The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett - 10

“ W hat a … warm-looking room.”

That was what I’d said last night when Frances showed me where I’d be sleeping. It looked like a veritable torture chamber to me. The bed had a canopy roof over it and was surrounded by heavy velvet curtains on all sides and everything was yellow: the walls, the carpet, the bedding, the drapes—it would be like trying to sleep inside the sun. Sure enough, I woke up at dawn just as I’d feared: hot and buttered in the sheets.

Beside the bed, a gold-braided rope hung down the wall, which, Frances had said, “rang for the maid in the kitchen,” in response to which I’d jokingly asked if rich folks were really that lazy, whereupon she’d explained that there was a difference between rich and lazy. Something about the “obligation to let others do for you as they’d been hired to do.” She’d said it like a Bible verse. She looked a little deflated when she’d said the Tartts didn’t really use the ropes anymore.

In the bedroom-sized bathroom, I washed my face and put the blue dress from last night back on, mostly unwrinkled. When I came out, I noticed there was a breeze coming in from under a door next to the bathroom and it wasn’t Frances’s or Mrs. Tartt’s bedroom. I opened it and glory hallelujah . It was a sleeping porch on the corner of the house. It had two walls of floor-to-ceiling screens with a pair of iron cots and that promising breeze. It was dusty, it looked like it hadn’t been used in years. I whispered, “I will be seeing you tonight, lover.” And I closed it back.

As I walked past their still-shut bedroom doors, I noticed a door at the end of the hall near the grand staircase, with a large brass lock drilled into it. It locked from the inside. Going down the stairs, I wondered, Who would you lock out of your room in your own house?

The maids weren’t in yet, so I found a can of Community Coffee in the kitchen cabinet and a silver percolator on top of the stove. The stove was a huge black beast made by an outfit called Duparquet, Huot & Moneuse Co. It was fitted with cast iron and had four cooking compartments inside it, instead of one like our stove in Footely. It’d been converted to gas and had six modern cooking eyes and a grate on top. It looked explosive, warlike. I held my breath, turned a little red gas knob on the wall and flipped on the eye and threw a match in. I scooted back quick. A flame lit, gentle and polite as Mrs. Tartt.

While I waited for the percolator to boil, I looked around the downstairs part of the house. Ten minutes later, I had a pretty good handle on the place. This wasn’t a house, it was a dang suitcase. One of those big traveling trunks with compartments and shelves stuffed full of all their things. In the grand hall, two closets were both packed tight with coats and hats for all four seasons and everything from a spring drizzle to a full-blown hurricane. The deep closet off the dining room stored crispy linens, crystal and china, but also stacks and stacks of old magazines, newspapers, and catalogues from the past thirty-some-odd years. One random drawer held two shirts’ worth of buttons and a bird’s nest of thread, unused shotgun shells, playing cards, Christmas cards, dance cards, Y&O train passes from 1919 to 1926, and a Boy Scout handbook that looked like not a page had been turned. Meemaw’d say someone here is hiding something because on the surface the house looked nice and neat until you opened up a drawer. Not that the Calhouns threw anything away either. The Tartts just had so many more things they were not throwing away. None of it looked like it belonged to Frances.

When the coffee was ready, I took my cup out on the back porch. The morning was bright and breezy, not too hot yet. The yard felt like a room. The back was bordered by crape myrtle trees, to the left was a tall hedge of privet. There was an iron arch in the center you could walk through, covered in thorny pink roses. On the right side stood a black oily barn with a Studebaker parked next to it. A mockingbird complained from the silver hood ornament and a rooster crowed back at it and then a cow lowed somewhere. Two miles from town, there were only country noises out this far.

I found the cow standing in a muddy pen behind the barn. “Poor lady.” Her udder was bulging; maybe the yardman Rory’d fired was supposed to be milking her. There was a stool and bucket so I sat down to do it. It took a minute for her milk to drop, so I laid my cheek on her flank and rubbed her belly until she sighed and let it down. If they’d let her graze, she could probably knock that tall backyard grass out in a day.

I was whisking eggs and cream together in a bowl when I heard the screen door whine. “She don’t even say please—”

“Morning,” I said. Picador and Polly both stopped their conversation and nodded. “Mawning.” They were in plain white uniforms, no hats today.

“I made coffee,” I said. “Help yourself. And I milked the cow. I set it in the cupboard to cool.”

Polly looked over at the stove like this made her a little nervous. “Go on and siddown in the dining room, ma’am, we bring you breakfast in there.”

