The Queen of Palmyra

by Minrose Gwin

  “How much school you say you missed last year, Miss Nosy?” she said.

  “Pretty near all of it, I guess.”

  “Shame to have good schools to go to and not go.” Her glasses had crawled down on her nose so that I could tell what she was going to look like when she got to be a prissy old-lady schoolteacher.

  “I was sick and we moved a million times.”

  She looked me over. Then she frowned and said, “Well, you can look on if you want to. But don’t stand between us and the fan. And don’t breathe all over me.”

  That was the day Eva got it into her head to teach us how to diagram sentences, which she said would help us with our reading, and more important, our writing. I was all for it. I’d heard that you had to write themes in fifth grade and stories too. Ray, I think, would have much rather read The Hunchback of Notre Dame but was too polite to say so. He sat at the kitchen table watching her work with pencil and paper to map out the sentences, and I looked over his shoulder. Eva loved diagramming. She said it was a way to tell what something is by what it belongs to. If there’s nothing for a word to belong to, you have to let it go. Cut the rope. It is a dangling modifier.

  The first sentence Eva diagrammed for us was about a girl and a rose. The girl carefully touched the beautiful rose. She said beautiful belonged to the rose. It got its life from the rose. The other side of the story, she told us, was that the rose became what it was by being beautiful. So the modifier and the thing being modified, they each made the other what it was, until they were both like Miss Josephine counting mimosa leaves, going on forever and ever until belonging to the thing made you become it. All of that just tumbled out of Eva’s mouth like a poem. Though I didn’t understand a word of what she was talking about, I could see how she loved the way words lined up and belonged to one another like the ingredients of a perfect cake, right down to the last grain of salt.

  She made one long line and hoisted the subject and verb onto opposite ends of it; then she drew the slanted lines for the modifiers. Just when Ray and I had gotten it straight about what was where and why, she smiled and said, “But what if…” and wrote out another sentence with almost the same words: The careful girl was touched by the beautiful rose. Ray and I groaned together.

  “How can a rose touch a girl?” I asked.

  Ray chuckled. “What’d it go and do, reach out and grab her by the hair of the head?”

  “There are many kinds of touching,” Eva answered with a frown, and shoved the dictionary at us. “Look it up and read it to us.”

  Zenie, who was all the time fussing at Ray for not reading lo these many years, was now stuck with the job of picking up books and papers and magazines all over the house. Finally, she said to Ray, “When you’re through with something, just drop it on the floor so I’ll know what to throw away and what to keep.” She’d go through the house picking up papers and books here and there, singing and humming little snatches of church songs under her breath. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace with an angel. Were you there when they crucified my Lord? Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble. Her singing and humming folded around the house like pretty paper around a present and made us feel everything that happened inside was strangely momentous.

  Listening to Eva’s pretty talk about words and looking over Ray’s shoulder while he sounded out the long words in his books and diagrammed sentences was the closest I’d gotten to being a part of the goings-on at Zenie and Ray’s. Most of the household happenings I watched as if I were peering through a piece of cheesecloth. I saw the life they lived that summer, but just a gauzy, dimly lit version of it, as if I were seeing it as a grown woman looking back in memory rather than being there in the moment. They had their secrets. When they wanted to say something they didn’t want me to hear, they turned their faces away from me and mouthed the words, or they took it outside on the front stoop and whispered it back and forth. They held themselves apart from my prying eyes and kept their privacy even though I was eternally present and watchful, taking up the living room with my hungry self. I wanted to be in it, what it was they had together, but I was always scratching on the door.

  So it was strange when one afternoon Eva came over and sat down beside me on the couch. I was just waking up from a nap and still half asleep.

  “Hey Flo,” she said, “I have an idea. What would you say about me tutoring you in reading and grammar? I’m almost a teacher, you know, and I’m going to teach junior high when I graduate.”

  My eyes popped open. This was the first piece of luck I’d had all summer. “Is tutoring the same as teaching?”

  She winked. “It sure is, except better because it’s just you and me so you get personalized attention.”

  The way she said personalized made my heart rattle about in my chest.

  “Why you wanting to do that for? You got other fish to fry.”

