On the Right Side of a Dream

by Sheila Williams

  “I saw the packet from Arcadia Valley,” Jess spoke from the doorway. “Are you and Mignon signing up for another painting class?”

  “Yep,” I lied, gathering up the rest of the mail and the phone messages.

  My heart was thumping in my chest the way it always did whenever my children called. They are grown now, past the age where I have to worry about high fevers or fights on the playground. They have graduated to bigger and better things for me to worry about. Randy was paroled a while back and now works as a sous-chef in a restaurant. I am still learning the lingo.

  He had patted me on the shoulder as if I was ten years old.

  “No, Momma, not ‘cook,’ ‘chef,’ ” he’d corrected me.

  My baby was sautéing, stir-frying, and searing with the best of them. I was as proud as I could be.

  My daughter, Bertie, had come a long way, too. She’d gotten away from the couch, the soap operas, and the beer and was now working two jobs. She was taking business courses at Franklin and had decided to be an accountant. Not a bad job for a girl who’d always been able to count up change in her head from the time she was six and memorize all of the numbers on my lotto tickets, including the tickers.

  Rashawn was my wild card. He lived on the edge and he liked it that way. Drugs and guns. He knew what he wanted wasn’t anything that I was talking about.

  “I’m a businessman, Momma,” he would tell me in his cool tenor. It was a voice smooth enough to sing in a church choir. It was a voice that was scalpel sharp when it told you that your time was up and hand over the money. “Every business has its rewards and its risks.”

  It sounded very black and white, like he was talking about running a dry cleaners or a Starbucks or something. I wished he was making lattes.

  “I can take care of myself,” Rashawn always said. I had no choice but to believe him but it didn’t stop my stomach from churning whenever I got a message from “back home.”

  “Sixes and Sevens, may I help you?” The female voice was perky. Yep, that’s the word. Perky.

  “May I speak with Randy Jackson?”

  “Chef is out right now,” the voice replied. “May I take a message, please?”

  “Oh. I’m his mother and I am returning his call.”

  “Mrs. Louis? Chef Jackson was expecting your call . . . he said to tell you that . . .” I heard the sound of paper rustling. “Here it is. It isn’t an emergency, that he and Roberta are fine and he’ll call you tomorrow.”

  Chef Jackson, my, my, we have come up in the world. And has folks taking messages for him, too. I am impressed.

  I told her that was fine and hung up. I smiled to myself. I had almost forgotten that my daughter’s real name was Roberta.

  “Juanita?”

  Jess and Dracula stood in the doorway.

  “I guess I wasn’t thinkin’,” he said. “Brought you straight over here without even asking if you’d rather go to Millie’s.”

  I had thought about it. But there would be time for that later.

  “What time do you have to be at the diner?”

  Jess sent the dog to the front room. His eyes twinkled as he smiled.

  “Mental health day,” he said simply, pulling me into his arms.

  I snorted as I nuzzled his cheek.

  “Mental health day, my behind,” I told him.

  “Exactly what I wanted to talk to you about,” Jess murmured as he gave me a squeeze.

  I have just one thing to say about Millie Tilson’s funeral. I have never seen anything like it. And that is saying something ’cause black folks can do some funerals.

  Number one, we’re not in any hurry to get the loved one buried so we have lots of time to plan a spectacle. God forbid that any fourth cousin from Bedbug, Georgia, should miss it! Aunt Sue is coming from Alabama on the Greyhound and won’t be here until next week? We’ll wait! Cousin Earl’s still recovering from gall bladder surgery? Friday after next is fine. The dead will still be dead then, won’t they? Time is not a factor. If you want to really insult a black undertaker just tell him that you want your loved one’s funeral—from the wake to the planting—done in three days. He’ll look at you like you’ve just smacked his momma.

  It takes time to coordinate all those details. Gospel choir or senior choir? Will Miss Virginia sing the solo or Sister OraLee? Brother Joseph is playing the organ? What about Mrs. Perkins, the piano teacher? But those are relatively minor issues. If the son of the deceased wants Reverend Smith to deliver the eulogy and the daughter wants Father Jones, you have a problem that might take a few more days to iron out. You have to decide whether the service will be held at Second Street AME or Mount Ararat Baptist! And if you have a Methodist issue or if there’s an Episcopalian convert, forget about it. You might end up putting your loved one on ice because the family will argue about that mess until Kingdom come. Last but definitely not least, there is the decision of which funeral home to use.

