Mary Alice laughed too, not at me, but at her own little brother. Then she said I was funny. I wasn't sure what to say to this. Someone said something about if you kissed your elbow, you'd turn into a boy.
"Who wants to practice kissing?" Mary Alice said.
They all squealed and ran toward Mary Alice's room. I followed. I had never been to Mary Alice's room. I had never kissed or practiced kissing. I was never so scared in all my life. Why couldn't we just tell ghost stories or braid one another's hair like we used to do at all the other birthday parties in all the other towns I'd ever lived in?
Mary Alice had all-white bedroom furniture—even her own desk with three drawers and a matching chair. Everything matched, with gold hardware. Her walls were a pink she called "blush," and she had a pink bedspread, a pink bed ruffle, a pink ruffled lampshade, and a pink canopy on her bed. I had always wanted a canopy bed.
By the time I finished looking around, somebody had turned out the lights and every girl was already kissing and hugging a pillow in the corners of the room. Luckily there were no pillows left. While the other girls giggled, Jeffy stomped and jumped in circles, pestering them. He burrowed between girls and pillows while Mary Alice screamed that he was acting like a pervert.
I excused myself to the powder room down the hall. On the way, I passed another bedroom, with walls almost completely covered with posters of rocket ships, and astronauts standing in front of their machinery at Cape Canaveral, and pictures of planets taped to the ceiling above the bed. There was a pile of clothes in the corner, and shoes everywhere. The bed wasn't made and the blankets and sheets were whipped up like one of my grandmother's meringues. A catcher's mitt sat on a wooden bureau alongside a watch laid smooth. A bookcase beside the bed held volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica, something I had always wanted for myself.
"Come on in," Stone said, popping up from his chair.
Standing there at his door, I jumped, terrified and embarrassed that he had caught me spying.
The TV was on with news about NASA's Project Mercury. The announcer talked about aero systems, satellite orbits, thermal and atmospheric systems, and secondary power equipment. The announcer reminded us that in May of that year, Kennedy had vowed that the United States would get to the moon first. "Now is the time to take longer strides," Kennedy had said. It had been five years since Sputnik blasted off from the Soviet Union.
He had a TV in his room! Never mind lunar conquests. Stone McLemore had a TV in his room!
He had posters of what he called space hardware: one was a TIROS 1. I looked at what he showed me and named. I tried to see the beauty in the hydrogen tanks, circuitry, fuel cells, and docking lights.
"See this?" he said, pointing to a map of the moon. "This shows the eight suitable sites to land. The Sea of Tranquility is the ultimate target."
"Makes sense," I said. Maybe I even liked him because of his name. I had never known anyone called Stone before, and it made him special, worthy of something.
He showed me a poster from Union Carbide, where he said he wanted to work someday to help manufacture aircraft and guided missiles. He pointed out the small print: "For reasons of security, the missile shown here is an artist's conception—not a drawing of an existing weapon."
When I saw Stone's profile, when I saw the little slope of his nose and the pout of his lip, I wished then that I had Perry's Pentax to snap a picture for keeps.
"Is it possible that the planets swirling around the sun eventually just swirl into the sun, like a whirlpool?"
Stone laughed, then he looked at me, considering. "Cool."
The TV news shifted from cooling systems and rockets to violent demonstrations in Alabama.
"It's all a Communist plot, you know," Stone said, turning toward the TV. "And these news people are making us look like rednecks. We're just trying to protect our people and our states."
"I know," I said, not knowing what else to say.
"This is a war."
I thought about that little word war and all the bignesses it caused, like my dad's death. I couldn't understand why or how Stone would use that word. I couldn't even understand the word.
"You might not know that yet," he said.
I didn't know what he could mean. Wars were fought in other countries. My dad had fought in two wars. Korea and then Vietnam. We weren't in any war here though. We ate sugared cereal and drank milk. There weren't even any rationings. Who was the enemy? The black people who lived down the street? Willa Mae? A war, here in Mississippi? Mississippi hadn't been involved in a war since The War, which was The Civil War, but that was over, wasn't it?
