Heading Out to Wonderful (10 page)

Then one day Sylvan Glass walked through her door, seventeen years old, a stack of magazines she’d picked up in Hollywood in her hands, and Claudie knew in a glance who she was and what she was and where she’d come from and what she wanted.

It was like an itching in her fingers.

CHAPTER NINE

I
’M SYLVAN GLASS.
I’ve come to see about getting some clothes made.”

Claudie took it in, this tall girl standing there on her porch with a clutch of magazines in her hands. She felt some kind of something, some shiver run through her, as though she were looking at the figure she’d drawn on all those pieces of paper all her life. The lines. The curves. The carriage. Now here she was, standing in front of her on the porch next to the rotting old sofa her grandmother had died on. She took it all in, and she saw the clay she’d been waiting for all her life, the clay from which she would build her perfect model of the white women who had both mystified and fascinated her.

“Well, you better come in, ma’am.”

Sylvan laughed. “Please don’t call me ma’am. I’m only seventeen. It makes me feel like an old lady. Call me Sylvan. Everybody tells me you can do anything. I’ve been mad to meet you. Simply mad. Here, hold these,” and she thrust the magazines into Claudie’s hands, then ran to the sleek white convertible Boaty had bought her and came back with a dozen bolts of cloth in her arms.

They stepped through the torn screen door and into the dim hallway that led to the workroom. Sylvan took notice of the broken chairs, the dusty box record player tilted on its side, the remnants of other people’s fabrics, the cat smell. She just hoped there weren’t snakes in the house. She’d seen worse, back home. It didn’t bother her at all.

In the workroom there was a big wooden table, and two chairs, and Claudie moved around the room, turning on the lights one by one until the gloom dissolved and Sylvan could see how clean everything was. There was a dress form, an old wooden box filled with every kind of scissor, a sewing box, and an immaculate new Singer sewing machine. There was no sign of life, of living, just the implements of Claudie’s work. Sylvan had heard she had a daughter, but she didn’t see or hear anybody, didn’t sense that anybody did anything in this room except what they were doing now.

“I’ve seen you. You’re married to Mr. Glass.”

“Call me Sylvan.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. It’s not my way. I just can’t. People around here . . . What are you after?”

“Dresses. A suit. Some skirts and blouses. I don’t know if you can make them.”

“I can make anything.”

“I heard that. From a picture?”

“From a picture. From a pattern. From some idea in your head, if you can say it clear.”

“I’ve got pictures,” she pointed to the magazines, dog-eared pages flipped over at the corners. “I just went to Hollywood, California, and I saw so many things. I think I even maybe saw Miss Joan Crawford. Looked like her, anyway. And I got these magazines all about movie stars. Miss Lauren Bacall. She’s married to an old man just like me. Miss Lana Turner. Lots of movie stars. There’s pictures of what they wear to lunch at the Brown Derby, what they wear at home when they have other movie stars over for tea parties or cards, everything.”

“Where do you come from? Not from around here.”

“I actually do. Right near here, out in the county.” She made it sound like she came from some grand plantation, with servants and foxhounds. But Claudie could tell.

“And how was that for you?”

“Well, I’m here in town, aren’t I?”

“You talk like somebody on the radio.”

“I hope so. I been studying that thing a long time. You don’t smile a lot.”

“Haven’t seen anything funny so far.”

“Most of the colored women around here smile at me all the time.”

“They’re not me.”

“No. I guess not.”

“I make clothes. I’m real good at it. Ask anybody. Rest of the time, I just mind my own business. I don’t know who that Crawford woman or any of those other women are. I’ve never been to the movies. Why would I?”

“You’ve never seen such beautiful people. Every one of them. That’s why they call them stars, I guess. They just shine.”

Claudie smiled finally, a broad, sweet smile that made her look fourteen. “How old you say you were?”

“I’m seventeen. But I’m married already. See, you smiled.”

