The Right Thing Page 3

  “Huh,” I managed, impressed in spite of myself. A princess with a hope chest! “Well,” I said, “that’s nothing much. Last week I drove our car and ran it into the garage.”

  “All by yourself?” Starr asked, eyes wide.

  “Sure,” I said. “I stepped on the clutch instead of the brake. Mr. Tate had to fix up the front of the garage, and the car had to go to the shop.”

  Starr looked awed, and I decided in that instant she was my kind of people. “Want to play?” I asked hopefully. “We’ve got air-conditioning.”

  “My poppa says air-conditioning is the Devil’s work. He says summer is God’s fiery time to remind us of the flames in you-know-where. Jesus cries when somebody turns on the television, you know. Television’s the Devil’s work, too.” Starr scratched at a mosquito bite on her bone-thin upper arm. “We don’t have a television set anymore. I surely miss it.” There were a lot of things missing at the Dukes house, Starr told me: lamps, the record player, a brand-new recliner, dishes, most of Starr’s mother’s clothes, and her sewing machine.

  “We had to leave without our stuff ’cause it wouldn’t all fit in the car.” It seemed the folks at the last outpost of Christianity in Dry Prong, Louisiana, hadn’t truly appreciated the quality of Mr. Dukes’s preaching, so the family had made a decision to relocate in the middle of the night. “They’re all going straight to you-know-where,” Starr announced with conviction. “Momma brang my hope chest, though, and my pageant dresses.”

  “You want some Kool-Aid?” I asked. It was getting on to the middle of the afternoon, and the sun was a steam iron on top of my head. Somehow we managed to get Starr over the fence in her pageant dress and trudged up the sloping lawn to the back door. The air in the glassed-in sunporch running across the back of the house—the conservatory, as my Grandmother Banks styled it—was almost as hot as the backyard. All the ferns and bromeliads slumped in a sullen bid for water and attention, the white wicker settees dusty from the summer’s long disuse.

  “Y’all got a mighty big house,” Starr said, looking around. “Where’s the air-conditioning?”

  “It gets cooler in the kitchen. Come on.”

  Methyl Ivory was across the wide center hall in the living room, pretending to iron while she watched television. “Methyl Ivory, can we have some Kool-Aid?” I yelled, already getting the big frosted pitcher out of the refrigerator. Starr had wandered into the living room with her hands clasped behind her back, the long dress a crumpled tide in her wake.

  “Don’t you touch nothing,” Methyl Ivory said to my new friend. “You be careful with that Kool-Aid,” she called to me. I slopped violently purple liquid into two glasses and carried them into the living room. Methyl Ivory warned me with a look that said I’d better not spill any.

  “Oh, my!” Starr squealed. Her fingers entwined under her chin in delight, she was so entranced with the program on the television. “It’s Queen for a Day. That’s my most favoritest show.” Without so much as a glance at Methyl Ivory, she folded up in wrinkles of dirty sateen onto the Oriental rug in front of the ironing board, taking the glass of grape Kool-Aid out of my hand without even looking.

  “Mmm-mmm.” Methyl Ivory cursorily ran the iron over a sheet, her eyes likewise glued to the small black-and-white screen. “That po’ woman.” I’d never seen the show, but with a shrug I sat down and watched, too.

  It turned out that Queen for a Day was lots more interesting than Methyl Ivory’s usual soap operas. Instead of people lounging around fireplaces talking about who loved who and who didn’t, this show had some action. Three contestants, all depressed-looking, lumpy women in black dresses, sat behind boxes on a stage and told the sad stories of their lives, each woman’s story more scarifying than the one before. Hospital bills, lost jobs, runaway children, disfigurements, dead husbands, unspeakable diseases, turned-off utilities, backbreaking labor at truck stops to make ends meet—these were only a few of the terrible things these women had to endure. Their tears overflowed like leaf-choked gutters. The last woman related her story about how the very evening her sick (“He got the lung-rot bad”) husband had lost his job, that same night the family dog had been run over in the street. Oh, we were transported with schadenfreude, a term I didn’t know then but was thrilled to experience.

  The announcer, an oily man in a double-breasted suit with slicked-back hair and eyeglasses, sniffed theatrically and dabbed at his eyes with an outsized handkerchief.

