The School of Beauty and Charm

by Melanie Sumner

  DREW AND I had been best friends since we were five years old, and we were as different from each other as real sisters. When I told her that I planned to have an affair with a factory worker at Southern Board, letting the word affair trail off my tongue, she was shocked. She widened her eyes, then narrowed them, letting her lip curl in disdain. She said, “Gross!”

  She had had a similar reaction when I began listening to country music. I tried to keep it a secret, but occasionally Drew overheard me singing quietly to myself “Good Hearted Woman” or Johnny Paycheck’s hit “Take This Job and Shove It.” Once, she found a Merle Haggard tape in my car.

  “I don’t believe you,” she said. She held the tape away from her as though by merely touching it, she might become a redneck. “How could you possibly like this shit?” I rattled off a comparison between rednecks and the pastoral world of Thomas Hardy, but she knew I didn’t mean it. How could I explain the warm, happy feeling I got when I listened to Loretta Lynn sing about birth control?

  That summer, no one wanted to know what I was thinking. “You don’t listen to me!” I screamed at Florida during one of our fights. “You’ve never listened to me for ten minutes in my entire life.”

  “All right!” Florida yelled. “I’m listening!” She set the oven timer for ten minutes. The kitchen was silent. “Well, I’m listening. Talk.”

  I tried to say the things I had wanted to say, but I couldn’t, so I threw up my hands and screamed, “Stop it!”

  “See,” said Florida when the buzzer rang. “You don’t have anything to say.”

  I started a diary. Everything I wrote was stupid, but I forced myself to scratch out the words without stopping for ten minutes a day. It was like trying to dig my way out of the ground with a teaspoon.

  IN JUNE, I entered the plant. On that first day, when Raymond Patch, the foreman, led me on a brief tour of the factory, I was terrified. Ceiling lights shot streaks of yellow through the iron rafters while the Georgia sun bore through high green windows. The heat itself was green. Gigantic machines slammed metal against metal, penetrating my soft Styrofoam ear plugs with a rhythmic, churning roar. The hot air was thick with paper dust and smelled like a skunk. As I followed Mr. Patch deeper into the plant, the odor become so intense I thought I would vomit.

  Raymond didn’t seem to notice the smell. He was a skinny man with a pointed face and small green eyes fringed by pale, almost invisible lashes. He wore a baggy polyester suit the color of tobacco and an unfashionably wide tie of similar material in a lighter shade of nicotine. He smoked so much that he had to fight for every breath. The expression of concentrated will had become permanent on his face. Apparently, women unnerved him.

  “This here is the corrugator!” he yelled, stopping in front of a long ream of rolling brown paper. “Stay away from it. Two years ago, a fellow fell on that and burnt like a piece of bacon.” Staring at my new boots, he asked me if I had read the safety booklet. When I said yes, I knew that he knew I was lying. He rubbed his ear, then pointed to a hunk of metal whirring with blades as big as hubcaps. “Slitter!” he shouted.

  I nodded. On the wall next to the time clock hung a calendar marking the days of continuous safety in the plant. When I came to work, Southern Board had gone 212 days without an accident.

  All of the men, except Jeremiah, looked at my feet. Henry had refused to buy me Red Wing boots. “You won’t be working in a factory for the rest of your life, I hope,” he told me at Pay Less Shoes. Then he laughed, patting me too hard on the back.

  Jeremiah Stokes was a strong, handsome man, smart as a whip, with a great noble heart and plenty of horse sense. Had he been white, he would have been Henry’s closest friend. The best Henry could do was promote him every year until he was in charge of all the other black men in the plant and had his own office in the back, next to the bailer. He was the only employee at the factory taller than five foot nine, Henry’s height, but like all the other men Henry had hired, his hands were huge.

  “Jeremiah has his own place back here,” said Raymond Patch, leading me into a small office paneled with pine board. Raymond leaned against his desk, arms crossed, while Jeremiah towered in the doorway. The office was tidier than the one Mr. Patch shared with two other foremen.

