He was standing in the center of the crowded room now, and he raised up his arms. “Oh what a day to live in!” he cried. “But one great and wonderful thing about this day we’re living in, we’re closer to the Coming of Jesus! The Bible says, any day the Trump could sound and the dead in Christ shall rise first and we that remain alive shall rise to meet Him in the air. Oh, we get to go home and be with Jesus! Oh, I tell you no eye has seen nor ear has heard, neither has entered into the heart of man what God has in store for them that love Him. In this day, we ought to love Jesus. Lift up your head and look because He could come today! Wouldn’t that be wonderful?”
In the bed, Daddy-Go turned his face to the wall.
“I think I’ll have some of that pineapple upside-down cake,” said Florida. “Even though I don’t need it. Not with this pot belly.” She patted her small midriff and stepped down into the dining room where the cake sat on the table. Roderick had already slipped out of the room.
To make up for their absences, Henry focused his gaze on Lyle, encouraging him to go on.
“It wouldn’t be so wonderful if you didn’t have the seal of the Lord on your forehead,” said Lyle. He pointed at me and shook his finger. “Then the locusts would get you. Yessirree. These locusts, the Bible tells us, are as big as horses, wearing golden crowns, with the faces of men, the hair of women, and the teeth of lions. Them tails sting like scorpions.”
I gave up trying to picture Mr. Rutherford.
“Yes, if it was me, I’d want to have the seal of the Lord on my forehead when He lets them varmints loose.”
In the dining room, Florida said, “I’m just going to have a bite. I really shouldn’t.”
The cuckoo in the clock crowed four times, and soon the room began to grow dark. Lyle pulled a harmonica out of his shirt pocket, blew a chord to get himself started, and then began to sing.
There is a fountain filled with blood drawn from Immanuel’s veins;
And sinners plunged beneath that flood, Lose all their guilty stains:
Lose all their guilty stains. Lose all their guilty stains:
And sinners plunged beneath that flood, Lose all their guilty stains . . .
After Evange Lyle left, Florida said, “Now I thought that was just a little bit rude. If I was sick, I wouldn’t want somebody bringing a Bible into the house. We’re not having a funeral.”
“Won’t be as long as it has been,” said Grandmother.
“He’s showy,” said Florida.
“He ought to get him one of those pocket-sized Bibles,” said Henry. “A New Testament. He could carry that in his breast pocket and leave it there until he needs it. Nobody reads the Old Testament much anyway.”
“Henry, the Old Testament is important. Don’t tell the children that.”
“I didn’t say it wasn’t.”
“Well, what did you say?”
“Never mind.”
“Y’all don’t fuss,” said Grandmother.
“No one is fussing mother. We’re having a discussion. Is that against the rules? Can’t we talk about God and Jesus in our home?”
LATE THAT NIGHT, we stood around the bed in the parlor, watching Brack die. “Say good-bye to your grand-father,” said Henry. “You may never see him again.”
I leaned against the bed, keeping my eyes on a carved bird holding a grape in its beak. When Henry pressed his hand on the back of my neck, pressing his Masonic ring between my shoulder blades, I looked obediently at Daddy-Go. His hair was greasy, and his face had turned gray, the color of dishwater. When he put his cold hand over mine, I felt how hard his body was shaking with the effort to talk. He moved his dry, cracked lips.
“He’s trying to say something to her,” said Florida. “Daddy, what is it?” He opened his mouth, but no words came out. He let his head fall back on the pillow. Did he think he was in one of those dreams where you can’t move, can’t speak? Was he trapped under the hull of a boat?
When he finally spoke, his voice was strong and clear. He said, “Voulez-vous couchez avec moi?”
BRACK DID NOT die that night, but in the morning we found Roderick stiff and cold on his cot. The coroner said he had died of asphyxiation—caused by the small blue pine tree he’d set up in the corner of the porch after I went to bed and decorated for Christmas-in-July.
Chapter Five
IT TOOK ME an hour to decide what a sane person would wear to see a psychiatrist. In the fourteen months since Roderick’s death, I had gained forty-three pounds on a steady diet of Ho Ho’s, King Dons, and Hershey’s Kisses; nothing looked good on me. There was no uniform at Bridgewater, but I wore one anyway: a plaid tent dress, a ponytail, and a pea coat. I looked repressed. My weekend outfit—a pair of oversized army pants tied with rope and one of Henry’s dress shirts—screamed Electra Complex. If I wore anything that had belonged to Roderick, Dr. Frommlecker would think I had killed my brother.
