“At least let her try in on,” Lauralee said. “Let her see for herself.” She zipped me into the green satin. It came down to my ankles and fit around my midsection like a girdle, making my waist seem smaller than my stomach. I admired myself in the mirror. It was almost perfect. I looked exactly like a nightclub singer.
“This one’s fine,” I said. “This is the one I want.”
“It looks marvelous, Rhoda,” Lauralee said, “but it’s the wrong color for the wedding. Remember I’m wearing blue.”
“I believe the child’s color-blind,” Miss Onnie Maud said. “It runs in her father’s family.”
“I am not color-blind,” I said, reaching behind me and unzipping the dress. “I have twenty-twenty vision.”
“Let her try on some more,” Lauralee said. “Let her try on everything in the store.”
I proceeded to do just that, with the salesladies getting grumpier and grumpier. I tried on a gold gabardine dress with a rhinestone-studded cumberbund. I tried on a pink ballerina-length formal and a lavender voile tea dress and several silk suits. Somehow nothing looked right.
“Maybe we’ll have to make her something,” my grandmother said.
“But there’s no time,” Miss Onnie Maud said. “Besides first we’d have to find out what she wants. Rhoda, please tell us what you’re looking for.”
Their faces all turned to mine, waiting for an answer. But I didn’t know the answer.
The dress I wanted was a secret. The dress I wanted was dark and tall and thin as a reed. There was a word for what I wanted, a word I had seen in magazines. But what was that word? I could not remember.
“I want something dark,” I said at last. “Something dark and silky.”
“Wait right there,” the saleslady said. “Wait just a minute.” Then, from out of a prewar storage closet she brought a black-watch plaid recital dress with spaghetti straps and a white piqué jacket. It was made of taffeta and rustled when I touched it. There was a label sewn into the collar of the jacket. Little Miss Sophisticate, it said. Sophisticate, that was the word I was seeking.
I put on the dress and stood triumphant in a sea of ladies and dresses and hangers.
“This is the dress,” I said. “This is the dress I’m wearing.”
“It’s perfect,” Lauralee said. “Start hemming it up. She’ll be the prettiest maid of honor in the whole world.”
All the way home I held the box on my lap thinking about how I would look in the dress. Wait till they see me like this, I was thinking. Wait till they see what I really look like.
I fell in love with the groom. The moment I laid eyes on him I forgot he was flat-footed. He arrived bearing gifts of music and perfume and candy, a warm dark-skinned man with eyes the color of walnuts.
He laughed out loud when he saw me, standing on the porch with my hands on my hips.
“This must be Rhoda,” he exclaimed, “the famous red-haired maid of honor.” He came running up the steps, gave me a slow, exciting hug, and presented me with a whole album of Xavier Cugat records. I had never owned a record of my own, much less an album.
Before the evening was over I put on a red formal I found in a trunk and did a South American dance for him to Xavier Cugat’s “Poinciana.” He said he had never seen anything like it in his whole life.
The wedding itself was a disappointment. No one came but the immediate family and there was no aisle to march down and the only music was Onnie Maud playing “Liebestraum.”
Dudley and Philip and Saint John and Oliver and Bunky were dressed in long pants and white shirts and ties. They had fresh military crew cuts and looked like a nest of new birds, huddled together on the blue velvet sofa, trying to keep their hands to themselves, trying to figure out how to act at a wedding.
The elderly Episcopal priest read out the ceremony in a gravelly smoker’s voice, ruining all the good parts by coughing. He was in a bad mood because Lauralee and Mr. Marcus hadn’t found time to come to him for marriage instruction.
Still, I got to hold the bride’s flowers while he gave her the ring and stood so close to her during the ceremony I could hear her breathing.
The reception was better. People came from all over the Delta. There were tables with candles set up around the porches and sprays of greenery in every corner. There were gentlemen sweating in linen suits and the record player playing every minute. In the back hall Calvin had set up a real professional bar with tall, permanently frosted glasses and ice and mint and lemons and every kind of whiskey and liqueur in the world.
