The Queen of Palmyra Read online

  Mr. Skinny stood there staring her down, not a word out of him either. Even the nosy lady, who’d been breathing hard behind me, seemed sealed up, shut up. The words that any of us might have said were flushed quail, forever gone.

  Sometimes a space in time feels like a slap in the face. First you don’t breathe, then you touch the spot, then you can breathe again. Anybody who’s been slapped knows this. That’s why you can live with getting slapped once every now and then, just not over and over all the time. You need the quiet spaces between.

  My heart jumped once, then twice. The sound of it cut through my ears from the inside out. All at once I felt as though I were carrying my head like a punch bowl full to the brim and about to slosh over.

  So I said, “Mama.” I made it whiney, which wasn’t hard, and quiet, which was. I put my hot sweaty hand on her cold limp one and pulled gently so that she slowly turned toward me like a sleepwalker. Then I took her out of there.

  When we got back in the car, I knew just one thing. I was sorry about Eva getting bothered, and I knew it was worse than ugly talk—the burn told me that—but I was getting to be hard-nosed; right then I had one thing on my mind and one thing only: I knew I had to get me something to eat.

  The last thing on Mama’s mind was feeding me. She was sitting behind the wheel looking straight ahead like she didn’t even know where she was. The paregoric men and the mean-eyed gun-toting men were having a contest to see who could stare us down the hardest and the guns were winning, but she didn’t care who was running their nasty eyes over us. She was cogitating something, but whatever it was was hers alone. Nobody else’s. She didn’t even see them or me or anybody or anything. In fact, lately I’d been feeling like Mama couldn’t see what was right in front of her face. I’d been feeling like I was my mama’s eyes. She was blind as a bat at high noon.

  So I pushed on her arm. Hard with my knuckle. Turning it. I wanted to hurt her. Make a bruise the size of my fist on her bony little arm.

  “I want to go on by Mimi and Grandpops’. Drop me off up there.” I spit it out like a mouthful of nails.

  Mama didn’t answer, but I could tell she’d heard me because she moved her arm a little when I pushed on it. I laid my head back and closed my eyes and waited. In a minute she started up the car. I didn’t open my eyes. I didn’t know where she’d take me. Home, Mimi’s, Zenie’s, the bootlegger’s. With Mama behind the wheel ripping up and down the county, you never could tell where you were going to end up. I was getting sick and tired of being so here and there all the time. I wanted to be like other children. Precious Cargo. I wanted to have a set bedtime I could whine about and glasses of milk and dentists and somebody telling me to eat my collards for the iron. I wanted to grow up dense and thick with blood and flesh and bone, and I was beginning to think something else was going to happen instead. That I was going to get myself lost somewhere between places. Look at what happened to Eva.

  Riding with my eyes closed not knowing where Mama was taking me and thinking about all the bad things that had already happened to Eva and seemed ready to happen to me, I started to cry. Not like a crybaby, but quiet. No carrying on. Just eyes overflowing the far corners like a pot boiling over on the stove so quietly you don’t hear it. When you smell smoke and finally find out it’s boiled over, it’s hot and burnt and dry as a bone in the desert, bleached white in the sun.

  Mama took me to Mimi and Grandpops’. I didn’t open my eyes until she stopped the car at the curb. By then my face was wet and so was my shirt. She didn’t wipe me up, but she handed me her handkerchief with Martha written across it in blue script and hyacinths reaching over either side of her name like heavenly guardians. Then she leaned over and kissed me on the lips, which is something she’d never done before in her life, something nobody had ever done. She kissed me so hard it broke the skin on the undersides of my lips.

  “The lights are on. Go on in,” she said and when she said it, she looked deep inside my eyes like she was searching for a lost fleck of color. Then she reached over me so that the tips of her pointy bra pierced my side and opened the car door. She gave me a little shove so that I slid across the slick plastic seat and out of the car. Once she got me going I couldn’t stop until my feet hit the curb. Then she leaned over again, pulled the door shut, waved a little wave, and drove off.