"You need protecting," he said. "We got to protect the women of the South, girls like you. That's what my mom says."
I had to smile. How could I not? Hadn't the handsomest boy I had ever talked to in my fourteen years of living on this earth just said that he was going to protect me?
We turned to watch the TV. The local anchorman was saying something about a boy named Virgil who'd been riding on the handlebars of his brother's bicycle when he was fatally shot by white teenagers.
"Oh, that's terrible," I said, putting my hand over my mouth, feeling sick at the news.
"It is." He got up and turned off the TV.
"Guess I'd better get back," I said.
Stone just nodded. He seemed distracted.
***
When I got back to Mary Alice's room, Jeffy had taken off his fish tank helmet and was whizzing around in his space suit.
"Get out of here," Mary Alice yelled at her little brother. Then she called him a name we never ever ever used. Not in our family ever, north or south. We said Negro or colored or black. The bad boys at school used that other word. But this girl, Mary Alice, she just said it, out loud, like that, like she said it every day. I had never heard a girl, no matter how old, speak this way, and it gave me a queer, cold, sick feeling.
"You're not the boss of me," Jeffy said, and stomped out of the room.
"I'm bored," one girl said, throwing down her pillow date, not caring what Mary Alice had just said.
"Let's keep on talking like grownups," another girl said, tossing her pillow alongside the other.
"Mary Alice?" I finally said. "Can we just go outside now?"
And all at once we were changing to swim in Mary Alice's swimming pool.
"Do my straps, will you?" Mary Alice asked me. Me! I was helping Mary Alice with her swimsuit. Her skin was a perfect brown and her sparrow shoulder blades jutted out like wings.
***
Mary Alice was the first girl I knew who wore a bikini. Hers was pink gingham. Everybody else wore a one-piece with a belt or two full-coverage pieces, some with skirts built in. I had circle-shaped brown marks on my sides from my cut-out swimsuit, which had been new and special when my mother had bought it for me back in June, but was now saggy and faded from swimming in my grandfather's pool in Franklin all summer, the summer my grandmother called "my recovery."
The McLemores had an in-ground pool with landscaping. We all took turns with the Hula-Hoop I had given Mary Alice. She said she had four others, but none with pink and silver sparkles like this one.
When Mary Alice's brother Stone brought out a tray of Coca-Colas, I jumped into the pool so he wouldn't see me in my suit. I didn't like the idea of being almost completely naked in front of anyone, let alone Stone. It wasn't that I was shy. It was mostly because I didn't think I looked too good almost naked.
Sneaking stares at him again, I decided he was surely the handsomest boy I had ever seen. This was a boy you want to marry. This was a boy who was good and kind because he said women needed protecting and he brought out Coca-Colas for his kid sister's birthday party.
Some of the girls played how-long-can-you-hold-your-breath, swimming underwater the length of the pool, sometimes twice. Stone dived in, and he didn't make a big show of taking in his breath before he went under. After one length, two lengths, then half of the third length of the pool, he shot up from the deep end,
laughing and gasping for air, his hair spraying a crown of thousands of water drops. Yes. He really was the most beautiful handsome boy I'd ever seen.
Paddling around in the deep end, I realized then and there that, excluding her kid brother, Jeffy, Mary Alice had the perfect family and the perfect life. When you're an only child in a family with an only parent, you look at other, bigger families with envy. Mary Alice had a family with a station wagon, a split-level house, and a pool.
But then I looked up and saw Mary Alice's toes, as she stood at the edge of the diving board. Her second toe lay on top of her big toe on each foot. I had never seen such a thing. I wondered if Mary Alice's toes would ever prevent her from doing the things she wanted to do in life.
"Look, y'all!" she said, forming her perfect body into a perfect swan's dive. I decided then that any time I got frustrated with my overall situation in life, mad or jealous of knee socks or a pink canopy bed in a pink room, I'd take a deep breath and think about Mary Alice's toes. At least I didn't have Mary Alice's toes.