  She pushed her glasses back on her nose. “Money, pure and simple. I need money. Plus, girl, whether you know it or not, you need me.”

  My eyes filled up, which mortified me no end. “But I don’t think Daddy…”

  “Don’t go asking your daddy. Ask your granddaddy. Tell him I charge a dollar an hour for my services. Tell him I can start tomorrow. We can meet every day if need be. It can be our secret.”

  “When are you going to sell your encyclopedias if you got to tutor me?”

  She stood up. “You just worry about talking to your granddad. Let me worry about selling my encyclopedias.”

  Eva had gotten on with another company, this one in New York City. She was trying to sell encyclopedias, which was another reason she wanted people to learn to read if they didn’t already know how to. A week ago the sample set had arrived at Zenie and Ray’s.

  The encyclopedias were the color of blood that’s almost dry but not quite. A dark pearly red. The color seemed heavy and full of portent. There was one book for almost every letter of the alphabet except some that were combined, like XYZ.

  That morning Eva had taken them all out and put them in order on the living-room floor. They made a good-sized square.

  “Don’t get them out of order, and wash your hands before you dare touch them,” she said in her queenly way. So I parked myself in front of A and started in on it. I was a dog with two dozen bones. My first time through the books I just looked at the pictures. Africa was a pretty shape with a big fluffy tail and lions and tigers and elephants galore. Babylon was a city on the Euphrates River with palm trees and gardens. California was the state that hung out into the Pacific Ocean and had artichokes growing down to the water and earthquakes that brought down skyscrapers. I began to think I didn’t need to go to school, just read Eva’s sample set and I’d know more than most people ever do.

  At the bottom of one of the boxes the sample set had come in was a booklet of directions on how to sell them in “economically slow areas.” The trick lay in selling the books in three sets. Cash in advance. The layaway plan. Folks paid a little at a time and then finally they got A through G. Then they laid away more and got H through O. And then finally the P through Z. I had a picture in my head of a little girl’s mother and father starting out with paying for A through G, then working their way to H through O, by which time the little child had grown into a woman, knowing everything there was to know about anything that started with A through G. Nothing about anything else. Leaving home and going to work. Meanwhile, her mama and daddy would be putting away for P through Z.

  With the encyclopedias Eva got a white man named Frank. He was so big and colorless that he looked like a polar bear without fur. He was called a team captain and was supposed to be training her to sell encyclopedias in the Negro community, which was a joke. Eva said he didn’t know the first thing about Blacks, which is what she’d started calling Negroes in the past few weeks. When Frank arrived a week ago he wanted to go knocking on doors with her, but after the first day, she wouldn’t let him. “He just plain scares folks,” she said. “H
e doesn’t know how to meet and greet. He’s big as a barn and looks like he’s got a sheet for skin. He’d have to put a gun to their head to get them to buy anything from him. I’ll do better on my own. They know me.” Plus Frank slowed her down. He was so heavy and white he couldn’t take the sun. He was always huffing and puffing and wore a wet white cloth on his head that made him look like the men in Daddy’s club. “Going to drop dead at my feet one day, and nobody’s going to lift a finger,” Eva said. “Expect me to carry him to the funeral home. Ha!”

  But she kept Frank close. You could tell he loved her to death. He drove her up and down the little dusty Shake Rag streets in his blue Chevy with its big backseat for all their sample sets and sat in the car fanning himself and drinking Orange Crushes while she went door to door, his upper lip getting brighter and brighter orange as the day went by. His eyes followed her to every door, but Eva told Zenie he kept his hands to himself. He lived in a boarding house downtown and went over to Indianola to see his mother twice a month. Eva had the good sense never to travel in the car with him outside Shake Rag. In fact, she never went outside of Shake Rag herself. “Enough right here to keep me busy till the end of the summer,” she said when Zenie told her it was no kind of life she was living, being cooped up like a chicken in a wire cage.

