The Sisterhood of the Queen Mamas

by Annie Jones

  “Why, Maxine! You wild thing! I am shocked!” I wasn’t. I could totally see Maxine looking achingly adorable with her skinny legs poking out of a box-pleated plaid skirt and her smile framed by sugared bubble-gum-colored lips. But what I’d said wasn’t a lie. It was hyperbole. In other words, I was making something big out of something ordinary, just for the joy of reveling in said bigness and the foolishness that often accompanies it. It’s a Southern thing. And speaking of making something big out of nothing, you know I just had to ask, “Did you also tease up your hair?”

  “Oh, no!” It was Maxine’s turn to look shocked. But her response was clearly the real deal, not a sky-high case of Texas hyperbole. “I didn’t dare mess with my hair!”

  She touched the cropped-short-and-too-cute-for-words cut that she now wore.

  I checked my own coiffure-du-jour in the rearview mirror. It didn’t have the flair of my circa-1960 upswept beehive, but it still had style. Big style. And so I smiled and waited for Maxine to finish her story.

  “No, ma’am. I did not try anything fancy with my hair. Not after all the things my aunts and older sister did to get it ironed and flattened out and softened and straight so that they could slick it down and curl it up and give me that immovable stiff flip.” She made a motion along the side of her head and shoulder to show the line her hair would have followed in those days.

  “Kicky,” I said, using the vernacular of the day—after keen and before groovy. “Me? I used to tease mine, but I really could never get enough height to suit me.”

  “I can see that about you.” Her eyes lifted to the top curls of my pumped-up and pale-streaked hairdo.

  “You should have seen me on my wedding day!”

  “Oh, my! I bet they had to put a red flashing beacon in your do to ward off low-flying aircraft.”

  “Rhinestones.”

  “Rhinestones?”

  “I had twinkling rhinestones sewn into my three-tiered quarter-length veil, complete with blusher. You know, the…” I motioned with one hand to show something covering my face, then being lifted away.

  “Yes. Yes, the…uh, I know what you mean.” Maxine made the same motion. “I refused to have one of those, even though I think Mama and Daddy thought I should, tradition and all. But I said no, I am going into this with my eyes wide open, thank you very much!”

  A woman who kept her own name and hyphenated it with her minister husband’s name, she would think of a thing like that.

  “But then, for me, after that one last gasp…”

  “Gasp?”

  “The rhinestone veil. Everybody said it was time to put aside childish things—”

  “Childish? How is showing some personal flair childish? How is being yourself childish?”

  I stared straight ahead. The town where I had grown up, where almost everyone I knew had grown up, the place where I had formed all of my attachments and most of my ideas, stretched out before me. And Maxine’s question expanded inside me. How is being yourself childish? “I don’t know. It’s just what everyone said.”

  “Everyone?”

  “My mother, for one.” I loved my mama, but she believed that things should be done a certain way, and woe to anyone who got them out of order or colored outside the lines.

  I didn’t have to say all that to Maxine for her to comprehend it, either. Mothers of Castlerock of a certain era, no matter what their races, tended to come from the same mold. “Uh-huh.”

  I came to a stop sign and stopped. And stayed stopped while I added softly, “And David.”

  “David?” That caused Maxine to turn loose of the dashboard and twist her whole upper body around to face me. “Your own husband called you childish?”

  He had, and I remembered exactly when and what over. I did not turn to Maxine, however, when I said, in a sheepish voice, “When I got upset about losing the few pieces I had of my Hostess Queen partyware.”

  “Few pieces? I assumed you had the whole set at one time!”

  “Something that showy?” Now I did look at her. I mean, Maxine was talking crazy talk for even suggesting such a thing. I had to look at her when I explained. “For a bride and groom right out of seminary? No. No, ma’am. I got four pieces as wedding gifts, and that was it. Mama didn’t even think I should ask for those. They were too sophisticated-suburban for Castlerock, she told me. Something straight out of TV.”

