The Right Thing (2 page)

“I hate it. This one hangs on me like the curtains at Tara—if Scarlett had lived in some tacky subdivision—and shoulder pads only make the mess wider.” I point at the other dresses crammed on their silk hangers. “I hate all of it. I want something with . . . a little more under the hood. In black, maybe.”

“Oh, no. Honey, you can't.” Dolly disapproves, the authority of my mother's say-so backing her up. Black is for funerals. Period. On any other occasion, black makes women look hard, or fast, or something else We Don't Do. “Besides, you know black's not your color—it washes you right out,” she reminds me.

And the hell of it is, I know she's right. Since my first grays, I've bleached my previously blondish, shoulder-length hair to an unnatural shade of platinum and my once-apricot skin has faded to ivory. Catherine Deneuve was right: after a certain point in a woman's life, you have to choose between your face and your ass. I've chosen my ass, dieting myself into a size zero, keeping the status quo of five foot three and ninety-nine pounds of Annie by virtue of living on black coffee and Marlboro Lights. The hollows under my cheekbones will only look deeper, hovering above a black neckline. I'm about to give in like always, but suddenly I see myself in the mirror, slipcovered alive in this humongous swathe of fabric, and I just can't do it. After this morning, plus the trial of the partners' dinner tonight, I
need
a black dress.

“I'll wear lots of blush.” Let the partners' wives think what they want of Du's other half in black. If I'm not pregnant (
you'll never be pregnant
), I'm going for sophisticated and edgy, if Dolly will let me. “C'mon,” I wheedle. “At least let me try something on.”

“Oh, all right. We just got a Calvin Klein in.” Dolly's capitulation is grudging at best. “I'll go to the back and get it. You want me to have Ardelia bring you a robe to wear while you're waiting?” she asks.

“No,” I say. “I'll be fine. Please, just go get the dress.” She wheels out the rejects with a pained air, off to hunt down a size zero in black.
Ah, look at all the lonely people.
The Muzak sobs in saccharine counterpoint to my chronically deprived stomach's grumbling.

Dolly has left the door to the dressing room open a crack. Sitting in a discouraged heap on the divan, craving a cigarette, I succumb and am pouring myself a demitasse cup of coffee (no cream, no sugar) when I hear a raised voice out in the hallway.

“I said that account's been
closed,
ma'am.” The saleswoman's voice has an edge to it, like her back teeth are chewing on tinfoil.

“But it just can't be. I know the bill's been paid up, and I hardly never use the store charge anymore.” It's a sweet-pitched bell of a reply, although infected with the nasal twang of trailer park. I stifle a yawn, thinking, There they go again. The Maison-Dit sales staff is nothing if not ultrapicky about who they want traipsing around the store, and the little voice's accent, the grammar—or the lack of it—belongs precisely to the kind of person these dismissive women in last season's markdowns will want to send right out the door and back to shopping at JCPenney, where that person belongs.

“I'm sorry.” The saleswoman's tone is even snippier now.

“But what am I going to wear? I don't have nothing that fits, not anymore.” Trailer Park's voice is gravid with tears.

“Perhaps you should go elsewhere, like the outlet mall in Gulfport?”

“Gulfport?” Those nascent tears evaporate like an August shower on a blacktop road. In fact, Trailer Park's starting to sound mad. “Look, lady—I
walked
here from my house. They came and got the car yesterday.” Well, I'll be damned. Even after getting her car repoed, Trailer Park doesn't sound like she's going to lie down for the full Maison-Dit treatment, and that spirit makes me want to cheer her on, even though she's shopping in the wrong part of town.

“So unfortunate,” the saleswoman says, an audible sneer pasted across that word,
unfortunate
. “You'll just have to take everything off and leave it in the dressing room.”

“Well, I should of known better than to come in here,” Trailer Park grates, “even though you all couldn't have been no sweeter before, back when it suited you to take my money!”

She had money before? What's she talking about? I sneak the door open an inch or so wider. Her back to me, Trailer Park's really short, shorter than I am and that's saying something. With a furious toss of canary-diamond curls over those diminutive shoulders, she advances on the beefy saleswoman like she means to smack her silly.

