The Right Thing (4 page)

“We're so sorry to hear about your trouble, Missus Bledsoe.” I held the golf club microphone closer to the Missus Bledsoe doll.

“I can't hardly keep the lights on anymore, so I borrowed some money from the church plate, only the pastor don't see it that way and now he says if I don't put out he's calling the police to put me in jail. Now who's going to feed my children if I'm locked up in the pokey?” Starr shouted, swinging Missus Bledsoe's rigid plastic arms over her head in complete mystification as to what to do next.

For some time I hadn't paid attention to the bridge party going on behind the open windows overhead, which is why I didn't notice how deathly silent the sunporch had become.

“And how can we help you, Missus Squeaky Posey?”

“I mean to tell you, I got to get me some relief from the drink!” The Missus Posey Barbie hopped across the grass to the microphone. “Lord Jesus,” Starr hollered. “If it weren't for the drink, I wouldn't beat my children with their daddy's belt. He's been laid up for years with a broke back from falling off a ladder. Sometimes Heber yells for the bottle, but I can't bring myself to give it to him because being a drunk is one thing—at least I can get to work at the nursing home when I got to—but being a bedridden drunk is just a waste of good booze.”

“You po', po' woman,” I said with a gusty sigh.

At that moment the screen door crashed open with the screech of rusted springs, and there on the top of the wide cement steps were my mother and Mrs. Bledsoe herself.

“I'm telling you I heard what I heard, Collie Banks,” Mrs. Bledsoe said, her voice frosty as an engine block in January. “My Duh-honald wouldn't duh-ream of leaving me for his secretary, and the very i-yuh-dee-a of me stealing from the church!” The tulips on her hat were shaking with scarcely contained rage. She pointed a fat finger at the Barbies. “Look! There's my name on that, that . . . doll dressed like a stuh-reetwalker! I simply can't stay another minute.” She turned her back with a loud sniff and stomped inside the house.

“I'll deal with you later, Mercy Anne Banks,” my mother hissed, and her face was as wrathful and dire as God's. In a whirl of rose-colored polished cotton skirts, she was gone. “Wait, Dottie—this is all a terrible misunderstanding!” Starr and I looked at each other, round-eyed. I realized I didn't have time to cry: the scene was just littered with incriminating evidence.

“Run, Starr!” I whispered urgently. “Go home! My mother's using my whole name!” Beginning with the scissors, I scooped up all our props. Starr ran for the fence. I heaved everything under the ligustrum hedge by the armful, hoping without much hope that my mother wouldn't remember what the Barbies had been wearing. It hadn't occurred to me that stolen socks and pill bottle tops were going to be the least of my troubles, not yet.

That was the prelude to the End of the World, or at least the end of Queen for a Day. It was a measure of the social disaster Starr and I had wreaked that a whole foursome departed our house that very afternoon and subsequently formed their own bridge club. My mother took to her bed for half a week. Once she finally ventured out, she was snubbed at the Jitney Jungle in the frozen food aisle by women who hadn't even been invited to join the bridge club. Worse, when her friends from the Ladies' League tried to ease her way back into polite company, speaking to Dottie Bledsoe and Squeaky Posey on her behalf, they were met with that impenetrable, blank mask of social punctilio. My mother was almost ruined. If it hadn't been for the president's assassination giving breath to a fresh topic of conversation in Jackson, Mississippi, it's possible her excommunication would've lasted for years.

But for me, it meant Starr Dukes was forbidden. School started and even though our desks were just a few feet apart, even though we were best friends, Starr and I were Not Allowed.

“I
flat do not
believe
that you didn't know who the hell I was.” It's the first thing Starr's said since we got in my car ten minutes ago. In fact, it's the first thing either of us has said, but then she was always braver than I am.

