June (7 page)

June bowed her head in prayer. The dining room was a large, dark rectangle at the back corner of the house, designed, she sometimes thought, to make one feel as though one lived inside a jewelry box. The walls were brown tapestry, the mahogany table designed to seat twenty, the sideboard a floor-to-ceiling triumph of curved tiger maple and paneled glass. Under her mother’s watch, the thick chocolate curtains stayed closed against the daylight, so the chandelier burned above; the leaded-glass window which led out to the small back porch was the only indication that the sun had come out to greet the new month.

Every few minutes, Apatha would come through the pantry door bearing a pitcher of juice or a new dish of butter; it was all June could do not to get up to help the dear old woman. But not today; today she would obey. June could feel her mother’s eyes scrutinizing every square inch of her body: the open collar, the thin blue belt. She folded her hands in her lap, ready for the verdict. But, as the quiet moment neared its end, she smiled to herself. No tongue had been clucked her direction. She had done well.

“You must excuse us earlier than usual this morning, Uncle,” Cheryl Ann began, deciding that grace was finished. “It’s a special day for June. She’s engaged to one of the Danvers boys—you recall?—and today he returns from his travels.”

June was certain Lemon had no idea about, or interest in, her affairs, but, for her mother’s sake, she accepted a hearty spoonful of eggs and replied, “The nine o’clock bus, is it?” Uncle Lem gaped and sputtered, more than half of his eggs already on the bib Apatha had sewn from oilcloth. June wished she could feed him. But she wouldn’t try it, not today.

“The nine o’clock from Columbus,” Cheryl Ann repeated. This information had been relayed nearly a dozen times in the day before, a pleasing fact plucked from the simple, folded letter which now sat beside Cheryl Ann’s grapefruit spoon.

June could vaguely remember a time when Cheryl Ann had been beautiful; it might not have even been that long ago. But since Marvin’s death and the loss of everything she held dear, the woman’s lustrous hair had grown thin and her face had been swallowed by a conspiracy of chins. Her back hurt and she made sure June knew it. She often passed wind and rarely excused herself. June didn’t begrudge her mother the genuine heartache she’d endured, but it was the way Cheryl Ann kissed her disappointments full on the mouth that appalled June, though she’d never have admitted as much to even Lindie.

June watched her mother shove a sausage into her mouth while she prattled on about changing the floral arrangement in the front hall especially for Artie’s return. She asked, without really asking, what recipe June thought Apatha should use to make the roast on Sunday: “I’d prefer her to use Mother’s recipe, but not if she ruins it again. What gives her the idea she knows best?” June knew Apatha could hear through the pantry door. Cheryl Ann knocked on the mahogany tabletop, pleased with her intolerance. “She’d be sitting right beside me if she had her way.”

Most of Lemon’s eggs had made their way to the floor. But Cheryl Ann dished up another pile for him as though it hadn’t been torture to watch him wrestle with the last batch. “I’ll confirm the church with Reverend Crane, and ask Clyde again about the reception hall. We have plenty to do, now that we know the date is firm and the rooster has come home to roost—what do we have, thirty-some-odd days? Hmm? June? June! Stop mooning.”

“Yes, Mother, thirty-three days.” June watched her mother crest the next speculative wave, fluttering through seating charts and the menu and what flowers they might use and having June fitted again with Mrs. Jamison, because June had gotten nice and fat in her happy engagement, hadn’t she?

June pushed her eggs around her plate. The wedding, she reminded herself—the wedding would be wonderful. Artie’s big brother, Clyde, was paying, and he’d promised she could have any kind of cake she wanted. No expense spared! Clyde was a rich and handsome bachelor. June supposed he must feel protective of her and Cheryl Ann, must believe that marrying them into his own family would be a way to help out the family of his wayward war buddy, like saving the two women left on a sinking ship. Not to mention that Clyde obviously loved his younger brother, Artie, because why else would he be going to all this trouble? Clyde Danvers was the man who got things done; June supposed she liked the feeling of being a necessary aspect of one of those things. She hadn’t felt necessary in so long. And so what if the prospect of the wedding filled her with pleasure, and thinking of Artie himself made her feel, well, a hollow unknowingness? She believed that her simply taking the leap of faith that she could be a good wife to tall, quiet Artie Danvers might be enough to get them both through the first year or so, and by then she’d probably love him anyway, because that was how it worked.

