That’s about the time old Walter Murray Hill walked in.
Chapter Seventeen
We all live with expectations, whether we realize and acknowledge them or not. Our expectations define the way that we think our world should be, the way things should go. Some expectations are obvious. When you walk into a restaurant, you expect someone to serve you a plate of food. When you go to school, you expect to be bored out of your mind (I mean, learn something). You go to a shoe store, you expect them to sell shoes, not handguns.
So when you get dragged into the Bienville County Jail for drinking under age, what do you expect from the authority figure who shows up to bail your behind out? An endless lecture and punishment up the wazoo. And if you’re a Magnolia Maid, you expect to be kicked off the Court, then sent home for more punishment from your God-fearing, authority-respecting Southern parents.
Me, I was convinced we were going to be fine, but the girls were terrified. The minute Uncle Walter showed up, Ashley dropped the catfight and switched into full damage-control mode. “Oh, Uncle Walter, I don’t know why that officer stopped us!” “Yes, we did each have a little teeny-weenie drink but all those big bottles must have been Daddy’s, I don’t know where they came from! I’m so worried that Zara’s in trouble, Uncle Walter. Please say it isn’t so!” Of course, she was trying to cover her own butt, but she was at least covering everyone else’s in the process.
Mallory also went into hysterics mode when Uncle Walter came in. She was so panicked about losing the opportunity to wear her antebellum dress and represent Bienville that she wept uncontrollably as we were escorted into an investigation room. “Please don’t kick us off the Maids. Please don’t take this away from us! I’ll just die if you take this away from us! Just die!”
The rest of us remained quiet.
There were only four chairs in the interrogation room (just like in the one Kyra Sedgwick uses to interview people of interest on The Closer—God bless her and her totally fake Georgia accent). Walter Murray Hill gestured for us all to take a seat, and everyone did except me and Zara. We repaired to opposite corners, like prizefighters waiting for the bell to announce the first round.
Standing at the head of the table, Walter Murray Hill loomed above us. “Girls. Maids,” he corrected himself. “This is a night that will go down in Magnolia Maid history.”
“I knew it!” weeped Mallory. “No Maid has ever been arrested before. We’re the first ones. It’s a travesty!”
“It is true that this is the first time I have ever in my life gotten out of my bed in the middle of the night to bail a bevy of Magnolia Maids out of jail. I have on more than one occasion bailed out my sons and their wayward friends, but you girls.” He shook his head. “I thought y’all had more sense than this, okay.” One by one, we hung our heads in shame.
Walter Murray Hill sighed deeply. “Maids, I knew changing up the Court was going to be hard. Many of my acquaintances and colleagues told me time and again that the way things were was fine. ‘Walter, why go rocking the boat, okay,’ they said. ‘Let’s run things the way we always have.’ To those people I have said, Bienville’s ready. We can do it. Let’s leave the past behind. Move into the future.”
Mr. Walter paused and looked us each in the eye. “But I may have made a mistake here, okay. I did not take into consideration how hard this was going to be on you all. Ashley, Mallory, your expectations about what this year was going to look like were not met, and you’ve had a hard time bonding with the other girls.”
They nodded, though their agreement lacked the fervor and anger of their initial reaction at the pageant all those weeks ago.
“Zara.” Walter Murray Hill turned to her. “You being a newcomer to town, and Jane, your having been away so long, well, it’s affected your ability to fit in. Brandi Lyn, I sure am sorry to hear about your money situation. That’s a real issue, it sure is, and I didn’t take that into account when I approved you. Caroline, I know it’s not easy for you, what with your mother being the sponsor.” He sighed again. “I kept thinking, though, this group of girls, they’re interesting. Modern. They’re going to be able to do a lot for us here in Bienville. You proved that right with the fund-raiser, that’s for sure. And I thought with time you’d all be able to pull it together. But what happened tonight…” He closed his eyes. “Tells me I made a mistake. A big one. Do you have any idea how many rules in the handbook you just broke?”
I raised my hand. “Four. Drinking while wearing the dress, driving while wearing the dress, wearing the dress on an outing not approved by the organization, getting arrested while wearing the dress.”
