The School of Beauty and Charm (3 page)

“Where are your shoes? Is that my cricket box? I've been looking all over for that thing. Put it back where it belongs, right now. Never mind, give it here. You'll knock the vase
over.” She didn't add “And it cost a fortune” because we had company.

When company came, they used my bathroom. Florida shut the sliding door to my bedroom, opened the hall door, and whipped out the four guest towels and six tiny shell-shaped soaps that no guest had ever dared to touch—until Regina arrived.

While she waited for Lacy to finish her business in the adjoining toilet, Regina stood at my sink, scrubbing her hands with a delicate lavender clamshell. Through the sliding door, which I had cracked open, I watched with delight as she snapped an ironed linen guest towel from the rack. Her back was ramrod straight, and through the mirrored wall facing us, I could see her sharp gray face in the dark glasses. Pressed against the door, I trembled, wondering if she would take them off. Roderick said that her eyes had been plucked out, leaving two holes through which you could probably see her brain. Florida said that was foolish; she'd have glass eyes, like marbles, and Henry said that surely someone would have shut the eyelids. Although I was taking shallow, quiet breaths, and standing so still that my feet had gone to sleep, I felt sure that she was looking back at me through the mirror.
Half a million dollars,
I thought, watching her rings glint as she roughly dried her hands, then tossed the wadded guest towel onto the counter.

Suddenly, she spoke. Her voice was loud, a habit she'd acquired from responding to people who raised their voices to talk to blind people, and it startled me so much that at first I thought she was talking to me.

“Who are they?” she asked.

From the toilet, Lacy grunted, “Who?”

“The Pepperses,” repeated Regina. “Who are they?”

“Oh,” said Lacy. “They're nobody.”

I waited, but no explanation followed. Regina took her cane and went out into the hall; Lacy rinsed her hands at the sink, drying her hands on a Kleenex, and then carefully folded the towel Regina had used and replaced it on the rack.

I sat down on my bedroom floor, on the purple shag carpet that still showed the vacuum cleaner tracks and looked at the iron bed from Grandmother Deleuth's attic, which Florida had painted to look like brass, and the white laminate dresser from Sears. On the wall behind my mamason chair, Henry had carefully hung the John Denver poster that Roderick gave me for my seventh birthday. My heart felt the way it did when I'd eaten too much peanut butter too fast.
Nobody
.

What happened next seemed like fate. I walked into the living room, where I found Regina sitting alone on the couch, sipping a hot toddy from the thermos she carried in her large black pocketbook, thumbing through a copy of
Southern Living
. As she turned the slick pages, her mouth softened, and a dreamy expression came over her face. What was she seeing? The voices of the women downstairs drifted through the intercom.

“Now this is just darling—a fur bedspread. Cute, cute, cute.”

“He picked the wallpaper out by himself. I could kick myself for letting him, but I did. Bugs on the wall! He wants to be a doctor; every time I turn around, he's dissecting—”

“Shirley, could you do a ceiling like this in my house, or would that be too much? Go on, Florida, I'm listening.”

Although I made no attempt to disguise my presence, Regina and I didn't speak to each other. When I heard the lizards jumping in the cricket box, I took them out to thump them into submission as if there were no company in the room. Inside the box, they had turned from gray to gold. I looked around for Roderick, to show him, but he had disappeared. Regina burped, then crossed her ankles, which were as thick as the trunk of the dogwood tree.

Nobody
, I thought, and then I stepped forward and placed one golden lizard on each of her legs. Slowly, the chameleons, with their noses pointed up, gulping air, turned gray. Then they darted beneath the hem of her skirt.

Regina screamed. It was a wild call, released from the deepest, darkest jungle of her heart, and when its chill reached the back of my neck, I wailed with her. Our cries reached an ear-splitting crescendo that sent Florida and the DAR up the stairs at breakneck speed, but it was too late.

With her skinny arms raised over her head, her mouth drawn into a murderous grimace, Regina thrashed her cane into the Chinese vase.

T
HAT AFTERNOON, AFTER
the Daughters of the American Revolution had left with fluttering waves and tense smiles, Roderick said, “Who wants to live in a museum? Not me.”

