The Queen of Palmyra Read online

  “Come here, you.” She flicked the paper. I came on over and stood in front of her. She took up my left arm and turned it from side to side. She looked at the top and then she looked at the underside. Then she took up the right one and did the same, like she was looking for ticks on a dog.

  “Ow,” I said. The turning back and forth was like getting an Indian burn.

  She raised one eyebrow. “What you gone and done to yourself? How come you trying to bake cakes in the dead of the night? Don’t you know how to light a stove, girl? I made sure and showed you a hundred times. How come you to go get yourself in a fix like this?”

  She took a deep breath and started back in. “And what you doing cooking in long sleeves for anyways, with it hot as fire? Don’t you know no better than that? What you wearing get you all burned up like this?” She reached out and grabbed my hand and started pulling at the tape on my arm to undo the gauze. “Where them burns at? Top or bottom?”

  “Don’t go hurting it!” I jerked my arm away. “It’s all right the way it is. Don’t go undoing it all.”

  “Might need changing out,” she said, grabbing at me again. She was on her feet and coming at me. “I’m going to get the scissors. Take a look at it.”

  “No! Let me alone!” I’d never hollered at Zenie before, but I did now. “Don’t touch it. Don’t touch me!” My voice sounded odd to me. I was mad as fire and giving orders to Zenie like she was being the bad baby and I was the grown-up. I was expecting her to stop short and whap me good for giving her sass the way Mama would have done.

  But she didn’t. She just stopped short with the scissors in her hand, and gave me a look that was a river long and deep. A look that said she had been waiting for this very moment, for me to be bad like that. Just like Miss Josephine’s look three days back had said she’d been waiting for me to bust through the front door yelling for Ray. Zenie knew it would come someday, and here it was, a vileness in me that she knew was there before I did. She’d been waiting for it to pop out, an evil just waiting for the right time and place to be born, and here it was at last, rearing its ugly horned head.

  When I saw that look, all I could do was stop talking. I could not say Zenie, I beg your pardon, Zenie, I’m sorry to have hollered at you, disrespected you. Because I saw in her face that I had set something loose. It could not be taken back, or even slowed down. Not for even a minute. It wasn’t a story that had a beginning and an ending, it was a fire that licked its way out into a bigger and bigger circle. No, no, stop, I didn’t mean it that way, you could say, but it always moved beyond your watery voice. It did not hear you.

  She looked but she didn’t say a mumbling word. Then she just turned heel and walked over to the drawer and put the scissors back and then moved to the sink slow and tired, and started up washing the breakfast dishes.

  At first I thought she’d get over it, that it was just another humbug, but she didn’t, at least not for a while. Oh, she’d be nice enough, but it wasn’t the kind of nice that meant I like you. It was the kind that called attention to its niceness, the way Mimi called attention to her too-loud hats. Do you want some more strawberries? Eggs or waffles this morning? Are you ready to go home now? A niceness like the decorated cakes at the grocery store. It had nothing to do with whether the ingredients were pure and right, whether it was butter not Oleo or real vanilla not imitation; it was just on the outside.

  That afternoon I sidled along home behind Zenie for the first time since Eva had gotten hurt. I was hoping I could help Zenie with some sewing or cleaning to get back in her good graces. She didn’t say a word to me while we were walking from Mimi’s house to hers, she was so busy nursing her grudge. Every now and then she’d mutter something under her breath about people being ungrateful.

  When we got up to the house and went in, Miss Josephine was back in her chair. She wasn’t talking to anybody either. She was through with her counting. The mimosa tree was stripped bare up as high as she could reach. She’d tried to get Ray to bring her a ladder, but he said he wouldn’t because she’d fall sure enough and then he’d have her on the bed too.

  There were only two beds to go around for the four of them, and Eva had been spread-eagled on Miss Josephine’s bed for a week. Miss J was having to sleep with Zenie, and Ray had ended up on the couch. I knew all this by hearing Zenie talk to her friends on Mimi’s telephone when Mimi wasn’t in the house. The day before, I’d come out of the bathroom and caught her crying into the phone, not saying a word to whoever was on the other end, just holding it up to her cheek and crying.

