by Lesley Kagen
Chapter Three
After Frankie, Viv, and I burst through the squeaky screened door that we were sure Aunt Jane May refused to oil so she could keep track of our comings and goings, we mumbled our good mornings, took our preordained seats at the kitchen table, and awaited delivery of pork sausages, flapjacks with maple syrup, home fries, and the daily lecture she expected us to digest along with our breakfasts.
I felt bad for letting her down and was worried almost to tears that she’d ask if the sleepover had been the kind of respectful evening she’d expected it to be, but all she said was, “’Bout time” and went back to shuffling the silver fry pan across the burner.
She was planted in front of the stove, so the girls and I couldn’t see her heart-shaped face, navy-blue eyes, and generous mouth, but the auburn hair she’d stopped winding into a tight bun and begun folding into a French twist was hard to miss. Viv certainly didn’t.
She nodded toward Aunt Jane May, raised her eyebrows a few times—Groucho-style—and whispered to me, “I’m tellin’ ya … hot to trot.”
As if the girls and I weren’t terrified enough by all the “creature features” we were taking in, we were about to fall into the abyss of adolescence and were pretty fuzzy about where we’d land. We weren’t complete ignoramuses. We knew we’d grow breasts and hair in smooth places, and we’d rarely ride past a farm without seeing livestock mounting a barnyard pal. But we mostly had to rely on Doc’s medical books—horrifying—and whatever we picked up from girls in town who’d supposedly been around the block. After “Easy Mimi” Kincaid caught us gazing at the sanitary napkin dispenser in the school bathroom like it was the ninth Wonder of the World, she informed us, “One of these nights you’re gonna wake up covered in blood that comes from Virginia and you use these pads to clean off the sheets and then ya have a baby.”
To further muddy the waters, Viv wouldn’t stop spouting off about what she learned from the ladies’ magazines in her mother’s beauty parlor that she treated like a reference library.
“Don’t be disgusting,” I whispered back to her at the breakfast table. “She’s too decrepit to trot.”
With thirty-seven years under Aunt Jane May’s belt, I was convinced she was far too long in the tooth for romance. It wasn’t that she wasn’t good-looking enough to attract a fella. She was. Very. In both face and figure. And her many attributes did not go unnoticed by the bachelors in town. Our elderly mayor had a crush on her and would shower her with compliments, the butcher gave her extra-thick pork chops, and her baker’s dozen was always more generous, but their flirtations were met with nothing more than a curt nod and a “Much obliged.”
Keeping her eye on Aunt Jane May, Viv slowly tilted my way again. “True Confessions says the first things gals do when they’re dating a man is freshen their hairstyle, push up their bosom, and show more flesh. And if they get very worked up, they wear black stockings with seams, high heels with cleats, and their cheeks look like roses in bloom.”
Aunt Jane May’s bosom was where it always was, as were the shoes she bought at Harrington’s Department Store, the same place the nuns got theirs. Her legs, as usual, were covered in the oatmeal-colored mesh stockings the five-and-dime sold on aisle four, and she wasn’t any pinker in the cheeks than she’d normally be on a scorcher of a morning. But I couldn’t deny that she had changed her hair and she was showing more skin, around the house and yard anyway.
“Bare my arms in public?” she’d huffed after I suggested she wear sleeveless tops when the heat came down hard on us. “I’d rather be lyin’ in the ground next to your mama than wear an ensemble that’d give the men in this town the idea that I was advertising my wares.”
Fat chance, I almost told her.
She maintained the house and garden, and when called on, she’d dust off her nursing skills to assist Doc at his office on Bridge Street. On the evenings she wasn’t at a Garden Club or St. Thomas’s Ladies Auxiliary meeting, she’d study the words of God and William Shakespeare. She also enjoyed singing along with show tunes on the hi-fi and wouldn’t miss the Gillette Friday Night Fights and the Kraft Television Theatre on our Sylvania set. If the weather was right, she’d sit on the back porch glider, listen to the crickets courting one another, and wait for Frankie’s mother to come over after she tucked the Maniachis’ house in for the night. When she and Dell let their hair down and drank cooking sherry out of jelly glasses, the girls and I would lie on the hideout floor, barely breathing, so we could hear them talking woman to woman, and we’d gotten an earful one night last summer.