“Ma'am, there's no need . . .” the saleswoman begins to say, backing down the length of the brightly lit hallway. It's Veronica. I've never liked Veronica. She sucks up to my mother.

“Oh, there most surely is a need! You got eyes, don't you, you big ol' heifer?”

“Heifer?”
Pale and perspiring with the messiness of it all, Veronica might as well be carved out of Crisco. A single, perfect bead of sweat tracks a rut through her foundation and her eyes bulge just like a spooked Holstein's—if a cow's eyes could be rimmed in bright blue shadow and thick mascara. I can't help but snicker, I'm so tickled at the nerve of this tiny woman.

This tiny pregnant woman. When she turns away from Veronica, the swell of her belly is unmistakable. Price tag dangling from one fluttering sleeve, Trailer Park turns and sweeps past my door on stockinged feet, the flame-red dress hanging almost to the carpet.

Then, without even glancing in my direction, she snaps, “And what the hell do
you
think you're looking at?”

What? I gasp in midgiggle. Trailer Park stops, fists planted on her scarlet hips. Through the crack in the door, she slaps me with this
look
. Her light-colored eyes are stony, her mouth as pink as a child's, but no child ever wore a smile like this one. Too white and even to be natural, Trailer Park's teeth are bared in a humorless grin when she says, “Go on. Tell all your tight-ass friends how you saw me here.” She enters the dressing room two doors down from mine like a queen going into exile, shutting the door behind her with a muted slam.

My jaw is hanging around somewhere near my collarbones. I'm flushed all over, despite being in only my underwear. Who the hell is this woman? Who the hell does she think she is? Unnerved, I get up to close the door and knock my knee against the rickety table. The coffee service slides to the floor in a slow-motion avalanche of dainty silver-plate, and suddenly there's coffee everywhere. I can only stare at the umber puddle seeping into the white carpet in a kind of fascinated shame, familiar to me but now somehow oddly connected to the pregnant woman. Troubled and confused, I look for something to clean up the mess, but there's nothing.

Dolly's found the black dress, though, slipping into the dressing room with it just as I'm retrieving the coffee pot.

“Leave that, Annie.” She pokes her head out into the hall. “Ardelia!” She hands me the black dress. “Did you hear all that?” Dolly loves a drama. “Lord, honey, I'm hoping we've seen the last of
her
.” I don't even have to ask what that scene in the hall was all about since Dolly fills me in while Ardelia is mopping the coffee up off the carpet with paper towels.

Dolly says, “She's the . . . well, I can't say a word like that to you, Annie, but she's the round-heels you-know-what who's been shacked up in the Burnside Tower with Bobby Shapley for the last six months, and honey, Julie Shapley was in here yesterday—looking like she's aged twenty years overnight, poor thing, and who can blame her, even though I always say you should always look your best no matter what, you never know who you'll run into—and she never said a thing about it, but of course everybody just knew that affair was going to burn itself out sooner or later, a tramp like that always thinking she's going to land a man in the bedroom, and
now
Miss No-Better-Than-a-Slut has gone and gotten herself in the family way, and when Bobby told her to get rid of it, that low creature said she'd die first, and oh, poor Julie!—I know it's already been H-E-double-L for her even before there was a baby involved, believe me, your husband being seen all over Jackson with that little home-wrecker—absolutely terrible, just a mess, and now an illegitimate
baby
on the way, for heaven's sake, and I was told Julie took to her bed when it got so bad her parents took the children and were going to commit her to St. Dominic's for observation, but now the word is Judge Shapley has stepped in and told Bobby to get home to his wife and family and to leave that little, that little . . .” Dolly runs out of both breath and euphemisms.

“But who is she?” Ever since this purported Jezebel shot me that look in the hall, I've felt as though I ought to know her. Something about her eyes, pale as blue ice, fierce as a feral cat facing down a pack of dogs. “Where did she come from?”

