer.”
“Aunt Wheezer what?”
“Aunt Wheezer said you got mad at Daddy and fed him a dog-food sandwich with mustard and pickles and lettuce.”
“I did no such thing.” They reached the Confederate memorial statue to the glorious dead of the unsullied lost cause. “It was cat food.”
Nicky burst out laughing. “Momma!”
“He never knew the difference.” Julia pondered a moment. “Sugar pie, let me give you a piece of advice that may not mean much now, but you’ll thank me for it later. Your father deserved far worse than a cat-food sandwich, but that was years ago.” She lifted her eyes to Epstein’s Jewelry and thought to herself that while the whole thing had happened years ago, it never went away. “If it’s got testicles or tires it’s gonna be trouble.”
Spending time in the stable, Nicky knew what testicles were. “Oh” was her reply. She spied Louise crossing the square from the Bon-Ton, toting two shopping bags. “Aunt Wheezie!” She scampered across the shaded path to greet her aunt, whom she liked most days.
Juts caught up with them. “What you got in there?”
“Odds and ends.”
“I bet everything in there is useful and you’ve been waiting years to purchase it.”
“Don’t start,” Louise warned. “Why don’t we sit for a minute?”
“Not on the north side. Let’s cross the line.” Juts walked back a few paces and flopped on a pretty wrought-iron bench. “Did you see Mary Miles Mundis’s brand-new, as in two-minutes-old, Cadillac?”
“Not yet.”
“You’ll only have to wait a few minutes because she’s cruising around town. She should be due for another pass at the square any minute now.”
“It’s red,” Nickel piped up.
“A red Cadillac.” Louise sighed. “Must be nice. Harold makes the money and Mary Miles spends it.”
“You can’t take it with you.”
“Nickel, don’t listen to your mother. Money burns a hole in her pocket. You must save.”
“Yes, Aunt Louise.” Nickel swung her legs back and forth, since they didn’t touch the ground. The wrought-iron bench was cool on her bottom.
“What’s this about telling my child I served Chessy a cat-food sandwich?”
“I thought it was dog food.”
“That’s not the point.”
“I don’t know,” Louise hedged. “Just popped into my mind.”
“Well, it didn’t have to pop out of your mouth.”
Louise, saved from further defense, caught sight of the red Cadillac stopping on the Emmitsburg pike, a flash of color between the sepulchral whiteness of the two city halls.
“She ought to give more money to the church.”
“Balls,” Juts snapped.
“Testicles,” Nickel corrected her mother.
“No, balls.” Juts lit up a Chesterfield.
“Your mother is relishing an uncouth moment,” Louise commented dryly.
“You, of course, are so full of the milk of human kindness that you moo. Nary a harsh word escapes your perfect lips.”
“I had something in this Bon-Ton bag for you. Now I’m keeping it for myself.” Louise crossed her arms over her chest.
“What?”
“I’m certainly not going to give a gift to someone who insults me. My own sister!”
“That’s what sisters are for.” Julia smiled. “There she goes. I think she had the dealer remove the muffler.”
They listened as the deep rumble of the huge V-8 engine permeated the square. Even the birds were silent.
“Can you imagine having that much money?”
“Yeah.” A dreamy look came into Juts’s eyes. She refocused on the shopping bag. “What’d you get me?”
“Don’t you reach in there!” Louise smacked Juts’s hand. She reached in and pulled out an egg slicer, a small gadget that had wires strung across it like a tiny harp.
“Hey, I can use this. Thanks.” Juts kissed her sister on the cheek lightly so as not to leave a lipstick mark.
Nickel, quietly expectant, inched closer to her aunt on the bench.
“And this is for you.” Louise brought forth a cowboy bandana.
“Neat!” Nickel immed
iately rolled it and tied it around her neck. “Thanks, Aunt Wheezie.”
“Say ‘Thank you.’ ‘Thanks’ is for scuz buckets.” Juts pointed a finger at the child.
“Thank you, Aunt Louise.”
“You’re welcome.”
Mary Miles made another flyby around the square.
“How many miles do you think she gets to the gallon in that thing?” Juts blew out smoke.
“Luckily for her there’s a station down on Baltimore Street.” Louise lusted after that car. “By the way, I almost forgot. The pool party will be this Saturday. Everyone’s invited.”
“Peepbean, too?” Nickel asked.
“Everybody.”
“Grandma Smith?”
“Her, too,” Louise replied.
“I can’t wait to see that fat load in a bathing suit,” Juts said.
“Juts, Josephine Smith will never wear a bathing suit. She’ll sit under an umbrella. She’ll complain of the heat even if it’s a day like today. She’ll call for Rup to fetch her a lime rickey, which I know full well is a gin rickey. She’ll get bored after an hour and make Rup take her home. Or better yet, she’ll get Chessy to do it.”
“I guess it’s a good thing. She’d have to wear a tent.”
The pool party, blessed with perfect weather, drew the whole town. No one would miss it. And as Louise predicted, Josephine Smith reposed under a large oak tree, fanning herself, drinking a rickey, her feet on a small hassock provided by her attentive host.
As it was the beginning of summer everyone was white as chalk, which made some of the guests look fatter than they were. Mary Miles had picked up a pound or two, but at least her bulk was well-proportioned. Also, her bathing suit had a little skirt on it.
Juts, her beautiful figure still without a sag in it, splashed and played around. Louise, too, was in good shape. Juts couldn’t resist a malicious remark to Louise concerning Trudy Epstein, who now exhibited a little pot belly.
Juts had known that the Epsteins would be there. After all, the whole county, practically, was invited. If she hadn’t wanted to be in the same place with Trudy, Juts could have refused to come. She never would have done that, however. After all, she was going to be the life of the party.
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