The grandfather clock chimed the half hour. Cheryl Ann jumped, her hand fluttering over her heart. She frowned at June’s full plate and shook her head, wiping her mouth with the cloth napkin. “Time to go, time to go.”

“But the bus isn’t until nine,” June objected, then, wondering why on earth she was complaining about getting free of her mother early, stood. “No, you’re right, I should leave extra.”

June watched Cheryl Ann ring for Apatha, remembering what her father had told her before he’d redeployed, when she’d come in to his carpentry workshop and begged him not to leave, not again. “When something seems impossible, find a part deep down inside yourself that’s strong,” he’d said, wrapping his large hand around June’s, then tightening his grip. “Clench it, like a fist.” It had hurt, to feel him squeezing her fist so tightly inside his own. But she had understood.

The movie people were strangers, but Lindie didn’t need to know their names. They fit together like gears; it was plain to see that if any of the pieces of the mechanism malfunctioned, it could be replaced with a die-cut replica. The camera operator operated the camera, and the costume department sewed the ladies into their long, bustled dresses, and the cinematographer was the man with the small telescopey thing in front of his right eye. The studio had even brought along a fellow whose sole job was to wrangle the ogling crowd; most St. Judians between the ages of one and a hundred had come to watch the show. Lindie had never taken crowd control to be a skill until she watched this man handing out flyers that called for more extras in the days ahead; then, just as a wave of excited whispers threatened to crest over the relative quiet, he hushed the onlookers with one Svengali-like look, and she understood he was a master of his profession.

There were plenty of job-related nicknames—Scripty or the “script girl” was not a girl at all but a bookish-looking woman who noted every alteration to the script with the pencil that was otherwise tucked behind her petite ear, Crafty was where the crew got their meals, and P.A. stood for production assistant, which was a glorified name for the person who could, and would, be asked, at a moment’s notice, to count two thousand silk buttons out for a seamstress, or move ten crates of apples a half dozen times until the director and the production designer agreed on their placement in the background, or make sure the flowers for the leading lady’s dressing room were delivered at 10:00 a.m. on the dot. In short, a P.A.’s work was exhausting, thankless, and underpaid, and Lindie loved every second.

Casey was in charge of the P.A.’s. That first day there were four of them, and Lindie was the only child, only local, and only girl. She certainly hadn’t appreciated how influential that letter from Alan Shields had been; once she handed Mr. Shields’s letter over to Casey, he’d reluctantly told her to go tell the horse and wagon that it needed to move to the other side of the square in order to be in the shot. Casey was youngish—couldn’t have been but a few years beyond June—but just as mirthless. He wore brassy wire-rim glasses and a grave expression, and, if he didn’t see you running, he was glad to remind you how replaceable you were.

Lindie was happy to ask how high when Casey said jump. In her first hour on set, she ran two messages to the lighting crew, took a note from craft services up to Illy’s restaurant indicating they’d be in need of a case of Coca-Cola come noon, discovered she didn’t have authority to deliver that letter, went back to Illy’s to tell them to forget it, returned to set to discover that Crafty did, in fact, need a case of Coca-Cola after all, and could she also ask Illy’s for some 7UP, and went back to Illy’s to reconfirm that she’d be back at 11:30 to somehow shoulder two cases of glass-bottled soda back to set on her ninety-pound frame. Then she jogged down to the Memorial High gymnasium before anyone asked for Dr Pepper.

