The Right Thing (3 page)

Well, air-conditioning might have been the work of the Devil, but Starr and I were willing to risk eternal damnation. We decided to go play upstairs instead of back outside in the stifling yard. In my bedroom, Starr surveyed my collection of toys and clothes. She touched everything, seeming to figure up how much each party dress, each deck of Old Maid cards, even the worn-out pair of Keds under the bed, had cost. I began to feel a little disgruntled at this silent appraisal. When were we going to get around to playing?

“Look!” My new friend pounced on a pile of dolls on the floor, holding up one of the tribe of Barbies I'd accumulated for birthday and Christmas presents over the last couple of years. “See what you've done to them!”

I looked away, feeling uncomfortable. It was true: my Barbies were in a deplorable state. They were all naked as only plastic dolls with breasts could be since I'd carelessly mislaid their clothes, and their Dynel ponytails and bouffant hairdos were in ruins of fused plastic strands. I'd attained a rudimentary understanding of chemistry when I'd taken them to the kitchen sink so they could get shampoos and sets. A vinegar rinse was what my mother used on her lovely dark hair to give it shine, but the ammonia treatment I'd improvised had turned the Barbies' hair into frizzy, globular masses that no amount of combing would restore.

“It's just terrible, what you done to their hair.” Starr was aghast, picking up each one of my naked dolls tenderly and stroking its plastic mat. “Poor things,” she said. “We oughta do something nice for them.”

I had an idea. “What if we made them Queen for a Day?”

“You mean, like on the TV?” Starr seemed to think it over. “We got to make them some clothes first. You can't be on TV
nekkid
.”

With that, we got busy. It seemed Starr had a genius for making clothes for Barbies. We tiptoed across the hall into my parents' huge bedroom and raided my daddy's drawers for the long black silk socks he wore with his good shoes. Then, we cut off the foot ends with my mother's scissors (she'd forgotten a previous incident involving the living room curtains and returned them to her sewing basket) and poked weeny little holes in the long black tubes for the dolls' arms. When the Barbies were slid into their new dresses, we folded down the excess material at the top and ta-da! Sheath dresses, like the sophisticated, cocktail-sipping ladies wore on
As the World Turns
. Next, Starr insisted they needed underpants, so we made black panties with the socks' leftover toes and used rubber bands to hold them up.

“They need hats, too,” she said. “Their hair is a dis-grace, I mean to tell you.” It was 1963, and everyone was wearing the pillbox hat that Mrs. John Kennedy, the president's wife, had made popular, so we foraged in my parents' bathroom cabinet until we found enough pill bottle tops. There were a lot of pill bottles in the old-fashioned cabinet: my daddy was always bringing home samples from the pharmaceutical reps for my mother that promised to combat weight gain and insomnia and to give her some pep. The round tops to the bottles kept falling off the Barbies' misshapen heads, so we glued them on. Finally, our attention was drawn to the dolls' feet. “They can't be on TV barefooted.” I was completely stumped, but not Starr. While I distracted Methyl Ivory down in the living room, she ransacked the kitchen for the roll of tin foil. Back upstairs, Starr molded sheets of it into cunning little high-heeled shoes for the Barbies.

“Now,” she said. “Now, they can be on the TV.” The Barbies looked like some weird religious sect—long black dresses, white plastic hats, and silver shoes—but at least their blue-lidded eyes no longer seemed to accuse me of doll atrocities.

But now it was time for Starr to go home. “My poppa wants his dinner on the table at five pee-em every day. If I'm late, he gives me a whuppin',” she told me. I realized that while I was pretty sure I wouldn't be whupped, my mother would be home soon and I had better return to the backyard since I hadn't been explicitly told I could come inside to play, much less have a friend over.

At the fence, I helped boost Starr over the wire. Landing with a kitten bounce in the grass on the other side of the fence, she hiked up the hem of her dress in both hands, scampering across the Allens' manicured St. Augustine lawn for the next yard over, where the grass was high and weedy behind the rental house.

“See you tomorrow,” she called over her shoulder.

