Little Altars Everywhere (2 page)

Siddalee, 1963

O
ne thing I really hate about Girl Scouts is those uniforms. They bring out my worst features—fat arms and short legs. Mama tries her best to give that drab green get-up some style, but I just get sent home with a note because the glitzy pieces of costume jewelry she pins on me are against regulations.

The only reason I joined Scouts in the first place was all because of merit badges. I wanted to earn more of those things than any other girl in Central Louisiana. I wanted my sash to be so heavy with badges that it would sag off my shoulder when I walked. There wouldn’t be any doubt about how outstanding I was. When I walked past the mothers waiting in their station wagons outside the parish hall, I wanted them to shake their heads in amazement. I wanted them to mutter, I just don’t know how in the world the child does it! That Siddalee Walker is such a
superior
Girl Scout.

I love going over and over the checklists for earning those badges in the
Girl Scout Handbook.
I have eight badges. More than M’lain Chauvin, who constantly tries to beat me in every single thing. I have got to keep my eye on that girl. She is one of my best friends, and we compete in everything from music lessons to telephone manners.

I was making real progress with my badges, and then our Girl Scout troop leader up and quit right after the Christmas holidays. She said she could no longer handle the stress of scouting. She didn’t even tell us herself—just sent a note to the Girl Scout bigwigs, and they cancelled our meetings until they could find someone to take us on.

And wouldn’t you know it, out of the wild blue, Mama and Necie Ogden decide to take things over and lead our troop. I could not believe my ears. Mama and Necie have been best friends since age five. Along with Caro and Teensy, they make up the “Ya-Yas.” The Ya-Yas drink bourbon and branch water and go shopping together. All day long every Thursday, they play
bourrée
, which is a kind of cutthroat Louisiana poker. When you get the right cards, you yell out
“Bourrée!”
real loud, slam your cards down on the table, then go fix another drink. The Ya-Yas had all their kids at just about the same time, but then Necie kept going and had some more. Their idol is Tallulah Bankhead, and they call everyone “Dahling” just like she did. Their favorite singer is Judy Garland or Barbra Streisand, de
pending on their moods. The Ya-Yas all love to sing. Also, the Ya-Yas were briefly arrested for something they did when they were in high school, but Mama won’t tell me what it was because she says I’m too young to comprehend.

At least Necie goes out and gets herself a Girl Scout leader’s outfit. Mama will not let anything remotely resembling a Scout-leader uniform touch her skin. She says, Those things are manufactured by Old Hag International. She says, If they insist on keeping those hideous uniforms, then they should change the name from “Girl Scouts” to “Neuter Scouts.”

Mama drew up some sketches of new designs for Girl Scout uniforms that she said were
far
more flattering than the old ones. But none of the Scout bigwigs would listen to her. So instead, she shows up at every meeting wearing her famous orange stretch pants and those huge monster sweaters.

The first official act of Mama and Necie’s reign is to completely scrap merit badges, because Mama says they make us look like military midgets.

Whenever I gripe about being cut off just as I was about to earn my Advanced Cooking badge, Mama says, Zip it, kiddo. Don’t ever admit you know a thing about cooking or it’ll be used against you in later life.

Now at our meetings, instead of working on our Hospitality, Music, and Sewing badges, they have us work on dramatic readings. They make us memorize
James Whitcomb Riley and Carl Sandburg poems and then Mama coaches us on how to recite them. She calls out, Enunciate, dahling! Feel it! Feel it! Love those words out into the air!

All my popular girlfriends look at me like: Oh, we never knew you came from a nuthouse. I just lie and tell them Mama used to be a Broadway actress, when all she ever really did in New York was model hats for a year until she got lonely enough to come home and marry Daddy.

Our annual Scout camp-out always comes up just after Easter. I just dread it. I’m in the middle of reading a truly inspiring book called
Judy’s Journey.
It’s all about this girl who’s exactly my age, and she and her whole family are migrant workers. They have to travel from place to place, living hand-to-mouth. Judy works in the fields and never complains, and she is brave, and a hard worker, and very popular with all the other migrant kids. Her father plays the harmonica, and her mother is so kind and quiet. I fantasize around fifty times a day about being her instead of me. I would just kill to stay in my room and finish that book instead of going on a stupid camp-out, but you’ve got to do these things whether you want to or not. Otherwise any chance you have at popularity can go straight down the drain and you will never get it back.

