The Right Thing (6 page)

In a wide-eyed, disbelieving panic, I dropped to my knees to hide. The picture book slid off the arm of the Chesterfield to the floor, falling open. Through the now-open door, I could just make out an old-fashioned black-and-white photograph of three young women in maids' uniforms, bent over at the waist. Full skirts rucked up, three sets of bare buttocks waited for the thin cane brandished by a mustachioed man in a top hat. The young women's faces looked really happy, even though they were obviously in line for what Starr's father called a whuppin'. This picture shocked my intelligence to a thunderous vacancy.

Then the gasping stopped.

Mr. Treeby barked,
“Who's there!”

Silently backing away from that photograph, I crawled backward in a perfect terror down the dark hall along the cheap runner, my hands and knees stinging with rug burns. Mr. Treeby shouted again. “Who's there, dammit!” It sounded like he was putting on his pants in a hurry—a zipper rasping, coins falling to the floor.

“Goddammit, Lollie, get down here!”

I backed around the corner to the entryway, fast. In my haste to get to my feet, I knocked over the majolica umbrella stand. The elephant broke in two when it hit the tile, and clattering umbrellas rolled across the floor like timbers released from a logjam. My hand was on the doorknob when Mrs. Treeby trundled headlong down the stairs in a flapping brown dressing gown, her brow furrowed.

“Why, Annie—where are you going?” she asked. She was out of breath.

“Home. I, I don't feel good,” I improvised. Before she could reply, I yanked the door open to the bracing air. A wind skittered through the poplars outside, driving yellow leaves before it.

“Lollie, what's the meaning of this?” Mr. Treeby strode around the corner into the entryway, his hair wild, his pinstriped shirt only half tucked in. His eyes narrowed when he saw me.

“What's wrong, dear?” Mrs. Treeby was lumbering toward me, stepping over the umbrellas with her arms outstretched, her kindly horse face concerned. I leapt down the steps to the sidewalk and landed running.

“Pellagra!” I shouted over my shoulder. “I've got pellagra!”

 

I ran and ran until I couldn't run anymore. The four blocks to the Treebys' house—miles long this morning when I was walking to my date with the playhouse in the basement—were a blur. I slowed to a trot and then walked, holding my ribs against the throb of the stitch in my side. I had to stop to catch my breath. The crow was still perched in the top of the crape myrtle tree. It hopped to a lower branch, and bright, bold eyes seemed to ask,
What happened to you?

I shuddered against the memory of Mr. Treeby's study and what I'd seen there, sharp as scissors, greasy and sickening as the taste of soapsuds on my tongue. There was no possibility of going home now, no doubt in my mind that within seconds of my escape Lisa's mother had telephoned both Methyl Ivory and my grandmother. What Mrs. Treeby would say to them was beyond my imagination, but once again my natural badness had undone my best efforts to be good. Big slow tears ran into the corners of my mouth, and I yearned then to be the crow overhead, to spread shining black wings and fly home to my ragged nest in the top of the live oak tree, where crow brothers and sisters would want to hear about my adventures and tell me their own.

There was no home for me. Instead of turning onto Fairmont, I ran north, around the corner, and down the long block to the end of Gray Street. When I saw the little asbestos-sided rental house, it seemed that I'd been running there all along. It never occurred to me that Starr wouldn't be home as I punched the doorbell and waited on the cracked cement stoop. My breath returned to normal, my flushed cheeks cooled, and I realized the temperature had dropped again. There was a front pushing through, and I was cold. Rubbing my bare arms' goose bumps, I rang the doorbell again. Overhead, low clouds scudded across the sky, and a dog barked somewhere, harsh and insistent.

And then, just as I was ready to give up and walk around the block, back home to the certain doom awaiting me, the door to Starr's house cracked open.

“Who is it?” a thin, scared-sounding voice asked.

“Starr!” I said, hugging my arms to my chest. “It's me, Annie. Can I come in?”

The door opened wider. I was enveloped in the thick, stale aroma of boiled cabbage and cigarette smoke, with something unpleasant and unidentifiable lurking underneath. Starr peeked around the edge of the door.

“Get inside,” she said. “Somebody might see. My poppa said don't let anybody in the house while he's to the church.”

