Chapter 9 #4
Finally Frances stopped forking food into her mouth and leaned back. “Garnett said you could come to the Orphan with me tomorrow and see can you help straighten out the books.”
“I’m happy to help,” I said. I didn’t know how long I’d be here, but I didn’t have anything else to do when Frances was off volunteering.
“And guess what? A new baby got dropped off today and she is the most precious thing you’ve ever seen in your life.
She has these fat cheeks and big blue eyes—” My sister looked so ravenous, bloodthirsty, talking about that new baby, that if she said, So I stuck a fork in that baby and I ate it up, I would not have been surprised. (Mama says my humor type is depraved.)
“I hope we get some more,” Frances said.
“You’re hoping for more orphans,” I said.
“Just a few more babies. Even with this new one, we still don’t have but two.”
I looked at her but she did not see my point.
“How many girls do you have right now?” Mrs. Tartt asked.
Covering her mouth chewing, Frances said, “Seventeen now.”
“Poor things,” Mrs. Tartt said and tsked. “When Mary Pepper ran the Orphan, there weren’t but seven or eight girls there. Course that was down from twenty-five when the place first started. They opened it on account of the flood in ’27.”
I nodded; everybody knew the flood she was speaking of.
Daddy’d shown us harrowing photographs taken after the Mississippi River had swallowed entire families, houses, and all their livestock over in Greenville.
Daddy helped design the levee system to keep it from happening again, so it was interesting to me that what Daddy’d done for a living was also what got Frances out of bed in the morning to put on ridiculous outfits.
“Greenville and Oxford women’s clubs have always been close,” Mrs. Tartt said. “They asked me to join the senior committee, but I was already vice chairlady of the Flower Club. Frances, any mention of you joining the senior committee yet?”
Frances finished a mouthful of noodles. Finally she said, “No.”
At seven thirty, Rory still wasn’t home. No one said anything about it, and by eight, I was in my white nightgown in the yellow room, feeling warm and waxy. I’d be sneaking across the hall to that screened-in sleeping porch after I had my talk with Frances.
When I knocked on her door, she opened it wearing a pale silky nightgown with a bow tied in front.
She smelled like lavender from a bath and had on fresh lipstick.
She told me to come in though clearly she’d been hoping I was Rory.
As she climbed back up on her bed, I looked around.
Her bed had a roof like mine, but instead of a scorching yellow, hers was the color of the Lydia Pinkham female aid I sold at the ladies’ counter, a milky rose.
On a mirrored dressing table was a Mathilda Tate–esque silver hairbrush, a powder puff and box of powder, and a framed picture of, no surprise, herself.
Frances’s face peeped from a high-necked wedding dress festooned with white lilies.
Her hand-colored lips were red and parted like she’d just said Frances.
She wasn’t saying Footely, that was for sure.
I saw nothing in here from home, not even the jewelry box Granddaddy’d made her with her initials carved on top.
Where had it gone? I wondered. Had she stuck it in a drawer like she’d done to us?
I also saw nothing that looked even remotely like it belonged to Rory.
“What are you doing?” Frances said from the bed.
“Being nosy.” I opened her double-door wardrobe and saw it was full of hanging clothes, folded sweaters, drawers of stockings and brassieres. Growing up, we’d shared a small closet and one dresser between us. “Franny, what is this?”
It was a pink strappy satin thing dripping off a hanger, with high-cut legs, less than the size of a swimming costume.
I held the thing up and Frances’s cheeks went whiter; she didn’t tend to turn tomato red like I did when I was embarrassed.
She slipped off the bed and reached for it, saying, “Put that back, it’s private. ”
“Where’d you get it?” I asked, handing it over.
“I ordered it. From New Orleans.” She sounded mortified. “I was saving it for my birthday trip, but I guess we’re not going anywhere.”
“Bring it to Footely, you can wear it around the plantation.”
Something glittered near the crotch, and when she saw me looking at it, she said, “They’re called snaps. It’s the new thing, they pop right open. I can’t afford any kind of a malfunction again.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “What sort of malfunction?”
