Miss Dreamsville and the Collier County Women's Literary Society

by Amy Hill Hearth

  “May I speak for a moment?” Jackie asked, raising her hand like a schoolgirl. “I want to explain that what I have in mind is a salon.”

  “You mean like a beauty parlor?” Robbie-Lee asked.

  “No, dear, not that kind of salon,” Jackie said. “There was a time when a salon meant a gathering of people who discussed the issues of the day. They would meet in the parlor of someone’s huge, oversized house and discuss literature, art, politics.”

  “I have a huge, oversized house,” said Mrs. Bailey White. It wasn’t really an invitation but more like a statement of fact. Still, even the suggestion of meeting at her place gave me the creepy-crawlies, since she had gone to prison for murdering her husband in that very house. I wasn’t sure if Jackie knew of Mrs. Bailey White’s checkered past, but she must have picked up on the uneasiness that swept through the rest of us like a rogue wind off the Gulf.

  “Well, that’s very nice,” Jackie said politely. “Perhaps someday you will be kind enough to have us over.”

  “But does this mean we’re not going to read books?” asked Robbie-Lee, still a little confused.

  “Yes, we will read books,” Jackie replied patiently. “We will be centered around books. But I am suggesting we choose books that make us think and expand our horizons. If we read a book about music, we might invite a musician to perform as part of our book discussion. The idea is to read books that stimulate our minds and challenge us to think about the issues of the day.”

  We responded so enthusiastically that we sounded like an amen chorus.

  “But if you’ll permit me to say so,” Jackie continued, “I am thinking we really must meet here, at the library, as a way of letting the community know that everyone is welcome. This is not a private club.”

  These words were met with a second round of approval. I felt punch-drunk (not that I’ve ever actually been punch-drunk in my life, on account of a promise I made to Mama). Private clubs, official and otherwise, were pretty typical in our little town. I looked from face to face around the circle. None of us was Junior League material; none of us had big money; Mrs. Bailey White was an ex-con. If you were colored, homosexual, a divorced postal worker (me), or—God forbid—a sexy redhead with a Boston accent newly arrived in town, you were on your own. But Jackie was suggesting that we form our own group. And meeting at the library would give us cover.

  A place to belong? Here in Naples? Just the possibility made me giddy as a jaybird. I began feeling something in my heart that I thought was long gone and buried. I’m not 100 percent sure, but it might have been hope.

  Two

  The worst day of the year, if you worked at the post office, was when the Sears catalogs arrived. Every family in Collier County, and throughout the universe for all I knew, got at least one copy of that darned catalog. Rumor had it you could kill a man if you heaved a Sears catalog at him, or derail a train by placing one strategically on the tracks. They were that big.

  The quietest day of the year was the day after they were delivered. Kids would choose their clothes for the coming school year—socks, pants, underwear, bathing suits, churchgoing clothes, you name it. Then the moms would figure out what they needed, and when the fathers came home, they’d do the same. Even the women who sewed their own clothes needed something—a girdle, maybe—from the catalog. If you wanted something special—say, a pair of Levi jeans—you had to drive all the way to Maas Brothers in Fort Myers. Few people had the money to do that, and even among those who did, southern pride kicked in and they stayed home. Going to Maas Brothers to shop meant you were uppity. Real Southerners shopped from the Sears catalog, they did without air conditioning even if they could afford it, and they never, ever sunbathed or wore sunglasses.

  Once you figured out what you wanted from the catalog, you could fill out a form and mail it to Sears. If you wanted faster service and cheaper shipping, which most of us did, you could go to the Sears Service Center. This was not actually a store but a place that resembled a hamburger stand. The one employee for the past five or so years was Robbie-Lee Simpson, the man who had joined our Women’s Literary Society, a move that was either brave or bizarre, depending on your point of view. Robbie-Lee’s job was to “expedite” (his word) your order, whatever that might be. He had, however, shown a special talent for home décor and had developed a loyal following of customers, all women. My own mama had gone to him for advice on ordering curtains. She’d had big plans to redecorate but died before she could finish the job.