The Burnside Tower is just a jumped-up high-rise apartment building, in my opinion, but that's where we're headed. My brain scurrying like a hamster in a hailstorm, I cannot think where else we can go. Coffee? Someone would be bound to see us together, and that would be purely nuclear in this town. And not to my house, God forbid: Du would find out. I swerve left against oncoming traffic, just missing the massive brick pillars of the Burnside's entrance, and drive through the tall iron gates onto the long, curving drive lined with severely trimmed boxwoods and bare-branched redbud trees.

I pull into the big, dark garage before I say anything. Parking in a deserted corner, I leave the Beemer running so we can stay warm. Only then do I unsnap my seat belt and turn to her across the caramel-leather-covered console. Starr's staring out the window at the cinder block wall of the garage, her face turned away from me.

“I'm sorry,” I say humbly. She doesn't answer. “At first I thought you were familiar, but—”

Starr interrupts. “No, I meant just what I said. You were going to pretend you didn't know who I was.” She turns to look at me then. It's plain the recent past hasn't been good to her by the lavender shadows under her eyes, the weary set of her mouth, and yet now that I really look, I can't imagine why I didn't know her the moment she turned around in the hallway at Maison-Dit. It's really her.

“No, Starr,” I plead. Staring at my reflection in the side mirror because I can't face that accusing gaze, I say, “No, please believe me—I honestly didn't recognize you. It's been such a long time!” I swipe at my eyes since I'm beginning to cry now. “Why didn't you ever write me? Why didn't you call me as soon as you got to town?”

Starr reaches into her coat pocket and silently hands me a tissue. “You always did tear up easy,” she mutters moodily. She turns away from me again and blows on the passenger window, making a small frosted patch of condensed breath on the glass. With the tip of her finger, she draws a pair of stick figures in the mist: two little girls.

“Why do you think I didn't call?” Starr asks at last. Her voice is tired-sounding. She rubs out the stick figures. “I mean, look where we are—parked in the back of the damned garage! You don't even want to be seen with me in public, do you.” It's not a question.

A silence falls in the car, broken by the faint squeal of someone's car tires making the turn into the garage on the other end of the building. How do I answer her? If Dolly hadn't told me the juicy story of Starr and Bobby Shapley, I'm sure someone else would have eventually. Jackson is social flypaper, all those little scandal corpses stuck fast to a much-handed-around broadsheet. What's happened to her is so incredibly messy, I'm amazed that I'm only just hearing about it, even though I'm usually out of the fresh-gossip loop. Like I said, I have my own issues. I don't hang around much with people who know these things, and when I do, we don't spend a lot of time chatting about the latest whispered news around town.

But I realize that Starr's hand is on the door. She pushes it open, and the November wind whips around the corner, bullying its way inside the car in a freezing gust. “You know,” she says, sounding wistful, “I had an Audi, before.” Her bee-stung lip curls. “Listen to me, talking about
before
. Before was a lie.” She starts to get out. “Bye, Annie Banks. Thanks for the ride.”

“Starr, wait. Don't go,” I say, putting my hand on her sleeve. “That last day I saw you back in second grade, you never said a word about leaving. On Saturday you were there, Monday you weren't. It tore me up. Whatever happened to you?”

Starr laughs shortly. “That's a whole 'nother story, honey. A long one.”

“Look,” I say, frantic because she's leaving and I don't know how to fix this. “Let's go upstairs and have a cup of coffee.” For emphasis, I turn off the engine and pull the keys out of the ignition. I dab at my eyes one last time. “Come on, please? I've never been in the Tower penthouse before. You can show me the view.”

Starr shrugs, as if it doesn't matter to her at all.

Luckily, we don't run into a soul in the elevator that smells so powerfully of floral aerosol that when the door opens on the penthouse floor, I trade the reek of English lavender for a deep, grateful breath of unfreshened air. Up here the spacious foyer area is furnished with a demilune table and a gilt mirror, flanked with two oversized doors. Starr unlocks the door to the right-hand condo, and we walk inside.