“Everyone says,” Dolly yaps, happy to be of service, “Bobby met her at a Bar convention in New Orleans, where she was dancing in some night club. Well, we all know what that really means.” She lowers her voice to a conspiratorial whisper, as if she doesn't want Ardelia, scrubbing away at the carpet on her hands and knees, to overhear. “She's no spring chicken, but she must have lit some kind of fire in Bobby Shapley's basement, if you know what I mean, since Julie Shapley is nobody you
ever
want to cross, honey, much less the Judge.”

“I've known Julie since before kindergarten,” I say, my tone carefully neutral. Julie Shapley has grown up to be the same kind of friend she was when she was still a Posey and I was still a Banks—the kind you never turn your back on because she might decide to stab you there. “So you're not telling me anything I don't already know.”

At this, Dolly pauses, purses her lips, and almost lets the subject drop, but provided with both an ear and a story, she can't stop herself. “Well, that little bleach-blond money-grubber used to come in here with Bobby, buying shoes and underwear and outfits and I don't know what all else, anything she wanted, all she had to do was point,” she says, hissing with indignation on Julie's behalf. “Bobby put her up in the penthouse over at the Burnside Tower, and when the board kicked up a fuss, it didn't do any good because you know how the Shapleys are when they're set on something and so he got his way. Anyhow, I don't care what wide spot in the road she came from—she's not from here.”

And that, as they say, is that. “Not from here” is a hanging offense, even without the wrecking-ball-to-the-family-home part.

Ardelia gets to her feet, a clutch of damp paper towels in her hand. “I got all I could, Miss Dolly,” she says. “We gone have to get the man in here with the Shop-Vac to get the rest of this up.”

I glance at the peach silk wall with its Rorschach splatter of coffee and realize it's most likely ruined. “I'm sorry,” I say. “I hope this comes out okay.”

 

Ten minutes later, I'm dressed, have signed the store charge, and am walking through the big front doors. Outside on the sidewalk, I pause before going to my car. The long plastic dress bag rattles in the wind that's tearing across the parking lot like a hungry dog. My new low-cut black silk faille cocktail dress doesn't seem as daring as I thought it would, but it sure beats the hell out of curtains and slipcovers. And then as I dig in my purse to find the keys to the BMW, I remember I'm fresh out of home pregnancy tests. Sometimes I go all the way out on Old Canton Road to the discount drug store to buy them since I won't run into anyone I know there, but thanks to the god-awful partners' dinner tonight, I don't have the time today. Before I belatedly remember that I'm not going to do this anymore—the trump of doom is going to sound before I'll need an EPT test ever again—I turn to go to the Walgreens, and she's there on the sidewalk, facing me.

Trailer Park. Her pale eyes meet mine, and the wind lifts that hair, the color of good champagne, in a foamy tangle. I know this woman. I'm sure of it even before she speaks my name.

“Annie Banks,” she says. She folds her arms above her belly. Even in my confusion, I notice her coat's grown too small, the buttons not able to meet. I'm speechless. Who the
hell
is she? I wonder.

“Yes,” I manage. She knows me? I used to be a Banks before I married Du and became a Sizemore. Without thinking, the rite pertaining to social awkwardnesses comes to my lips and I say, “Do I know you?” Immediately I realize I've said the wrong thing—even though under these circumstances, of course it's the right thing to say—because her face closes like a prayer book at the end of a funeral.

“I'm Starr Dukes,” she says. The look she gives me is as cold as the wind. “It's sure been a long time.”

The Jackson liturgy fails me. There's no rite conforming to this situation, no magic incantation at my disposal to turn this into a casual encounter. I'm stunned. Before I can stop myself, I reach out to take the freezing, ringless hand of my once-best friend.

“Oh, Starr,” I breathe.

It's been twenty-seven years.

I
met her in the summer of 1963.

“I hear he's a preacher,” my father said, looking worn out. The end of August had been a big week for his pediatric practice, what with immunizations, back-to-school physicals, screaming toddlers with ear infections, and the day wasn't even over yet. My parents still had a cocktail party to attend after we finished eating, but this was
news:
a family had moved into the rental on the back of the block, next door to the Allens' big white Victorian house over on Gray Street, and my mother and father were talking about this development over dinner.

