Mum's the Word

by Dorothy Cannell

  Only one of the hairdryers was occupied and there were no heads in any of the three basins. The receptionist, who wore a T-shirt with “World’s Best Great Grandma” on it, ran a finger down the book resting on the glass cabinet and said Barbara could take me.

  Coming over, Barbara administered a quick smile without looking at me. Usually the kiss of death from a hairdresser. But maybe she was embarrassed. Her eyes were a little red, and she spoke as though she had a cold. I followed her past the client under the hairdryer, an elderly lady sleeping as soundly as the terrier on her lap.

  I was soon sitting on a black vinyl chair, neck arched back over the rim of the sink. Not the most comfortable of positions; the same I suppose could be said of childbirth.

  The water was soothing. Barbara asked if I wanted conditioner and I gurgled a response. Hairdressers and dentists! Her massaging hands were relaxing. I was sinking into a warm well of comfort. Mendenhall brought in its drinking water, but there must be a well somewhere on the island. I wondered about the missing knives. Surely a Mangé competitor had not armed his or herself for the upcoming trials? I knew competition was fierce, but surely no one would carry things that far?

  Suddenly water was splashing all over my face, gushing into my mouth, filling up my nose. I couldn’t breathe, my neck was breaking and those hands, Barbara’s hands, the hands of a woman who hadn’t known I existed three minutes before, were pushing me down into a world of darkness where ghosts are the living. Strange, my last thoughts weren’t of Ben, but of Rowland Foxworth, dear handsome vicar of St. Anselms. How awfully sad if the economics of returning me to British soil cheated him out of performing last offices.

  “There, there cookie, you’ll be fine. You’ve had a shock, is all. Here, take a couple of my nerve pills.”

  A second voice—mentioning hot tea. Not too appealing considering it would be served the American way. Without milk. And none of my business, seeing I wasn’t recipient of all this kindness. Great Grandmother Receptionist and Roxanne, hair stylist, were seated on a vinyl bench, arms draped around Barbara as she sobbed into a fluffy towel. I wore a similar one, which Grannie had absently dropped on my head, rather as though I were a parrot in a cage, whose squawks must be silenced before everyone developed screaming headaches.

  “I’m so sorry!” Barbara lifted a face raw with tears. “I must have gone mad. You look like that little slut who stole my Dave. She bet Dave a Bud Light at the Catfish Fry she could eat him under the table. That’s how it started. And I know I’ll never get him back—not while she works at the bank!”

  “Hush up, sweetie!” Roxanne rocked Barbara like a baby.

  “If I don’t let him see her Thursday nights, she could foreclose on the house. All week I’ve been thinking what if she comes in for a wash and blow dry. And just now it all got mixed up. That was Darlene’s head over the basin …” The flood gates reopened.

  “You cracked, is all!” Great Gran pressed a Styrofoam cup to the trembling lips, while Roxanne stroked the red hair.

  “I’ll lose my license. Then what happens to me and the kids? And she’ll sue me for millions.” Her finger pointed at me. “Nothing else for it, I’ll have to kill myself for insurance.” Barbara’s voice rose, shrill as a whistling kettle.

  Finally, the three of them were looking at me—not as a bona fide participator in this human drama, but as a witness who must be made to see reason.

  Great Gran aimed a smile at me, guaranteed to warm the cockles of my heart, if not my soaked torso. “You do see, hon, how things are! Barb’s been through one real hard time.”

  Before I could answer, however, Roxanne grabbed my towel and began massaging my hair. “That red mark on your throat comes from wearing the neck of your dress too tight. Now how’s about I give you a blow dry on the house and all the coffee you can drink?”

  Gently but firmly I removed the towel and wadded it up into a ball. “Please, all of you, don’t give my involvement another thought. I’m fine …”

  “Are you sure?” Tears still splashed down Barbara’s face.

  “Yes.” Standing up, I patted her on the shoulder. Remembering Mary, I realized I’d been doing a lot of that today. “This has been a positive experience for me. When I came in my life didn’t look too good—for reasons similar to yours, but I have been reminded that however bleak life is, it still beats the alternative.”

  “Then you won’t say a word?” Barbara said, still eyeing me suspiciously.