  Right smack in the middle of Sears catalog week—when the end was in sight but my boss, Marty, was tired and cranky—two things happened at the exact same moment that could have cost me my job. A boy about fourteen years old brought an injured snapping turtle—wrapped in a tarp—right into the post office and asked for my help. And with uncanny timing, my ex-husband, Darryl, showed up and made a scene about how I should be a good wife and move back to Ocala with him.

  I was in back with the turtle, which was ripping a hole in the tarp, when I heard Darryl’s voice. “Dora, I need to talk to you,” he said in a tone that made me think he’d been drinking.

  The turtle got loose and started moving around underneath the mail-sorting table. The boy had a deep scratch on his left arm already. “You go on home,” I said. “I’ll take it from here. And thanks for bringing him in.”

  “Dora, you need to come to your senses and move back home with me,” Darryl was pleading.

  “And you need to get the hell out of here!” This from Marty, who had just walked in on this pretty scene. Marty had never liked Darryl much in the first place. “This is my post office! Now get out!”

  “This is not your post office,” Darryl yelled back. “It belongs to the United States Government!”

  “Why don’t the two of you shut up and help me,” I said. Darryl walked out, but Marty, bless his scared little heart, crouched down and together we pressed our hands firmly on the turtle’s back to keep him steady.

  “You see the problem?” I said to Marty. The turtle had a long crack in its shell. We were basically holding the shell together.

  “Wow, he’s a goner,” Marty said.

  “No,” I said. “Just hang onto him.” I left poor Marty there alone but returned as fast as I could with a roll of duct tape.

  “Aw, come on, you dumb critter, I am saving your life,” I said to the turtle. I taped the crack while Marty watched, shaking his head. When I was done, we both jumped back, and I chased the turtle into the restroom and closed the door tightly.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll take him home later,” I said to Marty. “They calm down after a while.”

  I already had three turtles convalescing at my little house—Norma Jean, Myrtle, and Castro. Sometimes they never left, just lived by the little pond in my yard. Norma Jean was the largest one and very territorial. I’d had Norma Jean for years. Norma Jean had even gone to Ocala with me when I got married. Darryl—and I give him credit for this—didn’t seem to mind. Sometimes Norma Jean made a noise that resembled a dog barking. Darryl said instead of a watchdog, I had a watchturtle.

  “You know, with all this turtle stuff, maybe you were lucky to get Darryl in the first place,” Marty said, catching his breath. “If he’s willing to put up with that, maybe you ought to go back to him.”

  I didn’t say a thing. I’d felt enough pressure already to go back to Darryl. Women didn’t leave their husbands. They just didn’t.

  With Marty’s help (and part of a hamburger one of the guys had dumped in the trash) I coaxed my new turtle—I decided to call him Marty—into the rolling cart we used for unloading the mail truck. Once the turtle was in the cart, he settled down long enough for me to get him home. I kept him separate from the others, feeding him sardines (a treat) in a pen I built myself just for this purpose.

  The days crawled by, there was no more sign of Darryl, and Marty (the turtle) was doing nicely. The next meeting of the literary society was coming up, and I realized I was looking forward to it
with an eagerness that made me feel slightly pathetic. We had finished our first meeting without deciding what book we were going to read—not a great start, I’d say, for a literary society. But as Jackie had said, we were more than that. We were a salon.

  We had agreed to meet weekly. (At least we agreed on that.) Jackie would drive. The only one who didn’t need a ride was Miss Lansbury, who owned a small Volvo. Plain Jane, we realized, lived catty-corner to Jackie, so she would be picked up first. I was next.

  When the day arrived, I waited in front of the post office complex, as everyone called the butt-ugly building where I worked. To my way of thinking, the word complex was such an overstatement, it made the building seem even smaller. In truth, the complex was just one building with three tenants: the Rexall Pharmacy, the Book Nook (mostly magazines and paperbacks), and the post office, the last being the smallest of the three—so tiny, in fact, that if the name of our town had been any longer, it wouldn’t have fit on the sign.