They’d spent some time chatting about the price of beef and whether or not they approved of Elvis Presley before the conversation took a turn. Someone lay on a car horn, so we missed what Dell said, but Aunt Jane May answered, “Before they knew Sophia was born with a birth defect, some of the ladies in the Auxiliary were saying that she and Sally were part of a mob family and she was crippled when she got shot in the back during a bank robbery.”
That was news to us, and picturing jolly Sally and bashful Sophia wielding Tommy guns and yelling, “Hand over the money, you dirty rats!” to a bank teller had us rolling around on the hideout floor attempting to smother our giggles.
Sure that Dell’d react the same way we had to that ridiculous gossip, we waited to hear her tinkling laugh coming off the back porch, but you know, it went real quiet back there before she said, “If the truth ever comes out … God help us all, Jane May.”
The girls and I still weren’t sure what to make of that, so we chalked up Dell’s comment that night to the cooking sherry. She could go gloomy like that after one too many jarfuls. Frankie called it her Billie Holiday mood.
“This pork could sole a shoe,” Aunt Jane May said as she slapped the patties onto the white breakfast plates. “What took ya?”
“So sorry for keepin’ you waiting, Auntie,” Viv said, because after we performed the ceremony, my blood sisters considered her a relative, the same way I considered their families mine. “It’s Frankie’s fault.”
Looked like she wasn’t going to waste any time getting back at her for the witch dare, and, as the peacekeeper of our triumvirate, it behooved me to consider all options. I was almost certain the jump rope Viv’d stuck in her shorts before she climbed down from the hideout figured into whatever revenge she’d come up with, because I’d recently caught her fashioning nooses with it. When I asked her if she was planning on hanging anybody in particular, she had the gall to tell me, “For your information, Elizabeth, I’m working on my knot merit badge,” like I’d forgotten she’d been kicked out of Girl Scouts for eating what she was supposed to be delivering. (She had a sweet tooth a mile wide and was unable to resist those chocolate mint cookies.)
“Biz and I got up early to pray,” Viv further lied to Aunt Jane May, “but Frankie wouldn’t wake-up and—” She yowled. “She just kicked me under the table!”
Brandishing a wooden spoon, Aunt Jane May spun around. “This better not have been how y’all acted last night.” She inspected our faces, but we’d practiced looking guileless for many years and our hard work paid off. “And how many times do I have to tell you to sit right in those chairs? Mark my words, you’re going to end up lookin’ as hunched as Edith Dirks, bless her heart.”
Most of her lectures began with “Mark my words” and didn’t end with, “And they all lived happily ever after.” The second she’d turn her back, we’d smirk at her gruesome warnings the way know-it-all girls of that age do—but not always. Because she and my mother had grown up in a town that had about as much in common with Summit as Mars, there were times Aunt Jane May seemed as strange to us as the aliens that scared us at the movies.
In Little Wildwood, Louisiana, you could be both a Roman Catholic and a believer in voodoo—a burlap doll sat next to Aunt Jane May’s missal in the top drawer of her dresser. Folks wrestled alligators in swamps, and because we didn’t know what the main ingredient in hush puppies was and were too afraid to ask, we tho
ught they ate shoes down there. It also wasn’t unusual in her neck of the woods for a baby to be born on the “right side of the blanket,” the way she’d been. She possessed “the gift,” or what some folks called “intuition” or “being on God’s wave length,” and knew things that she seemed to pluck out of thin air.
Steaming plates in hand, Aunt Jane May shouted, “Did you not hear me? Put some starch in those backbones!”
Only after we did would she set our breakfasts down and herself at the head of the table, because my father was already at his busy downtown office. When we finished saying grace, Aunt Jane May snapped open the red clutch purse she’d begun carrying around since the heat flared up, withdrew one of the large, white lace hankies she kept at the ready to dab the “sheen”—never sweat—off her brow, and began her daily lecture.
“Where I come from,” she said, “ya know what they like to say when it grows so fiercely and unexpectedly hot like this, girls?”
