Chapter 9 #3
It wasn’t even nine yet but already it was getting hot.
I strolled under the eave shading the storefronts.
Only a couple dozen people were on the square at this hour, so not a crowd, but it would be considered a mass mob in Footely.
According to Rory’s Oxford Eagle newspaper I’d read this morning, Oxford was just under three thousand people.
Footely’s population was 330, 329 when I was out of town.
They seemed to have a store for anything you needed here, plus several you didn’t.
I passed Ruth’s Dress Shop, Boles Shoe Shop, City Grocery, Patton Beauty Shop, where I saw a lady through the window with a blue contraption on her head and wires springing out of it.
A store called Shine Morgan Appliance was peddling a Maytag Agitator Clothes Washer Wringer in the window for only $41 dollars!
How we would love to own one of those, our washer was ancient, but for forty-one dollars I could put a down payment on a Ford coupe.
In the window of the Gathright-Reed drugstore, a poster asked the ever-pressing question DOES YOUR HUSBAND SAY YOU ARE OFTEN IN POOR HUMOR?
with a picture of a woman, kind of wild-eyed, smiling, holding up a brown bottle.
When a man pushed the door open to the drugstore, a string of bells jangled so loud, I could see why she needed something to calm her nerves.
On the outside corner, an arrow pointed upstairs to Falkner Law Services and O H Douglas & Co.
Undertakers, meaning a person could get dressed, have their hair styled, get a better attitude, plan their funeral, and sue somebody all in the stretch of about forty feet.
Still, I passed an empty, dark window, like a tooth missing, every five or six stores.
Plenty of shopkeepers leaned in their doorways, waiting, maybe terminally, for customers.
So not everybody here was prospering. The people walking around seemed to cover a range of financial situations as well—a woman all dressed up in yellow silk with a patent leather handbag clipped past a slow-moving fellow with one shoe sole flapping.
I guess the better you dressed here, the faster you moved.
The tattered man joined a row of more men, white and colored, leaning on a rail, also waiting on something I wasn’t sure was coming.
Work, I guess. The shoeshine seat stood empty, with a man dozing at the bottom.
It felt as if much of the town was waiting on something. Then I realized what it was.
The largest shop was on the east side of the square, called the J.
E. Neilson Co. Department Store. A wall of wide windows ran across the front, shaded by a blue-and-white-striped awning.
I peered through the glass at a pair of stiff wooden people gazing back at me, wearing bright red sweaters, the wooden man holding a shouting horn painted with the words Ole Miss.
A banner over his head read College days will be here soon!
I realized almost everybody, from shoe shiners to sweater sellers, was waiting on the college students to return.
“I guess it gets busier around here when the university’s back in session?” I asked a man cleaning the shop window. He was stylishly dressed in wide khaki trousers and suspenders.
“In a month, you wouldn’t guess it’s the same town,” he said. He looked at my old-fashioned boots and homemade dress, deciding that while I ought to be a customer, I probably was not. But he was still friendly about it.
“You visiting?” he asked.
“My sister, Frances,” I said. “Married to Rory Tartt?”
He stopped polishing and his eyes turned flat as the wooden people in the window. He smiled but it was tight. “Course. I know Rory. Give our best to Mrs. Tartt.” He strode his fancy pressed trousers inside. Huh. I had no idea what that was about.
It was getting seriously hot now so I went in the Variety Everyday & Grocer to buy a cold drink with Frances’s money.
It had high, tin-tiled ceilings and smelled like wood shavings and had rows of metal bins of onions and something called a shallot, three kinds of potatoes, flour that came in prepacked bags instead of a barrel.
I reached down into a red cooler of ice as a delicious shock shot up my arm.
I drew out a dripping bottle of Co-Cola.
Mr. Parkins wouldn’t pay the extra bond for Co-Cola, so we only carried Chero.
As I headed to the counter, a colored man in a black bowler hat backed into me—“’Scuse me, ma’am,” he said.
I realized he was letting a white man check out ahead of him, which was no different from the Foote.
Except I’d noticed that the store next door to here, Boles Shoe Shop, was run and owned by a colored man, which Footely didn’t have, but I doubted white folks stepped aside for the colored people in there instead.
