Humiliation has its good side. Because of that incident, I swore I would make enough money to have a new bra to wear every day of the week. At the height of my so-called career, I had an entire closet of lingerie created by some of the most expensive designers in the world. I only wore safety pins for the small percentage of my clients who were partial to a little jab here and there.
That was not a fact I intended to share with my new neighbors in Mossy Creek. I believe when I sit down to write my memoirs—and I do intend to get around to putting them on paper—as soon as I lose interest in making new ones, that is—I believe I’ll begin with a few simple feminine truths: If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that you can start a car with a tube of lipstick.
Now, I’m sure most logical folk wouldn’t agree, and you might even think I’m a little cock-eyed to bring it up. But honey, a tube of lipstick in just the right shade and used in just the right manner will get men to start cars for you all day long. Yours, theirs, even ones people leave in those neat little parking spaces on the sides of the road. A tube of lipstick is a downright miracle, or a lifesaver if you’re in need of saving and such.
* * * *
“My daddy doesn’t like me wearin’ lipstick,” Linda Polk said, touching her lips with the blunt tips of her fingers.
We were sitting on my newly-painted porch stairs, watching the occasional car go by and chatting while we waited for her mother to pick her up. The teenager had walked the short distance from “downtown” Mossy Creek to bring me a package I’d accidentally left at her Aunt Effie’s fabric store on the square, where she worked after school.
“He says I was born plain, and there’s nothin’ I can do to change it,” Linda continued. “He says my only chance is to find a man with more heart than eyesight, to make up for my short comings.”
I knew I should stay out of it, being new to town, but men can be such asses sometimes, and I am living proof they can be taught lessons if the effort is worth it, or that they can be fooled over and over again if I’m too tired to teach. I had to turn a bit on the steps in order to trap Linda’s face between my hands.
“How old are you?”
“Fifteen-and-a-half.”
Her hair, limp, blondish, and straggling down to her shoulders looked clean at least, but no conditioner, no curl, nothing to help the view. Plain. I studied her dark blue eyes, almost too dark to see blue unless you searched for it, and she simply looked back. “Haven’t you ever had a boy tell you you’re pretty?”
She thought for a while as I pushed her hair back out of her face and anchored it behind her ears. “No. They’ve said some things to me, but not that.”
I could just bet what things they’d said. Things which could be classified under ‘juvenile ass’ in the file. But I wasn’t keepin’ score anymore. I’d given up the life of my former incarnation and set out on a new path in a new place. The greasy old police chief in New Orleans would probably say I was strikin’ out on the straight and narrow—“Hallelujah, chere!” Then as he always used to do, he’d punctuate his pronouncement by smacking me on the rump like I was his to handle, and cackle that wheeze his buddies called a laugh. I had to laugh with him then. It was good for business. But I don’t have to worry about what men think any more. Never again. I’ve reached the point where I’ve accumulated enough money and investments to start a new life, manless and proud of it. Retired at thirty, but then, I’d started young.
I released Linda’s face and smoothed my sundress over my knees before hooking my hands around them. She was like most other girls who lacked a pedigree, standing outside an imaginary circle of acceptance and approval, her wistful, everyday face pressed against the impenetrable glass barrier between the haves and have nots. I’d been there, done that.
“Have you ever heard the ancient—” I raised my eyebrows to illuminate the word so she, being a teenager, couldn’t lob it back at me like a hand grenade—“saying, Beauty is as Beauty does?”
“Huh?”
“I guess it’s older than I thought,” I mumbled and turned away. Why was I trying to explain anything to this girl? I barely knew her from my occasional visits to the fabric store. I certainly wouldn’t recommend the life I’d led to her, but then again, compared to being stuck under the thumb of a father who thought she was plain and. . .“What kind of grades do you make in school?”
“Mostly B’s.” She looked down at her tennis shoes and wiggled them nervously. “I made a C last semester, and Daddy said that he guessed B’s and one C was the best I could do—”
I raised a hand to stop her before she said the dreaded word ‘stupid’ which almost always came connected to ‘plain.’ “Are you stupid?”