Like butter wouldn’t melt, Viv said, “What do they like to say, Auntie?”
“That Satan knows when there are young souls ripe for the pickin’ and in his excitement to gather them, he fled perdition so fast he left the door of the everlasting fires open behind him. So less’n you three are itchin’ to spend all eternity burning, I’m warning you to keep your eyes open for lurking evil and trouble of any kind.” She swiveled my way. “As always, I expect you to remember that you’re a Buchanan and keep these two in hand. Stay away from Broadhurst, don’t pester Audrey Cavanaugh, keep your noses out of other folks’ business, and,”—she paused to wet her lips— “I want you to quit visiting Earl Spooner’s Club. In fact, once the sun sets, I don’t want you ridin’ over the tracks at all.”
When the Northern Railroad came through Summit way back when, they must’ve been in a hurry, because the part of town she was forbidding us to visit looked like it’d been built on the fly and was aptly named. The sewer system in Mud Town was sub-par and the drainage almost nonexistent. The ground was always damp and smelled freshly turned, and when it rained too much, you could almost feel the place slipping off the face of the Earth. Property went for near nothing and was bought by “colored” families, many of whom were descendants of the men who’d come to town to lay the tracks, and they had every right to set roots, no matter what some of our neighbors thought.
Aunt Jane May wasn’t like those folks.
Whatever reason she had for not wanting us to go over to Mud Town after dark, it wasn’t because she was prejudiced. She spoke in glowing terms about the brown-skinned women who had tended to the Mathews sisters when they were growing up and her best friend, Dell, wore only white at night to avoid getting struck by a car.
As our mouthpiece, Viv should’ve been vehemently challenging Aunt Jane May’s new rules, but she was as dumbstruck as I was, so it was up to Frankie to say something and she didn’t disappoint.
“Pardon me, Frances?” Aunt Jane May said. “You got somethin’ to say, speak up.”
Too smart to repeat the caustic remark she’d uttered under her breath, Frankie replied, “I said that as soon as we’re done here I gotta go clean the wax out of my ears ’cause I thought you just told us that we couldn’t go over to Mud Town after—”
“Nothin’ wrong with your hearin’,” Aunt Jane May spit out, “and nothin’ wrong with mine neither.”
“But,” I said, “we promised Jimbo that we’d—”
“Then you ought to be more careful what you promise,” Aunt Jane May barked. “What goes on after dark across the tracks is …”
She was searching for the right words, but if I’d been asked to fill in her blank, I would’ve had no problem coming up with “mysterious” and “delicious” and “religious.”
The girls and I had been visiting Mud Town our whole lives and loved it much more than we did Summit proper. If we could manage it, we’d slip out of St. Thomas’s Sunday Mass and ride over to Emmanuel Baptist to sit beside Jimbo and Dell and get treated to a lively sermon by Reverend Archie and singing that made our choir sound soulless. We’d play Ghost in the Graveyard in the cemetery on Wickers Avenue with our friends over there, and we couldn’t get enough of Jimbo and his front-porch stories. And not only did Earl Spooner’s Supper Club serve far and away the best food in town, the back door was left open on steamy summer evenings. The girls and I would eat slices of chiffon pie and watch couples on the dance floor move nothing like the couples at our church mixers. Their hips undulating to that low-down saxophone music made the high insides of my thighs tingle in a way the polka never did, though I couldn’t have told you why.
Aunt Jane May flicked her tongue over her lips again and said, “I’m givin’ the three of you fair warning. If I should hear from Jimbo or Bigger or anybody else that you were seen over in Mud Town after the sun sets”—she smacked her fist down on the table like it was a gavel—“there will be severe consequences. Ya hear me?”
Frankie nudged me under the table to let me know what she was about to do, then turned to Aunt Jane May and said, “Jesus Christmas, of course we can hear you. Sam Osbourne could and he’s been dead and buried for a week.”