I slipped inside the doorway. Despite the smell, it was warm in the Dukes house. Starr, barefoot, was wearing a pilled yellow nylon nightgown with a limp collar. “Come on in,” she said. I followed her down a short, dark hall into a bedroom not much bigger than our pantry, lit only by the listless light filtering through a small, sheet-covered window. On the bare wooden floor, there was just room for the single mattress heaped with a patchwork quilt and a battered cardboard suitcase covered in tweed-patterned cloth in the corner. A drift of spangled white tulle spilled from the suitcase's overstuffed sides. Starr's pageant dresses were hanging on nails driven into the pockmarked walls.

“Set,” she said. “How come you're here? I thought we weren't allowed anymore.”

I collapsed onto the mattress, drawing my knees under my chin. “I'm running away,” I said, wiping my nose. “Please, Starr—won't you come with me? We can be friends again.” I had only conceived the idea in the last instant.

Starr shook her head. “I can't.” She sat next to me on the mattress and put her thin arm around my shoulders. “See, my momma went away last week. Poppa says I've got to look after him now since she's not gonna come back, not this time.” Her pale eyes were huge in her narrow, pointed face. “I was fixing to get ready to make him some dinner 'cause he'll be coming home at five pee-em. He'll be
real
hungry, Annie. A man's got to eat,” she said uncertainly. “Right?”

Starr's mother's desertion fought for precedence with the day's disaster. My spirits plummeted as she stroked my back. “But I can't go home, Starr,” I said. Voice shaking, I told her about the Treebys' house. It was hard to confess what I'd seen through the cracked door, harder still to explain my consummate dread of my mother's lashing disappointment at my failure—once again—to stay out of trouble. This was the biggest trouble yet of my short life, and I was sure I would not survive it.

When I had finished, Starr shook her head and said, “Poppa says this world's nothing but sin, woe, and sorrowful torment, and we only get through it with the healing from Jesus. I surely miss my momma, Annie.”

“And I'm scared to death of mine.”

We sat quiet for a minute.

“Hold on.” Starr stuck her hand underneath the mattress and fished around on the floor for something, a picture in a cheap frame. “This's my momma on her honeymoon with my poppa. They went to Biloxi.”

I took the faded black-and-white photograph from her, looking intently at the slight woman, her arms folded tightly across a shirtwaist dress, standing on the flat sands of the Mississippi Gulf Coast. She looked worn out, as though she'd been up for days on end, her shoulders tensed, unsmiling. I couldn't help but compare her to my own mother, Collie Banks, the beauty. How would I feel if she were to disappear into thin air like Starr's momma had done? I shivered, wondering if my latest descent into bad behavior would make her leave me, too.

“She's sure pretty, huh?” Starr asked.

I nodded, although I was thinking that Mrs. Dukes was anything but pretty. Her face with its long upper lip and protruding teeth bore a strong resemblance to the pet rabbit Joel Donahoe kept in a cage in the backyard.

“After she left, Poppa threw this picture away, but I fished it out of the garbage can.” Starr took the photograph from me and kissed her mother through the glass. “My momma used to be the Soybean Queen of Avoyelles Parish, you know. After we come here, sometimes she'd put makeup on me and her when Poppa wasn't home so's we could be pretty together. She always said everything looks better when you got your best face on. But Poppa didn't like it. He came home early that last time and made us wash it all off. He gave me a whuppin', then he made her put every bit of her makeup in the trash and she cried.” With another kiss, Starr shoved the picture under her mattress again. “I wonder where she's at all the time, Annie. I surely wish she'd come home again, but Poppa says she's not gonna.”

“I'm sorry.” It was all I could think of to say, but Starr nodded.

“I know,” she said.

Wrapped in each other's misery, we sat on Starr's bed for at least another minute before we realized that for the first time in nearly three weeks, we were together again. We looked at each other shyly. I couldn't help but smile then.

“Want to see what I got in my hope chest?” Starr jumped up off the mattress and opened the suitcase. Crammed inside it was a long net veil spangled in silver sequins, Starr's Little Miss Princess Anne Look-Alike tiara wrapped in tissue paper, a gold-flowered porcelain bonbon dish, six cheap violet sachets, a pair of scuffed ivory satin pumps (“Momma says maybe I'll grow into 'em”), a stiffly crumpled bouquet of pink plastic roses, a white leather Bible with a stain on the cover, shiny pearl pop beads, a yellowed
Vogue
wedding dress pattern, and the earnest beginnings of a quilt made from Starr's pageant sashes.