  This issue alone has been known to bring about divorce, incite violence, and create rifts between folks wider than the Mississippi River. In a community of any size, there are at least two black funeral homes. Half of the folks in town use one (and have since Moses was a boy), the other half uses the other one. There are usually members of both camps in one family.

  “I wouldn’t send a dead mouse to Robertson’s,” says the brother-in-law. The fight begins there. Voices rise, threats are made, and tears shed. The arguing only ends when someone (once again, it’s usually an in-law) suggests cremation. The guns may come out then. You know black folks have to have a body to cry over, and we love wakes. They are the next best thing to wedding receptions.

  When it’s all said and done, you don’t have a funeral, you have an event (or an ordeal, depending on your point of view) with music, testimonials, preaching, crying (I’m not talkin’ about delicate sniffles into cloth handkerchiefs either, I’m talkin’ about gut-wrenching sobs, “Lord, Jesus, help me!”s, and mounds of wadded-up Kleenex), and little “side” services from this guild, that club, or fraternity or sorority. Bring your lunch because you’ll be there all day. There will be food served afterward but you’ll need a snack to get you through the three-hour service.

  Before Millie’s going-home, that was my experience with funerals. But this was Silver Lake County, Montana, settled by Presbyterian Scots, Lutheran Germans and Swedes, with a few free-range Baptists and Methodists thrown in for flavoring. When Millie went to church, which wasn’t often, she attended First Presbyterian in Mason. So I had prepared myself for a forty-five-minute one-hymn-two-prayer-reading-of-the-obituary-dust-to-dust-ashes-to-ashes-it’s-11:45-let’s-wrap-this-up service with coffee and cake afterward to fortify the family.

  Man, was I wrong.

  The folks at First Presbyterian were not ready. And neither was I.

  I wore a black sweater and matching long skirt—an appropriate “going to a meeting” outfit. Looking back on it, I should have worn a cocktail dress and heels.

  Millie had written instructions for her funeral. She had outlined in detail the music, flowers, reception hall, type of champagne, hors d’oeuvres, and the location of that Maine bocker suit she’d wanted to be buried in. Millie didn’t leave anything to chance.

  She had an accomplice. Reverend Hare had grown up on the farm next to the Tilsons, having lived with them for a while when he was a boy after his mother died. Millie was like his big sister. He did anything she told him to. And that included having a jazz trio soothe the mourners instead of the pipe organ, testimonials from Millie’s friends, including a Texas oilman and a few retired Follies Bergere chorus girls, and the recorded strains of The Preservation Hall Band playing “When the Saints Go Marching In” as the casket was carried from the church. There were some gasps when a heavily made-up and obviously male, but dressed as a female, soloist gave a moving rendition of “You’ll Never Walk Alone” but, other than that, I thought the residents of Mason, Paper Moon, and other parts of Lake, Silver Lake, Mineral, and Missoula cou
nties in southwestern Montana coped pretty well with the unorthodox service. They listened quietly to the sermons—all three of them—given by (in order) a Buddhist priest, a female Druid (if I’m lyin’, I’m flyin’), and the accommodating Reverend Thomas Hare, on behalf of the Presbyterians. Later, the Reverend confided that he’d had one of the Altar Guild ladies standing by with smelling salts, water, and pillows in case any of the mourners were overcome.

  After the service, the mourners were invited to pay their respects to the family and bring their dancing shoes. That’s what it said at the bottom of the program. “Bring your dancing shoes.” In my experience, postfuneral activity means fried chicken in the church basement or church-lady lasagna at the family home. I should have known that Millie Tilson would not have anything as boring as that. Folks were invited to pay their respects at the Mason Ramada Inn. And it was not a quiet, solemn pat-the-family-on-the-back-and-we’ll-keep-you-in-our-prayers affair. It was a cabaret.

