The School of Beauty and Charm

by Melanie Sumner

  In her spare time, Florida painted. She used acrylic paint because oil takes too long to dry and is hard to clean up. Once, Henry suggested that she wear rubber gloves while painting, to keep her hands unstained.

  “Artists don’t wear gloves,” she answered tartly.

  “Well I didn’t know,” he answered. He had never paid much attention to art, but he considered her renditions of Starry Night, The Last Supper, and Femme au Miroir, almost as good as the originals, and of course, much less expensive.

  Florida performed her jobs so well that no one really noticed them, but three times a week we followed her into the beige interior of Bellamy Baptist Church because Henry told us, with a doleful face, “It’s the least you can do for your mother.”

  Although much of the architecture in Counterpoint has enough historic significance to warrant a plaque, Bellamy Baptist Church was built to appear eternally new. It is beige, inside and outside: beige brick, beige trim, beige carpet, beige pew cushions. Since stained-glass windows don’t come in beige, we compromised with pastel, which shine weakly in contrast to the brilliantly colored windows of the Catholic church next door. Those windows pour their heathen colors through our pale glass, and sometimes, in bright sun, red and purple light slashed across my hands as I ran them along the beige pew cushion.

  I longed to be a Catholic. I wanted to drink wine instead of Welch’s grape juice, wear a rosary, and have a huge cross hanging on our living-room wall, bearing a plaster Jesus who looked like he’d been in a motorcycle wreck, his blue eyes rolled up in agony, blood dripping down his flat, white belly. My best friend, Drew St. John, was a Catholic, and she had class. Until the tornadoes hit, and Jesus called me, I was privately planning to join the St. Johns in hell.

  Although I had broached the subject of my salvation with Florida and Henry several times, I had never received a satisfactory reply. “If I’m not born again, and I die suddenly, will I go to hell?” I asked. They babbled all sorts of evasive nonsense back at me, but the answer was plain from the worried frown on Florida’s face. Sometimes, when Henry wasn’t around, she’d hiss, “The devil’s got hold of you. Do you want to end up with him in hell?”

  To appease her, I’d say, “Oh, no. I want to go to heaven,” but I could only envision endless beige carpet.

  EVERY YEAR IN Counterpoint, the Daughters of the American Revolution sponsor a tour of homes. Each year they traipse through half the choice new residences in town, noting pet stains on stair treads, unappealing shower curtains, odors of diapers, whiskey, or take-out food. Then they return to Mansion Avenue, where they select the same five white mansions they put on tour every year.

  Still fuming from Red Cavern’s dismissal of her house, which Grandmother Deleuth had dutifully shared over the phone, Florida was determined to present Owl Aerie to the DAR. Henry balked, but he lost like a gentleman, and after locking up his financial records and personal correspondence, hiding the contraceptives, and polishing the forty-one plaques of recognition on his study walls, he left the enterprise alone. He was at work when Lacy Dalton, Regina Bloodworth, and Shirley Frommlecker arrived. Although Shirley was not in the DAR, she was rich, and as our official decorator, she took the privilege of showing the house—“To drum up business,” Henry said.

  From my vantage point on the roof, I watched the Frommlecker’s tank roll up our steep driveway and disappear behind a bend of crepe myrtle, where it stalled out. For a few minutes, the sound of birds was drowned in Lacy Dalton’s shriek, punctuated by Shirley’s exclamation, “Isn’t this the most original thing you’ve ever seen!”

  In a low voice that carried straight up to the roof, Regina said, “Indeed.” Regina had been legally blind in both eyes for a decade. When relatives urged her to have corrective eye surgery, she turned up her nose. “Hospitals stink,” she said. “Besides, I’ve seen everything. None of it is as interesting as what I can imagine.” A pillar of the DAR, Regina accompanies her friend Lacy to each of the residences seeking admission to the Tour of Homes, and Lacy considers her input invaluable.

