The School of Beauty and Charm (6 page)

I had other worries. What if Barbara Groche stopped playing the organ before I reached the altar—what if she didn't see me? If that happened, I would be the only person left standing up in church, like the loser in musical chairs. Or what if I got to the altar and kept walking, right past Reverend Waller, out the door? Florida would kill me when we got home.

What happened to me was this: My chest began to hurt. Then I felt warm all over, and light, the way I did when I had had the chicken pox. Everything in the sanctuary at Bellamy Baptist Church began to glow. The sun hit the pastel stained
glass in a new way, as if someone had just cleaned the windows. The plain wooden cross over the baptismal, which I had never admired because it didn't have a dead body on it, suddenly looked important. Inside, I felt clean and bright and new. As I passed by Mrs. Gubbel, my Wednesday night Girls in Action leader, I didn't think,
Gobble gobble gobble
. I wasn't afraid of anybody. I didn't worry about the zippers on my boots. I didn't feel like beating anybody up. I felt fine. I felt the way Florida looked when she was listening to Elvis.

By the time I reached the altar and took Reverend Waller's sweaty hand in mine, I knew that it was all true somehow, that you could really close your eyes and talk to God. God and Jesus listened to you and loved you like crazy.

Smoothing the cord of the microphone with his free hand, Reverend Waller smiled and said, “Brothers and sisters in Christ, Frances Louise Peppers comes to us this morning with a decision to surrender her life to Jesus.” We beamed at each other. He had bad breath, but I didn't care.

While Barbara Groche played softly “My Redeemer,” the church body filed out of the pews and snaked down to the altar to shake my hand, to say they were happy for me, I had made a good decision, and they loved me. I shook hands the way Henry had taught me: two short, firm strokes and look ‘em in the eye.

An old, stooped-over lady, smelling strongly of gardenias, wouldn't shake hands. Instead, she pressed my hands inside her gloved ones, and held them. She wore a stiff navy blue hat with a short blue veil, a dress in the pattern Florida called Swiss dot, and two long strands of fake blue pearls. Leaning in close, she
said in a raspy voice, “You have shed that old life like a snake skin.” Her eyes were milky blue. “Reborn.”

“So fresh,” she said, running one gloved finger down my cheek. I nodded. I felt so new I was afraid I would squeak if I opened my mouth. Reborn! I couldn't wait to do it again.

A
LL
B
APTISTS LIVE
for doomsday, but the Pepperses are downright morbid. Henry is the least embarrassed about it. If he saw a wreck on the highway, he'd change lanes and slow down to see the victims up close. Florida always closes her eyes, so he narrates the scene in gruesome detail, filling in the blanks with his imagination.

“That eighteen-wheeler creamed right into him,” he'd say, craning his neck to get a better view. “Cut his arm clean off.”

Without opening her eyes, Florida would say, “Henry, you're telling a story.”

“No I'm not! I saw the fingers sticking right out of the honeysuckle. Saw his wedding band.” Such a scene, real or imagined, brought to Henry's mind other tragedies, which he related in the form of lectures on safety.

He once told about the time he saw the back door of a Pontiac pop open on I-75. “That baby flew right onto the
shoulder of the road. Couldn't have been more than two. Luckily, it was all right. I hope that mother learned her lesson.”

“That's enough Henry,” said Florida, covering her face with her hand, but he went on.

The tornado he'd witnessed on Mount Zion grew bigger with each telling. Twister, he called it.

“Why, there I was lying in the ditch, when that sucker hit the ground inches from my face. It untied my shoelaces.”

“You wouldn't get in a ditch in your good suit to save your life,” corrected Florida, but he continued, his eyes glowing.

I loved the story about the businessman in Bloomingdale's who fell down an escalator and was strangled by his tie. “People just don't think ahead,” Henry would conclude with a frown.

For a long time, Roderick and I thought every family traveled with funeral clothes—church clothes in dark colors, without undue decoration, just in case.

“It's a good practice,” Henry said. “What if you got out there and someone died and the store was closed, or they didn't have your size? What if all you had to wear were tennis shoes? Then you'd be up the creek.”

