“It’s hard to grow up sometimes,” the lady said. Peyton did not know if she was speaking to her or to her aunt. “We often really don’t want to do it. But it’s always easier if we have the right pretty things to wear.”
Then you wear them, Peyton shrieked in her head. But she could not have spoken even if someone had held a gun to her head. Her stomach lurched.
“Why don’t you just pick out a couple that you think would be suitable and add them to my charge?” Aunt Augusta said. “I guess the smallest size they have. Do they make them small enough?”
“Oh, yes. Sometimes our girls ask for them at ten or eleven. It makes them feel grownup. The sizes start at twenty-eight triple-A. I think this young lady would do fine in a thirty double-A. It has the padding, after all. Now, could I just show you a little garter belt and some stockings? She’s really going to need them to look finished in these pretty things.”
“Bring them,” Aunt Augusta said. The saleslady scurried away, happily gorged on a fat charge account.
“Peyton,” her aunt said, turning to her in annoyance. “You might say thank you, at least. That lady has put in a lot of time with you. I’ve put in a lot of time with you. Your father has put a lot of money into this little trip—”
“I think I’m going to throw up,” Peyton said.
The trot between the Tween and Junior departments to the restroom seemed endless. Swallowing hard against bile, Peyton plodded dumbly behind her aunt, who was leading her by the hand and saying, “You can hold it, now. You just hold it. You know you don’t want to throw up in the middle of Rich’s.…”
Peyton did hold it, but only just. She lurched into one of the stalls and gagged and vomited before she could even latch the door. She heaved and retched until she thought she would begin to bring up the lining of her stomach. When she finally stopped, she was weak and sweaty and splattered. She leaned against the cold steel of the cubicle and breathed in deep, desperate gasps.
Presently her aunt opened the cubicle and produced a handful of wet paper towels. She began to dab and scrub at Peyton’s dress and swiped at her face with the cool brown paper.
“Come on out here and let’s wash your face,” she said, whether in concern or annoyance Peyton could not have said. “Oh, goodness. Just look at you. Your makeup is all smeared.…”
Peyton stood mute, splashing her face in the sink when her aunt told her to, rinsing her mouth, letting Augusta pat her dry with fresh brown towels. She did not look in the mirror or anywhere else. Her eyes were firmly shut.
“Better now?” Augusta said. “You’re looking better: your color’s coming back. Here, let’s just touch you up a little. I wonder if it was that chicken salad—you’re really not used to rich food. Come on, let’s get you home. We’ll get a Coca-Cola in the parking lot. That’ll settle your tummy.”
Peyton found that she could not walk out of the ladies’ room without opening her eyes, so she did, looking fixedly away from the mirror. They fell on a middle-aged Negro woman in starched black, with a tiny white apron. The woman sat impassively on a stool beside the end of the counter, a basket full of fresh towels and hand lotions on one side of her and a discreet little china dish full of coins on the other. She looked a great deal like Clothilde, or like Clothilde would have looked if she had been gotten up like a French maid, with a ruffle of white organdy on her massive head and narrow black slippers on her feet. This lady had slits cut into the slippers through which flesh protruded like bubbles in hot tar, and she did not rise from her stool.
Peyton felt suddenly soothed. Here, then, was succor: this woman’s stout arms were made for enfolding, her huge shelf of bosom was designed for pressing a hot face into. She wouldn’t, of course, but still, the arms and bosom were there. She smiled at the woman.
The woman did not smile back. She stared at Peyton with such level malevolence that Peyton almost gasped aloud. She looked into the mirror to see what the woman saw that could engender such contempt.
She saw a ghastly, smirking succubus with wild, stiff yellow hair and smears of pink and black on her white face, the skirts of a silly puffy dress swirling about her, the bodice splotched with damp. She saw what the woman saw: a flossily dressed teenager whose mama had spent too much money on her makeup and hairstyling, who had just thrown up her little ladies’ lunch in the toilet and had had to be dabbed and wiped and cosseted like a baby. The woman saw girls like her every day. She hated them.
