Liberating Paris

by Linda Bloodworth Thomason

  Later, when she pulled in the garage and saw that his car still wasn’t there, she felt sure that he’d gone to Excelsior Springs. If Duff had the flu, as Elizabeth said, that would be the perfect cover for them to see each other. Milan went inside and turned the oven off and put away the leg of lamb that had been warming there. It was Wood’s favorite and she’d asked Mrs. Denby to make it for him.

  Charlie was spending the night with a friend, so she went straight to her bedroom and got undressed. Then she crossed to the window and looked out on the road to Fast Deer Farm. How many nights she had sat here, when she and Wood were first married, waiting for a glimpse of his car as it turned on to their gravel road. When it did, she would literally sail down the stairs to meet him and he would be happy to see her, too. Afterward, she would warm up his dinner, because that was the life of a doctor’s wife and one that she reveled in. And then they would talk about their babies and the farm and whatever had happened at the hospital that day and maybe go upstairs and have a long hot bath together or make love and sit outside on the master bedroom porch afterward.

  But these things didn’t happen anymore and there were no car lights on the road to Fast Deer tonight. And Milan had to admit finally that the feeling she was getting was not one of mere ordinary unease, but rather of simply not being good enough. There was fear and shame and real dread in it and she crossed to the bed and curled up on her side of it, holding herself. It was the same feeling she used to get whenever she went anywhere with her family—riding in the back of Tom Lanier’s old, rusted-out truck, with her and Frank getting to sit on the two broken pizza parlor chairs. To this day, Milan will not go to certain places, like the Dairy Queen, because of the way the owner would stare at all of them as they poured into his establishment like cockroaches and tried to cash in their expired coupons. She had seen that same look, in varying degrees, on the faces of other merchants when the Laniers would pull up outside their businesses. She could almost feel their intake of breath and raised shoulders, as though this were something that would have to be suffered and then gotten rid of as quickly as possible—these children with their crusted noses and aluminum foil sticking pitifully out of their shoes, who smelled of pork fat and dirty hair—whose clothes hung on them like the children themselves were the coat hangers and whose eyes told you that there is nothing more you will ever know about them other than what you can see.

  Certainly, there were well-intended church people who held rummage and bake sales in order to help the family. But the problem was, they said it was for something called “The Lanier Fund,” which was then painted across a twenty-foot banner. And the proceeds were always announced in church on Sunday, which so horrified Milan that she wasn’t able to attend school the next day. And perhaps worse, when all the youngsters were called to come down front and form a prayer circle, Milan had been connected to a little boy whose mother, a woman with a kind smile, got out her handkerchief afterward and wiped his hand.

  After years of that kind of reception, there is a sadness that one starts to feel about oneself. And finally, a curtain that goes down on that sadness, and there it stays. If you are smart, like the woman now curled like a fetus on her bed, it will be seldom visited. But also, never erased.

  One of the places the Laniers did always feel welcome was Jeter’s Market. All the children hung out there, but it was Milan who attached herself to the glass candy case like a small blonde barnacle. Most days, Pauline Jeter gave the Lanier kids free candy, as they knew she would, though she never said it was free. She said it was the result of something called “overstocking” or “taking in too much inventory,” which Frank Lanier invariably fumbled and then finally giving up, would just ask, “Um, did that thing happen to you again?”

  To which Pauline would unfailingly reply, “You know, I believe it did.”

  A block away, Milan also found refuge at Lena Farnham Stokes’s. She never went to Jeter’s that she did not stop by the haberdasher’s window first and stare at the picture of the buxom young monarch riding in her coronation coach and waving. One time, after Milan had told Hank Jeter that she would give anything to some day meet the queen, he had appeared to size Milan up, as she stood there conquering her free jawbreaker, and then he said, “She ain’t so much. I think that ole gal would be lucky to know you.”

