The Right Thing Page 6

  “What are you doing up here?” she demanded crossly. Rough in her haste, she wiped my face with a damp washcloth and ran a brush over my hair. “Come downstairs this minute and eat your breakfast. We’ll be late.”

  And if I’d had my way, we’d have been very late indeed. My mother’s heels sounded a brisk, martial rat-tat on the sidewalk ahead of me. I lagged behind, feeling as though I were headed to an appointment with a firing squad. Overnight the weather had turned cooler, and I was uncomfortably aware of my bare arms and legs in the misty air. A vermilion crape myrtle leaf fluttered to the damp sidewalk, and I stopped, bending over to examine it, my hair falling around my face. In the tree overhead a crow jeered raucous advice. Run away, run away!

  “Annie!”

  “Coming.”

  And so, fifteen minutes after eleven o’clock, I was deposited in the Treebys’ gloomy, tiled entryway with only an assortment of umbrellas packed in a purple elephant majolica stand for company. Lisa didn’t count. I’d commenced ignoring her while our mothers said good-bye at the door.

  “Just send Annie home before five,” my mother was saying. “Wade and I are going to the Ole Miss game, but the maid will be there.” Everybody who was anybody would be at the Ole Miss–Alabama game. We’d passed the Bledsoe house on the way over, Mrs. Bledsoe decked out in an intense red-and-blue ensemble of shattering school-spiritedness, Mr. Bledsoe toting a bulging picnic basket to their station wagon. Mrs. Bledsoe had ignored my mother, even though it would’ve been impossible for her to have missed us. After that petty humiliation, my mother’s color was up, but she carried her head high.

  “Thank you again for having Annie over,” she said.

  Tall Mrs. Treeby, wide as a boxcar in the hip region, smiled her big, square-toothed smile. “It’s so nice, having Annie to play. Lisa gets quite lonely, you know.” With a wave, she shut the door as my mother tap-tap-tapped her way down the sidewalk in her scarlet heels, on her way to a football game where no one would speak to her.

  “Be quiet now, girls,” Mrs. Treeby said to us, her voice and expression vague. “And play nicely together. I’ve got one of my headaches.” She promptly vanished somewhere upstairs, her hand to her forehead. Lisa’s mother got bad headaches, a lot of them. I’d overheard my mother’s friends—back when she still had friends—gossiping about how that skinflint Jerome Treeby wouldn’t allow poor Lollie a maid, how he was such a tyrant around the house, and wasn’t that just a scandal?

  Lisa and I stood in the entryway looking at each other with not much to say.

  “Want to play in my playhouse?” Lisa finally asked. She was a husky, adenoidal girl, tall for her age, with an oversized head round as a bushel basket.

  Now, I knew from previous visits that the Kenmore playhouse in the Treebys’ basement was about it as far as entertainment went over there. Lisa’s allergies made playing outside impossible since weeds, leaves, and dust made her moon face swell to alarming proportions and then she couldn’t breathe. We weren’t allowed to play upstairs either because Mr. Treeby, an accountant, worked at home and any child-related racket resulted in a fearsome display of temper. Poor Mrs. Treeby would flutter and wring her hands when he ranted like a wrathful Old Testament patriarch and then tearfully beg him to calm down. No, it was the playhouse or nothing, so down to the basement we went.

  Kenmore playhouses were never made to withstand the combined assaults of mildew, damp basements, and kids who’d grown bigger than they used to be. Each was made of middleweight cardboard fastened together with tabs and plastic snaps into a top-heavy box roughly the size of a kitchen stove—Sears sold a ton of them. Lisa’s playhouse had been threatening to collapse for as long as I’d known it and was pieced together with masking tape. There wasn’t room for both of us to be inside the playhouse at the same time.

  “You want to go first?” Lisa was a polite child with the kind of manners parents universally applauded. As a consequence, the other kids didn’t like her very much.

  “No, you go ahead,” I said. “I need to use the bathroom, though.” I didn’t really, but I was already bored to death with the basement.

  “Okay,” Lisa said. She squeezed through the door opening. Hunkering down inside the playhouse, she turned around like a dog in a too-small crate while the playhouse threatened to tip over. Lisa tried to look out the window, but her head wouldn’t fit. She stuck her arm through the opening instead and wagged a finger of caution at me. “Watch out—don’t bother my daddy.”