Roderick’s room had become a museum exhibit, lacking only a velvet rope across the door. Henry was the official duster; he didn’t trust anyone else to handle the Boy Scout merit badges, the copperhead snakeskin, the blue sock, and the shell containing a single marble, a pair of toenail clippers, three pennies, and a burnt match. Each day he smoothed the Star Wars bedspread over the pillow. Florida had his sweaters dry-cleaned. When Roderick didn’t come home from Red Cavern, Puff had looked for him all over the house, sniffing in corners, crawling under beds, peering over bathtubs. After several weeks, he gave up the search and became incontinent.
We all needed therapy, but there was only one shrink in town, and Henry couldn’t go to Leo because they were in Rotary Club together. Florida wouldn’t see anyone who wasn’t a Christian. I was the obvious candidate, but Henry stalled with the insurance paperwork because he didn’t want a psychiatric diagnosis to go on my permanent record. Henry discussed my permanent record in the same grave voice he used when discussing my permanent teeth. What was lost was lost forever. In the end, he decided to pay cash for the visit, and I wore Florida’s ancient full-length mouton, buttoned up to my chin.
In late September in Counterpoint, Georgia, the temperature hits eighty-five in the afternoon, but the air conditioner was on full blast in Dr. Frommlecker’s reception room, so I kept my coat on. The receptionist made no comment.
She was one of Alfred Hitchcock’s cool blondes—slim and pure white except for an icy blue shadow in her eyes. “Dr. Frommlecker will be with you in a moment, Louise,” she said in a sculpted voice. She handed me a clipboard then went back into her glass cubicle.
I hunched down in my fur and set to work on the battery of tests Frommlecker gave all of his patients. Drew St. John, who had been sent here when she was flunking out of the fourth grade, had prepped me for the IQ test. “Most of the answers are C,” she said. According to Drew, the results of this test showed that she had one of the highest IQs in the country. Her mathematical skills were equivalent to those of a college sophomore, and her reading comprehension was perfect. I chose C for most of my answers, but occasionally I encountered a question with such an obvious answer that I had to go with my gut. For instance, in the analogy,
Teeth : chicken :: sentience : __________.
A. dog
B. grub
C. chicken
D. cabbage
E. human
I chose E, confident in my understanding that people were fools.
Next, I took the Myers-Briggs personality test. Henry said I had a good personality, and Florida said I had a lot of personality, but I was sure Myers-Briggs would ferret out the truth; I was insane. On this one, I answered C for all the questions.
Drew had not told me where to sit in Dr. Frommlecker’s office, and I panicked when I entered the room and was told to sit anywhere. My choices were a straight-backed wooden chair, a chartreuse beanbag, and a brown couch. I suspected that this was another test, and I finally chose to lie down on the couch because that’s what I’d seen in the movies. The ceiling above me was painted bright ora
nge—Mrs. Frommlecker’s touch.
Dr. Frommlecker rolled out from behind his desk on a chair with chrome wheels. He wore running shoes, a pair of brown Haggar slacks, and a silky shirt unbuttoned at the collar to reveal a gold chain that Henry would have hated. His thin dark hair was parted in the middle, and he had the smart, beady little eyes of a doctor fresh out of medical school. I could tell right off that he was a Yankee because he didn’t smile at me. When I had settled back into my mouton, with my feet resting on a pillow, and my hands folded in my lap, he rolled forward and said, “So who did you fuck?”
It was a shocking question to put to a Peppers. To make matters worse, I was a virgin. I was a virgin by circumstance rather than choice. No one had ever tried to have sex with me unless you counted the Mormon who had put his tongue in my mouth at Bridgewater’s Freshman Fling. His tongue was soft and fat and tasted like spit. Afterward, he asked me how much I weighed.
When I didn’t answer Dr. Frommlecker, he stared at me until I began to cry. Then, embarrassed, he handed me a box of Kleenex and began to talk about himself.