  This was electrifying information. For days, Milan couldn’t even sleep. Someone thought the Queen of England would be lucky to know her! In her wildest imagination, she could not have come up with such an idea. And the person who thought it, was not just anyone either. He was a man who owned an entire store full of food and candy. And who would one day be put out of business by a two-hundred-thousand-square-foot superstore, which with all its power and might and money, would be unable to provide the familiarity or trust necessary for transmitting an idea of such exquisite discernment.

  The one store on Main Street that Milan would never go inside was Sidney Garfinkel’s. The expensive clothes and seemingly formal atmosphere made her feel almost light-headed. Ironically, he was one of the few merchants who acted as though the Laniers would be welcome to come in if they had wanted to. It was somewhere in the way he smiled and said hello. Maybe the others didn’t pick up on it, but Milan, with her fine ear for social interaction, did. And the fact that she never took him up on it did not stop her from pressing her face against the glass every day after school and staring in awe at the dazzling mannequins and their sleek, stylish outfits. She was respectful, too, never leaving a nose or handprint on the window, and especially if she had a cold, which was often, she always wiped the glass with her coat sleeve.

  Milan would seriously study these resin women with their sunken cheeks, while writing in a small spiral notebook that she filled with childish sketches and minute details. Sometimes, at night, she would even practice their facial expressions, holding the little seashell mirror Tom Lanier had given her. She secretly named each one of the mannequins, faithfully describing the length of their hems, whether their sleeves were pushed up or left down, or how a certain coat looked better unbuttoned than buttoned. Her favorite was the brunette one with green cat eyes and short wavy hair. She especially liked that this girl seemed to be on her way somewhere, with her head thrown back, as though she would laugh if she could. Milan had given her the name that she herself wished was her own—Karen. Oddly, Karen was not a wife or a mother. At nine years old, children were the last thing Milan wanted more of. She already slept with sick, coughing toddlers who regularly wet the bed, and she had to spend a good portion of her day helping to shore up the rest of her siblings. No, Karen was not a mother. She was a stylish, independent career gal whose job caused her to travel, where she stayed in fancy hotels and sat in huge bathtubs smoking cigarettes and ordering pork chops and chocolate sodas from room service, and telling the hotel operator to please get her rich boyfriend on the telephone.

  Milan especially loved imagining Karen at work. She loved how people depended on her and looked up to her and how her name sounded when they said things like, “Karen, can you bring me that file?” “Oh, Karen, are you free for lunch?” Or “Tell me, Karen, how do you do it?”

  These were the sorts of dreams Milan had, standing outside Sidney Garfinkel’s store window. But still, she never went in. She did, however, begin knocking on the door and inquiring as to the precise date and time he would next be changing out the clothes in his window displays. Unlike Wood and Jeter and Brundidge, who observed this ritual haphazardly while making their rounds on Main Street, Milan looked upon it as an event that should be scheduled and appreciated. And Sidney Garfinkel, who had never considered that he would have to come up with a date and time for such a thing, ended up doing just that—especially after he saw that Milan had gotten out her little notebook and written down everything he said in it.

  Over the years, neither Sidney nor his faithful admirer ever missed a “changing of the mannequins” date. Once, when he had a terrible cold, he still came down to the store and chan
ged out his after-Christmas window on the day and time he had told her he would. And she knew he must’ve gotten out of bed to do it, too, because it was the only fashion faux pas she ever caught him in—blue pajama tops under a wool overcoat.

  As Milan got older, and even more striking in appearance, she became Sidney Garfinkel’s top model at local fashion shows, a sort of Audrey Hepburn to his Givenchy. And Sidney attempted to impart as much of his own fashion sense and expertise to her as he did to Brundidge. Although, to his regret, Milan would never own the kind of inviolable personal style that eclipses the mere wearing of designer labels.

  Then, not long after a particularly notable show in which their picture had appeared in the Paris Beacon with their arms around each other, something terrible happened—an event that so mortified Milan, she avoided Sidney Garfinkel for months afterward. The newspaper had come out by two in the afternoon. By two thirty, someone had read it and thrown it away, making it possible for Tom Lanier to get one. Eventually, he had propped the photograph up on the dashboard of his truck, which was parked to the side of the Texaco station. There he spent several hours drinking whiskey from a bottle and talking to the man in the picture. Then, he had found a dime wedged between the seat cushions and after he tried for a long time to pick some hair and sticky stuff off of it, finally gave up, got out of his truck and called Sidney Garfinkel on the nearby pay phone.