  “Oh, Missus Swank, that was just about the saddest thing I ever did hear,” he said. “But it’s good to know your children are healthy, even if the dog’s not! Now it’s time for our audience to vote on whose story pulls at our heartstrings the very most.” He looked straight into the camera. “Your applause will tell the world which of these little ladies here deserves to be Queen for a Day!” A glamorous woman with a towering beehive hairdo and a long, sequined gown tripped out on the stage behind the sniveling contestants and held up her arms under a big dial with an arrow pinned to it—the Applause-O-Meter.

  “Contestant Number One, Missus Rita Mae MacRevus!” The audience clapped enthusiastically, and the arrow moved halfway up the dial. The camera moved on to the next woman, a doughy lady with a fascinating wen under her left eye. She put her head down on the box and sobbed her guts out. “Contestant Number Two, Missus Geraldine Pettit!” This time the applause was thunderous, and the arrow went past halfway, dipped, and then shot to the three-quarter mark. Contestant Number Three, Missus Pam Swank, didn’t stand a chance, not even with the dead family dog story. Missus Pettit was Queen for a Day.

  Immediately, both the other contestants were herded off the stage, still crying, while the glamorous lady draped a velvet cape with an ermine collar over Missus Pettit’s big heaving shoulders. The announcer placed a crown on her wiry gray bun. The theme music rose to a crescendo. A bouquet of long-stemmed American Beauty roses ended up in Missus Pettit’s arms, and the audience clapped like mad things.

  The rest of the show boiled down to a bunch of relatively uninteresting prizes, like the washing machine the beehived lady rolled out from behind a curtain and the year’s supply of Duz detergent Missus Pettit was going to receive since she had eight children and no way to get to the Laundromat. The show ended with a close-up of Missus Geraldine Pettit’s face wearing a brave, gap-toothed smile, waving at her loyal supporters in the audience. “Queen for a Day!”

  The list of sponsors scrolled across the screen. I announced, “That was great. I want to be Queen for a Day.”

  “You can’t,” Starr said practically. “You got to be married, with children. It says so, right on the entry form.”

  “How come you know that?”

  “You can get one off the back of any box of Duz detergent,” Starr said with authority. From the floor, she looked up over the ironing board, catching Methyl Ivory’s eye. “Isn’t that right? If you’re married and got kids, you can be on the show?”

  Methyl Ivory shook her head. “I never seen no colored folks on Queen for a Day.” She stretched the ironed white cotton between her strong arms, bringing them together with a disgusted sigh to put a crisp fold in the sheet. “I know I got a lot a ironing to do ’fore you momma get home, Annie Banks. Y’all git now. I got things to do.”

  Well, air-conditioning might have been the work of the Devil, but Starr and I were willing to risk eternal damnation. We decided to go play upstairs instead of back outside in the stifling yard. In my bedroom, Starr surveyed my collection of toys and clothes. She touched everything, seeming to figure up how much each party dress, each deck of Old Maid cards, even the worn-out pair of Keds under the bed, had cost. I began to feel a little disgruntled at this silent appraisal. When were we going to get around to playing?

  “Look!” My new friend pounced on a pile of dolls on the floor, holding up one of the tribe of Barbies I’d accumulated for birthday and Christmas presents over the last couple of years. “See what you’ve done to them!”

  I looked aw
ay, feeling uncomfortable. It was true: my Barbies were in a deplorable state. They were all naked as only plastic dolls with breasts could be since I’d carelessly mislaid their clothes, and their Dynel ponytails and bouffant hairdos were in ruins of fused plastic strands. I’d attained a rudimentary understanding of chemistry when I’d taken them to the kitchen sink so they could get shampoos and sets. A vinegar rinse was what my mother used on her lovely dark hair to give it shine, but the ammonia treatment I’d improvised had turned the Barbies’ hair into frizzy, globular masses that no amount of combing would restore.

  “It’s just terrible, what you done to their hair.” Starr was aghast, picking up each one of my naked dolls tenderly and stroking its plastic mat. “Poor things,” she said. “We oughta do something nice for them.”

  I had an idea. “What if we made them Queen for a Day?”

  “You mean, like on the TV?” Starr seemed to think it over. “We got to make them some clothes first. You can’t be on TV nekkid.”