  The minute we got inside the front door, Zenie pushed me in the direction of the green leaf curtain hanging in front of Miss Josephine’s bedroom door. “Get on in there and tell Eva a story. Tell her about how you almost burned down the place, she’ll get a kick out of that.”

  I went over and peeked around the curtain. Eva didn’t look like she was about to get a kick out of anything. She was propped up in Miss Josephine’s bed like a stuffed toy you see in rich white girls’ houses. Sometimes they prop a bunch of them up on the prissy little pillows on their beds. She looked a sight. Her hair had lost its puff and was slicked straight back. If it’d been long enough, she would have had it in a bun in back but it wasn’t, so the ends stuck out behind, like an ugly ducktail. Her face was ashy. The burnt circle on her cheek had made a big light brown scab. Around the scab was a perfect pink circle, the beginnings of a scar. She looked like she had in mind that she was somewhere else, that she wasn’t propped up in Miss Josephine’s nice soft bed in Zenie and Ray’s Jim Walter Home in Shake Rag in Millwood, Mississippi, but somewhere much worse. She was just staring into space. She had on a blue nightgown with lace at the neck and was covered up to the waist with a white sheet. Her hands were on top of the sheet. She looked down at them like they were a puzzle she hadn’t put together yet.

  Zenie was standing right behind me on the other side of the curtain. I could tell she was ready to give me a big push right through it, so I piped up and said, “Hey, girl! How you doing?” kind of peppy and frisky, like I was talking to a sick dog. I almost clapped my hands the way you’d do to get a dog’s attention. I was trying to perk her up some, hoping that if I could get her talking and being happy again, Zenie would stop being mad at me. I was prepared to make a fool out of myself.

  I started off with some advice. “You ought to put some Ungentine on that place on your face. Daddy put Ungentine on my arms and it cuts down on the sting.”

  Eva twitched her head a little. I took the twitching for a good sign. She might have been struck dumb, but at least she wasn’t deaf to boot. Then the twitching turned into something else. A snicker, then a giggle. “Daddy says put Ungentine on it!” The words came out of her mouth like the dry heaves. Then she started cackling like a witch, mean and nasty.

  I decided to ignore her. I held onto the edge of the curtain and started in on The Story. “Hey, Eva, you won’t believe what I gone and done. Set the whole dadgum kitchen on fire. Almost set the whole house on fire. Almost burnt Daddy to a crisp.” I said it all in a rush. I almost believed it myself.

  By the time I got to the end of the story, her lost eyes had come running back home to her ashy face. She still didn’t say a word, but I could tell I had gotten her attention because she turned and looked over at me. So I kept on, trying to get her interested in the details. “Yes siree, I’d just got my three devil’s foods out of the pans just fine and they were out there on the table cooling and then there was the icing all cooked and ready and I couldn’t find a pot holder so I got a cup towel to get it off the fire…”

  “You burnt your arms?” The question came as a thief in the night. Her lips moved so fast and she said it so soft I almost missed hearing it. After she said it, she turned her found eyes toward me. She had the look of a statue that had decided to say a word or two. No more.

  I opened my mouth then shut it. My tongue felt thick and muddy, a creature in a swamp that was trying to rise up through the muck
and roots and bog. It couldn’t, it wouldn’t. I just sat there thinking I needed Bomba right then to grab ahold of a vine and swing over and rescue me in this story. No Bomba, and my mouth was full of the jungle.

  So I changed into the statue, but not a speaking one. Eva looked hard at me, and something fierce leapt up between us. “I know how Flo got burnt, I know how Flo got burnt.” She made it into a soft singsong that one little child would sing to another. It didn’t sound a bit like Eva, but it was a blessed relief to me when she sang it. She didn’t have to say anything ever again as far as I was concerned. I loved her for singing it. I loved her for knowing The Story wasn’t true.