  Maxine chuckled at that. “But you had a few pieces. All I ever had was the luncheon set—you know, eight kidney-shaped plates with a place on one side for the matching cups?”

  I nodded. “What happened to them?’

  “Oh, I still have them. Still in the box.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh, yeah, because you know, being a minister’s wife, I never had luncheons that didn’t involve more than eight people, and even if I did, nobody I knew ate the dainty kind of lunches that would fit on those plates.”

  “Castlerock, not the home of the sophisticated suburbanite,” I joked.

  “But you had four whole pieces? And you lost them all? Now that’s a pity. They get broken over the years, or what?”

  “Worse. They got…appropriated.” It still stuck in my craw a bit, all these years later. Stuck in my craw, and stung a little bit, too.

  “Apropri—what?” Maxine folded her arms.

  “You know.” I gave the truck some gas at last and went rolling slowly onto the deserted downtown street. “One morning the women’s Bible study needed something to serve refreshments, and David handed over my hot and cold beverage carafe.”

  “You had that?” Maxine’s face went all dreamy. I know it’s corny, but this Hostess Queen service? It really was the stuff of dreams, back in the day.

  “And my six-compartment relish tray,” I added, so she’d know exactly what had been at stake.

  “He lent them both to the women’s Bible study?”

  “I thought he lent them, but next thing I knew, somebody wrote ‘Property of’ and the church’s name and address on the bottom with a permanent marker, and that was that.”

  “David didn’t get it back for you?”

  “He told me not to be childish.”

  “Oh, Odessa.” She put her hand on my shoulder. She didn’t need to do or say another thing. I knew she understood completely how that had made me feel.

  “Same with the other pieces I had, when they got carted off for use for some church event, never to be seen again.” I sighed, turning to take us around the block one more time. “That was when I knew.”

  “That you were going to dedicate the rest of your life to finding and replacing all those pieces and completing the entire set of Hostess Queen partyware? No matter how long it took? No matter how much junk you had to look through or how many vendors who had to bargain with?”

  “Oh, Maxine, you say that like it’s some kind of military mission.” I sat up a little straighter, and smiled at last. “I am so proud of you!”

  She beamed.

  “But no.”

  That, as we say around here, took the shine off her penny. She scowled my way, just a little, and with her silence asked me to explain myself.

  “No, that’s not when I decided to try to replace my pieces. That is when I knew I was never going to come first.”

  “With David?” Disbelief softened the edges of what might otherwise have sounded like a harsh accusation.

  “With anybody.” Again, I did not look at her, but kept my eyes on the road, and occasionally the sidewalk—because we were still looking for Chloe, after all—and drove. “I knew I was never going to be important enough to have my own full set of partyware, for one thing. And by extension I realized that anything I did manage to have or accomplish or even create was never going to be mine to keep. Not my household goods, not my children, not even my husband. I had to share with everyone, and put myself at the end of the line. Bottom of the heap.”

  “Bottom of the…?” Maxine’s mouth gaped wide open. She huffed. She rolled her eyes. �
�Odessa Pepperdine, that is the…Oh, I just don’t know…. Odessa, if ever there was a person destined to hit the heights, you are that person.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”

  “Well, I do. Top of the world, Odessa, that’s where you belong. And I am so sad that you didn’t have friends and family who made you feel that way.”

  I gave a faint smile.

  “Well, never you mind. You have a friend like that now. One who never thought of you as the bottom of the barrel.”

  “Heap. I said bottom of the heap.” There was a difference. Slight, but a difference.

  “Whatever. The point is that we are in the same sisterhood, girlfriend, and from now on it’s up, up, up.” She pointed skyward.

  I wanted to believe her, but… “I don’t know, Maxine. It doesn’t seem that simple. I mean, despite our present flabby, age-ravaged carcasses…”

  “Excuse me?”

