Chapter 25 #4
“Wait a minute,” he said and pulled me toward him and kissed me again, harder than the last time, and with an open mouth—exactly what my mother had warned me about.
I wasn’t numb at all anymore. I could feel every nerve ending, every hair on my head.
Every drop of blood draining into my sister’s shoes.
Hands on my waist, he set his forehead on mine. “Where did you come from?” he asked.
I didn’t know. I couldn’t have answered that if I’d tried.
I told him I’d see myself to the door and I could feel his eyes on me as I walked up the brick path.
When I turned around to wave goodbye, he was leaning against his car, arms crossed, watching me.
I felt wobbly on my feet. I wished I could go down the brick path and fall into him one more time.
But I really needed to deal with something else right away.
Once I was inside, I stared down the long hall.
On my right, the door to the library was now shut to hide the piles of junk we’d stuck in there.
On my left, in the formal sitting room, I saw Flossy.
She was sitting on the three-legged settee, filing her fingernails.
She had on a pink silky robe, one side slipping off her thin shoulder.
Somebody had thrown a white bedspread over the smelly settee to, I assumed, tamp down the bad smell.
“Oh, hiya, I was just”—Flossy kicked up a large bare foot—“practicing my dance steps. For the new dance club and all.” I noticed her toenails were painted pink, something I’d never seen before.
“Is that … Frances’s bathrobe you’ve got on?” I asked. My bones felt loose, unconnected to my joints.
“Who’s Frances?” she asked. Then, with a little smile, she pointed a bony yellow finger at me. “You. Got a glow.”
“Where’s Charlie?” My voice sounded far off, already wandering through the house to find her.
“She’s taking a tub bath, which was not a bad idea. She fished a dead mouse outta this couch cushion while you was gone. I threw this bedspread on it from the room upstairs. When we getting better furniture in this crib anyway?”
I groaned. That bedspread, it was from Mrs. Tartt’s room. “I don’t—not anytime soon.”
She sighed. But smiled showing her huge false teeth. “Well. I suppose these things take time, they do.”
I thought about barging into Charlie’s bathroom, but instead I sank down on the edge of the settee.
Now that Flossy’d gotten some sleep and washed the kohl out from under her eyes, she had an affable face.
Though her big blue eyes had folds and wrinkles under them, and her full lips curved over her teeth.
Maybe if I asked her the right thing, I’d find out this was all just a big misunderstanding.
“I know I was complainin’ when I first come here,” she said, “on account a Charlie lied to me and all, but we had a talk, and I want a say thank you. For the employment opportunity.” She said it like oppor-toonity. “It’s real nice not to be working for Priscilla no more.”
“How long did you say you worked there?” I asked.
She hesitated. “Two years and change.”
“And why … did you work there?” And by the way, was it a dance club or a … brothel?
“She’s sorta where you go when you got nowhere else to go.”
“And there’s just the one … place of business there? In Sweetwater? No others of any kind?” My voice sounded shimmery and high, light on broken glass.
“She’s it and she knows it too. Overcharges us for room and board, cheats us out our pay, and if you can’t cover the cost, she sends in the bulldog—a guy who—” She shut up there.
Who what? Who are you? But she’d gone hollow, arching into herself. I guess Charlie’d told her not to say too much, though she added, “Most those girls ain’t never gonna dig their way outta that place. It’s real sad.”
“But this place’ll be different, right? Our dance club will be—different?”
She thought about it and gave me a shy smile. “I’m sure hoping it’ll be different. Charlie says it’ll be, you know, like we’re a family.”
“And do you have a family? Somewhere?” Maybe she’d say, Oh sure, a family dance troupe, actually, we traveled the country, doing our dancing act.
But again, she had that shy look and an embarrassed shrug. “At the moment, that’d be you guys.”
I heard a door shut in the house. “I’ve got to go find Charlie.”
She waved a finger at me as I walked out. “By the way, there’s something for you to see out back—oh and I want to hear about this guy. And no omittin’.”
I went through the swinging door to the kitchen. Charlie was sitting at the round table, writing in a ledger. She had on a dress I hadn’t seen before, slender, black with a white collar.
“I moved Frances’s things to the nursery upstairs,” she said without looking up. “And I heated up some rice and gravy for supper if you want.”
“I don’t. Want.”
My heart was pumping blood directly into my ears. I wondered, if I went up to bed, when I woke up, I’d be wrong about this? I placed both hands on the back of the curved wooden chair beside her. “Charlie,” I said. I swallowed. “Are you starting a …”
It was like a pencil snapped in her face. That was all I had to say.
