She smelled cigarette smoke then, a smell so alien in this house that it was as shocking as fresh blood would be, and she looked up at her cousin. Nora sat in the chair across from her father’s, where her brother had always sat. No one had occupied it since Buddy’s death. Nora was wound sinuously around the chair, her head tipped far back. She was smoking a cigarette from the fresh pack of Salems that sat on the table beside her, and her eyes were closed. Still with them closed, she smiled her wide Halloween smile.
“Have I broken a real taboo?” she said in the rich, slow, melted-chocolate voice. “Am I going to have to sneak behind the woodshed to smoke?”
She opened her eyes then, and swept the heavy hair off her face with one long hand, and turned to Peyton.
“Might as well join you in Coventry,” she said. “Two’s company, they say.”
“Coventry?” Peyton said in a small, tight voice, despite her determination to get through this meal without speaking. All her apprehension had come flooding back at the sight of this bronzy, coiled stranger at her breakfast table. The earlier moment of desperate, cowardly tears and the feel of succoring arms was gone as if it had never been.
“It means disgrace. For some reason, being sent to Coventry means the ultimate punishment; it means shunning. I don’t know why. It means we’re both of us in deep shit.”
Peyton gasped. She had never heard a word such as that used in this house. Frazier McKenzie did not swear, nor did he use slang. It was somehow a part of him, a piece of whatever had buried his laughter deep. The word hung in the warm air like a hovering yellow jacket, and in the ensuing silence Peyton heard the subterranean rumble of the furnace coming on and heard the snorted “Huh!” from Clothilde that meant her direst disapproval. Clothilde did not chide her white family at the time of their indiscretions, but Peyton knew she would hear about this later. She wondered if Chloe would tackle Nora directly.
“I’m sorry, Clothilde,” Nora called out. “I have a bad mouth on me. I know I do. I’m trying to do better. I hope I haven’t blotted my copybook too badly.”
She smiled into the kitchen at Chloe.
“It ain’t like I never heard ‘shit’ before,” Chloe said. “It just that Mr. Frazier ain’t gon’ want Peyton to hear it.”
“It’s not like I haven’t heard it before, either,” Peyton surprised herself by saying. And then she looked down at her plate and blushed. She would speak no more to this usurping stranger. Her cousin was not going to charm her with sweet cigarette smoke and soft “shit”s.
Nora seemed comfortable with the silence. She finished her coffee and told Clothilde it was the very nectar of the gods, and Chloe poured her more, and only when she had finished that and smoked another Salem, finally tapping it out on the edge of her saucer, did she move to rise. Peyton saw that her hands were long and beautiful, and her nails were perfectly formed ovals, innocent of polish. The hands were the only thing that did not seem incidental about her Cousin Nora, did not seem, if you would, offhanded. Somewhere in her mind Peyton filed the knowledge. Here was a source of pride, then. Here was a vulnerability.
She was completely unaware of the thought, but still, it warmed her.
Nora stretched and yawned and said, “I have never eaten a better breakfast. I mean that, Clothilde. It is all right if I call you that?”
“What else you gon’ call me?” Chloe grumbled, but it was not one of her wholehearted grumbles. Peyton looked over at her. There was something akin to the butterfly beginnings of a smile at the corners of Chloe’s black eyes.
“I’m bushed,” Nora said, getting up from the chair. Peyton saw that she wore tennis shoes over bare feet, and that her feet were small and neat, out of all proportion to her height.
“You upstairs in the back bedroom on the right,” Clothilde said. “Mr. Frazier already took your bags up before he went to work. There’s a bathroom next door. Mr. Frazier said to let you sleep as long as you wanted to, that he’ll see you for dinner. See all of us, I means.”
Peyton would not look up.
She felt rather than saw her cousin come around to stand behind her chair. In a moment those long hands were cupping her head, smoothing back the electric hair, pulling it sleekly behind her head and winding it.
“Got bobby pins? Chloe?” she said, and Chloe produced some from somewhere in her vast necessities drawer. There was a final tug and the feeling of the bobby pins slipping firmly home, and then Nora took her shoulders and stood her up and led her to the old mirrored cabinet hanging over the oak chest that served to hold linens and china and silver.
