Dress Codes for Small Towns

by Courtney Stevens

  Sometimes a seed goes into rock-hard clay in a barren desert. And sometimes it falls into manure and sunlight beside the grandness of Kentucky Lake.

  Ada May had the last word. It’s not what she said, but how she said it. Ears open. Heart soft. “The committee will take your suggestion under advisement.”

  Woods threw his arms around the back of my and Janie Lee’s chairs, binding us together in this scheme. He smiled because he knew that Ada May taking it under advisement was as good as Billie’s name on the ballot.

  He believed we’d done something good there.

  Made up for something lost.

  Maybe we did.

  But I hope Billie never finds out.

  21

  I carry myself off to bed around three thirty that night, having spent hours researching Davey’s LaserCon. His costumes are all over the home page. Basically, he’s a legend. If we’re going to win a thousand dollars, Beauty and the Beast will have to be spectacular.

  I am so groggy when I get to the elementary school the next morning, I nearly walk right in front of Fifty’s mower.

  When Janie Lee scoots up next to me and says, “Hey, we’re doing our after-school service project together today,” I actually groan. I catnap through school, not for the first time, and join Janie Lee in her mother’s Acura.

  101 Needmore Road, home of Victor Nix, is a white farmhouse half-lost in some untended soybeans. We arrive windblown and delighted by the freedom of a country road. There’s an oak tree in the front yard that must be three hundred years old. It has the remnants of a tree house high in its branches and a dilapidated ladder that doesn’t even look safe for squirrels. She parks in its shade and I prop my sunglasses on my head.

  “If I fall asleep, punch me,” I say.

  And then we walk purposefully toward the door and knock. A gentleman, who must have been poised to go out as we were coming in—his trilby hat under his arm, wearing a camel-colored coat with a line of fur that’s far too heavy for September—opens the door. “Well, hello there,” he says cheerily.

  “Mr. Nix?” I greet.

  “I am.” He raises his neck and shoulders from their slouch, thrilled for company. “And you?”

  “I am Billie McCaffrey, and this is Janie Lee Miller. We’re out doing some service projects for Community Church, and wanted to see if you needed anything done.”

  “Well, I was about to run to the mill for seeds, but I guess . . .” He places his key on a hook by the door labeled Front Door. “I’m afraid I can’t offer you anything fancy to wet your whistle, but I have water from the tap.”

  Sure that he will give us something to do soon, we accept water in juice glasses and the three of us sit in yellow Naugahyde chairs around a white Formica kitchen table. The clock on the wall chirps like a bird, and a cat emerges from beneath the table and lands on my lap. His tag says Otis. He’s ogling the selection of Little Debbie cakes in a bowl. Janie Lee is too. There’s a sign on the bowl that reads Take One. One is underlined.

  Mr. Nix lifts a chocolate cake. Midair, he passes the cake to Janie Lee. “Did you know my nurse counts these things?”

  She eats the cake, which loses me Otis as a friend.

  “Mr. Nix, can you think of anything we might help you do?” Janie Lee asks, wadding the paper from the cake and placing it in her pocket.

  “Maybe I should check Gloria’s list,” he says.

  Mr. Nix’s late wife, Gloria, is the youngest Corn Dolly recipient to date. When she was the fresh age of twenty-three, she won the 1968 Corn Dolly. Though many have tried, no one has replicated the win. Other Corn Dolly winners are all forty and up. When paired with the fact that Mrs. Nix wasn’t even mildly attractive, or from a well-reputed family, she’s a curiosity among the aging Corn Dolly queens. (This is discussed and debated freely over coffee and cakes because Gloria Nix died and isn’t around to defend herself. She clearly went on living in the heart of Mr. Victor Nix.)

  “What did you younguns say you were selling?” Mr. Nix asks, taking a Little Debbie cake from the bowl.

  Thinking this man probably needs more company than service, I answer, “We weren’t selling anything, sir, but we’d love to hear more about your lovely wife.”

  “God rest her,” Mr. Nix says. “She’s over in Fairfield Memorial. I need to get some flowers for her grave. Maybe I’ll go to the mill later.”

  Janie Lee sags a little lower in her chair, but says, “We could help you with that.”