  Waiting there, and looking out at my humble little town, I thought of something Jackie said at the end of our first meeting. When they arrived here, Jackie had tried to get the kids excited about their new hometown, so she took them for a drive. She was trying to stay upbeat for all of their sakes, but then she spied Big Bert, Ernie Sanders’s hound dog, sleeping in the middle of the road. Big Bert was old and didn’t hear too well. We were used to driving around Big Bert, but Jackie, of course, was caught by surprise. She hit the brakes and her car stopped maybe twenty feet from that fool dog. Jackie said Big Bert lifted his head and sniffed. Then he rolled over, rubbed his back in the dirt, yawned, and continued his little siesta. Jackie admitted that she’d thrown the car in park and cried right then and there. This was just off Fifth Avenue, the main road through town. The way she told the story, she seemed to find it funny—after the fact, anyway. But I could surely see her point. She was a long way from Boston.

  Standing in front of the so-called complex, I broke one of the time-honored rules for proper southern ladies: I leaned against the building. For some reason this act was associated with pure laziness or something truly wicked, maybe even prostitution. At the moment, I was so hot and tired, I didn’t much care.

  While I’d been living up in Ocala, somebody got the brilliant idea to add an outdoor clock and temperature gauge at the bank, directly across from where I stood. The clock tended to be slow or would stop altogether, an annoyance to most people, but to me, it seemed like a message that time had passed me by. As for the temperature gauge, well, no one needed to be reminded that it was hot outside. In fact, some folks in town believed, as I did, that it was better not to know at all, and the exact temperature was a subject best avoided.

  By now I was truly tired of waiting. I considered walking to the library, but it had been built north of the new high school and would be too far in the heat. Finally I went into the Rexall, sat at the counter, and ordered a root beer float and a grilled cheese sandwich. By the time Jackie pulled up and tapped the horn twice—assuming, correctly, that I’d emerge from the building—I almost had a handle on my grumpiness.

  Jackie’s station wagon looked freshly washed, no small accomplishment when you drive mostly on unpaved roads. I climbed into the backseat and fought the urge to stretch out and go to sleep. But with the windows rolled down, I began to feel something close to human once the car moved forward.

  We were on our way to pick up Priscilla at the house where she worked. When we pulled into the drive, I was surprised by the size of the house, which was completely hidden from the road. It was a stucco mansion, probably built in the 1920s, and the kind of place that reminded me that I was dirt poor.

  These people were rich—maybe not stinking rich but pretty close. People in Collier County with money were few and far between, and their deep pockets usually had something to do with large-scale agriculture. They might own a place out in the sticks, like a plantation, and a separate house in Naples, which they considered “in town” because there was a doctor, a bank, and the post office. I had a vague recollection that the lady of this house was a distant member of the Toomb family. I’d seen the name in the social pages, back when I’d bothered to read them. The Toombs seemed to ooze money. Even the far-flung relatives had money to burn. I began to wish I’d just stayed home, but as it turned out, I was needed.

  Jackie made an awful mistake, one that only a Yankee would make. She pulled up close to the front door, threw the car in park, and hopped out.

  I called after her. Jackie should have stayed in the car and waited for Priscilla to come out, but she sashayed—plain as day—right up to the front door and knocked.

  Priscilla answered. Just as I feared, the white lady Priscilla worked for must’ve made a beeline for the foyer, ’cause suddenly she was looming over Priscilla’s shoulder.

  “Priscilla, are you ready?” Jackie asked gaily. “Oh, hello there,” she added when she saw the Boss Lady. Jackie was so loud we could hear her from inside the car. Plain Jane shrank in her seat but I couldn’t help but look. Priscilla was wide-eyed, and Boss Lady glowered like a junkyard dog. As for Jackie, her smile melted faster than ice cubes on asphalt. She knew she’d messed up. But she was totally confused, as any Yankee would be.

  “Ready? Ready to go where?” Boss Lady said finally, her lower jaw sticking out. In a daintier woman, her expression would have seemed like a pout.