He was a student of Freud, whose books lined his shelf. He’d written a book titled The Didactics of the Human Sexual Malady, which he informed me with a wave of his hand was waiting to be published. Here in Counterpoint, he practiced something called Reality Therapy.
My heart sank. Florida could have told him that Reality Therapy wouldn’t work on me. “You don’t live in reality,” she accused me several times a day. She was right; reality held no attraction for me. Except for the police blotter and the comics, newspapers bored me. I could care less what time of day it was. Facts were like brussels sprouts; I pushed them aside. I liked to think that I could live my way and let other people live their way, but realists wore the world as a tight garment, and like all evangelists, they weren’t happy until everyone else was as uncomfortable as they were. Now here I was, in Reality Therapy with Frommlecker.
While he talked, I lay on my back staring up at the orange ceiling, crying silently. The soft fur around my face smelled of Florida and made me think of “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”—hunching in my mother’s belly with my fur froze.
For months after Roderick died, I couldn’t stop laughing. At Bellamy Baptist, I snickered in the pew, and during a French class at Bridgewater, reciting with the class, “Où est Sylvie?” “Elle est au cinema,” I laughed so hard that I burst a blood vessel in my eye. In the funeral home, every time I glanced at the coffin—the puffs of pale blue satin, the prom-dress bows, and the glut of cut flowers, I had to press my fist into my mouth to suppress a howl. Lacy Dalton had helped Florida arrange Roderick’s trophies and ribbons around the coffin. He was captain of the Bridgewater Debate Team, Third Place Winner of the Bellamy Baptist Go-Cart Race, and two merit badges short of Eagle Scout. Now he was dead. For the occasion, he wore a real tie, not a clip-on.
I covered my snort with a cough, did it again, and then lost all control and let out a hoot. Henry led me out of the room. When hysterics had sucked the breath out of me, the funeral director put a paper bag over my head and made me count backward from ten. He was a dapper little man with a bald, egg-shaped head, wearing a permanent expression of compassion.
When school started, Mr. Rutherford read us “The Hanging” by George Orwell. In the essay, after the executioners hang a prisoner, they can’t stop laughing, so I knew he had selected it for me.
“Whatdya think, Rhoda?” he asked after everyone else had left the room.
Looking down at Mr. Rutherford’s shoes, I thought back to that day at Grandmother Deleuth’s farm in Red Cavern. Roderick sat in the swing in the yard, kicking the toe of his sneaker in the beaten dirt, waiting for Daddy-Go to come home from the hospital. He was too old, too old to play with me, older than Daddy-Go—pale and shimmering in the falling sun. I didn’t want to be at the farm where old people were dying; I wanted to be at Camp Berryhill with Drew St. John, and I was babbling to him about Berryhill’s Christmas-in-July.
“They get a real tree and decorate it. They give each other presents. They have stockings.”
“Huh,” said Roderick, unimpressed. “Drew’s over there this summer?”
“She goes every summer. It costs as much as a year of Bridgewater.”
“Well, I’ll say,” he said with a mocking curl of his lip. “Christmas in July.”
Then Daddy-Go was home in his bed, hollowed-out from his stroke, and Uncle Evange Lyle came to the house to preach to him. While he was playing his harmonica, singing,
There is a fountain filled with blood drawn from Immanuel’s veins;
And sinners plunged beneath that flood, Lose all their guilty stains:
Lose all their guilty stains. Lose all their guilty stains:
And sinners plunged beneath that flood, Lose all their guilty stains . . .
Roderick crept outside to cut me a Christmas tree the size of a lamp. He decorated it with the sleeping nasturtiums he’d cut from Grandmother’s flower beds. He put it on the screened-in porch where we slept.
“‘The Hanging’ was cool,” I said to Mr. Rutherford, looking down at my topsiders as my cheeks grew hot. They were brand new, but like the topsiders of every single other eighth grader at Bridgewater Middle School, they had been soaked in a hot salty bath and then wrapped with duct tape.
Mr. Rutherford put his arm around me. I felt his thick, warm hand square in the middle of my back, pressed against my bra strap. I smelled his lime aftershave. When I lifted my burning face, I saw his scar up close—a thick red welt that ran up his neck and to his ear. Some said he’d been in a knife fight over a lady he loved; others said he caught someone’s cleat during a football game. He looked sad; he always looked sad when he wasn’t joking.