Peyton read the hate and turned away. She wanted to shout, “This is not me; don’t think I’m like this! They did this to me, but I can undo it all.…”
But she did not. She followed Augusta McKenzie down the escalator to the basement parking lot and sat there dumbly while their car was brought around, sipping the Coca-Cola her aunt bought her and knowing in her sick heart that there had been nothing asked of her, no test put to her, that she had not, on this day, failed.
In the Lincoln Peyton put her head back against the seat and pretended to sleep.
“You go right ahead,” her aunt said. “You’ve had a busy day. You’ll be all fresh when you model the new Peyton McKenzie for your papa.”
Nausea stirred like a sleepy snake in Peyton’s stomach, and she swallowed hard against it. She turned her face to her window, away from Aunt Augusta. She would never in this world sleep, not on this day, she thought. The helmet of curls itched and was so stiff with spray that her head bounced against the headrest, and in the backseat the green Rich’s bags holding the clothes and the loathsome bras and garter belt crouched and pulsed like poison toads.
She heard her aunt click on the radio, and wonderfully, miraculously, Andy Williams’s plummy tenor drifted into the car. He was singing “Moon River,” and Peyton felt her tight chest ease a little and her eyelids begin to soften. Breakfast at Tiffany’s was her favorite movie in the world. The hard mica-glitter of New York, the lost sweetness of Audrey Hepburn, the sheer tenderness of George Peppard filled her with a tremulous joy so intense that she often had to close her eyes against it. Peyton knew she would go to New York when she was older, to that New York where, as Holly Golightly said, nothing bad could ever happen to you at Tiffany’s. She would look like Audrey Hepburn. “She has a long neck and big feet and funny eyebrows, too,” she had breathed to the Losers Club after her first viewing of the film.
“Yeah, and about a million trillion dollars,” Boot jeered cheerfully.
“And a waist and at least enough boobs to fill out a dress,” Ernie observed.
“Well, she’s grown-up,” Peyton had said sullenly. “You just wait till I am.”
“I wouldn’t hold my breath,” said Ernie.
But Peyton continued to be charmed and soothed and brought to the brink of joy by the movie, and by its theme song. They became her amulet against the backwater that was Lytton, against whatever in the world was currently pursuing her. Something usually was. Peyton snuggled down into the supple beige leather—“Like being inside a buttered biscuit,” she had once told her father—and drifted off down Moon River with Andy and Holly.
She woke only when the car stopped at last, and for a moment she did not know where she was. And then she remembered not only where but who and what, and felt the sour sickness uncoil itself again.
She opened her eyes slowly, keeping them slightly squinted so that if she had to she could call up the invisibility again. Perhaps, if it was still early enough, she could get to her room and lock the door and begin the undoing of the horror before anyone saw her.
What she saw was her father and Clothilde, wrestling a mattress down the front steps and onto the lawn. Her father had on his white office shirt, but the sleeves were rolled and the collar was unbuttoned, and his hair fell over his face. Peyton had never seen him like this. Even on Saturdays and holidays Frazier McKenzie wore his starched plaid shirts with the cuffs and collars buttoned. His forearms were corded and brown, like wisteria vines. She could see the sheen of sweat on his face. Somehow the sight of him made her want to
avert her eyes, as if she had seen him naked. Behind him, at the other end of the bouncing mattress, Chloe shone with sweat in the muzzy sun, like basalt. Peyton did not move, and they did not hear the car. Was it possible that they might finish their task and go back into the house without seeing her?
Aunt Augusta tooted the horn gaily.
“Frazier McKenzie, come here and look at your grown-up daughter,” she trilled, and then she got out of the car, the better to see the first viewing of her handiwork. Peyton did not move.
Her father shielded his face against the sun with his hand and stared. Then he walked slowly toward her side of the car, hand still on his forehead. When he reached the car he stopped and stared in. Peyton could not meet his eyes, and then she did.
Sheer shock and revulsion stared back at her. They were gone in an instant, replaced by the squint of his smile, but they had been there.
“Well, my goodness,” her father said. “Get out and let’s have a look at you.”
Peyton sat rooted in the Lincoln.