The thought of sitting at that long table alone. “I’ll fix it, I don’t mind.”

Little Picador smiled at me, sort of. It had a dab of frost on it, hovering around thirty-two degrees.

While they set their bags down and washed their hands, I struck a match on the back of the stove and melted butter in a pan. Before it browned, I poured in the eggs I’d very lightly whisked and raked the pan with a fork. Close behind me, I heard Picador whisper something.

“Picador, give her some room,” Polly said.

When the egg was slightly firm, I banged the pan twice on the stovetop, sprinkled in the chopped cheese I’d found in wax paper and some chives and a tomato I’d picked from the garden; then I closed the omelet in thirds like folding a shirt and turned it onto a plate. I leaned against the counter and took a bite. “Should’ve used more cream,” I said.

Picador eyed me and my egg pan from a distance. “If you don’t mine my asking, who teach you to cook, ma’am? Your mama or your maid?” The question was a slow, carefully measured recipe.

“My daddy taught me egg making, he learned it in the war. Me and Frances didn’t have help growing up.”

Picador looked over at Polly, one eyebrow up like she’d won a bet. Polly covered her smile with the back of her hand. I heard Frances’s voice in the dining room and I set my plate in the sink and grabbed my coffee but before I made it to the swinging door, Polly handed me a china cup and smiled and took the tin one away. “You using the help’s cup,” she whispered. “Watch out or your sister gone get on you.”

Frances and Rory were sitting at the dining room table, set for breakfast last night. Rory sat at the head with Frances sort of hanging over him, on his left, like a houseplant.

“Then how about we spend a few nights in Jackson?” Frances was saying. “We could stay at the Robert E. Lee, where you usually stay—”

“Morning, Birdie,” Rory said. He looked very happy to see me. Or maybe he was very happy Frances had to stop talking a second.

“Morning, Bird,” Frances said. Her hair was in perfect beige finger waves, she had ruby lipstick on, but she was still in a long pink bathrobe with a ruffle at the neck. I sat down beside her. “We’re talking about my birthday. Can you believe I’ll be twenty-two in three weeks? Practically an old lady,” she said. Then she patted my arm. “ Sorry. ”

Rory had on a tight blue tie today that made his face look very round. Circles ringed his eyes like he’d hardly slept, and even with his boyish face, I could see he was a few years older than Frances.

Picador came through the swinging door. “You didn’t eat no supper last night,” she said, pouring Rory coffee. They were almost eye level, she was so small.

“I promise to eat my breakfast, Pic,” Rory said.

“Picador,” Frances said loudly. “I’d like some cream .” When Picador went in the kitchen, Frances said, “Every day I have to ask for it.” She turned back to Rory. “Anyway, Garnett said there’s this restaurant in Jackson called Rotisserie and they serve filet mignon—”

“I have to go to Jackson so much already, dear,” Rory said. “Can’t we just go to dinner somewhere in town?”

But Frances was locked and loaded: “Then what about Memphis? The train only takes a couple hours. We could stay at the Peabody, I saw it in a magazine—they have these ducks that swim around in a fountain in the lobby.”

Rory smiled at me, the company, and lower, he said, “I told you, Frances, I don’t want us taking expensive trips right now, it looks bad. We ought to be careful ourselves, these are unpredictable times.”

“But. I want us to go somewhere.” Frances dropped her hands in her lap. “Just the two of us.”

Easing back from her, I saw that same look Rory’d had last night: I want to get out of here. But he said, “What if—what if we went down to the Delta for your birthday? I could see the plantation you grew up on and where all your ancestors are from.” He looked at me. “What do you think, Birdie? Don’t you think your mother and grandmother would like that?”

There they were, those slick little lies again. I licked my lips and aimed my answer at Frances. “Heavens, Mother and Grandmother would probably be tickled to death to have y’all at the Calhoun Plantation.” Frances was fixated on pouring the cream that Picador’d finally brought her into her coffee. It was practically white. I gave her an extra second to think about Rory getting a peek at our grand lifestyle, then I said, “But I’m afraid this is just not a good time. Mother hasn’t been feeling well lately.”

“Are you sure?” Rory said. “I thought it sounded like a good idea—”

“Supper in town’s just fine,” Frances said. She took a sip of her cream with coffee.

A few minutes later, Mrs. Tartt came in wearing a long, pale blue housecoat. “Good morning. Morning, son,” she said and touched the top of his shoulder.

“Mother,” Rory said and refolded his napkin on his lap.

