by Minrose Gwin
I came to think of myself more as part of those dark comings and goings out in the hot shifting night than that other Florence who went through her humdrum days. I kept a sheet pulled up over me, though it kept me sweating all night long. Before I turned out the lights, I shut the bedroom door and shoved my night table in front of it. I slept on my right side, turned toward the door. If Daddy was to slip in to lie down with me, I wanted to hear the door creak and the table scrape before I heard his brick shoe drop on the floor and felt his weight on the bed. I wanted to be awake and prepared. Gone was the homey feeling I used to have with my father lying there with me and telling white-knight stories while Mama would be cooking and singing in the kitchen and the door was open and the light shining in. Now when he would go on about knights and agitators and brown mongrels and communists, it got to sounding like a crazy song on a stuck record. Sometimes he would turn away in the bed and thrash about like an evil spirit had taken hold of him and was trying to get out. Mama used to call Daddy back from my bed like he was a little boy out playing Red Rover past dark. Now, when Daddy dropped his brick shoe beside my bed, there was no one to call him home.
In the mornings he took me up to Zenie’s in an old Valiant he’d borrowed from a man who spit tobacco juice right next to my bare feet. When I’d knock on the door and Zenie would open it a crack so that I could come in, she’d just look at me and shake her head and tell me to go back to sleep on the couch, I looked like something the dog dragged in.
One day, about a week after Grandpops died, Zenie took Mimi into the kitchen and told me to go out and play. I didn’t waste any time getting up into my tree next to the window, the one I was in when, unbeknownst to us, Grandpops was dying upstairs while Zenie was frying bacon on the stove under the window. In the kitchen Zenie and Mimi talked in deep earnest, Zenie standing tall with her arms folded, like the queen she was. Mimi sat in Zenie’s high-back chair and tilted her head up to listen. Then Mimi’s face turned sour and she started to rub her hands together like she was washing them. Then she reached up and grabbed at her own face the way you see a cat go after a biting flea. I expected Zenie to lean over and pat her on the arm, but Zenie turned back to the stove. After a while, Mimi said something to Zenie and Zenie nodded in agreement. They looked at each other like they’d decided something and a weight had fallen off their shoulders. When Mimi walked out of the kitchen, Zenie flicked an eye at me in the tree, which let me know they were through and I could come back in.
The next morning Mimi calls me into her room and sits me down. She has made some phone calls. She has decided to send me to a camp for girls up on top of Lookout Mountain in Tennessee, where the nights are so cool you need a blanket and I can be a regular girl. I will ride horses and swim in lakes. I will do crafts. Camp Mentone. It isn’t cheap, but it will give Zenie, who is plumb worn out, a rest and my mother a chance to see the error of her ways and come back. It will get us through July. Mimi has talked to Daddy and he says it’s all right with him as long as he doesn’t have to pay for it and it’s only for two weeks.
For my camp clothes, Zenie measured me bottom and top. She made a pattern out of newspaper and sewed me up some new crop tops and shorts with elastic waists. “You getting big as a horse. You needs to get out and play like the other children,” she said. “Why don’t you get out and play with some them girls?” She went rummaging around in the bottom of one of the shoeboxes and came up with some chalk. She handed it to me. “Take this home and make yourself some hopscotch.” I knew other children were out in their yards doing this and that, but playing didn’t appeal to me. The heat was smothering, plus I didn’t have any skates or a bicycle. Hopscotch and jump rope are about the only things you can play by yourself, and they get old fast. It was true that my waist had gotten bigger but so had everything else.
When Mimi started sewing name tags into my underpants and shorty pajama pants, she threw up her hands and said her grandchild was wearing rags, she couldn’t even get a label to hold in them. She cried over the labels, and she cried behind the wheel, driving us down to Black’s Department Store, where we got some more underpants in all colors of the rainbow and some pink pajamas with white ruffles. Then she cried while we had some rainbow sherbet at the counter at the Ben Franklin, and cried even harder when the Baldwin sisters saw us and came over to say they were sorry about Grandpops. Then she blew her nose and we headed down the street for the post office to buy some postcards. Later that day she sat down and addressed them to herself and put stamps on them and gave them to me so I would write and let her know how I was doing. Her eyes swam with tears as she told me to write her. “I depend on you,” she said. “I’m going to miss your company. You’re all I’ve got left in the world.”