  “Hold on to your hats, ladies!” cried Shirley, as she gunned the machine back into gear and brought it to a screeching halt at the back door. She drove the only Tracked Troop Carrier in town, given to her by Dr. Frommlecker after she had wrecked two Lincolns. Sliding across the roof on my belly, I dipped my head over the edge to watch as Shirley, wearing a paisley skirt and a turban, directed the women away from our garage door and onto the raised walkway that crosses a cactus garden and eventually leads to the disguised front door. Lacy Dalton, who is shaped like a watermelon, wore a wraparound kelly-green skirt covered with watermelons, a watermelon-pink blouse and matching espadrilles. She tottered along with one hand on her hip so that Regina could hook her long thin arm through Lucy’s short fat one.

  Regina always wore black, so that she could dress herself. She kept her silver hair cut short above her ears, like a man, and despite everyone’s warnings that one day she’d be knocked down and robbed, she adorned her person with half a million dollar’s worth of jewels. Even her cane glittered with diamonds as it tapped along the planks. She smelled faintly of rum and vanilla. With their arms linked, the two women walked in practiced synchronicity behind the turbaned Shirley, who was talking a mile a minute. From the corner of my eye, I saw the white flash of Roderick’s hair in the sun. He was hunting lizards beneath the trampoline. Silently, I descended the dogwood tree.

  “I kid you not,” Shirley was saying over her shoulder. “There she stood, in the middle of Front Street, at ten o’clock in the morning, naked as a jaybird. Agnes had just done her hair.”

  “Frenchie Smartt’s girlfriend?”

  “Live-in. I can’t recall her name.”

  “I know I’ve seen her. The one with the bosoms?”

  “Of course I didn’t stop the car, but I can tell you that she wears an underwire bra.”

  “What goes up . . .” said Regina.

  “Lawdee,” said Lacy, turning serious. “Someone really ought to do something about her. I mean, having a cocktail is one thing . . .”

  Shirley halted and turned to face the women. In a hushed voice, she said, “Alcoholic.”

  Just then, Florida opened the front door. All three women beamed back at her and began to talk at once. The high slippery waves of their voices filled the yard, then the door shut behind them, and all was quiet except for the buzzing of insects in the noonday sun.

  Roderick approached me carrying a Japanese cricket box in his hand. Shirley had found the box in Atlanta, a purely ornamental piece to set on the living-room coffee table beside the Chinese vase, but Roderick soon discovered that it served as a fine cage for crickets, worms, and lizards.

  “Here,” he said, handing me the box. “I got two of them. If they get rowdy, just thump their heads.”

  Once inside, I removed my go-go boots and sidled along the walls so I could spy on the DAR, but they saw me.

  “Isn’t she precious.”

  “The boy got the hair. She’s the spittin’ image of Henry.”

  “Oh Florida, I disagree, honey. She’s you all over again.”

  Florida opened the front door and hollered, “Roderick! Are you out there in the weeds!”

  He yelled back that he was fine.

  “Come in here and get your inhaler! I don’t want you having an attack tonight.” She marched outside with the small green inhaler in her palm.

  “THESE ARE MY WORKS,” Florida was saying in her studio while Lacy made ooh and aah sounds.

  “You are so talented. I could just kill you. Regina, they are out of this world. Is that a Matisse, honey? It’s just gorgeous.”

  “It’s supposed to be Van Gogh,” said Florida. “I flubbed up on the stars. The children were fussing that day.”

  “Well, I learned all that in college, but I get them mixed up now. I guess it’s old age.”

  “Lacy! You’re not old!” said Shirley, laying a ringed hand on her round pink shoulder.

&n
bsp; “Oh yes I am! Did I tell you that Bill offered to loan me his razor, to shave my chin?”

  “Shame on him!”

  “Did you wring his neck?” Their perfumes mixed and filled the air. Regina did not laugh when other people laughed. She stood tall, leaning slightly on her cane, facing the canvas in her black sunglasses.

  “Getting old is the best thing that ever happened to me,” she said loudly. Then she added, “Starry Night. I love that painting.”

  “Isn’t it great!” said Shirley. “I made her put these out when I was doing the house. She had them in a closet—”

  “Henry doesn’t like to put too many nails in the walls,” said Florida.

  “Men!” exclaimed Lacy. “I tell you what.”

  As the women rustled out of the room, trailing their scents behind them, Florida spotted me in the corner.

  “Where are your shoes? Is that my cricket box? I’ve been looking all over for that thing. Put it back where it belongs, right now. Never mind, give it here. You’ll knock the vase over.” She didn’t add “And it cost a fortune” because we had company.

