Queen of October

by Mickle, Shelley Fraser

  She was also the librarian for the Coldwater Public Library, which was open on afternoons and Saturdays. She must have closed the library for today or, more likely, had gotten a substitute, because she believed in offering culture to what she called the country people and Saturday in Coldwater was a big day for farmers. Not many of them, though, chose the library over the cowboy movies at the Ritz.

  Now, while Miss Pankhurst had her head down, reading, I studied her closely. In the last year, I’d gotten real interested in human sexuality, and started just automatically categorizing everyone I met as one who did, one who didn’t, or one who couldn’t. I decided Miss Pankhurst was one of those who couldn’t. She was a rich old maid. She was so ugly that I decided she was one who couldn’t because no one wanted to do it with her. And studying her profile while she read Better Homes and Gardens, I suddenly realized that she looked a whole lot like Gene Autry. Even in the body she was thick and not exactly right. Above the black lace-up shoes, her calves were as stout as those of someone who’s spent a lifetime spurring mustangs.

  According to my grandmother, my legs were one of my weaknesses, too. But mine were nothing like Miss Pankhurst’s. My grandmother had this thing about thin ankles being a sign of good breeding. She thought all women should have ankle bones like thoroughbred horses or the stems on fine crystal, and I was skinny and shapeless everywhere but in my legs. I was built like Olive Oyl, with Popeye’s forearms in my calves. But I could outrun anybody up through the fifth grade. I would even sprint, alone, through dust alleys on the way home from school, coming out the other end panting and windblown with the excitement of my own speed. But racing had gone the same way as marble shooting. I got sent to the principal’s office for bending over a circle drawn on the playground and lining up my agate with the boys, while wearing a dress. When my grandmother found out she broke out in hives, and I was benched. If she hadn’t been so determined to make me a skinny-legged debutante, my Popeye legs would probably have run me straight into the Olympics.

  But compared to Miss Pankhurst’s, the size of my calves was nothing. She didn’t even shave hers. I remembered what Joel Weiss, one of the boys I had shot marbles with, said one day as we watched Miss Pankhurst walk across the library to check us out some books: “She’s so ugly I bet she has to whip her feet to get in bed with her.”

  I looked out the window of the bus, watching the fields as we passed. Beside me Sam Best was breathing heavily. His head was turned slightly toward me, his face sliding into the crease between our two seats. I pulled down my skirt. I wiggled a little and popped my gum. But Mr. Best still slept. I aimed my face toward the bus window. In the reflection, my own face and Sam Best’s came back. Below my shoulder, his hair, dark brown with a few traces of gray, lay clean and freshly cut. There was the smell of shaving lotion. Probably he’d stopped at a barbershop right before coming to the bus depot. His skin was tanned, drawn smooth by sleep. And, strangely, I found myself admiring his nose. It looked like it’d once been broken and was now crooked, yet on him it looked good. I liked the way his cheeks blended into his jaw.

  Mr. Best had a daughter a year older than me, who in earlier times had played Kick-the-Can and Rollie-Bat under the water tower summer evenings with a group of us town kids. Then after I moved I heard Julie had been elected junior homecoming queen and had gotten stuck up. Now Mr. Best’s wife, Ellen, had apparently moved to Little Rock and taken the homecoming queen with her.

  Over the years my grandfather, who had been the only doctor in Coldwater for forty-two years, had treated Sam Best’s father for all sorts of ailments, mostly connected with too much alcohol. My grandmother said Ed Best had “owned” Coldwater—had in fact ended up owning almost that whole section of the state. I had heard my grandfather whisper that Mr. Best had died a terrible death. His liver gave out and there had been nothing my grandfather could do for him. And soon after, Sam’s mother had died. She had lived in the large Victorian house that Sam inherited. For several years before her death she was purple from bad circulation, and children were afraid of her.

  I had also heard the stories of Sam’s orphans. Every year or so he would leave his business, at the cost of thousands of dollars, to go to South America to see about an orphanage he sponsored in Peru.