“You wouldn’t believe some of the things I hear, the way some women fool themselves. They think they’re thin when they’re fat, or the other way around. They act like they’re rich when they can’t even pay their old cleaning woman. You. You think I can turn you into somebody you’re not, just somebody you saw who looked like somebody else who makes movies. Well, I like a dreamer. I’m a dreamer. I can’t tell you I can do that, turn you into Miss Cranford or whatever her name is, but I sure can make you some pretty clothes to wear. Let’s see what you’re after. Let’s see those magazines.”

So they sat down and went through Photoplay, Motion Picture, Screenland, and the rest, Sylvan turning the pages as if they were the pages of an ancient family Bible, her face lit up with longing and hope. She pointed out daytime dresses that were so fanciful they looked like something out of a fairytale. Suits that made Claudie want to reach for the scissors and start cutting. Elegant, lush clothes, alive with desire, worn on rich, full bodies. Claudie felt her heart beat fast in her chest.

Here was a girl who wanted to wear the kind of clothes Claudie wanted to make, who had the kind of full, womanly body she wanted to make them for. She didn’t ask why, or where on earth in this town Sylvan thought she was going to wear them, she just knew this girl had an idea in mind of who she was going to be, and that excited her.

They went through every magazine. As they looked at the pictures, Sylvan told Claudie about this fantastic place she’d been, Hollywood, staying in a hotel called the Roosevelt, with maids who changed the sheets every single day, taking buses and taxis, eating a lobster, going to a movie studio, and actually seeing some of the houses where these impossibly beautiful people lived, at least glimpsing them in the distance through the thickly ivied front gates.

She’d gone to a department store, dragging her husband along. She’d bought so much material for the clothes she wanted they had to buy an extra steamer trunk, yards and yards of stuff even Claudie had never seen before. Silks, and wools so fine you could have pulled a yard through a wedding ring, and linens as sheer as a handkerchief.

They picked six things, and matched the materials to the dresses they chose. Sylvan undressed down to her slip, and Claudie took all her measurements.

“You have a good behind for clothes,” Claudie said at one point.

Sylvan laughed. “Big,” she said. “At least it’s good for something besides sitting.”

“All us colored women all have big butts,” Claudie said.

“Why is that?”

“Clothes fit better. And the men like it.”

“Do you have a man?”

“Men don’t like me. These men around here, they don’t want a strong woman with her own money and her own car. I might run off on ’em.” She laughed. “Probably would, too, if I had anywhere to go.”

It took all afternoon. By sunset, there were plans for twelve dresses, and Claudie already knew she’d never be paid enough for all the work she was going to put into them. But she didn’t care.

That was the great thing about Claudie. She just didn’t give a damn.

CHAPTER TEN

C
HARLIE BEALE NEEDED
a house to live in. The nights wouldn’t stay warm forever, and Alma wanted him to have a roof over his head before the days got short. He wanted to live in the country, but she wanted him in town, near the shop, said he’d get too lonely out by himself, even though Charlie said he was never lonely and liked the quiet. She wanted him to be able to stroll down to work, to water his lawn after dinner the way the other men and women did, to be a part of it all.

To Alma, there was no end to the wonder, the delight of being in town. She had grown up far out in the country, a family of twelve and even though she liked it when they drove out there to visit her sisters and brothers, nothing beat town. She liked hearing her neighbors’ voices on their porches at night, hated hearing the occasional arguments, late at night, from upstairs, the voices so close you could hear what the argument was about.

It wasn’t very hard to find a house for Charlie. There were only three for sale in the town, and one was too big and one was too small, so that left one. Alma picked it, even though Charlie said the smaller one would be enough, she insisted, saying that he’d find a girl and then have a family and outgrow the smaller one and have to move to one of the other ones, anyway.

He paid cash for it, the way he paid for everything. Eighteen hundred dollars for three bedrooms and two bathrooms and a big wide porch that wrapped around the front and the sides. The trees in the yard were big and old, eight feet around, and Alma said they would keep the house cool with shade and breeze, even if Charlie might miss the beauty of the sunrise out by the river.

