Welcome to the World, Baby Girl! (24 page)

Lenore Simmons Krackenberry was a large, handsome woman who always wore pins and scarves and gave the impression she was wearing a cape even in summer. She had silver-white hair, impeccably styled in a winged backflip, one of the many reasons her children secretly referred to her as Winged Victory. As soon as Toncie opened the door, Lenore swept in with arms outstretched, swooping through the house, leaving a trail of expensive perfume behind her, calling out for Dena in a loud voice dripping with honey.

“Where is that precious thang? I can’t wait to get my hands on you; where are you? You’d better get out heah this very minute before I have a fit.”

Sookie heard her coming. “We’re here on the patio, Mother.” She warned Dena, “Prepare for attack.” But by that time Lenore was upon them, gushing at Dena, “Oh, there she is, come heah and let me give you a great, big hug!” Dena stood up and winced in pain as Lenore crushed her in her arms, pressing pearls into Dena’s chest.

“When Sookie called and said you were heah, I just couldn’t believe it but heah you are in person.” She squeezed her again.

“How are you, Mrs. Krackenberry?”

“Well, honey, I’m just wonderful! Just wonderful! Oh, let me look at you, still as pretty as a picture. Look
at
that skin. Sookie, that’s what your skin would look like if you would have stayed out of the sun like I told you.”

Lenore collapsed into a large chair, flipping her scarf with a flair, and calling out, “Toncie, let me have a glass of tea, will you, honey? I’m exhausted from the drive. Dena, can you believe that Sookie and Earle moved so far out in the country? It’s practically an overnight trip to get to see my grandbabies.”

“Mother, it’s twenty minutes from town.”

Toncie brought a glass of iced tea. “Thank you … well, you might as well be living on Tobacco Road, way out heah. I wouldn’t
be surprised if my granddaughters don’t grow up and marry potato farmers. Where are the babies?”

“Upstairs. I had to lock them up to keep them from driving Dena crazy.”

Lenore said to Dena, “Aren’t they just the cutest things? I’m getting their portraits painted this spring.” Then she made a sad face and whispered, “Did you notice their little ears?”

Dena said, “No, not at all.”

“Mother!”

“Well, darling, they do have the Poole ears! I told her that before she married Earle but you know she wouldn’t listen to me, when every boy in the state was after her.”

Sookie sighed. “Nobody was after me, Mother.”

“And I suppose she told you about her brother Buck, living halfway across the world with the Arabs and the camels. Poor little Darla. But enough about us, how are you? You little angel, just setting the world on fire. Sookie said she would never speak to me again if I brought this up but I am just literally breaking out in a cold sweat trying not to throw you a party while you are here.”

“Mother.”

Lenore raised her arm in the air. “I’m not saying a word to anybody, but it just kills me that here you are in Selma and you are not even going to be written up. Just say the word and I can have the mayor here in three minutes with the key to the city.”

“Mother, now, stop it—you promised.”

Lenore looked at her innocently. “I know … but I just think she needs to know how loved she is. It just seems so sad. I could have had the Magnolia Trail Maidens and a brass band out at the airport and everything.”

Sookie looked at Dena. “You see, I told you but you insisted.”

Lenore said, “What did you tell her?”

“Mrs. Krackenberry,” Dena said, “that is so sweet, really, but I’m just here for a quiet visit.”

“Oh, I know you are, darling, and I would not intrude on your incognito for anything in this world. You career girls need your rest. I just hate it that we can’t show you some of our Southern hospitality;
we are all so proud of you, that’s all. I told Sookie the first time I met you, I said, now, that girl is going to go far. I think it’s just wonderful the way you young girls nowadays have such exciting careers. My daddy wouldn’t let me work … you know how men were back then, thought we were all too delicate.”

“Mother, I don’t know how anybody ever thought you were too delicate.”

Lenore’s eyes got big. “He did! And your father would never have let me work, and I don’t mind telling you, I regret it. If I had had a chance back then, no telling what kind of career I could have had.”

“The one you would have wanted was already taken, Mother.”

“What’s that?” Lenore said.

“There was already a queen of England.”

Lenore’s laughter was loud. “Oh, Dena, do you see how ugly she talks about me? I’ll tell you, nothing hurts so much as an ungrateful child, and I have two.”

“Yes, Mother, your poor life is hell. We just treat you so terrible.”

Lenore leaned toward Dena. “They accuse me of being a domineering mother, can you believe that? Me, just because I care about them. I hope your children don’t turn on you when they grow up.”

“Mother, face it, you
are
domineering.”

“See how she is; once she gets it in her mind about something, she starts to believe it.”

Dena smiled. “Oh, yes, I know.”

“See, Sookie, Dena knows how you are.”

Sookie looked at her mother and pointed to her watch. Lenore said innocently, “What?”

“Mother … you promised.”

Lenore sighed. “Oh, all right. Dena, she made me take a sacred oath that I would not stay longer than ten minutes. Can you believe it, throwing her poor mother out in the snow with the wolves.”