  “Oh, that’s so nice,” Mr. Nix tells us. “I’m eighty-three. Did you know I don’t even have to have a picture on my driver’s license anymore?”

  From my spot at the table, I have a full view of the front yard. There’s no vehicle parked there. No hook labeled Car Keys by the door.

  “Mr. Nix, would you like us to drive you to the mill?” I suggest.

  Mr. Nix pats the part in his hair, and then points a withered finger toward a large shed. “Oh, I must have plenty of seeds in the barn. But I’m not supposed to go out there with my hip.” He rubs his left hip, and then his right.

  “Mr. Nix, we’ll slip out and check. Then we’ll help you do some planting for your Gloria.”

  “Gloria was the most beautiful woman in Otters Holt other than our Hannah,” he tells us. And in his old voice, there’s a kernel of a much younger voice. I see a woman on tiptoe kissing a smooth-skinned man in the same trilby hat under an oak tree in the front yard.

  “Key’s around here somewhere.” Mr. Nix pats his pockets.

  I lift the key off an equally well-labeled hook by the door, and promise we’ll be right back with seeds. The door closes behind us. We walk slowly on the path to the shed.

  “That man—” Janie Lee says.

  “Is painfully wonderful,” I finish.

  Key to lock, I swing the door wide on its hinges, revealing the shed. There isn’t a packet of seeds to retrieve; there are thousands and thousands. Daisies, sunflowers, marigolds. Bins of seeds. Buckets of seeds. Bunches of bulbs. This man has been going to the mill and forgetting he went to the mill for years.

  “What do we do?” she asks.

  I sink my arms deep in a barrel, let hundreds of prickly bits cling and fall through my fingers. What a wonder. I can’t tell whether I am insanely happy at the way he has loved this woman or insanely sad that he hasn’t been loved by this woman in so long.

  “I think we ask him if we can borrow some seeds for the elementary school,” I say.

  “Yes,” Janie Lee agrees.

  First, we load our arms with supplies for Gloria. Flowerpots, soil, Miracle-Gro, and seeds. Inside, we pot the seeds while Mr. Nix searches for Gloria’s Corn Dolly. He’s intent on showing us, as if we’ve never seen a Corn Dolly before.

  “Mr. Nix, it’s okay if you can’t find it,” I call upstairs.

  He is gone long enough that I want to make sure he hasn’t fallen, but he returns holding a crumpled Corn Dolly wrapped in a green string of white lights. “With the Christmas stuff,” he announces, holding it high above his head, the cord from the lights falling like an unwanted tail. “Gloria liked to use it as an angel.”

  I take a plate from the cupboard and make peanut butter sandwiches. “Tell us about the year she won?”

  “Oh, yes.” He strokes the corn husk carefully and eases his bones into the chair next to mine. They pop audibly. He rubs a hip. “We were astonished she made the ballot. All Tyson Vilmer’s doing. Always been a magician. I need to go visit him soon and ask to buy a goat.”

  Janie Lee flinches and I bite my lip. He continues, “Tyson and Gloria grew up together. Sort of like siblings. It was probably Tyson’s influence that made her so strong.”

  “Is that why she won the Corn Dolly?” I ask.

  “Oh, no. It was the flowers.”

  “The flowers?”

  “People were in a rage over Vietnam. Myself as well.” He taps the side of his head as if he’s wearing a helmet. “And I guess, they just needed happiness instead of war. Glori
a wasn’t one of those hippie people, but she loved flowers better than anything. Planted them all over town. Mostly without permission. Said to me once, ‘Vic’—she always called me Vic instead of Victor—‘I can’t help myself. I need more color than this.’”

  I often feel this way. I like Gloria more and more.

  “How many flowers do you think she planted, Mr. Nix?” Janie Lee asks.

  “I reckon she did every yard in the county.”

  Marshall County isn’t huge. But the notion of Gloria Nix planting seeds in every yard is huge.

  “She was such a pretty soul.” His eyes water with love and memories. He says to Janie Lee, “You are too, dear. What’s your name again?”

  “Janie Lee,” she whispers.

  “Mark my words, eyes like that, and you’ll be winning your own Corn Dolly one day.”

