Chapter 30 #4
“Next,” Flossy said with no enthusiasm now, blotting her neck with a handkerchief she then stuffed down her dress as two young ladies walked up the stairs at once. “Hey, one at a time … oh. You’re a two-fer-one.”
Twins had walked up on the porch, identical twins. Skin-and-bones blonds, except one moved faster up the steps while the other loped behind her slowly. They were both tall, a little knock-kneed. I put them in their early twenties, with thin, drawn faces.
“You’re filthy,” Flossy said. “And I don’t mean in the prostitutish way.”
Mud was splattered across their pale drop-waist dresses.
I guess it must still rain where they came from.
One carried an old paper bag that looked sadly empty.
Their skin was tanned brown, more so against their white hair, or maybe that was just dirt.
Neither wore a hat, and I could hear my mother saying, You will ruirn your skin, doing like that.
Mud was also stuck in their yellow, stringy hair.
“Sorry for the mess,” the leader, and somehow dirtier one, said.
“We been on the road a while now. I’m Trixie, this Dixie.
” They had thick blond eyebrows Frances would have given anything to pluck.
I wouldn’t call these two pretty; I’d call them oddities that I feared might attract too many eyes.
I tried to think if I’d seen any identical twins in Oxford—surely there must be some, but I couldn’t recall any.
“I-dent-i-cal,” Flossy said, nodding. “Lemme guess, twenty … one?”
“Twenty-two,” Dixie, the slower-walking one, said.
“And you?” Flossy asked the other one, then winked. “Kidding, doll.” Neither laughed. “Where’d you two come from?”
“Texas.” Dixie sighed like just saying the state made her exhausted. When she blinked, her eyes stayed closed for a second.
“And you’ve been in this line of work before?” Charlie asked.
Trixie nodded. “All over Texas. Started in San Antone, then Abilene, Houston, Refugio, Beaumont … You ’member what come before Beaumont?” she asked her sister.
“’Redo.”
“Traveling whorehouse? Not a bad idea,” Flossy said.
“Circus,” Trixie said. “We had us a sideshow reading minds and that kind a baloney.” Trixie also seemed to be the slightly more talkative one. “A fella worked us on the side, doing this for extra.” I didn’t like the sound of that term “worked us.”
“We keep to ourselves and we’n share a room. We’re just looking to work a couple weeks and then move on,” Dixie said.
“Good, because we’ll only be open until mid-October,” Charlie said. “But you have to stay that long.”
They both nodded. Before she could tell them the rules, Trixie said, “Don’t worry, we don’t drink or do any a them other things.”
“And no rolling customers either,” Charlie said. “We don’t need to draw unnecessary attention out here.” I turned and looked at her—did she think identical prostitute twins from Texas wouldn’t draw unnecessary attention?
Trixie grinned, showing a crooked front tooth. “Too bad. Dixie here’s one hell of a pickpocket. She’n steal the thoughts right outta your head. We never seen a doctor, but I reckon we’re clean.”
“It’d be the only clean thing about you,” Flossy said.
Dixie, the darker-mooded one, said nothing in all this but she gazed over at the front door.
They both seemed itching to go inside, get off their feet.
I felt bad for them, especially after we’d done nothing to help the sick woman.
When Charlie’d said, four days ago, that a woman out there was gonna see our ad and say, This.
This is exactly what I’ve been waiting for, I didn’t think she meant circus twins, but my vote was yes. They looked utterly exhausted.
Charlie and Flossy looked at each other, since there were no more questions to ask.
Oh, but evidently there was one more.
“So, you two do doubles with a customer?” Flossy asked.
“Sure,” Dixie said, glumly. “We kinda prefer it.”
“Okay—” I stood up, almost toppling my chair, and gripped the back of it.
“It makes sense,” Flossy said to Charlie. “Charge more for it.” No, that does not make sense, Flossy, I wanted to say. They are sisters, for God’s sake.
“But you wouldn’t have to do that if you didn’t want to,” Charlie said to the girls. “You can say no.”
Flossy said, “I think what she means, Charles, is then you don’t got to do it alone.”
Charlie turned to me to see what I thought.
Lord, don’t look at me. All we’d hired today was that scary Ruby Slipper, and the economics of this business were very simple: For profits, we needed to hire people, and for people, we needed to hire a two-for-one deal because nobody else was left in the dang yard. I hated this business.
When Flossy told them they were hired, they were able to produce three dollars between them. “Close enough,” Charlie said.