Smoothing her housecoat under her bottom, she sat on Rory’s right. Right on cue, Picador came in and set a plate with two shot-glass-sized biscuits in front of Mrs. Tartt and a plate of pancakes in front of Rory. She served Frances her single piece of toast last.

“How do you always know what I want, Pic?” Rory said and grinned at her. He seemed more affectionate with her than he was with his own mother.

“Won’t you eat something, Birdie?” Mrs. Tartt said.

“She made herself eggs ,” Picador said and went back in the kitchen.

“You like to cook?” Mrs. Tartt said, smoothing butter on a biscuit. “I used to cook all the time when I first got married. Frances doesn’t like to.”

“I like to cook ,” Frances said.

I patted her arm and said, “We know, but please don’t.” I’d pay for that later. Frances said nothing, but Mrs. Tartt smiled. Least somebody here thought I was funny.

“Before Henry’d opened the bank, he liked to cook too. Course the next year Rory was born and we hired Picador.” She looked at Rory, waiting for him to look back at her. He didn’t. “Last time I went in the bank I hardly saw a soul left from Henry’s days,” she said.

“When did you go to the bank, Mama?” Rory asked. He was looking at her now, his fork in the air.

“Oh it’s been a month, you remember, I came in for my dividend. That reminds me, when you get to the office, I want you to telephone Jackson and check on the Fraser painting. That restorer’s had it for months.” Rory nodded and went back to eating his pancakes.

“What all do you do at the bank?” I asked him. I’d never even been inside a bank before. Daddy’d called bankers crooks.

“He’s a vice president,” Frances said.

“I handle investments mostly, speculation, futures,” Rory said. “We’re in all the big American exchanges, a few overseas too.” He sounded confident, which I took as a good sign since I was here to ask for money. I also took it to mean he was still making some, even in these “unpredictable” times. “We write mortgages and loans, too, though of course no one’s loaning much of anything these days.”

“That,” I said, “is a shame.”

“How is the market doing, son?” Mrs. Tartt asked. “I saw in the paper this week it was up a little.”

“Down yesterday,” Rory said. “There’s no point worrying about it.”

He stood up from the table, and Frances touched his hand. “Don’t forget it’s my day at the Orphan and you said you’d drive me since Pripp can’t.”

We’d discussed this last night, when I’d asked Frances if she could change her “day” and spend it with me. She’d looked offended and said, “But it’s my day .”

“And I was thinking Birdie could ride along with us and you could let her out at the square to look around, and maybe she could come in and see the bank too—”

“I’m sorry, I forgot. I can’t drive you this morning.” Rory dug down in his pants pocket and set a quarter and three dimes on the table. He took back one of the dimes. “I have to be in early. See can Mr. Binny come pick you up.”

“What if … we all had lunch together, then?” Frances said. “I could get a ride to the bank around noon and meet you both there, Garnett won’t mind—”

“I can’t leave work, Frances. I’ve got meetings one after the other. My secretary’ll bring me something for lunch.” He bumped his lips on her cheek. “I’ll try not to be too late. See you tonight.”

When Mrs. Tartt had left the table too and it was just us, Frances said, “Birdie.”

“I’m sorry, but you cook like you’re trying to poison somebody—”

“Thanks, for what you said about the trip home. I promise I’ll bring Rory home one day, I just need a little more time.”

“Don’t worry, I’m sure your ancestors will understand.”

I followed her to the telephone in the hall, but before she picked it up, she eyed me up. “Garnett’s been looking for somebody to work on the books. And you’re pretty good at that.” As she informed me of this breaking news, she tapped her foot, thinking. “I’ll ask if you can come in with me tomorrow and help out in the office.” It wasn’t a question.

She picked up the telephone and asked the operator to ring Mr. Binny to come get her, I gathered so she wouldn’t have to pay for the call. Then she started up the stairs. “Get ready to go in twenty minutes. And don’t wear that dress.”

I owned two pairs of shoes. They were on a strict schedule. My W. B. Coon black button-up boots from 1925 were worn on Sundays and special occasions, and my comfortable brown-and-white oxfords I wore all the other days, including today. To make up for it, I put on blue dress number three, the nicest one, with imitation pearl buttons, and clipped my brown hair back the way Frances had done it last night, though it still lay lank against my face.

Frances came into my yellow room. She had on an “industrious yet fashionable” volunteer look today: olive-colored dress with lots of square pockets and a red kerchief tied around her long neck. She looked my outfit over but said nothing, which I found right rude—I hadn’t seen her in a year and she could at least take the time to criticize me a minute.

