“You mean he’s Frankenstein,” Merle said, and held his arms up in monster position.
“Frankincense,” I repeated. “That’s the perfect name for R.W. Quincy.” I surprised myself and Misty by speaking out. Charity had given Misty the new name Bathsheba, because they had had a little disagreement over the exact words of “Bend Me, Shape Me.”
“Why is Frankincense such a good name, Agape?” Charity asked, the feigned sweetness with which she had named me diminishing as fast as you could say “Day by Day” or Godspell. Charity and her friend, Brotherly Love, were saints until you crossed them.
“Because he has a very distinct smell,” I said, and braced myself for bolts of lightning and rolls of thunder or, worse, those who were now going to say that they would pray for me. Merle grinned at me, I think more impressed than anything, and R.W. was not fazed. He just started saying that I had “leopardsy” just like in the Bible. Merle slapped R.W. and called him “Franko,” looked at me again and grinned.
My greatest fear was that my name would be the next to appear under his on some graffiti board. All over the school Merle wrote his name great big, Merle Hucks, and no one, not the teachers or principals could figure out when he did it. Then, within a day where Merle wrote his name, someone with a different-color ink, would change the h to an f and then write a girl’s name below. Misty’s name had appeared once but mine never had. Merle himself had marked through her name, but she didn’t see it as an insult at all; she said he was calling more attention to her name than all the others that had appeared. Though no one would ever admit it, it was kind of a status symbol to have your name appear there; it was a status symbol in the same way as making out was. At that time I had neither experience. Lord Forgive Me When I Whine.
That last night we had to list our sins and it seemed Misty and I could have filled a book. We lay in a narrow bottom bunk and whispered back and forth long after lights were out and the Woman at the Well had asked us numerous times to shut up. “Bathsheba? Agape? Can you hear me?” she called from the other side of our cabin, but we ignored her, our bodies quivering with laughter, the November chill, the excitement of breaking the rules. “I’ve got to tell you who all I like,” Misty whispered, her breath like Teaberry gum. “I like Dean’s friend, Ronald, you know the tall one?” She squeezed my arm and I nodded. “I still kind of like Todd Bridger, but who doesn’t.” I nodded again. “And”—she twisted my arm, which was our abbreviated way of saying don’t you ever as long as you live repeat a word of this it is graveyard talk—“R.W. Quincy.” She started laughing and I did, too, though I knew that a part of her was serious. “And I like Merle,” I said sarcastically, and laughed in the same way. We lay there shaking, our noses cold as we huddled under our sleeping bags.
“Agape? Bathsheba? I mean it now!”
Oh Lord, forgive me when I whine; it was so easy to sin.
“It’s a birthmark,” Mama said again, all the while rearranging her cornucopia so that it looked like a natural tumbling-forth. “And I don’t think that makeup Mo Rhodes gave her does one bit of good other than to get on her clothes.” Mama looked at Daddy as if they were the only two people in the room. “I just want her to see that she can’t let this ruin her life; there are things we just have to accept.” She said the word as if it carried some special message to him. Accept. I wanted him to ask her why she did not accept Angela. “Why, poor Misty’s weight problem and that orange hair is ten times worse.”
“Think of it as a beauty mark,” my father said, and turned towards me, his warm type-stained hand cupping my cheek, thumb rubbing firmly as if he could erase the mark. “You see, I recently read how there are people these days who have no wisdom teeth at all, none under the gums even when they x-ray.”
“And how much is tea in China?” Mama asked, and broke the spaghetti strands not once, but two, three, four times before dropping them into the boiling water.
“You could’a just fixed rice, Cleva,” he said, and grinned. Then he pulled out a kitchen chair and motioned for me to sit. “Anyway, these folks without their wisdom teeth, well, it’s evolution in action. What happens when people do cut their wisdom teeth?”
“They get wiser.” Mama started chopping the salad lettuce as if she were making slaw.
“They get them pulled,” I said.
“Damn right. Evolution.” My father raised his glass, toasted it softly against my cheek. “One day, wisdom teeth will be extinct and one day everybody will have a beauty mark. You’re just ahead of things.”
