The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett - 33

Chink! I was dressed and ready for the night and then heard it again outside. Chink! When I opened the back door, a hot wind sucked my blue dress number two to my thighs. I watched bits of broken glass ornaments go scattering across the dance floor. All day the sky had been a blinding, back-to-school blue, but now, as Saturday turned to evening, dark clouds were moving in and a gusty wind sent trees swaying and more glass ornaments crashed to the floor. The wind felt ominous, admonishing. Confirmation from God that this was a terrible idea.

We were opening at six and it was about twenty till. I went upstairs to find all the ladies gathered in Frances/Flossy’s room as Charlie sailed a fresh sheet over the mattress, telling them, “Change the sheet after every john or we’ll all have scabies and head lice.” My God, for all the s-e-x Frances wanted but never got in this room, I imagined writing her: Good news, Sister.

Charlie smoothed the sheet with her hand. They were thin and cheap and she’d set a stack in every room. Mrs. Tartt’s good embroidered sheets I’d moved up to the attic. The vision of Ruby doing whatever her “specialty” was on Mrs. Tartt’s initials made my eye sockets ache. I’d move myself up to the little attic rooms too, away from this business, but it was awfully hot up there, so I was stuck on the sleeping porch, across the hall from Ruby.

“I put a clock in every room. Make sure you wind them up. The widows are under all the mattresses, and don’t throw the used ones in the toilet.” Charlie sounded like somebody’s mother. Definitely not mine.

“And looky, if a john insists on using the bathroom upstairs,” Flossy said, “keep an eye on ’em or they’ll drink all our hair solution and wipe their crotches with our towels.” I’d be keeping my towels in my room, thank you.

“Come on, y’all, it’s almost six,” I said. I did not want to be out there alone when customers started showing up.

The girls settled in at little cocktail tables around the dance floor. Esmeralda was still inside, hanging the menu on the wall. I sat at the telephone table I’d moved out here, ten steps to the left of the dance floor in front of the opening in the trellis. This way I had a good view of Lamar Boulevard and could act as gatekeeper. My job was simple: A customer had to get past me first and buy at least one dance token, which were really just the little red disks from a set of tiddlywinks I’d found in the nursery, and maybe a cold drink, I had root beer or Co-Cola, from a metal washtub, before he could enter the yard.

Mr. Binny was up on the porch, perched at an upright piano we’d had delivered, with his three brothers behind him holding an oboe, a clarinet, and a little brass horn in their laps.

The sun still simmered well above the fields across the road, in its usual September stubbornness. Least it wasn’t too warm tonight and we hadn’t had enough rain for the mosquitoes to come out. In the distance, I heard thunder rumble. I prayed it wouldn’t rain and I prayed it would. I’d turned my chair so I could see the girls, the road, the band, Charlie. I wished she’d sit down.

She was pacing the yard in a black dress, in front of the porch. “Everybody remember the rules?” she asked. She’d told them these rules only an hour before this. “One dance minimum, ten dances max. If he hasn’t turned by then, he’s a dead john, forget him. Everybody know the password to be let inside the house?”

“ Frances ,” Ruby and Flossy sang. Hearing it the second time still smarted.

Ruby snatched Flossy’s Lucky and took a drag off it. Everything on them looked like it’d been elevated. The red buttons on Ruby’s red dress holding her bosoms in and up looked as if they could fire off any minute, like artillery. Flossy’s thin, drawn-on eyebrows lifted high in an arch, not just by pencil but by a thread she’d tied under her hairline. When she’d pulled it taut, it had made her look closer to forty than forty-five but very, very frightened about what was about to happen to her.

The twins were leaning on each other, half asleep, their white hair hanging like veils over their faces. They were probably the last two girls in the country under the age of seventy-five with hair past their shoulders. They had on Frances’s floral dresses they’d gone advertising in, Trixie’s yellow, Dixie’s blue.

“If you hear Mr. Binny play ‘Night and Day,’ it means trouble,” Charlie said. Again. “Get dressed as fast as you can, but nobody comes in the house and nobody goes out.”

I couldn’t look proper old Mr. Binny in the eye. Charlie’d told him to play only slow waltzes so the girls didn’t get too hot and they’d have time to work out the price with their customers. The back door opened and Esmeralda walked out, her hair perfect, cheekbones high, plum lipstick on, wearing the rose-colored dress. She had long legs and moved colt-like across the porch. Mr. Binny twisted around on his squeaky stool and leaned up like he might say something to her. Esmeralda nodded politely to him and kept going down the porch stairs. He frowned, even harder than usual, like he was confused over who she was. I supposed everybody wished they knew beautiful Esmeralda.

Charlie locked the back door behind her. She’d locked every door in the house she could find a key to and roped together the double doorknobs on a side door that she couldn’t.

For a good half hour, there was nothing but the whoosh of wind in the trees and the occasional chink! of an ornament, which Charlie quickly scooped up with a broom and dustpan.

“Somebody’s coming!” I called. It was a quarter to seven. I could hear the motor in the distance, and a few seconds later a dusty black motorcar came rolling up Lamar Boulevard. I leaned over to get a better view. It was a Ford Model A and it stopped at the front gate, then backed up and turned around in the road. Like at the depot, shirtsleeves hung out the windows. I heard a man’s laugh, like a donkey’s bray, and I clenched my teeth, waiting for them to climb out. The engine still idled, and then the car shot forward toward town again, blowing up a cloud of dust behind it.

“Tourists,” Flossy said. “Damn rubberneckers that don’t spend a dime.”

