The Queen of Palmyra

by Minrose Gwin

  When I heard her lay down the law like that, my sinuses all of a sudden popped wide open, and I felt like I just had poked my head out from under a smothering blanket. I took the first deep breath I’d breathed in a year.

  After that night there were days of nobody talking and a flurry of boxes to mail our things to Mimi and Grandpops in Millwood (C.O.D.). About a week later I woke up before light. Daddy was kicking the leg of my cot. “Get up, Sister, hurry up.” He spit the words out of his mouth one by one. They fell to the floor like stones. We took the Greyhound bus straight from Houston to Jackson, getting off only to eat nabs and drink Orange Crush and go to the bathroom in dusty depots with brown-stained spittoons. Mama and Daddy made me ride in the seat between them for the whole day and night that the trip took. Daddy sat on the aisle and closed his eyes. Mama turned her head away from him to the window and looked out over the passing fields and swamplands and monster oil rigs until her eyelashes touched the dark circles underneath them and she fell into a deep sleep. I was the only one with my eyes open, and I wanted the window, for the air if nothing else, but knew better than to ask Mama. She and Daddy couldn’t have stood to be any closer to each other than they were. I was the fly in the ointment that kept them together, and I needed to stay stuck.

  The land whipped by. It was the last day of April when we left, and the trees were forcing out their new leaves. Everything looked hopeful, even the warthogs standing in clumps in the Louisiana swamps. They rubbed their snouts up and down expectantly on the old tree trunks and vines as if they were polishing themselves up for a party. There’d been a rain, and the restoration fern on the swooping oaks had perked up and turned from brown to green.

  We sat way up in the front of the bus because Daddy said he didn’t want to be close to Them. He said they stunk and their food stunk. When he said all that right out loud as Mama and I were climbing the steps onto the bus, Mama stopped short on the top step and turned around and looked down at him like she was going to kick him square in the face. I was on the middle step between them, and actually ducked. He shut up, but he shoved me into the second set of seats and then grabbed Mama, who was going on down the aisle, and told her to get in too. She jerked her arm away like his hand had burned her, but she turned around and, instead of making a fuss, climbed over me to the window seat. As the hours went by, I decided that the people in the back smelled fresher than I was beginning to and their little paper sacks with glistening grease spots made my mouth water. Their eyes flitted over us like lazy flies but never settled.

  By the time we rolled into the Jackson depot on the second day, it was almost dark and the katydids were revving up. Sticky from the heat and leaden from the silent heavy journey, we tumbled off the bus into Mimi’s talcumed arms, at least Mama and I did. Daddy hung back and shook hands with Grandpops and did a little bow in Mimi’s direction. In honor of the occasion, Mimi had on one of her more subdued hats, a little black straw number with a cluster of drooping strawberries and a red wisp of a veil that stood straight up so that she looked like a Roman soldier. Mimi’s hats were wild things. Grapes and feathers, cherries and ribbons and doodads. The top shelf of her closet was stacked with pretty-colored hat boxes, round and square, large and small, where all shapes and sizes and colors waited in their crisp tissue nests.

  Grandpops squatted down in front of me, his bony knees popping, and asked, “Ready to read this old man some stories?” I answered, “Yes sir!” but when I tried to grin, my face split and then froze over again like a pond striving to come alive after a long hard winter. He reached over and took my hand and put it up against his cheek. “You’re sure a sight for sore eyes, girl. Your grandmother and I been moping around like two old ornery bears,” to which Mimi responded, “Don’t you call me a bear, old man!” Then we all laughed, rinsing the ice from my heart, and Mama, Daddy, and I piled into the backseat of Mimi’s Plymouth, me in the middle as usual, and headed for Millwood.

