“Playful boys,” Mrs. Pearl would laugh, stitching the sleeves back on their jackets, the rips in their pants. It was a wonder to me that she couldn’t smell the whiskey breath set deep in her fine embroidery. But she didn’t, and I wasn’t gonna commit the sin of telling her what God surely didn’t intend her to know.
“Sometimes you’d think Mama’s simple,” Shannon told me. It was one of those times I was keeping my head down, not wanting to say anything. It was her mama. I wouldn’t talk about my mama that way even if she was crazy. I wished Shannon would shut up and the music would start. I was still hungry. Mrs. Pearl had packed less food than usual, and Mama had told me I was always to leave something on my plate when I ate with Shannon. I wasn’t supposed to make them think they had to feed me. Not that that particular tactic worked. I’d left half a biscuit, and damned if Shannon hadn’t popped it in her mouth.
“Maybe it’s all that tugging at her throttle.” Shannon started giggling funny, and I knew somebody had finally given her a pull at a paper cup. Now, I thought, now her mama will have to see. But when Shannon fell over her sewing machine, Mrs. Pearl just laid her down with a wet rag on her forehead.
“It’s the weather,” she whispered to me, over Shannon’s sodden head. It was so hot; the heat was wilting the pictures off the paper fans provided by the local funeral home. But if there had been snow up to the hubcaps, Mrs. Pearl would have said it was the chill in the air. An hour later, one of the Tuckerton cousins spilled a paper cup on Mrs. Pearl’s sleeve, and I saw her take a deep, painful breath. Catching my eye, she just said, “Can’t expect that frail soul to cope without a little help.”
I didn’t tell her that it seemed to me that all those “boys” and “girls” were getting a hell of a lot of “help.” I just muttered an almost inaudible “yeah” and cut my sinful eyes at them all.
“We could go sit under the stage,” Shannon suggested. “It’s real nice under there.”
It was nice, close and dark and full of the sound of people stomping on the stage. I put my head back and let the dust drift down on my face enjoying the feeling of being safe and hidden, away from all the people. The music seemed to be vibrating in my bones.
TAKING YOUR MEASURE, TAKING YOUR MEASURE, JESUS AND THE HOLY GHOST ARE TAKING YOUR MEASURE . . .
I didn’t like the new music they were singing. It was a little too gimmicky.
TWO CUPS, THREE CUPS, A TEASPOON OF RIGHTEOUS. HOW WILL YOU MEASURE WHEN THEY CALL OUT YOUR NAME?
Shannon started laughing. She put her hands around me and rocked her head back and forth. The music was too loud and I could smell whiskey all around us. My head hurt terribly; the smell of Shannon’s hair was making me sick.
“Uh huh uh.” I started to gag. Desperately I pushed Shannon away and crawled for the side of the stage as fast as I could. Air, I had to have air.
“Uh huh uh.” I rolled out from under the stage and hit the side of the tent. Retching now, I jerked up the side of the tarp and wiggled through. Out in the damp evening air, I just let my head hang down and vomited between my widespread hands. Behind me Shannon was gasping and giggling.
“You’re sick, you poor baby.” I felt her hand on the small of my back pushing down comfortingly.
“Lord God!”
I looked up. A very tall man in a purple shirt was standing in front of me. I dropped my head and puked again. He had silver boots with cracked heels. I watched him step back out of range.
“Lord God!”
“It’s all right.” Shannon got to her feet beside me, keeping her hand on my back. “She’s just a little sick.” She paused. “If you got her a Co-Cola, it might settle her stomach.”
I wiped my mouth, and then wiped my hand on the grass. I looked up. Shannon was standing still, sweat running down into her eyes and making her blink. I could see she was hoping for two Cokes. The man was still standing there with his mouth hanging open, a look of horror and shock on his face.
“Lord God,” he said again, and I knew before he spoke what he was gonna say. It wasn’t me who’d surprised him.
“Child, you are the ugliest thing I have ever seen.”
Shannon froze. Her mouth fell open, and as I watched, her whole face seemed to cave in. Her eyes shrank to little dots and her mouth became a cup of sorrow. I pushed myself up.