At seven thirty, the sun finally dipped below the fallow fields across the road. Charlie plugged in the gold lanterns strung up in the trees, and by eight it was dark and lightning bugs winked and flirted, soliciting sex themselves, I reckoned. At least something is. My eardrums ached, listening for a motor. We’d spent nearly every cent we had setting up the house. It was quiet except for the girls playing cards and chatting and the occasional slap at a mosquito.

I heard another rumble coming up the road and sucked in a breath. Dear God, please don’t be the sheriff.

A few minutes later, a young man, a boy really, got out of a taxi and walked slowly through the side yard toward my table. He had on a dark suit, and his pants were a little too short on him, showing his white socks. He had so much Brylcreem in his hair, it lay shellacked to his small head. He stopped short of my table and moved his eyes only, left, right, left. Pale, terrified, he looked maybe eighteen.

“Hi,” I said and coughed. “Welcome to our dance club. Would you like to buy a dance token?”

He stayed where he was, a safe five feet away under the trellis. He swallowed hard. His eyes on the girls in their chairs behind me.

“Girls get up ,” Charlie hissed. “For God’s sake, Mr. Binny, play something .” There was a tap-tap on wood and Mr. Binny and his brothers started playing a slow, rickety waltz. “Come on in, it’s only one dime for a dance,” I said and winked at him—God knows why—and he looked at me, horrified, his head settling deep into his neck. He stepped backward and then turned around and all but ran to his taxi, which was already easing away. The boy chased after it until it stopped and he hopped in and the taxi disappeared into the dark.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, was the only customer of the night.

At midnight, Charlie and I sat down in the dining room and we stared at each other. My God, after all we’d done, it felt like we’d just pedaled backward. No one else had even driven by the house to gawk after the terrified boy chased the dust of his taxicab. Charlie’d paid Mr. Binny and his brothers their dollar fifty and told them to go home, and the girls had dragged themselves up to bed, tired though complaining they were not near tired enough.

Charlie wrote what she’d paid Mr. Binny in the ledger. Her neat chignon had come loose and her dark hair was frayed around her neck. On the table sat a stack of books she’d torn the back pages out of, which must’ve pained her, and she’d pasted a white envelope inside each to store the girls’ money until payday next Friday. We’d thought they’d be, well, not full , but populated by a couple of presidents, paper, silver, at least some copper. Something.

“We just—we have to find a way to get the word out,” Charlie said. Tomorrow was Sunday, so we’d be closed. “Next week, we’ll do more advertising and things will pick up.” Had she been saving that bit of optimism from some better days? Tucked deep in her pocket just for a time like this? I took my glasses off and looked at her. Considering all she’d been through, shouldn’t she be out of damn optimism by now?

“And if it takes a while to get going, we’ll just stay open a little longer, a few weeks more than we’d planned,” she said. She reached over for my glasses and put them on; they were good to hide behind.

She knew we could not extend more than a few days; it was too risky and my sister and Mrs. Tartt would be coming home. Today was September 9—if we had to stay open a month (tops!), we’d agreed it would be wise to give ourselves a week’s padding in between closing and when the mortgage was due on October 13—but that wasn’t the real problem here. The real problem was Charlie didn’t know what the real problem was, because I hadn’t told her the real problem.

“There’s no extra time, Charlie.” Was it cruel of me to tell her the truth now, after such a terrible night? I didn’t have a choice. “Garnett is trying to get Meg returned to the orphanage.”

Charlie froze; her hands stopped fiddling with the pencil. She was no longer blinking. She was the one who’d predicted this, and yet she looked utterly surprised.

“I ran into Garnett last week. She told me to my face. I spoke to Mrs. Heidelberg—the older Mrs. Heidelberg, whose son adopted Meg—and she said the family wasn’t supposed to adopt Meg in the first place. They wanted a newborn from someplace in Memphis.”

A red wave was moving up Charlie’s neck, her face.

“I don’t know when or how Garnett is planning to do it, or if the Heidelbergs will keep Meg a little longer. All I know is Garnett can’t send Meg to the factory until January, when she turns twelve. I saw Welty and I think he might’ve persuaded Mrs. Heidelberg to—”

Her eyes had gone so very wide it shut my mouth up.

“You spoke to Welty ?”

“He spoke to me—I saw him at the bank yesterday. But he has no idea you’re here. He doesn’t know anything about the house, the club, he doesn’t know that I know anything about you and him.”

Charlie, still wearing my glasses, said nothing for a few seconds. I was impressed she was this calm after everything I’d just told her. Finally, she said, like it hurt her mouth to speak it, “Why … didn’t you tell me any of this before now?”

“Because I was afraid you’d go and do something rash, Charlie. Something stupid that would get all of us in trouble.” My position had not changed on this, but for the last six hours, I’d been sitting at that little telephone table thinking how everybody was down to their last chance—Charlie, Meg, Mrs. Tartt, me. We couldn’t afford for Charlie to blow it.

“How stupid do you think I am?” Charlie said.

“I don’t think you’re stupid, Charlie, I just think you’re a little out of your mind.” I looked around the room to show her that I meant for doing this . “And I don’t blame you for wanting to get Meg back—but if you did, the Heidelbergs would report it to Garnett and the police would arrest you again. Hell, if they came out here looking for you, they’d arrest all of us, and this time they really would throw away the key. I didn’t tell you to protect you from yourself.”

Charlie took off the glasses. Her dark eyes sizzled. She wasn’t calm, she was furious.

“You underestimate me, Birdie.”