She stuck her nose up, Frances style. “You’d have to be married to understand.
” She hung it back up so it couldn’t be discussed further by her old-maid sister.
Honestly, I couldn’t believe she’d said as much as she had.
Frances did not like to discuss intimate relations, at least not with me.
The last time was probably in high school, when the topic had been who was or wasn’t “necking” or, according to her, “worse.”
So I didn’t press her, but I was curious: “Why aren’t Rory’s clothes in here? Does he not stay with you?”
“Of course he does.” But then she said, “I mean. Sometimes.” Then she said, “He likes to sleep in his old room down the hall.” I wondered, did she mean the door with the lock on it?
Maybe I didn’t know my sister as well as I’d thought.
That scandalous outfit, a husband who had to lock his wife out to keep her off him?
I chuckled at the thought. God, I could so easily entertain myself.
Or maybe I was just trying not to think about what I was really in here to ask.
I climbed up on Frances’s bed and sat at her feet, the way I used to when she’d come home after a date.
As I did, a pair of car lamps dragged across the wall.
There wasn’t much traffic out here so I thought, I better ask fast. Frances watched the lights, but the car drove on.
She leaned back on the headboard and crossed her arms.
I took a breath, about to ask her, when she blurted out, “How come you’re always so content?” She’d narrowed her eyes at me. “I swear, you’re the most content person I’ve ever known.”
“I am not content,” I said. She’d said it like this was tacky of me, like my country fashions she didn’t approve of.
“In fact, I am extremely discontented, every day, by something I taste or smell or read in the newspaper. How come you’re so content?
” I looked around the pretty pink plush room, trying to find a flaw. “Never mind, don’t answer that.”
“You are too.” She picked at a loose thread on the coverlet. “You’re perfectly content to live in Footely for the rest of your life. Work at the Foote, take care of Mama and Meemaw. Live in the same house you grew up in.”
“I’m sorry my life isn’t as swanky or exciting as yours. I’ll work on it.”
“At least nobody’s built up all these expectations of you. First it’s when are you gonna get married, then it’s when are you gonna have a baby, then it’ll be when are you gonna have another baby. You don’t even have to worry about having children.”
I smiled at her slowly, sweetly. It was true, I was damaged goods.
The mumps had scorched my ovaries. But that she’d bring this up made me want to ask her why her husband had lied that he was too busy to eat lunch with her when I’d seen him on the road.
Or why he didn’t sleep in the same bedroom with her, or why Mathilda Tate never once wrote her back after Frances’d helped her graduate.
I could’ve asked her these things, pretending it was innocent, but I wouldn’t do that to her.
All I said was, “You’re going to have beautiful children, Frances, just give it time. ”
And then I changed the subject before I lost my nerve tonight. “Listen, I need to talk to you about something.”
I turned to look at the window so I wouldn’t have to look her in the eyes and told her that the Bad Things Happening had managed to catch up with us, leaving out the more humiliating details such as how little Mr. Parkins paid me but also not reminding her of the four dollars and seventy-five cents in train tickets plus long-distance telephone call we could’ve saved if she’d just written us back.
So, in a way, I was being considerate of my sister’s feelings.
“We were hoping you could loan us some money to get by.” Loan was my own word, to maintain some pride.
She smoothed the silky gown against her thighs and smiled, I assumed, at my humiliation. My face felt hot, pimply. I felt like I was twelve. “About how much?” she asked.
I shot high. “Maybe two hundred fifty dollars?”
She backed her chin up. “That’s a lot.”
“Daddy’s annuity check is still eight months away.”
She took in a deep breath and let it out, considering it.
Up to now, I’d thought about her saying no the way I thought about the world ending—there was always the chance the sun could pummel into us, but I doubted it would happen.
This thinking it over she was doing felt worse than her smiling.
Did she really have to contemplate whether she should help her family out?
Did she understand what would happen if she said no?
Besides the fact they’d cut our lights off and we couldn’t pay for gasoline to get me to work, we’d be two years and forty-three dollars and fifty cents overdue on our property taxes.