“You bastard!” I staggered forward and he backed up, rocking on his little silver heels. “You goddamned gutless son of a bitch!” His eyes kept moving from my face to Shannon’s wilting figure. “You think you so pretty? You ugly sack of shit! You shit-faced turd-eating . . .”
“SHANNON PEARL!”
Mrs. Pearl was coming round the tent.
“You girls . . .” She gathered Shannon up in her arms. “Where have you been?” The man backed further away. I breathed through my mouth, though I no longer felt so sick. I felt angry and helpless and I was trying hard not to start crying. Mrs. Pearl clucked between her teeth and stroked Shannon’s limp hair. “What have you been doing?”
Shannon moaned and buried her face in her mama’s dress. Mrs. Pearl turned to me. “What were you saying?” Her eyes glittered in the arc lights from the front of the tent. I wiped my mouth again and said nothing. Mrs. Pearl looked to the man in the purple shirt. The confusion on her face seemed to melt and quickly became a blur of excitement and interest.
“I hope they weren’t bothering you,” she told him. “Don’t you go on next?”
“Uh, yeah.” He looked like he wasn’t sure. He couldn’t take his eyes off Shannon. He shook himself. “You Mrs. Pearl?”
“Why, that’s right.” Mrs. Pearl’s face was glowing.
“I’d heard about you. I just never met your daughter before.”
Mrs. Pearl seemed to shiver all over but then catch herself. Pressed to her mama’s stomach, Shannon began to wail.
“Shannon, what are you going on for?” She pushed her daughter away from her side and pulled out a blue embroidered handkerchief to wipe her face.
“I think we all kind of surprised each other.” The man stepped forward and gave Mrs. Pearl a slow smile, but his eyes kept wandering back to Shannon. I wiped my mouth again and stopped myself from spitting. Mrs. Pearl went on wiping her daughter’s face but looking up into the man’s eyes.
“I love it when you sing,” she said and half giggled. Shannon pulled away from her and stared up at them both. The hate in her face was terrible. For a moment I loved her with all my heart.
“Well,” the man said. He rocked from one boot to the other. “Well ...”
I reached for Shannon’s hand. She slapped mine away. Her face was blazing. I felt as if a great fire was burning close to me, using up all the oxygen, making me pant to catch my breath. I laced the fingers of my hands together and tilted my head back to look up at the stars. If there was a God, then there would be justice. If there was justice, then Shannon and I would someday make them all burn. We walked away from the tent toward Mr. Pearl’s battered DeSoto.
“Someday,” Shannon whispered.
“Yeah,” I whispered back. We knew exactly what we meant.
I’m Working on My Charm
I
’m working on my charm.
It was one of those parties where everyone pretends to know everyone else. My borrowed silk blouse kept pulling out of my skirt, so I tried to stay with my back to the buffet and ignore the bartender, who had a clear view of my problem. The woman who brushed my arm was a friend of the director of the organization where I worked; a woman who was known for her wardrobe and sudden acts of well-publicized generosity. She tossed her hair back when she saw me and laughed like an old familiar friend. “Southerners are so charming, I always say, giving their children such clever names.”
She had a wineglass in one hand and a cherry tomato in the other, and she gestured with that tomato—a wide, witty, “charmed” gesture I do not ever remember seeing in the South. “I just love yours. There was a girl at school had a name like yours, two names said as one actually. Barbara-Jean, I think, or Ruth-Anne. I can’t remember anymore, but she was the sweetest, most soft-spoken girl. I just loved her.”
She smiled again, her eyes looking over my head at someone else. She leaned in close to me. “It’s so wonderful that you can be with us, you know. Some of the people who have worked here, well . . . you know, well, we have so much to learn from you—gentility, you know, courtesy, manners, charm, all of that.”
For a moment I was dizzy, overcome with the curious sensation of floating out of the top of my head. It was as if I looked down on all the other people in that crowded room, all of them sipping their wine and half of them eating cherry tomatoes. I watched the woman beside me click her teeth against the beveled edge of her wineglass and heard the sound of my mother’s voice hissing in my left ear, Yankeeeeeees! It was all I could do not to nod.