  I stood there on the curb. The green Ford with Mama in it was bumping down Goodlett Street getting smaller and smaller. Then it became nothing but a piece of smoke and curled up and vanished into thin air. The night was steaming around me, the way it gets right after the still darkness gathers up the heat of the day like a mother taking up her baby out of a warm bath. When I looked up at Mimi and Grandpops’ square brick house on its little hillock, I could see the two of them through the front window. They were sitting down at the table for supper. Grandpops was facing out so I could see his long grave face straight on. He was bringing a fork up to his mouth. Mimi was sitting by his side, her hydrangea curls all plumed out on her head, which was cocked in Grandpops’ direction like she was listening to him say something important. There was a ceiling light that dangled over their heads and made them look like speckled trout, pretty and silvery and slick. My mouth watered.

  I couldn’t take my eyes off them, so when I took two steps through the hot breathing dark I tripped over the black roots from the oak tree that snaked up from the deep between the curb and the sidewalk. Went down hard on my knees, wham bam, like a sinner before an angry God. Crawling through fire and brimstone to get to the Promised Land.

  Kneeling there, I knew I was between one thing and the other thing. I knew I could just walk on down the street and vanish into thin air like my mother had just done. Just flat not go on to the next thing. Anybody can do that anytime, that much I knew. I prayed for God to send me Uncle Wiggily with his trusty valise and walking stick and, last but not least, some supper in a red plaid bandana. I wanted Uncle Wiggily to tell me a funny story and make me laugh so hard my mother would hear me and come on back and pull me up off the ground and clean up my knees and take me on home. Then the old gentleman rabbit and I wouldn’t have to jump the midnight Frisco and be hobos in a world without end.

  Then Mimi slowly turned her head away from Grandpops and toward the window and the dark beyond where I was kneeling. She looked like a bird dog on the point. She smelled me.

  All at once I was up and scrambling up the steps, sparks firing up and down my legs. I pushed down the front-door handle with my thumb and went right on in. Mimi was halfway through the living room on her way to the door to see what was out there in the dark. There was a stir, but no what are you doing here girl, or where’s your mama and daddy, honey. Nobody breathed a word about my mother or father. The Honey Bunny hat was long gone and Mimi wasn’t mad at me anymore. She washed off my knees and put Mercurochrome on them. She was telling me about the tuna salad and tomato aspic she’d made on account of it being such a hot night. I wasn’t surprised. Tuna salad, tomato aspic, and hamburgers were the only things Mimi knew how to fix. Even her coffee was bad.

  “You want a hamburger honey?” she said all at once like she wasn’t able to breathe quite right, and I said, “Yes ma’am, please,” in the nicest way possible. To help out, I went to the kitchen drawer and pulled out a knife, spoon, and fork. I got them in my fist and put them down where I usually sat at the table, facing the window, fork on the left, knife and spoon at the right, like Zenie’d taught me. I sat down at the table cool and calm like I’d been invited to supper and arrived a little late.

  Grandpops handed me a tuna-salad sandwich, no crust, and said he was glad I was there to take this aspic off his hands, he’d had it two nights in a row and it gave him heartburn. He handed me his little green glass sherbet dish and his own spoon, which was clean.

  “I got a spoon,” I said and gave him back his in case there was ice cream for later. Mimi liked to pour each aspic into its own separate dish unless she was making it for the Saturday Matinee Club and then sh
e used her big star mold for show. The aspic shook when he passed the dish. It had half a green olive on top. I popped the olive in my mouth and dug into the aspic. I knew what it was: V–8 (two cans of the small but tall ones), two packs of Knox’s sparkling gelatin, onion juice (not much), cayenne to taste. Boiled up and cooled down, which is what I was feeling like right now. Molten.

  Grandpops said it was awful late for me to be coming by but he was glad to see me. He got up and poured me some milk. I drank it down, and got myself some more.

  He sat back down at the table. His eyes narrowed watching me drink the second glassful. “What you had to eat today, girl?”

  “I don’t know, can’t remember.” Just when I was answering him back, I could feel my eyes cutting away the way they do when I’m lying. I can’t help it; they start cutting away from the person I’m lying to. I try to corral them like they’re the sheep out of the pen and I’m the collie dog, but they get away from me.

  Grandpops leaned his bony elbows out over his plate. “Try to remember.”