  There were at least a hundred fifty people there, maybe more. Millie had contacted the motel’s manager in advance (his grandmother was one of her bridge partners) so when he found out about her passing, he knew just what he was supposed to do.

  Jess and I stood in the corner like two wallflowers sipping our Dom Perignon (slowly, because we knew how much it cost) and trying not to stare too hard at Millie’s friends, both Montanans and “others,” dancing around the room in a conga line. There was a live band, champagne, and hors d’oeuvres trucked in from a la-di-da place in Missoula. (California rolls and smoked salmon were not on the banquet menu of the Mason Ramada.) Not only were the townsfolk of Paper Moon in attendance (the whole town closed down to go to Millie’s funeral) but the colorful members of Millie’s past lives (and she’d had many) were also there. The parade of characters made cable television seem stale.

  The six-foot-three-inch transvestite soloist came with three similarly dressed colleagues from Miami’s South Beach. They’d known Millie when she’d owned a condo there.

  “Girl,” gushed Patsy Pinkman, a nearly seven-foot-tall wonder who could salsa in high heels better than I walked in sneakers and who had once played men’s college basketball, “Millie gave the best partays. Champagne fountains, tables groaning with food, great music, and the cutest waiters . . .” He batted his inch-long eyelashes at me. “I’ll miss the old girl. Here’s to her!” He lifted the squatty little glass of neat bourbon and dropped it with one gulp.

  “Takes a real man to do that,” Jess observed solemnly. Together, we watched Patsy P, as she, er, he, liked to be called, move to the center of the floor and start an electric-slide line. Reverend Hare and Mr. and Mrs. Olson joined them.

  A whole plane of Texans had come up from Austin and San Antonio, business colleagues of Millie’s last husband, the oilman Paul Daniels. They did the Texas two-step to Bootsy Collins in their ostrich and alligator cowboy boots. The staff of Francine’s Beauty World—from Francine with her platinum blonde twelve-inch-high beehive to the shampoo girl with fuchsia-colored tresses—came, bringing their dates. Even the members of Millie’s creative writing class at the college stopped by. These were mostly college kids wearing black (but not for mourning) with studs in their noses and ears. They congregated together in the corners of the ballroom looking like latter-day vampires, waiting for the food train to arrive and only becoming animated when someone put on (by mistake) a heavy-metal CD. It was quite a bunch.

  I two-stepped with a man named “Bud” for a little while and tried to keep up with the electric slide without getting trampled but had to give up the floor when the showgirls joined us. We’d started doing “the Bump” and, with my wide hips, I was afraid that I’d bump into one of them and break a bone—my bones, not theirs.

  The retirement home of former Follies Bergere dancers was well represented by ten ladies who claimed to have been in the chorus line with Millie back in the twirties. When I asked what that meant, one of them (a striking woman with navel orange–colored hair) cackled, “Darling, we can’t remember if we danced with her in the twenties or in the thirties, so we just put the two together.”

  “Barbara,” one of the other ladies chimed in. “It might have been the forties!”

  They made quite a sight.

  Now, Jess is rarely impressed or surprised by anything. But the sight of these old ladies moving around the dance-floor ballroom of the Mason Ramada was more than he was ready for. They danced with canes and without. Some of them wore sneakers, some of them wore forties-style platform heels. One thing they had in common, though. I have more gray in my head than any of them had in theirs.

  “These old bats better be careful, they’ll break a hip!” he exclaimed as one of them twirled by in the arms of one of the “boys” from South Beach. Both she and he were wearing platform shoes.

  “Watch your language,” I shouted back to him. The music was really loud. “Not ‘old,’ ‘mature.’ ”

  “Mature, hell,” snorted Jess, watching one of the brightly rouged octogenarians scamper across the floor doing the salsa with a walker. Now, that was a sight. “These women are artifacts!”

  Mountain stomped by with his girlfriend on his arm, moving like a tree stump with legs. He and his girl are cute together but they don’t quite fit. For whatever reason, Mountain likes to date the tiniest, skinniest little girls that he can find. “I like to pretend that they’re Tinkerbell,” he says.