  I cleared my throat. “Uh, despite our fabulous and ravishing…”

  She sat back in her seat. “Much better.”

  “…carcasses.”

  Maxine held her hand up between us. “Girl, when I am around you, I never fear of suffering the sin of pride, is all I got to say.”

  I smiled. “Despite all that, can we agree that inside each of us, we still have a sliver of that scared, insecure young girl wanting to be loved, to feel special?”

  “The only sliver of anything I have in me is pie, honey. That scared little girl in me is gone for good.”

  “Gone? Really?”

  “Yes.”

  I have to say I admire that about Maxine more than probably anything she ever told me. Because my scared young woman, my inner Chloe, Bernadette and even Jan, is still alive and kicking. And not in that hip, happening, kicky kicking way, either.

  “I am so glad you are my friend, Maxine, you know that?”

  “Right back at ya, Odessa. I love you more than Hostess Queen partyware and a sparkly tiara combined.”

  We drove for a few seconds before I asked, “Do you love me more than bacon?”

  “Don’t push it.”

  I laughed and exhaled hard, breathing out a lot of the self-doubt and sadness that the discussion had churned up inside me. We had a task at hand. “Okay. Back to finding Chloe. Where would you go if you lost your job, had a scary relationship and even scarier hair?”

  “Jan went out onto the roof.”

  “That’s entirely different.” I scanned the few open shops on the town square, knowing they were not the types of places Chloe would frequent.

  It got real quiet then. And as you can imagine, real quiet is not the natural state between Maxine and me.

  Finally, softly, with an almost reverent tone, Maxine whispered, “What was she doing up there? What did she go up there to see?”

  “Or to avoid seeing?”

  “You mean her husband?”

  I raised my eyebrows and shrugged. “I used to think maybe he went up there the day he fell to get away from her.”

  “No.”

  “Well…yes. I wondered…You know what it says in Proverbs about living on a roof being better than living with a cantankerous woman.”

  “In what translation do they use the term cantankerous?” She chuckled softly. “But I get your point.”

  I nodded. “It’s not the kind of thing I would ever ask Jan about, but it did occur to me. Why else would a man go on the roof?”

  “Doing repairs?”

  “Let me rephrase that. Why would a husband go out onto the roof?”

  Maxine laughed at the subtle difference. A man might have all manner of reasons to tackle big, unappealing chores, but a husband…?

  “Speaking of husbands, I think it’s time I spoke to mine.” With that, I pulled over to the side of the street and parked in front of what used to be a dress shop but now sold used paperback novels.

  “Speaking of husbands? That’s not why you want to call David. You want to call him because we were speaking of Morty Belmont and chores and you want to make sure your own man followed through on the assignment you set out for him.” She cranked the window down to let some air blow through while the engine was off. Maybe it was the prospect of the Texas heat that put a little bit of attitude into Maxine’s voice when she mumbled, “And here you haven’t even completed the task you set out to accomplish this morning.”

  “You want to keep working on our task? Then scoot over here and take the wheel, big talker.” I popped out of the truck, walked around the front and opened the passenger-side door. “I am going to make this call.”

  Never in my wildest dreams did I think Maxine would actually start up the truck, much less drive off without me in it!

  Luckily, she noticed her error in leaving me standing in the streets of downtown Castlerock. She said she thought I had jumped in the seat, when in fact I had only just tossed my purse in and then stepped back to try to see the numbers on my cell phone. Tiny things. And on a gray-on-gray screen in brilliant daylight!

  Anyway, Maxine backed up and allowed me to climb into my own truck and started driving while I made contact with my own husband, to whom I promptly told the whole story, including our stopover at the tattoo parlor.

  “No, for the last time, we did not get tattoos, David!” I wasn’t cross with him, so much as curt. “Yes, I know. Go get your lunch and we’ll talk this evening. I love you, too.”