  Soon Eva had sold so many layaway orders she needed to spend part of her afternoons filling out forms and sending them off to New York City. The encyclopedias were a big hit. Folks liked them and the idea of them. In the past week she’d started wearing bright little scarves around her neck. Nice rows of bracelets on her arms. She bought Zenie some Dr. Scholl’s pads for her shoes and made Ray pick himself out a good shirt in the Sears catalog. She measured the space where the bathroom door should be and got Frank to go into the lumberyard and buy a rough wood door and then sent him to the hardware store for some hinges. Ray planed, sanded, and shellacked the door, then put it up and sanded and shellacked it again. It was a perfect fit. Now everybody could have privacy.

  Eva would sit at Zenie’s kitchen table with a nice glass of sweet tea and all her layaway tickets and money stacked up in neat little piles. While she did her paperwork, she turned the radio on low so as not to wake Miss Josephine and Zenie and hummed little snatches of songs. Sometimes, while I lay on Zenie’s couch with my eyes closed, I would pretend I was in my bed at home and Eva was my mother baking in the kitchen.

  Which was fine with Zenie, who lay down on her and Ray’s bed and propped up her legs like the doctor said to do, each one on its own pillow, sores scattered up and down like seeds in the earth, some deep and wide and crusted over, some just getting started. Her veins came together in dark little hills rising up here and there amongst the sores. Her feet had big bumps and humps all over. You couldn’t tell where her ankles were. She put a fan up on her dresser so it blew right on her feet and legs. When she lay there spread out like that, she claimed the whole bed. She slept so deep that she looked dead. She was sure enough dead tired I could tell, and I tried my best to be still and good while she rested.

  Zenie dreamed in the afternoons. She said one minute she’d be swimming through the air the way she used to swim in Jasper Creek when she was a girl, breaststroking her way back and forth over Millwood, looking down on everything happening. Sometimes, up in the air, she’d follow the straight paths of the train tracks. Other times she’d make her own paths over the mill and fertilizer factory through puffs of black soot through Milltown with its peeling doubles and peaked-looking white folks, over the nice parts of Millwood with their solid two-story houses like Mimi and Grandpops’, by Crosstown where Mama ran into the train, over the cemetery where the tombstones in the white and colored parts looked like dominoes in a lopsided game. Full circle and then she’d glide back down to her own home sweet home. Her own good bed. Light as a feather, cool as a cucumber on vinegar ice. When she flew like that, everything became clear as glass. Everything there was to see she could see. The good, the ugly, and where they came together and got mixed up. When she woke up from her swimming dreams, her legs felt heavy as lead, slip sliding on the sheet, like she’d been running all afternoon (Ha! she said, as if she could run for one minute even). All she’d want was to fly back into that dream and steal away over this good earth with a cool loose heart.

  While everybody slept, Eva worked and hummed along at the kitchen table in the peace and quiet of the long afternoons. She took off her shoes and curled her toes around the bottom rung of the kitchen chair. Bent over her paperwork, she twirled pieces of her hair, and her bracelets would jangle soft and sweet like wind chimes in the distance.

  At first Eva and Grandpops had been stiff with each other when he came to get me in the afternoons, but when I told him she was teaching folks to read over at the AME, he said he couldn’t fault anybody for that. Then I told him that Eva was teaching me and Ray how to diagram sentences and he said good, it’s time somebody taught you something. The afternoon Eva offered to tutor me, the encyclopedias were stacked up in a corner of the living room when he came to pick me up. He leaned down and picked up A and started reading, standing there in Zenie’s living room.

  “Those are good-quality encyclopedias,” he said in a surprised voice after he’d thumbed through them. He picked up B and C.

  Eva slowly raised her head from her paperwork in the kitchen. “Good as they come,” she said in a prissy voice. “Wouldn’t be selling them if they weren’t.” Then she went back to her work, the late-afternoon sun pouring over her, turning her to gold.

  “Grandpops,” I burst out. “Eva said she’d tutor me! She’s going to teach junior high and she knows what I need for fifth grade.”

  Eva had gone back to her paperwork and didn’t lift her head.

  Grandpops raised his eyebrows at her. “Is that right, Eva? You’re willing to do that?”

  She raised her head again, nodded and went back to her paperwork.