Now, I gained no pleasure from challenging the powerful forces that ruled our world—our aunt and the Almighty—but if Frankie hadn’t distracted her with that blasphemy, I would’ve placed my hand down on the kitchen Bible and sworn to stay on the straight and narrow and make sure the girls did as well. I would’ve been lying, of course, and if Aunt Jane May ever found out, she’d kill me. “Spinnin’ a tall tale is one thing, and holding back a truth that could hurt feelings is allowable in certain situations,” she’d lecture us, “but the Lord detests lying lips, and He and I are on the same page.” She meant the page of the Bible she was quoting from. “Mark my words, girls, I ever catch you prevaricating to me I will cook your gooses beyond recognition and bury them under the willow out back.”
Since her parenting philosophy was similar to everyone else’s at the time: raise children like you would mushrooms—keep them in the dark and feed them lots of bull crap—the girls and I had to rely on our keen powers of observation to determine what future she had in mind for us. A tapping toe promised an afternoon of chores. Calling any of us “Missy” was a lit stick of TNT. And when she gave her lips a tongue lashing? That meant she was hiding something from us, and judging by how vigorously she was going at it that morning—it was something big.
When she finished reprimanding Frankie for taking the Lord’s name in vain, she moved on to the Tree Musketeer who’d usually be giving her the business. “You’ve been suspiciously quiet this morning Vivian,” she said. “You got somethin’ on your mind needs airin’ out?”
“Actually, I was thinking these flapjacks are the best I’ve ever had and … oh, yeah.” Viv smacked her forehead, like this idea had just dawned on her. “I’ve been meanin’ to tell you how much I love your new French twist. It’s very oo là là.”
Aunt Jane May didn’t want to be charmed by Viv, but I saw a hint of a smile coming onto her lips before the grandfather clock in the front hallway chimed a warning that tempus fugit. “Lord Almighty,” she said, “it’s eight already?” She dabbed at her mouth with her napkin. “I have a million and one things to do today and you foolish girls and this heat have me—”
“Fit to be tied?” Viv said as she plopped the jump rope she’d been holding in her lap down onto the table.
Given the mood she was in, I was sure Aunt Jane May would not find that amusing, but she chuckled. With gusto! Even Frankie, who found Viv funny but hated to let on that she did, grinned. I did, too, but only because I was relieved to learn the rope was not intended for Frankie’s neck.
Viv was so pleased with herself for pulling that gag off, but she wasn’t about to rest on her laurels. Sure now that she had our aunt eating out of her hand, she snatched Frankie’s newly created paper fortune teller off the table and impishly asked her, “Three’s your favorite number, right?” After she manipulated the paper the
requisite number of times and flipped up the flap, she pretended to read what she found in the mysterious voice gypsies used in werewolf movies to tell fortunes in their caravans in the woods. “It’s a goood thing you are loooking like a million bucks, because you’re about to meet a tall, dark, and handsome man or maybe yooou already have.” She dropped the act. “You got somethin’ on your mind needs airin’ out, Auntie?”
That was so out of line, even for her, that I cringed at the dressing down she was about to receive, but Aunt Jane May turned as red as her clutch purse and bolted out of the kitchen so fast she created the breeze the girls and I had been hoping for all week.
Granted, she could’ve just been in a hurry to get to her chores, but it looked to me like her hasty exit coming on the heels of the fictional fortune meant that it’d hit a nerve. Judging by the smarmy look on Viv’s face she thought so, too, and given her passionate desire to catch our aunt in the act, I feared that trouble was coming our way, just as Aunt Jane May had warned us it would if we strayed from the straight and narrow.
Chapter Four
Back then, kids were kept under adults’ thumbs nine months out of the year, but during the summer, they led their lives and we led ours, and the twain rarely met except at Sunday suppers and in church pews, which is where the girls and I were when we received the news that could put the kibosh on the freedom we’d been enjoying the past few weeks.
Doc, his younger brother Walt, who was the sheriff of Summit, and Aunt Jane May and I were expected to sit in the dedicated Buchanan pew up front. Viv was with her family a few rows behind us. Frankie and the Maniachis back further still. Frankie was a Baptist at heart and would’ve liked to have been over at Emmanuel Baptist wedged between Dell and Jimbo, but those church busybodies and the group of Germans would notice if the “orphaned relative of the Italians” didn’t show up at Mass with them.