  I didn’t know my way around the Treebys’ house very well, but I knew where the powder room was. Upstairs in the dark hallway, the door to the half-bath was shut. The door across the hall was cracked open, though, and a strange, low hooting was going on inside the room behind it. The noise sounded like a morose beagle. I knew the Treebys didn’t have a dog, thanks to Lisa’s allergies.

  Curious, I tiptoed across the hall to peek through the long strip of light between the door and the frame. The rhythmic moaning grew louder as I sneaked the solid oak door open an inch wider, then another inch. I peered into the dim room. Long olive-colored curtains were drawn over the window, the bright banker’s lamp on the big mahogany desk the only illumination. To the right, just inside the door, was a Chesterfield sofa with a large photograph book balanced on the end of its rolled leather arm. The moaning had turned to gasping and ran rough and fast now. Cautiously, I stuck my nose inside the door for a better look.

  Planted on top of the tufted cushions of the Chesterfield were two oxblood leather men’s shoes and a pair of gray serge pants bunched loosely around a pair of skinny white shins holstered in gartered socks. Wide-eyed, I slid the door open another inch and saw naked hairy thighs spread wide, an astonishing thatch of wolverine-like fur, and in the middle of the fur was a hand gripping something wrapped in a large white handkerchief.

  “Gah!” It was Mr. Treeby’s voice, explosive as a burst gas main. His bare hips bucked in a furious spasm. “Gah!”

  In a wide-eyed, disbelieving panic, I dropped to my knees to hide. The picture book slid off the arm of the Chesterfield to the floor, falling open. Through the now-open door, I could just make out an old-fashioned black-and-white photograph of three young women in maids’ uniforms, bent over at the waist. Full skirts rucked up, three sets of bare buttocks waited for the thin cane brandished by a mustachioed man in a top hat. The young women’s faces looked really happy, even though they were obviously in line for what Starr’s father called a whuppin’. This picture shocked my intelligence to a thunderous vacancy.

  Then the gasping stopped.

  Mr. Treeby barked, “Who’s there!”

  Silently backing away from that photograph, I crawled backward in a perfect terror down the dark hall along the cheap runner, my hands and knees stinging with rug burns. Mr. Treeby shouted again. “Who’s there, dammit!” It sounded like he was putting on his pants in a hurry—a zipper rasping, coins falling to the floor.

  “Goddammit, Lollie, get down here!”

  I backed around the corner to the entryway, fast. In my haste to get to my feet, I knocked over the majolica umbrella stand. The elephant broke in two when it hit the tile, and clattering umbrellas rolled across the floor like timbers released from a logjam. My hand was on the doorknob when Mrs. Treeby trundled headlong down the stairs in a flapping brown dressing gown, her brow furrowed.

  “Why, Annie—where are you going?” she asked. She was out of breath.

  “Home. I, I don’t feel good,” I improvised. Before she could reply, I yanked the door open to the bracing air. A wind skittered through the poplars outside, driving yellow leaves before it.

  “Lollie, what’s the meaning of this?” Mr. Treeby strode around the corner into the entryway, his hair wild, his pinstriped shirt only half tucked in. His eyes narrowed when he saw me.

  “What’s wrong, dear?” Mrs. Treeby was lumbering toward me, stepping over the umbrellas with her arms outstretched, her kindly horse face concerned. I leapt down the steps to the si
dewalk and landed running.

  “Pellagra!” I shouted over my shoulder. “I’ve got pellagra!”

  I ran and ran until I couldn’t run anymore. The four blocks to the Treebys’ house—miles long this morning when I was walking to my date with the playhouse in the basement—were a blur. I slowed to a trot and then walked, holding my ribs against the throb of the stitch in my side. I had to stop to catch my breath. The crow was still perched in the top of the crape myrtle tree. It hopped to a lower branch, and bright, bold eyes seemed to ask, What happened to you?

  I shuddered against the memory of Mr. Treeby’s study and what I’d seen there, sharp as scissors, greasy and sickening as the taste of soapsuds on my tongue. There was no possibility of going home now, no doubt in my mind that within seconds of my escape Lisa’s mother had telephoned both Methyl Ivory and my grandmother. What Mrs. Treeby would say to them was beyond my imagination, but once again my natural badness had undone my best efforts to be good. Big slow tears ran into the corners of my mouth, and I yearned then to be the crow overhead, to spread shining black wings and fly home to my ragged nest in the top of the live oak tree, where crow brothers and sisters would want to hear about my adventures and tell me their own.