  It seemed like a blessed relief to her too because right after she said it, she reached down and lifted the sheet off herself. It slipped over to one side as she rose up and put her feet on the floor. Her feet looked strong, even if the rest of her didn’t. She had wiry toes, which seemed longer against the light linoleum floor. They were brown right down to the tips, which were pinkish. Her feet were long and flat to the ground. No arch to speak of. She sat for a while on the side of the bed looking down at those feet stretched out in front of her on the floor. She seemed to be thinking about them. Where they could go. What they could do.

  “Dizzy,” she said, with a little shake of the head.

  Behind me Zenie said, real quiet and easy, “Take it slow. Just sit for a little bit and let it pass on.” I don’t know how long she’d been standing there.

  Eva kept on sitting on the edge of the bed and looking at her feet stretched out. She touched the scab on her face, then started picking it.

  Zenie came over and took her hand. “Don’t fool with that thing,” she said, “you’ll make it worser. You’ll raise the scar.”

  All of a sudden Eva bent her head over and started laughing. “I’ll be scary-fied, sure enough,” she said. “Yes siree. I got myself good and scary-fied!” Then she stomped one foot, then the other. “Peckerwoods.” She said the word like she was upchucking something nasty.

  Then all of a sudden, her eyes caught mine and lit a fire between us. “You out there walking around,” she said. “Guess if you can do it, so can I. You got to live with him.”

  Then she rose up in her blue nightgown, and the ripe bed smells rose with her. “Whooee, got to clean this self up,” she whispered to herself, and she swept past us in a cloud of blue.

  I got a good whiff of her as she went by. “Eva, you need some Mum.” That’s what Mama always said to me when I was dirty and smelly. “A little Mum never hurt anybody,” she would say, handing me the jar of cream to dab under my arms. Not too much or it would glob up, particularly if you used baby powder on top of it.

  “Need more than Mum,” Zenie said. “Need a good scrubbing.”

  Zenie and I stepped back and watched Eva pass. She whipped back the green leaf curtain to the bathroom and disappeared. Then under the curtain we saw the blue gown drop to the floor. We looked at each other for a minute. The water in the bathtub had started up. Then Zenie put her hand on my head. “All right,” she said, and I knew she meant the sheets. They smelled to high heaven. I reached for the top one. “Don’t hurt its arms,” Zenie sang out to me, and walked over to the other side of the bed. The words sounded like music sure enough when they came out of her mouth. I was grateful for them beyond measure.

  “I won’t.” I sung it back to her across the bed. A mockingbird song, changed but the same. When I sang it, I all at once saw my mother’s face from the midpoint of a long dark burrow, the kind rabbits make. Turn one way and I see her young with round eyes that ate up the rest of her face. Turn the other, she’s old as dust with puckers and whiskers. That’s when I knew my own mother would live; she’d tunnel out. Eva had risen from the dead and come back to us. Mama would too.

  What I didn’t know was how many ways there are to be dead.

  People say dead’s dead, but that isn’t exactly it. There’s the buried dead, but there’s also the walking talking dead. Later on, I’d come to think that what Mama really wanted was the first thing. Walking talking was what she had to settle for.

  10

  While Eva was fixing herself up, Zenie poured a glass of tea out of the pitcher in the icebox and eased herself down on the couch with a groan. I came and sat down beside her. She had the sheets soaking in Clorox in the sink. Miss Josephine had nodded off in the easy chair.

  “Want some tea? There’s more where this come from.” Zenie held up her glass.

  “That’s all right.”

  “Some cold biscuit on the stove.”

  I patted my stomach. “Still full.”

  “Want to lie down?” She patted the couch, so I laid myself down, thanking my lucky stars that I was back in Zenie’s good graces. I had to lie flat on my back on account of my arms. It hurt to bend them. I couldn’t lie on my sides at all. I curled my legs up so I wouldn’t be putting my dirty feet up next to her. But that wasn’t good enough.

  Zenie pushed on my leg. “What’s all that sticking to the bottom of those feet of yours? When was the last time you had a bath?”

  I did a U-turn of myself. All the better to see Eva’s bare feet under the curtain. First she stood on one foot then the other. Clatter slam bang was all we could hear. She was busy. First I smelled Alba lotion, then rosewater and glycerin, then something sweet like jasmine, something new I’d never smelled on Eva or anybody. She was piling it on, I could tell. Maybe she’d been saving it to rescue herself.

