Chapter 23
Birdie
“What is it now?” Frances asked with real fear in her eyes. At this point, I couldn’t blame her.
“Can you curl my hair again like you did last time?” I asked.
“I can try,” she said. “What for? You going somewhere?”
I pulled over a chair with a saggy cane seat and mumbled an answer I didn’t really want her to hear.
“You mean Jack from the bank Jack?” she said. I nodded. “He asked you out?” I nodded. “Wull. What time’s he showing up here?”
“At one.” It was only ten o’clock, but I knew this hair procedure took a while.
Yesterday morning Mrs. Tartt and I telephoned Mr. Allison at the bank.
She told him, in all her humble optimism, how she’d raised most of what she owed on the mortgage but was only two hundred dollars short.
Well Mr. Allison was surprised but he’d stammered that there was still nothing he could do unless the mortgage was paid in full.
So leaning into the receiver, I said, “Put Jack Walsh on the phone!” which the coward did.
He sounded thrilled to be passing the problem to somebody else.
Jack listened, made a growling sound at Mr. Allison’s response, and said he could make no promises but that he’d place some calls.
When he called back, it came down to this: If Mrs. Tartt could pay twenty-five hundred dollars, 90 percent of the mortgage, the bank could grant her one measly extra month to pay the rest. Jack had sounded angry and bitter, saying, “I guess that’s the kind of world we live in now. ”
“Mrs. Tartt, please think this through,” I’d said.
“What if you give them all the furniture money and then you can’t raise the last two hundred dollars?
They’ll take the house and you’ll have nothing left to live on.
” Well what’s the alternative, dear? she’d said.
Her point was, even if she did manage to sell her house in just three weeks, she still wouldn’t have her house.
She said she’d rather pay the 90 percent and hope that something came through in the extra month.
I suspected, like Frances, she thought there was still a durn chance Rory’d come back to save them. Her heels were dug in firm.
Before I forked over the money, I took thirty dollars out for Mrs. Tartt to live on, the twenty-two dollars she owed Picador and Polly, plus what we needed to get the current and the gasometer turned back on.
This time, cash in hand, there wasn’t a “truck delay,” though the fellow at the light company looked awfully smug about it.
After that, Mrs. Tartt now owed two hundred eighty-four dollars on the mortgage and had sixty dollars to live on.
Finally, I mailed a letter to Mama that simply said that Frances needed me to stay longer, I’d explain later but to please let Mr. Parkins know.
Frances parted the top of my hair with her fingernail.
“Alright, I’m gonna try and wave it, but it might not take.
You know, you’ve really let yourself go lately.
” Frances had told me this a few times since I’d been here.
Like I’d left the gate open and let my looks wander out.
She poured dribbles of Jo-cur wave set on my head and cut the comb through a section of my hair, pinched it, crimped it with a clip.
“Have you gone on a date since …?” She stopped combing to think about it.
“No,” was the safe answer. Frances knew I’d spent my last year of high school in bed with encephalitis, which sort of put a damper on my social life.
When I was well, it seemed like everybody’d already gotten engaged or even married.
She also knew about my “date,” if you could call it that, six months ago when somebody’s city cousin had come into the Foote, bought a pack of Juicy Fruit, and asked me for a drive in his Willys-Knight roadster.
When his tire blew out on the way home, I’d changed it for him since he didn’t seem to know what he was doing. I never heard from him again.
“Now look, no kissing on a first date,” Frances said. “And don’t think for a minute I forgot you kissed that man with an open mouth when you were sixteen.”
I turned back to look at her, Jo-cur dripping down my temple. “Have you never kissed Rory with tongue, Frances?”
“Of course not, that’s disgusting. That’s how the Spanish flu got around. It’s how people get sick.”
I thought about the small, dull world Frances believed I lived in, but I knew something she did not. It tasted like Red Hots. And after you try them, you will crave them the rest of your life.
Still, all morning, sordid little questions had been winding their heads around corners at me: Why even bother going on this date?
You’re going back to Footely. Don’t you know it’s gonna turn out to be a big fat nothing?
But when Jack had covered my hands with his at lunch, it had felt like he’d swallowed some of me, and I kept craving it—had for years—a darker, meatier grasp, not just as a cure for loneliness.
I was sucking on other people’s cigarettes, for God’s sake, eating a tomato like an apple to feel the juice running down my chin, to get at that dire craving.