  “Jeremiah is as neat as a pin,” Henry liked to say. On Sundays after church, he sometimes drove us past Jeremiah’s small brick house in the black section of Counterpoint. Idling the car in front of the manicured lawn, he would exclaim, “Clean as a whistle!” Then he admired the polished white Cadillac which Jeremiah never drove to work. We never got out of the car, but sometimes Jeremiah came to our house. On these occasions, he wore a coat and tie and parked cars for our guests. “Jeremiah is as honest as the day he was born,” Henry told people.

  Now, as I stared at the crisp blue curtain Jeremiah’s wife had hung on the office wall to make it look like there was a window, I wondered, for the first time since I had set my heart on entering Southern Board, if I could hold a job. Had anyone said “What is this little girl doing here?” I would have run out the door and never come back.

  “Well, look what we have here,” said Jeremiah, smiling down at me. “I think she favors her daddy.”

  Raymond, acting as my bodyguard, didn’t comment.

  “Your daddy is a good man,” said Jeremiah. “A fine person. Now, he used to talk about bringing Roderick out to work, but I never heard him mention you.” His voice softened. “My wife and I were really sorry when your brother passed away. We lost one of our chirren, when she was just a baby. I ain’t been the same since.” Raymond coughed. “But now we got you out here with us,” said Jeremiah, straightening his broad shoulders. “We’re proud to have you.” We shook hands.

  “Ready to go to work?” barked Raymond. Jeremiah stepped aside to let him pass, reaching down to turn the cap backward on my head when I followed.

  Within minutes, I was throwing scrap board into the bailer. I continued to do that for another seven hours.

  After I had worked at the plant for several days without any mention of being fired, I began to worry about my popularity. Besides a twenty-four-minute lunch, Southern Board workers had two twelve-minute breaks a shift. The white people spent these free periods in the break room at the front of the plant. It was a crowded, smoky little room, but whatever table I chose remained empty except for me. The men crammed chairs around the other tables where they sat elbow to elbow with their black lunch boxes open before them, blowing smoke in each other’s faces. Occasionally, a Frito hit me in the back of the neck, but when I turned around, all the men had their heads down.

  “YOU’RE NOT THERE to socialize,” Henry said when I complained to him. He leaned forward in his La-Z-Boy recliner, eyeing me sternly over Business Week. “I hope you understand that. Just do your work out there and come straight home.”

  “Hen-ry!” Florida hollered into the intercom. “Lou-ise! Supper!”

  “Dad, they throw things at me.”

  “Throw things?” He frowned. “What things?”

  From the top of the stairs Florida yelled, “Louise! Tell your father to come and eat!”

  “Coming!” I yelled back, without moving. “Potato chips. Empty chewing tobacco pouches. Pieces of string.”

  Henry laughed. “That’s just their way of being friendly. They’re having fun with you, honey. If they didn’t like you, they wouldn’t tease you. How’s old Drewster doing at her job?”

  “She hates it. She—”

  Florida stomped into the den, announcing that she was throwing supper in the garbage can since no one wanted it. She had recently acquired several MacMe jogging suits in alarming colors, designed by Mary MacDermott, and would wear nothing else.

  “Women need to express their anger,” Mary told her clients. “I’ve started smashing plates in the garage. I have a special hammer. I’ve painted the word kill on it.” Florida could not break a plate on purpose, but she took Mary’s ideas seriously because she was a real artist; people
drove down from Atlanta to buy MacMe clothing. “Try some ‘I feel angry’ statements,” Mary suggested.

  Florida was angry at her hair for going gray on her. She was angry at Henry for not being romantic and for working all the time and for picking lint up off the carpet. She was angry at the owl who had seized Puff LeBlanc. She was angry at the white-trash tenant on the Deleuth farm, who a tossed a cigarette and burned the place down. She was angry at Grandmother and Daddy-Go for digging their heels in when she found them a house in Red Cavern. All afternoon, she’d been angry at Helen Olfinger, who was her own age and the most talented person in Special Art. Helen had drunk the green paint.

  Now she was livid because Henry and I would not come to the table before the food got cold. Standing in the center of the den, she announced, “I am not your slave.”

  When she was gone, Henry blinked, as if coming out of a dream. Then he said, “I think your mother has supper ready,” and began to fold his paper.