“That is correct, Jane. And one of those is a crime. Do you have any idea what I’ve just had to do to convince the police not to book you? Mizz Upton was right. This is the most unfit group of Maids I have ever encountered. Which is why I’m considering disbanding the organization for the year.”
Boy, when he said that, you could have heard a hoopskirt drop, it was so quiet. We were all a little shocked by Walter Murray Hill’s announcement. This was so much more serious than what I had seen coming.
And we may have been completely and totally mad at each other, but there ain’t nothing like a group of Magnolia Maids on the verge of being disbanded. No way were we going to let this end now.
“No, Mr. Walter, please don’t!”
“We’ll never do anything like this again!”
“I know we’re difficult, Mr. Walter, but we can do this!”
“We are modern!”
“The fund-raiser is only the beginning of what we are capable of!”
“We can live up to your expectations!”
“Are you kidding? We can surpass them!”
We were such a whirling dervish of ferocious persuasion, Walter Murray Hill couldn’t keep up with us. He held his hands out to shut us up. “I hear you! I hear you! I want to give you all another chance. I want this to work, too. But there are going to be some ground rules, okay.” He cleared his throat. “Number one. I do not—repeat DO NOT—want Martha Ellen Upton to hear word one about this. I do NOT want it in the gossip columns. I’ve talked to the boys out there about making sure this thing stays private, and they’ve agreed. You girls do your part and keep your mouths shut. Don’t tell a soul. I mean anyone. Not your parents, your siblings, your friends, your boyfriends. The first phone call I get with somebody asking about Magnolia Maids being hauled to jail, I will disband you. Do you understand?”
We couldn’t yell “Yes, sir!” fast enough. This was really good news, and we all knew it. The fact that Mr. Walter was powerful enough to control the small-town gossip mill was going to make life a whole lot easier.
“Number two. You girls are going to sponsor an alcohol-education course for teens as one of your charity events, and you’re going to actually take the class yourselves.” Oh, I had to hand it to Mr. Walter. Make it look like we were helping the community, when we were really saving ourselves from a future as lushes? Genius.
“Number three. I need you to elect a queen by Saturday, okay. Number four. If anything else happens like this again…”
“We know,” said Ashley.
“We’ll be the first Court in history to be disbanded,” said Mallory.
“Exactly. Now don’t you ever let me catch you here again.”
As he escorted us out of the police station, Walter Murray Hill chuckled. “You know, Maids,” he said. “You girls have spark and passion. You remind me of the first girl who ever asked me when was I going to integrate the Court.”
“Really?” Mallory leapt on this information like a rooster on a hen. “A Maid asked you to integrate? I never knew that!”
“A queen, as a matter of fact. She said, ‘Mr. Walter, how can we say that we truly represent the city of Bienville, which is a wonderfully diverse place, if we only have wealthy white girls on the Court? It’s just not right, Mr. Walter,’ she told me.” Melancholy invaded his words as he shook his head. “I’ve heard her vo
ice in my head every one of the twenty-five years it’s taken me to get up the gumption to do it.”
“Who was she?” Mallory asked. “The maid who asked you?”
Walter Murray Hill put his hand on my shoulder and looked me in the eye. “Cecilia Fontaine. Jane’s mom.”
Chapter Eighteen
Unlike Uncle Walter, I still couldn’t hear my mother’s voice. All these weeks of cruising around B’ville asking her questions, trying to integrate her into my life as Grandmother suggested, and I still couldn’t hear her.
