Chapter 14 #2
“Miss Calhoun, I know you don’t know me, but—would you be willing to help me find my daughter?
” She folded her lips inside her mouth like she expected me to say no and she’d take it like a punch in the face.
But it didn’t matter because she would just keep right on asking.
I knew people like her. Because I was people like her. But that didn’t change the facts.
Getting arrested doesn’t exactly make you mother of the year, I wasn’t completely sure I trusted this woman. And Meg was with a new family now who, according to Frances, could well afford to look after her. This woman didn’t look like she could afford a bowl of soup, much less support a child.
I buried my hands in my apron pocket. I just wanted what was best for Meg, whatever that was. I need to think about it. “Give me a couple days,” I said.
Charlie nodded and breathed deep like she was trying to accept that this was the best she’d get for now.
Her eyes looked bee-stung, they were so red from crying.
“I’m staying outside of town at Mr. Finch’s boardinghouse.
” She sort of shivered when she said that.
“He’s letting me sweep up for him, but I won’t have enough for another taxi until …
” She thought about it. “Tuesday afternoon. There’s no telephone out there. ”
If I was leaving on the next train, it wouldn’t be until the following day. “I guess that’s alright,” I said.
“Is there somewhere else we could meet? I can’t come back here.”
Frances would not be happy about this woman coming out to the house, but my heart had always bled harder than hers. “I’m staying out at Idlewilde at the end of North Lamar, about two miles from the square. You’ll see the carriage block out front, it says Tartt.”
I made a dent in painting the big girls’ ceiling before the others came in, but I’d have to slip in tomorrow to finish the rest. When I knew Frances was off getting beauty parlored at the Unique, I went home to bake her a birthday cake.
Not just a cake, a coconut cake. I’d bought the bag of dried coconut at City Grocery with my own piddling money.
As I opened and closed kitchen cabinets, Picador stood at the sink, watching me with a flat mouth. “Whatchou need, Miss Birdie? Lemme get it,” she asked a second time.
“Here they are,” I said and set three round cake pans on the counter.
“I’m on make Miss Frances a caramel cake today. So you go on in there and I do it.”
“I’ll make it. I’m baking a coconut cake.” I went to the pantry and scooped a bowl of flour out of the barrel.
When I came back out, Picador said, “Did your sister ast you to make her a coconut cake stead a my caramel one?”
“No, no, Picador, I just know coconut is her favorite.”
“I see,” she said and watched me pour the paper bag of dried coconut flakes onto a pan to toast. Way down low, almost under her breath, she muttered, “Well I prefer fresh.”
I looked at her. “Fresh … what?” She walked past me and down the cellar stairs and brought back up a wooden box lined with straw and took out a fresh green coconut. A red stamp on the side of the box said Baracoa, CUBA.
I’d never even seen a fresh coconut before.
Imagine that. I picked it up, puzzling over how to get the thing open.
Picador took it from me and hammered it with an iron stake, draining its milk into a jar, and then stuck the whole coconut, on a pan, in the oven.
When she pulled it out, it cracked easily into pieces.
She grudgingly let me take over after that but looked like she’d just had to teach me to boil water and there was still a pretty good chance I might mess it up.
By the time Frances got home many hours later, I’d finished the cake and hidden it in the cupboard, and the ordeal of my sister’s dressing ritual began.
Frances had a magnificent talent for stretching a procedure as simple as cladding herself for supper into an entire afternoon and still managing to run late.
I had nothing better to do, so I followed her around.
The Unique had plucked her eyebrows, though “not too much,” so they were a bit thinner and arched a little higher.
She very carefully tied a pink shower bonnet over her newly waved honey-brown hair and stepped into a bath.
I sat on the stool while she ran a pumice stone up her legs and the Curvfit under her arms and chattered about her birthday.
“I’m so excited, I asked for that bracelet from Lett’s …
You think he got me the bracelet from Lett’s?
… No, don’t tell me if it’s the bracelet from Lett’s.
” Then she got out and slicked herself in oil, powdered it all down again, did fifty face exercises to build her already beautiful cheekbones higher, and rubbed her face with chamomile oil so she wouldn’t look like a tomato.
(She glanced at me.) At five thirty she took a white silk dress out of her wardrobe, slim and hit her mid-calf.