  AS SOON as everyone was seated at the table, Florida bowed her head, squeezed her eyes shut, and prayed, “Lord, thank you for the food you bestowed on us tonight and for giving me the time to prepare it for my family, in my busy day. Teach all of us to be more grateful. Be with Roderick in the mansion you have prepared for him. Guide Louise and help her to make mature decisions as she grows into a Christian young lady and starts dating, if that is your plan for her. Teach her to listen to those who know better and would help her. Be with Mother and Daddy—help them to adjust to their new way of life in town and be grateful for it. Help them not to get negative. Be with Helen Olfinger. Help us all to not get discouraged. Amen.”

  Embarrassed, I sank my teeth into the cold tuna melt. Lately, Florida had been asking Henry and me if we were ashamed of our Savior. “I am proud to know the Son of God,” she would remind us, on the verge of tears. Then she would select one of Henry’s faults—his concern with public opinion, for instance—and rail. “I don’t go to church because it looks good,” she told him. “That’s not what it’s all about it. If that’s why you worship, to see and be seen, then you are going down the wrong path.”

  Every Thursday morning, Florida put on a suit for her Christian Women’s Club meeting. She met with Miriam Gubbel, the organist at Bellamy Baptist Church whose daughter had shot herself in the ear; Lacy Dalton, who had lost a breast; and Shirley Frommlecker, whose husband had divorced her by mail. There were others: Agnes from Cuts and Curls, who had gone bankrupt twice; her niece, Laurin, who laid the entire Bridgewater Boy’s Tennis team; and Frenchie Smartt’s girlfriend, from the other side of the river, who was just as sweet as she could be. Weekly fellowship with these women— except for Agnes, who was a pill—gave Florida the courage to go on living.

  “Witness,” the women said with their waxed lips, holding cups of herbal tea. “Witness,” they murmured, making the word soft, alluring, and infinitely feminine.

  I was turning into an atheist and a hellcat.

  “I can see it coming,” Florida would say with her lips stretched into a fierce grimace.

  “What?” I asked, taunting her. “See what coming?” Then I laughed with the high whine of a girl brought up in a rusty trailer park on the other side of the river, a girl no one cared about, with no respect for her mother and father. I no longer sent underwear to the laundry room, which told Florida that I had either stopped wearing it or was in something too fancy to be seen.

  “You have turned your back on Him,” she said. “Mark my word. You’ll be sorry.” I mimicked her until she wept.

  Henry tried to stay out of it, but we wouldn’t let him.

  “You two stop that fighting,” he said one morning, lifting his head from his cereal bowl.

  “You two! Who is you two?” cried Florida. “Don’t put me on the same level with her. She is a child.” I knew she was right. My disrespect was ugly, but I was afraid to give in to her will. I was afraid that Florida and Jesus would take my soul, leaving me lost forever behind a mask like the one that had been created at Salon di Emilio. In my dreams, she came at me with a knife.

  She started tucking Bible verses into my lunch bag. One day, I sat at an empty table in the break room at Southern Board and read the note under my peanut butter and jelly sandwich:

  Whosoever therefore shall be ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation: of him also shall the Son of man be ashamed when he cometh in the glory of his Father with the holy angels. St. Mark 9:38.

  A plastic spoon winged past my ear. I ignored it. Then a man called Polecat, because he was skinny and worked on top of a ladder, wedged his thick hand into the plastic window of the Lance’s snack machine, pulled out a package of Choco-Fil cookies, and farted with such an explosion that I jumped. The men howled.

  “’Scuse my language,” said Polecat, shuffling back to his seat.

  Someone said, “The boss’s daughter never heard a fart before.”

  “What the hell is she doing here anyway?” asked Smiley, a scar-faced man who never smiled.

  “I reckon Henry and Florida are having hard times. I hear they had to cut back on the champagne and them trips around the world. So Henry put the girl out to work.”

  “Ain’t that a shame.”

  “Naw,” said Jack. “They ain’t having hard times. They’re still sitting pretty up on that mountain. I’ll tell you what happened.”

  “Jack’s the maid.”

  “Naw, he’s the pool man on weekends.”

  “He’s their white nigger,” said Smiley, and muttered something about Jeremiah under his breath.

  “Smiley’s so pretty when he’s mad,” said Polecat. “Ain’t he?”

