Nora, Nora

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “It ain’t for you, though it ought to be,” she said. “Your feet gon’ be stickin’ out the door of that little old room before long. I reckon we’re going to have a guest in the guest room pretty soon, and it looks like the hind axle of hard times. Couldn’t nobody sleep in here without choking to death on the dust.”

  “A guest?” Peyton said stupidly. She could not make Clothilde’s words fit into any context she knew. “What guest?”

  “Your Cousin Nora coming to see us. She gon’ stay a little while. Your daddy called from his office this afternoon; I reckon she called him there. He said to get the room ready and to tell you he had to go into Atlanta to the courthouse this evening and not to wait up for him. He’ll see you in the morning. Oh, and your Aunt Augusta said she’d pick you up at nine in the morning, and to wear your Easter dress and straw hat.”

  Peyton’s head spun. She clung to the top of the old cherry bureau, which gleamed now with new polish.

  “What cousin? I don’t know any Cousin Nora,” she said. “I never heard of any Cousin Nora. Who is she? How old is she?” Peyton thought with hatred and alarm of blond curls and rosy cheeks and dancing little feet, and a cherub curled into her father’s lap.

  “She your mama’s younger cousin’s girl,” Clothilde said. “I never met her. Her mama and your mama had some kind of falling-out right after Miss Lila Lee and your daddy got married, and your mama didn’t talk about her, least not that I ever heard. I reckon Nora is your second cousin, and she’d be about—oh, maybe thirty now. Seem to me they lived in Florida someplace. I know she’s coming in from Key West.”

  Peyton felt a great gust of terror, and then anger. What was happening here? Had the entire cosmos gone mad?

  “Well, I’m not going to talk to her,” she said, her voice trembling. “She can stay up here in this room, and I’ll stay down there in mine. I’ll eat in my room. I don’t know any cousins, and I don’t want any visitors. Does Daddy even know her?”

  “Not too good, I don’t think she come up here for a visit when she real little, but he wasn’t home much. Nora born a long time after your mama and her cousin stop talking.”

  “Well, why is he letting her stay here if he doesn’t even know her?” Peyton cried. “She’s not even his cousin, and she’s not mine, really. For all he knows she might steal our things, or be coming just to get money from him.…”

  “Because she your mama’s kin, and yours, and it’s what you do for kin,” Clothilde said severely. “Just listen to yourself, Peyton. Your mama was famous for her hospitality and good manners, and here you think her little cousin gon’ steal the silver. You got a nice house and a good daddy; you ought to be glad to share a little of what you got with people not as lucky as you.”

  “How do you know she’s not as lucky as me?”

  “Well—” Chloe paused. “I guess I don’t. It just seem to me she sounds kind of lonesomelike. She ain’t coming with anybody. She ain’t married, your daddy said. He’ll tell you some more about her at breakfast. And you gon’ be nice to her or I’m gon’ turn you inside out. She almost all you have of your mama’s kin.”

  “How long is she going to stay?” Peyton asked, figuring in her head how she could arrange her days: breakfast so early nobody would be up; straight to the Losers Club after school; into her room the minute she got home; supper in her room with a book.…

  “Not very long, I don’t think. Your daddy say she on her way somewhere up north for a job. She just need a place to stop and rest on the way.”

  “There are about a million motels up on the interstate,” Peyton muttered.

  Clothilde rolled her eyes. “Why should she stay in a motel when she got folks here? Git on now, Peyton, and let me finish. I ain’t even started supper yet.”

  Peyton started to slam out of the room and then stopped.

  “Chloe—Nana knew she was coming! She told me this afternoon there was somebody coming, and it was a woman! She saw it in…the water.”

  Peyton was not about to reveal that her grandmother had seen this troublesome cousin bearing down on her in a bowl of tomato soup.

  “Huh. Most likely she saw it in a Bell telephone,” Clothilde grumbled. “You know your daddy call her every afternoon. Git on now.”

  “So when is she getting here?”

  “I don’t know. Two or three days, your daddy says. By the time she gets here you’ll be all prettied up and have some new clothes and all. She’ll look at her cousin and say, ‘Woo-woo!’”