  “Thank you, sir. My friend Billie here is on the ballot this year.”

  “Well, that’s wonderful. I didn’t understand this dolly hubbub at first. I says to Gloria, ‘There’s nothing outright special about a corn husk made into a dolly.’ And she says to me, ‘Oh, Vic, it’s so much more than a doll. It’s about being seen.’ I must have turned my head halfway around like an owl when she said that. She’d always been something to see, dolly or not, if you asked me.”

  Grandy’s Corn Dolly—Maybel is what she named her—sits beside my Grampy’s urn in the pie safe. If there were a fire, Grandy would grab Maybel on the first trip, Grampy on the second. That used to bother me, placing so much value on a thing. But after hearing Mr. Nix, I realize again that the Corn Dolly is not a thing . . . it’s a metaphor.

  I have been seen in my town, but I’ve never been seen as Mr. Nix is suggesting. I am not sure I want to be.

  The time is seven p.m. And according to the chart beside the Corn Dolly calendar, Mr. Nix is due to shower in thirty minutes.

  “You kids are so kind to visit. Let me give you something for your trouble,” he says, patting his breast pocket.

  I mount a full, but kind, protest. “We won’t hear of it. Your company is our payment.” This is a line Woods might use at the Liars Table; it is not a lie.

  Victor Nix is robotically removing items from the pockets of his coat: Kleenex, money clip, a peppermint, which he offers to Janie Lee and which Janie Lee accepts. Pockets empty, he lifts the camel-colored coat into the air, the way my mom did to me when I was a little girl who wanted to trek into the snow. He coaxes me. “Try it on. Make an old man happy.”

  “Sir, I can’t.”

  Mr. Nix makes the coat dance. The soft under-skin of his biceps flaps. “Please.”

  Forced into polite obedience, I try on the man’s coat.

  Mr. Nix is part tailor, part pixie. He pets the fur collar into submission, makes it lie correctly around my neck. Satisfied, he tugs the lapels and says, “A coat like this might win someone’s affection, young man.” He nods in Janie Lee’s direction, and I wish I hadn’t been too tired to attend to myself this morning. Bombshell one day. Man the next.

  “Yes, sir,” I say.

  I leave Mr. Nix’s house with my soul in a twist. We don’t speak at all on the way to my house and then we speak at the same time.

  Janie Lee, who has recovered herself, says, “He knows you’re a girl.”

  And I say, “I think we can transplant all those daylilies to the school.”

  22

  Friday night lights shine high above the football stadium. Insects swarm in little visible clouds even as a cool wind whips through the air, driving up hot chocolate and coffee sales. Davey, Fifty, Mash, and I share a blanket, awaiting the halftime show, in which both Woods and Janie Lee will perform with the band, and I, along with Tawny Jacobs and Caroline Cheatham, will be recognized like homecoming candidates.

  Seven minutes left on the clock.

  Janie Lee helped me get ready. After Mr. Nix’s confusion, I was not surprised this afternoon when she showed up at my house with her overlarge makeup bag and hair accessories. My hair isn’t easy to work with. The left side is clipped short. The top is choppy, falling left to right in jutting sections that range from ear-length to chin-length. It’s snappy and smart if you’re not trying to be sophisticated. The plan is for me to take black dress pants and a blouse—hers, because she insisted—and change just before halftime. Spending an entire football game, on cold aluminum bleachers, with concession stand food, in dress clothes? No thank you. This way, I can be back in my jeans as soon as the ceremony is over.

  Mash is painted up with school colors—orange and white—and has so much food in his lap that we’ll be seeing it a second time around. “Don’t eat all that, dude,” Fifty tells him.

  “What?” Mash protests.

  Fifty responds, “You’re as likely to throw that up as we are to walk Vilmer’s Beam.”

  “Dude, let it go.”

  “Do you like football?” I ask Davey while the other two duke shit out.

  Mash speaks around the hot dog. “You played football at Waylan, yeah?”

  Davey seems interested in something happening to the band. They’re assembling on the track, thirty feet below. I know better than to show him sympathy with Fifty around. He answers his cousin reluctantly, “Yes, and lacrosse.”

  John Winters is on his way up the bleachers. Beneath the blanket, Davey squeezes my knee.

