The Silver Star (15 page)

A couple of minutes later, he returned carrying a brown paper bag. He got into the car, reached into the bag, and handed me an RC Cola and a little cardboard cylinder.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“Chips and soda.” He passed Doris the same.

“This isn’t what I asked for,” I said. “I asked for orange soda and Cheetos.”

“That’s RC, which is the best cola on the market, and those are Pringles. They’re just out, and they’re better than Cheetos.”

“But that’s not what I wanted.”

“I asked what you wanted, but I didn’t tell you that I was going to get you what you wanted,” he said. “You have to pay attention to exactly what I’m saying.
That’s important if you’re working for me.”

I examined the container of Pringles, which had a little tab on the tin lid. I pulled back the tab, and it let out a whoosh. Inside was a perfect stack of saddle-shaped chips. I ate one.
“This tastes funny,” I said.

“What are you talking about?” Mr. Maddox asked. “Pringles taste better than Cheetos. But it’s not just the taste. They’re far superior in every way.” He
started lecturing me about the technological advances that Pringles represented. They were uniform in shape, he said, and they didn’t break and crumble, because they were stacked neatly
inside the cylinder instead of rattling around in a bag that was filled mostly with air. You didn’t have to deal with the sharp edges or burned spots that you sometimes found on regular
potato chips. With Pringles, you knew precisely what you were getting. Consistency of product. Pringles were the wave of the future. “What’s more, you don’t get that orange crap
on your fingers.”

“I like that orange crap,” I said. “It goes with the orange soda that I also asked for but didn’t get.” And, I continued, Cheetos were in fact better than
Pringles—in my opinion, anyway. They came in a variety of sizes, so you could choose big or little, depending on your mood at the moment. And they came in all sorts of different shapes, so
you could have fun trying to figure out what each one looked like.

Mr. Maddox was gripping the steering wheel, and I could see a vein on his temple pulsing, like his head was going to explode.

“That’s about the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” he said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” He pointed a thick finger at my face.
“I’m telling you, Pringles are better than Cheetos.”

“He’s right, you know,” Doris piped in. “Jerry knows what he’s talking about. You’d be best off listening to him rather than trying to argue. And just be
grateful he bought you anything at all.”

Mr. Maddox nodded. “You made a bad choice about the Cheetos, so I had to overrule it. That’s what I have to do when the people around me make bad choices.” He paused. “So
shut up and eat your damned Pringles.”

Later that afternoon, when Liz and I were riding our bicycles side by side back to Mayfield, I told her about the Cheetos-versus-Pringles debate.

“I don’t see why he got so bent out of shape,” I said. “If he thinks Pringles are better than Cheetos, that’s his opinion, but if I like Cheetos, that’s my
opinion. If I have a fact wrong, that’s one thing. But an opinion isn’t a fact. And he can’t tell me my opinion is wrong.”

“Bean, you’re getting all worked up over a bunch of snacks,” Liz said. “It’s not important.”

“He can’t tell me what to think.”

“He sure can, especially if you’re working for him—but that doesn’t mean you have to think it. At the same time, you don’t have to tell him you disagree. You
don’t have to argue.”

“In other words, I should just shut up and eat the damned Pringles?”

“Choose your battles,” she said. “It’s like with Mom. Sometimes it’s better to go along with what they say.”

That was what she did with Mr. Maddox, Liz said. He had strong opinions on just about everything, and what worked best was simply to listen. Mr. Maddox had told Liz he knew he could be a
hothead, and one of the reasons he liked her was that she didn’t get upset when he got a little out of control. She knew how to handle herself. He also trusted and respected her, and that was
why he gave her real responsibilities. He had let her see confidential legal papers about the lawsuits he was involved in.

“Like what?” I asked.

“I can’t discuss them,” she said. “Mr. Maddox swore me to secrecy.”

“Even with me?” I asked. Liz and I always shared everything.

“Even with you.”

