Queen of October

by Mickle, Shelley Fraser

  My grandfather and Ezekiel were bending over a crowbar set into the side of the sun porch. They’d discovered dry rot.

  My grandmother rubbed her hands. “I just wish the whole house would fall down. We should have moved to the Mill Pond years ago.”

  “Go ahead and fix it,” my grandfather said to Ezekiel.

  Ezekiel nodded, while studying the side of the sun porch. There were tight swirls of gray in his hair. He was a little younger than my grandfather. His face was bluish black, thin and sort of bony. Usually he wore overalls that had hammers and screwdrivers, rulers and pencils sticking out of pockets or tied on. Today his overalls didn’t have tools on them. And as long as I’d known him he’d always been called Ezekiel and not Zeke, though I’m sure at times the short form was tried—it just never stuck. Maybe that’s what his parents counted on when they gave him the name of someone in the Bible who had his own book—that Ezekiel would end up to be just as he was now: proud, tall, maybe a little too skinny, but never called Zeke. My grandfather was hunkered down beside him, still dressed in what he called his Sunday-go-to-meetin’ suit—a blue seersucker with a light straw hat.

  “Yessir, Dr. Maulden,” Ezekiel said. “Won’t be soon though.”

  My grandmother stepped toward him. “It has to be. It just simply has to be.” She smoothed down her hair that had come loose in the heat. “I’ve got the Missionary Society luncheon in eight weeks.”

  “Oh, it won’t take that long.” Ezekiel put up the crowbar in a tool chest. “‘Bout three weeks at the most.”

  Thin wisps of hair flew around my grandmother’s face like spun sugar. The face in the dining room picture seemed like a distant relative. “This is just the last thing on earth I need—two months before the Missionary Society luncheon—this and,” turning, she pointed, “that.” On the other side of my grandfather’s office, where the alley blended into the back of the newspaper office, was a gray-board outhouse. “I’ve written four letters to the editor to get rid of that thing. But no one cares. It can smell and stink and ruin our health, but people in this town are too lazy to do anything about it. A few members of the Missionary Society wrote letters supporting my proposal. But do you think Charles Rankin will do anything? Of course not! He enjoys controversy. He wants to hear citizens screaming and tearing their hair out.”

  Apparently the outhouse was my grandmother’s latest project. She was always writing letters to the editor to point out how Coldwater citizens could improve themselves. And apparently she and Charles Rankin, the newspaper editor, who also owned the outhouse, were having a knock-down-drag-out battle over it.

  We stared in silence at the outhouse. Disappointment put a hitch in one side of my grandmother’s lip, and when she moved her mouth to speak the crease stayed. “We might as well eat,” she said and headed for the porch steps.

  My grandmother told me to go take off my good dress and put on the one that she’d laid out on the bed. A lot of good it’d do. The whole stupid closet was full of damn Tara dresses. I turned the key in the lock of the bedroom door. It probably hadn’t been turned in half a century. It’d be just like my grandmother to come busting in while I was undressed, saying she just wanted to check on me.

  I put on a sundress that had yellow flowers on it. It was one my mother had made. It had attached petticoats that made me look like a damn lampshade.

  I studied myself in the mirror of the dresser that went with the Man-from-Shiloh’s bed. He probably hadn’t used it much. I didn’t know why men needed mirrors on their dressers, anyway. To mash bumps or pick turnip greens out of their teeth?

  I looked awful in yellow. In fact, my ears were sticking out. My chin was shaped the same as my grandmother’s, and the color of my eyes was hers. She was as evident in my face as in the dining room picture. I grinned at myself and stuck out my tongue.

  I turned the key, and then the knob; but the door wouldn’t open. I leaned against it, jiggling the lock and beating on the doorknob. I was too embarrassed to yell.

  I sat down on the bed to think. I could feel my stomach getting all the old signals that I was in trouble. But I kept telling myself I was too old to throw up. Then I could hear her voice. At first it was normal, but it soon rose to a very high decibel on the last syllable of my name. And the terrible sound of her clumping down the hall began.