“She’s had a little upset tummy,” Aunt Augusta offered across the roof of the Lincoln. “She probably needs some iced tea and a nap. But first we’re going to have a fashion show.…”
Peyton jerked her door open and leapt out and ran past her father and the wide-eyed Clothilde and into the house, and into her room, and closed and locked her door. She heard the murmur of voices out on the lawn, a hum like bees, with an occasional fragment of a sentence spiking up: “…at least she might have said thank you. All these new things, and before she got sick such pretty makeup. Look, she’s just left everything in the car. Frazier, I really think…”
More murmuring, and then her father’s voice: “…maybe a little extreme for her age, Augusta. Let her get used to it. Let us get used to it. Good Lord, I didn’t even recognize her.”
“Well, I guess ingratitude runs in the family,” she heard her aunt huff, and shortly after that the solid thunk of the Lincoln’s door closing, and the soft growling of its motor.
She jerked off the vaunted Villager and left it in a pile on the floor, and pulled out her soft, faded blue jeans and a T-shirt that said “Daytona Beach” and crawled onto her bed and pulled the faded afghan that her grandmother had made for her at her birth up over her chin and ears. She did not move. She did not hear any more talk, or any sound at all, from outside her door for a long, long time. By the time Chloe came to her door, her windows had darkened with the still-winter twilight, and she was stiff and cramped from lying so long in one position.
“Peyton, you come on out to supper now,” Chloe called. “Your daddy gone to a board of stewards’ meeting up to the church, he say he want to see you before you go to bed. He say he think you looks pretty as a princess, and he wants to tell you himself. And I think we can fix that hair a little bit so it ain’t so hard, and take some of that stuff off your face. It’s gon’ be all right. Come on out now, and after supper you can show me your new clothes. Your aunt left them for you.”
Peyton did not reply, and she did not move. Presently Clothilde went heavily away.
She was back in an hour or so.
“I got to go home,” she said. “Ain’t nobody with Boot. I’m settin’ this tray right here outside your door. You stop actin’ like a baby now and come on out and eat it. Your daddy don’t have time for this. Your Cousin Nora comin’ sometime tomorrow. You don’t want her to think you a baby in a tantrum.”
Peyton still did not reply. She heard Clothilde mutter, and soon the closing of the front door, and then silence and darkness fell down over the house. Peyton padded to her door and opened it and pulled the tray inside so that her father would not see it sitting there, and set it on her desk and crawled back into her bed under her afghan. The smell of the food pooled thickly in the back of her throat: pork chops and sweet potatoes and green beans that Nana had canned the summer before. She got up and dropped an old T-shirt over the tray and got back into bed. Perhaps she slept. Perhaps not.
She heard her father at her door some time later, dimly.
“Peyton, you awake?” he called softly.
She did not answer. She lay very still, motionless, silent, until at last, eons later, she heard him click off the television set and start up the stairs to bed. She waited another hour, just to be sure, and then she got up and tiptoed through the dark to the big downstairs bathroom and ran a tub of water. She ran it very slowly so that her father would not hear it thundering into the big porcelain tub. It took a long time to fill.
Peyton got into the bath and submerged herself. She felt the hair helmet soften stickily. She got the sliver of Ivory soap from the soap dish and scrubbed her head until it stung. The water around her yellowed like urine. Some kind of rinse, then. Good. One down.
She scrubbed herself all over, then got out of the tub, wrapped her hair in a towel, dressed, and stole back to her room. She sat down in front of the maple dressing table and closed her eyes for a long time, and then she jerked the towel away.
A towering mound of dun-colored Brillo sat atop her head, lightless and dense. She could not get her comb through it. It was already as dry as rabbit tobacco in the fall.
Peyton got up and went out of her room again. She took with her the afghan and a pillow from her bed. She got an apple and some cheese and a Coca-Cola from the refrigerator and went outside into the moony dark and climbed her dogwood tree.
Over the years, since she was very small, her father had constructed a sort of shelter there for her, more elaborate than a platform but less so than a roofed tree house. It had railings and one solid wall at the back, against the tree trunk. Two years before she had dragged an old air mattress up there, and now she pushed it against the wall, and propped her pillow on it, and lay down and covered herself with her afghan. She was not cold except for her wet head; the night was soft and so still that she could smell the faint, rotten curl of sulfur that people in Lytton always said was from the big mills over in Birmingham.