By the end
of summer, Liz and I had saved up enough money for new clothes. Mr. Maddox had been paying me in cash, as I wanted, and I
had been keeping it in a cigar box in the little white cradle, along with the photograph of my dad and his Silver Star. Liz withdrew some money from her savings account, and one afternoon shortly
before school began, we went down to Kresge on Holladay Avenue. I thought we should get several cheap sets of clothes, but Liz insisted that, in addition to jeans and T-shirts, we needed to invest
in at least one really striking outfit. She kept saying it was important to make a good first impression at a new school. Liz picked out a bright orange-and-purple skirt and a shiny purple shirt
for herself. For me, she found a pair of lime-green pants and a matching lime-green vest. “You need to make a statement,” she said.

On the first day of school, we each put on our one really striking outfit, and even though there was a bus stop within walking distance of Mayfield, Uncle Tinsley drove us to
Byler High in the Woody. He also believed in making a good first impression.

The school was a big brick building, three stories high, with limestone pillars and trim. Hundreds of students were milling around under the huge poplar trees in front of the school, all the
black kids in one group and all the white kids in another. As soon as we pulled up, I realized that we had made a terrible mistake clothes-wise. All of the white kids were wearing faded jeans,
sneakers, and T-shirts, while all of the black kids had on flashy, bright clothes, like the ones Liz and I were wearing.

“We’re dressed like the black kids!” I blurted out.

Uncle Tinsley chuckled. “Well, I do believe you are,” he said. “These days, the coloreds dress better than the whites.”

“Everyone will point and stare,” I said. “We need to go home and change.”

“It’s too late,” Liz said. “Anyway, like Mom is always saying, who wants to blend in when you can stand out?”

We certainly stood out. The other kids, both black and white, were eyeing me, giggling, and doing slack-jawed double takes as I walked from class to class. “Hey, Day-Glo Girl!” some
white boy shouted.

That night I hung the lime-green pants in the closet, next to Mom’s debutante gowns. Tomorrow I’d put on jeans and a T-shirt. Liz said she was going to do the same, but I knew that
even if I never wore those pants again, they’d made an unforgettable first impression. From here on out, I was sure, I would be known as Day-Glo Girl.

Byler High was
one old building. Unlike the flat, modern schools I’d been to in California, it had stairways and high ceilings
and was musty as well as noisy, with lockers slamming and bells ringing between periods and students yelling in the crowded halls. It quickly became clear that kids who’d known each other all
their lives had no interest in meeting a new girl. Even if I gave them my friendliest smile, they quickly looked away. Maybe it was because of integration, but there was also a lot of pushing and
shoving in the halls and stairways. You could tell that Byler High was filled with riled-up kids itching for a fight.

When I was in sixth grade, I’d thought junior high would be hard, with changing classes, thick books, and mysterious subjects like algebra. Liz was the smart one, not me. But despite the
intimidating names, such as literature and comprehension, social studies, and home economics, the courses themselves were no big deal. Literature and comprehension was just reading. Social studies
was just news with a little history thrown in. And the first thing we learned in home economics—required for all seventh-grade girls—was how to set a table. Knife on the right side of
the plate, facing in; spoon next to that; forks on the left, lined up in the order they were to be used.

Our teacher, Mrs. Thompson, was a big, slow-moving woman with a powdered face and earrings that always matched her necklace. She said she was teaching us “survival skills” that every
woman needed to know. But you were never going to die because you put the spoon on the left side of the plate. The seventh-grade guys got to take shop and learn all these interesting, useful
things, like how to fix a flat tire, how to wire a lamp, how to build a bookcase. When I told Mrs. Thompson that fixing a flat tire—not setting a table—was my idea of a survival skill,
she said that was a man’s job.

We weren’t even learning practical stuff, like how to keep a budget or how to sew on a missing button. It was all about being proper, knowing where the water glass stood in relation to the
juice glass, and the need for correct foundation garments. Mom wouldn’t be caught dead in a girdle, and some of her friends didn’t wear bras, but Mrs. Thompson was always going on about
how you should never be able to see a woman’s body jiggle under her clothes, which was why all women should wear girdles—an essential foundation garment—and it was a shame in this
day and age that so many of them had stopped.

