A Life of Bright Ideas (8 page)

“Freeda was a fairy godmother when it came to helping women gussie up and feel good about themselves, that’s for sure,” Aunt Verdella said.

“She’s always giving them tips on their hair, clothes,
makeup … filling them up on psychobabble bullshit.” Boohoo covered his mouth and giggled over Winnalee’s cussword. “She likes telling people who they should be.”

Aunt Verdella missed the sarcasm in Winnalee’s voice. “Oh, isn’t that wonderful!” she said. “Where’s her shop?”

“Northville. A little place outside of Detroit.”

“You always wanted to go to Detroit,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said, her elbow coming up to rest on the table, her hand curling against her cheek. “But then, I wanted a lot of things back then.”

Aunt Verdella gave a feeble smile. “At least you got to Detroit,” she said.

“Yeah, except that Freeda decided it was a dive once we got there, so we pulled out in less than a year.”

Winnalee’s face brightened. “Hey, right after we eat, let’s go to your place, Button. Your old place. So I can see Aunt Jewel and Uncle Reece.”

Everything stopped.

Time.

Forks.

Mouths.

Breath.

Everything.

Well, except for Boohoo, who was making bomb-dropping sounds and little screams as he dropped forkfuls of scrambled eggs over his bunny’s remains.

I set my fork down. I didn’t want to say what happened. I looked at Aunt Verdella for help, and she looked at Uncle Rudy. He grabbed a couple of strings of ham fat off his plate and got to his feet. “Hey, little buddy, what do you say you and me take Knucklehead out to do his duty?”

Boohoo leapt to his feet and snatched the flubber out of Uncle Rudy’s hand. “I wanna give it to him,” he said. He hurried over to Knucklehead’s mat. “You wanna go do your poopy
duty?” Knucklehead struggled to get to his feet. “Hoppy’s going out, too.” He tossed Knucklehead the ham, then ran to get his toad, who was now living in a secondhand aquarium Aunt Verdella bought last summer when she was going to set up a fish tank for Uncle Rudy, but never got around to it.

After they were gone, Aunt Verdella reached over the corner of the table with both arms, one hand coming down over Winnalee’s and the other gently touching her elbow. “Jewel isn’t with us anymore, honey,” she said, stroking Winnalee’s arm. “She was killed in a storm four years ago this August.”

“What?” Winnalee asked, in a small voice that made her sound as if she was nine again, and someone had just confirmed that fairies don’t exist.

“She’d gone down into the basement to level the clothes in her new washing machine because it was thumping, like they do when they get out of balance. She was standing in a couple inches of water, because the sump pump hadn’t tripped on, and lightning struck the house.” Aunt Verdella’s voice was shaking, and so were my insides. I knew why her eyes were closed, and she rubbed her temples. I’d overheard her tell Ada once that she couldn’t think of that day without remembering my frantic phone call (the one I didn’t remember), and the sight of me running down Peters Road toward her house, Boohoo in my arms, both of us soaking wet and sobbing.

“Oh God,” Winnalee said, shock pooling in her eyes. Then she turned to me, as if she needed confirmation that it was true.

Winnalee reached for me just as Aunt Verdella did, and the three of us held hands across the table like we were praying.

“Button’s daddy isn’t the same anymore. After Freeda helped Jewel feel better about herself, those two were happy for maybe the first time in their marriage. Oh sure, they bickered now and then about the money she spent, and the messes he left, but there was real tenderness between them, wasn’t
there, Button?” I nodded as I thought of how sometimes when Dad passed Ma in the kitchen, he’d lean over and whisper something in her ear, and she’d blush and slap his arm as she giggled, and, how sometimes when I got up at night to pee, Ma would be watching the Johnny Carson show, Dad stretched out on the couch, his head on her lap.

We were silent for a time, then Winnalee looked at me and asked, “Did you see her get struck?”

I didn’t know what to say, so I looked to Aunt Verdella again.

“She doesn’t remember anything about that day,” Aunt Verdella told her.