“You’re still wearing that old hat?” I should’ve known she couldn’t resist. It was my short-brimmed straw hat with the red silk flower I’d ordered in the mail for three dollars and fifty cents.

“It’s not but two years old.” It was my one nice thing.

She took a deep breath, swallowing whatever else she wanted to say. You’d’ve thought she was trying to swallow a cotton boll.

A few minutes later, Mr. Binny tooted his horn and held open the back door of his little taxicab for us. He was a short, heavyset man in a wide-cut black suit, with near black skin and a gray horseshoe of hair. His demeanor was grumpy. Maybe because, Frances had told me, he used to “take up” with Picador after her husband died the year before last, but their romance had since soured, and Mrs. Tartt had to ask her not to scowl at him through the window.

In the back seat, Mr. Binny folded a green footstool down like a church hassock for our feet to rest on and drove us toward town. Though it was warm, Frances insisted on keeping the windows up so we wouldn’t get dusty.

“All this land used to belong to the Tartts,” she said, “but like I said, Rory sold it off a few years ago.”

“I hope it was before prices went to nothing,” I said. Frances shrugged; didn’t know, didn’t care. “What’s that house?” I asked. It was a little closer to the road and big as the Tartts’, but their yard looked even more overgrown. Signs were pasted onto its white pillars.

“That’s the Percy house, old friends of the Tartts’. They lost all their money in the crash, but don’t bring it up around Mrs. Tartt or you’ll have to hear her talk about it for hours.”

For the rest of the ride, I thought of the dreaded conversation about why I’d come to visit. Another minute and we pulled up to the square.

I hadn’t really seen the square properly when I’d arrived the day before. “Y’all have a lot of stores to choose from,” I said, getting out of the taxi. Twenty, thirty, probably fifty businesses were pushed together around the square. A paved road inside it circled an impressive white courthouse. It was several stories tall, with a four-sided clock tower perched atop the roof so you’d know what time it was no matter what side you stood on. In the grass around it, wagons stood full of watermelons and cantaloupes and vegetables, their mules tied up to hitching posts.

Through the open car door, Frances handed me fifteen cents. “Here, buy yourself a drink and a little something.” I found this smug though I was probably being sensitive. I wasn’t dreading asking her for money because I was afraid she’d be upset; I was afraid of how happy she’d probably look about it. “But bring me the change,” she added.

It wasn’t even nine yet but already it was getting hot. I strolled under the eave shading the storefronts. Only a couple dozen people were on the square at this hour, so not a crowd, but it would be considered a mass mob in Footely. According to Rory’s Oxford Eagle newspaper I’d read this morning, Oxford was just under three thousand people. Footely’s population was 330, 329 when I was out of town. They seemed to have a store for anything you needed here, plus several you didn’t. I passed Ruth’s Dress Shop, Boles Shoe Shop, City Grocery, Patton Beauty Shop, where I saw a lady through the window with a blue contraption on her head and wires springing out of it. A store called Shine Morgan Appliance was peddling a Maytag Agitator Clothes Washer Wringer in the window for only $41 dollars! How we would love to own one of those, our washer was ancient, but for forty-one dollars I could put a down payment on a Ford coupe. In the window of the Gathright-Reed drugstore, a poster asked the ever-pressing question DOES YOUR HUSBAND SAY YOU ARE OFTEN IN POOR HUMOR? with a picture of a woman, kind of wild-eyed, smiling, holding up a brown bottle. When a man pushed the door open to the drugstore, a string of bells jangled so loud, I could see why she needed something to calm her nerves. On the outside corner, an arrow pointed upstairs to Falkner Law Services and O H Douglas & Co. Undertakers, meaning a person could get dressed, have their hair styled, get a better attitude, plan their funeral, and sue somebody all in the stretch of about forty feet.

Still, I passed an empty, dark window, like a tooth missing, every five or six stores. Plenty of shopkeepers leaned in their doorways, waiting, maybe terminally, for customers. So not everybody here was prospering. The people walking around seemed to cover a range of financial situations as well—a woman all dressed up in yellow silk with a patent leather handbag clipped past a slow-moving fellow with one shoe sole flapping. I guess the better you dressed here, the faster you moved. The tattered man joined a row of more men, white and colored, leaning on a rail, also waiting on something I wasn’t sure was coming. Work, I guess. The shoeshine seat stood empty, with a man dozing at the bottom. It felt as if much of the town was waiting on something. Then I realized what it was.