  Jack rubbed his chin and leaned back in his chair. I studied his face: the crow’s feet around his blue eyes, the hardened bitter twist of his lips that could flash into a grin. He has lived, I thought. He is real. All of the men had that face, and I wanted one.

  Jack said, “See, one day up on the hill, Henry says to his wife, ‘Let’s you and me do an experiment. Let’s us put that girl in the plant. What about it? We’ll put a cap on her head and some brogans on her feet. Let’s see what happens.’”

  “Hey Experiment,” said T. C. Curtis, winking at me as he shuffled to the Coke machine.

  “T. C., don’t mess with Experiment now,” said Jack. “This here is a scientific operation.”

  “Just experimenting,” said T. C.

  T. C. WAS THE one I chose to be my lover, by virtue of the fact that he was under forty and had winked at me. He was only my lover in my imagination, where he entered as a seed and grew wildly, in eight-hour increments, under the hot green lights.

  I had used up all my regular daydreams in the first two weeks of work. While I was shoving boards into the bailer, turning boxes in the printer, or slamming away at the M-12, I now thought about T. C. Curtis. With each stack of boards that went down the conveyor belt, his beer belly became smaller. By quitting time each day, when my ankles hurt and my eyes stung from sweat, the man was an inch taller and a year younger. After work, when I drove the Bonneville over the bridge and up the mountain with the windows down, singing along to “Scarlet Fever,” T. C. Curtis was intelligent, sincere, and hopelessly in love with me.

  On the 245th day of safety, T. C. sidled up behind me at the Coke machine, standing so close I could feel the heat coming off his chest, and whispered loudly in my ear, “Will you marry me?”

  “Never!” I cried out. My face burned. All around us, the men watched, laughing. For a moment, I saw T. C. clearly: a leering, pot-bellied man in a John Deere cap, with a wad of chewing tobacco in his cheek. Then I resented him for destroying the man I had taken such pains to create in my imagination.

  Being a Peppers, however, I did not give up. As the days wore on, 247 days of safety, 259 days of safety, I continued to conduct our romance in the privacy of my own mind, taking occasional peeks at the real T. C. as he hummed by in a fork lift. I began to write about him in my diary. On the cover of the notebo
ok, I wrote the words UNCENSORED DO NOT READ.

  Florida and Henry had become limp, gray, and predictable.

  “Back to the old grindstone,” Henry said on Monday mornings.

  “Drudge, drudge, drudge,” said Florida. “Back in the rut.” At the end of the day, she stretched out on the couch in a MacMe suit and said, “Oh, I am weary.”

  I was determined to have an exciting life. Each morning, when I reported to Raymond Patch, I stared into his lashless green eyes, praying for an assignment to work with T. C. Curtis, but it never happened. Most of the time, Raymond sent me to the back of the plant to work with the black men on machines that paid a dollar less an hour, but when he was in a bad mood, he put me to work with Dopey.

  Dopey was a miracle of the company’s insurance benefits policy. Taking advantage of full medical coverage, he kept himself stoned on prescription drugs. Several times a year, when he overdosed, he took up residence in a private room at the hospital while his wife cashed in his checks. When he did come to work, he acted as if he might die at any moment.

  When Mr. Patch ordered me to help Dopey clean the railroad, my obsession with T. C. Curtis was the only thing that kept me from quitting. Henry was as much of a neatnik at the plant as he was at home, where he irritated Florida by shining sink faucets, and of all the jobs at Southern Board, tidying up the tracks that ran through the interior of the plant to Henry’s satisfaction was the most deplored.

  “I can’t bend my knees!” Dopey hollered as I climbed down the short ladder to the depressed tracks. “So I’ll sweep the trash over the wall, and you pick it up!” Gripping the rails of the ladder with his emaciated, blue-veined arms, and staring at me through a pair of foggy glasses whose frames had been wrapped with yards of Scotch tape, he screamed over the roar of the machines, “and I ain’t picking up after no niggers! We only go halfway down. I ain’t picking up no watermelon rind.” He put one hand across his bony chest, as if the thought of touching a black man’s trash was giving him a heart attack. He removed a pill from a vial in his shirt pocket. Then, patting a sticky strand of white hair across his skull, he settled himself against his broom handle and watched me work.