They’d take our house like they’d taken the Tates’, which I’d deliberately left out because I wanted Frances to say yes without that fact.
But Frances was still thinking—and I wanted to ask her, Is your heart really buried so deep, Franny?
“You know what, if it’s that hard to decide, I’ll just ask Rory myself,” I said.
“No—no, do not bring up money around Rory.” She pressed her temples with her fingers, clearly shook up by this.
“Then I’ll ask his mother.” That didn’t sound like much fun either, but I’d do it.
“Perfect, then she really will think we’re poor.”
“Just because we don’t have any money, doesn’t mean we’re poor, Franny. Daddy was a civil engineer, for God’s sake. We’re still doing better than … most.” I took a deep breath. “The Tates lost their house and all their land for taxes last week. We’re better off than they are now.”
“Oh my God—really?” I searched her face for the hint of a smile but there was none. She looked as stunned by the news as I was.
“I’ll figure out how to ask Rory,” she said. “He’s just—he’s real sensitive about money right now. Or least when it comes to me.”
I made a point to look over at the wardrobe full of beautiful clothes and shoes. Frances waved her hand like they were old rags over there on hangers. “Mrs. Tartt took me shopping when we got engaged and put it on her account. I think she felt sorry for me when she saw my old dresses.”
I worried a split second that maybe this wasn’t just Frances’s selfishness or embarrassment that her family needed money, maybe it was something else.
But I was too relieved the asking part was over with to worry long.
“Thank you, Franny. And I’m sorry to do this to you.
” I wasn’t sure why I was sorry, but I was.
“Please write Mama tomorrow so she’ll quit worrying. ”
“I will, I know I need to,” she said, twisting her gold wedding ring. “She must’ve been a wreck that I didn’t telephone her back.”
“I’d call it a perpetual state of mind.”
Lights slid across the room again and a minute later, there was a gentle shudder through the house as a door closed.
Frances slid off the bed in her satin gown and went to the dressing table and looked quickly at herself in the mirror.
“I’ll talk to him, give me some time. Let me do it after my birthday. ”
“That’s three weeks away … can’t you ask him sooner?”
“When, at breakfast? Please pass the preserves, by the way I need two hundred fifty dollars? I’m telling you, Birdie, he gets grumpy when it comes to money, but I promise, I’ll find the right time.”
I didn’t love the idea of her asking him after I left; I was afraid it wouldn’t happen. We stared at each other a second.
Frances sighed. “Fine, stay for my birthday.” She shrugged. “It’s kind of nice to have you here anyway.”
Staying was definitely the safest choice; Mr. Parkins would have to wait. “I’ll be ready at eight to go to the orphanage.” I was glad I could give her some small thing in return for this. Debts itched my very soul.
When the house got quiet and I’d heard all the bedroom doors shut, I crept across the hall and lay down on a squeaky wire cot out on the old sleeping porch.
I’d brought my sheet and pillow over from the inferno but I was burning up, so I stripped my nightgown off and lay naked on the mattress.
My skin prickled as a summer breeze blew in through the metal screens.
You’re gonna live in Footely for the rest of your life, Birdie. You can’t even have children.
Sometimes at night, after the last customer left the Foote and there was nothing left to say to make them linger—a farmer stopping in to buy castor oil for the baby, the Coleman girl who’d sometimes sneak out with her daddy’s car—I’d pick a half-smoked cigarette out of the standing ashtray next to the red drink cooler.
And I’d sit on the steps of the store and I’d smoke it.
Wasn’t that filthy of me? It was something a hobo would do but it felt so intimate to put my mouth where somebody else’s mouth had been and I thought I could feel their lips and I didn’t care if they were colored or white, a man or a woman.
Though I did pick the Lucky Strikes or Parliaments that cost something, hoping they could at least afford tooth powder, but really how could I know?
I was an odd bird, I knew that. People had told me that most of my life.
But I’d learned how to live with loneliness in a way my sister never would.
She’d never had to. I’d be afraid for her if she ever did.