  There was no home for me. Instead of turning onto Fairmont, I ran north, around the corner, and down the long block to the end of Gray Street. When I saw the little asbestos-sided rental house, it seemed that I’d been running there all along. It never occurred to me that Starr wouldn’t be home as I punched the doorbell and waited on the cracked cement stoop. My breath returned to normal, my flushed cheeks cooled, and I realized the temperature had dropped again. There was a front pushing through, and I was cold. Rubbing my bare arms’ goose bumps, I rang the doorbell again. Overhead, low clouds scudded across the sky, and a dog barked somewhere, harsh and insistent.

  And then, just as I was ready to give up and walk around the block, back home to the certain doom awaiting me, the door to Starr’s house cracked open.

  “Who is it?” a thin, scared-sounding voice asked.

  “Starr!” I said, hugging my arms to my chest. “It’s me, Annie. Can I come in?”

  The door opened wider. I was enveloped in the thick, stale aroma of boiled cabbage and cigarette smoke, with something unpleasant and unidentifiable lurking underneath. Starr peeked around the edge of the door.

  “Get inside,” she said. “Somebody might see. My poppa said don’t let anybody in the house while he’s to the church.”

  I slipped inside the doorway. Despite the smell, it was warm in the Dukes house. Starr, barefoot, was wearing a pilled yellow nylon nightgown with a limp collar. “Come on in,” she said. I followed her down a short, dark hall into a bedroom not much bigger than our pantry, lit only by the listless light filtering through a small, sheet-covered window. On the bare wooden floor, there was just room for the single mattress heaped with a patchwork quilt and a battered cardboard suitcase covered in tweed-patterned cloth in the corner. A drift of spangled white tulle spilled from the suitcase’s overstuffed sides. Starr’s pageant dresses were hanging on nails driven into the pockmarked walls.

  “Set,” she said. “How come you’re here? I thought we weren’t allowed anymore.”

  I collapsed onto the mattress, drawing my knees under my chin. “I’m running away,” I said, wiping my nose. “Please, Starr—won’t you come with me? We can be friends again.” I had only conceived the idea in the last instant.

  Starr shook her head. “I can’t.” She sat next to me on the mattress and put her thin arm around my shoulders. “See, my momma went away last week. Poppa says I’ve got to look after him now since she’s not gonna come back, not this time.” Her pale eyes were huge in her narrow, pointed face. “I was fixing to get ready to make him some dinner ’cause he’ll be coming home at five pee-em. He’ll be real hungry, Annie. A man’s got to eat,” she said uncertainly. “Right?”

  Starr’s mother’s desertion fought for precedence with the day’s disaster. My spirits plummeted as she stroked my back. “But I can’t go home, Starr,” I said. Voice shaking, I told her about the Treebys’ house. It was hard to confess what I’d seen through the cracked door, harder still to explain my consummate dread of my mother’s lashing disappointment at my failure—once again—to stay out of trouble. This was the biggest trouble yet of my short life, and I was sure I would not survive it.

  When I had finished, Starr shook her head and said, “Poppa says this world’s nothing but sin, woe, and sorrowful torment, and we only get through it with the healing from Jesus. I surely miss my momma, Annie.”

  “And I’m scared to death of mine.”

  We sat quiet for a minute.

  “Hold on.” Starr stuck her hand underneath the mattress and fished around on the floor for something, a picture in a cheap frame. “This’s my momma on her honeymoon with my poppa. They went to Biloxi.”

  I took the faded black-and-white photograph from her, looking intently at the slight woman, her arms folded tightly across a shirtwaist dress, standing on the flat sands of the Mississippi Gulf Coast. She looked worn out, as though she’d been up for days on end, her shoulders tensed, unsmiling. I couldn’t help but compare her to my own mother, Collie Banks, the beauty. How would I feel if she were to disappear into thin air like Starr’s momma had done? I shivered, wondering if my latest descent into bad behavior would make her leave me, too.

