The School of Beauty and Charm (12 page)

Teeth : chicken :: sentience : __________.

A. dog

B. grub

C. chicken

D. cabbage

E. human

I chose E, confident in my understanding that people were fools.

Next, I took the Myers-Briggs personality test. Henry said I had a good personality, and Florida said I had a lot of personality, but I was sure Myers-Briggs would ferret out the truth; I was insane. On this one, I answered C for all the questions.

Drew had not told me where to sit in Dr. Frommlecker's office, and I panicked when I entered the room and was told to sit anywhere. My choices were a straight-backed wooden chair, a chartreuse beanbag, and a brown couch. I suspected that this was another test, and I finally chose to lie down on the couch because that's what I'd seen in the movies. The ceiling above me was painted bright orange—Mrs. Frommlecker's touch.

Dr. Frommlecker rolled out from behind his desk on a chair with chrome wheels. He wore running shoes, a pair of brown Haggar slacks, and a silky shirt unbuttoned at the collar to reveal a gold chain that Henry would have hated. His thin dark
hair was parted in the middle, and he had the smart, beady little eyes of a doctor fresh out of medical school. I could tell right off that he was a Yankee because he didn't smile at me. When I had settled back into my mouton, with my feet resting on a pillow, and my hands folded in my lap, he rolled forward and said, “So who did you fuck?”

It was a shocking question to put to a Peppers. To make matters worse, I was a virgin. I was a virgin by circumstance rather than choice. No one had ever tried to have sex with me unless you counted the Mormon who had put his tongue in my mouth at Bridgewater's Freshman Fling. His tongue was soft and fat and tasted like spit. Afterward, he asked me how much I weighed.

When I didn't answer Dr. Frommlecker, he stared at me until I began to cry. Then, embarrassed, he handed me a box of Kleenex and began to talk about himself.

He was a student of Freud, whose books lined his shelf. He'd written a book titled
The Didactics of the Human Sexual Malady
, which he informed me with a wave of his hand was waiting to be published. Here in Counterpoint, he practiced something called Reality Therapy.

My heart sank. Florida could have told him that Reality Therapy wouldn't work on me. “You don't live in reality,” she accused me several times a day. She was right; reality held no attraction for me. Except for the police blotter and the comics, newspapers bored me. I could care less what time of day it was. Facts were like brussels sprouts; I pushed them aside. I liked to think that I could live my way and let other people live their way, but realists wore the world as a tight garment, and like all evangelists, they weren't happy until everyone else was as uncomfortable
as they were. Now here I was, in Reality Therapy with Frommlecker.

While he talked, I lay on my back staring up at the orange ceiling, crying silently. The soft fur around my face smelled of Florida and made me think of “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”—hunching in my mother's belly with my fur froze.

For months after Roderick died, I couldn't stop laughing. At Bellamy Baptist, I snickered in the pew, and during a French class at Bridgewater, reciting with the class, “Où est Sylvie?” “Elle est au cinema,” I laughed so hard that I burst a blood vessel in my eye. In the funeral home, every time I glanced at the coffin—the puffs of pale blue satin, the prom-dress bows, and the glut of cut flowers, I had to press my fist into my mouth to suppress a howl. Lacy Dalton had helped Florida arrange Roderick's trophies and ribbons around the coffin. He was captain of the Bridgewater Debate Team, Third Place Winner of the Bellamy Baptist Go-Cart Race, and two merit badges short of Eagle Scout. Now he was dead. For the occasion, he wore a real tie, not a clip-on.

I covered my snort with a cough, did it again, and then lost all control and let out a hoot. Henry led me out of the room. When hysterics had sucked the breath out of me, the funeral director put a paper bag over my head and made me count backward from ten. He was a dapper little man with a bald, egg-shaped head, wearing a permanent expression of compassion.

When school started, Mr. Rutherford read us “The Hanging” by George Orwell. In the essay, after the executioners hang a prisoner, they can't stop laughing, so I knew he had selected it for me.

“Whatdya think, Rhoda?” he asked after everyone else had left the room.