  “Promise.” A wistful smile brushed my lips as I followed her to the loo to change. The Mangés had their secrets and so did I.

  When I walked into Jimmy’s Bar, I wasn’t surprised that none of my fellow auxiliaries rushed up to me with cries of welcome. I was a changed woman. Roxanne had decided a blow dry was insufficient compensation. She had wound my hair on fat pink rollers, sprayed it with Stif-Set, and popped me under the dryer to bake until golden brown. And thus a country-and-western songstress was born. As for my clothes—I had expected the switch over from regular wear to maternity to be an occasion worthy of a champagne toast, but it had happened in the loo at the Scissor Cut, without any beating of drums.

  Jimmy’s Bar might do great business, but I wasn’t smitten with the red rubber floor or Styrofoam ceiling.

  A good-looking chap in ultra-tight jeans wouldn’t move fore or aft to let me pass. “Miss …” He was so close I could count his eyelashes.

  “I’m trying to meet some people.” Scanning a tunnel between heads I saw Ernestine, from the neck up, over by the back wall.

  “Miss, you are standing on my foot.”

  “Sorry!” Men today are such frail creatures.

  “You’re also wearing a price sticker.”

  Shucky dam! I climbed over three people to reach Ernestine and found her at a table with Solange and Henderson Brown, who was hiding out under his white sun hat. His gloom did not lift when the waitress headed our way. Probably disapproved of her substantial bosom refusing to be confined within the ruffled edge of her blouse. And from the looks of her Roman nose and iron jaw, she wasn’t all that tickled with being decked out like Heidi on her way to Grandfather’s chalet. Licking her thumb, she flipped over a page in her order book. “What’s your pleasure, people.”

  Henderson fought for the courage to speak out. “We need separate checks.”

  “Ain’t no extra charge.” Heidi had her pencil poised. “What you all want to drink?”

  Solange and Ernestine ordered white zinfandel.

  Henderson forced a thin smile. “I’m a chronic abstainer. Water please, if it’s fresh.”

  “Won’t find better anywhere, with or without the French labels.” Heidi had a deep voice. “Natural spring water, crisp and clean as a spring day.”

  For the first time post-Valicia X, I had to swallow a laugh. She sounded like a television advert. Flashback to the Mulberry Inn. Ben and I watching the excerpt from Melancholy Mansion and Mary Faith’s interview with Harvard Smith. Now sitting there in Jimmy’s Bar, the realization swamped me that I was a puppet in the hand of fate, pranced and danced across thousands of miles to this place.

  What can’t be changed can be improved by a good lunch. “Hamburger, double fries, and a Coke, please.”

  “Rest of you want to order?” Heidi cocked an eye at the big round clock above the bar. “Fashion show’s due to start in ten minutes.”

  Ernestine reminded us that Jeffries had turned down the chance to be a model. Henderson said he would have the vegetable beef soup, then changed his mind. Lois, he informed us sourly, made the best soup in the world. Trust Ernestine to hotly disagree. Her Bingo, at age three, could produce a potage de légumes that had your mouth watering a mile away. The comtesse, her heavy rouge darkening, stared into the crowd. Poor Eeyore—I mean Henderson! Mouth set in mutinous lines, he joined the rest of us in ordering a hamburger.

  Before Heidi could escape, Ernestine asked if the man behind the bar was Jimmy.

  “Him—grey-haired guy with chi
pmunk cheeks? That’s our good old boy Sheriff Tom Dougherty. Comes in every day along of this time to check if there’s any fight needs breaking up.”

  “This town has its own sheriff?” Henderson would be writing his congressman to protest abuse of taxpayers’ money.

  Heidi looked him smack in the eye. “Believe it or not, sir, Mud Creek used to be the county seat. That’s Jimmy up next to Sheriff Tom.”

  “Jimmy’s a she?” Henderson couldn’t keep on at this pace, shocked one moment, aghast the next.

  “You’re looking at her! Name’s Jemima on her birth certificate. But don’t never let on I told.” Tucking the pencil behind her ear, Heidi was off with a rolling gait toward the door marked Private.

