A Life of Bright Ideas (32 page)

Freeda peeked under the table. “Jesus,” she said. “What’s up with
that
?”

“She won’t show her legs,” Winnalee said. “She doesn’t even own a pair of shorts, or a skirt.”

That wasn’t exactly true. In a box shoved in a downstairs closet, I had a pair of short shorts, and the skirt I sewed and wore when Penny and I went parking with those older guys. I used to wear them around the house sometimes when Dad was working, and Boohoo was with Aunt Verdella. It was humiliating to even think about how I would put them on with a tight shirt and prance around the house while I was cleaning, pretending I was irresistibly sexy.

“No wonder that boy only stayed your
friend
through high school,” Freeda said.

“She hates her legs.” Winnalee tattled.

Aunt Verdella looked confused. “You hate your legs? Why? You’ve got cute legs, Button.”

Freeda got to her feet, and yanked me to mine. “Okay. Down with those jeans, kid.”

I laughed nervously, and Winnalee rolled her eyes. “Good luck with that one. She won’t get naked in front of anybody.”

“Well,
that’s
not necessarily a bad thing,” Freeda said, her eyes narrowing at Winnalee.

“I mean not in front of
anybody
. Not even me.”

Freeda stood up. “Okay, that’s it. Drop your drawers, missy. Let’s see what you got goin’ on there.” She reached for the snap on my jeans, and I wrapped my arms around my hips, covering the zipper and button as I held tight to Jesse’s letter. I was laughing, until I realized that she wasn’t kidding.

“What do I gotta do, sit on you, too?”

I glanced at the door, and Freeda reminded me that Uncle Rudy and Boohoo had left for town. She grappled to get at the button, backing me against the counter alongside Winnalee, who was fanning her hair again. “Oh, for crissakes,” Freeda said. “You’d think I was asking you to strip down to your birthday suit. You got panties on, don’t you?”

“Glad she didn’t ask
me
that,” Winnalee mumbled, and Freeda slapped her with a scowl.

Freeda started tickling me then, making me weak with laughter I didn’t feel. I dropped Jesse’s letter, and she dropped my jeans.

“Oh, for crying out loud,” Freeda said, her hands going to her hips.

“See what I mean?” Aunt Verdella said, all serious. “She’s got cute legs.”

“You do,” Freeda said. “Skinny and pale, but shapely. Damn cute.”

I felt near tears, standing there with my ugly, skinny, stilt-long legs showing, my white, bony knees clanking together like cue balls.

Freeda softened, “Honey …,” she said. “Are you gonna cry?
Why?
Look at me.”

“Oh Button …,” Aunt Verdella said, as though
she
might cry.

Freeda lifted my chin off my chest. “Are you
that
ashamed of your legs?”

“They’re ugly!” I said, my voice so forceful that I even startled myself.

Freeda shook her head at Aunt Verdella. “No mystery where she got
that
from?”

I nodded. “Yeah. Ma had skinny legs just like mine.”

“I didn’t mean where you got your
legs
from. I meant, where you got that crappy attitude about your body from.”

Freeda bent over so she could look into my face. “They’re not perfect, that’s true, but they’re not ugly, either. Far from it. You think I got perfect legs? Or Winnalee?
Anybody
, short of a
Playboy
model? Well if they got them at all—who knows, the way their legs are always tangled in bedsheets.”

Nobody was going to convince me I had good legs. At least somebody with fat legs could lose weight and exercise to get them normal, but there was nothing I could do about mine. Aunt Verdella had been stuffing me since I got my first tooth, but I swear, every ounce of food she fed me only stacked up on my boobs.

Freeda dropped her shorts to her bare feet and kicked them into the bathroom doorway. “Look at this,” she said, showing me the outside of her thigh, squeezing it so that the dimples puckered deeper. She let go and put her hands back on her hips again. “We all have things on our body we wish were better, Button. But that doesn’t mean we should hate them because they’re not perfect.”

“I used to have chubby thighs when I was young,” Aunt Verdella said. “Can you believe it? But they thinned down, and my middle plumped up. Maybe I whittled them down by all the walking I did over the years.” She ha-ha’d.

“Or maybe Rudy rubbed them away.” Freeda laughed, and Aunt Verdella blushed.

Winnalee dropped her cutoffs—no underwear, as usual. “Look at my legs, Button. They’re almost as short as Evalee’s!”

“They’re short because you’re short,” I told her.