“What do you think?” Nora said, and Peyton looked.
A small face under a smooth crown of hair looked back at her. The face sat atop a long neck that seemed, now, slender instead of scrawny, and around the sharp chin and slanted cheekbones a few wisps of the horrendous curls lay softly. The eyes were dark with something totally alien, and the sallow skin flushed with a blush that Peyton felt start at her collarbone and surge up. The image was not appalling, not even remotely. But it was not her. She merely stared.
“It’s a French twist,” Nora said, cocking her head just as Mr. Antoine had done. “It’s not really right for you, but it gets that mess off your face and under control, and it shows off those fabulous bones and neck. If you like, we’ll work on it some more tonight.”
Still, Peyton stared.
Nora gave her shoulders a small shake, then went into the kitchen and hugged Clothilde hard.
“You have saved my life. There’s no doubt about that,” she said, and yawning, she went up the dim staircase toward her room.
Only then did Peyton look at Clothilde. Chloe was looking back at her, and she was smiling.
“That’s right nice, Peyton,” she said. “Shows off them eyes.”
“I hate it,” Peyton said, but there was no heat in her voice. She went into her little room to get dressed for school, and for the first time in her life she felt almost confident, almost anticipatory, about going into the swarm of flips and bouffants that awaited her at school.
Nobody’s got a French twist, she thought. This ought to shut up a few of them. Of course, I’m not going to keep it….
She realized as she left the house to walk in the soft, chilly morning to school that she could not wait to show her new hair to the Losers Club that afternoon.
But it was not her hair that the Losers Club wanted to talk about. They did not even mention it. Instead the subject was, first, her night in the tree, and, second, her Cousin Nora Findlay.
“Guess you gets the stupid prize, Peyton,” Boot said, eating Planter’s peanuts out of the big can from which Ernie doled a grudging inch or two for each of them once or twice a week.
For the first time, Peyton felt no humming-bird dart of triumph in her chest. She felt cross, waspish. The night before had been a source of stunning pain and revelation to her. She was not going to have it cut down to the status of stupidity of the week.
“It wasn’t stupid. It was something I planned, a protest. I’m proud of it,” she said.
“I should think you might make your point better face to face,” Ernie drawled, but Peyton knew somehow that he envied her her flight into the dogwood tree. She realized then that Ernie Longworth would never dare leave his mother to go and sit in a tree all night.
“OK, so it ain’t stupid. Tell about your cousin,” Boot said, licking salt off his small nimble fingers. “I heard she redheaded as a woodpecker and ain’t got no brassiere. Hubba-hubba. What your daddy say about that? What Miss Augusta say?”
“They haven’t said anything yet,” Peyton said. “Nobody’s really seen her yet but me. She has long red hair like a waterfall and green eyes, and real long legs, and she smokes Salems. As for the brassiere, I don’t know anything about that,” she added prissily.
In her mind, her Cousin Nora Findlay was rapidly being transmuted into something fabulous and strange, a unicorn, a young griffin.
“Sounds like her, all right,”
Ernie said casually, upending his Coca-Cola. “Little red pullet of a thing, running around half naked, with big cat’s eyes and this funny, gritty voice. She stole a bunch of flowers off a grave right here in this cemetery.”
“How do you know?” Peyton said indignantly, knowing that somehow he did know. The fine, glinting edge that her cousin’s arrival had lent her crumbled like chalky soil.
“Because she was here once when she was little, right after the war started. She was by herself; her mama didn’t come with her. We never knew why, but I have my own ideas. I used to play with her some. We’re about the same age. I know about the flowers because I was with her. I got the whipping of my life, I can tell you.”
“Why, if you ain’t the one stole ’em?” Boot said interestedly. His ideas of white people’s justice were flexible.
“Because little Miss Nora Findlay told everybody it was me, and then cried when I said it wasn’t. She got peach ice cream out of it. I got privet-switch welts all over my legs. Your cousin is as slippery as an eel, Peyton. Watch your back.”