  With that, we got busy. It seemed Starr had a genius for making clothes for Barbies. We tiptoed across the hall into my parents’ huge bedroom and raided my daddy’s drawers for the long black silk socks he wore with his good shoes. Then, we cut off the foot ends with my mother’s scissors (she’d forgotten a previous incident involving the living room curtains and returned them to her sewing basket) and poked weeny little holes in the long black tubes for the dolls’ arms. When the Barbies were slid into their new dresses, we folded down the excess material at the top and ta-da! Sheath dresses, like the sophisticated, cocktail-sipping ladies wore on As the World Turns. Next, Starr insisted they needed underpants, so we made black panties with the socks’ leftover toes and used rubber bands to hold them up.

  “They need hats, too,” she said. “Their hair is a dis-grace, I mean to tell you.” It was 1963, and everyone was wearing the pillbox hat that Mrs. John Kennedy, the president’s wife, had made popular, so we foraged in my parents’ bathroom cabinet until we found enough pill bottle tops. There were a lot of pill bottles in the old-fashioned cabinet: my daddy was always bringing home samples from the pharmaceutical reps for my mother that promised to combat weight gain and insomnia and to give her some pep. The round tops to the bottles kept falling off the Barbies’ misshapen heads, so we glued them on. Finally, our attention was drawn to the dolls’ feet. “They can’t be on TV barefooted.” I was completely stumped, but not Starr. While I distracted Methyl Ivory down in the living room, she ransacked the kitchen for the roll of tin foil. Back upstairs, Starr molded sheets of it into cunning little high-heeled shoes for the Barbies.

  “Now,” she said. “Now, they can be on the TV.” The Barbies looked like some weird religious sect—long black dresses, white plastic hats, and silver shoes—but at least their blue-lidded eyes no longer seemed to accuse me of doll atrocities.

  But now it was time for Starr to go home. “My poppa wants his dinner on the table at five pee-em every day. If I’m late, he gives me a whuppin’,” she told me. I realized that while I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be whupped, my mother would be home soon and I had better return to the backyard since I hadn’t been explicitly told I could come inside to play, much less have a friend over.

  At the fence, I helped boost Starr over the wire. Landing with a kitten bounce in the grass on the other side of the fence, she hiked up the hem of her dress in both hands, scampering across the Allens’ manicured St. Augustine lawn for the next yard over, where the grass was high and weedy behind the rental house.

  “See you tomorrow,” she called over her shoulder.

  Starr was back at the fence the next morning and every morning after that for the rest of the week. She wore a different pageant dress each time, but after the first day she left the crown at home. “Don’t want to lose it.” We never went to her house to play, but that didn’t seem odd to me. The rental house had a forbidding look—the sheet-covered windows shrouded a blank white, the eaves rotting, and the grass grown as high as your waist. My daddy called it an eyesore, but I didn’t know or care what that meant. It was where my new best friend lived.

  And after that first afternoon together, that’s what we were. Best friends. I don’t know why I didn’t tell my parents about Starr, except that I had a dim but strong suspicion that my mother wouldn’t approve (that wandering-preacher thing again) and I didn’t want to run even a smidgen of a risk that she’d forbid me my new best friend, too. Besides, my mother was never home, and Methyl Ivory didn’t seem to mind. The only time she had us underfoot was when we were literally in front of her big white nurse’s shoes, clutching ourselves in high anticipation of the Queen for a Day Wurlitzer’s theme music.

  Once the camera closed on the winner’s rictus of haggard ecstasy, we’d take off. The Barbies were a de facto pool of contestants clutched under our arms as we flung ourselves out the screen door to the backyard. We couldn’t get enough of playing Queen for a Day, especially after we scrambled up our reenactments with tips Starr had accumulated over the course of her pageant career.

  “Before they tell their stories, they got to walk down the runway and smile big at everybody.” Starr daubed the dolls’ permanently lipsticked mouths with Vaseline purloined from my parents’ bathroom cabinet to give them some sex appeal.

  “But that’s not the way they do it on the show,” I objected. I wasn’t sure about the way the Barbies’ severe black dresses had begun to show so much leg and cleavage either: they looked a lot less like Mennonites and more like showgirls, but Starr had control of the scissors and was the final arbiter of taste.

