The School of Beauty and Charm

by Melanie Sumner

  “Why, there I was lying in the ditch, when that sucker hit the ground inches from my face. It untied my shoelaces.”

  “You wouldn’t get in a ditch in your good suit to save your life,” corrected Florida, but he continued, his eyes glowing.

  I loved the story about the businessman in Bloomingdale’s who fell down an escalator and was strangled by his tie. “People just don’t think ahead,” Henry would conclude with a frown.

  For a long time, Roderick and I thought every family traveled with funeral clothes—church clothes in dark colors, without undue decoration, just in case.

  “It’s a good practice,” Henry said. “What if you got out there and someone died and the store was closed, or they didn’t have your size? What if all you had to wear were tennis shoes? Then you’d be up the creek.”

  Florida backed him up 100 percent. “We’re going to see old people,” she reminded us of the summer we tried to ditch the funeral clothes for our trip to the Deleuth farm. “You have to be practical. The shops in Red Cavern don’t have anything you’d like.”

  “I refuse to participate in this panic mentality,” declared Roderick, removing the clip-on tie that Florida had stuffed in a corner of his suitcase. He was at the rebellious stage: He’d begun to lock his bedroom door, blow-dry his hair, and snicker on the telephone. On his chin regularly sat a bright red pimple that we were all supposed to ignore. He was thirteen. Because of his asthma, he was smaller than other eighth graders: skinny and bluish-white, with delicate wrists like a girl and a head of those soft, swirling, golden curls. After a few valiant attempts to play football, which failed because he was allergic to grass, he resigned himself to an intellectual life of Dungeons and Dragons, Thoreau, and an occasional joint.

  “Am I a bison,” he cried, blushing as his voice cracked, “running off the cliff with the herd, or am I human being, free to think and act as I choose?”

  “He wants a real tie,” said Florida, “like yours, Henry. This one is for little boys.” She glanced at Roderick’s angry face, worrying over his pimple. “Do you need to go to the bathroom before we get in the car?”

  “I do not want a tie,” said Roderick, glaring. “I want to live unhampered by the conventionalities of this bourgeois, fear-based society. I want to breathe!”

  Henry told him to get a job. To avoid a fuss, Florida slipped the tie into her dress bag, along with my Mary Janes.

  We spent an hour in the garage, watching Henry pack the car. Roderick had already checked the oil and cleaned the windshield, but Henry had to pack the trunk himself. If anyone put a bag inside the trunk, Henry shook his head, declared “There is a place for everything in this life,” and took it out again.

  “Slow poke,” said Florida. “We go through this every time. Did you pack my knitting? Give me that. I need that in the front seat.” She stepped boldly between Henry and the trunk to snatch her knitting bag from the elaborate puzzle he was creating in the trunk.

  Henry mumbled something.

  “What did you say?”

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “You look like you want to murder me. I’m not going. I’m going to stay here. You all go. Everything is such an ordeal with you!”

  “Don’t start a commotion.” Henry turned his back to her and with one last surveillance of his work, closed the lid on the trunk.

  “Commotion? Without me to push you, you’d never get out of this house. Dawdle, dawdle, dawdle. I suwaan! You’ve got a problem—an obsession. Sometimes you need to just pick up and go. Move your feet!”

  Henry removed the handkerchief from his back pocket and polished the lock of the trunk, a sign that we could all board.

  Roderick stretched out in the back seat with his inhaler and worn copy of Civil Disobedience, while I sat in the front, squeezed between Henry, Florida, and the white toy poodle, Puff LeBlanc, so that Roderick and I wouldn’t fight.

  Legally, Puff was Roderick’s dog. Roderick was allergic to most dogs, including his favorite breed, the Saint Bernard, for which Florida thanked God. She tried to talk Roderick into a Venus’s-flytrap, a plant that eats hamburger, and then a koi fish, but in the end, she gave in because at least poodles don’t shed.

  Roderick swore she would never have to lift a finger. He read several books on dog training and cleaned out a corner of his room for Puff’s dog bed, food bowl, and toys. When Puff arrived, he devoted himself to its happiness and well-being, following the pup around with a faint furrow in his brow and looking very much like Henry. Was his water clean enough? Did the collar fit? Why were we holding him wrong?