  It was Clothilde’s most favored superlative. Peyton hated it. She turned wordlessly and stumbled down the stairs and went into her room and closed the door, and she did not come out until Clothilde knocked hard on it and insisted that she eat her supper.

  “I ain’t carrying no trays to children in a temper fit,” Chloe said through the door.

  Peyton got up and shambled out into the breakfast room and ate tuna-fish casserole and green beans. In the entire time she ate, she did not look up at Clothilde in the kitchen, and she did not speak.

  That night she showed herself her movies again, all of them, the entire tapestry of McKenzie life unrolling on a white sheet in a dark room. If her father came home before she slept, she did not know it. She could not have heard him over the whir of the projector. When she finally did sleep, it was to dream of flying, a wonderful dream she had had only a few times since childhood. She woke with the parabolas of flight still on her skin, wind still in her mouth and hair, and she stretched and smiled with the remembrance of it.

  And then she remembered the other thing, that the stranger who was her own blood was coming, and that the only important thing was to manage never to meet her before she left again.

  4

  You have a little bitty head in proportion to your neck,” Mr. Antoine said, standing back and squinting at Peyton in the mirror. “And you’re really long and thin through the waist and legs. I think we’ll balance that with an extravagant cloud of curls. Really feminine and soft around your face—it’s sort of sharp, isn’t it? And maybe just a few highlights at the hairline to bring out your nice eyes. How does that sound?”

  Peyton, feeling pinheaded and as attenuated as an El Greco, did not answer. Indeed, since Aunt Augusta picked her up that morning in her clifflike Lincoln, Peyton had said as little as it was humanly possible to say without incurring her aunt’s wrath.

  “That sounds lovely, don’t you think?” Aunt Augusta said. She was hovering behind the chair in Rich’s Beauty Salon, where Peyton sat dripping-haired and swathed in a pink drape, steadfastly regarding her clenched hands. It was hard to tell to whom Aunt Augusta spoke. Mr. Antoine, probably, Peyton thought. Or perhaps herself. Her aunt kept glancing at her reflection in the huge lighted mirror while Mr. Antoine danced around Peyton like a dervish, darting in to snip, fluff, stand back, snip again. Mr. Antoine was willow-thin and fox-faced, with black hair slicked straight back, and he wore slender black trousers that cupped his little round buttocks, and a white shirt with a black bow tie. A certificate on the wall of his cubicle said that he had graduated from the Peach State School of Beauty and Makeup Artistry, though it did not say when. Very recently, Peyton thought. It was obvious that Mr. Antoine did not shave much yet. She supposed that he was what people considered elegant, even though you could detect, under the fluting of his voice, a whine that spoke of outhouses and pickup trucks.

  “So did you get bubble gum in your hair, or what?” he said to Peyton as he snipped. “I see that a lot. Not to worry. You left us plenty to work with. Not like some of the girls I’ve seen, who didn’t leave enough even to make a pin curl. And you have nice, strong, shiny hair. You’re going to leave here looking like Sandra Dee.”

  Peyton closed her eyes then. She did not open them as he worked in the permanent solution, which felt cold on her scalp and smelled of sulfur-scented roses. She did not open them when he pulled her hair smartly onto rollers, or put her under the dryer. Before long the comforting, droning heat inside her own sma
ll cave soothed her into a drowse. It seemed hours later when Mr. Antoine shook her awake for what he called the comb-out. Peyton opened her eyes then, but she did not look into the mirror.

  He combed and brushed and tugged and fluffed and sprayed. He hummed tunelessly under his breath as he worked. Peyton thought it was “Que Sera, Sera,” but she couldn’t be sure. She smiled grimly to herself. Truer words were never hummed.

  Finally she heard him step back.

  “Voila!” he cried gaily. “The new you. And just look at you!”

  “Oh, Peyton, it looks just lovely,” Aunt Augusta trilled.

  Peyton lifted her eyes. Her stomach lurched. She thought she was going to throw up her cereal then and there on Mr. Antoine’s elegant pointed shoes.