At the Ben Franklin, after we’d gotten some calamine lotion and a pink toothbrush holder and some Mum, Mimi turned around and looked me up and down. She frowned. “Hmm…your mother got an early start in life.” She looked around, then went over to another counter where a silver-haired lady stood. “We need some supplies for camp,” Mimi said in a funny sort of way. The lady nodded and reached under the counter. She came up with a box of Kotex and a belt and whipped them into a sack almost before I could see what they were. I wasn’t born yesterday. I’d been thinking about when I was going to have to get on the rag along with the rest of the world. What I was going to do. Not that anybody had ever explained it to me. I’d sleuthed it out here and there, like Nancy Drew. It looked horrible and smelled like pennies. I hoped my time would never come, but I knew that was wishful thinking. I kept up my research. I had pulled used Kotex out of the bathroom at home when Mama lived there. Before she left, she had been thoughtful enough to leave some in a box under the lavatory in the bathroom. I had pulled one out and stuck it in my pants, just to get the effect. It had slid forward and then back, then all over the place, and it gave me that funny feeling, like scratching the poison ivy that time I got it Between the Legs. I was afraid that it would slither around like a slippery bar of soap and pop out kerplop right on the sidewalk if I ever actually tried to walk around in it.
When we got home and unloaded my stash on the kitchen table, Mimi pulled out the sack with the Kotex and belt in it and handed it to me. She looked down at her feet. “Did your mother tell you how to use these if you need them?”
She seemed to be holding her breath for an answer. I knew if I said no she would just turn on the waterworks again. Mimi looked bad. She needed a blue touch-up on her hair, which was growing out a yellowish gray. Her face was covered in red blotches and puffy to boot. Mimi was a neat dresser, but one of her garters had slid below her dress and her slip was showing. I wanted to throw my arms around her middle and bawl my eyes out too, but I knew that would just make matters worse.
“Yes ma’am.” I tried to say it in a comforting way.
“All right, then,” she said briskly. “Now Florence, you know you have your grandmother’s ear if you ever have anything you feel you need to tell me.”
It was an odd thing to say and an odd way of saying it. I tried to diagram the sentence in my head so I could follow the sense of it. What would I need to have her ear for? While I was trying to figure that out, she nodded and firmed up her lips. “All right, then, shoo fly,” she said, “I’m worn out. Going to take a nap.”
Right after Daddy picked me up later that afternoon and took me home, he went out in a hurry, with both of his boxes, one under each arm. In his hands he carried two paper sacks full of white paper. After he left, I took the belt out of the drugstore sack and fooled with it until I got the hang of putting the Kotex on and taking it off. I didn’t need it yet, but it seemed smart to practice. I had the idea that girls gushed like geysers when they were on the rag, and I didn’t want to be trying to figure all this out for the first time in such a state. I wanted to be prepared. Plus I had a feeling that it was exactly what I needed. In Eva’s C encyclopedia I had read about a garb called a chastity belt, and that’s what it struck me as. I imagined it
as having a bit of gold on the tabs and some nice jewels hanging from it. The Kotex roasted me like a goose, and the hooks that held the tabs pulled and pinched my bare skin, but it somehow seemed good and right to wear it. It felt safe and true, a thick gauzy lock on the door in case I started up. I had plenty of other things to worry about, so I figured if I kept whole business on, I wouldn’t get caught short. Plus if I didn’t get to bleeding and took a bath every night, I could use the same one over and over.