“No. They don’t even fit with the rest of my body.” To
make her point, she whipped off her shirt; it stayed tangled in her hair. She wasn’t even embarrassed to be exposing her nipples, pale pink as Evalee’s cheeks, right in the kitchen. “Look how long I am here. That’s why when we sit side by side, Button, we look the same height. If somebody else hadn’t gotten my legs, I’d probably be five foot nine, too.

“And check this out. I look like I have a flat gut, right? Well, watch this.” She turned sideways. “This is my gut when I’m not holding it in.” Her tiny pouch puffed twice its size. “And look,” she said, pointing to the inside edge of her hip bones. “Stretch marks. They creep me out. They look like silver worms.”

“Hey, those are your mommy badges. You wear them proudly, little girl. I do mine.” Freeda tugged off her panties, and bent back to poke out her hips. “Look at these. I got way more than you. A row on each side, lined up like ribs. Between my boobs and my belly, I looked liked a watermelon patch when I was carrying you.” To prove her point, she ripped her short-sleeved white top over her head and snapped her bra off. Her shirt landed on the table over the leftover bunny pancakes, her bra on the floor, over her shorts.

“Wow, you’re saggy,” Winnalee said.

“Tell me about it. They say you should be able to slip a pencil under your boob and if it doesn’t fall out, you’re too saggy. Shit, I could stick a whole box of number twos under these girls and keep them there until next semester. I don’t know what in the hell happened.” Aunt Verdella giggled as Freeda nudged her left boob over and pointed to the stretch marks streaking its side. Then Freeda turned around and grabbed the swell of skin high on her hips. “And get a load of this mess.” She shook her hips and shouted, “But ooh-la-la, can these hips swing!”

I envied Freeda as she stood there—a little saggy, a little chubby, a little dimply—because I could tell,
really
tell, that
she wasn’t ashamed of her body at all. Not even of the patch of dark red hair between her legs, where Dewey had once left his grime.

Winnalee turned, exposing her bare backside. “I got a good ass, I think. Sorta makes up for my stubby legs.” Winnalee and Freeda shook their bare bottoms in unison, while me and Aunt Verdella laughed nervously at the absurdity of the four of us standing in the kitchen in broad daylight, three of us in various stages of dress.

Winnalee caught me off guard then, when she grabbed the hem of my shirt in back and yanked it up. “I bet Button’s boobs are her best part. Bet you any money.”

“What are you doing?” I yelled. I ducked—a bad move, because Winnalee yanked the shirt up over my head with one jerk. She gave my bra hooks a quick snap, then hustled in front of me and yanked it down my arms before I could stop her. “See? See? I knew it! Didn’t I tell ya? Ooooo, look at her nips, they’re cotton candy pink.”

“Nice boobs, kiddo,” Freeda hooted. She looked at Aunt Verdella. “Sort of like looking at the ghost of Christmas past, huh, Verdella?” Freeda tossed her head back and laughed.

Freeda blew bangs out of her face. “It’s hotter than Hades in here, and even hotter outside, but damn, if it ain’t a whole lot cooler when you’re naked! Verdella, shed those skins and cool yourself off before you have a heatstroke.”

Aunt Verdella brushed away the invitation with a freckled hand. “Oh, I’d scare these girls half to death, showing them this old wreck.”

Freeda put her hands on her hips. “Did it ever dawn on you, Verdella Peters, that maybe if girls saw bodies—big and small, old and young, fat and skinny, smooth and lumpy—they just might stop comparing themselves with the perfect bodies they see in magazines and on TV? Young women need to see what regular people look like.”

“Freeda’s right. I saw all kinds of naked, regular people at Woodstock, and let me clue you, most of them weren’t perfect. Not that anybody noticed.”

“Yeah, well, somebody noticed yours. Obviously,” Freeda said. She turned and nudged Aunt Verdella with her elbow. “Come on, Verdella. Cool off. Show us your wild side. I know it’s there!”

Giggles, the kind that fill your mouth when a fat man bends over and you can see the crack of his butt, swelled in my throat. I held my hand over my mouth to keep them in.

Winnalee started dancing like she was back in the cage at the Purple Haze, shouting at Aunt Verdella to take her clothes off. Laughter busted out of my mouth at the thought. I’d never seen Aunt Verdella in less than her big white bloomers and her pointy white bra.

“Damn, I wish it was raining,” Freeda said, giving a glance out the window.