“Mother, it’s one hundred and three degrees outside.”

“Well, you know what I mean. I’m going! But, darlin’, do come back when you’re all rested up and let us go just hog wild over you. I’m just itching to roll out the red carpet.”

They walked her to the door. “Now, if you girls need anything, call. I’ll have Morris run over and bring you anything you want.”

She crushed Dena again and pecked Sookie on the cheek. “Good-bye, you old mean daughter. I love you anyway,” and she swept out to her car, where Morris, the driver, was waiting and had kept the air conditioner running for her.

“Now, do you see why I talk so fast,” Sookie said, closing the door. “I have to just to get a word in.”

“I think she’s terrific.”

“Oh, she is, but exhausting. Now, you know how hard it was to make her keep her mouth shut. She is
obsessed
with making everybody feel welcome to Selma. Last year one of the Daughters of the Confederacy officers came in from Richmond and she had all the poor Magnolia Trail Maidens stand in heat hotter than this for three hours waiting for her plane. Two of them passed out with heatstroke.”

“What’s a Magnolia Trail Maiden? Sounds like some sort of flower.”

Sookie laughed. “No, they’re not flowers, they’re girls, silly, all dressed up in antebellum dresses; you know, with hats and parasols. They are darling.”

“Do they sing or something?”

Sookie looked at Dena like she had lost her mind. “No, they don’t sing, they curtsy.”

“Curtsy?”

“You know, bow to the ground, like this.” Sookie did a deep curtsy. “When a person gets off the plane or train or whatever, we stand in a line and curtsy to them as a gesture of welcome.”

Dena was impressed. “Were you a Magnolia Trail Maiden?”

Sookie opened the door to the back patio and walked out. “Of course, and Buck was a little Colonel of the Confederacy. You know, we love to dress up. Besides, Winged Victory made us do it. Mother had her seamstress make the girls three miniature, little Trail Maid outfits and hats, but don’t mention it whatever you do or they will insist on trying them on for you. They wanted to wear them when you got here but I wouldn’t let them.”

“Why?”

“I didn’t want you to think we were any crazier than we are.”

They sat out by the pool under the canopy. It was another wonderfully bright day. Dena said, “Everything is so green.”

Sookie seemed surprised. “It is?”

“Yes. And it’s so quiet here.”

“It’s quieter anywhere after Mother leaves.”

“Oh, Sookie, stop. You’re lucky to have a mother, lucky to have lived in one place all your life. I’ll bet you know everybody here, don’t you?”

“I guess between the Simmonses, the Krackenberrys, and the Pooles, we’re probably related to everybody in town.”

“What was it like when you were growing up?”

Sookie took a sip of her tea. “Like a three-ring circus, with Lenore as ringmaster. The house was always full of people. The bridge club or garden club always had some kind of meeting at our house and Buck’s friends were running in and out. Poor Daddy, I miss him. He was the sweetest thing; he said the only reason he could live with Lenore was the fact that he was deaf in one ear. One time Buck said, ‘Daddy, why can’t you hear out of that ear?’ And Daddy said, ‘Wishful thinking, son, just wishful thinking.’ He was a scream.”

“Did you go to the same grammar school and high school?”

“I had no choice.”

“How great. And in high school, were you a cheerleader or majorette or something?”

Sookie looked at Dena in horror. “Dena, surely you don’t think I was ever a majorette. A cheerleader, yes, but a majorette? There was never a Kappa that was a majorette, Dena.”

“Well, I don’t know, what’s the difference?”

“If you don’t know I’m certainly not going to tell you. Honestly, Dena, sometimes I wonder where you’ve been all your life.”

Toncie came out with more tea. “Those girls are having a jumping-up-and-down fit to get out here, Mrs. Poole.”

They looked up at the second story of the house. In the window were little faces pressed against the glass, staring at them longingly.
“Look at that, like three little monkeys.” They waved and just as Toncie had said, they were literally jumping up and down.

“Oh, Sookie, let them come down.”

“Can you stand it after Mother?”

“Yes. Don’t make them stay inside.”

“All right, if you say so.” Sookie raised her arm and announced to Toncie, “Release the prisoners. Free all the infidels at once.”

A minute later, the three girls, dressed in matching bright pink-and-white-polka-dot bathing suits, came running and screaming out the back door headed straight for Dena.

Dena spent the day at the pool with Sookie and her girls and it was not until Dena had been upstairs in the girls’ room and had been introduced to seven hamsters by name, looked at every doll, every toy, every dress, and every pair of shoes that Dee Dee, Ce Ce, and Le Le owned that they finally calmed down and went to sleep. All three passed out in one bed, exhausted from the day’s excitement.

It was after nine when Sookie and Dena went back downstairs so they could relax.

Sookie handed Dena a glass of wine. “I hope you realize that you have ruined my children forever. From now on they will ignore me, think I’m just some old frumpy housefrau.”