  I squinted to find the minuscule red symbol on the button that would end the call. Would that I could have cut the connection between Maxine and the steering wheel and gas pedal with so little effort.

  Turns out Maxine was not a devotee of that smooth-driving school that I adhered to, or maybe she had never driven a beat-up old truck with bad shocks and mushy brakes and a steering wheel that tended to resist all attempts at using it for steering. So we’d gone bumping along for the whole five-minute cell-phone conversation. And not a sign of Chloe, to boot.

  “Tattoos?” Maxine took a turn so fast my whole side flattened against the door. “David did not think that of us, did he?”

  “I sort of think maybe he did.” I pushed myself away from the cold, unyielding door. “He says I am not myself lately, so he didn’t know what to expect.”

  “Not yourself?”

  “That I’m running around more, going places without him, driving a truck, chairing action committees, making friends with people it would seem I’d have nothing in common with…”

  “Oh, that.” She waved her hand, and the truck veered slightly. “That’s not like you?”

  “Well, I think it is.” My own hand shot out, as if it had a mind of its own, and grabbed the wheel to get us going straight again. “But I can see where he might think it’s a new development.”

  “Because it is a new development, or because David hasn’t been paying attention to the real Odessa?” Her driving might be all over the road, but her thinking was right on track.

  “A little of both. You know…ministers.” More than once, I’d thought that if I were a total stranger who’d come in off the street, sat down in David’s office and told him the story of my life, I’d have gotten more empathy and understanding from him than I had sharing his home and life for more than forty years.

  “Men.” Maxine sighed.

  “Husbands!” We both said it at the same time, and instantly shared a laugh, as well.

  “I don’t care what he says. I haven’t known you in person for all that long, Odessa, but I know you in my heart. I am you in many ways, and I have to say this—you are more like yourself than anyone I have ever met.”

  “And that’s a good thing?” I asked.

  “That’s a terrific thing!” She hit a speed bump without so much as tapping the brakes.

  I covered my head, the way we had been taught to protect ourselves from tornadoes and nuclear blasts in grade school, and uttered a most sincere “Thank you, Maxine.”

  “T’weren’t nothing. What did I do?”

  “You liked me.�
�

  “Oh, Odessa honey. I told you, I love you.”

  “I love you, too, Maxine. But I also like you.”

  “I get it,” she said softly.

  “In fact, I like you so much, my friend, I am not even going to demand you pull this truck over and let someone who knows how to drive it take over.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I am going to let you drive us all the way to where we are going.”

  “We’re going somewhere?”

  “Yup. To find Chloe.”

  “Where to?”

  “Jan Belmont’s house.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope. David said he didn’t get anywhere trying to talk to Morty, and had to leave when Jan threw him out because she was expecting her subcommittee any minute. They plan to go over all the letters of complaint about the flea market.”

  Maxine sighed and pointed the truck toward the Belmont house. “Do you ever get the idea that the two halves of our action council are canceling each other out?”

  “I do, and I am going to put a stop to it.”

  “How?”

  “I have a plan.”

  A plan. Beauty might be skin-deep, but there was some thing more going on under this pretty hairdo of mine.

  A distraction was what was called for, I figured. But not a distraction merely for the sake of distraction. This distraction had to serve a greater purpose. I didn’t discuss it with Maxine, or let myself dwell on what David might have to say about my solution and how unlike me it was. It was unlike me, I suppose, if you only looked at the skin-deep Odessa who al ways did what was expected. That hesitant young woman who wore rhinestones on her veil and let her husband give away her favorite wedding gifts and only wanted to be liked.

  But to anyone who thought of me as the woman most like herself, a woman destined to rise above her fears and shortcomings, it would have made perfect sense when I hit Jan Belmont’s door, stepped inside and announced, “Hey, y’all! Maxine and I think that since we have the collective knowledge of so many mamas here all at once, and we only want what’s best for our girl, we should perform an emergency makeover on Chloe!”