“What?” She jumped like no one had ever asked her for an opinion before.
“I said, are you stupid?”
She thought for a minute, frowning, then looked me in the eye. “No. I don’t think I’m stupid.”
“Hallelujah, chère!” I tapped her knee in agreement. “That’s good, because you’re not. It’s a start.”
“Don’t you think I’m plain, Miss Jasmine? You’re so beautiful, you must know plain when you see it.”
So beautiful. I’d been called that, by rich men, by most men, and a few women as well. Most of the females had been my competition, so I always thought of their flattery as a sort of camouflage, like a Cobra mesmerizing you with his lyrical dance before spitting venom in your eye. The few women who were sincere were . . . not my type. And here I was in Mossy Creek, doing my best to be plain again, letting my hair get to know its natural color for the first time in years, wearing little makeup and going without shoes in the garden when I felt like it. After years of living as a ‘luminous’ creature of night habits and sleeping away most of the day, I’d been sunburned for the first time in my experience picking blueberries the summer past. A travesty. A Southern ‘girl’ must take care of her magnolia complexion, along with a list of other do’s and don’ts that I don’t care about anymore.
But this girl cared—would probably always care—unless someone like me showed her it was all a power game.
I pulled my gaze from a car passing on the tree lined street, in the town where I’d found what I hoped would be my final home and resting place, and looked at her. There she sat, an open book, giving compliments to me, another plain girl who’d grown into beauty only after winnowing out exactly what beauty really meant. “Thank you,” I said, “And no, you’re not plain. You act plain, that’s all.”
I was always one for telling the truth . . . except to my men. No use in telling them the truth; it only gave them too much to think about when I intended to do all the thinking for them, anyway.
“What do you mean, act?”
Beauty is as beauty does. “I mean, you can learn to be beautiful.”
She made a chuffing sound and looked away, her hopeful expression soured. I could almost hear her father’s voice in her head, echoing for all time. “Born plain . . . need to find a man to make up for shortcomings . . . stupid.”
“I’m not talking about turning into Britney Spears overnight. To become someone like that, you’d need to start when you’re about nine years old and work at it. You’d also need about five hundred thousand dollars or so, but you could do it.”
“Five hundred thousand—”
“For stylists, personal trainers, and the right clothes. I know.” I smiled to take some of the sting out of my words. “You’re poor too, right?”
Tears welled in her eyes, and I felt like the hard businesswoman I’d been. Why had I thought this girl needed to know the truth? The truth can set you free, but sometimes it hurt more than a nice, comfortable lie. I put a buddy-like arm around her shoulders and gave her a good pat. “You can learn to be as pretty as you want to be. All you have to do is want it and work at it.”
We heard a car. A woman pulled an old Buick into my driveway. “Linda?” she called out the open window.
“I’m comin’,” Linda answ
ered. “That’s my mom,” she said to me as she pushed to her feet.
“Thanks for delivering my thread and patterns.” I stood, casually patting the newel post of my very own, fully paid for, porch.
“You’re welcome.” She was halfway down the stairs when she stopped and turned. “Do you think you could teach me how to do it? Be pretty, that is? The big reunion’s coming up this fall, and there’ll be dances. . . ” Her voice trailed off. She looked embarrassed and bit her lip.
For longer than I wanted to admit, young girls had looked to me for advice or as the anecdote to their parents’ best expectations. And I’d usually helped—some a little, some a lot. My therapist explained about guilt, about my inability to save my own sister, but back then, I thought I had the world and everything in it, figured out. My resume would have read—‘Seen it all.’ By the time I learned the error of that assumption, it was too late to save anyone but myself.
I avoided answering Linda’s question and waved to her mother. “Hello, Mrs. Polk.”
She nodded and raised a hand, but didn’t answer. We were strangers, after all, and maybe some Creekites, as they called themselves, weren’t quite sure what to make of me. It dawned on me that taking on her timid daughter as a project could remedy the ‘stranger’ part of the equation. But there would still be the question of friend or foe.