Aunt Verdella’s face changed after Freeda said that. Maybe because she was remembering the time, long ago, when we—Ma included—danced naked in the rain with the Malones. She lifted her chin and pursed her smile, like she’d suddenly been handed a permission slip from Heaven. Then she peeled her stretchy shorts (and undies!) down, and kicked them behind her. Her legs were skinny for a fat lady, bubbled with veins, and the insides of her thighs looked like wrinkled pockets somebody just emptied.

Freeda started dancing then, dipping at the waist and shimmying, her boobs wagging, then bending backward and shaking with all she had. She circled the table and danced up to Aunt Verdella, who was ha-ha’ing so hard by now, that her whole body wobbled. “Come on, pretty mama. Let it
all
hang out!”

I busted into an outright roar when Aunt Verdella, caught up in the crazy moment, crisscrossed her arms and pulled her
white sleeveless shell over her head. And there she was, full-bellied as a just-fed baby, the skin where the waistband of her shorts had been puckered and red circling her middle like a striped hula hoop. Freeda twirled and continued her crazy dips and back bends.

Aunt Verdella broke out in a fresh batch of oh-what-the-hell ha-has and unhooked her big white bra. She tossed it over her head like a wedding bouquet, flipping it into the dining room. “I look like a pinup girl ripped out of the pages of
National Geographic
!” she said, as she looked down at the boobs that had instantly stretched out to recline against her belly. Freeda roared with laughter, then danced her dips and stretches around the table. “Now shake it pretty mama.” Aunt Verdella started mimicking Freeda’s dance moves.

Winnalee was laughing so hard she couldn’t stand up straight. She braced her hands on the table, then started thumping them, her head banging, the tangled shirt flying free from her hair.

I’m guessing that it was Winnalee’s rhythmic hand thumps that prompted Freeda to start singing out
da-da-das
in the tune of the guitar opening of Roy Orbison’s “Oh, Pretty Woman.” Freeda grabbed Evalee’s empty bottle from the table, holding it upside down and bringing it close to her mouth like a microphone. She jabbed her hip hard to the side as she pointed first at Aunt Verdella, then at me, while belting out, “I don’t believe you, you’re not the truth, no one could look as good as you. Mercy!”

Freeda handed the bottle-mic to Winnalee for the rest of the verse, then motioned for Aunt Verdella to take ahold of her hips. Freeda started the train, heading from the kitchen into the dining room, and Winnalee hurried to join them, the pseudo-mic under her chin as she belted out the next verse.

“Come on, Button!” Freeda bellered. “Wiggle what you got!”

I stood there giggling, my arms at my sides, skin touching skin, watching. Each of them was flawed, but none of them cared, as they did their jiggle-dance under the archway and sang off key.

I could see Ma dancing in the rain again. So clearly that it was as if she was in the room with us. Crazy or not, I took down my underpants and hurried to take Winnalee’s waist. She passed me the bottle-mic, and I sang as I mocked the crazy dance steps right along with them.

Freeda stopped at the box fan propped on the dining room table, and bent over to offer her shimmying boobs to the whomping air, her voice bouncing back to us as we started the first verse all over again. “Ha cha-cha!” she yelled as she did a spin to move her to the side, leaving Aunt Verdella standing in the rush of air. Aunt Verdella spread her arms and giggled, then turned and shimmied to air her backside. Together, we all shouted out,
“Mercy!”

We danced into the living room, where Evalee lay awake, blinking up at us. And then she laughed. Not just smiled—laughed!

“Oh my God, she’s laughing! Her first laugh!” Winnalee said.

Aunt Verdella was sputtering as she said, “She probably thinks we’ve all gone crazy.”

“No she doesn’t! She’s thinking about how
she
wants to do the naked lady dance with the big girls! Aren’t you, Cupcake?” Winnalee reached down and tore the tabs from Evalee’s diaper, then lifted her above her head and danced her to the engine position of our train.

We were laughing so hard by the time we got back into the dining room that we couldn’t sing
or
dance anymore—only stand and drape our arms over one another’s shoulders to keep ourselves standing as we hooted. “Oh, stop! Stop!” Aunt Verdella begged as she held her legs together so she wouldn’t pee.

I swear, my heart crawled right up into my ears, when I saw whose car was parking in the drive. There she was, Fanny Tilman, getting out of the car with a Ben Franklin bag clamped against her sweater.

I pointed, too horrified to speak. “Oh my Lord!” Aunt Verdella shrieked. She hopped in circles, like she didn’t know which way to run.

Freeda peeked through the lace curtain and started mimicking the jingle from
The Wizard of Oz
, the one that plays when Almira Gulch is riding her bike to nab Toto.