“Fred.” Mama stopped her chopping and turned to stare at him, the long kitchen knife held firmly, her knuckles white with the grip. I knew what she wanted to say, things about false hope and false pride, truth, reality and justice and God’s own way.
“She pulled a knife on me,” he said. “It was a dark and steamy night and it all took place there in the kitchen, mayhem and murder.” She just shook her head and turned back to the boiling pot. Steam clouded the kitchen window, erasing the view of the yard and the row of pastel houses, the new Stuckey’s being built in the distance.
“Anyway, some people have beauty marks and some people don’t. Now, take my niece, Angela,” he said, glanced at Mama’s stiff back and then turned back to me. “You remember Angela?” I nodded, anticipating an explosion of some kind. “Well, she has a mole, a little raised mole even, right above her lip.” He pointed with his little finger. “I’m not talking a little tiny mole either. Big, a big mole, except nobody calls it a big mole. No, no, no, it’s known as a beauty mark. Some women draw one on, I’ll tell you, that’s how anxious they are to evolve. Take your mama, for instance.” She didn’t turn but I watched her reflection in the window, shoulders limp as if the steam had taken all of the starch from her body. She just stared at the back of his head, her mouth quivering slightly, cheeks flushed. “Your mama painted herself a great great big mole there on her face. I didn’t know until after we were married that she could wash it off at night.” I knew from the look on her face that there was no truth in that story. She never even glanced at me though I know she was aware that I was watching her. She turned back to the stove and lifted the pot lid to release a thick cloud of steam.
“No, sir, Angela is fully evolved, beauty mark and all.”
“Isn’t it a shame we aren’t all so evolved?” Mama asked, and found her way over to my chair, placing a cold damp hand on my shoulder.
“And I was talking about wisdom teeth.” My dad reached over and put his hand on top of hers and squeezed until she looked up and met him eye to eye. It seemed that they stared at each other forever, their hands heavy on my shoulder. “I didn’t mean to rile you up, Cleva,” he whispered, and then waited for her smile—a weak one but a smile nonetheless. “Anyway, I was in the service with this old boy who had a couple of wisdom teeth pulled, got a hemorrhoidectomy and got circumcised all on the same day.”
“Fred,” Mama said, her face flushed, but with a lingering look of amazement. “I do not believe that.” I didn’t understand the full logistics behind circumcision, only that it involved the penis, which was enough to make me look down at the linoleum.
“He was not feeling real good, I’ll tell you,” he said, and shook his head, stood and grabbed Mama by the waist when she passed his chair. They were almost the same height, and in every way she was broad and rounded, he was lean and angular. As a child I had felt terribly guilty for always thinking of them when I heard the rhyme about Jack Sprat and his wife, so I confessed it to my Sunday school teacher, who unfortunately at the time was Mrs. Poole. For years after, people at church would sometimes refer to us as the Sprats. “Why did you tell her?” Mama had asked, but I hadn’t really known. Now, her hands were up against his chest, her body stiff as he tried to whirl her around. “Anyway, I was talking about evolution.” He paused and laughed. “That old guy with the wisdom teeth? Well, clearly he was not there yet.”
I was never certain which of my dad’s stories were true and which had be
en embellished; I’m not even sure that he himself knew. He always had a joke to tell and for years he was asking things like “Why did Little Moron throw the clock out the window?,” only what I heard was “Little Mo Ryan,” all the while picturing this round little Irishman with red hair and face. Somehow the knowledge of an idiot, a moron, was such a letdown after picturing this whimsical leprechaun, that my father had to find a new target. Pollack jokes were out, due to respect for Madame Marie Sklodowska Curie, and Helen Keller jokes were certainly out of the question. It was then that I realized your best jokes are at someone else’s expense. But whose? We finally agreed, much to my mother’s distaste, that we would tell Theresa Poole jokes. How many Theresa Pooles does it take to screw in a light bulb, and so on.