  As I stared at the window, I watched his face, reflected against a background of August dried pastures and fields. He was sliding over to lean on me. I would have rolled the jacket of my sundress into a pillow and placed it under his head, to at least keep him from slipping. Doing that seemed only natural. But Sam Best was Sam Best, and I wasn’t even fourteen years old.

  “Listen, honey,” Miss Pankhurst said, standing in the aisle and tapping my shoulder. “Come sit with me.”

  I climbed carefully over Mr. Best. And as I slid next to the window, Miss Pankhurst handed me a book named A Man Called Peter.

  She must have just bought it. It was brand new and smelled wonderful. I turned the pages slowly, reading only parts. Then I became fascinated by the section where Peter feels he is being called by the Lord. Unconsciously I began smacking my gum.

  “Dear,” Miss Pankhurst said. “Do you have to?”

  I looked up. At first I didn’t know what she meant. “I guess not,” I said.

  “Do you like it?” She nodded toward A Man Called Peter.

  “Fine.” I said.

  “That Peter Marshall was one of the greatest men ever put on this earth. And his wife who wrote the book’s no small potatoes either. I finally raised enough money to buy a copy for the library. I don’t like to donate my own personal books for public use. You’d be surprised at what I find in the pages of returned books.” She looked at me. “Things like gum, food, fingernails … nose products.” She looked away. “Oh I could go on and on.” Then she looked back. “Are you glad to be returning to Coldwater?”

  I said yes, because I was, though I wasn’t overjoyed about having to live with my grandmother. Of course I didn’t say anything about that. I hadn’t said anything nasty since I was about five and said “poot on you” to some old biddy at church who’d tapped my shoulder for wiggling. My mama switched me for that. Then it seemed that whenever I got in trouble and got caught, I threw up. I even found out that when I got in trouble and didn’t get caught, I would still throw up. So when I was about seven I gave up making trouble, because my stomach couldn’t take it.

  “It’s just too bad about your parents,” Miss Pankhurst said, leaning her arm on my arm rest. “They never should have gotten married in the first place.”

  “I guess not,” I said.

  “In fact, if you want my opinion, I think the greatest danger to a young person in the world today is animal lust. But, then, your mother’s probably already warned you about that. Why, at the time, I’ll bet not a person on this earth could have told your parents they weren’t a good match. And now look.…”

  She looked at me. She was right. I was what came from a union that was doomed from the beginning. I swallowed. And by accident, my gum went too.

  “I just hope you don’t come out of this crazy,” Miss Pankhurst said.

  “No ma’am,” I said, coughing as my gum hit bottom.

  She smiled. “Well, if anybody can keep you on balance, it’ll be your grandmother.”

  If anything, I thought, she might be the one to tip me over.

  “But of course, that’s what Freud says,” she said. She looked at me. “If you keep your fears conscious, you can lick ‘em. Right?”

  “Yes ma’am.” I didn’t know anybody in Coldwater named Freud, but what Miss Pankhurst said sounded good.

  “Anyway, right now it seems your whole family’s in hot water. Your poor grandfather—and your grandmother. It must be awful for her to see everything they’ve worked for hanging on the brink of a precipice.” She blew a little wet spot on my cheek when she said precipice. I turned to the window and dried it off, as though scratching my face.

  The trouble she meant was my grandfather’s medicines
and his trial. My family was so busy going to court that year, I had to think to keep it straight. My grandfather had invented two kinds of medicines that were supposed to make the whole human race invulnerable. One was for the inside of the body and the other was for the outside. He put some ads in magazines and newspapers to tell the world about it, with a Coldwater P.O. box where you could send for it. Then the Post Office, with the Food and Drug Administration, took him to court for mail fraud.

  Almost the whole town of Coldwater came to the county courthouse and testified on his behalf. My mother and father went, too, and I heard them talking about it. The prosecutor had said my grandfather’s medicines belonged in the same class as the left hind foot of a rabbit caught in a graveyard in the dark of the moon. My grandfather was forbidden to sell any more of them. If he did, he’d lose his license to practice medicine. To my grandmother, that was as embarrassing as being married to Jesse James.

  In fact, when you got right down to it, I guess my grandfather was somebody my family could have been just as eager to hide as me.