We swam until the sun set and then changed into our sleep clothes. Mary Alice wore a nightgown that my mother would have had me wear as a good party dress. Everybody else wore baby-doll pajamas with bloomer panties. I wore one of Tine's old faded cotton nightgowns.
That night Mary Alice showed us her most prized possession: a Doublemint chewing gum wrapper signed by Elvis, framed in a gold-colored frame. Mary Alice said that two summers ago her daddy heard that Elvis was back home in Tupelo and the McLemores had a cousin who lived there, and that McLemore cousin called over to the one hotel in town and said, "What room is Elvis staying in?" When the cousin went over to the hotel, there were two white Cadillacs parked out front with I LOVE YOU in red lipstick covering the cars. A real pretty blond woman came to the door and said, "Would you like an autograph?" All that McLemore cousin had was a gum wrapper. And when Elvis himself came to the door, he signed it. Elvis signed Mary Alice McLemore's cousin's Doublemint chewing gum wrapper, and that little gum wrapper is what got Mary Alice hooked on celebrity signatures.
"How do we know you're not making all that up?" one girl asked. "How do we know Elvis signed it and not you?"
"Because he did and I don't lie and you're just going to have to believe me."
I stared at Mary Alice then, watching her every move. I would never be one of those girls who screamed at the way Elvis moved when he sang, only because I was too shy, not because he didn't do me the same way. But if I had a chewing gum wrapper signed by Elvis Presley, I would have said a lot of other stuff to defend it. Mary Alice only said what she said, and you had to admire that.
We spent the rest of the night painting one another's fingernails, a luxury my mother had never allowed. I could hear the wind outside blowing and laughing, trying to tell me something, warn me maybe. I thought of the cicadas already buried deep in the soil, sleeping, maybe getting geared up to come out again in seven years. All the other girls were still so chatty on the floor in sleeping bags and pallets, which was good, because all I had to do was listen to their voices until I fell asleep while outside the last of the cicadas hummed.
CHAPTER 4
THE FOLLOWING MORNING at Mary Alice's house, we ate breakfast in a glassed-in patio the McLemores called their Florida breakfast room, because that's where they had breakfast. I couldn't imagine having a room just for one meal. We drank instant Tang, and they could even afford grapefruit juice in a can.
I thought of how Mrs. McLemore must have seen her life, as if she were in some TV commercial: Mrs. Jack P. McLemore enjoys making breakfasts in their sunny Florida room. "There are plenty of outlets and it's more relaxing here," she told us, as if she were addressing her fans. She fried up a mess of sausages and pancakes in an electric skillet on their glass coffee table. Still, it was nice that she went to so much trouble just for us girls. I'd never seen a mother do so much for her daughter.
Mary Alice's father and Stone took their breakfasts in the kitchen because, I guessed, they didn't want to eat with all us girls. I peeked in at them while they were both reading the morning paper, talking to each other in low, serious voices about world events. Mr. McLemore looked up and said good morning. Then out of nowhere, he said, "I understand your mama is a school person and your daddy was a war hero. He was from a fine family, your daddy was." The way Mr. McLemore said this made me both proud and uncomfortable. For some reason he singled me out and I didn't like being singled out for anything.
"We always have pancakes on Saturdays," Mary Alice told us girls back at the table. She said she also got to watch Lawrence Welk, Gunsmoke, Bonanza, and anything with Jim Nabors while she ate her dinner. My mother occasionally let me watch Hallmark or Disney specials, but I didn't tell anyone this. I ate up. My mother never made me pancakes on any day.
***
My mother didn't even ask me about Mary Alice's birthday party when she came to pick me up an hour later. She hurried out of the car and ran up the walkway while most of the other mothers sauntered and chatted leisurely with Mary Alice's mother. All these mothers looked the same, with their bright colored dresses, their frosted pink-lipsticked lips and bubble hairdos. They looked like they never worried about promotions, jobs, or money.
Mary Alice was still wearing the nightgown she called a Lanz, which I guessed was special because the other mothers grew hushed and quietly came over to examine the white rickrack at the hem.