  As I sat there, the thought came to me that if I was so bad as to cause my mother and father to bust up, living with my grandmother was probably my due. Soon as I got out of that bedroom, I really ought to have a talk with the Lord about that.

  5.

  Betty Jane Norris and Joel Weiss at the Rexall Drug Store

  “Sally, is something wrong? Are you sick?”

  “No ma’am.”

  The door knob wiggled. “Well then, open this door.”

  “I can’t.”

  I turned the key in what I thought was a display of its uselessness. “Oh good Lord!” She pshawed very loudly and then I heard her say down the hall to my grandfather: “Horace, she’s locked herself in the bedroom.”

  My grandfather didn’t even hesitate. More than likely he was eating the Jell-o salad or stirring his tea. “Just don’t tell her she’ll miss your lunch. She may never come out.” Then he added: “Maybe that’s why she did it.”

  “Horace, would you come here?”

  I sat on the Man-from-Shiloh’s bed and picked my fingernails. “I didn’t lock it on purpose,” I said. “I mean I did, but … I’m not unlocking it because I don’t want to.”

  Apparently my grandfather was still sitting in the dining room, because my grandmother was yelling. “She’s depressed, Horace! I knew this divorce business would ruin the child! And now look.”

  “I’m not in here because of my parents,” I said.

  “Call Ezekiel, Horace! Tell him to bring his tools! We’ll have to get her out of here by force!”

  “I didn’t do this on purpose,” I said, sort of loud.

  “Of course you didn’t.” Apparently my grandfather had gone for Ezekiel and my grandmother was now leaning on the door, breathing in my direction. “Anyone who has to leave their parents and come to a town like this is bound to lose control. Just don’t do anything rash.”

  I took the key out of the lock.

  “Are you moving around? What is that you’re doing?”

  Through the big rusted keyhole I thought I saw my grandmother’s eye.

  “I’m trying to get a nail file to open the lock.”

  “Oh my Lord!” She pressed against the door and yelled. “Ezekiel, Horace, would you two hurry! She’s going to commit suicide!”

  I filed the key for a minute, thinking that by removing some rust it might work. I put it in the lock and slid the nail file through the door. I tried to work the key and began sawing the lock at the same time, more as a sign of my mental health than a belief that I could let myself out. But the best thing was that the sharpness of the file made my grandmother step back.

  I heard Ezekiel come down the hall carrying the tool chest; when he walked, the tools clanked. I stopped my sawing and moved in front of the dresser. “Won’t be but a minute,” Ezekiel said.

  “Yes,” my grandmother whispered, “but it only takes a minute to kill yourself.” Then: “Sally! What are you doing now?”

  “I’m just standing here,” I said.

  “There hasn’t been anybody in this house,” my grandfather added, “with a body worth locking up in twenty years. You want me to help you, Ezekiel?”

  “No sir. It just seem the hinges so rusted I gonna have to oil them to pull out the door pin.” I could hear him move away.

  “Everything’s going to be all right, Sally. Believe me.” My grandmother must have been leaning on the door; she sounded very close. “You’re going to have a good year with us, I promise.” My grandfather chimed in behind her: “We can put you a dog house out back and get a poodle.”

  “Nonsense.” My grandmother must have looked at him, her voice sounded muf
fled. “What do we need a poodle for?”

  “A girl needs a dog. Everybody knows that.” My grandfather leaned on the door and yelled through the keyhole. “You’d like a poodle, wouldn’t you?”

  “I guess,” I said. At least along with all the old Gardenia bath powder, you wouldn’t be able to smell it in the house.

  “Which you want—,” he asked, “white or black?”

  “Think of the fleas it will leave in the rugs.” My grandmother’s voice sounded aimed at him and not the door. “We’ll have to have the house fumigated before each Missionary Society meeting. As if the outhouse weren’t bad enough.”

  My grandparents might have just been fooling around, but I was sick and tired of being smack in the middle of a fight. “I don’t really need a dog,” I said.