“Well they didn't pick us for the tour, so hush,” said Florida. She removed a cookie sheet from his hands. “Oh honey, not my good pan. You don't have to do that today, do you?”

Roderick took the cookie sheet back and covered it with tin foil, spreading Crisco in a rectangle for each lizard he intended
to cook. “All I know,” he said sternly, “is that I don't want a bunch of ladies poking around in my room, getting goop all over my stuff.”

“They like fine furniture,” said Florida. “Knickknacks. Junk. I don't think Lacy even got a good look at the vase before it was broken. That Regina is nuts. I don't know what got into her. She's not right. I'm going to submit Owl Aerie to
Southern Living
anyway. The DAR doesn't have the last word on everything. Owl Aerie is original. They like the same old, same old. Old money. They probably want you to have a black maid.”

Roderick opened the cricket box.

“I told you they were gold,” I said.

“If you have to cook your lizards,” Florida said with her back turned, “I am going to ask you to kill them first.”

“It's probably a good thing we don't have a maid,” said Florida, sitting down at the table with the Chinese vase, now a box of shattered china, and a bottle of glue. “She wouldn't last a minute in this house.” With her brow furrowed, she began working the jagged edges of porcelain together like a jigsaw puzzle. Wheezing from his afternoon in the weeds, Roderick turned on the oven and removed an envelope of sterilized surgical instruments from his pocket. “Son,” she said, without looking up, “don't you use my manicure set on those lizards. I'll tan your hide. You hear?”

T
HE SOUND OF
a tornado begins with a low whistle. Something is calling you, not coming for you yet, but calling. It is hard to sit still, impossible not to listen. This is how most people die in tornadoes; they run to them. On the day Owl
Aerie was hit, the patch of sky outside the kitchen window turned a yellowish, lake-water green, and five pieces of hail the size of golf balls struck the glass in rapid succession, like a knock.

“Henry, don't you go out there,” said Florida. “I'm telling you.” With his face deep in his cereal bowl, Henry pretended not to hear. He had never missed a day of work at Southern Board, and he saw no reason to lay out now. “A national tornado isn't a good reason to stay home?” cried Florida. Henry didn't think so.

He did not, however, ignore the risks of inclement weather. T
HE BEST WAY IS THE SAFE WAY
was the motto at Southern Board, and the guiding principle of Henry's life. That morning, after his shower, Henry stepped into the walk-in closet he shared with Florida to find his tornado hat.

On the left side of the closet, above a row of polished shoes packed with shoe horns, twelve gray suits hung a hand's width apart on wooden hangers. The suits were followed by starched white shirts. At the end of the shirts, there was a burst of color—a banner of maroon and navy ties. The last tie in the line-up was banana yellow. Florida had given him that one after she received yet another kitchen appliance for her birthday, and Henry didn't have the heart to get rid of it. This was Henry's side of the closet, emerging like a regiment of well-heeled soldiers against Florida's side, which can only be described as savage.

Here, hangers made of wire, yarn, and catgut disappeared under blinding wheels of color. In a dizzying sweep of plaid, check, and polka dot, Florida's wardrobe appeared to be caught in flight. Turquoise and chartreuse sequins flashed beneath
something pink and bulbous, covered in feathers. A flame-orange spike heel dangled from the strap of a white patent-leather bag. A pair of padded, cone-shaped falsies from an ocher bathing suit teetered on the top shelf, and a stocking hung between them like a tail. Red was splashed around like blood.

Henry had trained himself not to look over there. Reaching up to the top shelf on his side of the closet, he removed his tornado hat. It was shaped like a motorcycle helmet, covered in a tasteful plaid merino, and trimmed with coyote fur. Coyote earmuffs swiveled up or down. He turned the hat in his hands, inspecting it for lint, then fitted it on his head without messing up his hair.

When he returned to the kitchen with his briefcase, Florida was ready for him. She was wearing what she always wore in the morning: a slinky zebra-print housecoat that zipped to the floor and a pair of sparkling gold spandex house shoes with hard soles that clacked on the tiles. A quilted green scarf covered her head, to keep her hair from going flat when she slept. Even though it was still dark outside, she wore lipstick. “I know you don't want to listen to me,” she said, “but I'd like to make a suggestion. May I make one suggestion?” Henry smiled behind his coyote fur.