The largest shop was on the east side of the square, called the J. E. Neilson Co. Department Store. A wall of wide windows ran across the front, shaded by a blue-and-white-striped awning. I peered through the glass at a pair of stiff wooden people gazing back at me, wearing bright red sweaters, the wooden man holding a shouting horn painted with the words Ole Miss . A banner over his head read College days will be here soon! I realized almost everybody, from shoe shiners to sweater sellers, was waiting on the college students to return.

“I guess it gets busier around here when the university’s back in session?” I asked a man cleaning the shop window. He was stylishly dressed in wide khaki trousers and suspenders.

“In a month, you wouldn’t guess it’s the same town,” he said. He looked at my old-fashioned boots and homemade dress, deciding that while I ought to be a customer, I probably was not. But he was still friendly about it.

“You visiting?” he asked.

“My sister, Frances,” I said. “Married to Rory Tartt?”

He stopped polishing and his eyes turned flat as the wooden people in the window. He smiled but it was tight. “Course. I know Rory. Give our best to Mrs. Tartt.” He strode his fancy pressed trousers inside. Huh. I had no idea what that was about.

It was getting seriously hot now so I went in the Variety Everyday & Grocer to buy a cold drink with Frances’s money. It had high, tin-tiled ceilings and smelled like wood shavings and had rows of metal bins of onions and something called a shallot, three kinds of potatoes, flour that came in prepacked bags instead of a barrel. I reached down into a red cooler of ice as a delicious shock shot up my arm. I drew out a dripping bottle of Co-Cola. Mr. Parkins wouldn’t pay the extra bond for Co-Cola, so we only carried Chero.

As I headed to the counter, a colored man in a black bowler hat backed into me—“’Scuse me, ma’am,” he said. I realized he was letting a white man check out ahead of him, which was no different from the Foote. Except I’d noticed that the store next door to here, Boles Shoe Shop, was run and owned by a colored man, which Footely didn’t have, but I doubted white folks stepped aside for the colored people in there instead. I also noticed that the colored man in the bowler hat stood waiting, silently, about five feet away. At the Foote, folks at least chatted while they waited whether they knew each other or not. Get yer seed in the ground yet? or That sure was some rain last night . There seemed to be a cooler, stiffer silence here in the big town of Oxford.

After the colored man paid, I set my bottle on the counter. An old man in a red bow tie told me it’d be a nickel and, “Don’t reckon I seen you in here before.”

“No sir, I’m just visiting.”

“Must be here for the college, what you matriculatin’ in?”

I slid him a dime, and watching his expression, I said, “I’m here visiting with my sister Frances, married to Rory Tartt?”

The old man held on to my nickel change an extra second. Behind dry lips, his tongue moved over his teeth. He gave a short, curt nod and handed me the nickel without another word. It did not seem like folks cared to hear the names Frances and Rory.

I found a bench in the shade and fanned my warm face with my hat. Even the stationery I’d brought in my pocketbook was limp from the heat. I wrote carefully on my knee so the pencil wouldn’t stab through the paper.

Dear Mama and Meemaw,

I arrived in Oxford in one piece. Frances is fine and there’s no need to worry. Rory and Mrs. Tartt have both been kind and welcoming. Frances’s house has more indoor bathrooms than they have rear ends and I wish you could see all the stores in this town

I stopped writing, staring at a statue of a Confederate soldier. I refused to brag about a place Mama and Meemaw might never be invited to because Frances regarded us as a homemade embarrassment. So I erased the last line and wrote,

Frances says how very sorry she is she didn’t write or call but she will very soon. I’ll ask her about the money tonight.

Love, Birdie

I went into the post office in the back of city hall and bought a three-cent stamp, happy to be out of the sun for a minute. When I walked out, I dropped Frances’s two cents change into a red box nailed to a post, with the words ORPHANAGE DONATIONS painted on it. It made a satisfying clinking sound.

I wasn’t sure what else to do with my morning, so I decided to go for a walk in the neighborhood, headed south, at least to give the illusion of a breeze. Under the shade of old oak trees, I passed a few huge, gothic-style houses with deep green yards. A pair of colored women with baskets on their heads were going from back door to back door, collecting laundry. Like they had on North Lamar, the houses eventually grew less grand and the road turned to dirt, and I admired a middling-sized house with a pretty stone fountain out front with an angel praying up to the sky.