Looking down at Mr. Rutherford's shoes, I thought back to that day at Grandmother Deleuth's farm in Red Cavern. Roderick sat in the swing in the yard, kicking the toe of his sneaker in the beaten dirt, waiting for Daddy-Go to come home from the hospital. He was too old, too old to play with me, older than Daddy-Go—pale and shimmering in the falling sun. I didn't want to be at the farm where old people were dying; I wanted to be at Camp Berryhill with Drew St. John, and I was babbling to him about Berryhill's Christmas-in-July.

“They get a real tree and decorate it. They give each other presents. They have stockings.”

“Huh,” said Roderick, unimpressed. “Drew's over there this summer?”

“She goes every summer. It costs as much as a year of Bridgewater.”

“Well, I'll say,” he said with a mocking curl of his lip. “Christmas in July.”

Then Daddy-Go was home in his bed, hollowed-out from his stroke, and Uncle Evange Lyle came to the house to preach to him. While he was playing his harmonica, singing,

There is a fountain filled with blood drawn from Immanuel's veins;

And sinners plunged beneath that flood, Lose all their guilty stains:

Lose all their guilty stains. Lose all their guilty stains:

And sinners plunged beneath that flood, Lose all their guilty stains . . .

Roderick crept outside to cut me a Christmas tree the size of a lamp. He decorated it with the sleeping nasturtiums he'd cut from Grandmother's flower beds. He put it on the screened-in porch where we slept.

“‘The Hanging' was cool,” I said to Mr. Rutherford, looking down at my topsiders as my cheeks grew hot. They were brand new, but like the topsiders of every single other eighth grader at Bridgewater Middle School, they had been soaked in a hot salty bath and then wrapped with duct tape.

Mr. Rutherford put his arm around me. I felt his thick, warm hand square in the middle of my back, pressed against my bra strap. I smelled his lime aftershave. When I lifted my burning face, I saw his scar up close—a thick red welt that ran up his neck and to his ear. Some said he'd been in a knife fight over a lady he loved; others said he caught someone's cleat during a football game. He looked sad; he always looked sad when he wasn't joking.

“I'm very sorry about your brother,” he said.

“He had an asthma attack,” I said. “A Christmas tree killed him.” A giggle rose up in my throat, and I was about to say “and it wasn't even Christmas yet,” but instead I pushed my face against Mr. Rutherford's hard shoulder and began to cry. He kept his back straight, holding me firmly in his arms without pressing me against him, as if I were a tackle. “Hush,” he whispered hoarsely. “Hush, now.” After that, we avoided each other.

A
T THE END
of the hour with Dr. Frommlecker, the collar of my mouton was wet with tears, and I had said nothing. In the reception room, Ice Lady made an appointment for me to return at the same time next Thursday.

“Why are you wearing that hot old thing!” Florida cried as I climbed into the front seat of the Ford Country Squire station wagon. “It's seventy degrees outside. I'm perspiring just looking at you. You think you can hide your body in these big clothes, but they make you look even bigger, call attention to your weight. Everyone can see you.”

“That's not a very nice way to talk to a crazy person.”

“Shoot. You're not crazy. You're just—well, what did the doctor say?”

I mumbled something about reality.

“Honey if you don't take that fur coat off, I'm going to suffocate. I'm sorry. It is just too hot to wear that thing. I hope he didn't see you in it. What do you have on under there?” She turned the air conditioner on full blast and asked if Dr. Frommlecker had any suggestions about my weight.

“Shirley swears by grapefruit, brussels sprouts, and catfish— broiled, not fried. She lost twenty pounds in two weeks, and Lacy Dalton says she lost ten, but you can't tell; she's such a rolly-polly. You've got to stop that snacking at night. Sweets. This morning I pulled an empty package of Oreos out from under your bed. I wasn't snooping; I had to vacuum in there. I'm going to quit buying them. You've been crying. What's the matter? What did he say to you?”

“Nothing!” I shouted.

“What do you mean, nothing? Here you go, shutting me out. We can't communicate.”

As we chugged up Mount Zion, I looked out the window, at the view. Beside the narrow gravel road, the earth had broken off and lay far below in an ephemera of civilization: blue rivers curving like the lines of a Magic Marker drawn over green paper, penciled-in roads, and tiny lights flickering like fireflies in the dusk.

“I read somewhere that 2 percent of the corpses buried aren't dead. Isn't that amazing?”