Florida backed him up 100 percent. “We're going to see old people,” she reminded us of the summer we tried to ditch the funeral clothes for our trip to the Deleuth farm. “You have to be practical. The shops in Red Cavern don't have anything you'd like.”

“I refuse to participate in this panic mentality,” declared Roderick, removing the clip-on tie that Florida had stuffed in a corner of his suitcase. He was at the rebellious stage: He'd begun to lock his bedroom door, blow-dry his hair, and
snicker on the telephone. On his chin regularly sat a bright red pimple that we were all supposed to ignore. He was thirteen. Because of his asthma, he was smaller than other eighth graders: skinny and bluish-white, with delicate wrists like a girl and a head of those soft, swirling, golden curls. After a few valiant attempts to play football, which failed because he was allergic to grass, he resigned himself to an intellectual life of Dungeons and Dragons, Thoreau, and an occasional joint.

“Am I a bison,” he cried, blushing as his voice cracked, “running off the cliff with the herd, or am I human being, free to think and act as I choose?”

“He wants a real tie,” said Florida, “like yours, Henry. This one is for little boys.” She glanced at Roderick's angry face, worrying over his pimple. “Do you need to go to the bathroom before we get in the car?”

“I do not want a tie,” said Roderick, glaring. “I want to live unhampered by the conventionalities of this bourgeois, fear-based society. I want to breathe!”

Henry told him to get a job. To avoid a fuss, Florida slipped the tie into her dress bag, along with my Mary Janes.

We spent an hour in the garage, watching Henry pack the car. Roderick had already checked the oil and cleaned the windshield, but Henry had to pack the trunk himself. If anyone put a bag inside the trunk, Henry shook his head, declared “There is a place for everything in this life,” and took it out again.

“Slow poke,” said Florida. “We go through this every time. Did you pack my knitting? Give me that. I need that in the front seat.” She stepped boldly between Henry and the trunk
to snatch her knitting bag from the elaborate puzzle he was creating in the trunk.

Henry mumbled something.

“What did you say?”

“I didn't say anything.”

“You look like you want to murder me. I'm not going. I'm going to stay here. You all go. Everything is such an ordeal with you!”

“Don't start a commotion.” Henry turned his back to her and with one last surveillance of his work, closed the lid on the trunk.

“Commotion? Without me to push you, you'd never get out of this house. Dawdle, dawdle, dawdle. I suwaan! You've got a problem—an obsession. Sometimes you need to just pick up and go. Move your feet!”

Henry removed the handkerchief from his back pocket and polished the lock of the trunk, a sign that we could all board.

Roderick stretched out in the back seat with his inhaler and worn copy of
Civil Disobedience
, while I sat in the front, squeezed between Henry, Florida, and the white toy poodle, Puff LeBlanc, so that Roderick and I wouldn't fight.

Legally, Puff was Roderick's dog. Roderick was allergic to most dogs, including his favorite breed, the Saint Bernard, for which Florida thanked God. She tried to talk Roderick into a Venus's-flytrap, a plant that eats hamburger, and then a koi fish, but in the end, she gave in because at least poodles don't shed.

Roderick swore she would never have to lift a finger. He read several books on dog training and cleaned out a corner of his room for Puff's dog bed, food bowl, and toys. When Puff arrived,
he devoted himself to its happiness and well-being, following the pup around with a faint furrow in his brow and looking very much like Henry. Was his water clean enough? Did the collar fit? Why were we holding him wrong?

Puff, however, had his own ideas. Within forty-eight hours of his arrival, he had scoped out the situation and bonded firmly with Florida. All over Owl Aerie, you could hear the tap tap tap of Florida's heels followed by the tippety tap, tippety tap of Puff's painted blue toenails. Up and down the stairs they went, in and out of rooms, tap tap tap, tippety tap, tippety tap. On the rare occasion that Florida sat down, Puff collapsed, exhausted, in her lap. Often he awoke from these naps entangled in knitting yarn, and she would scold him, pushing him roughly to the floor. She spoke no endearments, and did not rub him behind his well-brushed ears. Still, at the sound of her, “Shoo. Git!” he wagged his puff of a tail with delight. Daily, she fed him, walked him, and jerked the tangles from his hair with a cold metal comb. When he had diarrhea, she cleaned it up and fed him teaspoons of Pepto-Bismol, bracing his mouth open with her fingers. Once, she knitted him a sweater.