“What kind?” my mother asked. Her green eyes were watchful. “What kind” was an important distinction because preachers weren't the same as pastors or priests or even reverends. Preachers' sermons were characterized by unseemly physical exertion, gross quantities of sweat, hollering in unknown tongues, falling out in the aisles, and occasional snakes, so “what kind” was a serious question.

“The wandering kind,” Daddy answered. “What's for dessert?”

I was seven years old and an only child, so to me, my parents, especially my mother, were still the most extraordinary people in the world. Sneaking worshipful glances at her during the course of the meal, I was almost unable to eat my chicken à la king on toast points, my throat was so backed up with inexpressible admiration. My mother, Colleen O'Shaunessy Banks, “Collie” to her friends, was never anything but enviably dressed, and that night she glowed in an emerald-green, off-the-shoulder sheath, gleaming pearls about her long neck. A real beauty, her skin had that classic Black Irish, pore-less luminosity, set off with hair as dark as crow feathers. Because her people had worked the Georgia linen mills, her past was a nightmare of hand-me-downs and cheap shoes, and so she spent a scandalous amount of money on her clothes at Maison-Dit, the most exclusive department store in Jackson. To me, my mother was always, always beautiful, and tonight she was heart-stopping.

“What are you staring at, Annie Banks?” my mother said irritably. “Eat your peas.”

I swallowed and asked, “Do you
have
to go out tonight?”

“Lord, we're only going down the block to Dottie Bledsoe's for cocktails. It's not the end of the world, Annie. Wade, could you hurry up? We're going to be late.”

And so, being under her thrall, I ate my peas instead of hiding them in my housecoat pocket when no one was looking like I usually did. After dessert, my parents slipped off into the warm August evening like released exotic birds, and our maid, Methyl Ivory, let me put off bedtime half an hour. I think she meant to make it up to me somehow—my mother's being out so much—but even I knew that her staying at home was a hopeless proposition since my mother would've cut her own leg off rather than miss an engagement. Her bridge club, cocktail soirees, costume parties, Ladies' League charity teas—it didn't matter. The newly prosperous, social-diamond life of a small-town doctor's wife was the manifestation of a dream that had sustained her for more years than I'd been alive.

The next afternoon, my mother was at yet another bridge party and I was in the backyard. It was the end of summer vacation, and the last scorching days of August were cooking down to Labor Day and the start of school. I was spending my life outside, for the most part, having caused a fair amount of trouble that summer. I was forbidden my preferred associates—Joel Donahoe, the boy from next door, and the rest of the Bad Kids on the block—and my mother had relegated my playdates to the company of well-behaved children like prissy Lisa Treeby, or Julie Posey, or even Laddie Buchanan, who still used floaties even though he was already eight and peed in the pool. In any case, Joel Donahoe was rumored to have been sent to a work farm for boys in Pelahatchie, and the Bad Kids had been down at the old garage by the railroad tracks on the other side of Fortification Street all that summer. So in lieu of better options, I kept to the yard, waiting for school to begin in two weeks, a high-water mark of how low my spirits had sunk.

That afternoon I was moping around the backyard, smacking the blowsy heads off the rosebushes with one of my daddy's golf clubs. Soon I would be reduced to playing with a bunch of sissies. I was in a bad way.

“Hidey!”

This shout came from the Allens' backyard, from a long ways past the boxwood maze, from the very edge of our lawn. Startled from a wistful reverie wherein my mother might come home today with a pony for me in the Buick's back seat, I turned to see who was calling. Behind the Paige wire fence waved what looked like a miniature mop draped in a slick pink shower curtain. The afternoon sun glittered on a sparkly something snagged in the mop's strings.

“Yoo-hoo.”

Company! I barreled past the boxwood maze down to the fence to see what was what. Close up, the mop turned into a girl about two inches shorter than I and therefore a midget, wearing a rhinestone crown and a long gown, the grass-stained hem a carnation-pink puddle around her dirty bare feet. This must be a kid from the rental house.

