Mississippi Sissy (11 page)

I placed Coco in her penned-up spot in the yard and started to run back inside so I wouldn't miss any of my mother's performance. “What are you running for, little man?” asked the Simpson Lady where she knelt at her prized flower beds and planted even more bulbs in there between the rose bushes. Her voice stunned me and I stopped dead in my tracks. A sun bonnet framed her beautiful face. My father once said she reminded him of a classier version of Jane Russell, but he told my mother “you're my tiny-assed Marilyn,” when she got upset at the compliment he had paid their raven-haired neighbor. “Cat got your tongue?” the Simpson Lady asked. “Or has that nasty little Chihuahua got it instead? That thing never shuts up, does it? Did I just hear your mother in there singing with somebody? Whose car is that parked there in your driveway? Couldn't make out what they were singing exactly, though their voices sounded pretty. Of course, anything would sound pretty compared to the yapping back in that pen. My husband is going to have to speak to your daddy
about that dog again real soon.” She fashioned the brim of her bonnet in a more pleasing angle. “So what's going on inside your house this afternoon? It sounds like such
frivolity,”
she said, that last word spoken with so much longing in her voice I thought it must be something nice she wanted for herself even though I had no idea what it meant. She turned her attention back to her flower bed and rearranged the plastic cushion she used beneath her pink pedal-pushers so she wouldn't get her knees dirty when she knelt and did her digging as she scooted along. “I think there must have been some sort of animal crawling around in here. Some of these plants have been flattened,” she said. “You haven't let Coco play over here have you?” she asked. I shrugged and stared at her. I thought of my friend's crawdad hole and, more troublingly, of the Simpson Lady's. She had just started emerging from inside her family's log-cabin cottage after the trauma of the Peeping Tom incident a few days earlier. I stood for a moment watching her weed the flower bed then ran up the back steps and opened the door to my kitchen. Ethel Merman's voice blared a few notes from
Gypsy
as I entered the house. When I turned to shut the door I saw the Simpson Lady look up from beneath her bonnet, her eyes bearing down on me as the
frivolity
she said was hidden in my house seemed to sadden her by its proximity instead of its presence.

“And now for our encore,” my mother announced after taking a big bow in front of me when I settled in on the couch again. She and Miz Kirby broke out singing “Together, Wherever We Go” right along with the cast album from
Gypsy
that Miz Kirby had brought along with her toga in that Jitney Jungle sack. When they finished the number, I applauded wildly once more. My mother took off her frizzy wig. She plopped it on my head. The telephone rang. When she answered it, a worried look came over her flushed face. “Could you go by the Jitney and pick up some milk first? And some Sunbeam bread. And some . . . ah . . . cherry Kool-Aid. Kim and Karole drank the last
of it this afternoon,” she lied, as I had seen her make a fresh pitcher, dumping all those cups of sugar into it, making it even sweeter than her tea. “Thanks, honey. See you soon.”

“Howard?” Miz Kirby asked.

“Yes. He says his neck is killing him so he's skipping his last P.E. class and coming straight home. Your husband's covering for him. Hurry. We've got to get this stuff off our faces. I've got to hide my costume. Here,” she said, picking up Miz Kirby's bra from the floor and throwing it to her. She pulled the frizzy red wig off my head. “Oh, God! I just know we're going to get caught!” she said, and the women started to giggle in their panic. They helped each other snap their brassieres back in place—first giving me a noticeable flash of nipples—and reassured themselves that their performance wasn't just foolishness on their part. Miz Kirby slipped back on her shorts and shirt. My mother pulled on some plaid shorts herself and a white blouse. She made sure its collar was turned up against her neck just-so, in a kind of trademark style statement she always made a la Dorothy Malone, one of her favorite stars. She once told me that in the months after my birth she went on a mad moviegoing spree with me swaddled in her arms. “It was the only place you'd stop crying from your colic. Maybe it was the smell of the popcorn or the movie music or the air conditioning or whatever was going on on-screen, but you quieted right down and seemed kinda hypnotized by it all,” she told me. I'd ask her again and again to recite the names of all the movies she'd seen when I was a baby and it was “just-the-two-of-us,” as she always put it, when she was trying to get me to take a nap when I was almost past my toddler years, the litany like our own private lullaby:
The Searchers, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Around the World in Eighty Days, The Ten Commandments, The Bad Seed, Baby Doll, Bus Stop, Giant, High Society, The King and I, Anastasia, Lust for Life, Friendly Persuasion,
and her all-time favorite,
Written on the Wind,
in which a shameless Malone “finally ended up wearing her hair in a
chignon. Do you know what a chignon is, sugar? Let me tell you,” she'd whisper as I drifted off to sleep.