  “I can’t,” I said again, which was in the strictest sense true. If you don’t eat anything, you don’t remember anything. Then he stopped asking, and his mouth marched in a line across his face. He got back up and went digging around in the refrigerator and pulled out a pot of something. He took it over to the stove where Mimi was flopping her hamburger, which was smoking up and making my mouth water. She poured a good shake of Worcestershire on top of it and peppered it up, which made it sizzle and smoke even more.

  “Got a hungry girl here. Let’s heat up some of Zenie’s peas for her to go along with that hamburger.” Grandpops carried the pot over to the stove eye. Mimi didn’t even look up, just reached over and turned it on. I knew I was doomed to eat those peas, though I was so hungry I didn’t care, just hoped they were field peas, which I tolerated, instead of English peas, which I didn’t much care for unless they were real little and came with potatoes. They were standing close to each other at the stove with their backs to me. They were eyeing each other sideways. Their mouths trailed down the sides of their faces like matching parentheses.

  I was eating the last tuna sandwich, relishing the crunch of the celery, and watching them eye each other at the stove when they thought I couldn’t see. When they both turned around at the exact same time like two halves of the same person and looked back at me nested at the table, I knew that look. When I was still going to school in Millwood before Daddy’s escapades, it was the way the teachers looked at The Children’s Home Children, who were not regular children but orphan children. Holy Roller children. The Pentecostal Children’s Home, which looked like a bigger version of Mimi and Grandpops’ house, was a redbrick two-story building out from town. About a dozen or so orphan children lived there. I remembered them from when I was in the first grade here. Their clothes bloomed large around their stalk bodies. They came to school in a bus that said Children’s Home. They trooped off the bus looking neither left nor right, just trudged on into the schoolhouse. They sat in a row in the cafeteria and bowed their heads to pray while everybody else was laughing and talking. Then they opened little packages of waxed paper like Christmas presents and brought out corn bread, sometimes hard flat biscuits.

  At night sometimes you could hear the Holy Rollers moaning and hollering across town. They sounded like something coming up from deep under the swampy ground. On Holy Roller nights I tossed and turned. In my mind’s eye I saw the orphan children dancing around, their drapey clothes billowing out like the clouds of heaven. I wondered, if they were orphans, why were they so happy? Did they feel light and free, having no parents?

  I was still sitting at the table, but suddenly I couldn’t get the food to my mouth anymore. The air around my face felt gauzy. In my mind I was back to being little and wrapped in Uldine’s sheets.

  “Come on upstairs, honey,” Mimi said and pulled on the back of my shirt. Grandpops was gathering up the dishes to put in the sink. Upstairs Mimi pulled me into the bathroom by the shirt and before I could say thank you ma’am I can take it from here, she yanked the shirt over my head like she was whipping a pony and threw it on the floor.

  “Got to get you some decent clothes,” she said low under her breath, like I was not even in the room, much less pressed up to her middle. “Get your pants off.” Her voice sounded worn out. She went over the tub, put in the plug, and started the water. Then she walked out and shut the bathroom door and I thought I was home free. I got myself a washcloth and towel out of the bathroom closet and got into the tub. Then, lo and behold, here she came back, opening the door without even knocking. I was used to taking a bath by myself, and I pulled the washcloth up in front of Between the Legs. No “excuse me” either when she put a towel down beside the tub and knelt down, letting out a little groan while she settled her knees, which had arthritis, and the front of her left leg, which had sciatica running down it, she was always saying, like a little stream of boiling-hot water. Then I saw she had the purple glass she always kept full of water on the table beside her bed, the table that she put in front of the door between her room and Grandpops’. Plus a bottle of Breck shampoo with a pretty lady on the front.

  “Mimi, I’m too tired to get my hair washed,” I said, and I heard myself sounding like a whiney baby, but she was already pouring the soapy water over my head.

  “Dirty. This head is dirty.” It came out grit between her teeth as she started pouring water out of the glass over my head. Once she got my head soaking wet, she poured cold shampoo on it, which woke me up big-time. When she started digging her fingernails into my scalp, I could tell she meant serious business so I squinched my eyes tight.