“Hey,” I said. “How old are you?”

“Seven.”

“Me too.” I curled my fingers in the fence's mesh and poked my nose into Mrs. Allen's backyard to get a good look at this new girl on the block. She was thin as a ligustrum switch, with white-lashed, watery-blue eyes that blinked a lot, as though it had been a long time since they'd seen daylight. Her mouth seemed awfully wide in that narrow freckled face, the kind of face my mother always attributed to poor nutrition and worse genetics. Her teeth were a tannish color.

I introduced myself. “I'm Annie Banks.”

“I'm Starr Dukes,” the new girl said. “I got two
r
's in my name.” She pointed at the tiara snagged in her limp yellow curls. “I'm Little Miss Princess Anne Look-Alike for 1963.”

“You are not.” I was instantly on fire with envy and certain it was a lie. The universal Fairmont Street dare phrase was ready on my tongue. “Prove it,” I added, folding my arms across my chest.

“I got a crown, don't I?”

I had to admit it was so.

“And can't you tell this is a pageant dress? I got lots of pageant dresses. The Princess Anne sash's back to the house,” Starr Dukes added. “My momma's making all my sashes what I won into a quilt. We're gonna stick it in my hope chest for when I meet Mr. Right.”

“Huh,” I managed, impressed in spite of myself. A princess with a hope chest! “Well,” I said, “that's nothing much. Last week I drove our car and ran it into the garage.”

“All by yourself?” Starr asked, eyes wide.

“Sure,” I said. “I stepped on the clutch instead of the brake. Mr. Tate had to fix up the front of the garage, and the car had to go to the shop.”

Starr looked awed, and I decided in that instant she was my kind of people. “Want to play?” I asked hopefully. “We've got air-conditioning.”

“My poppa says air-conditioning is the Devil's work. He says summer is God's fiery time to remind us of the flames in you-know-where. Jesus cries when somebody turns on the television, you know. Television's the Devil's work, too.” Starr scratched at a mosquito bite on her bone-thin upper arm. “We don't have a television set anymore. I surely miss it.” There were a lot of things missing at the Dukes house, Starr told me: lamps, the record player, a brand-new recliner, dishes, most of Starr's mother's clothes, and her sewing machine.

“We had to leave without our stuff 'cause it wouldn't all fit in the car.” It seemed the folks at the last outpost of Christianity in Dry Prong, Louisiana, hadn't truly appreciated the quality of Mr. Dukes's preaching, so the family had made a decision to relocate in the middle of the night. “They're all going straight to you-know-where,” Starr announced with conviction. “Momma brang my hope chest, though, and my pageant dresses.”

“You want some Kool-Aid?” I asked. It was getting on to the middle of the afternoon, and the sun was a steam iron on top of my head. Somehow we managed to get Starr over the fence in her pageant dress and trudged up the sloping lawn to the back door. The air in the glassed-in sunporch running across the back of the house—the conservatory, as my Grandmother Banks styled it—was almost as hot as the backyard. All the ferns and bromeliads slumped in a sullen bid for water and attention, the white wicker settees dusty from the summer's long disuse.

“Y'all got a mighty big house,” Starr said, looking around. “Where's the air-conditioning?”

“It gets cooler in the kitchen. Come on.”

Methyl Ivory was across the wide center hall in the living room, pretending to iron while she watched television. “Methyl Ivory, can we have some Kool-Aid?” I yelled, already getting the big frosted pitcher out of the refrigerator. Starr had wandered into the living room with her hands clasped behind her back, the long dress a crumpled tide in her wake.

“Don't you touch nothing,” Methyl Ivory said to my new friend. “You be careful with that Kool-Aid,” she called to me. I slopped violently purple liquid into two glasses and carried them into the living room. Methyl Ivory warned me with a look that said I'd better not spill any.