That wasn’t exactly true, though. I did remember some things: earsplitting lightning and thunder that rumbled the windows, and the whooshing of heavy rains. I remembered Ma, bent over Boohoo’s high chair wiping tomato sauce from his pudgy hands, then her straightening up and asking, “Is that wash machine thumping again?” I remembered her opening the basement door to listen, then sighing hard and talking to Dad as if he was home, saying, “Dang it, Reece. When are you going to level that washer?” Then, when she was partway down the stairs, adding, “About the same time you build a decent platform so the sump pump doesn’t keep tipping over, I suppose.” I was pulling Boohoo out of his high chair when she cried out, “Oh no! The floor’s soaked clear to the boxes of our winter things!”

That’s all I remembered. Well, except for one more thing I wished I could forget: that her death was Dad’s fault.

“Oh, Button,” Winnalee said, tears flowing now. She got up and came to me, leaning over my chair and putting her arms around my neck, her hair spilling down over me like a lemon-scented waterfall. And then she did something that would have dropped me to my knees, had I not already been sitting. She recited the last few lines of the poem—by Yeats, I
believe—that Aunt Verdella had recited to us right here in this room, when we were little:

I didn’t want our first night together to be sad, and luckily, it wasn’t.

We hugged Aunt Verdella and Uncle Rudy and Boohoo good night, then headed out the back door, laughing as we ran.

Winnalee moved her van into my driveway, then yanked open the double side doors. “Come on in,” she said, as she hoisted herself inside. “I had the seats ripped out back here to make more living space.”

There was a string of hippie beads hanging from a suspension rod behind the front seat, the strands pinned to the floor by two droopy potted plants. Winnalee kicked the thin mattress with tangled sheets against the wall, and shoved a Styrofoam cooler out of the way.

“It’s a mess, I know,” she said. And it was. Crumpled potato chip bags and candy wrappers sat in nests of wadded clothes that were everywhere but in the white laundry basket propped beside the plants. A cardboard box was buckled against the wall, a sketch pad curved to fit inside. Winnalee reached down to pick up a half-crushed blue pastel and tossed it in a box.

“Oh! Oh! I’ve got something to show you!” she said as she grabbed a fat duffel bag off the floor. She made like she was going to unzip it, then stopped. “I’ll wait until we’re inside.” She pulled a few record albums out of the collapsed stack and shoved them in my arms, then muttered, “shoes … shoes.” She found a pair of sandals with frayed straps under the rubble, then rescued a pair of flattened moccasins from under the mattress, holes in each sole the size of quarters.

I grabbed the laundry basket. “Here,” I said. “Let’s fill this with your dirty clothes and take them inside. We’ll wash them at Aunt Verdella’s in the morning. That’s where I do my laundry.”

“I don’t think all of them are dirty,” Winnalee said, as I scooped them off the sand-pocked floor. “I’ll come back for my plants.”

Loaded with her things, we headed to the house, the sunset spinning our hair to gold.

Winnalee spilled the contents of her duffel bag over my bed. Deodorant, a bar of soap, a bottle of Breck shampoo, a toothbrush, toothpaste, a fistful of hemp chokers and bracelets, a tangle of beaded earrings, and, a package of
Trojans
! I looked away.

Winnalee started shaking wrinkles out of her clothes, sniffing them when she wasn’t sure if they were clean or dirty: granny dresses in bold patterns, prairie dresses with tiered skirts in fairy-floating fabrics, a few mini-length dresses, empire-style, with big bell-shaped angel sleeves, or
elastic gathered-at-the-wrist cuffs. A couple of faded tie-dyed T-shirts, the necklines haphazardly expanded with scissors, a couple of pairs of denim cutoffs with frayed hems, and two pairs of blue jeans, the bottoms of the bells ragged and brown from walking on them, just like mine. She picked up a fringed leather jacket and tossed it aside. “Won’t need this until fall,” she said. She gathered a bunch of dirty underwear, rolled like socks, and tossed them on our heap for washing. I didn’t see any bras, but then I’d already guessed I wouldn’t.

Winnalee rummaged through the army bag that apparently served as her purse and grabbed a rubber band, slipping it onto her wrist, then continued to dig. “I must have left my brush somewhere,” she said. “Shit.”

I opened my drawer and took out the hairbrush Winnalee had left behind that magical summer. The one I once grabbed out of Penny’s hand and put back on my vanity, telling her it was not for using, but for remembering. “Do you recognize it?” I asked. “It was yours.”