My mother wore a gray suit and a white blouse and black pumps, and she looked like a prison warden. This on a Saturday.
"Ready?" my mother asked. When people spoke of my mother they used words like arty and intellectual, and it was never in a good way either. She didn't wear lots of makeup like other women. She only put on bright red Revlon lipstick, blotting her lips with a square of tissue or whatever old envelope she had in her purse. She hated taking too much time getting ready for anything. She quit wearing hats and gloves like other women too because she said it was silly, and in the summer it was too hot. All the other mothers wore rollers at night to do their hair like Jackie Kennedy's. I'd seen them come out in the morning for their papers, their hair still done up. My mother kept her hair short so she didn't have to curl or fuss with it and it looked as though she were always wearing a black bathing cap. She wasn't pretty the way other mothers were pretty. My mother was striking.
Now she was breathless, thanking Mary Alice's mother, then putting her arm around me as we hurried toward the car. The sun was one big white unshuttered lens in the sky. It was Indian summer, and the warm air smelled of leaves burning.
"Why are we running?"
"We're late for Tougaloo." A few of the mothers turned at the word Tougaloo.
***
Striding through the halls of Tougaloo, the all-black college in north Jackson, my mother was a different person. She held her head high and smiled. A passing student called her Professor even though she was just a visiting lecturer. She didn't correct him. She was happy here and I wondered why she wasn't like this all the time at home.
The lecture wasn't in a classroom like I thought it would be. It was in a big auditorium and there weren't but a handful of people there, all of them black, none of them looking too thrilled to be inside, in school on Saturday morning. I could tell my mother was disappointed in the small group.
I didn't see him at first, but Perry was already there, taking pictures. He was white, but nobody took notice of him. I wondered how he did that.
I had never been to Tougaloo, and I had never sat in a room with more black people than white people, and neither had I wondered about how that might feel, being one of a few. I didn't like it one bit because there was no way to blend in.
I didn't make eye contact with anyone. I looked down at my shoes or I picked off the rest of the pink polish from my nails, while my mother showed slides of paintings of virgins, Old Testament patriarchs, bloodied St. Sebastians, and Jesuses getting beaten by the mobs. I looked up to see a few students listening. One was asleep. Her le
cture was on religious icons and martyrs from the past, but it felt as if she were suggesting that this past had everything to do with our lives right then.
The students who listened sometimes nodded their heads in agreement. At the end, they clapped. Someone, not Perry, snapped a picture. I felt clearly then that the students who listened liked her and what she said, and it surprised me because it was only my mother.
***
Monday morning after the lecture at Tougaloo, my mother and I found the flowerpots at our front door knocked over, the dark, glossy leaves of our sasanqua bushes trampled, and the words WE'RE WATCHING painted in red on our front door. Garbage was all over our lawn and it wasn't even our garbage. We both started picking up the lawn when we saw that among the garbage was that morning's paper with my mother's picture there on the front page of the Clarion-Ledger under a headline that read "Local Professor Addresses All-Negro Crowd." There she was, my mom, standing in that auditorium at Tougaloo, her mouth open and her hands raised in the air as though she were speaking to a crowd of hundreds.
"Your picture's in the paper," I said. "That should be good."
"No," my mother said. "Not good."
Neither one of us said anything else. My mother just put her hand over her mouth. There was another, smaller photo. I looked closer. In the bigger photo my mother looked as though she were convincing a crowd of something even though she was just talking to a few people about art. I was in the smaller picture, the one with the few people there clustered together. I looked closer at my tiny figure, the only white person. I couldn't help but notice how tightly Tine's old shirt fit across my chest.
This was way after what had happened in Montgomery, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man, and even after the bombings, fire hoses, and police dogs in Birmingham, where Bull Connor unleashed the KKK on a group of Freedom Riders on Mother's Day.
I, for one, did not want to get involved in any of that. I just wanted to fit in to this place just as we had fit in to all the other towns we had lived in, go along like everyone else, do whatever it was we were supposed to do, let whatever was supposed to happen happen. I intended to live my life staying out of the way.
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