 

Starr was back at the fence the next morning and every morning after that for the rest of the week. She wore a different pageant dress each time, but after the first day she left the crown at home. “Don't want to lose it.” We never went to her house to play, but that didn't seem odd to me. The rental house had a forbidding look—the sheet-covered windows shrouded a blank white, the eaves rotting, and the grass grown as high as your waist. My daddy called it an eyesore, but I didn't know or care what that meant. It was where my new best friend lived.

And after that first afternoon together, that's what we were. Best friends. I don't know why I didn't tell my parents about Starr, except that I had a dim but strong suspicion that my mother wouldn't approve (that wandering-preacher thing again) and I didn't want to run even a smidgen of a risk that she'd forbid me my new best friend, too. Besides, my mother was never home, and Methyl Ivory didn't seem to mind. The only time she had us underfoot was when we were literally in front of her big white nurse's shoes, clutching ourselves in high anticipation of the
Queen for a Day
Wurlitzer's theme music.

Once the camera closed on the winner's rictus of haggard ecstasy, we'd take off. The Barbies were a de facto pool of contestants clutched under our arms as we flung ourselves out the screen door to the backyard. We couldn't get enough of playing Queen for a Day, especially after we scrambled up our reenactments with tips Starr had accumulated over the course of her pageant career.

“Before they tell their stories, they got to walk down the runway and smile big at everybody.” Starr daubed the dolls' permanently lipsticked mouths with Vaseline purloined from my parents' bathroom cabinet to give them some sex appeal.

“But that's not the way they do it on the show,” I objected. I wasn't sure about the way the Barbies' severe black dresses had begun to show so much leg and cleavage either: they looked a lot less like Mennonites and more like showgirls, but Starr had control of the scissors and was the final arbiter of taste.

“That's 'cause on the show they haven't thought on any of this yet,” she told me. “Don't these gals deserve to look pretty? My momma says she used to look pretty and now she can't hardly stand to look at herself in the mirror anymore.” Put that way, I was on board with the beautification and strutting, for after all, I'd been the one who'd tied them to the oak tree like Druid sacrifices when playing kidnappers with Joel Donahoe. I'd sent them boating, naked, down the drainage ditch on a collapsing shoe-box raft when they were
Titanic
passengers, and scotch-taped them to roller skates so they could die in fiery car crashes. Sure, I agreed: let the Barbies live a little.

We got better at the stories, too. I admit, my first attempts at manufactured pitiful were feeble. Mostly I mimicked what we watched on the television every afternoon, the usual miserable litany of poverty and plain bad luck that afflicted the po', po' women on
Queen for a Day
. Starr juiced these stories up a lot, and soon I just let her be in charge. She must have heard plenty of harrowing tales firsthand, being the only child of the wandering kind of preacher.

“And then I come home from working in the laundry-mat, folding other people's clothes and whatnot, until I look like a wrinkled pillowcase myself, and caught him in the bed with that Vonda from the Tote-Sum!”

“What happened next, Missus Bledsoe?” In my role as announcer, I'd taken to calling the Barbies by the names of my mother's friends from around the neighborhood. It was easier than coming up with new names every day.

“Why, then I picked up a grease gun and passed it across his lying mouth—he barefaced lied to me, right there with that hoor beside him in our Broyhill bed what's not been paid for yet—and now my Cubert's in the hospital needing twenty-five stitches and I don't know where the money's coming from anymore. I'm so tore up I can't go back to the laundry-mat,” Starr wailed. We clapped until our palms were burning for that one.

Sometimes, as the announcer, I would've been hard put to decide which one of the silent dolls propped up under the sunporch windows was going to win the crown made of my mother's borrowed topaz cocktail ring. All the stories were enthralling in their utter dreadfulness, and besides, it wasn't up to me anyway. Since Starr wore the pageant dresses, she got to be the lady with the beehive hairdo and the Applause-O-Meter. She usually decided who was going to get a vacation in Hawaii—no washing machines for
this
Queen for a Day.

And so we passed that week's afternoons until the sun fell below the tall top of the live oak tree in the backyard, until the cicadas shrilled dry vespers to day's end, until Starr would go home so her poppa could have his dinner on the table at five pee-em.

Until the day of my mother's bridge club party.