“Oh. My. God! I can’t believe you kept this thing!” I glanced at the scuffed blue plastic cup on my nightstand, the cup Jesse drank from the first time he stopped at my house, and the gum wrapper chain, yards long, that was looped over the curtain rod above the window seat, and made from the silver foil wrappers of every piece of gum Jesse gave me, or chewed himself when I was around him in the last three years. “I keep everything the people I love leave behind,” I said. But that was only partially true. Ma’s things—every last thing she owned—was still in Dad’s house, untouched. Even her Kenmore sewing machine, though it was better than the old Singer Aunt Verdella picked up for me after the motor burned out in my first one. Aunt Verdella believed I should have all of Ma’s personal belongings, but I wasn’t sure Dad agreed, so I left them where they were.

Winnalee laughed as she unwound a tangle of blond hair
from the bristles. “Wow, this is nine-year-old hair.” She grinned, then stopped. “Okay, that’s kind of gross,” she said, flicking the snarl of hair into the air.

Winnalee brushed, then swirled her long loops over to one side and cinched them at the shoulder with the rubber band. “I like keepsakes, too. That’s what I want to show you.” She rooted around in her duffel bag until she found a sandwich bag. “Don’t look! Don’t look!” she said, turning her back to me.

She tossed the empty plastic bag on the bed and spun around, holding out what I thought was a movie ticket. “Ta-da—my prized possession!”

I stared down at the ticket in my hand. “A three-day pass to Woodstock? You were going to go to Woodstock?”

“I
did
go!”

“But this is your ticket.”

Winnalee’s eyes were close to bursting—as if she’d gone to the festival yesterday, rather than over nine months ago. “They weren’t taking tickets by the time I got there. The mob had flattened the fences, so I poured in with everybody else. I drove there myself, too. All the way from Northville, Michigan, to Bethel, New York, even if I’d just gotten my license the day before and couldn’t drive worth a shit. It wasn’t hard finding my way once I got to Route 71—you just followed the caravan. The traffic stalled miles from Yasgur’s farm, so I just left my van parked on the road like everybody else and walked. Blistered the hell out of my feet—I didn’t think to grab my sandals—because the pavement was hot as hell. But it was worth it!”

“Freeda let you go to a rock festival? And by yourself?” The minute the question was out, I realized how stupid it was. Freeda was every bit as loose with her parenting skills as she was with her body. I, on the other hand, didn’t even dare ask to go see the Woodstock movie with Penny, because Aunt
Verdella heard the movie had nudity and drugs in it, so she said I had to ask Dad. Which I didn’t. “You’re so lucky to have Freeda,” I said.

Winnalee rolled her eyes. “Yeah. Right. Freeda turned into a regular Carol Brady after we left here—all but for the cussing part. She got weird first. Staring off into space a lot, and crying without making a sound. Then I think she started seeing a shrink, because when school let out for summer vacation that year, she dragged me to this office once a week and left me in the waiting room for a good hour at a pop. Not that I minded. They had markers and big sheets of paper sitting on this kiddy table, and I’d make pictures for the lady at the desk until Freeda came out, wearing red eyes and this fake, ain’t-it-all-good smile.

“She turned into a real drag then. After I went to Woodstock, I came home one morning and found her digging through my room. I don’t know what she was looking for, but I went off on her. She was ready to go off on me, too, then stopped, claiming she had to pee. She told me to stay put. Like I didn’t know she’d gotten a library card and was into this let’s-read-how-to-be-the-perfect-parent-so-your-kid-forgives-you-for-leaving-her-and-lying-to-her kick! I’d seen that dorky
Between Parent & Teenager
book she had stuffed below the vanity when I was looking for ass-wipe. What a joke. She shut and locked the bathroom door—like
that
in itself wasn’t suspicious? Freeda would pee with the door open, even if the whole congregation of the First Baptist Church was sitting outside it.
That
didn’t change because she got her head shrunk.

“She came out and delivered her lines like some seventh grader in a bad school play, telling me how it wasn’t
me
, it was my
actions
that were bad. It was so stupid I couldn’t even take her seriously.” Winnalee rolled her eyes again, then busied herself putting her ticket carefully back in the plastic bag. I
didn’t say so, but I felt sad for Freeda, who obviously had realized that her parenting skills were lacking, and wanted to do better. I knew from handling Boohoo just how hard it was to raise a kid.