He and Will painted some of the rooms, at night, after work, and Alma got a girl in to sweep and scrub the floors. Soon, Charlie Beale had the first real home he’d had in a long, long time.

In the weeks before school started, they’d drive around the county to auctions; there were always one or two every Saturday. They took two vehicles, Charlie and Will in the pickup, to bring home whatever things Alma picked out, and Alma and Sam in the old Buick. They parked side by side in dirt fields, and by the time she got out of the car, Alma was already running with excitement.

Charlie wasn’t used to the country auctioneers. He could never understand what they were saying in their rapid-fire singsong—it was like the country songs without the melody—but Alma would raise her hand when she saw something he needed, and keep it up until the auctioneer slammed the gavel down.

Ray Miller was always the auctioneer, and whatever didn’t sell, Ray would buy for pennies on the dollar. He kept it all in two big barns somewhere out near Glasgow, and he knew somehow that all this country stuff that people didn’t want today, milk-glass darning eggs and butter churns and whatnot, they’d come to want a few years down the road. They’d start to miss their grandmothers and grandfathers, the old ways, the home place, and they would fill the corners and knickknack shelves of their new houses with things that were familiar to them from their childhoods, even if the stuff had belonged to other people, other childhoods than their own.

Usually, they served lunch at these auctions, and they’d sit at long tables and eat Brunswick stew or hot dogs, while prim, sad-faced families watched from the porches of the houses they were soon to leave. They were festive and sad, those auctions, eager and mournful at the same time.

There wasn’t anything you couldn’t buy, if you thought you needed it. Beds and chairs and tables and rugs, of course, but also plates and glasses and sets of silverware, even good old sheets and mixing bowls and egg beaters and wooden spoons. A great find was an old pine blanket chest that turned out to have eight good quilts inside it.

People, some people, were already tired of the country, tired of living with the same stuff that had been in the house for generations. After the war, they wanted a clean sweep. There was a longing for the new, the modern, and a disregard, just beginning, for lives that had been lived in faithful seclusion, fathers and sons working the same land, climbing up and down the steep stairs their great-grandfathers had climbed, had sometimes even built by hand.

A whole hotel, Alum Springs, went out of business because people just didn’t believe any more in the curative powers of the waters, and Alma got for Charlie a whole set of heavy hotel silver, knives and forks and spoons for twelve, even if Charlie didn’t know twelve people in the whole town. She bought him a porch rocker for a dollar, and heavy maroon velvet curtains, everything he could need for setting up a kitchen, and rugs that ladies had walked on when their skirts still swept the floor.

There was even a grand piano, and Alma raised her hand to bid, but Charlie and Will begged her to stop—nobody played, no matter how beautiful it might be or even how cheap, so she stopped at thirty-four dollars. It went for forty-eight, and Alma settled instead for twelve huge bath towels with
ALUM SPRINGS
written on them, two dollars for the lot.

She had a vision for Charlie’s house that mystified the amused men. She wanted it not simply to house, but to attract, although who or what wasn’t quite clear. It was as though she already had a vision of who Charlie would become, and was outfitting his rooms so that a woman would feel at home when she arrived.

He moved in on the last Friday in September. Most of the furniture was already there, but Will and Charlie worked all day, putting the pieces where Alma told them to. They opened all the tall windows, and the warm Indian summer air blew through the house, the men with dark sweat rings under their arms as they lugged sofas and armoires from one room to another.

Charlie picked out a bedroom, not the biggest one, but facing east, so he might still wake at the first light of dawn and smell the first breeze of the day. Alma laid out the linen sheets on the bed, tucking the corners tightly so the sheets wouldn’t get all tangled up in the night. She put on the bed one of the strongest and brightest of the quilts, a pattern called Crown of Thomas, even though Charlie wouldn’t need it for weeks and weeks, just to add some color to the room.