  Ezekiel came back and squirted oil on the hinges. He pounded on them with a hammer and nobody could say anything. Behind me I heard something tapping on the window. When I turned to look at what it was, I saw my grandmother looking in at me. “Just stand still and talk to me, “ she yelled through the glass. She must have been standing on a stool or something. She looked shaky and was holding onto the windowsill.

  Ezekiel lifted the door off its hinges and broke the lock. They found me sitting on the Man-from-Shiloh’s bed, filing my nails, while my grandmother watched me through the window and recited all sorts of stuff off a boring list of things she planned for us to do that year.

  When we were all in the dining room again, my grandmother put her arm around me. “Now you won’t do that again, will you?”

  “No’m,” I said, meaning it.

  We ate our lunch, which was something congealed called Sunrise Salad—meat and vegetables with carrots rising to the top. My grandmother seemed to have hundreds of recipes that could harden things together in a jell. While we ate, she kept up a running conversation. My grandfather rarely joined her, but my grandmother talked at him anyway. I think Emily Post taught her how.

  “This is weird,” he said, holding out his fork with the salad shimmering on it.

  “Don’t talk about your food, Horace,” my grandmother said.

  My grandfather took a bottle of his Inside Medicine out of his back pocket and poured some in his iced tea.

  “Oh good heavens!” My grandmother stood up and looked at him as though he had just stripped naked. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m going to need this after this lunch.”

  She moved close to him and pshawed with such guttural participation that I thought she was sick. “Horace!” She leaned over him and breathed fire. “You know you’re not supposed to be doing anything with that medicine.”

  But my grandfather remained calm. I was awed at his display of courage. My own flesh was puckering just from the nearness of her breath. “They mean I can’t sell any,” he said. “It doesn’t mean I can’t use it on my own family.” He took a drink. “In fact, I guess that includes you.” He poured a little into her glass.

  At this point, my grandmother may have considered divorce herself, except of course she would have jeopardized her membership in too many organizations.

  My grandfather walked around behind her as she cleared the table. He was sipping from his glass, telling us that fifty years from now everybody would be laid up with emphysema and heart disease while he was out catching largemouth bass on some sweet riverbank. Unless of course he won an appeal on his case and could offer his medicine to the whole human race.

  I was the only one still sitting. I didn’t want to get up and be noticed.

  Then my grandfather walked into the real dining room, which my grandmother called the den, and he told me to follow him. When my grandparents bought a TV they moved the dining room to the living room because it was low-class to have a TV in the living room.

  “Now,” my grandfather said, sitting back in his recliner and reaching over to switch on the TV. “After a lunch like that we need a rest.”

  I didn’t want to sit in my grandmother’s swivel rocker, so I sat down in a straight-backed chair that had been a dining chair at the banquet table on my grandmother’s family plantation. It made me sit up too straight and was hard.

  My grandfather looked at me. “She’ll go rest in a minute and we can do whatever we want.” Then he turned on the TV and we found an old Gene Autry movie. We could hear my grandmother still shuffling around in the kitchen, and my grandfather nodded in her direction. “Anybody who doesn’t drink my medicine will poop out and have to go to sleep.” Then he winked. “We might even go out and buy a poodle.”

  When my grandmother looked in on us to say she was going to lie down, my grandfather was snoring. The afternoon was a hum of lawn mowers and car doors banging shut and the occasional low voice of someone passing on the street. I sat listening to my grandfather breathe. The room was so quiet and dark with the drapes drawn, it felt that no one in the whole world was near. Inside me was something hard, settling down on the inside of my ribs, under my heart. Against the background of my grandfather’s breathing, a loneliness spread through me like I was a hollow egg, blown completely out, painted and empty. It was the craziest thing in the world—to be right there in the room with someone alive and breathing and to hear people outside moving around talking, and yet have a loneliness take me over with a pain so sharp it was worse than moving ice against a sore tooth. I got up and went out onto the front porch. For a while I just stood there studying the bushes against the house and the grass all the way out to the street, seeing how everything was dry and wilted. For no reason I could name, I felt scared. Being in the room with an old person doing nothing but breathing would probably make anybody feel scared. I stood awhile on the porch, watching Ezekiel load up his wagon, putting a bushel of plums in it that my grandmother must have given him. He had an old mule—she looked old to me, anyway—to pull it. As he drove off he waved at me.