I also noticed that the colored man in the bowler hat stood waiting, silently, about five feet away.
At the Foote, folks at least chatted while they waited whether they knew each other or not.
Get yer seed in the ground yet? or That sure was some rain last night.
There seemed to be a cooler, stiffer silence here in the big town of Oxford.
After the colored man paid, I set my bottle on the counter. An old man in a red bow tie told me it’d be a nickel and, “Don’t reckon I seen you in here before.”
“No sir, I’m just visiting.”
“Must be here for the college, what you matriculatin’ in?”
I slid him a dime, and watching his expression, I said, “I’m here visiting with my sister Frances, married to Rory Tartt?”
The old man held on to my nickel change an extra second. Behind dry lips, his tongue moved over his teeth. He gave a short, curt nod and handed me the nickel without another word. It did not seem like folks cared to hear the names Frances and Rory.
I found a bench in the shade and fanned my warm face with my hat. Even the stationery I’d brought in my pocketbook was limp from the heat. I wrote carefully on my knee so the pencil wouldn’t stab through the paper.
Dear Mama and Meemaw,
I arrived in Oxford in one piece. Frances is fine and there’s no need to worry. Rory and Mrs. Tartt have both been kind and welcoming. Frances’s house has more indoor bathrooms than they have rear ends and I wish you could see all the stores in this town
I stopped writing, staring at a statue of a Confederate soldier. I refused to brag about a place Mama and Meemaw might never be invited to because Frances regarded us as a homemade embarrassment. So I erased the last line and wrote,
Frances says how very sorry she is she didn’t write or call but she will very soon. I’ll ask her about the money tonight.
Love, Birdie
I went into the post office in the back of city hall and bought a three-cent stamp, happy to be out of the sun for a minute.
When I walked out, I dropped Frances’s two cents change into a red box nailed to a post, with the words ORPHANAGE DONATIONS painted on it. It made a satisfying clinking sound.
I wasn’t sure what else to do with my morning, so I decided to go for a walk in the neighborhood, headed south, at least to give the illusion of a breeze.
Under the shade of old oak trees, I passed a few huge, gothic-style houses with deep green yards.
A pair of colored women with baskets on their heads were going from back door to back door, collecting laundry.
Like they had on North Lamar, the houses eventually grew less grand and the road turned to dirt, and I admired a middling-sized house with a pretty stone fountain out front with an angel praying up to the sky.
I was about to turn around and go back in the direction of the Tartts’ when a truck came rumbling up slowly behind me.
I glanced back and saw it was loaded with teetering fruit crates.
There was a car riding close behind it, and when the road widened, the car sped around the truck.
It was a two-toned gray whale of a car, a Studebaker like I’d seen parked by the barn this morning and—is that Rory?
The car drove on ahead but from behind I could see him, or somebody like him, short, roundheaded, a little man in a big car.
It turned right, heading away from the square.
Supper was just the three of us again that night, though this time it was short and sweet and definitely too salty.
It was an Oriental duck and noodle dish served from a blue-and-white urn.
It was awfully rich and had involved Picador frowning at an old newspaper clipping from, of all things, The New York Times.
I’d heard her murmur, “Miss Viktoria don’t need to be eating something this thick. ”
There was a long stretch of silence while we ate.
Frances and Mrs. Tartt both kept glancing in the direction of the road at the slightest sound.
Sitting across from us, Mrs. Tartt had gone to the beauty parlor today but her hair looked exactly the same as before, round, stiff, and creamy.
Which, I knew, was the point. Living with two aging women, I understood that change was to be feared since it only went in one direction, which was old, so the least you could do was hold on to the same hairstyle you had when you were thirty-nine.
It suited Mrs. Tartt though, framing her pretty, pleasant face.
For a little while, we ate in silence. The chairs were uncomfortable, shallow and upright.
I’d much rather we ate in the kitchen where, like at home, I could read the newspaper while I ate or listened to The Chase and Sanborn Hour.
At my rudest, I’d sometimes prop our orange cat up in Mama’s chair and serve her a plate of whatever I was eating with a napkin tied around her neck if I had to eat alone.
Problem solved. Somehow this was lonelier than eating alone.