  Halfway to us, John stops. “David.” He gives a quick wave.

  “Can you see my makeup?” Davey asks me.

  In truth, better than usual. Heavier eyeliner and a tiny bit of smoky gray shadow. That isn’t the response he wants. I uncoil fingers from my knee, and whisper the easiest truth, “He’s seen you in costumes before.”

  “But not at football games,” Davey says.

  Five minutes left on the clock before halftime. I need to go change, but . . . I need to be here more.

  “David,” John Winters calls again.

  Davey removes himself from the blanket and goes. He’s wearing a shredded band shirt, bright-blue skinny jeans, black Converse high tops, and more glue in his hair than a kindergartner after an art class. This outfit causes John Winters to frown, and then set his jaw with fury. John must decide he needs a better look at Davey’s friends because Davey returns to us under the arm of his father.

  Before they arrive, Fifty says, “Dude’s a prick,” and Mash says, “You have no idea.”

  John makes room for himself on our bench. We fall under his scrutiny. He nods at Mash and to the rest of us he says, “Hello, townie friends.”

  No one speaks.

  I assume he is a man used to pivoting around uncomfortable situations, because he gestures to the crowd and says, “What do you think of all this hubbub over a cornstalk?”

  Four minutes left on the clock.

  Fifty scratches a sideburn, answers, “We think it’s fucking delightful, sir.”

  Oh my God, I love Fifty right now.

  Mash chokes on his hot dog, and I slap him hard on the back. He spits hot dog and ketchup and bun all over my jeans. “God, I’m sorry,” he says to me, using a slimy napkin to remove the damage. If I’m going to change, I need to leave right now.

  John folds robotic arms over his puffy chest, blocks the end of our bench. “David, I want to know what’s so fucking delightful that your friend here would say that to his elder.”

  For Davey’s sake, I try to schmooze. “I believe Fifty is just excited because I’m on the ballot this year?”

  “You?”

  I start to stand, wiping at the smudgy places on my jeans.

  “Your mother was on that stage once,” John informs Davey. Davey doesn’t react. It’s new information to me. They don’t put nominees on the Corn Dolly calendar, only the winners. John tells us, “I stood right over there and listened to Big Bad Tyson Vilmer read a paragraph on her worthiness. As if baking pies and planting flowers and nursing babies will get you anywhere. That’s when I knew I had to get her out of here.”

  Three minutes on the clock
.

  We are all wriggling, no one more so than Davey. “You should have black-out under your eyes, not around them,” he tells Davey. “I talked to your lacrosse coach. He says if you come back to Waylan in the spring, he won’t penalize you for not starting the season with the team.” Davey says nothing at John’s continued commentary. “You can’t possibly want to throw away scholarship offers.”

  This isn’t a conversation for public consumption.

  Two minutes on the clock. Nominees are moving down the bleachers. The stage gets wheeled to the track. The band members have assembled at the urging of the director. I should go change right now.

  John Winters fills the air with more arguments. “You seem pretty satisfied with all this nothingness. Which is why I told Thomas I’d trade him my Mustang if he got you to come back to Waylan.”

  This is too much. “You didn’t,” Davey says.

  “I’ve only got one son. And I’d like to see him make something of himself.” He licks his thumb, as if Davey is five, and makes a show of smearing Davey’s makeup in front of us.

  Davey is stock-still.

  I wrestle with not punching John Winters. Fifty might be too lazy to do most things, but he has no intention of backing down, elder or not.

  “I don’t think anyone here has any interest in hearing you speak again,” Fifty tells John.

  One minute on the clock.

  I can’t keep myself from quietly asking Davey, “Would you really move back with him?”

  He tells me, “I might have to.”

  The clock ticks down. Halftime. And I am not dressed. And I have been spit up on. All of Otters Holt stands and claps as the Otters run to the locker room. The stadium is overfull and bubbling with anticipation. Every generation in town has turned up to see the halftime show: the Liars Table, the Methodists, the Baptists, the Corn Dolly committee, Corn Dolly winners of old (they have their own section and sashes), football parents, band parents, everyone. Even Mr. Nix and his nurse. They’re all on their feet. They’re all a force.