You have to start early if you plan to be popular. Mama was extremely popular when she was growing
up. She was elected Most Well-Liked, she was head cheerleader, captain of the girls’ tennis team, and assistant editor of the yearbook. Everyone at Thornton High knew who she was. Even though it sometimes wore her out, she said
Hi!
to every single soul she passed in the hall. It was a lot of work, but that is how her reputation was built. Mama understands the gospel of popularity and she is passing it on to me so I won’t be left out on the fringes.

We head out to Camp Mary Alice real early on a Saturday morning. It is twenty or so miles from Thornton, in the deep piney woods. They named the camp for this very famous Louisiana Girl Scout who gave up her entire life for scouting. There is a main lodge built of logs with a huge fireplace at one end, long tables set up in the middle, and a big kitchen at the other end. Not far away, at the edge of the woods, there is a screened-in cabin filled with bunk beds where you sleep.

Right off the bat, Necie backs her Country Squire station wagon into the flagpole and bends it in half. I’m inside the cabin unfurling my bedroll when I hear this big uproar. I bolt out the door and—wouldn’t you know it—there is the Girl Scout flag flapping in the breeze a couple of inches above the ground! The Louisiana state flag with the mama pelican feeding her babies is right next to it, and the American flag is right next to that.

Mama is laying on the ground kicking her feet up
and down, just howling with laughter. Tooty, she yells, quit it! I’m tee-teeing all over myself!

“Tooty” is Necie’s Ya-Ya nickname, and all the Scouts flutter around me squealing, Sidda, why is your mother calling Mrs. Ogden “Tooty”? Why is your mother wetting her pants?

Well, I could have predicted that something like this was going to happen. You can’t go anywhere with Mama without things getting nuts. If it’s going along too smooth she will
invent
something just to stir things up. Sometimes we’ll be downtown shopping and everything’s going normal, and Mama will put her fingers in her mouth and let out the loudest, most piercing whistle you ever heard in your life. Then everyone gets startled and drops what they’re doing and looks around to see where the noise came from. And Mama, she’ll just bend over and pretend to be looking at a pair of shoes. Then she’ll lift her head and look around, acting like she’s just as puzzled as everyone else. But later, once she gets us in the car, she’ll laugh her head off, saying, Did yall see how I shook up those old fuddyduddies?

And that is only one of her tricks.

Necie sits in the car hooting her head off, too, and finally Mama pulls herself up off the ground and goes over to Necie, walking like Red Skelton.

She says, Good going, dahling. Done like a true Ya-Ya!

Necie says, Vivi, when in the hell did they put a
flagpole there? And they both crack up again and Mama lights them each a cigarette.

I stand off to the side behind one of the big loblolly pines, hoping Mama can’t spot me, but she yells out: Sidda, dahling, go get me my file out of my purse. I think I’ve broken a fingernail.

Great, I think, just great. This is going to be a perfect camp-out with my perfect mother, who I wish would shrivel up and blow away. Then I say a quick prayer so I won’t burn in hell for having such thoughts about my own mother. It can wear you to a nub, trying to be a popular person and a good Catholic all at the same time. There is no way in the world she can pull this off. It’s one thing for her to act half-normal in an hour meeting at the parish hall on Wednesday afternoons, but trying to act sane and sober for a whole weekend is a whole different ball of wax.

So what do our great leaders do? They just walk away from that station wagon and that bent flagpole like nothing ever happened and lead us off on the big hike.

Now, I just hate hikes because they always get me out of breath. Plus, I would rather simply look at the great outdoors than actually be in it. But I step along as quick as I can to keep up with M’lain and Sissy with their Ladybug shirts tucked into their pants. They’ve both got these neat walking sticks that they found, and their hair is done up in dog-ears, and everything about them is clip-clip.