  The crowd had shifted away from the bar providing us with a good view of the big-boned woman with hair that was stained, rather than dyed, a metallic red. She wore a satiny garment which could have been a negligee; a faded rose was stuck into her cleavage. Her face was caked with enough paint to do up a semidetached inside and out, and she had a voice guaranteed to stop rabble-rousers dead. “Dad-blamed fly!” she roared, hand whapping down on the counter.

  The conversation at our table flowed like water up hill. “Should always wear your hair like that, Ellie,” Ernestine said. “Makes your face look thinner.”

  “You are an authority on fashion?” Solange surveyed the other woman’s Friar Tuck coiffure, mustard dress and frog green beads. Did I detect a growing coolness between these two?

  “Honey, I don’t claim to be a glamour girl. Never could go out in the sun without turning into a hot dog. But that’s all right with me because my family is what’s important. Frank’s and my money is spent on our child. But being childless, you can’t know what real self-denial is. My Bingo’s happiness, his …”

  “His being a Mangé, n’est-çe pas? Mais oui, you don’t like so much when I tell you—before Monsieur and Ellee come—that my Vincent will not hand in his dreams to please you. He has tricks up his sleeve you don’t dream!” Solange had changed from a photograph into a woman of fire. The cape collar of her black dress brushed the table as she snapped her flame-tipped fingers in Ernestine’s outraged face. “I give this much for your Bingo. My poodles are the children of my heart. Angelique, Fleur, and the rest, how can they be content when their papa is sad? My Vincent is near to fifty and I am running close behind. He is bored of putting me in the oven on stage—making the big bang explosion before he brings out the burned chicken. My wish is for Vincent once in his life to find a dream that does not ask for me to be sliced in two.”

  What had fueled such animosity? We had seemed harmonious enough friends last night, when conducting Operation Marjorie Rumpson.

  Ernestine’s hair stuck to her red face. She looked ready to speak volumes, but fortunately our drinks and food arrived and I was able to move smoothly into praise of the crispy golden fries, the artful way the onion and tomato slices were nestled on the hamburgers.

  “Yes, but is the beef Grade A?” fretted Henderson.

  Heidi shouldered off and a voice bellowed through the hubbub. “Hush up, all you big time yackers, this is Jimmy speaking.” The ogress in satin with the rose growing out of her bosom tapped cigar ash in a glass and leaned forward, elbows on the bar. “We’ve had some problems raising money for repairs to the kiddy playground, but a challenge is what the Hope Church women likes best. So sit yourselves down, hold up the walls or whatever suits, and listen up while our very own Sheriff Tom Dougherty gives you the run down on our Fashion Fantasia!”

  Applause.

  “Shucks, folks.” The sheriff smoothed a hand over a thatch of hair which was at once grey and boyish. A hoist of the gun belt slung low on hips. Just like the movies. “Howdy do, friends, neighbours, and tourists!” His eyes picked out our table as though committing each of us to a file marked vagrants. “Don’t anyone go expecting me to come off sounding like some spokesman for Dior.” A suggestion of dimples in his chubby cheeks as he smiled. “But I tell you we’ve got some down-home goodlooking gals for your viewing pleasure. And, remember, the voluntary contribution isn’t voluntary, not unless you want to be charged with leaving the scene of a good cause.”

  The jukebox began playing drifty, dreamy music. The sheriff pulled out a notebook. “A big welcome if you please for Mud Creek’s favourite twins, Terese and Teresa Brinharter!”

  Through the door marked Private, down the rectangle of space between the people lining the bar and the tables lining the window wall, came two young females. Hair: Swedish blonde. Tans: California’s best. Their skimpy outfits could have served as wrist bands for sporty males. Their giggles floated among the outcry of admiration. “Clothes made by the gals’ mother Irene, God bless her.” I vowed every scrap of clothing worn by my child would be lovingly stitched by hand.

  Next a fresh-faced young woman in a barn dance outfit, a check blouse and blue skirt flounced out by a white frilled petticoat. Almost as much applause for her as the twins. Now came a sweet little girl about four. She wore pink and carried a basket of posies with all the aplomb of a grownup.

  My interest didn’t fade. I began to fade. So little sleep last night. The figures coming down the ramp began to blur one into another … I hoped I wouldn’t slide off my chair or worse, start talking in my sleep. I heard a click, as of a door opening, and Ben strolled nonchalantly into my mind.