“Maybe I should just stay home,” I said.
Clip between her teeth, Frances said, “You most certainly will not. This might be your last chance, Birdie.”
“Thanks, Frances,” I said. “I still wish he wasn’t a banker, of all things.”
“Well, too bad, the slims are picking,” Frances said, and I smiled. Slims are picking was what Meemaw liked to say.
She combed, pinched, clamped, and asked, “So which one you wearing? The blue dress or the other blue dress?”
“Frances is funny, isn’t she?” I said. “Actually, I’m wearing one of Mrs. Tartt’s old dresses. Charlie altered it for me.” It was the deep wine–colored one with matching buttons down the front. She’d cut it so slim though, I had to cross my legs to sit comfortably.
I felt Frances’s fingers tighten on the clip. “How much longer is she staying here?”
“Hopefully as long as I do.” We’d gone over this plenty, the fact that Charlie was helping and for free, real important words around these parts.
“There’s still something I don’t trust about her,” Frances said. She’d worked her way around to the front of my hair. “One day we’re gonna come home to find she’s taken every—” She stopped.
I looked up at her. “How’d that taste?”
She stuck another clip in my hair, then said, “Not good.”
Daily, I’d watched Charlie work off her frustration, scrubbing the kitchen sink down to a gleaming white bone, waiting for me to get Meg’s address.
I’d hinted around to Frances, but I hadn’t figured out yet how to get it.
Charlie washed and folded our clothes, organized piles from a hundred years of Tartts, hung up dresses and blouses and skirts on picture nails, swept floors, dusted what furniture was left, moved furniture to make a few of the rooms a little more sittable.
Here in the parlor, along with the faded red sofa, she’d found an old standing lamp with a busted shade and a steamer trunk stuffed with Rory’s winter clothes, remarking that we might enjoy propping our feet on his things.
For the newly redecorated “dining room,” she’d pushed together a pair of Mrs. Tartt’s lucky card tables, green felt tops peeling and stained, along with some old cane chairs with sagging seats like the one I was sitting on.
In the front sitting room that faced the road, she’d moved in a blue sofa with one leg missing that reminded me of a three-legged dog I’d nursed as a girl.
It certainly smelled like it. “Good heavens, my house looks like a Hooverville,” Mrs. Tartt had said, though not rudely.
She laughed because what else was there to do?
Frances made an S curve in my hair with her finger. “Why does she always act so interested in those boring stories about the big parties in the backyard? I swear, every time Viktoria brings out those pictures, I can practically smell the old people.”
“Why would you complain about that when it makes Mrs. Tartt happy?” I asked.
Charlie’d been helping Mrs. Tartt organize old letters and photographs that had no drawers to hide in anymore.
I didn’t always have time to play a hand of bridge with her or come look see at a picture she’d found, but Charlie’d stop whatever she was doing and go to her.
“I’m just tired of how she’s always kissing Viktoria’s feet. She’s not even family.”
“Says Garnett Pittman’s number one footlicker,” I said. Of course Frances ignored this. She liked to ignore big truths. “Speaking of, when do you go back to the Orphan?”
“Monday. It’s my turn to work in the office. I’m gonna have to go in and act like nothing’s happened.”
I thought it was a miracle that in a town as gossipy as Oxford, the Tartts’ situation hadn’t already gotten out.
“I’m supposed to write letters to all the new parents who adopted girls a few weeks ago, to make sure they’re doing alright.” Then she whispered, “Maybe Ella Jane’s been so bad they want to return her.”
It was so selfish it was funny, but then I heard what she’d just said. “You do that?” I didn’t know they did this. “Does that mean you’ll be writing Meg’s family too?”
She shrugged. “Probably. They got adopted on the same day.”
I nodded. I knew pouncing wouldn’t work. “I sure wish I could write Meg a letter,” I said. Nothing. Frances narrowed her eyes on a crimp. “Could … you get me Meg’s address, do you think?”
“You know that’s not allowed. You don’t even work there anymore. And I’m not getting in trouble for you again.”
I looked over at her, but she turned my chin to face ahead.
Swallow that pride, Bird, you can always cough it back up later.
I tightened my rear on the chair frame and said in a pathetic voice that made me ill: “I can’t have children of my own, Franny.
” She frowned, a raised ripple between the eyes, and set her hand on her heart.