  The little white house we’d lived in before was an unexpected surprise to us, at least the fact of it being there waiting for us with its lights glowing in welcome and beds freshly made, thanks to Zenie Johnson, who worked for my grandmother and helped her get it ready. Mama started crying when Mimi and Grandpops drove us up our old street. Daddy studied the other side of the street and looked bored. Mimi was thrilled with herself. About a week ago, right after Mama had called, Mimi had just been driving by when she saw the For Rent sign, which had just been put up that very morning. It was meant to be! She jumped out of the car and paid the first month’s rent on the spot. She knew my mother would love coming back home to our old house. The moldy mattresses were gone, but Mimi had to get the bug man in to spray for roaches twice. Zenie’s husband, Ray, had painted the inside and pulled the weeds in the back alley. I’d loved the little house the minute I’d laid eyes on it years back, but now it looked like a meringue, white outside and in, light and airy with starched white café curtains and pretty little throw rugs.

  The house was oddly placed. It didn’t sit on the street like other houses, but was tucked in behind another house, the Chisholm place, which was nicer and bigger with a long porch and rocking chairs that didn’t pinch like the ones up at Mimi and Grandpops’. Our house was a little square box, high off the ground, the Chisholms’ a lower extended L whose tail went almost up to our front door.

  Perched up like that in the big house’s backyard with a shaded path of small stepping-stones leading from the street to our doorstep, our place looked more like a little rich girl’s playhouse, white-washed and clean and innocent. It was hidden and secret. You could barely see it from the street, and then only from an angle. When Mama would give directions to her new cake customers, she’d describe the Chisholm place, and then say we lived behind it. Ours came to be known as the house behind the house.

  The house wasn’t much on the inside, but we ended up paying $60 a month to live in it. Big Dan, who owned the Big Dan Ford place and who had gotten Daddy the radio-less car for next to nothing, rented to us. His wife called herself Miss Kay Linda, which she said meant “How pretty!” in Spanish if you pronounced the Linda as “Leeenda.” Miss Kay Linda did not live up to her name. She was short and pudgy, and her hair was the color of the sky when there’s a tornado coming, a sickly yellow. Her elbow fat crawled down her lower arms like melting lard. Mama and Daddy got funny little twitches around their mouths and looked straight down at the ground when she told us what her name meant and how to say it right.

  When we’d lived in our little house those three years before our year on the lam, Miss Kay Linda had planted some clematis vines next to our front door and attached them with clothespins onto the lattice on either side of the front stoop. Soon after we moved back that May, Mama asked Miss Kay Linda if she could take down those clothespins, seeing as how the clematis was climbing just fine, and those old moldy pins looked like big brown warts up against the pretty whiteness of the flowers, but Miss Kay Linda said no, she wanted to keep the pins there, just in case. She had gone to a lot of trouble to get that clematis to climb and she didn’t want to have it falling down all straggly with folks coming and going all the time. She was referring to Mama’s cake business, which she didn’t like being conducted in the house, and had raised the agreed-upon rent $10 a month to accommodate for the wear and tear that Mama’s cake customers would cause with their comings and goings, plus adding a $50 deposit to the whole deal. “Which I’ll never get back,” Mama said.

  Besides Little Dan, who started the rumor about me having leprosy, the Chisholms had a girl, May, and those two had a new swing set in what was their backyard and our front yard. There were two swings and a little ladder and slide. It was right in front of our living room window, and I would watch them swing on it. The spring we moved back, Little Dan was twelve and May my age. They might have been my playmates, but they’d always thought they were better than we were and treated me worse than dirt unless they wanted something, which was usually a piece of one of Mama’s famo
us cakes since that was all we had of any value.

  In the past Mama and a lady named Mrs. Polk had divided up Millwood’s sweet tooth between the cake people and the pie people. The two of them had an agreement. Mrs. Polk would make the pies and Mama would make the cakes. When you wanted a pie for a Saturday Matinee Club meeting or a bridge party, you called Mrs. Polk and ordered chocolate, coconut, or caramel, the latter being my personal favorite. One of Mrs. Polk’s five fulsome daughters would show up at your door several days later with a pie puffed up like a sail full of wind, meringue riding high on the breeze. And then whenever you wanted the best cake you could imagine, you called up my mother and put in your order: lemon, caramel, or devil’s food cake with angel icing. Mama said the devil’s food with angel icing should be a lesson to me about how both bad and good could look pretty and taste sweet. How they could get so mixed up, each with the other, that sometimes you couldn’t tell which was which. What a danger those kinds were.