  Priscilla sputtered, and Jackie spoke up. “Why, we’re on our way to the library.”

  “The library?” Boss Lady moved forward. She looked from Jackie to Priscilla and back again, finally fixing her gaze on Priscilla. “Why would you be going to the library?”

  Priscilla gave Jackie a warning look. Suddenly, Jackie understood. Boss Lady didn’t know Priscilla could read. That she liked to read. That she had a life of her own and maybe even a future.

  It must have gone against every bone in Jackie’s body, but she was willing to be a jerk if she could save Priscilla’s job. “Why, Priscilla here is helping us at the library, aren’t you, dear? She’s a volunteer—isn’t that wonderful? I bet she didn’t even tell you. Of course, she doesn’t do anything important—she just waits on us hand and foot, pretty much like I’m sure she does here. She makes the coffee and cleans up afterward, and sometimes she even cleans the toilets.”

  This last bit of sarcasm soared right past Boss Lady, who nodded and tried a small smile. “Oh, I see,” she said. “Well, Priscilla, you are full of surprises. But doing your civic duty is important.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Priscilla said flatly. Then she gave Jackie a “don’t you dare go any further” look.

  In the car, Priscilla waited until Jackie pulled away. Then she lit into her.

  “How could you do that to me?” she wailed. “You upset Mrs. B and you had no right. I need that job!”

  I was definitely on Priscilla’s side. While I didn’t always find the nerve to stand up for myself, I could be downright feisty when I thought someone else had been “done wrong,” as Mama used to say.

  “What were you thinking?” I snapped at Jackie. “You can’t play games with people like Priscilla’s boss! Priscilla will end up paying the price! Don’t you understand that?”

  I gave Priscilla a clean hankie. Priscilla was only about ten years younger, but I felt almost maternal with her sitting there sniffling and all hunkered down in the seat.

  I could see part of Jackie’s face reflected in the rearview mirror. She seemed to be in shock and fighting back tears herself. Plain Jane pretended to look out the window; Jackie clutched the wheel and drove slowly, the car barely moving. Priscilla stopped crying and closed her eyes.

  Jackie suddenly pulled the car to the side of the road. She turned toward the backseat. “Priscilla, I apologize,” she said.

  Priscilla hesitated. She opened her eyes and nodded, accepting the apology gracefully. But I wondered if Priscilla would continue with our group after that night. I didn’t think so.

  “Maybe next time we can pi
ck you up somewhere else,” I said to Priscilla. “How do you usually get home after work?”

  “I walk to the corner of Vine and Picayune and wait for the bus,” Priscilla said, “though sometimes I stay overnight here, if they need me. But I don’t really like to.” There was no energy in her voice now.

  “Well, maybe next time we can pick you up at the bus stop,” I said soothingly.

  “Yes,” Priscilla said, “that would be fine.” She smiled at me shyly.

  Except for Jackie’s occasional questions about directions, no one said much while we traveled to our next stop, Mrs. Bailey White’s house. I didn’t think we would ever get there. As the crow flies, Mrs. Bailey White didn’t live that far from Priscilla’s boss, but the house was at the end of a private driveway that was at least a quarter mile long and was lined on both sides with spindly, sickly looking pine trees. Finally we passed some outbuildings—maybe, at one time, a carriage house and a barn—that told us we were nearing Mrs. Bailey White’s house. We were a long way from nowhere, and it was a little unnerving, but at least the mood in the car had changed.

  When the house came into view, Jackie hit the brakes so hard, we slid to a stop. It was the scariest-looking place I ever saw, and evidently Jackie felt the same.

  “My!” Jackie said, speaking for all of us.

  “Let’s go home,” Plain Jane said.

  “We can’t! We have to pick up Mrs. Bailey White,” Jackie insisted. We started moving forward again. Very slowly.

  I babbled nervously. “Do we really want her in our group? Maybe we don’t need her in the group.”

  “What exactly happened here?” Jackie whispered.

  “No one knows the whole story,” I said, “but she killed her husband back in the twenties.”

  “How did she do it?” Jackie asked.