  When company came, they used my bathroom. Florida shut the sliding door to my bedroom, opened the hall door, and whipped out the four guest towels and six tiny shell-shaped soaps that no guest had ever dared to touch—until Regina arrived.

  While she waited for Lacy to finish her business in the adjoining toilet, Regina stood at my sink, scrubbing her hands with a delicate lavender clamshell. Through the sliding door, which I had cracked open, I watched with delight as she snapped an ironed linen guest towel from the rack. Her back was ramrod straight, and through the mirrored wall facing us, I could see her sharp gray face in the dark glasses. Pressed against the door, I trembled, wondering if she would take them off. Roderick said that her eyes had been plucked out, leaving two holes through which you could probably see her brain. Florida said that was foolish; she’d have glass eyes, like marbles, and Henry said that surely someone would have shut the eyelids. Although I was taking shallow, quiet breaths, and standing so still that my feet had gone to sleep, I felt sure that she was looking back at me through the mirror. Half a million dollars, I thought, watching her rings glint as she roughly dried her hands, then tossed the wadded guest towel onto the counter.

  Suddenly, she spoke. Her voice was loud, a habit she’d acquired from responding to people who raised their voices to talk to blind people, and it startled me so much that at first I thought she was talking to me.

  “Who are they?” she asked.

  From the toilet, Lacy grunted, “Who?”

  “The Pepperses,” repeated Regina. “Who are they?”

  “Oh,” said Lacy. “They’re nobody.”

  I waited, but no explanation followed. Regina took her cane and went out into the hall; Lacy rinsed her hands at the sink, drying her hands on a Kleenex, and then carefully folded the towel Regina had used and replaced it on the rack.

  I sat down on my bedroom floor, on the purple shag carpet that still showed the vacuum cleaner tracks and looked at the iron bed from Grandmother Deleuth’s attic, which Florida had painted to look like brass, and the white laminate dresser from Sears. On the wall behind my mamason chair, Henry had carefully hung the John Denver poster that Roderick gave me for my seventh birthday. My heart felt the way it did when I’d eaten too much peanut butter too fast. Nobody.

  What happened next seemed like fate. I walked into the living room, where I found Regina sitting alone on the couch, sipping a hot toddy from the thermos she carried in her large black pocketbook, thumbing through a copy of Southern Living. As she turned the slick pages, her mouth softened, and a dreamy expression came over her face. What was she seeing? The voices of the women downstairs drifted through the intercom.

  “Now this is just darling—a fur bedspread. Cute, cute, cute.”

  “He picked the wallpaper out by himself. I could kick myself for letting him, but I did. Bugs on the wall! He wants to be a doctor; every time I turn around, he’s dissecting—”

  “Shirley, could you do a ceiling like this in my house, or would that be too much? Go on, Florida, I’m listening.”

  Although I made no attempt to disguise my presence, Regina and I didn’t speak to each other. When I heard the lizards jumping in the cricket box, I took them out to thump them into submission as if there were no company in the room. Inside the box, they had turned from gray to gold. I looked around for Roderick, to show him, but he had disappeared. Regina burped, then crossed her ankles, which were as thick as the trunk of the dogwood tree.

  Nobody, I thought, and then I stepped forward and placed one golden lizard on each of her legs. Slowly, the chameleons, with their noses pointed up, gulping air, turned gray. Then they darted beneath the hem of her skirt.

  Regina screamed. It was a wild call, released from the deepest, darkest jungle of her heart, and when its chill reached the back of my neck, I wailed with her. Our cries reached an ear-splitting crescendo that sent Florida and the DAR up the stairs at breakneck speed, but it was too late.

  With her skinny arms raised over her head, her mouth drawn into a murderous grimace, Regina thrashed her cane into the Chinese vase.

  THAT AFTERNOON, AFTER the Daughters of the American Revolution had left with fluttering waves and tense smiles, Roderick said, “Who wants to live in a museum? Not me.”

  “Well they didn’t pick us for the tour, so hush,” said Florida. She removed a cookie sheet from his hands. “Oh honey, not my good pan. You don’t have to do that today, do you?”