  Puff, however, had his own ideas. Within forty-eight hours of his arrival, he had scoped out the situation and bonded firmly with Florida. All over Owl Aerie, you could hear the tap tap tap of Florida’s heels followed by the tippety tap, tippety tap of Puff’s painted blue toenails. Up and down the stairs they went, in and out of rooms, tap tap tap, tippety tap, tippety tap. On the rare occasion that Florida sat down, Puff collapsed, exhausted, in her lap. Often he awoke from these naps entangled in knitting yarn, and she would scold him, pushing him roughly to the floor. She spoke no endearments, and did not rub him behind his well-brushed ears. Still, at the sound of her, “Shoo. Git!” he wagged his puff of a tail with delight. Daily, she fed him, walked him, and jerked the tangles from his hair with a cold metal comb. When he had diarrhea, she cleaned it up and fed him teaspoons of Pepto-Bismol, bracing his mouth open with her fingers. Once, she knitted him a sweater.

  “He worships me,” she admitted. The dog only tolerated the rest of us, who ultimately had a low opinion of poodles and were disappointed that Puff acted so much like one. “You can’t change a personality,” Florida reminded us. “I have tried and tried with Henry. You take the good with the bad. When I married Henry, I thought he was perfect, but he’s not.” She poked him in the arm. “Are you?”

  ALTHOUGH HENRY HAD never in his life exceeded the speed limit or turned without signaling or blown his car horn, he did have one bad driving habit, and it drove Florida up the wall. Sometimes he let the car run out of gas. It was an addiction, like gambling, an insane obsession to pit himself against chance. He did it that Sunday on the way to Red Cavern, Kentucky.

  At two o’clock that afternoon, when the needle of the gas gauge rested delicately on the inner edge of the bright orange e, Henry slowed down in front of a Texaco station in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Then he read the price sign and drove on.

  “Dadgonit,” said Florida. She glared at him. “It’s on empty.”

  Henry looked straight ahead. He wore his driving sweater, a soft cotton cardigan with leather patches on the sleeves, and a pair of sunglasses from Kmart. Outside, it was too warm for a sweater, but we all needed one in the car, with the air-conditioning on high. With one hand on the steering wheel, leaning back in his seat as if it were a recliner, he said, “There’s at least three gallons left.”

  “Then why does it say empty?” demanded Florida.

  “Oh, that’s not accurate. They set these gauges up for the general public. To give them plenty of warning.”

  “That’s why the general public doesn’t run out of gas,” said Roderick from the back seat. We passed another gas station. Henry made a snide remark about the price, lit a fresh cigar, and drove on.

  “Oh boy,” said Florida. “Here we go. You do this every time, and it burns me up. You’re cheap. Tight. Refuse to pay two pennies more so we won’t all be sitting on the side of the road while Mother’s dinner gets cold.”

  Henry looked into the rearview mirror and frowned. “Son,” he said, severely. “I don’t want to have to tell you again to get your feet off that window. If we hit a bump, your feet will go right through the glass. Another car might come by and cut your legs off. How would you like to be sitting in a wheelchair for the rest of your life?” Roderick sucked on his inhaler, filling the car with its faint medicinal odor, and without looking up, turned a page in his book. “That wouldn’t be much fun,” Henry con
tinued. “I can tell you that right now.” In response, Roderick coughed loudly.

  “Your cigar smoke is making him sick,” said Florida. “He’s wheezing.”

  Henry turned the air vent to the back seat. “Why, if a big ole eighteen-wheeler came by, and you broke the glass, that wind could suck you right out of the car. You’d blow out of here like a paper bag.”

  “Mom,” said Roderick. “Don’t let her open that nail polish; I’ll throw up,” but I had already twisted off the lid of Good Morning Peach and was applying the first coat.

  “She’s almost finished,” said Florida. “Henry, let him crack his window. Did you pack my book in the trunk? Darn it, Henry!”

  “What was the name of it?”

  “Temptation.”

  “You didn’t tell me not to.”

  “You know better than that. How I can read my book if it’s in the trunk?”

  “Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” said Henry.

  “You did that on purpose.” She cracked her window and let Puff stick his nose out. Roderick offered her some Thoreau.