  “That’s ’cause on the show they haven’t thought on any of this yet,” she told me. “Don’t these gals deserve to look pretty? My momma says she used to look pretty and now she can’t hardly stand to look at herself in the mirror anymore.” Put that way, I was on board with the beautification and strutting, for after all, I’d been the one who’d tied them to the oak tree like Druid sacrifices when playing kidnappers with Joel Donahoe. I’d sent them boating, naked, down the drainage ditch on a collapsing shoe-box raft when they were Titanic passengers, and scotch-taped them to roller skates so they could die in fiery car crashes. Sure, I agreed: let the Barbies live a little.

  We got better at the stories, too. I admit, my first attempts at manufactured pitiful were feeble. Mostly I mimicked what we watched on the television every afternoon, the usual miserable litany of poverty and plain bad luck that afflicted the po’, po’ women on Queen for a Day. Starr juiced these stories up a lot, and soon I just let her be in charge. She must have heard plenty of harrowing tales firsthand, being the only child of the wandering kind of preacher.

  “And then I come home from working in the laundry-mat, folding other people’s clothes and whatnot, until I look like a wrinkled pillowcase myself, and caught him in the bed with that Vonda from the Tote-Sum!”

  “What happened next, Missus Bledsoe?” In my role as announcer, I’d taken to calling the Barbies by the names of my mother’s friends from around the neighborhood. It was easier than coming up with new names every day.

  “Why, then I picked up a grease gun and passed it across his lying mouth—he barefaced lied to me, right there with that hoor beside him in our Broyhill bed what’s not been paid for yet—and now my Cubert’s in the hospital needing twenty-five stitches and I don’t know where the money’s coming from anymore. I’m so tore up I can’t go back to the laundry-mat,” Starr wailed. We clapped until our palms were burning for that one.

  Sometimes, as the announcer, I would’ve been hard put to decide which one of the silent dolls propped up under the sunporch windows was going to win the crown made of my mother’s borrowed topaz cocktail ring. All the stories were enthralling in their utter dreadfulness, and besides, it wasn’t up to me anyway. Since Starr wore the pageant dresses, she got to be the lady with the beehive hairdo and the Applause-O-Meter. She usually decided who was going to get a vacation in Hawaii—no washing machines for this Queen for a Day.
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br />   And so we passed that week’s afternoons until the sun fell below the tall top of the live oak tree in the backyard, until the cicadas shrilled dry vespers to day’s end, until Starr would go home so her poppa could have his dinner on the table at five pee-em.

  Until the day of my mother’s bridge club party.

  I should have known something was up because Methyl Ivory had been making party food for what seemed like forever: flaky puff-pastry shells filled with canned smoked oysters in cream sauce, molded tomato aspic with olives, and her special tiny mint-fondant calla lilies to go with the demitasse cups of strong coffee my mother would be serving after dessert. The sunporch had been relentlessly cleaned, the tablecloths and embroidered napkins starched and ironed. Still, I didn’t figure it out until I saw the folding chairs come up from the basement that morning. My mother was at the florist’s, picking up the flower arrangements for the card tables.

  “You got to stay outside,” Methyl Ivory said with a grunt. She wiped her face with the sleeve of her white maid’s uniform and unfolded a chair. “Can’t even go to your grammaw’s house. Ol’ Miz Banks say you cut up too much without you parents bein’ there for keepin’ an eye out, and I got to serve the white ladies they luncheon.” She adjusted the placement of the tablecloth and frowned at me. “Listen here, Annie Banks, you play nice in the backyard. I’ll save you a few of them lily candies. Y’all can have a lil party out there.”

  I didn’t care at all about missing an afternoon at my grandmother’s house. Though it was even bigger than ours, the rooms there were dark, full of breakable knickknacks, smelling of floor heaters and paste wax. There wasn’t a thing to do at my grandmother’s except to ferry her obese dachshund, Pumpernickel, up- and downstairs in the elevator until my grandmother’s maid, Easter Mae, made me stop. Besides, the heat had abated in the last few days as it used to do in Mississippi toward the end of August. My father had cut off the air-conditioning units to save money, and all the windows were open again to let the cool breezes inside the house, so not minding banishment, I banged through the screen door to meet Starr down by the fence. Today she was wearing fringed gauntlets and a knee-length dress liberally decorated in red, white, and blue sequins.