“I didn’t know she was here before,” Peyton said, feeling somehow betrayed. “Daddy never said. Chloe didn’t, either.”
“Well, your mama wasn’t too thrilled about her, I can tell you that,” Ernie said. “Likely it was just easier not to talk about her visit. Your mama could be a tiger.”
Here was another persona for her mother, then: a tawny, stalking, soft-growling tiger. Peyton knew she would have to think a long time about this before she could fit the image into the grid that held her mother captive in her mind.
At the door to the shed, she turned and looked back.
“How did y’all know about that stuff last night?” she said.
“Huh. Half of Lytton probably know it by now,” Boot said. His face was sweetly interested, nothing more. The doings of the folks in the big house on Green Street would provide as much entertainment for the black community as a month of circuses. Peyton saw, suddenly, the terrible pity of this: lives lived on vicarious energy. She turned and went back down the sidewalk to her house.
Nora was nowhere in sight, but her Aunt Augusta was, sitting at the breakfast table with a cup of coffee and a slice of Clothilde’s pineapple upside-down cake. She was stabbing the cake and waving it on her fork and haranguing Chloe at the same time; her presence filled the breakfast room and overflowed into the kitchen. Chloe ironed on, unconcerned and uncommunicative. Every now and then she would say, “Uh-uh,” when Augusta made a point, or “I don’t know nothing’ about that, Miss Augusta.”
Peyton tried to slip past her back and into her own room, but Aunt Augusta rounded on her.
“Well, so here’s our grown-up little lady,” she said with heavy sarcasm. “The one who, by now, the whole town knows spent the night in a tree after her daddy and her aunt bent over backward to fix her up some. If your daddy doesn’t listen to me now about boarding school, I’ll be mighty surprised. Just look at that hair! Now what did you do to it? It looks like a little old woman’s skinned back like that.”
“It’s a French twist,” Peyton said coldly. “My cousin fixed it for me. She thought that horrible Rich’s hair looked like a booger had a fit in it. She’s going to fix it some more when she wakes up.”
Peyton had completely forgotten that she herself had planned to murder the French twist as soon as she could get to a mirror. In a heartbeat it became a powerful amulet against Aunt Augusta.
“Everybody at school loved it,” she said. “Nobody else has one yet. Grace Kelly wore one at her wedding. Some of the girls said I looked just like her.”
None of this was true, but Peyton did not care. She had found her aunt’s one overweening vulnerability; she would, like Delilah, slay her aunt with hair.
For a moment her aunt was speechless. Then she recovered.
“Oh, yes, your Cousin Nora,” she said venomously. “Who drove in here at daybreak while decent people were still in their beds, in a dirty pink convertible with her shorts rolled up to her whatever and no foundation garments, and got in bed and slept all day. Oh, yes, that’s just wonderful. What a shining example she sets for you. No wonder your daddy didn’t tell anybody she was coming. When I think what her mother did to your mother, when I think what perfect little tramps all those Vandiver women were, I shouldn’t be surprised at anything this one does, but those shorts—”
“What do you mean, what her mother did to my mother?” Peyton said in a small voice.
“Well, it’s time you knew,” her aunt huffed. “Her mother stole your mother’s fiancé away from her and ran off with him, and we all heard that she had your famous Cousin Nora way before she ever married that no-good Creighton Findlay. Not that that little affair lasted long; he walked out on her before Nora was two years old. After that she lived all over the place, with one relative or another, dragging that child with her. I guess it’s no wonder…anyway, she and the child lived with almost every Peyton and Vandiver family except your mama and daddy. Your mama never spoke to her after that business with Creighton Findlay.”
“Her fiancé…” Peyton said, her eyes burning oddly. “You mean…not Daddy?”
“Of course not! Your daddy is worth a million Findlays. He met your mother just after that and married her the same year. It was the saving of her. Creighton Findlay was just white trash, as no-good as they come, but he was a handsome devil and she was crazy about him. He would have ruined her life. And yours. You wouldn’t have had this nice life of yours, or a loving daddy, or a big house like this, or a penny to your name.”