When I was sixteen I worked counter with my mama back of a Moses Drugstore planted in the middle of a Highway 50 shopping mall. I was trying to save money to go to college, and ritually, every night, I’d pour my tips into a can on the back of my dresser. Sometimes my mama would throw in a share of hers to encourage me, but mostly hers was spent even before we got home—at the Winn Dixie at the far end of the mall or the Maryland Fried Chicken right next to it.
Mama taught me the real skills of being a waitress—how to get an order right, get the drinks there first and the food as fast as possible so it would still be hot, and to do it all with an expression of relaxed good humor. “You don’t have to smile,” she explained, “but it does help. Of course,” she had to add, “don’t go ’round like a grinning fool. Just smile like you know what you’re doing, and never look like you’re in a hurry.” I found it difficult to keep from looking like I was in a hurry, especially when I got out of breath running from steam table to counter. Worse, moving at the speed I did, I tended to sway a little and occasionally lost control of a plate.
“Never,” my mama told me, “serve food someone has seen fall to the floor. It’s not only bad manners, it’ll get us all in trouble. Take it in the back, clean it off, and return it to the steam table.” After a while I decided I could just run to the back, count to ten, and take it back out to the customer with an apology. Since I usually just dropped biscuits, cornbread, and baked potatoes—the kind of stuff that would roll on a plate—I figured brushing it off was sufficient. But once, in a real rush to an impatient customer, I watched a ten-ounce T-bone slip right off the plate, flip in the air, and smack the rubber floor mat. The customer’s mouth flew open, and I saw my mama’s eyes shoot fire. Hurriedly I picked it up by the bone and ran to the back with it. I was running water on it when Mama came in the back room.
“All right,” she snapped, “you are not to run, you are not even to walk fast. And,” she added, taking the meat out of my fingers and dropping it into the open waste can, “you are not, not ever to drop anything as expensive as that again.” I watched smoky frost from the leaky cooler float up toward her blond curls, and I promised her tearfully that I wouldn’t.
The greater skills Mama taught me were less tangible than rules about speed and smiling. What I needed most from her had a lot to do with being as young as I was, as naive, and quick to believe the stories put across the counter by all those travelers heading north. Mama always said I was the smartest of her daughters and the most foolish. I believed everything I read in books, and most of the stuff I heard on the TV, and all of Mama’s carefully framed warnings never seemed to quite slow down my capacity to take people as who they wanted me to think they were. I tried hard to be like my mama, but, as she kept complaining, I was just too quick to trust—badly in need of a little practical experience.
My practical education began the day I started work. The first comment by the manager was cryptic but to the point. “Well, sixteen.” Harriet smiled, looking me up and down. “At least you’ll up the ante.” Mama’s friend Mabel came over and squeezed my arm. “Don’t get nervous, young one. We’ll keep moving you around. You’ll never be left alone.”
Mabel’s voice was reassuring even if her words weren’t, and I worked her station first. A family of four children, parents, and a grandmother took her biggest table. She took their order with a wide smile, but as she passed me going down to the ice drawer, her teeth were point on point. “Fifty cents,” she snapped, and went on. Helping her clean the table thirty-five minutes later I watched her pick up two lone quarters and repeat, “Fifty cents,” this time in a mournfully conclusive tone.
It was a game all the waitresses played. There was a butter bowl on the back counter where the difference was kept, the difference between what you guessed and what you got. No one had to play, but most of the women did. The rules were simple. You had to make your guess at the tip before the order was taken. Some of the women would cheat a little, bringing the menus with the water glasses and saying, “I want ya’ll to just look this over carefully. We’re serving one fine lunch today.” Two lines of conversation and most of them could walk away with a guess within five cents.
However much the guess was off went into the bowl. If you said fifty cents and got seventy-five cents, then twenty-five cents to the bowl. Even if you said seventy-five cents and got fifty cents you had to throw in that quarter—guessing high was as bad as guessing short. “We used to just count the short guesses,” Mabel explained, “but this makes it more interesting.”
Once Mabel was sure she’d get a dollar and got stiffed instead. She was so mad she counted out that dollar in nickels and pennies, and poured it into the bowl from a foot in the air. It made a very satisfying angry noise, and when those people came back a few weeks later no one wanted to serve them. Mama stood back by the pharmacy sign smoking her Pall Mall cigarette and whispered in my direction, “Yankees.” I was sure I knew just what she meant.