 

I should have known something was up because Methyl Ivory had been making party food for what seemed like forever: flaky puff-pastry shells filled with canned smoked oysters in cream sauce, molded tomato aspic with olives, and her special tiny mint-fondant calla lilies to go with the demitasse cups of strong coffee my mother would be serving after dessert. The sunporch had been relentlessly cleaned, the tablecloths and embroidered napkins starched and ironed. Still, I didn't figure it out until I saw the folding chairs come up from the basement that morning. My mother was at the florist's, picking up the flower arrangements for the card tables.

“You got to stay outside,” Methyl Ivory said with a grunt. She wiped her face with the sleeve of her white maid's uniform and unfolded a chair. “Can't even go to your grammaw's house. Ol' Miz Banks say you cut up too much without you parents bein' there for keepin' an eye out, and I got to serve the white ladies they luncheon.” She adjusted the placement of the tablecloth and frowned at me. “Listen here, Annie Banks, you play nice in the backyard. I'll save you a few of them lily candies. Y'all can have a lil party out there.”

I didn't care at all about missing an afternoon at my grandmother's house. Though it was even bigger than ours, the rooms there were dark, full of breakable knickknacks, smelling of floor heaters and paste wax. There wasn't a thing to do at my grandmother's except to ferry her obese dachshund, Pumpernickel, up- and downstairs in the elevator until my grandmother's maid, Easter Mae, made me stop. Besides, the heat had abated in the last few days as it used to do in Mississippi toward the end of August. My father had cut off the air-conditioning units to save money, and all the windows were open again to let the cool breezes inside the house, so not minding banishment, I banged through the screen door to meet Starr down by the fence. Today she was wearing fringed gauntlets and a knee-length dress liberally decorated in red, white, and blue sequins.

“Help me get up over this here fence,” she said. “I don't want to poke a hole in my tap outfit.”

While we were setting up, my mother's bridge club began arriving. I stood on my tiptoes and peeked inside the open sunporch windows. Eight ladies in hats were taking off their gloves and putting down their pocketbooks. Their perfume, a light and powdery-floral mix of Chanel No. 5, Shalimar, and Joy, floated through the window outside into the yard. My mother had returned from the florist's in the nick of time, and the card tables were elegant with their low bouquets of daisies and sweetheart roses, the decks of cards and bridge tallies, the company ashtrays.

“How nice everything looks!” said one of the ladies, a stout woman in a big hat stuffed with yellow tulips around the brim. That was Mrs. Bledsoe, from around the block. Methyl Ivory was making her way around the sunporch like a barge in a white uniform, carrying a silver tray full of glasses of sherry.

“Oooh,” shrilled Squeaky Posey, one of the Ladies' League's more prominent members and prissy Julie's mother. Her bright pink face beamed from under a red straw hat crowned with a cockade of rooster feathers. “I'd love one of those.”

“Me too,” another lady cried. It seemed my mother's bridge party was off to a good start. Soon the sounds of their bidding (“One, no trump,” “Three spades,” “To you, Dottie”) murmured overhead. Cigarette smoke filtered outside through the screens. Bored with spying on the bridge party by now, I sat down in the grass under the windows, ready to begin my role as announcer.

The Barbies were in fine fashion today, too. Starr had made the dolls big sashes from my hair ribbons with their names printed on them in straggling black Magic Marker. By the time the Barbies had finished their parade down the runway, inside the house Methyl Ivory had already been through the sunporch with the sherry tray twice. The bidding got louder, so we had to speak up when it came time for the stories.

“Tell me, Missus Dottie Bledsoe, why are you here today?” I boomed, holding the golf club to my mouth like a real microphone.

Starr cleared her throat importantly. “Well. I'm a-hopin' you folks can help me out with my fuh-ham-i-ly.” She sounded a lot like Mrs. Bledsoe, a loud lady with a Jackson accent thick as roofing tar. “My husband's run off with his seck-ertary, but before he left, he gave me a disease what I can't tell you about on the television, 'cept it's give me the dry itch so bad it keeps me up at night scratchin' like a dog with fleas in my lady parts. Got to where I can't even leave the house, I itch so bad. Don't know how I made it here today, God's my witness.”