“I’m very sorry about your brother,” he said.
“He had an asthma attack,” I said. “A Christmas tree killed him.” A giggle rose up in my throat, and I was about to say “and it wasn’t even Christmas yet,” but instead I pushed my face against Mr. Rutherford’s hard shoulder and began to cry. He kept his back straight, holding me firmly in his arms without pressing me against him, as if I were a tackle. “Hush,” he whispered hoarsely. “Hush, now.” After that, we avoided each other.
AT THE END of the hour with Dr. Frommlecker, the collar of my mouton was wet with tears, and I had said nothing. In the reception room, Ice Lady made an appointment for me to return at the same time next Thursday.
“Why are you wearing that hot old thing!” Florida cried as I climbed into the front seat of the Ford Country Squire station wagon. “It’s seventy degrees outside. I’m perspiring just looking at you. You think you can hide your body in these big clothes, but they make you look even bigger, call attention to your weight. Everyone can see you.”
“That’s not a very nice way to talk to a crazy person.”
“Shoot. You’re not crazy. You’re just—well, what did the doctor say?”
I mumbled something about reality.
“Honey if you don’t take that fur coat off, I’m going to suffocate. I’m sorry. It is just too hot to wear that thing. I hope he didn’t see you in it. What do you have on under there?” She turned the air conditioner on full blast and asked if Dr. Frommlecker had any suggestions about my weight.
“Shirley swears by grapefruit, brussels sprouts, and catfish— broiled, not fried. She lost twenty pounds in two weeks, and Lacy Dalton says she lost ten, but you can’t tell; she’s such a rolly-polly. You’ve got to stop that snacking at night. Sweets. This morning I pulled an empty package of Oreos out from under your bed. I wasn’t snooping; I had to vacuum in there. I’m going to quit buying them. You’ve been crying. What’s the matter? What did he say to you?”
“Nothing!” I shouted.
“What do you mean, nothing? Here you go, shutting me out. We can’t communicate.”
As we chugged up Mount Zion, I looked out the window, at the view. Beside the narrow gravel road, the earth had broken off and lay far below in
an ephemera of civilization: blue rivers curving like the lines of a Magic Marker drawn over green paper, penciled-in roads, and tiny lights flickering like fireflies in the dusk.
“I read somewhere that 2 percent of the corpses buried aren’t dead. Isn’t that amazing?”
“You’re making that up, and I don’t want to hear it.” “No, it’s true. They find the skeleton on its side, and that silky stuff lining the coffin is ripped—”
“That’s enough.”
“Ripped to shreds.”
“I said that’s enough. I’m trying to drive. You’re going to make me have a wreck.”
“You’re right. He’s rotted by now. First, his nose rotted off his face, leaving a black, stinking hole, and then his fingers . . .”
“Shut up!”
Heat rushed to my head as I screamed, “Dead! He’s dead! I killed him! I killed your son! That’s why you hate me!”
Turning a hairpin curve with one hand on the steering wheel, she reached over with her free hand and slapped me.
“Do that again and I’ll kill you,” I said. We were both crying. “I’ll kill myself and everyone else.”
“You need help,” she said. “You are crazy.”
I reached into the pocket of my coat, carefully removed a Virginia Slim Menthol, and without looking to check her expression, lit it.
EVERY THURSDAY I lay down on the couch, stared at the orange ceiling, and wept for an hour.
The ceiling was like a fire, sparkling in my tears, glinting off Leo’s round glasses. Behind the licking flames his eyes were flat and cold. One day he asked, “Why don’t you tell me what happened up there at your grandparents’ farm—Pennsylvania, was it?” He looked at his clipboard. “Kentucky, I mean.” He pushed the box of Kleenex toward me, looking embarrassed.
The rooster crowed. I waited, steeling myself, but when he crowed again, I wasn’t ready. I never was. It sounded like the end of the world—that’s how country people started their day. Grandmother was already up, shuffling across the kitchen linoleum with heavy sighs. Usually Roderick went with her to gather eggs, but he was asleep, so I went. She carried a pail of seed, and I trailed after her, shivering. My tennis shoes were wet with dew.
The School of Beauty and Charm Page 9