By the time I turned nine, the ALS had started to work its decaying ways on the muscles of her vocal cords. At first, it sounded like she was slurring, and we’d laugh that oops! She must have had one too many glasses of champagne! But as the disease stole more and more power from the neurons in her throat, Mom’s words came out as grunts and groans struggling to shape themselves into comprehensible sentences. Sadly, more and more often, our ears were incapable of making sense of them. Along came the DynaVox, and Mom would spend endless spans of time typing her thoughts into a mini-laptop that would then read them in a computer-generated voice. “Dyna,” we called her, and she eventually became the only way Mom could communicate. So what did the real voice of the fully capable woman my mother had once been sound like? I couldn’t remember. Was it screechy and high-pitched? Or low and breathy? Did she call my name quickly—“Jane!”? Or did she sing it out into two syllables, “Jay-ayne”? How did she construct a sentence? Did she ramble on? Or was she efficient and precise with her word choice? At least I remembered her laugh. That never changed, no matter how much her speech deteriorated. It kicked off as a bell tinkling, but if something was really funny, Mom’s laugh turned into a train rumbling high-speed off the tracks into sweet chaos. Even after she couldn’t speak, that woman could laugh, and she loved to hear me laugh. She called my laugh “her sweet nectar.” Cheesy, I know, but I liked it.
I wonder what she’d say about my laugh now that it’s all hoarse and croaky from the cigarettes? Ugh.
And what would she say about the train wreck that was my own personal Magnolia Maid experience? Ugh times two.
I wish I could describe the final days of rehearsals as full of forgiveness and friendship, love, peace, and happiness. But the damage had been done. Regardless of our passionate plea that Mr. Walter not disband the Court, we had fallen apart. Chatterbox Brandi Lyn had resigned and it was like we had all received a memo that no one was to talk to or look at anyone else. Ashley wasn’t speaking to Mallory, Brandi Lyn wasn’t talking to anybody because well, she wasn’t there, Zara wasn’t talking to me, and Caroline was so terrified she just wasn’t talking, period. She was a walking zombie, and who could blame her? Mizz Upton had ramped herself up into a frenzy way beyond her normal freak-show level. On the one hand, she was delighted that she had gotten one of her so-called undesirables off the Court. On the other, she worried like a madwoman about how the debut was going to come off since Caroline wasn’t “Magnolia-ready.” She constantly fretted about all the potato chip–eating and romance novel–reading Caroline had engaged in instead of participating in training. Mizz Upton took every opportunity to remind her of all this, and let me tell you, that’s such an effective way to inspire someone to greatness. Tear them down as much as possible so they’ll feel really crappy about themselves, then they’ll rise to fabulous heights. Riiiiiiiiiggggghhhhtttt. Whatever. Never fear, she used the same tactic on the rest of us as well. “When are you Maids going to understand that you simply are not ready for the responsibilities that lie before you!” Had we perfected our banking up? No! Did we have our curtsies down? NO, no, NO! Did we have any idea how to do the flight formation correctly? NO because we didn’t have a queen yet.
I tried to talk to Zara, but she wasn’t having it. Oh, she wallpapered a veneer of detached politeness/polite detachment, however you want to put it, onto her countenance, but she made a point of escaping over to the other side of the room as soon as she could extricate herself. Fine, be that way, Zara, I thought.
So, yeah, since nobody was talking to anybody at rehearsal, and I didn’t feel much like talking to anybody anyway, B’ville had turned into a ghost town again. I had a lot of time on my hands, so I ran. I got addicted to Glee, which I watched while carefully sponging Brandi Lyn’s vomit off my dress with dish soap. I started to look forward to Cosmo’s visit and prepared for his arrival by trolling the Internet for everything I could find on international business and shipping. After all, we’d need something to talk about over long, leisurely dinners at the Petroleum Club. And I roamed around Grandmother’s creakingly empty house trying to recollect my dead mother’s voice and thinking about Walter Murray Hill’s midnight revelation that it was she who pushed the idea of integrating the Magnolia Maids to begin with. Of course it had been Cecilia. Cecilia at seventeen had been blessed and perfect. Everybody loved her. She never did a thing wrong, had a completely normal life with two adoring parents. If she were alive, Daddy would never have left town, I never would have been kicked out of my own life and packed off to boarding schools or developed a bad attitude. Certainly, I would never have gotten a tattoo. No, I would have been sweet and wonderful and loving and kind and adored and adoring of others in return. I would have lived in a beautiful pink castle with a cute little pink lapdog and driven a little pink convertible and come in singing “The Hills Are Alive with the Sound of Muuuuuuu-sic!” every day after school and would have just adored life! Cecilia and Cosmo and I would have gone on family vacations together to Paris and eaten croissants on the Seine and waxed eloquent about how fabulous our family life was!