“My mother’s cousin—Nora’s mother—where is she?” Peyton faltered. She knew that her question could have no good answer.
“She died in a sanatorium for alcoholics in St. Petersburg, Florida,” Aunt Augusta said with satisfaction. “I hear that nobody claimed her and the city had to give her a pauper’s burial.”
“Not so,” a black-coffee voice said from the stairs. “Everybody knows she married the emperor of Bhutan and is living in splendor in the shadow of Everest. I see her often.”
Nora padded into the breakfast room, smiling amiably at Aunt Augusta, her green eyes slitted. Her mane of hair was tangled and hung over her face, and there was the imprint of a chenille spread on one smooth, speckled cheek. She wore a long T-shirt that said “Jesus Is Coming. Look Busy,” and obviously nothing else. She smiled at Aunt Augusta. Her face looked more jack-o’-lanternish than ever, luminous and exaggerated. Oddly, it was sweetly appealing.
“Well, Nora,” her aunt said, extravagantly avoiding looking at the Jesus T-shirt and the bobbling wealth of Nora underneath it.
“Well, Cousin Augusta,” Nora said, the smile widening until her eyes disappeared into freckled flesh. “It is, isn’t it? Cousin Frazier’s sister-in-law? You look just like I remember.”
“I don’t recall that we ever met,” Aunt Augusta said frostily. She looked at Nora then. Her eyes scanned her up and down like radar.
“We didn’t,” Nora said, pushing the russet hair out of her eyes and sitting down opposite Aunt Augusta at the breakfast table. There was a small sucking sound as her bare thighs stuck to the wooden chair seat. “I remember you from a picture that was in my bedroom that time I visited here. It was of everybody, all of you, at some kind of carnival or fair. I used to stare at it for hours, trying to will myself into it. I don’t think I’d ever seen a fair then. You really haven’t changed.”
“Well, needless to say, you have. You must have,” Augusta McKenzie said. “It must be twenty years since we’ve heard hide or hair of you.”
“Easily,” Nora said, stretching so that the T-shirt pulled tight across her breasts, and lighting a cigarette. Peyton saw that her aunt’s neck was turning dull red, as if she had just gotten out of the beautician’s chair after a bad permanent.
“So,” Aunt Augusta said. “How long do you plan to be with us?”
Peyton could not imagine that anyone could miss the animosity in her aunt’s voice, but Nora seemed t
o. She exhaled and smiled sleepily.
“I hadn’t thought, really,” she said. “I just got here. I’d like to look around some. Lytton seems like a nice little town. And then I’d like to see Atlanta. I don’t remember that we ever lived there.”
“Frazier said you were on your way to a job?” Aunt Augusta said. “What sort of job might that be? Where is it? Not here, I shouldn’t think. There aren’t any jobs here for a young woman that I’ve heard of.”
Peyton saw Clothilde lift her head from her ironing board and stare at Augusta. She felt a prickle of anger. This was far beyond the boundary of polite curiosity. If I said that, they’d put me in a convent, she thought.
“Clothilde, do you think I might possibly have a sliver of that cake?” Nora said, smiling into the kitchen. “It smells like pure heaven, and it’s been a long time since that fabulous breakfast. Well, I don’t have any specific plans, Cousin Augusta. I’m just looking around to see what’s what. And I wanted to see Cousin Frazier again, and meet Peyton here. I don’t have enough family left to spit on.”
Chloe brought the cake and poured a cup of strong, hot coffee for Nora. “More where that came from,” she said.
Nora smiled her thanks around a mouthful of cake and rolled her eyes. “Bliss,” she said. “Nirvana. Maybe you could teach me to cook while I’m here. I really don’t have any domestic skills. Everybody’s always telling me.”
“What are your skills, Nora?” Aunt Augusta said. “We never exactly knew.”
“Well, I’m good at English, and I write a little,” Nora said. “I’ve been teaching for the past few years, in Miami and Key West. I’ve really enjoyed that. I taught special English classes to Cuban and Haitian children, and sometimes to adults at night.”
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