My mother didn't break stride that afternoon as she tidied up the house after my father's surprise phone call and slipped on the scuffed-up pair of moccasins Aunt Vena Mae had bought her for her birthday at the Choctaw Indian Fair up in Neshoba County. Miz Kirby helped her make some more ice tea and vacuum the couch of Coco's little black hairs before we accompanied her outside to wave good-bye as she backed out of the drive. I looked over and saw that the only sign left of the Simpson Lady's presence was the plastic cushion she had left next to the flower bed. My mother and I hurried back inside the house. I watched as she hid her toga and wig under the skirt of her bed where she had been keeping them. She then put Kim and Karole down for their nap and ran to the kitchen to pour the fresh pitcher of cherry Kool-Aid down the drain. When she came back into the living room it dawned on her that Miz Kirby had left the
Gypsy
cast album behind. “Shoot. It's too late for me to call her once she gets home so she can come back and get this. Here, Kevin,” she said, handing me the album. “Take this thing outside and hide it. Can't chance your daddy finding it in here. Hide it good. I'll call Patsy later and let her know she left it.” I looked up and saw that my mother, in her frenzy about my father's imminent arrival, had forgotten about her blacked-out front teeth and looked as lovely as the naughty little snaggle-toothed tomboy who lived across the street. Should I point this out to her? Or should I wait and let my father wonder what was going on inside her mouth? The latter struck me as the more interesting idea, but before I could make a final decision she hurried me along. “Go on, Kevin,” she said. “Do like I say. Your daddy will be here any minute.”

I took the
Gypsy
album and headed out the door toward our backyard. At first I thought I might put it in Coco's doghouse but decided that she would chew it up. I next spotted the Simpson Lady's knee
cushion over in her yard and considered hiding the album underneath it, as they looked to be about the same size, but thought better of that idea after I tried it out and realized you could see the album beneath it if you looked really closely. Should I throw it behind one of her rose bushes or use the gardening trowel she had left behind with her other tools and just dig a hole and bury it in her flower bed? That's when it occurred to me: The best hiding place would be to stick it deep into the Simpson Lady's overgrown hedge where the tomboy had earlier made me push down my pants and sniffed at my butt hole. I scurried on tiptoe to the hedge and wedged the album deep inside the branches. “Who's out there?” the Simpson Lady called, her voice like a sentinel's bugled warning ever since she had been spied on through her bathroom window the week before as she soaped herself up in her tub while her twelve-year-old son—who had inherited his beauty from her—sat on the pot and worried about his homework and wondered if he should try out for the church choir. “Really! Who's out there?” came her querulous voice. “I can hear you! Who's out there?” I kept right on scurrying until I made it back to my house and heard the Simpson Lady's backdoor open just as I shut ours.