  Mama said things like that while she was baking. Hard things that meant other things. Then she’d stare at me like she was a hundred-year-old oak tree and I was the ax that was going to bring her down. So I’d say yes ma’am, soft and easy, and when I spoke the words, they folded back the hardness in her eyes. Then she’d tell me to bring her a measuring spoon or the sugar or the shortening. I’d scurry for what it was that she wanted, and the commotion of my reaching and touching would unclasp us from the spell of her dark thoughts.

  When we first got back to Millwood that May, people had turned to pies in Mama’s absence. At first, Mrs. Polk was doing a better business than Mama. One problem was that Mama’s cakes were so big. If Mrs. Polk’s pies were sails, Mama’s cakes were battleships. When you’d hand one over, the person you were handing it to would always go “Oh!” and have to lean back to adjust to the weight. In the past, ladies had ordered Mama’s cakes more for birthdays or anniversaries or Easter when they were having a crowd of people, but right after we came back home, Mama got the bright idea of selling half cakes. When the word got out, the orders started coming in left and right.

  After that, the house was burning up hot every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night with the stove on from after supper until long past midnight. I slept with the windows pushed as high as they would go, a fan blowing right on me, no revolving, and my pajama top pulled up. Mama would be mixing and baking and icing and talking back to John R on WLAC. I knew all of Mama’s cooking sounds. Brush, brush was the grater when she did the lemon rind, the loud scraping was the rack in the oven when she’d pull it out to adjust the height for the cake pans. The soft hen scratching was the wire whisk for egg whites.

  The problem with half cakes was that you wanted to sell both halves, so the orders had to line up just so. Timing was important. When the phone rang with an order for a half, Mama might say, “Hi, Darlene. Well, let’s see here. I have half orders for the lemon and the caramel for tomorrow, so I can give you one of those. Just not the devil’s food.” She would hang up, write Darl for Darlene, and beside the Darl put another mark the shape of half a cake in the spiral notebook she kept by the phone. A half cake looked like this: (. A whole like this: ( ).

  The trick was to have the two halves make a whole on the same day or following day. Otherwise you were dealing with a stale half, which was no good to anybody, except me (within reason) and Little Dan and May. If you had a half order of, say, lemon for Friday pickup, then you could take another half lemon for Saturday, though not for Sunday, because by then it would be too far gone and Mama had her reputation to think about.

  We divided the cakes at the last possible moment before a pickup. My job was to cut out waxed paper to fit the side of each cake to the exact inch. Mama had made me a cardboard model, and I kept a supply stacked up under a small plate on the kitchen counter. After Mama had sliced the cake in half, she pulled the halves apart, put the waxed paper up to the side of each half, and pressed with a gentle but firm hand, as if the cake had been a set of Siamese twins and she needed to stop the bleeding fast without damaging any cut vessels, so that both sides could bid adieu and go their separate ways.

  The icings were the thing. They had to be timed to the split second, or else they would turn into wet sugar grit. When that happened, Mama would get mad as fire and start yelling her worst curse word, which was “Damn it the hell.” She said icing was like some folks’ lives: Timing is everything and when things go bad they go really bad. They settle into sludge. They cannot be undone.

  Timing works only if you know your flame, which my mother did. She set her little white timer to four minutes for the caramel and five for the angel icing (two minutes with the top on the pot, three with it off) and the timer would go tick tick tick BING! throughout the night, though when the weather was stormy, timing would fall by the wayside and she had to use her thermometer instead. Even then, icing was finicky during thunderstorms. It could crystallize on a dime or just refuse to thicken up.

  The icings required double boilers so that they wouldn’t scorch, and there were mixing bowls and cake pans stacked up like skyscrapers all over the kitchen. Mama didn’t believe in compromise when it came to her cakes. The devil’s food had to have four layers. The caramel was a heavy white cake with three thick layers and between them a quarter inch of caramel fudge icing that tasted like velvet feels.

  The lemon cake was the most challenging. It had six thin layers with clear lemon filling in between. It was iced on top with a divinity icing that can turn grainy on you in a split second if you’re not careful. Don’t even bother trying to make it if the weather’s bad. Even if the divinity icing comes out perfect, your troubles aren’t over. Sitting there on the table in front of you is a cake with six thin layers iced between and on top with the lemon jell. Your job is to spread the divinity icing right on top of the top layer of lemon jell without blending into the jell and making a globby mess! You have to have a feather hand and nerves of steel.