“You're making that up, and I don't want to hear it.” “No, it's true. They find the skeleton on its side, and that silky stuff lining the coffin is ripped—”

“That's enough.”

“Ripped to shreds.”

“I said that's enough. I'm trying to drive. You're going to make me have a wreck.”

“You're right. He's rotted by now. First, his nose rotted off his face, leaving a black, stinking hole, and then his fingers . . .”

“Shut up!”

Heat rushed to my head as I screamed, “Dead! He's dead! I killed him! I killed your son! That's why you hate me!”

Turning a hairpin curve with one hand on the steering wheel, she reached over with her free hand and slapped me.

“Do that again and I'll kill you,” I said. We were both crying. “I'll kill myself and everyone else.”

“You need help,” she said. “You are crazy.”

I reached into the pocket of my coat, carefully removed a Virginia Slim Menthol, and without looking to check her expression, lit it.

E
VERY
T
HURSDAY
I lay down on the couch, stared at the orange ceiling, and wept for an hour.

The ceiling was like a fire, sparkling in my tears, glinting off Leo's round glasses. Behind the licking flames his eyes were flat and cold. One day he asked, “Why don't you tell me what happened up there at your grandparents' farm—Pennsylvania, was it?” He looked at his clipboard. “Kentucky, I mean.” He pushed the box of Kleenex toward me, looking embarrassed.

The rooster crowed. I waited, steeling myself, but when he crowed again, I wasn't ready. I never was. It sounded like the end of the world—that's how country people started their day. Grandmother was already up, shuffling across the kitchen linoleum with heavy sighs. Usually Roderick went with her to gather eggs, but he was asleep, so I went. She carried a pail of seed, and I trailed after her, shivering. My tennis shoes were wet with dew.

“Heh!” she called to the chickens, scattering seed. “Here, heh! Cluck, cluck, cluck, chickee.” They stepped stiffly around her, clucking and pecking at the ground. She became like them, stepping and clucking, jerking her head to see.

On the fence post the rooster raised his head to crow again. His throat was exposed.
Cock
, I thought, turning my eyes from the red comb and wattle. When he crowed Cock-a-doodle-doo, I cringed. On the post, he stretched his scaly yellow talons. “Heh!” she called to him, tossing seed, but he ruffled his feathers, flapped his wings, and stared past her shoulder, meeting my gaze with his wet black eyes. I thought,
Scared of a chicken!
and went boldly into the coop after her.

Inside, I blinked. Rays of bloody sun slanted through the cracks in the boards, but the corners were dark.

“Shoo!” she said, kicking at a hen. “Git.” The hen squawked, flapping her wings until she rose off the ground and feathers drifted through the air. What was the smell? Like mouton, but stronger. A mother smell.

“Heh.” She pulled my arm. With her other hand, she shoved a bird out of her nest. “Stick your hand in there. Git that egg.” The egg, crusted with dried shit and feathers, warmed my hand. The bird jumped from her roost. Flap! Flap! Flap! Squawk! Squawk! I ducked my head and stepped back, but my foot landed on another bird; I screamed, and suddenly the dank close air was filled with down and straw, and I couldn't breath, like Roderick. He said I didn't know but I did. I clenched my hands, sucking in more dust, and the thick yolk ran between my fingers.

Suddenly, the door opened, throwing light on Grandmother in her apron, holding the pail in the crook of her elbow and the birds, smaller now. I saw another egg. In the doorway, the shadow of Florida said, “You all come in the house. Something has happened to Roderick.” I thought,
I knew that. How long have I known that?

Frommlecker said, “You had to repress the sexual attraction you felt toward your father, so you transferred it to Roderick. Eventually, you'll transfer it to me. All patients fall in love with their psychiatrists.” He looked at me with distaste, as if steeling himself for the day I would fling myself at him.

I spoke my first words to him. “You're overpaid. Henry can't stand you.”

“You're a brat.” He looked at his watch, signaling that the hour was up.

In the car, Florida pursed her lips and tried not to pry, but
she was like a kettle of water boiling on the stove; the whistle had to blow.

“Well, what did he say?” she blurted out. I took my glasses off and cleaned them on the hem of my shirt, pretending to think. “What? Did he say something about me? He thinks I'm a bad mother, doesn't he?” I decided to tell her the truth.