“Don’t be silly. I hope I was all right with them. I don’t know how to act around children.”

“Are you kidding? They adore you. I know what’s going to happen. They’ll grow up and run away to New York to live the glamorous life with you and I’ll wind up just like poor Stella Dallas, old and broken, standing hiding in the yard, watching my children through the window get married to rich and famous men.”

“What are you talking about. You
are
rich.”

“I am not, stop saying that. Honey, Earle’s daddy was nothing but an old country doctor and Mother’s practically given away all our inheritance to the poor.”

“Really?”

“Well, not really, not all of it. She’s set up a trust fund for the girls. She didn’t run off and join the Peace Corps like Jimmy Carter’s mother or anything. Believe me, Mother lives well, but since Daddy
died, who knows what she’s liable to do next. She can come up with the craziest things.”

“Like what?”

“Just crazy stuff. Five years ago so many new people started moving here and she didn’t think the Welcome Wagon and the Newcomers’ Club were doing enough to suit her so she formed the Welcome to Selma Club … and I feel sorry for the poor people who move here. As soon as they hit town, Lenore’s troops make a beeline over to their house and swarm all over them like ants before anybody else can get to them. I said, Mother, it’s a wonder you don’t scare them to death. I know if I looked up and saw Lenore Krackenberry and her gang storming up my driveway with ribbons and balloons, singing at the top of their lungs, ‘Welcome to Selma,’ I’d move back where I came from.”

“Singing what?”

“Some old stupid song that one of her friends wrote. “ ‘Welcome to Selma, Selma, Selma … can we help ya, help ya, help ya.’ It’s just
awful
, but God knows people know they are welcomed.”

Sookie got up. “Promise me you won’t let me have more than two glasses of wine. Earle says I’m a cheap drunk and I get silly and talk too much if I have more than two glasses. I’m liable to get drunk and reveal all the family secrets.”

“Do you have any?”

Sookie sat down and threw her legs over the side of the chair. “Secrets? Are you kidding? In Selma, honey, we couldn’t have a secret if our lives depended on it. My life is an open book. Everybody in town knows that Buck is a big goofball and that Mother is a card-carrying crazy … and I’m probably not operating with a full deck myself.”

Dena was unwinding and the feeling was pleasant. “Sookie, tell me about your life down here.”

“My life? It’s just a plain old normal life. You’re the one who hobnobs with the stars. We are just plain old people, dull, dull, dull.”

“No, really, tell me, what do you do?”

“We just do the same old thing just about every day, year in and year out. Dinner at the club once a week, church every Sunday, and
brunch with Mother every Sunday at noon … that’s what my life has been, just the same old thing year after year from the day I was born.”

A wave of sadness swept over Dena. Sookie had no idea how lucky she was.

Dena’s childhood had become a blur. She could barely remember it at all. When she had been four her mother suddenly left Elmwood Springs and after that they had just drifted from one cold city to another and from one set of lonesome rooms in apartment hotels to the next. They were sometimes red brick or gray but they were always furnished with the sparest of furniture. And even though the buildings had fancy names like the La Salle, the Royalton Arms, the Highland Towers, and the Park Lane, they were never what they once were. The chairs and rugs in the lobby were always a little too worn and the halls were always bare. Even the neighborhoods seemed to look dim, with little light, and not quite but just on the verge of going down. These sad apartment hotels were filled with lonely people, the young who had been disappointed in love, had someone and lost them, or never had anyone. The old people in these hotels sat alone in their rooms, leaving only to walk an ancient dog or to buy an occasional can of soup that could be heated on a hot plate. All were living out their lives in these rooms, eating out, sitting at tables for one. Most had developed the habit of reading, and so their only dinner companion was the book from the library, their only tablemates the characters they were reading about at the time.
Usually, Dena was the one child in the building. But they never stayed long enough to really get to know anybody. She passed through people’s lives and never became more than that little girl who used to sit in the lobby and wait for her mother to come home. Most of her childhood had been spent in lobbies waiting for her mother or, sometimes, when she had learned to ride the streetcar, she would go downtown and wait for her mother in the ladies’ lounge of the department store where her mother happened to be working at the time. She would read or color; she didn’t mind. She felt better just being close to her mother and getting to ride home with her. Her mother was her entire world and she adored her. She loved the way she looked, her voice, the way she smelled. She was fascinated with everything her mother did. She loved to watch her put her makeup on, dress, fix her hair. When they went out she could not take her eyes off her; Dena was so proud to be with her. After work, when the weather was nice, they would walk for hours and window-shop and then they would always eat at some restaurant because her mother did not cook. And after dinner Dena used to sit and wonder what her mother was thinking about while her mother drank her coffee and smoked cigarette after cigarette. When they walked down the street her mother frequently walked very fast, and if you had seen the two of them you would have noticed the little girl, just a few steps behind the woman but trying her best to keep up with her.