  Mama did not deliver unless it was right down the street and then she’d send me. Daddy needed the Ford to collect policy money from his burial insurance clients, plus you can’t have your week’s income riding on a bed of chigger-infested Spanish moss. “Now be careful,” she always said. “Watch where you step. Don’t trip over the tree roots.”

  Some ladies, I won’t mention names, snatched their cakes from me, patted their pockets, and said ever so sadly, “Oh dear, honey, I don’t have the correct change, I’ll have to bring it by later.” And then they wouldn’t. So Mama filled me up like a walking bank. I could easily whip out whatever change was needed. No excuses for you, Mrs. Have-Your-Cake-But-Not-Pay-For-It. Florence can change anything! I relished walking out our front door, pockets blooming and drooping with dollars and quarters and nickels and dimes, breasting one of Mama’s masterpieces in full view, past Little Dan and May, past bony-hipped Mrs. Gardner on the corner, who looked like she’d never had anything good to eat in her whole life and told people the neighborhood was going down because of us. You knock on some nice lady’s front door, like Miss Shirley Bishop, who has a sweet tooth and orders a half caramel almost every week. No need to say a word, just hold out Mama’s cake and you’d make anybody happy to be on the receiving end. It was the best job I ever had. I never dropped a one.

  When I finished up all my deliveries, Mama said her thank you by putting me out on the front stoop with a big slice of what she called her mistakes: cakes that didn’t rise because of the weather or came out of the oven with a monster crack because someone, usually Daddy with his bad foot, stomped around on the floor. She put slices of her mistakes in the freezer, nicely wrapped in waxed paper. While I was out delivering cakes, she took out a slice, peeled off the paper, and put it on a little saucer up on the kitchen counter. By the time I got back, it had thawed out. If it was warm outside, she set me up on the front stoop with a glass of tea with ice and mint. No sugar because the cake was sweets enough. “Got to watch those teeth of yours with all this sugar,” she said whenever I got a
piece of cake. It was always Here’s the cake and, for a little added treat, a lecture on tooth decay.

  After we’d been back in Millwood about a week and Mama had started sending me out on deliveries, I was sitting on the front stoop with a piece of caramel cake and a glass of tea when Little Dan and May came sidling up to me like ants at a picnic. Little Dan’s hair was wet-combed into a little mud-colored mound at the forehead like a dirt-dauber nest. Mama called him Mr. Smarty Pants Hairdo. She said he was going to lose his little mound one day and turn into one of those men who grow out the last straggly piece of hair left on their pitiful heads and plaster it down on top like a run-over baby snake. She said one day I’d go to buy myself a car at his daddy’s place, and Little Dan would walk out onto the lot with a pot belly and a big old spit curl on his ugly bald dome, and I’d split my sides laughing.

  “That one of your mama’s good cakes?” Little Dan pulled out a comb from his back pocket, sucked on it like it was a popsicle, and then began to comb his little mound straight back like he was hot stuff.

  “Um hum.” I dug for a big hunk of caramel icing, held it on my fork and eyeballed it like I couldn’t decide whether to eat it or throw it on the ground and stomp on it.

  Little Dan stuck his comb back in his pocket and came closer. “You want to take a turn on my swing I’ll hold your cake.”

  I snapped to. I’d been eyeing those swings since we’d been back, hoping to get an invitation. I passed over the cake plate and fork with the icing still on it, knowing it was the last I’d see of the cake, and headed for the swing set.

  Little Dan and May grabbed at the cake, cramming big chunks into their greedy mouths and getting into such a fracas over the icing I’d left on the fork that it ended up in the dirt. What a waste, I thought, as I pushed myself off. I was barely getting going when Little Dan ran up behind me. He grabbed the swing, lifted it high in the air, ran behind it until it was over his head, and, last but not least, gave it a giant push that sent me to the moon. Then he settled in behind and started pushing me higher and higher. By the time I realized I’d been bamboozled, I was too high to jump and getting higher by the second.