  Miss Pankhurst smiled, looking at me head-on. I hated being looked at that closely. It made me think she thought we were in cahoots and belonged together. She had a faint downy mustache, and there was a space between her front teeth that any good cowboy would have cherished as a spitting hole. “Well, anyway,” she said, “we’re glad you’re coming back to Coldwater, even if for a little while.” She smiled, and face-to-face, close-up, she looked so much like Gene Autry that I couldn’t keep my eyes off her. Fascinated, I studied the shape, the similarity, the lines of her face.

  “Is something wrong?” She touched her hat, rearranging the cherries on it.

  “No’m.”

  “You know why I ride buses?”

  “No’m.”

  “I tell people I do it so I can spend all this time reading. But the truth is.…” She took a deep breath. “There’s something about them—their size, their strength, maybe even”—she laughed—“their smell. Don’t tell your grandmother; she’ll think I’m coarse.”

  Then she reached down between her cowboy legs into her shopping bag and brought out a burnt-orange cloche, the shape and color of a deformed pumpkin. “This is what I got for your grandmother’s luncheon, the one in early November—and I wanted something fallish, in a Halloween color, don’t you think?”

  “Yessum.”

  My grandmother’s Eastern Arkansas Missionary Society Meeting was looked forward to every November, and written up in the Coldwater Gazette about like if the King of England had come to visit.

  By then we’d been on the bus a couple of hours and it stopped for a few minutes so we could all get off and rest or get a drink. As quickly as I could, I headed as far away from Miss Pankhurst as I could get. Even Sam Best woke up and came smiling off the bus to where I was standing by a Coke machine, saying that he wanted to buy me something. We put peanuts in Cokes and let them fizz and sucked the foam. Sam Best could laugh and carry on as good as anybody I knew, maybe better. I kept thinking there might still be a chance he’d end up my stepfather. I made up all sorts of pictures in my head about that, because I’d end up rich. Probably I’d even get to be the Coldwater homecoming queen, seeing as how his real flesh and blood daughter had already gotten to be it. Not that I wanted to, or anything.

  We stood there, Sam and me, by the Coke machine outside a café named Pete’s Place, and he showed me how to skip gravel across the highway. Then, just as we were ready to get back on the bus, I turned and saw one of the strangest things I have ever witnessed in my life. Miss Pankhurst was flirting with the bus driver just like she was Marilyn Monroe, even sticking out her lips and talking breathy like that. And mercy, if that bus driver didn’t hold her arm and help her up the bus steps, with her still wearing that stupid orange, hat! She was even smiling at him out of her cowboy face. She stood there right by the steering wheel and the bus driver’s seat, and we all had to wiggle past her. She even left me alone where we’d been sitting and rode up there in the front seat for the rest of the trip and read aloud passages to him from A Man Called Peter!

  Another hour went by, and then I could see the water tower that was near the back of my grandparents’ house. Painted a bright silver, it glinted in the sun. When I had been small, I thought it looked like a pot-bellied man on stilts. Now it was only a water tower. But just as I remembered, only maybe a little faded, there was the large red heart painted on the front, and the words: Coldwater, Arkansas, Heart of Best County.

  I glanced around the bus. Just about everybody but me had somebody with them. I was in the world, on my own, and left out.

  Mr. Best had woken up and was reading the Wall Street Journal. He looked across the aisle at me and winked. One time when he’d come to visit my mother at our house in Coldwater, he’d looked up at the water tower, and after staring a minute at that heart and the words under it, he’d laughed a sudden deep laugh that pulled the edge of his mouth into a slight upward skip that was part amusement, part surprise and, without expecting any answer, said: “You ever heard a better name?” Then a beat of silence while he looked at us and grinned: “S’been right convenient.”

  As the bus bumped up over the railroad tracks onto the main street of Coldwater, I swallowed my stomach and then my heart. I was home!

  I slid my stupid-looking hat with the streamers under my seat and left it there. Finally, no mother to dress me up with her ideas of me. And no father wishing every minute that I was some stupid boy instead. Probably every girl in America would hate my guts for being so lucky.

  4.