I stood in the receiving line getting compliments on my dress, then wandered around the rooms eating cake and letting people hug me. After a while I got bored with that and went out to the back hall and began to fix myself a drink at the bar.
I took one of the frosted glasses and began filling it from different bottles, tasting as I went along. I used plenty of crème de menthe and soon had something that tasted heavenly. I filled the glass with crushed ice, added three straws, and went out to sit on the back steps and cool off.
I was feeling wonderful. A full moon was caught like a kite in the pecan trees across the river. I sipped along on my drink. Then, without planning it, I did something I had never dreamed of doing. I left the porch alone at night. Usually I was in terror of the dark. My grandmother had told me that alligators come out of the bayou to eat children who wander alone at night.
I walked out across the yard, the huge moon giving so much light I almost cast a shadow. When I was nearly to the water’s edge I turned and looked back toward the house. It shimmered in the moonlight like a jukebox alive in a meadow, seemed to pulsate with music and laughter and people, beautiful and foreign, not a part of me.
I looked out at the water, then down the road to the pasture. The Broad Jump Pit! There it was, perfect and unguarded. Why had I never thought of doing this before?
I began to run toward the road. I ran as fast as my Mary Jane pumps would allow me. I pulled my dress up around my waist and climbed the fence in one motion, dropping lightly down on the other side. I was sweating heavily, alone with the moon and my wonderful courage.
I knew exactly what to do first. I picked up the pole and hoisted it over my head. It felt solid and balanced and alive. I hoisted it up and down a few times as I had seen Dudley do, getting the feel of it.
Then I laid it ceremoniously down on the ground, reached behind me, and unhooked the plaid formal. I left it lying in a heap on the ground. There I stood, in my cotton underpants, ready to take up pole-vaulting.
I lifted the pole and carried it back to the end of the cinder path. I ran slowly down the path, stuck the pole in the wooden cup, and attempted throwing my body into the air, using it as a lever.
Something was wrong. It was more difficult than it appeared from a distance. I tried again. Nothing happened. I sat down with the pole across my legs to think things over.
Then I remembered something I had watched Dudley doing through the binoculars. He measured down from the end of the pole with his fingers spread wide. That was it, I had to hold it closer to the end.
I tried it again. This time the pole lifted me several feet off the ground. My body sailed across the grass in a neat arc and I landed on my toes. I was a natural!
I do not know how long I was out there, running up and down the cinder path, thrusting my body further and further through space, tossing myself into the pit like a mussel shell thrown across the bayou.
At last I decided I was ready for the real test. I had to vault over a cane barrier. I examined the pegs on the wooden poles and chose one that came up to my shoulder.
I put the barrier pole in place, spit over my left shoulder, and marched back to the end of the path. Suck up your guts, I told myself. It’s only a pole. It won’t get stuck in your stomach and tear out your insides. It won’t kill you.
I stood at the end of the path eyeballing the barrier. Then, above the incessant racket of the crickets, I heard my name being called. Rhoda… t
he voices were calling. Rhoda… Rhoda… Rhoda… Rhoda.
I turned toward the house and saw them coming. Mr. Marcus and Dudley and Bunky and Calvin and Lauralee and what looked like half the wedding. They were climbing the fence, calling my name, and coming to get me. Rhoda… they called out. Where on earth have you been? What on earth are you doing?
I hoisted the pole up to my shoulders and began to run down the path, running into the light from the moon. I picked up speed, thrust the pole into the cup, and threw myself into the sky, into the still Delta night. I sailed up and was clear and over the barrier.
I let go of the pole and began my fall, which seemed to last a long, long time. It was like falling through clear water. I dropped into the sawdust and lay very still, waiting for them to reach me.
Sometimes I think whatever has happened since has been of no real interest to me.
1944
When I was eight years old I had a piano made of nine martini glasses.
I could have had a real piano if I had been able to pay the terrible price, been able to put up with piano lessons, but the old German spy who taught piano in the small town of Seymour, Indiana, was jealous of my talent.
“Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!” she would scream in her guttural accent, hitting me on the knuckles with the stick she kept for that purpose. “Stopping this crazy business. Can’t you ever listen? Can’t you sit still a minute? Can’t you settle down?”
God knows I tried to settle down. But the mere sight of the magnificent black upright, the feel of the piano stool against my plump bottom, the cold ivory touch of the keys would send me into paroxysms of musical bliss, and I would throw back my head and begin to pound out melodies in two octaves.
“Stop it,” she would be screaming. “This is no music, this crazy banging business. Stop on my piano. Stop before I call your momma!”
I remember the day I quit for good. I got up from the piano stool, slammed the cover down on the keys, told her my father would have her arrested, and stalked out of the house without my hat and gloves. It was a cold November day, and I walked home with gray skies all around me, shivering and brokenhearted, certain the secret lives of musical instruments were closed to me forever.
So music might have disappeared from my life. With my formal training at this sorry end I might have had to content myself with tap and ballet and public speaking, but a muse looked down from heaven and took pity on me.
She arrived in the form of a glamorous war widow, was waiting for me at the bar when I walked into the officers’ club with my parents that Saturday night.
There she sat, wearing black taffeta, smoking long white cigarettes, sipping her third very dry martini.
“Isn’t that Doris Treadway at the bar?” my mother said. “I can’t believe she’s going out in public.”
“What would you like her to do,” my father said, “stay home and go crazy?”
“Well, after all,” my mother whispered. “It’s only been a month.”
“Do you know that lady?” I asked, wondering if she was a movie star. She looked exactly like a movie star.
“She works for your daddy, Honey,” my mother said. “Her husband got killed in the Philippines.”
“Go talk to her,” my father said. “Go cheer her up. Go tell her who you are.”
As soon as we ordered dinner I did just that. I walked across the room and took up the stool beside her at the bar. I breathed deeply of her cool perfume, listening to the rustling of her sleeves as she took a long sophisticated drag on her Camel.
“So you are Dudley’s daughter,” she said, smiling at me. I squirmed with delight beneath her approving gaze, enchanted by the dark timbre of her voice, the marvelous fuchsia of her lips and fingertips, the brooding glamor of her widowhood.
“I’m Rhoda,” I said. “The baby-sitter quit so they brought me with them.”
“Would you like a drink?” she asked. “Could I persuade you to join me?”
“Sure,” I said. “Sure I’ll join you.”
She conferred with the bartender and waved to my parents who were watching us from across the room.
“Well, Rhoda,” she said. “I’ve been hearing about you from your father.”
“What did you hear?” I asked, getting worried.
“Well,” she said, “the best thing I heard was that you locked yourself in a bathroom for six hours to keep from eating fruit cocktail.”
“I hate fruit cocktail,” I said. “It makes me sick. I wouldn’t eat fruit cocktail for all the tea in China.”
“I couldn’t agree with you more,” she said, picking up her stirrer and tapping it on her martini glass. “I think people who hate fruit cocktail should always stick together.”
The stirrer made a lovely sound against the glass. The bartender returned, bringing a wineglass full of bright pink liquid.
“Taste it,” she said, “go ahead. He made it just for you.”
I picked up the glass in two fingers and brought it delicately to my lips as I had seen her do.
“It’s wonderful,” I said, “what’s in it?”
“Something special,” she said. “It’s called a Shirley Temple. So little girls can pretend they’re drinking.” She laughed out loud and began to tap the glass stirrer against the line of empty glasses in front of her.
“Why doesn’t he move the empty glasses?” I asked.
“Because I’m playing them,” she said. “Listen.” She tapped out a little tune. “Now, listen to this,” she said, adding small amounts of water to the glasses. She tapped them again with the stirrer, calling out the notes in a very high, very clear soprano voice. “Do, Re, Mi, Fa, So,… Bartender,” she called, “bring us more glasses.”
In a minute she had arranged a keyboard with nine perfect notes.