  “Oh that’s too hard. I’m not as smart as you. I can’t read that. Maybe with the CliffsNotes. What did you bring to read, Louise?” Shoving Puff aside, she rummaged through my stack of books: Very Special People, an illustrated text about circus people. She flipped to a picture of Adolpho the Two-Headed Man, showing a handsome man in a suit lighting a cigarette for another man, the size of an infant, dressed in an identical suit and emerging from his own chest. From the expression on her face, I could see that she found the book in poor taste. Paradise Lost, which I was pretending to read to impress my English teacher, Samuel Rutherford III, did not hold her attention, even after I told her it was about God.

  “I read the Bible,” she said. “That tells the story of Jesus.” She added, “Your savior,” and I closed my eyes, pretending to fall asleep. Jesus was her back-up man. Together, the two of them created a superhuman SWAT team; Florida sniffed out the intransigence and Jesus crushed it with his Word.

  “You don’t want me to talk about Jesus, do you? Why does the Word of the Lord upset you?”

  “There’s a gas station,” said Roderick.

  “He won’t stop,” said Florida, and with a look of long-suffering resignation, she elbowed Puff onto my lap and pulled out her knitting bag.

  I DECIDED THAT I didn’t like anybody in the car. Mentally, I threw each family member onto the shoulder of the road and replaced them with my friends. An imaginary Drew St. John was riding beside me in the front seat, smoking a cigar.

  Once, I had taken the real Drew St. John to Red Cavern. Three and a half hours into the trip, Drew announced calmly that she couldn’t remember what her mother looked like. Both of us found this interesting, but Florida was upset.

  “You’re kidding,” she said.

  “No ma’am,” said Drew firmly. “I can’t picture her.”

  “That happens to me all the time,” I said. “It’s really weird. I think Mom, and nothing happens. I don’t get a picture.”

  “I can see my dad,” said Drew. “Unless I try too hard.”

  “Your mother is very attractive,” said Florida, determined to forge this broken link. “She’s tall and slender and has short brown hair. She’s kind of quiet. She plays golf, and she . . . she drives a blue car.”

  “Eldorado,” said Henry.

  “Do you see her now, Drew?” Drew squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them.

  “No ma’am.”

  “Her name is Katherine,” Florida said urgently. “She’s . . . she’s . . . oh, shoot! You can’t forget your own mother. You’ve only been gone one day. You’re playing.”

  To close this discussion, she picked up her novel; from the glossy cover, I gathered it was about a man and a woman who couldn’t keep their clothes on. After she’d read a couple of pages, she said, “If I had a picture of her, I’d show you.”

  That was the beginning of Drew’s breakdown in Kentucky. Drew was not a delicate child. Her hair, the color of honey, was cropped short and springing with cowlicks. She had three freckles on her nose; in the summer she had a farmer’s tan. A thin silver scar, incurred while jumping down a chimney, circled one sturdy wrist like a bracelet. She was a lefty, and she threw a mean, sneaky punch with her devil’s paw. She did not, under any circumstances, touch dolls. Once I saw her eat a worm. Dr. Frommlecker claimed, with his characteristic lack of enthusiasm, that she was a genius.

  All the same, Red Cavern did her in. Was it the landscape—mile after mile of monotonous tobacco, corn, and hay—everything growing to the same height inside rusty barbed-wire fences? Even in the middle of summer a gray pallor hung over the sky; nothing was bright and new. Dully painted trucks with dirty windshields rattled down the dusty roads. In the truck beds, cows stared morosely through weathered wooden slats as we sped by in the Galaxie 500, which Henry spritzed and wiped down at every gas station. In this part of the country, the gas pumps were antiques: big clunky things, once painted white, now dented and streaked with rust. These gas pumps had round heads; Henry stared into the glass face to watch the numbers creep by; it was like watching the hand of a clock. Everybody drank RC—there wasn’t any Coca-Cola.

  At the farm, Drew and I jumped from haystacks in the barn and taunted a bull in the field with a red tablecloth. We collected spearmint from the spring, locked Roderick in the chicken coop, and dissected the skeleton of a dog we found on top of a hill, but I knew she wasn’t having a good time. Grandmother Deleuth gave us stained plastic coffee cups filled to the brim with cheerful M&Ms, but still, the gloom settled on us. Grandmother would cry, not so that you’d notice if you weren’t looking right at her, but the rims of her eyes turned red, and small tears filled the creases of her skin like dew.