The vast room with the shiny wood floors was just as hot and loud as it was in the winter months, when it was jammed with the sweaty basketball team and the hollering cheerleaders. Dresses, shoes, racks of hats, and a dozen members of the costume department, pincushions tied to their wrists, filled the floor. Someone had dragged the lunch tables into the long space; on one, hundreds of men’s shirts waited to be ironed; on another, shawls were sorted by color. On the bleachers waited a thrilled scrum of St. Judians, eager to be transformed. Lindie ignored the jealous pit in her stomach when she saw that mean-hearted Darlene Kipp was one of the lucky ones.

Lindie presented herself at one of the lunch tables, where a man with a pin between his lips crouched at the feet of pretty, young Mrs. Sudman, already transformed into a vision of the last century in a cerulean gown. Without lifting an eye, the man, named Ricky, shoved a tomato pincushion at Lindie and told her to pin up the back of the wide dress. “If they’d sent us here a week ago instead of sitting us on our asses out on the lot,” he seethed, as though Lindie knew what he was talking about, “I’d have all these finished by now.” On the table above him, scores of taffeta skirts were draped, in deep shades of evergreen, eggplant, and plum. Lindie whispered that she didn’t know how to sew.

“I’m not asking you to sew,” he said, sounding more like a peeved friend than a punishing father, “I’m telling you to pin.”

So pin she did, and though Ricky fussed as he went over her uneven pinning with his needle, he didn’t fire her. He was a grown man but funny in the way even Lindie’s father wasn’t funny. He talked sometimes like women talked—“Oh, sweetheart,” and “Honey, if you ask me…”—but he was also firm in the way of men, especially when he called up the next girl for her fitting. Lindie stayed by his side as they hemmed four more dresses, and her skills improved.

When Lindie saw that the fifth girl up was Darlene Kipp, she almost announced she had somewhere to be, but Ricky would have balked, and he was the kind of person you wanted to have think the best of you. Darlene teetered up onto the little stool and smirked down. Her legs were swathed in midnight blue taffeta that scratched under Lindie’s fingers.

“Why don’t you sew this one?” Ricky suggested, handing Lindie a matching spool of thread and a long, sharp needle.

A lump formed in Lindie’s throat. “I told you I can’t,” she said fiercely. She knew she’d ruin the costume; Darlene’s costume, at that. She couldn’t invite any more abuse from the girl who’d thrown erasers at her head and locked her in the janitor’s closet and, worst of all, often called her “manchild.”

Darlene remarked loudly, “Yeah, just sew it, Linda Sue.”

Lindie felt her face grow scarlet. She told herself she didn’t care what horrible Darlene thought of her. And it didn’t make sense that she cared about Ricky; she’d only just met him. She mumbled that her father hadn’t cared to teach her the things that had brought about her mother’s moving out.

Darlene snickered above them. “Raised by a colored woman.” Her hand fluttered to her chest in mock concern. “Poor little boy.”

Without a second’s hesitation, Ricky took a pin from the corner of his mouth and jabbed it straight into Darlene’s juicy ankle. She howled in pain, grabbing at the site of the injury. Stumbling off the stool, she seethed like a bull, skirts rustling around her. Through gritted teeth, she told Ricky she’d have him fired. He calmly stuck the guilty pin back into his tomato and said, “Be my guest, honey. I’m sure my boss—who paid to fly me all the way from Los Angeles—will take your word over mine.” He batted his eyelashes, wrapped an arm around Lindie, and squeezed.

Tears cascaded down Darlene’s furious face as she stormed off. Victory soared through Lindie at the sight, and Ricky shook his head as he watched the girl go. Then he turned to Lindie and took her hands, dark eyes boring gravely into hers. “My darling little Dorothy Parker, if you want to get anywhere in this life, we must teach you how to sew.”

An hour into the day and Lindie was already in love with all of it. Her St. Judian existence, which had seemed perfectly enjoyable even the day before, suddenly revealed itself to be excruciatingly dull. She was a P.A. now. That was all that mattered. And it was why she didn’t consider the fact that, because of the movie, Artie’s 9:00 a.m. bus from Columbus, which June was on her way to meet, wouldn’t be stopping at the bus stop in Center Square. In fact, any thought of June or June’s concerns had flitted straight out of Lindie’s head—a first, to be sure, in years.