After the interviews were over, my head felt leaden.
It was now a fact that we were opening this business, though it’d also felt like it when we’d placed an ad in the situations and I feared how many more times I’d have to confront this fact.
While I sliced the last of the summer’s tomatoes for sandwiches, Charlie leaned against the kitchen counter.
“Four girls isn’t enough, but it’s better than nothing.” I didn’t answer that; I was running a dance club. “I think we can be open by Saturday night. You know what I think we really need now?”
“Please don’t say gambling tables, Charlie.”
“A proper supper. You feel like cooking?” she asked.
“Lord, yes.”
Cooking always calmed me down, and shopping with more than twenty-five cents felt downright luxurious.
We’d collected six dollars today thank goodness, since we’d already spent all of Flossy’s money on the telephone.
Since I didn’t have time to go over to Freedmen Town, I went to City.
At the counter, Mr. Fudge looked surprised when I ordered “ten pounds of coffee, two pounds of bacon …” Also ham hocks, grits, biscuit flour, sugar, fresh black-eyed peas, vanilla, and a big sack of very end-of-season overripe peaches, like I liked them.
I had six mouths to feed now, most of which had been places I did not want to know.
I paid Mr. Fudge an extra quarter to put toward the Tartts’ overdue tab and I hurried on out of there before he could ask me who all this food was for and I found myself telling him outright, Prostitutes, sir.
Four of ’em at the house. Imagined conversations like this were always playing out in my head.
A grocery sack in each arm, I checked the mail at the post office.
I didn’t know if Jack was back in town yet, but sure enough, there was a note from him.
No postage, just a folded note passed between us via good ole Mrs. Nutt, who seemed to want our romance to succeed.
It read: Got back this afternoon. See you tomorrow night.
Can’t stop thinking of you. I grinned like a kid, and behind the counter, Mrs. Nutt chuckled, even though I knew I’d probably have to postpone, now that I was running a front for a brothel.
Just thinking that sent a cold wash of wonder over me.
It was a relief to be cooking again in the same language I spoke, no Italian tins of fish or French jars of goo, just plain ole Footely, Mi’ssippi.
“Golly, that’s a swell spread,” Flossy said, eyeing everything I’d laid out on the white-cloth-covered card tables: a steaming bowl of black-eyed peas with ham hocks; rice with gravy on the side; bacon was the best I could do for meat; a tomato casserole with hoop cheese and bread crumbs toasted on top; and cornbread because I didn’t have time for dinner rolls to rise.
For dessert I’d made a pound cake with sliced peaches and whipped cream to put on top.
“Not a egg or a darn pickle in sight,” Flossy said.
Before I’d gone to the store this afternoon, Ruby’d returned, courtesy of her own two feet.
She’d walked in toting a flour sack full of clothes, a round blue case of some kind, and, thank the Lord, a Little Fella portable radio set.
I’d followed along as Charlie showed the new girls the house.
Now that I saw it through newcomers’ eyes, the sparse furniture looked even more decrepit under the twelve-foot ceilings, and the drawer-less piles of junk seemed to have bred and birthed more junk.
“This place ain’t near nice as I thought it’d be,” Trixie’d whispered to Dixie.
“Coming from somebody who’s been wallowing in a pigpen,” Ruby’d said, and Flossy’d snorted a laugh. I couldn’t decide if those two were friends or blood-sworn enemies. Maybe they were both.
The twins Charlie had put in Rory’s room with the two narrow mattresses, and Ruby’d gotten the large yellow guest room across from the sleeping porch.
My hope was maybe the heat in there would make her too lethargic to “remove somebody’s face,” as she’d put it when Dixie had accidentally stepped on the back of her shoe.
“Whose house is this anyway?” Dixie had asked.
“I don’t know,” Flossy’d told her, “but they’re outta town, so we’re turning it into a whorehouse.” The flat fact of it had made me light-headed.
Charlie called everybody down to supper. She sat at the head of the table and I sat on her right, Flossy was on her left with Ruby next to her. Dixie was next to me with Trixie at the end.
The last time I recalled eating with at least five other people was at the church potluck.
This was not that. When everyone was seated, I bowed my head and said a quick thanks for the food—I was not nearly ready to bring up anything else with Him yet.
Charlie served her plate but then opened the ledger and started scratching things down.
She’d put on red lipstick and brushed her hair down against her neck and more or less looked like she knew what she was doing, which was good because I sure didn’t.
“We need more bedsheets, more towels, what else?” Charlie asked Flossy.