“He worships me,” she admitted. The dog only tolerated the rest of us, who ultimately had a low opinion of poodles and were disappointed that Puff acted so much like one. “You can't change a personality,” Florida reminded us. “I have tried and tried with Henry. You take the good with the bad. When I married Henry, I thought he was perfect, but he's not.” She poked him in the arm. “Are you?”

A
LTHOUGH
H
ENRY HAD
never in his life exceeded the speed limit or turned without signaling or blown his car horn,
he did have one bad driving habit, and it drove Florida up the wall. Sometimes he let the car run out of gas. It was an addiction, like gambling, an insane obsession to pit himself against chance. He did it that Sunday on the way to Red Cavern, Kentucky.

At two o'clock that afternoon, when the needle of the gas gauge rested delicately on the inner edge of the bright orange e, Henry slowed down in front of a Texaco station in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Then he read the price sign and drove on.

“Dadgonit,” said Florida. She glared at him. “It's on empty.”

Henry looked straight ahead. He wore his driving sweater, a soft cotton cardigan with leather patches on the sleeves, and a pair of sunglasses from Kmart. Outside, it was too warm for a sweater, but we all needed one in the car, with the air-conditioning on high. With one hand on the steering wheel, leaning back in his seat as if it were a recliner, he said, “There's at least three gallons left.”

“Then why does it say empty?” demanded Florida.

“Oh, that's not accurate. They set these gauges up for the general public. To give them plenty of warning.”

“That's why the general public doesn't run out of gas,” said Roderick from the back seat. We passed another gas station. Henry made a snide remark about the price, lit a fresh cigar, and drove on.

“Oh boy,” said Florida. “Here we go. You do this every time, and it burns me up. You're cheap. Tight. Refuse to pay two pennies more so we won't all be sitting on the side of the road while Mother's dinner gets cold.”

Henry looked into the rearview mirror and frowned. “Son,”
he said, severely. “I don't want to have to tell you again to get your feet off that window. If we hit a bump, your feet will go right through the glass. Another car might come by and cut your legs off. How would you like to be sitting in a wheelchair for the rest of your life?” Roderick sucked on his inhaler, filling the car with its faint medicinal odor, and without looking up, turned a page in his book. “That wouldn't be much fun,” Henry continued. “I can tell you that right now.” In response, Roderick coughed loudly.

“Your cigar smoke is making him sick,” said Florida. “He's wheezing.”

Henry turned the air vent to the back seat. “Why, if a big ole eighteen-wheeler came by, and you broke the glass, that wind could suck you right out of the car. You'd blow out of here like a paper bag.”

“Mom,” said Roderick. “Don't let her open that nail polish; I'll throw up,” but I had already twisted off the lid of Good Morning Peach and was applying the first coat.

“She's almost finished,” said Florida. “Henry, let him crack his window. Did you pack my book in the trunk? Darn it, Henry!”

“What was the name of it?”

“
Temptation
.”

“You didn't tell me not to.”

“You know better than that. How I can read my book if it's in the trunk?”

“Where there's a will, there's a way,” said Henry.

“You did that on purpose.” She cracked her window and let Puff stick his nose out. Roderick offered her some Thoreau.

“Oh that's too hard. I'm not as smart as you. I can't read
that. Maybe with the CliffsNotes. What did you bring to read, Louise?” Shoving Puff aside, she rummaged through my stack of books:
Very Special People
, an illustrated text about circus people. She flipped to a picture of Adolpho the Two-Headed Man, showing a handsome man in a suit lighting a cigarette for another man, the size of an infant, dressed in an identical suit and emerging from his own chest. From the expression on her face, I could see that she found the book in poor taste.
Paradise Lost
, which I was pretending to read to impress my English teacher, Samuel Rutherford III, did not hold her attention, even after I told her it was about God.

“I read the Bible,” she said. “That tells the story of Jesus.” She added, “Your savior,” and I closed my eyes, pretending to fall asleep. Jesus was her back-up man. Together, the two of them created a superhuman SWAT team; Florida sniffed out the intransigence and Jesus crushed it with his Word.