Ewwwwww. Enough of that. But I did ponder over and over the question what would Cecilia do if she were in this situation?
I would have given anything to hear the answer.
A few days after the jail incident and about a week before our Boysenthorp debut, I was sitting out on the back porch furtively puffing on cigarettes and pondering the whole scenario once again. Zara’s words were starting to infest my thought process. Was I personally responsible for this mess? Had I really overstepped my bounds? Hmmm. Okay, so maybe I did go a little crazy. Maybe I could have controlled my mouth a little better. Looked at the whole situation more clearly. Decided to keep my bear-sized trap shut given the fact that everyone in the car was tipsy. Maybe I had made a mistake.
And if Walter Murray Hill hadn’t come down to the police station and thrown some of his high-class Old Bienville weight around, we might have been booked and gone to court and had to have done community service of a most un-Magnolia Maid variety. Me, I was accustomed to such getting in trouble and to paying the consequences—it had been my way of life for years—but the rest of the girls, they didn’t have the criminal element gene anywhere near their DNA. No wonder the whole thing bothered them. Maybe I was to blame!
In the middle of the sinking ship of my unwelcome self-realization, the doorbell rang. I threw open the front door to find Ashley standing there.
Ashley?!
I glanced out to the street to see her Escalade, recovered from impoundment, parked at the curb. So she wasn’t a hallucination, but still. All I could do was gape at the apparition before me until she rolled her eyes and scolded, “Jane!!! The proper thing to do is to invite me in and offer me a sweet tea.”
Shockingly, I did exactly what she said and a few minutes later we were out back on the porch. Grandmother had left for her Genealogical Society meeting, so I lit up another cigarette. “What are you doing here?” I asked Ashley.
“Well, don’t get too excited! It’s only because I have no one else to talk to that I’m here.”
“Still freezing out the Mal-ster?”
“Yes. And I’m certainly not talking to Katherine. And Courtney, well, she’s as big a part of it as anybody else.” Ashley took a sip of her sweet tea. “You know the worst thing? We all live at Bienville Place. There are only four houses, Jane, and three of them contain people I never want to see again in my life!�
� Agitated, she grabbed for one of my cigarettes.
I raised an eyebrow. “Ashley, you smoke?”
“Sometimes.” She lit up, took two puffs, coughed up a storm, stubbed out the cigarette. “Ugh! How can you do this?”
“Practice. Self-hatred. Love of the nasty.”
Ashley jumped up and started pacing. “And I can’t go anywhere without seeing someone who was at Lancer’s the other night! Everybody in our circle, even the people who weren’t there, knows what happened. They’re all talking about me, I just know it!” She whirled in my direction. “Do you have any idea what that feels like?”
I laughed. “Uh, yeah. Happens to me every day.”
Ashley glared at me. “Thanks, Jane, the last thing I need right now is your sarcasm.” She slammed her sweet tea on the table and jumped up to leave.
I grabbed her arm. “Wait, I’m not being sarcastic!” I said. “In all seriousness, Ashley, it happens every day. Some old blue hair, or some middle-aged friend of my mother will see me out and tell me I’m the spitting image of Cecilia and how kind and generous and fabulous she was and how sad it is that I’m left here without parents. That’s what they say to my face. And I know what they say behind my back is even worse because Mizz Upton told me.”
Ashley’s head rocked into a slow nod. “That’s true. People do talk about you. I talked about you…. Oh my God!” Her eyes fell to her sandals, in something that kind of appeared to be… shame? “Oh, Jane. I am so sorry. I just didn’t think.”
“It’s okay.” I shrugged. “Gossip. It’s Bienville’s favorite pastime.”
Ashley sighed and sat back down. “I don’t see how you stand being talked about so much. I saw Andrew Lancer at the Stop and Pump the other day, and you know what he did? He turned and acted like he didn’t see me. Like he didn’t see me! We’ve been friends since the sandbox, Jane! How could he?”
Never Sit Down in a Hoopskirt and Other Things I Learned in Southern Belle Hell Page 20