  “Mountain, that’s sick,” Jess tells him.

  Mountain is now dating Lawra Swenson, all five feet and ninety-five pounds of her. Watching them dance together is like watching a Saint Bernard cha-cha with a Chihuahua. Mountain looks like he’s fighting off a swarm of bees and Lawra looks as if she’s dancing with the Jolly White Giant. Very interesting.

  “Excuse me!”

  I jumped because it was so noisy and the owner of this comment had just yelled in my ear to make sure that I’d hear him.

  He was a tall, thin, unassuming man, wearing wire-rim eyeglasses and a business suit. He had perfectly cut light brown-colored hair and watery blue eyes. He looked like a lawyer.

  He handed me his business card. He was a lawyer.

  “You’re Juanita Louis, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I am!” I yelled back.

  “I want to introduce myself,” he said very slowly and loudly, “I’m Geoff Black. I’m Mrs. Daniels’s attorney.”

  “Mrs. Who?”

  “Mrs. Daniels. Sorry, Miss Tilson. She hired me when she was Mrs. Paul Hillman Daniels.” Right, the oil man.

  “Oh,” I answered. “Nice to meet you.” It was funny thinking of Millie as a “Mrs.” Anybody. She had always just been Millie Tilson, even though everyone knew that she’d been through more husbands than there were holidays in a year.

  “I need to confirm your mailing address,” he yelled.

  The band had been playing “Super Freak” and the fossilized chorus girls, the boys from South Beach, and the Mason City council were on the dance floor.

  “My what?” I thought I heard him say that he liked my dress.

  “Your mailing address,” he repeated, moving closer to my ear. “Box 4, Rural Route 17, Paper Moon, Montana?”

  “That’s the diner but that’s OK, I’ll get it,” I told him. “What are you sending?”

  “You are listed as a beneficiary in Mrs., um, Ms. Tilson’s will. Each beneficiary has to be notified pursuant to probate law.” He said this as if to make himself seem more lawyerly or something. It helped because the last time I saw him, he was dancing but looked as if he had ten-ton boulders on his feet.

  “Oh. OK,” I said because I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  “I’ll be in touch because—” Mr. Black started to say something else but was interrupted by the deejay’s announcement that the conga line was forming at the opposite end of the room. One of the mummified showgirls grabbed him by the arm and pushed him in that direction. He waved back at me with an apologetic expression. The showgirl gave me a wink
of one heavily mascaraed eye.

  “He’s got a cute ass,” she yelled over her shoulder.

  On the way back to Paper Moon, it suddenly came to me what the attorney had said.

  Jess thought that the whole thing was funny.

  “Got the old woman to write you into her will, huh? ”

  “She probably just left me her old movie collection. Or her shoes. We wear the same size.”

  Jess made a face as he turned the corner.

  “You don’t want her shoes.”

  “No, I don’t . . .” I murmured, looking at the night sky. I couldn’t fill Millie’s shoes. I wished she’d left me her spirit and her nerve. I wish she’d left me the strength to say “I can” instead of “I can’t.” I was thinking about the white envelope from the community college that I hadn’t opened yet—the one that might hold my future inside. I was thinking about my last conversation with Nina, about being her business partner.

  “I didn’t like Will Rogers as much as other folks did,” Millie had said once while she was working on her laptop, her glasses perched on her nose, her fingers flying. “But that man did have a few wise things to say. Said once that even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.”

  It’s true.

  I looked across the highway toward the street where Millie’s house sat near the top of the hill. The old place would always be “Millie’s House,” no matter who lived there, no matter what happened to it. It was dusk and the house was lit up, including the Tower Room, Elva Van Roan’s third-floor domain.

  Yeah. She’d probably just left me her old movie collection.

  Chapter Six

  * * *

  Just when life gets hectic and overwhelming, some pious soul will say, in a back-of-the-church whisper, “God never gives us more than we can handle.” They don’t know what they’re talking about. Here’s the gospel according to Juanita: Sometimes, God sneaks a quick one in just to see how much we can take before our legs buckle. It’s a test. But it’s hard to know, when it’s all over, whether you’ve passed or not. That comes later.