When Daddy came in late into the night, he smelled burnt. I wasn’t asleep and I caught his stink before he even opened the door to my room and made the night table scrape across the floor. When he sat down on the edge of the bed, I turned over on my back. He dropped his shoes and heaved himself in. He sighed and brought his hand, hot and heavy, down on my stomach. He was just about to say, like he always did, “You awake, Sister?” when his fingers touched the Kotex belt. He fumbled with it a minute, then jerked his hand away like he’d been nailed by a water moccasin. He made a little swallowing sound in his throat and in one scramble got his feet on the floor and leaned down and grabbed his shoes. I peered through the dark to see him bobbing out of the door in his bare feet as fast as he could go. I closed the door behind him and put the night table back.
The rest of that night I slept hard and dreamed of Mama coming to the window. She pressed her face up to the screen so hard it made her lips spread out in a blob so that I could see the pink underneath them. She just looked in at me, not saying a word, though it seemed to me as if she was trying to tell me a secret that would change everything.
Two days later Mimi took me down to the Greyhound station to put me on the bus to Chattanooga, Tennessee. Zenie came along, riding in back. Zenie stayed in the car while we got the ticket. Mimi and I waited in the side of the station that said, “Waiting Room. White. Interstate Passengers.” I had wanted to ride the train, but that would have involved taking the M & O to Memphis and then transferring to another train bound for Chattanooga. Mimi didn’t want me to transfer. She wanted me on the bus until the end of the line, where some camp people were going to meet me and drive me up the mountain.
When the bus came into the station, I ran back to the car to say good-bye to Zenie, but she was dead asleep in the backseat, her head resting against a partly rolled up window and her mouth a little open. I patted the part on the top of her head but she didn’t wake up.
Mimi got on the bus with me to get me settled and made me sit up next to the driver. She fussed over me. Did I have a sweater now? If I had to get off the bus to go to the bathroom, TELL THE DRIVER TO WAIT FOR ME. TELL HIM NOT TO LEAVE WITHOUT ME. How was I going to know who the camp people were? They would have on tee shirts that said Camp Mentone. Plus the camp people would be on the lookout for me. The driver was standing outside and Mimi stepped down to have a talk with him. I knew she was saying to watch out for me. Then she came back and bent down over me and hugged me for a good long time. She didn’t want to let me go, I could tell. I was her project, about to get launched. What would she do now? I was burning up hot under the never-ending hug. Zenie had made me a fried-chicken supper, which I was planning to eat just as soon as the bus pulled out.
“If Mama turns up, tell her I’ll be back soon,” I said with half a heart. I doubted the words were worth my breath.
“You just have a good time, honey.” Mimi’s face was gooey. Her eyes had misted up. “Just enjoy every minute. Don’t worry about a thing. You are going on vacation.”
The idea of going on vacation captivated me. At Mimi’s bridge parties I’d seen ladies’ pictures that showed them and their loved ones on vacation in Memphis or Florida or New Orleans. The ladies said they came back from vacation refreshed and more themselves. But actually I was going on vacation from my own real self, the one who listened for trains in the middle of the night and wondered whether her mother would bat on the window screen. The one that people’s eyes scurried away from like little wild kittens when they heard her daddy’s last name.
At camp I told everyone my name was Flo, and it was Flo this and Flo that. Flo, come here, I want to talk to you. Flo, do you think my nose is too big? I want to sit by Flo. Nobody asked my last name and nobody cared who my mama and daddy were. Nobody’s eyes turned sly at the sight of me. In a few days I began to see for the first time how I had this gift. In the twinkling of an eye I’d gathered girlfriends galore. I seemed to know what they wanted before they even started to feel the want themselves. Girls wanted to talk to me and tell me things and have me close. They were afraid of getting their period. They had a pain here. It needed rubbing. Would I scratch their back? I laughed at their funny little stories about their mothers and fathers, or about being aggravated with them. Their parents’ stupid rules and regulations to make sure they were safe and sound because they were Precious Cargo. How glad they were to be off at camp away from all that heavy loving.