  A few minutes before, Eva had whipped out the curtain and sailed out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel. Her hair was dripping, making little dabs on the linoleum. She glistened all over. I looked at her and thought, shine little glowworm, glitter, glitter. Then she disappeared behind the curtain to Miss Josephine’s room.

  She made such a ruckus behind the bedroom curtain, opening and slamming drawers, talking to herself about where this or that was, that she sounded a little mental. In a minute or two, here she came sailing out again in a pair of shorts and a hot pink halter top that bordered on being too loud. She had her little red makeup case in her hand and right back behind the bathroom curtain she went.

  Used to be Zenie and Eva would call out to each other back and forth through the curtain while Eva was getting herself beautified, but Zenie didn’t say anything. She just sat with her tea glass wrapped in a little cloth. Eva was the picture show she was waiting to see. The smells were the previews. Every now and then Zenie took a sip and let out a long hopeful breath.

  After a while, Eva stepped out from behind the curtain. She turned herself in a determined circle that ended in a little flourish. “Do I look all right?” The question was schoolteacherish: there was only one right answer.

  “Sure you do, honey,” Zenie broke into the question before it was over.

  “You do,” I piped in. “You look real nice, Eva.”

  Eva did look just fine. In fact she looked fine from every angle. Her hair was still slicked back, but now it looked shiny and clean. She’d put a couple of pink bow barrettes in it, which neatened up the loose ends. She had on lipstick and rouge and powder. She’d covered the place on her face with makeup so the circle from the cigarette lighter was barely noticeable. She looked brand-new.

  “I’m going down to Lafitte’s to get us some ice cream. What kind y’all want?” Now she was digging through her billfold.

  “Chocolate ripple! Let me go too.” I loved going to Lafitte’s Grocery in Shake Rag. It was more a dark cool alleyway than a store, with cigars and pickles and salt pork and candy all stuffed in behind glass counters you could make a breath on. The ice-cream freezer was at the back of the store, where it was so dim you could barely make out the flavors. It was the coolest place in town this time of day. Plus I was hungry for the sight of other people going about their business in an everyday sort of way, and there was always somebody hanging around Lafitte’s.

  Zenie pushed herself up off the couch and smoothed back her hair. “We all go.”

  �
��No ma’am. You sit yourself right back down. You been working your fingers to the bone. I’ll bring you back whatever you want.” Eva had her hands on her hips looking up at Zenie. “Just tell me what it is.”

  “You doing no such thing. You go, we all going. Everybody in the house going, and that includes yours truly.” Zenie drew herself up. Her lips got tight over her teeth. She was keeping her voice low, but there was a don’t-mess-with-me look in her eye. I knew that look from way back.

  Eva put her hands on her hips. Zenie towered over her, but she stood her ground. “I’m going on my own, Auntie.” There was something in the quietness of her voice that outmatched Zenie’s will and her bigness. Plus you could tell Zenie was dog tired and would a whole lot rather be sitting in her cool dark living room than trudging through the heat of the afternoon on some fool errand.

  “Take this one then,” Zenie said, and pointed to me.

  Eva looked down at me smushed down on the couch with my head in the hole Zenie left. She threw back her head and laughed out loud. “What good she going to do me?”

  I raised my head. “Take me,” I whined. I could act the baby. I goldfished my lips into a pout and stretched out my arms. Then I got into the spirit of it and threw back my head and pretended to cry like a baby. “Whaaa. Ice-cream cone, ice-cream cone, I got to have ice-cream cone.” Which was true, I wanted it bad. Lafitte’s had some open cartons and a scoop and some cones. You could get yourself the biggest scoop you could make stick on a cone. Mr. L always let me do it myself. I must have been special in his eyes because he scooped everybody else regular dips. What I wanted even more was going to Lafitte’s with Eva. I was proud of her rising from the dead like that, and I wanted to see her walk in the world, queen that she was, and have people say how lucky I was to get to trail behind her.