  “She’s sure pretty, huh?” Starr asked.

  I nodded, although I was thinking that Mrs. Dukes was anything but pretty. Her face with its long upper lip and protruding teeth bore a strong resemblance to the pet rabbit Joel Donahoe kept in a cage in the backyard.

  “After she left, Poppa threw this picture away, but I fished it out of the garbage can.” Starr took the photograph from me and kissed her mother through the glass. “My momma used to be the Soybean Queen of Avoyelles Parish, you know. After we come here, sometimes she’d put makeup on me and her when Poppa wasn’t home so’s we could be pretty together. She always said everything looks better when you got your best face on. But Poppa didn’t like it. He came home early that last time and made us wash it all off. He gave me a whuppin’, then he made her put every bit of her makeup in the trash and she cried.” With another kiss, Starr shoved the picture under her mattress again. “I wonder where she’s at all the time, Annie. I surely wish she’d come home again, but Poppa says she’s not gonna.”

  “I’m sorry.” It was all I could think of to say, but Starr nodded.

  “I know,” she said.

  Wrapped in each other’s misery, we sat on Starr’s bed for at least another minute before we realized that for the first time in nearly three weeks, we were together again. We looked at each other shyly. I couldn’t help but smile then.

  “Want to see what I got in my hope chest?” Starr jumped up off the mattress and opened the suitcase. Crammed inside it was a long net veil spangled in silver sequins, Starr’s Little Miss Princess Anne Look-Alike tiara wrapped in tissue paper, a gold-flowered porcelain bonbon dish, six cheap violet sachets, a pair of scuffed ivory satin pumps (“Momma says maybe I’ll grow into ’em”), a stiffly crumpled bouquet of pink plastic roses, a white leather Bible with a stain on the cover, shiny pearl pop beads, a yellowed Vogue wedding dress pattern, and the earnest beginnings of a quilt made from Starr’s pageant sashes.

  Starr carefully lined these items up on the mattress with pride. I stroked the quilt made of satin sashes as she rewrapped the tiara in tissue paper. “Starr, can I stay here with you?” I asked, feeling hopeful. At that moment, even the thought of her father’s return was preferable to what I was sure I’d be facing at home.

  “You can stay while I make dinner, but you’ve got to go home after,” Starr said. “Your momma will worry about you.”

  “No, she won’t,” I said, the knowing like an icefall in my heart. “She’ll be glad if I never come back. I can’t do anything right, never, no matter how hard I try. Look at what happened at Lisa’s
house!” In my mind I was certain—however confused that certainty—that my natural wickedness was somehow at the epicenter of my mother’s endless anxiety. And then there was my grandmother. How was I ever to explain myself to that terrible old woman now? I couldn’t say why, but as surely as I knew my own name, I knew that even from her wheelchair over on State Street, she used me to feed a rapacious appetite for domination. Without the words to express them, these were all feelings, merely, but feelings that rivaled the dark malignity of certain fairy tales, the ones I read with a stirring of recognition and fear.

  “Huh. All mommas worry about their little girls,” Starr said, sounding practical. She picked up the sash quilt and folded it. “That’s how come I know my momma’s coming back someday. She just needs a vacation.” She was changing into a too-big sweatshirt and a pair of old corduroy pants that looked like they’d once belonged to a boy twice her size.

  I shivered. My throat was scratchy from crying, and I was so tired. “Can I have a glass of water?”

  “Surely,” Starr said. “Come on in the kitchen. I’m cooking supper.”

  During that long afternoon my throat grew steadily worse, my joints aching in time with my throbbing head. I shivered under the long, grubby pink cardigan Starr gave me to wear over my shorts and sleeveless shirt. Like the rest of the few, tired clothes in the closet, it had been left behind when her mother had fled the house.

  And so I sat at the kitchen table, trying to swallow past the burning lump in my throat, racked with the chills of a high fever, while I watched Starr drag pots and a bag of potatoes out from under the sink. Her straggling blond curls tied up in an old scarf, she got a pound of ground meat, an egg, and a bottle of milk from the refrigerator. She was making mashed potatoes, Starr said, and a meatloaf with ketchup on top. In spite of my body’s increasing wretchedness, I stirred the instant butterscotch pudding for dessert, and it felt good, knowing I couldn’t get into trouble there.