I was about to turn around and go back in the direction of the Tartts’ when a truck came rumbling up slowly behind me. I glanced back and saw it was loaded with teetering fruit crates. There was a car riding close behind it, and when the road widened, the car sped around the truck. It was a two-toned gray whale of a car, a Studebaker like I’d seen parked by the barn this morning and— is that Rory? The car drove on ahead but from behind I could see him, or somebody like him, short, roundheaded, a little man in a big car. It turned right, heading away from the square.

Supper was just the three of us again that night, though this time it was short and sweet and definitely too salty. It was an Oriental duck and noodle dish served from a blue-and-white urn. It was awfully rich and had involved Picador frowning at an old newspaper clipping from, of all things, The New York Times . I’d heard her murmur, “Miss Viktoria don’t need to be eating something this thick .”

There was a long stretch of silence while we ate. Frances and Mrs. Tartt both kept glancing in the direction of the road at the slightest sound. Sitting across from us, Mrs. Tartt had gone to the beauty parlor today but her hair looked exactly the same as before, round, stiff, and creamy. Which, I knew, was the point. Living with two aging women, I understood that change was to be feared since it only went in one direction, which was old, so the least you could do was hold on to the same hairstyle you had when you were thirty-nine. It suited Mrs. Tartt though, framing her pretty, pleasant face.

For a little while, we ate in silence. The chairs were uncomfortable, shallow and upright. I’d much rather we ate in the kitchen where, like at home, I could read the newspaper while I ate or listened to The Chase and Sanborn Hour . At my rudest, I’d sometimes prop our orange cat up in Mama’s chair and serve her a plate of whatever I was eating with a napkin tied around her neck if I had to eat alone. Problem solved. Somehow this was lonelier than eating alone.

Finally Frances stopped forking food into her mouth and leaned back. “Garnett said you could come to the Orphan with me tomorrow and see can you help straighten out the books.”

“I’m happy to help,” I said. I didn’t know how long I’d be here, but I didn’t have anything else to do when Frances was off volunteering.

“And guess what? A new baby got dropped off today and she is the most precious thing you’ve ever seen in your life. She has these fat cheeks and big blue eyes—” My sister looked so ravenous, bloodthirsty, talking about that new baby, that if she said, So I stuck a fork in that baby and I ate it up , I would not have been surprised. (Mama says my humor type is depraved.)

“I hope we get some more,” Frances said.

“You’re hoping for more orphans,” I said.

“Just a few more babies. Even with this new one, we still don’t have but two.”

I looked at her but she did not see my point.

“How many girls do you have right now?” Mrs. Tartt asked.

Covering her mouth chewing, Frances said, “Seventeen now.”

“Poor things,” Mrs. Tartt said and tsked. “When Mary Pepper ran the Orphan, there weren’t but seven or eight girls there. Course that was down from twenty-five when the place first started. They opened it on account of the flood in ’27.”

I nodded; everybody knew the flood she was speaking of. Daddy’d shown us harrowing photographs taken after the Mississippi River had swallowed entire families, houses, and all their livestock over in Greenville. Daddy helped design the levee system to keep it from happening again, so it was interesting to me that what Daddy’d done for a living was also what got Frances out of bed in the morning to put on ridiculous outfits.

“Greenville and Oxford women’s clubs have always been close,” Mrs. Tartt said. “They asked me to join the senior committee, but I was already vice chairlady of the Flower Club. Frances, any mention of you joining the senior committee yet?”

Frances finished a mouthful of noodles. Finally she said, “ No. ”

At seven thirty, Rory still wasn’t home. No one said anything about it, and by eight, I was in my white nightgown in the yellow room, feeling warm and waxy. I’d be sneaking across the hall to that screened-in sleeping porch after I had my talk with Frances.

When I knocked on her door, she opened it wearing a pale silky nightgown with a bow tied in front. She smelled like lavender from a bath and had on fresh lipstick. She told me to come in though clearly she’d been hoping I was Rory. As she climbed back up on her bed, I looked around. Her bed had a roof like mine, but instead of a scorching yellow, hers was the color of the Lydia Pinkham female aid I sold at the ladies’ counter, a milky rose. On a mirrored dressing table was a Mathilda Tate–esque silver hairbrush, a powder puff and box of powder, and a framed picture of, no surprise, herself. Frances’s face peeped from a high-necked wedding dress festooned with white lilies. Her hand-colored lips were red and parted like she’d just said Frances . She wasn’t saying Footely , that was for sure. I saw nothing in here from home, not even the jewelry box Granddaddy’d made her with her initials carved on top. Where had it gone? I wondered. Had she stuck it in a drawer like she’d done to us? I also saw nothing that looked even remotely like it belonged to Rory.