It was so boring I couldn’t even listen. I would have flunked the first test, except Mrs. Thompson said she’d give us bonus points for every kitchen utensil we could name. Most of
the girls listed five or six, but I really went to town, coming up with everything I could think of, from pizza slicers to cheese graters to nutcrackers, swizzle sticks to apple peelers to rolling
pins. I ended up with thirty-seven.

“This doesn’t seem right,” Mrs. Thompson said after she graded the test. “You’re one of my poorest students, but you got the best score in the class simply because
of your bonus answers.”

“You made the rules,” I said.

Soon after that first test, I learned that you could get out of home ec one day a week if you joined the pep squad. So, without really knowing what the pep squad was, I decided
to volunteer. Our job, it turned out, was to help the cheerleaders rev up the crowds during pregame pep rallies on Fridays, the day of the football games, and then at the games that evening. We
also made the spirit stick—a painted broomstick gussied up with Bulldog doohickeys—which was awarded to the class that showed the most spirit during rallies, and we painted the posters
that went up in the hallways before each game.

Byler’s first game that year was against the Big Creek Owls. When we met in the gym, Terri Pruitt, the senior who was the leader of the squad, said we needed to come up with owl-themed
posters. When I told Liz about it, she rattled off a string of really neat owl puns and rhymes we could use—“Pluck the Owls,” “Disembowel the Owls,” “Befoul the
Owls,” “Owls Are Foul Fowls,” and best of all, “Bulldogs Growl, Owls Howl.”

“Why don’t you join the pep squad?” I told Liz. “You’d be great.”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “The whole thing’s too tribal.”

At the next meeting of the pep squad, I read out Liz’s list of slogans. Terri loved “Bulldogs Growl, Owls Howl.” She said we could make a big banner by spray-painting the words
on an old sheet and hanging it on the gym wall for Friday’s pep rally. She turned to Vanessa Johnson, the one black girl on the pep squad, who was also in my English class. “Vanessa,
you can help Bean,” Terri said.

“So I’m the help?” Vanessa asked. She was taller than most of the girls, with long, athletic arms and legs. She crossed those arms slowly and stared at Terri.

“We’re all helping each other, okay?”

Terri found the sheet and spray paint and had us take them outside. As we walked down the hall, I started telling Vanessa that we should outline the words in pencil first, to make sure we got
them centered and they didn’t scrunch up at the end.

“Who put you in charge?” she asked.

“That’s not fair,” I said. “It was just an idea.”

Vanessa put her hands on her hips. “Fair? You want to talk about what’s fair and what’s not fair? What’s not fair is having your own school closed down and being forced
to go to the cracker school.”

“What do you mean? I thought the black kids wanted to go to the white schools. I thought that was the whole point.”

“Why would we want to go to the white school when we had our own school?” At Nelson they had their own football team, Vanessa said, their own cheerleading squad and pep squad, their
own school colors, their own homecoming king and queen. Nelson families took pride in the school, and on weekends, they would come in to mop and polish the place. Some of the families even painted
their cars in the school’s purple and silver colors. But now the Nelson kids had to give up those colors. And the former Nelson students knew none of them would ever be elected class
president at Byler, or named homecoming king or queen, or be declared “Most Likely to Succeed.” Byler would never be their school.

“If that’s how you feel, why did you join the pep squad?”

“I didn’t make JV cheerleader, even though I was better than the white girls who did,” she said. “That doesn’t mean I’m going to just sit in the
bleachers.” Her sister, Leticia, she explained, was one of the two Nelson cheerleaders chosen for the Byler squad. Vanessa said she would be at every game, cheering on Leticia and rooting for
the Nelson boys on the Byler team. Then she looked me squarely in the eye. “And I ain’t giving up. I’m going to make cheerleader myself next year.”

I held up the sheet. “Then I guess we should get cracking on this banner.”

“The cracker wants to get cracking,” she said, and for the first time, she smiled.

The following Saturday,
I was down in the basement of the Maddoxes’ house, folding laundry, when Mr. Maddox appeared at the
top of the stairs. He clambered down the steps and came over, moving in that strangely light-footed way he had for such a large man.