  “Ellie, I love you.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “Sweetheart, you can’t believe everything you see and hear.”

  He had swept me up in his arms, I was floating … in circles. “Well, I suppose if you care enough to lie …”

  I snapped awake when the music changed pace to a bump and grind. Why all the gasps from the audience? Had the Brinharter twins been called back for an encore? Even Henderson Brown was straining forward in his seat.

  “Friends, darlings, country people! Lend me your ears!” The voice was spun sugar. The woman drifting down the ramp wore white silk edged with ermine, and swirled two gigantic feather fans before her. She was thirty—perhaps forty—years older than the twins, nowhere near as beautiful, but a hundred times more fascinating. Hers was a gamine face framed by bobbed silver hair. She had panda bear eyes and a vivid mouth stretched into a “gee whiz” smile.

  Theola Faith.

  “Theola Faith!” Ernestine clutched my arm, her expression repeated on forty some other faces. Only Henderson Brown looked aghast, as the woman in white pointed a dainty silver toe out from her skirt, arched her neck and swiveled her slender hips. “I do not come to bury my daughter under the kind of abuse she has shoveled on me. The quality of mercy is not strained, it is mightiest in the mother.” Two quick steps forward. Waggling one of the fans, Theola Faith tickled Henderson on the nose. He sneezed. Not another sound anywhere in the bar. She stood centre stage, the fans trailing to the floor. “I could have resisted the urge to return to the heartland, had not my darling daughter Mary usurped my house, my servants, and my pigeons.”

  “What you want, Theola?” The sheriff tucked his notebook in his belt.

  “Revenge.”

  “Hey, we don’t want trouble.” Unidentified male voice. The clown bright smile didn’t dim. “And you lot call yourselves the Welcome Wagon! As well Jimmy remembers, she owes me for all those nights I paid the rent on this joint, sitting on the bar singing ‘Love Me or Leave Me.’ Jimmy’s paying up by putting her penthouse at my disposal.” A flourishing sweep of the ceiling with one of the fans punctuated this avowal. “Any of you guys got a better offer?”

  A woman near our table shoved a hand over her male companion’s open mouth.

  “Theola,” the sheriff said, his face, under the grey thatch, as bashful as a boy’s. “You won’t find Monster Mommy on the book mobile when it comes through. Our Jane Spence, of Citizens For Decency, wrote over to the library and told them we wouldn’t have it.”

  “What! None of you has read the sweet things my darling Mary wrote about me?” The panda e
yes grew big. The crimson smile broadened. “Don’t you home-grown tomatoes keep up with what’s in in sin? Or do you only believe your eyes?”

  Executing a slow turn, Theola Faith brought the fans up over her eyes, slowly lowered them and purred, “Hit it, maestro, please!” The jukebox was silent, but she swayed to an inner rhythm. The silver hair curved against her cheeks; her ageless face was spread with a smile, coy as a bared ankle.

  Theola Faith sang in a bouncy, music hall voice

  “Oh, Ma whatever have you done

  Say you didn’t kill the lodgers just for fun!

  It simply can’t be true

  Mr. Jones hung in the loo …”

  Hard to tell the reaction to the ditty because the catcalls, and now Henderson sliding under the table, could have resulted from Theola Faith having tossed first one of her long white gloves then the other into the crowd. Oh, no! Everyone close their eyes! Holding both fans in one hand, she was unzipping the side of her white silk gown.

  “Mr. Green bumped off a treat.

  Mr. Smith laid out so neat!”

  Thank goodness Sheriff Dougherty was present to uphold the moral code of Mud Creek. Whipping his guns from their holsters he shouted “Freeze!” Scattered cries of “Shut up, Tom!” The effect on Theola Faith was minimal. She was sliding the sleeve of her shimmering dress off her shoulder. How far she would have gone to shock the homespun citizens of Mud Creek was not destined to become a matter of public record. Debate on the issue would continue well into the next century.

  The entrance door slammed inward, as if kicked by a spurred boot. A voice rang out, powerful enough to jiggle the bottles behind the bar and sway the plastic stained glass light fixture. The crowd fell back.