“Oh, Charlie.”
She leaned back in her chair and closed the ledger on the table. “Please, just please, listen to me a minute, Birdie.”
“When? When were you gonna tell me?”
“Tonight, I promise I was going to tell you tonight.”
“You—I can’t believe you’d go and do this, Charlie.”
“Look, I know it sounds … unusual. But … why can’t we?”
“Because we can’t—and that is a ridiculous question to ask because we could be arrested!”
“But what if we aren’t?” She said it like it was a lark, a small possibility. It reminded me of Mrs. Tartt asking, But what if it doesn’t fail, Birdie? I had no idea those two had so much in dang common. “Just—can you please sit down, Birdie, sit down and listen to me?”
“No, I will not sit down.” I couldn’t feel my feet. I felt like I might fly up to the ceiling. She’d called it “unusual”? “You said we were starting a dance club like you used to work in, for dimes, not—whatever a prostitute makes.”
“But it will be a dance club, and the town will think it’s a dance club because we’ll run a dance club as our front.
” She jammed her finger on the cover of the red ledger.
“If we get seven girls and charge five dollars for the upfront and three for board, right there that’d be fifty-six dollars before we even open, and on top of that we’d make money selling Co-Colas and cigarettes and liquor drinks—”
“We are not serving liquor in a house for prostitutes!” It sounded so absurd, I felt like my eyes were gonna pop out of my face.
“We’d water it down.” Like that changed something. “At a dollar a shot, with all those cases of it in the cellar, we’d be crazy not to sell drinks. And we’d be running a clean house, no rolling customers, no tar smoking, no needles, no cadillacs.”
“I … I don’t even know what that is.”
“Cadillacs—cocaine, there’d be none of that here.”
I squeezed the back of the chair. “And what exactly do you think will happen. When Mrs. Tartt gets home.” I sounded like Garnett, speaking in fragments. I felt like I might faint.
“If they don’t find Rory in Jackson …” Charlie took a breath.
Her voice was calmer now, but her hand on the ledger was trembling.
“We’ll have made enough money to send them to the next town, maybe to New Orleans, to start looking, and they’re not going to find him, or not anytime soon, and by the time they get home for good, money made, shop closed. ”
“My God, Charlie, if Frances finds out about this …” Bringing Charlie in had been my idea.
Staying here to help with a dance club, again my idea.
My sister would hate me, she’d tell Meemaw—she’d tell Mama.
I had to close my eyes and just breathe.
“Why, Charlie? Why can’t we just open a regular dime-a-dance club like you said in the first place?
” This ridiculous idea of hers now sounded so utterly logical.
Charlie frowned up at me like I was an idiot. “You think dancing for dimes would earn enough to pay Mrs. Tartt’s mortgage and Frances’s damn sorority dues and enough for me to get Meg the hell out of this state?”
“Yes—no—I mean, not anymore!” Maybe I was screaming a little.
“And what about your family, Birdie? Didn’t you tell me your family stands to lose their house?”
“Yes.” I felt a heavy sinking in my chest, thinking of what I was supposed to be doing here. What I’d failed at doing.
“They sent you up here to help the family, isn’t that right?”
I nodded, my mouth going dry.
“But you’ve decided you’re going to let your family lose everything instead, all because you don’t think it’s worth taking the risk to help them?”
“That’s not what I want at all. We’ll … find another way.”
She blinked at me, almost smiled. “Do you hear yourself? You think money’s going to drop from the sky and make everything all better? You sound a lot like Frances.”
“Hey. Watch it, Charlie.”
Charlie set her jaw tight; she was getting angrier now, and so was I. “Our ships are sinking, Birdie. No one’s coming to save us.” She was enunciating her words like I might not understand her. “We are going down with it unless, for God’s sake, we make something happen!”
“I agree, but this is too much happening, Charlie. You don’t understand, I come from a town with absolutely nothing happening.” The image flashed in my head of me standing at the ladies’ counter waiting on exactly nothing to happen. “How on earth did you even—”
But I stopped there, suddenly. I was still standing over her. She raised her chin up the slightest bit, her jaw set. “When you were arrested at the train station, was it for doing this?” I asked.
“I was only offering the man a ride, but I was charged with attempted miscegenation.” Miscegenation—I’d heard of that in the paper. The coupling of blacks and whites. It was a felony now. Another reason Charlie’s sentence was so harsh.