  Roderick took the cookie sheet back and covered it with tin foil, spreading Crisco in a rectangle for each lizard he intended to cook. “All I know,” he said sternly, “is that I don’t want a bunch of ladies poking around in my room, getting goop all over my stuff.”

  “They like fine furniture,” said Florida. “Knickknacks. Junk. I don’t think Lacy even got a good look at the vase before it was broken. That Regina is nuts. I don’t know what got into her. She’s not right. I’m going to submit Owl Aerie to Southern Living anyway. The DAR doesn’t have the last word on everything. Owl Aerie is original. They like the same old, same old. Old money. They probably want you to have a black maid.”

  Roderick opened the cricket box.

  “I told you they were gold,” I said.

  “If you have to cook your lizards,” Florida said with her back turned, “I am going to ask you to kill them first.”

  “It’s probably a good thing we don’t have a maid,” said Florida, sitting down at the table with the Chinese vase, now a box of shattered china, and a bottle of glue. “She wouldn’t last a minute in this house.” With her brow furrowed, she began working the jagged edges of porcelain together like a jigsaw puzzle. Wheezing from his afternoon in the weeds, Roderick turned on the oven and removed an envelope of sterilized surgical instruments from his pocket. “Son,” she said, without looking up, “don’t you use my manicure set on those lizards. I’ll tan your hide. You hear?”

  THE SOUND OF a tornado begins with a low whistle. Something is calling you, not coming for you yet, but calling. It is hard to sit still, impossible not to listen. This is how most people die in tornadoes; they run to them. On the day Owl Aerie was hit, the patch of sky outside the kitchen window turned a yellowish, lake-water green, and five pieces of hail the size of golf balls struck the glass in rapid succession, like a knock.

  “Henry, don’t you go out there,” said Florida. “I’m telling you.” With his face deep in his cereal bowl, Henry pretended not to hear. He had never missed a day of work at Southern Board, and he saw no reason to lay out now. “A national tornado isn’t a good reason to stay home?” cried Florida. Henry didn’t think so.

  He did not, however, ignore the risks of inclement weather. THE BEST WAY IS THE SAFE WAY was the motto at Southern Board, and the guiding principle of Henry’s life. That morning, after his shower, Henry stepped into the walk-in closet he shared with Florida to find his tornado hat.

  On
the left side of the closet, above a row of polished shoes packed with shoe horns, twelve gray suits hung a hand’s width apart on wooden hangers. The suits were followed by starched white shirts. At the end of the shirts, there was a burst of color—a banner of maroon and navy ties. The last tie in the line-up was banana yellow. Florida had given him that one after she received yet another kitchen appliance for her birthday, and Henry didn’t have the heart to get rid of it. This was Henry’s side of the closet, emerging like a regiment of well-heeled soldiers against Florida’s side, which can only be described as savage.

  Here, hangers made of wire, yarn, and catgut disappeared under blinding wheels of color. In a dizzying sweep of plaid, check, and polka dot, Florida’s wardrobe appeared to be caught in flight. Turquoise and chartreuse sequins flashed beneath something pink and bulbous, covered in feathers. A flame-orange spike heel dangled from the strap of a white patent-leather bag. A pair of padded, cone-shaped falsies from an ocher bathing suit teetered on the top shelf, and a stocking hung between them like a tail. Red was splashed around like blood.

  Henry had trained himself not to look over there. Reaching up to the top shelf on his side of the closet, he removed his tornado hat. It was shaped like a motorcycle helmet, covered in a tasteful plaid merino, and trimmed with coyote fur. Coyote earmuffs swiveled up or down. He turned the hat in his hands, inspecting it for lint, then fitted it on his head without messing up his hair.

  When he returned to the kitchen with his briefcase, Florida was ready for him. She was wearing what she always wore in the morning: a slinky zebra-print housecoat that zipped to the floor and a pair of sparkling gold spandex house shoes with hard soles that clacked on the tiles. A quilted green scarf covered her head, to keep her hair from going flat when she slept. Even though it was still dark outside, she wore lipstick. “I know you don’t want to listen to me,” she said, “but I’d like to make a suggestion. May I make one suggestion?” Henry smiled behind his coyote fur.