  Then he looked over at me. “That sounds like a pretty good idea to me, if Eva’s willing. And maybe we ought to get you a set of these books too. Should have done it a long time ago.” My chest set to chasing rabbits when he said that. “What do you think? Would you use them?” He looked down at me. What was left of the mimosa tree out front after Miss Josephine’s counting fanned out behind him in the window. He looked like he was in a picture frame.

  “You mean all of them? A through Z?”

  Grandpops laughed. “Well, it wouldn’t do you much good just to have A through F, now would it?”

  “That’s the way a lot of people have to buy them,” Eva piped up from the kitchen, waving a fistful of forms. “Can’t afford to do it any other way. Some people aren’t as well off as others. Can’t even make the rent. Or the burial insurance.” Her voice sounded like she’d just pulled it out of the icebox.

  Grandpops looked down at the floor for a minute, then said quietly, “Yes, I know that, and I’m sorry.”

  I was thinking Eva was the worst salesman I’d ever seen. I knew for a fact that she had yet to sell a full set, and here she was acting like her encyclopedias were too good for the likes of us. I opened my mouth to say I wanted the encyclopedias more than anything in the world, but that wasn’t true. I wanted Mama home more. I wasn’t averse to lying, but I didn’t want to jinx her from coming back, though as the days rolled on, I’d pushed her as far out of my mind as I could. She was a passenger on a train, getting smaller as it left the station.

  Grandpops grinned at me. “I’ll talk to Mimi about all this,” he said to me. Then he raised his voice. “How much do you charge for tutoring, Eva?”

  Eva stirred in her chair. “A dollar an hour.”

  “That sounds more than fair. We need to get this girl ready for school in the fall.”

  Eva raised her chin and eyeballed me. “I can do that. She’s got a lot of catching up to do, though.”

  “All right, then, y’all go ahead and start tomorrow, and save us a set of those encyclopedias, if you don’t mind.” Grandpops laughe
d a little. “We’ll get this girl educated yet.”

  Eva was chewing the corner of her mouth like it was a new wad of tobacco. “I don’t mind.” Then she half smiled at me. “No more naps for you, girl!”

  The next morning I sat in the fork of the tree outside Mimi and Grandpops’ kitchen. Sometimes now I could step outside myself and see a girl too old to climb trees and too old to combine stories and pretend I was Uncle Wiggily hiding out from Br’er Fox, though that very idea had just crossed my mind. I tickled my nose with a powder-puff blossom and watched Zenie at the stove. Her hair was in her regular bun and as usual, there were little curls galore pulling out around her face. She had on her white outfit with the white apron over it. She was frying bacon in an old iron skillet. I was prepared to jump down and come in to breakfast as soon as I saw the bacon come out and the eggs slide in and start to glisten in the grease. Mimi had gone out to the Curb Market for some butter beans. Grandpops was still in bed, which was odd given it was a weekday.

  Suddenly Zenie’s head went up. Her eyes popped wide open like somebody had poked her hard in the back. She dropped her long fork on the floor and started moving fast. I blinked and when I looked again, she’d disappeared. The bacon sizzled on. I watched it for a while until I started to see smoke. Then I climbed down and ran up the back-porch steps into the kitchen. The fork was where Zenie dropped it and the bacon pieces were black lumps in a float of smoking grease. I turned off the eye, but knew better than to move the skillet back. I’d learned my lesson on that score. It smoked on, the bacon shriveling up even blacker and smaller. I figured I’d just evened myself out in terms of fires, since now I’d stopped one from happening instead of starting one up.

  Then I heard a thump and a bang upstairs, then Zenie hollering Oh Lord have mercy help us, Oh Lord have mercy help us, on and on. I ran up the stairs so fast I don’t even remember doing it and followed her hollering into Grandpops’ room at the top of the steps. He was folded up in a heap on the floor, looking like a neat pile of dirty clothes. Zenie went for the phone in Mimi’s room next door, but I just stood over him not knowing what to do. Then I saw how he’d settled himself, like he’d climbed into a box and had to arrange his bones just that way to fit. It was careful, the way he laid himself down, like everything else he’d ever done in his life. He didn’t want to cause any trouble or take up any more space than necessary.