My heart was jumping inside my chest when my mother made her way into the kitchen and we heard my father pull up in the driveway. We stood at the backdoor's window, orange and turquoise toreadors darting about the curtain's pattern, a bull or two staring back at us from the untied sash that dangled toward the doorknob when the curtain was drawn against the afternoon sun that added too much heat to the already overheated kitchen. We listened as my father got out of the car and exchanged pleasantries with the Simpson Lady who had walked over to her flower bed to retrieve her knee cushion and gardening tools. My mother fidgeted with her white collar. She turned it up even higher on her neck as she strained to hear exactly what they were saying outside. The Simpson Lady laughed. “Howard
can make anybody laugh,” she said, more to herself than to me as she ran her finger along the dangling sash, her fingernail, resting now on the knob, the same color and size as the dash of red held by one of the toreadors in front of a charging bull. “All right. Let's Loretta Young it,” she said and winked my way, the inculcation of her love of show business and the names of stars she always dropped into our conversation a continual aspect of our closeness. She swung open the door. She moccasinned it down the back steps. I followed after her as my father stiffly turned toward us, his neck still encased in the huge white plastic brace the doctor had made him wear after his baseball collision. (It looked as if he, always the kidder, were mimicking my mother's love of white turned-up collars.) The Simpson Lady had taken off her sun bonnet and her hair was brushed into a perfect brunette pageboy about her beautiful face, her green eyes the same color as that overgrown hedge in back of her. She was, as my mother often had to admit, “quite lovely.” My father put one of his large hands on my shoulder and made sure I felt the full pressure of it as I looked away from her loveliness and over toward that hedge. His palm purposefully worked itself up against my own stiffening neck, rubbing it with a combination of affection and warning, each carefully disguised as the other. I could see the pink lettering of the
Gypsy
album peeking through the hedge like buds about to blossom deep within the thicket. “Coco!” my father called out to the dog who always went a little crazy at his presence. “Coco! No! Stop it! No! Stop!”

“Howard, I don't mean to be a nag,” said the Simpson Lady in her nicest voice, “but that Chihuahua really must find a companion or something to quiet its barking. My nerves are bad enough these last few days.”

“I know. I'm sorry,” said my father. “She'll calm down soon. She's in heat. I finally found a mate for her over just this side of Jackson. Met a breeder between innings at Battlefield Park,” he said. “She'll
quiet down once she has a litter. It quieted Nan down once she had one,” he joked. My mother rolled her eyes, but laughed along with the lighthearted ripple that surfaced from within our neighbor's long white throat, which was all the amusement the Simpson Lady could manage to muster in her wary state. “Good Lord, Nan. What's wrong with your mouth?” my father asked, having caught his first glimpse of my mother's blacked-out teeth.

“You look as if you've been eating too much licorice, dear,” said the Simpson Lady and pushed some of her stray licorice-colored hair behind a pierced ear. A lone pearl sat burrowed into her lobe as if an albino ladybug, shunned by its red sisters swarming in her flower bed below, had gratefully alighted there. “You're not pregnant again, are you?” she asked.

“When I'd eat too much chocolate as a boy, my daddy'd always say I looked like I'd been sucking on a sow,” said my father. The Simpson Lady allowed a less amused sound to ripple her body. She twisted the pearl in her ear.

My mother quite visibly blanched and stared down at me. “No, I'm not pregnant. Kevin and I were just fooling around today,” she said, thinking as quickly as she could for an excuse for her snaggle-toothed look. “We were playing Lucy-and-Ethel. It's one of our favorite games when we're feeling silly,” she continued and reached up to remove the black duct tape she had used on her two front teeth. She mussed my hair and moved her hand down along my father's, which still rested against the back of my neck.

“I've told you to stop letting him play that,” my father scolded her as I felt their fingers entwine. “You're not dressing him up, too, are you? I've warned you—no pretending he's a woman. Not even Ethel goddamn Mertz.” The Simpson Lady ignored this bit of family business and bent down to pick up her gardening tools. “You ought to buy a Chihuahua pup from us when Coco has her that litter,” my father propositioned, turning his attention back her way. “They make good
watchdogs. Their barks are bigger than their bites—but that's true for most of us.”

“Howard and his schemes,” said my mother. She lifted her hand and put her arm around my father's waist. On tiptoe in her moccasins, she kissed him on his cheek above the plastic brace. “He's always got a scheme going,” she said, alluding to his selling of World Book encyclopedias, breeding that little Mexican bitch out back, and planning on starting a Black Angus cattle farm with a buddy from here in Pelahatchie. “I'm glad to see you're out gardening again,” she told the Simpson Lady. “We all certainly hope they catch the pervert that scared you so.”

“Yes . . . well . . . ,” the Simpson Lady said. “My own family will be getting home soon. I'm going back to work at the phone company tomorrow. It is nice to see you all. Things are getting back to normal. My first petunias bloomed today. Life goes on.”