Mimi sent me thick packed envelopes every other day or so and Zenie sent two thin letters, but I just put them in the bottom of my suitcase without opening them. It could have been the best news in the world, or the worst. I didn’t want to know about it. I didn’t want to think of myself as Florence Irene Forrest. I wanted to think of myself as a regular girl. Flo. I would live there forever among other regular girls. Somebody would pack me up in her suitcase and take me home by accident.
She would say, “Oh look, Mama, I mistakenly brought Flo home in my suitcase. She was my best friend at camp. Can we keep her? Please?”
And the nice mother would say, “Of course, dear, any best friend of yours is like a daughter to us. We’ll adopt her and make her happy every day that she doth live. Welcome to our family, Flo honey.”
At night, though, I slept on the top bunk next to a window and watched the stars divide and multiply. I went right to sleep, but woke up in the middle of the night and stayed awake for long stretches. I loved the night sounds and the soft paddle of the other girls breathing softly in sleep. I loved my bunk. Room for one only. Up there, I could breathe in the cool mountain air and think about nothing but stars and night sounds. No trains to mark the hours. I began to think of myself not as bereft, as I had before, but somehow floating out there by myself in the darkness, not hurt or bothered, just hanging out there peaceful and quiet among the stars, like the moon. I wondered if this was what it was like to be dead.
I had a bunkmate whose name was Jennie. Jennie had worried about God ever since her brother Matt had gotten run over on his bike while delivering newspapers. She doubted God was really up there taking care of business, and if He was, she hated His guts because He obviously didn’t give a flip about Matt. When we said the blessing at meals, she looked straight ahead, her mouth in a determined hyphen. She slept in the bunk underneath mine, and sometimes in the night she would push on the bottom of my bunk with her feet and whisper, “Flo, are you awake?”
I usually was, so I’d say, “Um hum.”
“I’m cold.”
“Pull up your blanket.”
“I did. I’m still cold.”
I knew what she wanted. Jennie was always cold at night. She wanted to crawl in with me, which was against camp rules. No sleeping together in the same bunk, that was the rule and fine by me. I’d let her do it just once and I’d held her tight the way she asked, but after she’d stopped shivering and gone to sleep, I’d crawled down to her bunk and its cool sheets.
At camp I learned to dive, though it made my head hurt. I made pot holders galore and leaf imprints out of crayons pressed with an iron. I learned the difference between poison ivy and Virginia creeper and how to saddle up a horse. On the move all day, and never a worn-out feeling. We all had our chores. I’d jumped at getting kitchen work, for two reasons. I couldn’t get enough to eat. Maybe it was the fact that I was running from one busy thing to another, maybe I was having a growth spurt. I ate all three of my meals but still wanted more. I figured if I worked in the kitchen, I could sneak a few bites here and there. Plus there were Negro la
dies and girls my age working in the kitchen, and I liked the way they said some of the rich camp girls had their noses up their asses. The kitchen ladies were the only black people in the whole camp, and they didn’t live up on Lookout Mountain, the reason being, they said, that all of their folks who had moved up there had had their houses burnt down. They snorted and said either there was a serious problem with white people up on that mountain or those Negroes were the most careless smokers in the whole wide world. I impressed the ladies by showing them how to make Mama’s cakes. They were good cooks but they tended to make big dishes of cobbler and banana pudding for desserts. At camp, cakes were too much trouble and didn’t stretch far enough. But the kitchen ladies wanted to learn the cakes for themselves. I told them how Mama had made a good business out of it before she ran herself into the train. They looked hard at each other and clucked like hens.
I watched the pie sliver of a moon get larger and larger each night until one night it was full. And when that happened, it was over. All of a sudden, we were standing around a farewell campfire holding hands and singing should old acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind. That night, after I’d packed my pot holders, which I planned to give to Zenie and Mimi, and the leaf picture, which I thought Eva might like, and settled down in my top bunk, I could feel Daddy’s heavy hand moving into place. It was a beautiful night with the moon so bright and full, but I had a taste in my mouth like metal. I could hear a raccoon getting into the kitchen garbage. I tried to count the stars, but I kept losing count. I whispered to Jennie to see whether she was still awake, but she didn’t answer.