“What are you doing?” Frances said from the bed.

“Being nosy.” I opened her double-door wardrobe and saw it was full of hanging clothes, folded sweaters, drawers of stockings and brassieres. Growing up, we’d shared a small closet and one dresser between us. “ Franny , what is this ?”

It was a pink strappy satin thing dripping off a hanger, with high-cut legs, less than the size of a swimming costume. I held the thing up and Frances’s cheeks went whiter; she didn’t tend to turn tomato red like I did when I was embarrassed. She slipped off the bed and reached for it, saying, “Put that back, it’s private.”

“Where’d you get it?” I asked, handing it over.

“I ordered it. From New Orleans.” She sounded mortified. “I was saving it for my birthday trip, but I guess we’re not going anywhere.”

“Bring it to Footely, you can wear it around the plantation.”

Something glittered near the crotch, and when she saw me looking at it, she said, “They’re called snaps. It’s the new thing, they pop right open. I can’t afford any kind of a malfunction again.”

I couldn’t help but laugh. “What sort of malfunction?”

She stuck her nose up, Frances style. “You’d have to be married to understand.” She hung it back up so it couldn’t be discussed further by her old-maid sister. Honestly, I couldn’t believe she’d said as much as she had. Frances did not like to discuss intimate relations, at least not with me. The last time was probably in high school, when the topic had been who was or wasn’t “necking” or, according to her, “worse.”

So I didn’t press her, but I was curious: “Why aren’t Rory’s clothes in here? Does he not stay with you?”

“Of course he does.” But then she said, “I mean. Sometimes.” Then she said, “He likes to sleep in his old room down the hall.” I wondered, did she mean the door with the lock on it? Maybe I didn’t know my sister as well as I’d thought. That scandalous outfit, a husband who had to lock his wife out to keep her off him? I chuckled at the thought. God, I could so easily entertain myself. Or maybe I was just trying not to think about what I was really in here to ask.

I climbed up on Frances’s bed and sat at her feet, the way I used to when she’d come home after a date. As I did, a pair of car lamps dragged across the wall. There wasn’t much traffic out here so I thought, I better ask fast. Frances watched the lights, but the car drove on. She leaned back on the headboard and crossed her arms.

I took a breath, about to ask her, when she blurted out, “How come you’re always so content ?” She’d narrowed her eyes at me. “I swear, you’re the most content person I’ve ever known.”

“I am not content,” I said. She’d said it like this was tacky of me, like my country fashions she didn’t approve of. “In fact, I am extremely discontented, every day, by something I taste or smell or read in the newspaper. How come you’re so content?” I looked around the pretty pink plush room, trying to find a flaw. “Never mind, don’t answer that.”

“You are too.” She picked at a loose thread on the coverlet. “You’re perfectly content to live in Footely for the rest of your life. Work at the Foote, take care of Mama and Meemaw. Live in the same house you grew up in.”

“I’m sorry my life isn’t as swanky or exciting as yours. I’ll work on it.”

“At least nobody’s built up all these expectations of you. First it’s when are you gonna get married, then it’s when are you gonna have a baby, then it’ll be when are you gonna have another baby. You don’t even have to worry about having children.”

I smiled at her slowly, sweetly. It was true, I was damaged goods. The mumps had scorched my ovaries. But that she’d bring this up made me want to ask her why her husband had lied that he was too busy to eat lunch with her when I’d seen him on the road. Or why he didn’t sleep in the same bedroom with her, or why Mathilda Tate never once wrote her back after Frances’d helped her graduate. I could’ve asked her these things, pretending it was innocent, but I wouldn’t do that to her. All I said was, “You’re going to have beautiful children, Frances, just give it time.”

And then I changed the subject before I lost my nerve tonight. “Listen, I need to talk to you about something.”

I turned to look at the window so I wouldn’t have to look her in the eyes and told her that the Bad Things Happening had managed to catch up with us, leaving out the more humiliating details such as how little Mr. Parkins paid me but also not reminding her of the four dollars and seventy-five cents in train tickets plus long-distance telephone call we could’ve saved if she’d just written us back. So, in a way, I was being considerate of my sister’s feelings. “We were hoping you could loan us some money to get by.” Loan was my own word, to maintain some pride.

She smoothed the silky gown against her thighs and smiled, I assumed, at my humiliation. My face felt hot, pimply. I felt like I was twelve. “About how much?” she asked.

I shot high. “Maybe two hundred fifty dollars?”