You’ve got to understand the social structure of Troop 55. There are

1. The Popular Girls. M’lain and Sissy, and maybe Mimi Plauché. And me, if I do things right on a lucky day.
   
2. The Almost-Popular Girls. They try real hard but never quite make it. For instance, their leader is Rena Litz, whose father is the manager of the very first K-Mart in Central Louisiana. She dresses in brand-new clothes all the time but they’re cheap-cheap-cheap, and she has an accent from Ohio that sounds like she always has a stuffed-up nose.
   
3. The Unpopular Girls. At least they love each other.
   

and

• 4. Edythe Spevey.
  

Edythe Spevey is in a class all by herself. She has kind of a crow face with pimples around her big old honker nose, and hair so oily that M’lain says you could wax the floor with her head. (Oily hair is the worst thing you can have at Our Lady of Divine Compassion parochial school. If you have oily hair, you might as well just lie down and die and get it over with.) And—just to top things off—old Edythe
wears cheap pointy eyeglasses and crinkled-up shoes. She looks like an orphan, even though we know she has this fat mother who takes in sewing. In fact, just last Christmas, Edythe’s mother made her this special holiday dress of green felt that was designed to look exactly like a Christmas tree. Edythe wore it to a Catholic Youth Organization party and the thing actually had little balls dangling off of it, and every time she bent over to pick up the ones that fell off, you could see her underwear. Now, a true Catholic would try to be kind to Edythe, but I just can’t. It’s too dangerous. You could get lumped in with her, and then maybe even become her, and end up living in a trailer the rest of your life watching
Dialing for Dollars
.

Anyway, we’re hiking along like little marching rats, and Mama has on her white sunhat and sunglasses, and she’s holding the Super-8 like she’s shooting a movie in Hollywood. She adores that Super-8 and won’t let anyone touch it but her. She films all of us walking through the piney woods, and yells out, Yall
do
something! This is a movie camera!

You can smell the sun hitting the needles and see little mushrooms under your feet. If you quit thinking about everybody and everything, it gets real quiet and private, like swimming underwater with your eyes open. I stop for a minute to feel some bark peeling off a pine like it’s the tree’s skin. And then I look up and
suddenly realize that Edythe has almost caught up with me.

She says, Siddalee, did you see that monarch butterfly?

I wouldn’t mind seeing a monarch, but I panic at the thought of being left behind with Edythe. I act like I don’t hear her and take off running to the front of the group where my popular friends are. The sprint gets me winded, and I have to pretend I’m coughing, and palm my asthma inhaler to stop the wheezing.

I pray: God, please don’t let me get stuck with Edythe, and please don’t let M’lain see me sucking on this inhaler like Daddy.

Then Mama says, Okay yall, we’re gonna sing now! And she starts up with her old camp songs that only the Ya-Yas and their kids know the words to. I wish I could crawl off and hide from her voice and her legs marching like she is the general of the world. She sings:

Oh, she just makes me so sick! Who does she think she is, Mitch Miller? I signal to M’lain and Sissy that
my mother drives me crazy. I’ve got to let them know that I am not like her. But then—don’t you know it—they start trying to sing along with her! Stumbling over the words, acting like they’ve sung it a hundred times, when they’ve never heard it before in their lives. Mama keeps leading the big sing-along, and we march through the woods like in
The Bridge on the River Kwai.
Finally, I start singing too, all loud and full-throated. Mama always says, If you can’t sing it good, Siddalee, at least sing it loud.

By the time we stop to cook our food, I’m dizzy from all that hiking and singing. We have to dig out these little pits in the ground and drop hot coals in there, and then plunk our tinfoil packets full of potatoes and vegetables and hamburger meat down in there and let it all cook together. It takes forever and you get dirt under your fingernails and I just hate it. Mama acts like she’s an Indian princess in the great outdoors. But I notice that she’s got her these little packets of peanut butter crackers that she unwraps and eats, and a Coke that she slips out of her knapsack and gulps down. My throat is all dry and it’s too dusty out here. I don’t see how my Daddy can stand it, working in the fields all day long.