My favorite one he did that very night while Mama was rearranging her tumbled-forth vegetables. He filled a bowl with water and set it on the table. “This is the public swimming pool of Fulton. It’s the first day and here come all the white people.” He took the salt shaker and shook it over the bowl. “And here come all the black people. This is an integrated pool.” And he shook the pepper all over the bowl. “Everyone was swimming and having a great time when all of a sudden who came to the pool but Mrs. Theresa Poole and, oh, my God, she was in a bathing suit.” He ran around the table with his hands up to the ceiling, then clutched his head, up and down, up and down, while Mama rubbed a cucumber with Crisco to make it shine, all the while shaking her head back and forth. He stopped by the sink and put a little bit of dishwashing liquid on his finger. “She dove in the pool and . . .” He dipped that same finger in the bowl and when he did, all the little grains of pepper flew to the side. Mama turned away so that we wouldn’t see her laugh.
For years he had cut the obituaries from several different newspapers. He kept them in a cigar box, sorting them statistically by age and cause of death and geographical region. He subscribed to the Sunday edition of all the major papers, which arrived in Fulton on about the following Thursday, so it was a routine thing for him to do his cutting on Friday nights during “Gunsmoke.” “Pass me those scissors, Miss Kitty,” he said in Matt Dillon simulation. The only thing that irritated my mother more than this voice was when he imitated Jimmy Durante.
“Please,” Mama said. “I can’t stand when you call her that. Kitty sounds like, well, just like what you see there, like Miss Kitty.” She stood there and shooed a hand at Amanda Blake. “Miss Kitty with too much makeup and a spot drawn on her face. She’s the only woman on the whole show so you know what we’re to think.” I couldn’t help but laugh, all those jokes Misty had told me about Matt Dillon and Miss Kitty while we sat way up in the tree hoping to see some afternoon parkers.
“Matt Dillon sure seems to like her,” he laughed, and went back to his cutting and sorting. “Lots of people draw on their faces, Marilyn Monroe did, for example.”
“Well, she’s a good one to admire.” Mama sat down and opened her mouth as if she were about to comment on all those newspapers, and then stopped herself.
“Most men think so.” He put down his scissors and lit a cigarette. “It seems to me there’s a lot of cancer in California.”
“Well, there are a lot of people.” She stared at his cigarette, eyebrows raised as if to complete her thought, though I knew if he weren’t around and it were Theresa Poole sitting there, she would gladly smoke one herself.
“Little Angela has a beauty mark,” he said, and just that easily I saw it all starting again.
Mama drew in a long breath and let her copy of Fondue Cookery fall to the floor. “What little Angela has is a mole, a dark mole that sticks out just above her lip. And . . .” She stared at the glossy picture of little fondue forks there near her foot. “Smoking is hazardous to your health.”
“It’s a beauty mark,” he dragged out, in an attempt to mimic Festus, who my mama also could not stand, exhaling a stream of smoke aimed right for her. “You could paint one on, Miss Cleva,” he continued. “Why don’t you paint one on?”
She retrieved the book, which had recently prompted her to dip everything imaginable into melted chocolate, and held it in one hand, the fingers of her other hand spread flat, smoothing the material of her skirt. I went into the kitchen to call Misty, but the line was busy so I kept redialing over and over. I could have walked over there, but I really didn’t want to visit as much as I just wanted to get away from Miss Kitty and Festus. In between dialing I could still hear them, those harsh whispers they always used when they were angry but didn’t want me to know. If I walked in there that second, the room would become silent and my dad would tell a joke or she would say, “What about a kiwi in chocolate?” She was all into exotic fruits which the Winn-Dixie of Fulton did not carry.
“Angela has a mole,” she whispered. “A mole. A dark spot. It could be cancerous there beneath her skin. God knows, you come from a long line of strokes and heart attacks, might as well throw in cancer since that’s what you’re so interested in.”
“A beauty mark,” he sang back. “And my mother died of pneumonia.”
I stood listening to Misty’s busy signal and looked through the doorway, where I saw Mama stand, turning her hands over and over as if she didn’t know what to do with them until she found the deep pockets of her robe. “Angela should move to California. Maybe she could get a job of some kind.” I could see the glassiness of her eyes, though she never once turned and looked at me, and when she finally left the room, I gave up calling Misty and went upstairs.