Starr carefully lined these items up on the mattress with pride. I stroked the quilt made of satin sashes as she rewrapped the tiara in tissue paper. “Starr, can I stay here with you?” I asked, feeling hopeful. At that moment, even the thought of her father's return was preferable to what I was sure I'd be facing at home.

“You can stay while I make dinner, but you've got to go home after,” Starr said. “Your momma will worry about you.”

“No, she won't,” I said, the knowing like an icefall in my heart. “She'll be glad if I never come back. I can't do anything right,
never,
no matter how hard I try. Look at what happened at Lisa's house!” In my mind I was certain—however confused that certainty—that my natural wickedness was somehow at the epicenter of my mother's endless anxiety. And then there was my grandmother. How was I ever to explain myself to that terrible old woman now? I couldn't say why, but as surely as I knew my own name, I knew that even from her wheelchair over on State Street, she used me to feed a rapacious appetite for domination. Without the words to express them, these were all feelings, merely, but feelings that rivaled the dark malignity of certain fairy tales, the ones I read with a stirring of recognition and fear.

“Huh. All mommas worry about their little girls,” Starr said, sounding practical. She picked up the sash quilt and folded it. “That's how come I know my momma's coming back someday. She just needs a vacation.” She was changing into a too-big sweatshirt and a pair of old corduroy pants that looked like they'd once belonged to a boy twice her size.

I shivered. My throat was scratchy from crying, and I was so tired. “Can I have a glass of water?”

“Surely,” Starr said. “Come on in the kitchen. I'm cooking supper.”

During that long afternoon my throat grew steadily worse, my joints aching in time with my throbbing head. I shivered under the long, grubby pink cardigan Starr gave me to wear over my shorts and sleeveless shirt. Like the rest of the few, tired clothes in the closet, it had been left behind when her mother had fled the house.

And so I sat at the kitchen table, trying to swallow past the burning lump in my throat, racked with the chills of a high fever, while I watched Starr drag pots and a bag of potatoes out from under the sink. Her straggling blond curls tied up in an old scarf, she got a pound of ground meat, an egg, and a bottle of milk from the refrigerator. She was making mashed potatoes, Starr said, and a meatloaf with ketchup on top. In spite of my body's increasing wretchedness, I stirred the instant butterscotch pudding for dessert, and it felt good, knowing I couldn't get into trouble there.

Too soon, according to the clock on the stove, Mr. Dukes's dinner was ready and it was time for me to go home. In the gray light of the fading day, Starr walked with me next door, across the Allens' sloping lawn, down to the fence dividing their property and our backyard. I tried to climb over the wire, but my legs crumpled like Play-Doh and refused to do their job. No matter how urgently Starr pushed my bottom upward, I couldn't get to the top of the fence, much less climb over it. Yellow rectangles of light from my house shone through the sunporch windows down across the lawn. I could see the large, white-uniformed figure of Methyl Ivory passing like a ship of state in the center hall between the kitchen and the living room, and falling to my knees, I rolled into a miserable ball on the ground.

Starr knelt next to me in the cold grass. Her face was pinched and nervous in the gathering dark. “Annie,” she said. She shook my shoulder. “Hey. Get up. You can't lay here. I got to get home—it's almost time for my poppa to come back.” I couldn't answer her around the blaze of pain in my throat.

“Wait.” Limber as a cat, Starr scaled the fence, landing with a soft thud on the other side, in my backyard. “I'll be right back, okay?” The whisper of her bare feet running across the lawn faded into the chill dusk, and the slow rumble of occasional cars over on Gray Street, crickets, the call of a night bird, and the rasp of my own hot breath kept me company instead. The stars came out, one by one. I slept, I think, at last.

 

Later I woke in my own bed, in my pajamas. In the soft glow of the lamp, my mother and father were sitting on the edge of the mattress. My daddy had his stethoscope around his neck, and my mother's lovely face wore a worried frown.