Had somebody who didn’t know better assumed she was almost ready, I’d have told them she most definitely was not.
Eleven outfit changes later, here came the waterworks.
Now we were getting somewhere. She was too fat, too short, her bosoms were too small, her hips too round.
“Everybody has good clothes but me, Birdie.” By the time I’d brought her an ice pack for her face, she’d put the first white dress back on and was smiling in the mirror, delighted by her looks after all.
It felt like days later when Frances and Rory finally left for town.
Rory was trying very hard not to look annoyed at his wife on his wife’s birthday.
Tired from painting and cooking and reassuring, I told Mrs. Tartt I thought I’d just as soon skip supper tonight, that I’d come back down for the little birthday celebration when they got back.
On the sleeping porch, I shut my eyes—God, my body ached from painting only half that ceiling—but fifteen minutes later I woke up sore and stiff and wandered back downstairs.
Picador’d set the dining room table for cake before she left, along with Frances’s unopened presents.
A small white box with a pink bow was from Rory.
Mrs. Tartt’s gift was the box with a blue bow, which she’d shown me was a gold brooch from her own collection, but “only costume,” since she didn’t want to “outshine what Rory gives her.” I knew what else Frances had planned for this evening.
She’d hung the drippy pink bustier on a brass hook inside the door of her wardrobe.
“A literal birthday suit,” I’d teased her.
I could hear the radio playing in the parlor at the end of the hall, Kathryn Crawford singing “Love for Sale.” I’d rather listen to that instead of the talking in my own head. When I peeked in, Mrs. Tartt was sitting on the pink settee.
“Mind if I sit in here with you?” I asked.
She looked up, startled, and smiled. “Of course, Birdie, please, come sit.” She gathered up four hands of cards fanned out on the pink cushions, and I sat down.
“Well. Here we are.” She clasped her hands together. I’d been here three weeks, but she still took on the stiffness of a straight-backed chair around me. She was never rude—that would be rude—but I had no idea how she felt about the sister of the daughter-in-law she supposedly didn’t like.
“What were you playing?” I asked, patting the deck of cards.
“Oh, just laying out some bridge hands,” she said.
She stacked the cards on their side. Worn and powdered, they pictured a flapper girl lounging bare-legged in a gold fingernail moon.
“I used to play with Henry every night, honeymoon bridge mostly, contract if we had people over. Henry was a devil at cards.” I could hear the twist of loneliness at his name.
She’d told me he’d died four years ago, two years before Daddy.
She added, “I tried to teach Frances, but she couldn’t pick it up, so I just make do on my own. ”
“I’ll play bridge with you.”
“You play?” She sounded kind of suspicious.
“Sure, most Tuesdays down at the …” I smoothed down the front of my dress. “Ladies’ club.” I’d picked up a thing or two from Frances.
Braced and polite and clearly doubtful, Mrs. Tartt shuffled the cards, arching them in a perfect bridge.
She dealt out four hands; two were dummies since we didn’t have partners.
She fanned her cards, holding them close to her blue quilted housecoat.
We played the first set quietly. She won eight tricks, I won five.
Then I bid three but took six and she sat up straighter and said, “You’re good. ”
While I shuffled, she glanced over at her glass of something on the coffee table. “Would you care for a little nip of bourbon, Birdie?”
“Um.” I’d never tasted liquor before. I’d never really even seen liquor except when I didn’t see it on the train here. Once Meemaw drank too much cherry bounce and Granddaddy threatened to divorce her. Mama always said we’d get a “reputation” if we took liquor. “Sure, I’ll try it.”
She brought over a crystal tumbler from the brass cart and poured us both about an inch from the bottle of Old Taylor.
We raised our glasses and I drank it and a blazing fire shot down my throat, searing my stomach lining.
But then—it was a good burn. A smoky, rich burn.
My stomach growled from not eating any supper, so I took another sip.
“Where’d you get this?” I asked, picking up the bottle.
“I mean, if you don’t mind my asking.” A tag around the neck read BOTTLED IN BOND, which sounded legal to me.
Mississippi’d been dry since before I was born and so had the whole nation for over a decade, though the radio said Prohibition could end next year.
It’d be up to each state to decide. The Delta Dispatch claimed the river would freeze over before it ever ended in the state of Mississippi.