I looked at Linda. “You talk to your mother and bring her here with you, next time. I’ll help if she doesn’t mind.”
She looked hopeful again, then wavered when her mom called her name a second time. Mrs. Polk seemed to be in a hurry.
“I’ll try,” Linda said and jogged to the car.
* * * *
That evening I walked to the end of the porch to watch the sun slip behind Mount Colchik, the looming, mother-of-all-mountains west of town. A silver mist hung in the summer air, blurring the edges of the trees and softening the weathered roofs of the houses in the sweetly aged neighborhood. Some of the homes had stood for seventy-five years; some had been built in a rush of prosperity after World War II. They weren’t anything like the statuesque variety of New Orleans mansions, but that was fine.
I’d found this place because of a man, of course. After accompanying a very rich, very demanding former client of mine to his mountaintop ‘getaway’ for a ‘business’ weekend, I’d headed back to Atlanta in my client’s limo. Road construction and a detour had stranded me and the limo driver, by chance, in Mossy Creek. Something about the place—sheltered by bluegreen mountains, surrounded by the creek like a friendly little moat, dotted with pleasant shops and pretty little neighborhoods and sprawling mountain farms—resembled home to me, the home I’d wished I had. The home I would have given Jade, my sister. So, when the charm and the advantages in New Orleans had lost their allure, I’d chased a dream back to Mossy Creek.
I slipped my arms around the porch post and watched Raleigh Yates, an old man who lived across the street, digging post holes along the front edge of his rose-hedged lawn. Raleigh was installing a pristine new picket fence in honor of the festivities around the high school reunion. All my neighbors were cleaning and fixing and painting, although the reunion was still several months away.
“Have to spruce up for the big event,” Raleigh explained. “We can’t have folks coming home to shabby memories. Why, folks would just feel lost if their old hometown didn’t look its best.”
Lost in Mossy Creek. Impossible. You couldn’t get lost in this town if they blindfolded you, spun you around three times, then gave you a shove. Sooner or later, you’d walk into a war monument, a shade tree big enough to live under, or the creek, itself. Mossy Creek’s official motto—painted on the Hamilton Farm grain silo beside the main drag into town—says “Ain’t goin’ no where and don’t want to.” It ought to add, “So when you’re here, you’ll always know where you are.”
Good. I hadn’t come to Mossy Creek to get lost. I’d come here to live in plain sight by the light of day. To garden, to shop, and to take walks, to mow my own lawn and to sweep my own steps, without anyone to please or entertain. To lose my past in my own future.
And to entertain myself. I’d always had that particular talent. Unfortunately, my talent to entertain others became so admired that after awhile, I forgot about myself. People were always comin’ to find me—mostly men—to ask, to want, to touch. I’d enjoyed it in the beginning, as we do with all new things. Then when I’d stopped having a good time, I’d turned it to my own advantage, my own enrichment, so to speak. I may not want to repeat a good many of the things I’ve done, but I don’t regret them—with the possible exception of failing Jade. They were choices among the choices each of us make.
Women know all about making hard choices. Men think they do, but they have too much time and usually too much money on their hands to actually have to make and live with one choice–good or bad. At least the men I’d entertained did. They were masters at variety, at doing what they pleased. Some were spoiled, rich, sons of fortune, each perfectly secure in his position in life and willing to convince anyone who’d listen of his own importance. Some were so effortlessly male and beautiful without having to work at it that women would line up and sell their souls to be touched by their elegant hands.
Those men, the ‘perfect’ ones, in turn usually wanted the women they couldn’t have: other men’s wives or independent contractors like myself. Now there’s a good example of a bad choice.
None of the above could afford or acquire my soul, and that’s why they’d flocked to my door. The mystery and image I’d perfected kept them coming back.
I’m not fool enough to think they loved me, but they wanted me and would sink to the level of my choice in most matters to have me, that much I knew. I wasn’t kidding about the tube of lipstick.