  All you saw was the hair. It was a tall, round helmet with a perfectly smooth exterior, inside which a surf of tiny curls and waves swirled. Crazily, Peyton thought of clothes storming in the porthole of a washing machine, of glinting, voracious fish milling in a round glass fishbowl. Underneath the helmet’s surface her hair raged and writhed like the nest of baby snakes she and Ben Player had uncovered one day in their grandmother’s rock garden. You could have bounced a nickel off the surface.

  And it was blond. Butter yellow. Cadmium yellow.

  She could not speak, and lifted her eyes wildly to Aunt Augusta in the mirror. Augusta McKenzie smiled back. Mr. Antoine hovered and fluffed and pursed his mouth and fluffed again.

  “You’re an entirely different person, Peyton,” her aunt said. “You look years older. There’s absolutely nothing babyish about you now. You are a blank slate, and we’ll make a work of art of you.”

  Peyton still could not speak. Were they both insane? Could neither of them see what they had done to her? She felt her breathing begin to accelerate until her heart pounded and she felt lightheaded.

  “Oh,” she said, trying to suck air into her laboring lungs.

  “Told you you’d love it,” Mr. Antoine said, and he whirled away into another cubicle to answer a telephone.

  “Truly, isn’t it remarkable?” her aunt said happily, leaving a handsome tip for Mr. Antoine and guiding Peyton out of the chair and toward the salon door.

  “Yes,” Peyton whispered.

  “I think we’ll do a little something extra before lunch,” Augusta McKenzie said. “Your hair is lovely, but it sort of overpowers your thin little face. I think we’ll go down to Max Factor and get you made up. Nothing garish, of course, just a little blush and shadow and pink lipstick, to pop out those eyes and that mouth. Would you like that? Come on, Peyton, we have to hurry if we’re going to get you done before the fashion show starts. It’s on the first floor.”

  Peyton found to her horror that she could do nothing but follow her aunt out of the salon. Her legs and arms trembled so that she could hardly stand, and she was giddy from her traitorous breath. Blindly she reached out and took her aunt’s arm. All down the interminable escalator ride she held on for dear life.

  Augusta squeezed her hand.

  “Well, this turned out to be fun, now, didn’t it?” her aunt said, smiling. “You seem older already. We’re like a couple of girls, skipping school and out for a shopping spree. I haven’t had such fun in a long time.”

  Peyton let her aunt lead her to the Max Factor counter, as docilely as a lamb to the slaughterer’s knife. There was nothing more they could do to her. Whatever they did would pale beside the hair. Peyton sat down on a tall stool while her aunt conferred with a skeletal woman whose white-blond hair was pulled back so severely that her eyes and nostrils flared, and whose lashes were laden with black sludge. She closed her eyes again. She would endure. It would be over. They would go home. She would do something to the hair, something, anything. And then she would let herself sink down into J. D. Salinger, hover there, dream there, and from there slide into sleep. She felt a soft brush dancing over her face, and the blond woman’s birdlike fingers probing at her eyelids, and a thick smear of something that smelled like bubble gum being slicked onto her mouth. Peyton went far away behind her closed eyes and waited.

  When she was small, Peyton had learned a trick. It was to look at things without seeing them. It involved a certain slackening of the muscles around her eyes, a tiny blurring of focus that let her see masses and color but no detail. She did not know how she did it, but it served her well. She stared directly into the face of her angry aunt, looked with dispassion on the bodies of pets killed in the street, watched entire coy reels of female sexual behavior in Hygiene without ever registering either the impact or the import of them.

  She did this now when her aunt caroled, “Well, just look at our debutante!” and the skeleton woman said, “You’re better than pretty, dear. You’re going to be such a distinguished-looking woman,” and squirted her with a spritz of something that stung her lips and eyelids and smelled vaguely of Mum’s stick deodorant.

  Peyton looked, blurring her eyes. She saw nothing but color: the yellow aureole that she supposed was the hair, two pink blotches that must be blush, a slash of deeper pink that was undoubtedly the Tender Rose lipstick that the skeleton lady had extolled. Above the cheeks and mouth were two round black pits that could only be her eyes.

  “Wow,” she said, not seeing.

  “Wow, indeed,” her aunt said. “Everybody will think you’re in the fashion show. Let’s get you these things, and I can help you practice putting them on until you’ve got it down. It takes a little practice or it looks unnatural.”