  “You filthy Jew bastard. Who do you think you are puttin’ your hands on my girl? There ain’t enough Jew money in the world for you to put your hands on my girl. Do you hear me? Not by a long shot. And when I get aholt of your slimy Jew ass, you’ll wish you was back where you came from. Back at them ovens, where they said you was helpin’ put away your own kind and stealin’ their watches while you was doin’ it. That’s what they say about you! The only thing lower than a damn slimy Jew is a damn slimy Jew who will steal from another one.”

  Sidney Garfinkel had listened politely and then hung up. After that, Tom Lanier had started to cry. It was sudden and exaggerated, the way an actor in a comedy sketch might do it. Then he beat the phone on the side of the station and tried to throw the receiver down on the ground, but it stayed midway in the air, swinging from its cord. Finally, he got back in his truck and attempted to peel out, causing a brief screech, but he didn’t have the power, so he just sort of coasted away. Like a stray dog who yelps at you, trying to be powerful, and then, getting no response, limps off.

  Sidney never told this story to anyone, not even his wife or the female employee who had seen his face turn white. But Tom Lanier had told it all over town and changed the facts, too. He said that Sidney had tried to “get sweet” with Milan and that she had come home absolutely beside herself, which is why he had gotten in his truck and driven straight to the Garfinkels’ house. After asking Esther Garfinkel to leave, he had threatened to kill Sidney, who got on his knees and cried like a little girl for forgiveness. And then Tom always ended the story with, “Idn’t that just like a damn kike? Always got their hands in your pocket, but if it’s in their interest, happy to get on their knees, too.” But no one who knew Sidney Garfinkel could imagine him getting on his knees for anyone, except to pin a pair of pants. By the time Tom was done, everyone in Paris had heard the story, including most of the kids at school. Milan not only stopped going into Sidney Garfinkel’s store, she stopped going to Main Street period, for fear of running into him. And if she saw him pull up at the Stop-N-Go, where she worked in addition to Cotrell’s, she would run to the restroom and not come out till he was gone.

  A few months after the incident with Sidney, Tom Lanier had a complete nervous breakdown. This was around the time he told Milan that people were nothing more than blood and water and gravel with a hole punched in the top so they could speak and try to fool you. And then he started rearranging garbage, delivering it from one house to another, or just leaving most of it scattered in the street. This time, he was not taken to the county hospital (where poor crazy people went) but instead was transported to Milledgeville in Little Rock, which was about the most serious place they could put you for mental troubles. If someone said, “Well, you know, they’ve got him up at Milledgeville,” that meant that person was in a bad way. The word was that Tom Lanier was even too sick to be seen by his own family. Not long after he arrived there, the official diagnosis came down: acute schizophrenia. Tom had suffered breakdowns before, but he had never been given a surefire diagnosis like this one. Pretty soon, it got all over Paris and the high school that the Lanier children’s daddy was a complete schizophrenic. Far from being upset, Milan was happy. Finally a name upon which she could pin all the horrors of her childhood. The Laniers were not a litter of hopeless, ill-bred, hillbilly losers, after all. They were the offspring of a medically certified, card-carrying schizophrenic! The appalling food shortages, the notes from school nurses to please give so-and-so a bath, the shabby used winter coats and shoes, the drunken tirades and terrible violence (Milan was the only one Tom never hit, but she did always clean up the mess, whether it was spilt liquor or broken teeth), now it could all finally be placed under one forgiving, illuminating, exhilarating, all-encompassing banner! Schizophrenia! It was even better than cancer. She wanted to get in her drum majorette’s uniform and strut down Main Street yelling it. Schizophrenia! It was the most beautiful sound she had ever heard. So wonderful it should be the name of whatever goes on the tops of sundaes—“Two scoops of vanilla, please, and a sprinkle of Schizophrenia!” Or a place with houses by the sea—“We’re off to Schizophrenia!” Or a dance—“Come on everybody, let’s do the Schizophrenia!”