I laughed to myself as I released the post and turned for the front door. I wondered how these Creekites, these God-fearin’, small-town citizens, would react if they had a clue who’d moved into their town. A scarlet woman, the proverbial Jezebel, the woman their mothers warned about and the preachers condemned. Seeing me stepping out of a limo in the French Quarter, draped in a skin-clinging, silk dress which cost more than most of them made in a year, on the arm of a man who owned towns larger than any within a hundred miles of this place, might make them stand back in awe, like watching movie royalty. But seeing me entertain that man would convince them a legendary purveyor of original sin had come to life.
I was done with New Orleans, however, and determined to leave every vestige of the seductress I had created among the Vieux Carre and the tombs of voodoo queens. My siren song had ended.
I had come home to Mossy Creek—an-out-of-the-way, conservative, next-to-nowhere town in hope that it might help redeem my tarnished soul. Either that or burn me at the stake.
* * * *
It took the better part of two weeks before ‘plain’ Linda Polk visited me again. By that time, I had nearly forgotten our conversation about beauty, and I was deep into my own sprucing-up-for-the-reunion project of sewing curtains for my living room. I would have made Martha Stewart proud. Not all of my years had been spent in sin and wickedness. Sewing was a talent left over from my youth, when I couldn’t afford designer clothes or when I had the picture of a special dress in my mind that couldn’t be found in any store. It had been more years than I wanted to admit since I’d had the free time to sew for the pleasure of it. As I stepped over a tape measure, pin cushions and yards of material spread across my Oriental rug, Linda knocked on my door.
“Miss Jasmine?” She put a hand up to shade her eyes and looked through the screen. I’d propped the outer door open and turned on huge floor fan to draw the scent of summer through the house.
“Hey, Linda.”
“Hi, Miss Jasmine.” She sounded breathless and more than a little nervous. I’d never get over being called ‘Miss Jasmine,’ by a teenager or anyone else. Another quaint Mossy Creek custom. “Come on in,” I offered and held the door.
As she ste
pped inside, she saw the curtains in progress and made her way in their direction. “That’s the material you had Aunt Effie order from Atlanta, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is. What do you think?”
She gazed from the whimsical, pale-green brocade to the windows where it would be hung and smiled. “It’ll be perfect,” she said. She glanced around my living room and gasped. “Wow, a real leather couch. Don’t see too many of those around here. The mayor has one, I hear. This is so pretty.”
“You have good taste. That couch came from New York. It cost over eight thousand dollars.”
She clutched her heart and stared at the couch, speechless.
I patted her arm. “Would you like a soft drink or some tea?” I was trying to give her all the time she needed to get to the point of her visit.
“Sure.”
I started toward the hallway, and she followed tentatively, taking in her surroundings like an earthling who’s been invited on to an alien spaceship. “Is this you?” she asked as she stopped near an expensively framed photograph.
“Yes,” I answered, but didn’t offer an explanation. There had been few mementos of New Orleans I’d loved enough to keep. Most of them were in my bedroom, safely hidden from casual visitors, casual questions. The picture Linda asked about was one of myself with the only two people in the world I’d loved. I’m not sure why I’d hung it in the living room in a special space near the hallway’s arch, but I suspected it had to do with wanting to see it each time I moved from room to room. My old life haunting the new.
“Who’s that man? He looks like a movie star.”
“He’s a friend of mine.”
She looked at me closely. “A friend?”
“Yes.”
“What about the girl?”
“She’s my sister.” I feigned a shrug. “That picture might as well have been taken a hundred years ago. I hardly remember the details.” I’d said less than I could have and more than I should have. I’m not sure why. Perhaps that particular picture would be better off in another place. Before I found myself explaining to the U.P.S. man or the plumber how my frail, half-sister Jade had grown up into an exotic, breathtaking beauty and married the only man I’d ever made the mistake of falling in love with.
Reunion at Mossy Creek Page 14