“Here,” she said, moving the glasses in front of me, handing me the stirrer, “you play it.”
“What should I play,” I said. “I don’t know any music.”
“Of course you know music,” she said. “Everyone knows music. Play anything you like. Play whatever comes into your head.”
I began to hit the glasses with the stirrer, gingerly at first, then with more abandon. Soon I had something going that sounded marvelous.
“Is that by any chance the ‘Air Corps Hymn’ you’re playing?” she said.
“Well … yes it is,” I said. “How could you tell?”
She began to sing along with me, singing the words in her perfect voice as I beat upon the glasses. “Off we go,” she sang, “into the wild blue yonder, climbing high into the sky, dum, dum, dum. Down we dive spouting a flame from under, off with one hell-of-a-roar, roar, roar …”
People crowded around our end of the bar, listening to us, applauding. We finished with the air corps and started right in on the army. “Over hill, over dale, as we hit the dusty trail, and those caissons go marching along, dum, dum, dum… In and out, hear them shout, counter march and right about, and those caissons go rolling along. For it’s hie, hie, hee, in the field artilll-a-reeeee…”
A man near me began playing the bass on a brandy glass. Another man drummed on the bar with a pair of ashtrays.
Doris broke into “Begin the Beguine.” “When they begin the beguine,” she sang, “it brings back a night of tropical splendor. It brings back the sound of music so te-en-de-rr. It brings back a memorreeeeee ever green.”
A woman in a green dress began dancing, swaying to our rhythm. My martini glasses shone in the light from the bar. As I struck them one by one the notes floated around me like bright translucent boats.
This was music! Not the stale order of the book and the metronome, not the stick and the German. Music was this wildness rising from the dark taffeta of Doris’s dress. This praise, this brilliance.
The soft delicious light, the smell of perfume and gin, the perfection of our artistry almost overwhelmed me, but I played bravely on.
Every now and then I would look up and see Doris smiling at me while she san
g. Doris and I were one. And that too was the secret of music.
I do not know how long we played. Perhaps we played until my dinner was served. Perhaps we played for hours. Perhaps we are playing still.
“Oh, just let them begin the beguine, let them plaaaaay… Let the fire that was once a flame remain an ember. Let it burn like the long lost desire I only remember. When they begin, when they begin, when they begi-i-i-i-i-in the begui-i-i-i-ine…”
Perils of the Nile
Rhoda got up from her seat just as the house lights were going on, licked the rest of the Milky Way from her fingers, and looked around to see if any of the boys she liked were still there. Bebber Dyson was half-asleep in his usual Saturday afternoon seat, but he was too small and dark and poor to be of any real interest to Rhoda, even if he had shown her the eight-page book when they were collecting paper for the sixth-grade paper drive.
She rubbed her tongue across her teeth and gave a little shudder thinking of the picture of Dick Tracy sticking his thing into the dog.
She waved at Bebber and he started her way. Well, he was better than no one at all she thought. After all, he was the best basketball player in the whole school. He was such a good basketball player the seventh grade let him play in their games.
It was a mystery to Rhoda that Bebber was such a good basketball player. No one knew where he came from. He didn’t have a proper home. He didn’t have regular meals or ironed clothes or parents that went to the PTA. All he had was a father that drank and some rooms above a store.
It belied everything Rhoda knew about basketball. Rhoda’s brother had special basketball shoes and special pregame basketball training meals and his own basketball goal above the garage door to practice on. Rhoda’s father even had the concrete people come and pour concrete under the goal so they could mark off the free throw lines.
But no matter how many hours Rhoda’s brother stood at the free throw line practicing shots he could only get the ball through the hoop half the time.
Bebber Dyson’s shots always went through the hoop. He could shoot sideways and underhanded and over his head and one-handed and two-handed and every single time the basketball went through the hoop. Perhaps it was because he stayed at the pool hall all the time Rhoda thought. Perhaps it was because he was poor. Maybe you have to be poor to be a good basketball player.
In the Land of Dreamy Dreams Page 13