“Oh, my!” Starr squealed. Her fingers entwined under her chin in delight, she was so entranced with the program on the television. “It's
Queen for a Day
. That's my most favoritest show.” Without so much as a glance at Methyl Ivory, she folded up in wrinkles of dirty sateen onto the Oriental rug in front of the ironing board, taking the glass of grape Kool-Aid out of my hand without even looking.

“Mmm-mmm.” Methyl Ivory cursorily ran the iron over a sheet, her eyes likewise glued to the small black-and-white screen. “That po' woman.” I'd never seen the show, but with a shrug I sat down and watched, too.

It turned out that
Queen for a Day
was lots more interesting than Methyl Ivory's usual soap operas. Instead of people lounging around fireplaces talking about who loved who and who didn't, this show had some action. Three contestants, all depressed-looking, lumpy women in black dresses, sat behind boxes on a stage and told the sad stories of their lives, each woman's story more scarifying than the one before. Hospital bills, lost jobs, runaway children, disfigurements, dead husbands, unspeakable diseases, turned-off utilities, backbreaking labor at truck stops to make ends meet—these were only a few of the terrible things these women had to endure. Their tears overflowed like leaf-choked gutters. The last woman related her story about how the very evening her sick (“He got the lung-rot
bad
”) husband had lost his job, that same night the family dog had been run over in the street. Oh, we were transported with schadenfreude, a term I didn't know then but was thrilled to experience.

The announcer, an oily man in a double-breasted suit with slicked-back hair and eyeglasses, sniffed theatrically and dabbed at his eyes with an outsized handkerchief.

“Oh, Missus Swank, that was just about the saddest thing I ever did hear,” he said. “But it's good to know your children are healthy, even if the dog's not! Now it's time for our audience to vote on whose story pulls at our heartstrings the very most.” He looked straight into the camera. “Your applause will tell the world which of these little ladies here deserves to be Queen for a Day!” A glamorous woman with a towering beehive hairdo and a long, sequined gown tripped out on the stage behind the sniveling contestants and held up her arms under a big dial with an arrow pinned to it—the Applause-O-Meter.

“Contestant Number One, Missus Rita Mae MacRevus!” The audience clapped enthusiastically, and the arrow moved halfway up the dial. The camera moved on to the next woman, a doughy lady with a fascinating wen under her left eye. She put her head down on the box and sobbed her guts out. “Contestant Number Two, Missus Geraldine Pettit!” This time the applause was thunderous, and the arrow went past halfway, dipped, and then shot to the three-quarter mark. Contestant Number Three, Missus Pam Swank, didn't stand a chance, not even with the dead family dog story. Missus Pettit was Queen for a Day.

Immediately, both the other contestants were herded off the stage, still crying, while the glamorous lady draped a velvet cape with an ermine collar over Missus Pettit's big heaving shoulders. The announcer placed a crown on her wiry gray bun. The theme music rose to a crescendo. A bouquet of long-stemmed American Beauty roses ended up in Missus Pettit's arms, and the audience clapped like mad things.

The rest of the show boiled down to a bunch of relatively uninteresting prizes, like the washing machine the beehived lady rolled out from behind a curtain and the year's supply of Duz detergent Missus Pettit was going to receive since she had eight children and no way to get to the Laundromat. The show ended with a close-up of Missus Geraldine Pettit's face wearing a brave, gap-toothed smile, waving at her loyal supporters in the audience. “Queen for a Day!”

The list of sponsors scrolled across the screen. I announced, “That was
great
. I want to be Queen for a Day.”

“You can't,” Starr said practically. “You got to be married, with children. It says so, right on the entry form.”

“How come you know that?”

“You can get one off the back of any box of Duz detergent,” Starr said with authority. From the floor, she looked up over the ironing board, catching Methyl Ivory's eye. “Isn't that right? If you're married and got kids, you can be on the show?”

Methyl Ivory shook her head. “I never seen no colored folks on
Queen for a Day
.” She stretched the ironed white cotton between her strong arms, bringing them together with a disgusted sigh to put a crisp fold in the sheet. “I know I got a lot a ironing to do 'fore you momma get home, Annie Banks. Y'all git now. I got things to do.”