Up here on the ninth floor, the view is a vista of roofing shingles, exhaust vents, and oak treetops bisected by eight lanes of traffic howling along on the I-55 below. I turn from the plateglass windows and sit on one of the matching white leather sofas while Starr is in the stainless steel kitchen, making espresso in an Italian machine the size of a Ford Fiesta. Alone in this sterile space, I'm snow-blind from the expanse of chalky Berber carpet, the stark white walls, the chrome lamps like intergalactic telescopes, and the collection of artfully underexposed black-and-white photographs of desert landscapes hung around the Carrara marble fireplace. The only color in here is a bright paperback on the Lucite coffee table.
A Thousand and One Names for Your Baby
. I haven't taken off my mink. I'm shivering, and not just because the thermostat's turned down to a frigid sixty degrees to save money: according to Starr, Bobby quit paying the electric bill a month ago. I'd light a cigarette for at least an illusion of warmth, except there's a conspicuous absence of ashtrays on all these oppressively gleaming surfaces.

“Bobby redid the whole place before he even brought me here.”

Walking in from the kitchen, Starr sets a teensy cup of frothy espresso next to me on a silver-lacquered table that looks as if it wants to take off for Mars. “I know,” she says with a glance around the room. “Like a cross between a morgue and Cape Canaveral.” Grimacing, she tosses me a white alpaca throw, one of a pair. “Bundle up in this. You want the story of Starr Dukes, you may as well set a spell. A person could purely freeze to death in here.” She wraps herself in the other blanket, sits across from me on the opposite sofa, and curls up like an alpaca-wearing pregnant kitten. She folds her hands around the steaming cup. “Here goes.”

 

“That last Saturday night,” Starr begins, “Poppa got himself a calling to preach in another town. He was always ‘getting a calling'—usually after the church was missing collection-basket money, or somebody's husband figured out that ‘counseling' meant sharing his wife with the preacher. We were always leaving in the middle of the night, and this wasn't any different. He come in my room and told me to wake up, saying we were leaving before daylight. I was too sleepy and confused to argue with him, and oh, Annie, I was only seven years old. He handed me two brown paper grocery sacks and I tried to jam my clothes in there, but most of them wouldn't fit. The pageant dresses my momma had made for me, I had to leave them, too.

“ ‘What about Momma's stuff? We're going to take it, right?' I asked him, trying not to cry. ‘She's coming back, won't she?' I'd been praying she'd come home for over two months.

“His Sunday voice was all hard-boiled lightning, and he was for sure using it that dark morning. ‘Stop your whining,' he said. ‘That whore's not your mother anymore. Don't mention her again in my presence, not unless you want a whuppin'.'

“ ‘What about my hope chest?' I wanted to ask, but he hadn't said I could bring it, so I had to leave that, too. That hurt so bad, but when Poppa said git, I got. Always. And I was afraid, so I did like he said when he told me to hurry, that I could put my shoes on in the car. The front door was open, and our old DeSoto was running in the driveway. I remember it was so cold, like it was going to snow. I thought my bare feet were going to freeze right off.

“ ‘Go back inside and get the quilt,' Poppa said. So before I got in the car, I ran and grabbed the quilt my momma's momma had sewn for her wedding present. That was the only thing of hers I had anymore, except for her string of pearl beads I slipped into the pocket of my dress when he wasn't looking.

“We rode for hours through the Delta until the sun came up, Poppa not saying anything, smoking cigarette after cigarette, until we got to Batesville and he stopped for gas. That was when I realized I'd left without knowing your address or your phone number, even. It was like being on a ship, knowing that the dry land was a powerful ways behind me, that the captain of the ship was sailing without even having him some stars to steer by. I cried then, quiet as I could, because I knew you and my momma were both lost to me, probably forever.” Starr takes a deep breath, puts her coffee cup down, and wraps the alpaca throw closer. She's silent for a moment, her mouth pensive, and then she continues.