I sat out on the sleeping porch, an afghan pulled around me and watched the lights in the Huckses’ house, bare bulbs casting a glare on curtainless windows and cracked plaster walls. I tried to imagine the life in that house, what it must feel like to be a member of that family, and I realized again I was using my mother’s old trick on myself, imagining the very worst scenario so my own life looked better. I wanted to run over to Misty’s and lie there beside her in the big iron bed, her plump white skin carrying the scent of Intimate, which she had started wearing just that month when she turned fourteen. I wanted to hear her laugh and wipe the little tears that always gathered in the corners of her eyes. I wanted Mo to come in and sit on the end of the bed to tell us good night, the whole house smelling of chocolate and marshmallows just as it had that rainy day last spring when she first talked about having another baby. I wanted to whisper secrets back and forth, the bed shaking with our giggles. I’d tell her everything I knew about Angela and see if she could help me piece it all together.
I sat on the sleeping porch until I finally heard the dull scrape-scraping of the old phonograph needle after about the fiftieth straight run of Bessie Smith’s “Empty Bed Blues.”
“I think you need to get to bed.” My mother was standing in the shadows of the doorway, and though I jumped with the sound of her voice, I didn’t turn. “Let’s get some sleep.” I nodded and it seemed she wanted more from me though I couldn’t imagine what. Finally she turned and I listened as she made her way back down the stairs. I imagined her pulling her cotton gown close around her as she slid under the thick spread; she would lie there as still as death, eyes on the ceiling, hands on her chest, and she would not move once while waiting for my father, who tossed and turned and doodled, writhed and coughed and dreamed in his ink-stained leather chair.
As I sat there, I couldn’t help but feel like someone was watching me right back, someone, God, the Wilkins boys, Merle Hucks or maybe even Angela, crouched and hidden in the darkness, needing to talk to my father about whatever secret they shared. I liked to think there was a guardian angel, someone to look up to, someone I could imagine in a lofty protected part of the sky, who could on a whim simply look down and see me sitting out on the sleeping porch and somehow make sense of my placement in the world.
Having exhausted the Keller biography, I had begun anew, reading and rereading Anne Frank’s diary, hearing her “Dear Kitty” as an endearment of myself. I read the letters so often, so snared by her “Dearest Darling Kitt
y” that sometimes I almost believed that I was her Kitty, and that she was still very much alive and writing her letters, and sometimes I caught myself suddenly filled with hope for her salvation and future. Just as I had imagined the Wilkinses and Annie Sullivan and even Angela, I could close my eyes and see her there in her pinafore, thick dark hair clipped on one side; I could stare at the picture I had seen so many times until it was colored, until her deep blue eyes narrowed with a laugh. Maybe she would describe the changes in herself now that she was getting older, the way she saw Peter in a different light, the way her mother did not understand her at all, the way she would like to hoist the dirty children off the street and in through her window so that she could bathe them and mend their clothes. Her voice came to me with a Southern lilt similar to my own. I had also managed to lift any rough edges and hesitations from the voice of Helen Kellar, which I heard in a rich Southern baritone, a voice very similar to the one I had assigned to Angela, since I could no longer remember how she sounded.
I wanted to cling to the sensation that there was someone out there for me, someone simply out there, hovering, loving. I wanted to believe that I, too, would one day be there, uplifted and held by the truth of it all, that there would be someone out on a sleeping porch crouched and shivering while the world spun back around to day, someone who would wonder what purpose there could be to it all, and I could, with the breath of a weeping willow, with the honesty I felt when I looked into Misty’s clear blue eyes, lean down and whisper an answer as soft as ducks down.
Six
It was during Christmas vacation, a late afternoon, when Angela came to our house and waited on the front porch until my father got home. She looked so different from the way I remembered, and yet I knew immediately it was her. She was wearing low-slung bell-bottom jeans with a chain belt and a fuzzy fringed vest made out of what looked like pinto pony. Her dark red hair was parted down the middle and clipped back from her face; she wore large gold hoop earrings and a suede choker with a peace sign sewn in Indian beads.
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