  “I can do it!” I yelped, but she didn’t even answer, just dug deeper and deeper into my nasty head. How dirty did she think I was? Then she took the washcloth I was holding over my privates and slapped it over my eyes, tilted my head back and poured bathwater over it. After the pouring business was over, she belted out, “Hang on,” like she was worried I was going to hop up out of the tub and run around the block. I couldn’t open my eyes because of the water in my face so I just sunk down into the water, which was by now barely warm, with the washcloth still over my face. I felt myself wanting to turn over on my side, like you do in bed when you’ve been in one position too long and part of you has gone to sleep.

  After a while she was back and pulling on my arm to stand up and putting a towel around me. She brought in a satin slip of hers for me to sleep in. It was slick and didn’t cover anything to the north of my waist and was so long I had to hold it up to walk, like a lady going to the ball. She got the slip on me and as I was standing there holding it up, she started rubbing my head dry with another towel. When that was done, she combed my hair, which was still wet, pulling my head this way and that. I felt like a doll that a crazy baby girl had gotten hold of.

  My hair’s nothing to jump up and down about, plus it’s hard to comb wet because it’s kinky and clumps together. My mama’d taught me to always use creme rinse, which Mimi didn’t seem to know about, and to comb it out slow and easy starting at the ends. I was too tired for this business, and my eyes were starting to tear up again and I was thinking damn it the hell, this woman is killing me.

  When Mimi started digging around in the bathroom closet, I wondered what was next. Then she came out with a new pink toothbrush in a little plastic case. I was afraid she thought I was such a baby she was going to have to brush my teeth, but she handed it to me, case and all, and pulled some toothpaste out of the medicine cabinet. “I saved this just for you.” She said it like she’d just brought me an Easter dress from Montgomery Ward when all it was was a dumb toothbrush. I knew she was wanting me to say thank you ma’am. I didn’t. I just pulled the toothbrush out of the case. “Rinse it off. It might be germy,” she said, and unscrewed the toothpaste and turned on the water. I put the toothbrush under the water and then held it out to her. “Voila!” she said and squirted a big wad of toothpaste onto the brush.


  After I brushed my teeth, Mimi put me into my mama’s old bed in her old room like it was all planned. Sometime later Grandpops came shuffling up the steps in his bedroom slippers and sat down on the bed. I was long gone by then, but I knew he was there by the heft. Then he patted my damp head and walked out of the bedroom humming “This Is My Father’s World,” which is my favorite hymn, because it brings out the prettiness of the world, all that’s fair. The birds their carols raise, the morning light, the lily white declare their Maker’s praise.

  Sometime during the night I heard the phone ringing. There were windows on both sides of the bed. They were open and there was a cross breeze making the curtains curl at the edges like dark tulips. The straps on Mimi’s slip had slipped down over my shoulders so the slip was only covering me from the hips down. I tried to pull it up, but it was stuck under me. I was cold. So I grabbed at the sheet, but it wasn’t enough.

  I could hear Grandpops talking into the phone downstairs. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but I could see his words. Bits of gravel he was throwing up against a wall. Then I heard Mimi get out of bed. “Shush,” I heard her say. Then he quieted down and I sank back into the cold.

  The next morning I opened my eyes to Zenie looking down at me. Her face looked darker than it was really. It blocked out the bright sun coming through the window. It was hot already. Late morning, I was thinking. I kicked off the sheet. I’d slept a good long time. I opened my eyes wider. Her mouth opened like a long dark tunnel. What is she getting ready to say?

  Actually, I don’t remember anybody in particular telling me about how my mother had gone and run the green Ford smack-dab into the right side of the Memphis-bound M & O passenger train. Maybe it was Zenie blocking the sun who said it, but likely not. Maybe when she saw my eyes open in the morning light, she called in Grandpops. For me it became a fact that seemed to have risen up out of the earth and made itself visible, just like the fact that she did it at Crosstown, where everybody in Millwood had to pass over to get where they were going. There were parts of the Ford all over the place. A boy found the car papers up in a tree a block away. By doing it there, at Crosstown, she kept herself in front of our eyes for always, for whose heart was so closed they could not think of her as they bumped over the tracks on their errands and visitations? After she did it, they installed crossbars there, but it did not matter in people’s minds. Who did not taste hot metal when they heard the Frisco shriek through our dark town on its ten-thirty run north?