  I headed toward Main Street. Everywhere there was dust. The earth was so fine that it left with whatever breeze came. The ground was like sifted gray chalk, always eager to move. I remembered being little and sitting at the edge of our unpaved road and building dust castles. But that earth wouldn’t stay in any one shape for long. And I remembered sitting in the bathtub, bone-tired and my skin covered by dust that soaked off in the tub and made the water the color of chewed gum. My mother would lean over and run the washrag up my back and drip water over my legs like rain. “Mercy!” I could hear her say, “You sure are good at getting dirty.” I could remember what it was like: the warmth of the water. The smell of the room with heat and soap. And of being loved. But I’d ruined it.

  I headed for the Rexall’s drugstore. It had always been the gathering place for most of the town kids every day after school. We’d giggle in the booths and twirl on the stools, buy Hershey bars and Cokes and long new yellow pencils that smelled wonderful and had chaste, flat erasers. On report card day, Mr. Barber, the pharmacist, served cherry Cokes on the house for anyone who’d gotten nothing lower than a B. He kept us at a high level of achievement and cavity-prone. If we didn’t go on to college, at least we kept the dentist fat.

  I sat on the first stool at the soda fountain, just beside the cash register. Mrs. Barber was the soda jerk, and when she saw me she let out a high sound that I guess was supposed to be delight. “Lord a-mighty!” she squealed. “Sally Maulden, is that you?”

  “Yessum,” I said. Since the petticoats under my dress wouldn’t let my skirt drape over the stool, I pushed at them. I was just thankful nobody I knew was at the soda fountain—nobody except some country people. To them I probably looked like the daughter of a Rockefeller. The truth was, I liked pretty clothes; I just didn’t like extraordinary clothes that caused me to be stared at. And I didn’t like being dressed up in a Tara dress, like a miniature of some lady I wasn’t sure I especially liked, either.

  “Well, don’t you just look darling!” Mrs. Barber said. “I heard you were coming back. I’m sorry to hear why, though.” She smiled sweetly. I felt like a p
oster child with a disease.

  “That’s very kind of you to say,” I said—which was a really stupid remark. But since I’d been brought up to have a sparkling personality, by those rules silences were awful.

  “Well, anyway, we’re glad you’re back.” She asked me what I wanted, and I ordered a cherry Coke. I twirled the stool a little and looked in the mirror behind the soda fountain. I looked hot and my hair was a mess. Soda fountains with mirrors were probably put in drugstores so when you looked at yourself having a soda, you’d get up and buy a bunch of cosmetics or drugs.

  Mrs. Barber leaned over the counter toward me, opened one of the ice-cream vats and started scooping around in it. She had just had her hair permed into sausage-shaped ringlets, and when she got close the curling chemicals made her smell like a cat box.

  “Your grandfather’s misfortune sure is helping our business.” She shook her head. “I hate to say it on your account, but the government putting the quietus on his medicine’s been a boon to us.” She smiled and handed me a vanilla cone. “On the house,” she said. “A little coming-home present.”

  I was nearly through with the ice cream when the door was opened by a woman I had never seen in Coldwater. At first I glanced over when she came in, more of a reflex than anything else. But then I didn’t want to look away; and if I hadn’t been so well-bred, as my grandmother said I was, I would have stared. I was struck by how much she looked like my mother—or like my mother had tried to look when she had been younger. Their coloring was similar and they were the same height. From a distance, one could have been mistaken for the other if they’d been dressed alike. They stood the same, straight but with their shoulders bent forward a little, as though any second they could reach out, touch you, and wanted to. But this woman was younger and prettier than my mother. In fact, she was the most interesting woman I’d ever seen.

  She stood a moment, looking around, then went to the newsstand. She didn’t flip through the magazines; she just reached down and picked up one and came over to the cash register with it. I caught myself staring, so I turned the other way, putting the whole tail-end of the cone in my mouth, which would have been disgusting for her to see anyway.