She prepared to cry, but instead she slept.
She awoke with a jolt of body and heart, and pearly morning light was streaming through the tree’s bare branches, and her father was calling her from the ground.
Clothilde’s voice joined his, shrill and angry.
“Come down from there right now, Peyton,” her father said, and his voice was both cold and weary.
“Well, I hope you happy. Your cousin here waitin’ to meet you, and you stuck up in that tree like an ol’ possum. She drove all night, she say. You git down from there this minute,” Clothilde squalled.
Peyton did not look down at them, and she did not answer. She unfocused her eyes into the invisibility squint and looked instead out toward the street. A blur of pure, shocking flamingo pink flamed there against the pitted asphalt. She brought it into focus. It was a Thunderbird coupe, a fairly old one, from what she knew of those exotic cars, covered with road dust and bug-speckled of windshield, but still as fabulous in the morning light as a roc, its pinkness like wet bubble gum, like azaleas, like all the pink things in the world. Nobody in Lytton had a Thunderbird.
There was a rustle of leaves and a creak of the steps to the tree house, and a woman’s face appeared over its edge. It could have been any age at all. It was freckled with copper and long and sharp-chinned, and a thick sheaf of dark-red hair fell over one of its palegreen eyes. It was an exaggerated face, almost a grotesque one, and Peyton simply stared. Then the mouth quirked up into a smile, and it was transformed into something near beauty.
“Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” the woman said, and her voice was as slow and rich as cooling fudge, with a little hill of laughter in it. It was a wonderful voice, magical.
The woman swung herself up onto the platform and sat down, legs crossed, chin on hands. Her arms and legs were so long as to look almost simian, and in her blue jeans she was very thin. She looked solemnly at Peyton. Peyton stared back, as mesmerized as a cobra in a fakir’s basket.
“I’m your Cousin Nora Fi
ndlay,” the woman said. “I’ve driven all night to meet you, and I’m tired and I need my breakfast, and I want you to have yours with me. I don’t have any other cousins. Then we’ll do something about that hair. Sweet Jesus, what on earth were they thinking? How long have you been up here in this tree?”
Peyton put her head down and began to cry, and her Cousin Nora pulled her over until she was pressing against her shoulder, and Peyton cried and Nora held her until Peyton had cried herself out, and then they climbed down the tree to breakfast.
5
The first thing you noticed about Nora Findlay, Peyton thought, was that she gave off heat, a kind of sheen, like a wild animal, except that hers was not a dangerous ferality, but an aura of sleekness and high spirits. There was a padding, hip-shot prowl to her walk, and she moved her body as if she were totally unconscious of it, as if its suppleness and sinew were something she had lived with all her life. She was tall and a little stooped, with long tanned legs and the same blur of coppery freckles on her arms that her face wore. With her slanted yellow-green eyes and thick, tumbled red hair, Peyton thought she looked like some sort of wildcat: a leopard, a ruddy puma, a cheetah. She had a long Roman nose and a full mouth and small, soft breasts obviously free of any restraint: you could see the nubs of her nipples under the T-shirt she wore. Peyton averted her eyes, but it never seemed to occur to Nora Findlay that her breasts, fettered or otherwise, were matters for concern.
Clothilde had bacon and eggs waiting for them in the yellow breakfast room. It was still very early; dew silvered the grass under the dogwood tree as they walked to the house. Peyton had a couple of hours yet before school. She would have liked to retreat to her room and burrow under her covers and think about the enormities of the past twelve hours, especially this strange, leonine cousin who had arrived in a pink chariot and laid siege to her tree. But she knew that she did not dare. Disapproval of her shone out of Chloe’s face like steam off asphalt, and she could still feel the cold weight of her father’s eyes on her and hear the steel in his voice from that morning. She was in disgrace, and she knew it. There was nothing for it but to sit down at the blue lacquered table and wait for what would come. For a long time no one spoke, and she did not raise her eyes from her plate. There was only the chink of silver on china as Nora ate.
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