She backed her chin up. “That’s a lot. ”

“Daddy’s annuity check is still eight months away.”

She took in a deep breath and let it out, considering it. Up to now, I’d thought about her saying no the way I thought about the world ending—there was always the chance the sun could pummel into us, but I doubted it would happen. This thinking it over she was doing felt worse than her smiling. Did she really have to contemplate whether she should help her family out? Did she understand what would happen if she said no? Besides the fact they’d cut our lights off and we couldn’t pay for gasoline to get me to work, we’d be two years and forty-three dollars and fifty cents overdue on our property taxes. They’d take our house like they’d taken the Tates’, which I’d deliberately left out because I wanted Frances to say yes without that fact. But Frances was still thinking —and I wanted to ask her, Is your heart really buried so deep, Franny?

“You know what, if it’s that hard to decide, I’ll just ask Rory myself,” I said.

“ No—no , do not bring up money around Rory.” She pressed her temples with her fingers, clearly shook up by this.

“Then I’ll ask his mother.” That didn’t sound like much fun either, but I’d do it.

“Perfect, then she really will think we’re poor.”

“Just because we don’t have any money, doesn’t mean we’re poor, Franny. Daddy was a civil engineer, for God’s sake. We’re still doing better than … most.” I took a deep breath. “The Tates lost their house and all their land for taxes last week. We’re better off than they are now.”

“Oh my God—really?” I searched her face for the hint of a smile but there was none. She looked as stunned by the news as I was.

“I’ll figure out how to ask Rory,” she said. “He’s just—he’s real sensitive about money right now. Or least when it comes to me.”

I made a point to look over at the wardrobe full of beautiful clothes and shoes. Frances waved her hand like they were old rags over there on hangers. “Mrs. Tartt took me shopping when we got engaged and put it on her account. I think she felt sorry for me when she saw my old dresses.”

I worried a split second that maybe this wasn’t just Frances’s selfishness or embarrassment that her family needed money, maybe it was something else. But I was too relieved the asking part was over with to worry long. “Thank you, Franny. And I’m sorry to do this to you.” I wasn’t sure why I was sorry, but I was. “Please write Mama tomorrow so she’ll quit worrying.”

“I will, I know I need to,” she said, twisting her gold wedding ring. “She must’ve been a wreck that I didn’t telephone her back.”

“I’d call it a perpetual state of mind.”

Lights slid across the room again and a minute later, there was a gentle shudder through the house as a door closed. Frances slid off the bed in her satin gown and went to the dressing table and looked quickly at herself in the mirror. “I’ll talk to him, give me some time. Let me do it after my birthday.”

“That’s three weeks away … can’t you ask him sooner?”

“When, at breakfast? Please pass the preserves, by the way I need two hundred fifty dollars? I’m telling you, Birdie, he gets grumpy when it comes to money, but I promise, I’ll find the right time.”

I didn’t love the idea of her asking him after I left; I was afraid it wouldn’t happen. We stared at each other a second.

Frances sighed. “Fine, stay for my birthday.” She shrugged. “It’s kind of nice to have you here anyway.”

Staying was definitely the safest choice; Mr. Parkins would have to wait. “I’ll be ready at eight to go to the orphanage.” I was glad I could give her some small thing in return for this. Debts itched my very soul.

When the house got quiet and I’d heard all the bedroom doors shut, I crept across the hall and lay down on a squeaky wire cot out on the old sleeping porch. I’d brought my sheet and pillow over from the inferno but I was burning up, so I stripped my nightgown off and lay naked on the mattress. My skin prickled as a summer breeze blew in through the metal screens.

You’re gonna live in Footely for the rest of your life, Birdie. You can’t even have children.

Sometimes at night, after the last customer left the Foote and there was nothing left to say to make them linger—a farmer stopping in to buy castor oil for the baby, the Coleman girl who’d sometimes sneak out with her daddy’s car—I’d pick a half-smoked cigarette out of the standing ashtray next to the red drink cooler. And I’d sit on the steps of the store and I’d smoke it. Wasn’t that filthy of me? It was something a hobo would do but it felt so intimate to put my mouth where somebody else’s mouth had been and I thought I could feel their lips and I didn’t care if they were colored or white, a man or a woman. Though I did pick the Lucky Strikes or Parliaments that cost something, hoping they could at least afford tooth powder, but really how could I know? I was an odd bird, I knew that. People had told me that most of my life. But I’d learned how to live with loneliness in a way my sister never would. She’d never had to. I’d be afraid for her if she ever did.