“Well, after another day on those little two-lane roads, Poppa and me fetched up in a bitter, run-down place—Fogg's Notch—outside of Nashville, away up in the hills. Those were sure some backward folks. The women wore long, prairie-style dresses and weren't allowed to cut their hair, and the menfolk all had jobs in a machinery plant down the road in the next town, but nobody ever went there, not except to work and buy groceries. Being from the Notch meant keepin' yourself to yourself. Oh, and Poppa's new church? The Tabernacle of Forever Zion was a bunch of snake handlers, people falling out in the aisle, speaking in tongues and suchlike. But they loved my poppa's preaching—at least, at first they did. They turned on us later, after Poppa bought a new TV and the collection basket figured up light two weeks running. Then we were on the road again and again. I can't think of how many pissant towns we lit in.

“Soon a woman started in traveling with us. Miss Hulda. She said she was my poppa's wife now and my new momma. Wherever we were, I wasn't ever allowed to go to school without Miss Hulda walking me there and waiting for me to come out in the afternoons. When I cried and said I missed you, Poppa said I didn't need friends. He said my only friend was Jesus, and I'd better get used to it if I knew what was good for me.”

Starr's story sounds a whole lot like the explanation Daddy tried to offer me when I came home from school that Monday to find her gone, the rental house locked and empty. I was heartbroken and bewildered, crying and asking, “Why?”

“Because wandering preachers wander for a reason, Annie. I'm so sorry, honey.” Daddy put his arm around my shoulders and hugged me close, but that only felt like permission to cut loose and bawl like a baby with a bad case of colic. Even my mother couldn't make me stop until I finally fell asleep under my covers that night from sheer exhaustion. Every afternoon for weeks after that Monday, I wandered over to Starr's old house, hoping she'd somehow come back while I'd been at school. She was never there. Six weeks into this, my mother made me quit hanging around the rental house when the landlord called and complained that I'd tried to break inside. Mrs. Allen had seen me perched on an old box, prying at the screen to the window of Starr's old room, and told on me.

“I was only trying to find some clues,” I argued.

“Clues to what?” My mother sounded exasperated.

“Where Starr went! I'm going to be a detective and find her, like Dick Tracy.”

That night my daddy told me in no uncertain terms that I was to cease and desist any and all sleuthing activities. “She's not coming back, Annie. You'll have to get used to missing her.” Probably Daddy meant well: certainly he was right about them not coming back, but for me it was as though my seven-year-old world had been broken into shards and would never be whole again.

And truthfully, it seems as though it never really was after that.

I put down my cup, caught up in memory's net. When you're in the second grade, you don't know what the world can do to you yet. That's the big lie of innocence—that it's a happy state. In childhood all of the feelings you'll ever experience in your life come at you with the suddenness and ferocity of mudslides, burying you up to your neck in feelings so overwhelming that you can barely draw a breath from the power of them. My mourning for Starr had been childhood's first and greatest betrayal. Grown-ups forget that, probably because we'd all go mad if we had to experience what life throws at you every day with the same shock and wailing intensity of just-born emotions.

“Oh, Starr,” I say, remembering that day. “At first, when you didn't come to school that Monday, I thought you'd for sure be there for the Christmas pageant on Tuesday. You were going to be the Virgin Mary, remember? But when you didn't show up, that overachiever Lisa Treeby got to have your part instead of being a shepherd because she'd memorized everybody else's lines. She was such a moose, your costume came up way above her knees and was so tight Lisa had to walk around Bethlehem sideways until it was time for her to sit in the straw and hold the baby. Then those seams ripped right up the sides, almost to her waist. She didn't dare stand up after that, not even at the end when the Three Kings gave their gifts and everybody clapped.”

“And you were going to be the Angel Gabriel,” Starr says with a half-smile. “Poor ol' Lisa, having to be head shepherd 'cause she was the tallest in the class. I'm glad she got my part.”

“Julie Posey just about busted a gut, she was so jealous.” Since she's Bobby Shapley's wife, I bet she's miles beyond jealous now. I don't tell Starr about how Miss Bufkin almost recast me in the play because I kept insisting—loudly—that Lisa couldn't be Mary, that Starr would be there any minute and we should hold the show.