  “You all don’t know what goes on here after y’all go,” she’d say. “How he curses me.”

  “Hush,” my mother would say, while Henry looked on with the face he wore at church. “Let’s have a good time.”

  Then Daddy-Go, sunk deep into his old chair, with his cane leaning against the wall, would lift his stubbled chin and look around with his bleary eyes, blue with cataracts, seeking sympathy for his life.

  Both of them went through a litany of death; it was their main source of conversation. Sally Long—she was a Cartwright before she married—she fell on the front step and broke her hip for the third time, and her youngest stepsister, Mabel Brown, fell into the river, caught her hair on a branch, and drowned. Uncle Evange Lyle lost two cows in the electric fence when lightning hit, and the chickens all died of the feed.

  “Reckon I’ll be next,” Grandmother would say, and Daddy-Go would say, “Lord willing.”

  I saw nothing odd in any of this, but Drew was uncomfortable. During that entire week, she couldn’t conjure up her mother’s face. Finally, the ghost in the upstairs bedroom got her.

  The ghost was Frances Deleuth, Florida’s little sister. Frances was killed, I explained to Drew, on the night of her high school graduation, after she’d been voted Most Popular and Best Looking. Florida had been salutatorian of her class, but Frances was valedictorian of hers, which was a shame because whereas Florida applied herself, Frances spent most of her time looking in the mirror. When her suitors came to call, she’d play the piano and laugh until the cows came home. On graduation night, Frances fell off the back of a pick-up truck. She’d been drinking, with boys.

  “Her dress got caught in the tailgate,” I whispered to Drew. We were sitting on the sinking edge of the high feather bed in the musty, darkened room, our bare feet dangling. “She kept rolling back under the wheel, until she was dead.”

  Drew put on her poker face while checking the facts. “Why didn’t the boys in the truck bed tell the driver that she fell?”

  “They did,” I whispered. “They kept banging on the window, yelling, ‘Frances fell off!’ but the driver thought they were kidding.”

  We sat quietly, swinging our tanned legs, breathin
g softly. We faced two long windows, drawn with yellowed shades. Motes of dust hung in the narrow band of light beneath the door.

  “Do you want to know what else?” I asked. “My father dated Frances before he dated my mother.” Suddenly I jumped to the floor and padded across the scratchy wool rug to the cedar chest, where I rummaged through stiff black dresses and an assortment of black hats—some decorated with artificial fruit and flowers—until I found a pair of black elbow-length gloves.

  “These belonged to Frances,” I said, trying one on. There were no tips to the fingers of the gloves; I poked my hand through to show her. I put on the other glove and pulled them both all the way up to my shoulders. Then, feeling like a black widow spider, I waved my arms slowly back and forth.

  A few minutes later, during a game of hide-and-seek, I pulled the crocheted tab of the window shade and found Drew flattened against the glass like a moth. Tears ran silently down her cheeks. Afraid to touch her, and not knowing what else to do, I pulled the shade back down. At suppertime, she was still there.

  “She’ll fall right through that thin old glass!” cried Henry, hurrying up the stairs to the bedroom. “You all know better than to play in windows!” Florida and Roderick ran outside, as if they meant to catch her. Grandmother Deleuth, dusted with flour, shuffled out of the kitchen and hung by the foot of the stairs saying “Lawd a mercy!” and leaving her mouth hanging open so that a thin stream of spittle dribbled down her chin. In the parlor, Daddy-Go slowly brought his cane around to the front of the chair. Then, bracing himself with both hands on the cane, he stood up. He was a tall man.

  Henry stayed up there with Drew for a long time. No one would let me go upstairs, but we could hear him through the vent in the ceiling by the parlor woodstove. Roderick and I sat as close to the woodstove as we could, on the love seat. It was a cruel piece of furniture, too large for one person, and too small for two, without arm rests or pillows, designed to shift its occupants onto the floor. The only way to stay seated was to continually press oneself into the back of the love seat, which was upholstered in horsehair. There we sat, staring up at the dusty grate in the ceiling. Through the grate, Henry’s voice rumbled down over our heads, singing “Home on the Range.”