  About a week before Milan’s graduation, Tom came home from Milledgeville. Strangely, he didn’t seem to be crazy anymore. He didn’t seem to be much of anything. He mostly sat around in a pair of camouflage hunting pants and an undershirt, drinking orange soda and staring at a book he had stolen from the Milledgeville Hospital Library. It was a “How To” book for beginners on how to fix things. Milan, who normally didn’t dwell on irony, thought how much Miss Delaney could do with that.

  A few days later, when a magnificently wrapped package arrived at the Paris High School principal’s office with Milan Lanier’s name on it, the secretary became so excited that the giftee was called out of class to receive it. As soon as Milan saw the wrapping, she knew exactly where it had come from. And once she tore the paper away and lifted the lid, she had to cover her mouth to keep her excitement in check. Then, slowly, a few inches at a time, there emerged from the folded tissue a stunningly perfect dress of exquisite black linen with large covered buttons down the back and a wide chic belt and buckle made of the same fabric. And there was a blue velvet pouch, too, containing shoes with tiny, sling-back straps and impossibly high heels, which had been meticulously dyed to match the dress. And underneath the pouch, this, “A Paris original. The dress and the girl. With all good wishes, Sidney Garfinkel.”

  Milan must’ve drifted off to sleep because when she woke up, Wood was getting undressed and she hadn’t even heard him come in. But then, she was sure he hadn’t wanted her to hear him. She sat up in bed.

  “How was your patient?”

  The question did not seem to surprise him. “Fine. She has the flu. I, uh, tried to call you from the car, but it was out of range.”

  Milan lay back down. “Just don’t say anything, all right?”

  He started for the shower in order to wash off the evidence. Then he turned and added, “She doesn’t have any money, you know.”

  If Milan had been a rapier wit sort, this was a golden moment, but she wasn’t and it passed unused, as she put her head under her pillow and Wood went on into the bathroom.

  CHAPTER 17

  Mavis was making glorious beignets as Mary Paige read aloud names from a baby book. Mavis was thinking how happy she was and how much she liked the Christmas wreath Milan had fashioned from one of the holly bushes at Fast Deer Farm—the one that was now hanging on her door. But her reverie came to a screeching h
alt when she looked up and saw Lonnie Rhinehart and several of his redneck friends standing at the counter. She despised these men who loved her food and regularly came in to eat and swagger around, making lewd and inappropriate comments about Rudy, queers, and the physical endowments of many of her female patrons.

  But what disturbed Mavis most deeply was the story that had gone around about how Lonnie had taken his pregnant beagle hunting and that when she prematurely gave birth in the snow, he and his friends had used their large heavy boots to stomp the puppies to death. It had sickened Mavis to have to wait on him and now that she was pregnant herself, and also fresh from her success with the Baptist door, she was determined to do something about it.

  Lonnie attempted to give his order, but she stopped him. “You’re not welcome here anymore. Actually, you were never welcome here. But until today, I didn’t have the nerve to tell you.”

  He looked at her, amused, and then leaned his elbows on the counter. “Why ain’t I welcome?”

  “Because you stomped puppies to death in the snow. And it makes me sick to look at you. Now get out.”

  Lonnie drew back a little. Mary Paige felt sure that he had never been spoken to like this by anyone, much less a woman. She and Rudy held their breath.

  Lonnie said, “Okay, if that’s the way you wanna act.” Then he lied, “Your food ain’t that good. Anyway, looks to me like most of it’s goin’ down your own pie hole.” The other two men followed him to the door. Then Lonnie turned back, smirking like the ominous costar of The Donna Somebody Story.

  “I was thinkin’, you should get yourself an alarm system here. A big ol’ rough-talkin’ girl like you—you just never know when somethin’ alarmin’ might happen.”

  The men laughed, as though Lonnie had really outdone himself this time.