  “No shit,” Peyton whispered. All right, then. Just add it to the hair, another dreadful thing that could be fixed when she got home. Only a matter of soap and water…

  They ate frozen fruit salad and little chicken-salad sandwiches and watched tall young women, as skinny as Peyton but so different as to have just landed from Uranus, prance and preen down a runway and out into the tearoom, where other, seated women smiled and murmured and spoke to them. The girls held up price tags and smiled back. In Peyton’s squinted haze, they all looked like slender black or blue or pink herons, all neck and mouth and stilt legs, all as long and thin as a pencil stroke. For all she knew, they were all offering the same outfit, in different colors.

  “Do you see anything you like, Peyton?” Aunt Augusta said. “Not that you could wear these yet; it’ll be a while before you can fill them out. But the Tween Shop down on Two has some lovely things, quite grown up and smart. We’ll stop on the way out. Your daddy wanted me to get you a couple of dressy dresses and one or two school things. We’ll get shoes and bags later. I think this is enough for one day, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” Peyton said, almost soundlessly.

  They stopped at the Tween Shop, a terrible place of posturing prepubescent mannequins with impossibly slim waists and gently swollen breasts, most wearing pencil strokes of pink or blue or yellow, a few in shirtwaists with drifts of skirt and neat little collars and belts. A curly, flowered placard said that these offerings were suitable for young misses aged eleven to fourteen. Peyton didn’t see any difference between the plastic mannequins and the prancing girls upstairs in the tearoom. She knew that no matter what they put on her face or head or body, she wasn’t ever going to look like the women of Rich’s Department Store, corporeal or in-.

  “You pick something out,” she said to her aunt, looking around for a vista that did not contain a mirror. Apparently young misses spent a lot of time regarding their budding selves in mirrors. “I can’t decide.”

  Aunt Augusta and a clucking saleslady riffled along racks of clothes, pulling out a dress here and a skirt and blouse there, until the saleslady was laden with preteenery like a donkey.

  “Let’s just slip these on in the dressing room,” the lady began.

  “No,” Peyton said. “I’m awfully tired. Aunt Augusta, you pick some things for me and let’s take them home and I’ll try them there. My head really hurts…”

  Augusta McKenzie, who had a keen sense of how far Peyton could be pushed, tutted and shook h
er head and dug among the clothes like a terrier. She pulled out a horrifying cerise dress and jacket—“Let’s get some color into that face”—and a dark, plain sheath with a little coat to match, which she said would be nice for church. She selected two slim skirts and white blouses with little round collars, and one of the shirtwaists, blue-sprigged with tiny flowers and also adorned with a little round collar. It came with a gold circle pin on one wing of the collar.

  “A Villager,” the saleslady said solemnly, as if she were offering a Fabergé egg. “All the girls are buying them. Our Teen Board wears them. You’ll just live in this.”

  “You can try the others on at home, Peyton, but I want you to go in there and put this little dress on now,” her aunt said. “I want you to wear it home. I want your father to see you. He’s going to be so surprised and proud.”

  Surprised is right, Peyton thought. She, too, knew the boundaries of her aunt’s goodwill. Obediently, she let Aunt Augusta and the saleslady lead her into a small, curtained cubicle walled with mirrors, and let them divest her of the blue dress with the sash and puffed sleeves that she had worn for Easter for the past two years, and closed her eyes and let the legendary Villager slide down over her rigid hair and down her body. She stood, desperately unfocused, as the saleslady buttoned up the front of the bodice and pulled the belt snug around her waist.

  “We’re going to have to put another hole or two in that belt,” the saleslady said. “And if I might make a suggestion, there are some sweet preteen bras in Lingerie, with just a little light padding to give clothes some shape. This would fit a lot better with one of those. Shall I just run over and pick a few out? I promise they’re going to make such a difference.”

  “No,” Peyton all but wept. “I won’t wear one. You can buy five hundred for all I care, but I’m not wearing any bra. I don’t have anything to put in it. I wouldn’t wear one if I did.”

  Aunt Augusta raised her eyebrows at the saleslady and shook her head, smiling ruefully. The saleslady smirked back.