“I don't know why you're risking your life for a bunch of cardboard,” Florida said. “That bridge is probably out. You'll go straight into the New Hope River. What about your family? Your children? Don't you want to share our lives? Aren't we more important to you than money, money, money? You'd stay home this morning from the plant if you had any sense.”

No one in our family said
cardboard
. Again and again, Henry has instructed us to never, never say
cardboard
in reference to
the Southern Board product. That's ignorant. Did we want people to think we were ignorant? Of course not. Roderick and I could rattle off
corrugated board
before we were two.

Henry kissed her cheek and headed for the door. Like all Southern Board employees, he is steadily losing his hearing. Florida thinks he is doing it on purpose.

When he kissed her, she lifted one earmuff and said, “Goodbye, dear. I don't know if we'll ever see you alive again or not.” Henry hesitated. “Go on if you're going,” she said, clacking her heels across the floor as she crossed the kitchen to swipe the table with a dishrag. “Have a nice day.” She swept some crumbs into her palm. “Go on before it gets worse. I love you.”

G
RANDMOTHER
D
ELEUTH CALLED
that morning. We knew it was her because Florida was shouting back into the phone.

“Mother, I can hear you!”

Unconvinced that anybody in Georgia could hear someone talking in Kentucky in a normal tone of voice, Grandmother called out so that we all could hear, “The TV says you all are getting a twister down there! I commenced to worrying!”

“It's only a tornado watch, Mother. It's not a warning. Henry went on to work as usual. Don't start fretting.”

“Well, I am! Watch the chirren, Florida. Don't let ‘em out.”

“How are you and Daddy?”

“We're settin' here worrying about you all.”

“You said that, Mother. Let's talk about something else. Can you think of something else to say? How about something positive.”

“I don't reckon I can.”

“How's Uncle Lyle?”

“Last month one came up this way and took the roof off his barn. Jimmy Simmons, his sister's husband's half brother, don't recollect his name, she said it would have come off anyway. That barn was older than I am, reckon. ‘Twas his sister's husband's half brother told him to get up there and fix it, but he don't listen to people.”

“What came?”

“Honey, I told you! A twister! Evange Lyle—that's your Daddy's brother—”

“I heard you, Mother. Please don't shout.”

“Well y'all don't want to talk to us. Busy.”

“Hush that, Mother. I'm talking to you. I just want you to say something positive, stop fretting and worrying. Get out of the house once in a while.”

“Daddy-Go won't get in the car, you know that. Says it makes him want to upchuck.”

“Be sweet to him, Mother.”

“Pshaw. Y'all don't know. Y'all don't know how we do up here, honey. We just set and worry.”

“I'd feel bad if that's what I did all day long, too. Pick up the Bible. Read what Jesus tells you. That's the part in red. Look at the
Reader's Digest
I sent you. Get your mind off yourself.”

“I reckon.”

“Do you want to talk to your grandchildren? They're right here, waiting to talk to you if you'll stop that crying.”

“I can't hep it.”

“Hush. Here's Roderick.” Roderick pushed me toward the phone.

“Hello?” I whispered.

“Speak up,” said Florida. “She's old.”

“Y'all are sweet chirren,” said Grandmother Deleuth, crying softly. “Y'all be good to your mama. I guess I'll be dead and gone before I see you again.”

Florida took the phone. “Mother. I'm sending you a Billy Graham tape of positive thinking. Mother?” She shook the receiver, but it was Grandmother Deleuth's habit to hang up a telephone when she had nothing left to say.

F
LORIDA DECIDED WE
should pray for Henry.

“Don't get contrary on me this morning,” she said when Roderick and I made long faces. “It will only take a minute of your time. Grandmother is worrying me to death, and Henry is out in that tornado. Get down on your knees and say a prayer with me before I lose my ever-loving mind.”

On my knees, with my hands folded and my head parallel to the kitchen floor, I could not help but notice the pink tail of our hamster, America the Beautiful, poking through the refrigerator grate. While Florida prayed, I kept one eye open, watching the tail twitch, disappear, and reappear. It was all I could do not to shout. However, for the sake of Henry, who was driving straight into a tornado, I kept quiet and squeezed both eyes shut.