  Being Back

  When the sun broke open with yellow light onto the high headboard of my bed through the open window, I heard a laugh. The room my grandparents gave me was an enclosed sleeping porch with windows all around it. And the window behind my bed looked onto the side of my parents’ old house.

  Only a short driveway separated the two houses. I could see across the narrow yards into my parents’ old living room. New furniture was in it, and the voices I heard were coming from my parents’ bedroom. Some woman was talking. When she laughed the sound was high and light like someone running a finger up the treble keys of a piano. Then a man sneezed. “You?” she said and laughed again.

  I stretched out in the bed, thinking what a nice sound that laugh was. I couldn’t remember my mother ever laughing like that, except maybe once. She’d dressed me up—I was about six—and put me in a county talent show. I was supposed to tap dance and sing. When she got me all done up in a ruffly pinafore (I think I was supposed to be something like a Shirley Temple from Arkansas) she shrieked and laughed and near about went crazy over how cute she said I looked. But I was homely even back then; it just hadn’t gotten organized yet. And besides, when somebody’s little and plain they can get by. But now I was five-foot-four and still on the rise, and even though all my life I’d heard plenty of people say somebody was so ugly she was cute, I knew I’d long since passed out of that category. Then, when my mother and I got on the stage and she sat down at the piano to play while I sang, I got stuck. Even after she played the introduction five times, and I finally got out the first notes, I sounded like somebody pulling chalk across a blackboard. Nobody could hear the taps on my shoes any more than if I’d been tap dancing at a deaf school. My mother wanted Shirley Temple and she got me. I couldn’t sing any better than I could fish.

  I looked up at the wood curls in the walnut headboard of my bed. Everything was different. I was a woman now. I was out in the world, alone, and on my own. Even the bed was a sign of how much things had changed. Before now, I’d been afraid of it. It was part of the bedroom set my grandmother had shipped from her family plantation in Mississippi. It had been my great-great-grandfather’s and was very beautiful, except that my grandmother told me the man it had belonged to had fought at Shiloh and got shot in the stomach with a cannonball. She showed me his picture. For several years he had carried part of that cannonball in his stomach, and then he die
d of the flu. In his picture he didn’t look as though he had a stomachache any more than any of her other relatives. Still, sometimes when I spent the night at my grandparents’, I woke up in his bed sweating, his face crashing my dreams, in which he had tried to share the bed again.

  But now I thought about beds differently. The year before they’d only been places to sleep, read books, and dream. Now I attributed ninety-five percent of the world’s population to them, giving the other five percent to drive-in movies, bear rugs, or bare floors.

  I could hear my grandmother shuffling around in the kitchen, talking to my grandfather. She didn’t sound cheerful. My grandmother was never cheerful. I think it was part of her religion not to be. I wasn’t in any rush to get up and get in the middle of that.

  Of course my parents had called me the night before—my father first and then my mother—to see if I’d arrived in Coldwater all right. After I’d talked a minute, my grandmother had gotten on the phone and carried on about how much I’d grown. She said I was a bona fide teenager now, and she was too old to raise one again. She told my father she hadn’t gotten over raising him yet, and that he and my mother ought to cut out their shenanigans and straighten out their lives. Maybe my grandmother was just using me to push my parents, but I didn’t get the message like that. Maybe she thought I was sitting there beside my grandfather watching a cowboy movie on TV and couldn’t hear her. But it didn’t matter, because I knew the truth. Did they all think I was some peabrain two steps from the halfwit ward at the state insane asylum?

  My grandmother ended the conversation by telling my father she loved him and to not worry; she loved me and we’d get through the year somehow. Then my father told me he loved me and to also give his love to my grandparents. And then my mother called and we went through the whole business again. She hung up saying all that love stuff again, her voice sad and reeling it off like the inside of a greeting card. The whole time my grandfather sat in his chair in front of the TV, asleep and left out. But I’d just as soon have been. All that love stuff was a bunch of junk. I’d been sent away. My grandmother would never love me unless I became a bona fide debutante, and even if I broke down and agreed to “come out,” the paper would probably take one look at my picture and put it on the obituary page.