The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett - 6

I ’d only ridden the train a few times, the longest was when I was sixteen, when Mama had taken me to Jackson to let a doctor see to me after a bad fever. The train that day had been full of folks dressed up for Christmastime, so it would’ve been exciting had it been for a different reason. We’d ridden in the second class with cloth seats, which Daddy’d claimed was practically good as first. Today, I was riding third-class on a train folks called the Little J, behind the mail car and the colored car, closer to the noisy engine. The porter wiped soot off my row of wooden seats before I sat down. For a few seconds the train sat panting, while sweat ran down my temples.

Then the train rolled forward, slow and smooth as if we were sliding on ice. As we picked up speed, the slatted seat under me started to sway, the growl of the engine growing to a roar as we barreled past fallow fields, and when we turned a high-screeching bend, a fine grit of dirt blasted me through the open window. I stumbled up and grabbed hold of the stick that was propping the window open and it banged down shut and I fell back into my seat. It was even hotter now. But I figured it was better to show up at Frances’s just sweaty rather than battered in Delta dirt too.

From the back row, I counted a dozen or so other people in this car, nearly all men, except for a little girl in a red hat with her daddy and a middle-aged husband with his wife. I was the only woman traveling alone in the car.

“Get the taste that refreshes, ladies and gentlemen. Procure your dimes.” The porter came through the door and it slammed shut behind him. He leaned down to offer me the contents of a yellow box tied to his neck: Lucky Strike cigarettes, Doublemint gum, Co-Cola bottles, Bit-O-Honey, potted ham with the red devil on it, marked for one, two, or three dimes and all overpriced, which I knew from working at the store. I told him no thank you and he moved on to the husband and wife sitting up a row and across the aisle.

The man glanced at his wife, asleep against the window. Softly he said to the porter, “Thang else?” I watched the porter lift the top tray of the display, and like a thief, the man palmed a flat thing from underneath. He tucked it quick inside his suit coat pocket and slipped the porter some folding money. That man just bought some liquor. When the porter’d moved on, I leaned back and closed my eyes and smiled. I wondered what would happen if I called the porter back and said, Thang else? God, Frances would have a fit . It made me think of the spicy taste of Red Hots in a man’s mouth.

I’d come across the mouth in high school after Mama’d told me and Frances, in a panic, we were never to kiss a man “with tongue.” That was how she’d put it. She’d heard about a young woman doing this somewhere in the world, in some remote time. I was barely sixteen, which made Frances fourteen, and she’d Gawd Mama- ed her, said she’d never do something so disgusting anyhow, and I would put money on she still hadn’t. But then I did. Behind a barn with someone’s older cousin, and I felt something I could only describe as relief. A gasp of oxygen after being held underwater for too long—to feel another human being’s hot breath on mine, his stubbly face. I’d set a bold hand on his cheek as if magnetized. I never saw the older man again after that kiss, I’d fled, but I never forgot his taste—of cigarettes and a box of candy Red Hots. Watching a little bit of wickedness one row up from me made me think of that relief, of stepping outside my sheltered world at last.

Frances. I tucked her little pillow between my head and the window.

She was two years younger than me and the petite, prissier, cry-her-way-out-of-the-crime sister, while I was the taller, plainer one, but funnier and therefore, least in my opinion, more interesting. Frances got Mama’s light brown curls and hazel eyes and a more feminine figure, though she did have a peculiarly long neck. My eyes were dark brown like our daddy’s, and I had very vertical brown hair that lost a croquignole wave in the time it took to get from my dressing table to the front door. I also had a flatter chest and an underserved chin, which I was very conscious of because Frances had pointed it out so many times. “And o-pin-ions ,” Mama’d sing from another room. “Might find life a little easier if you had fewer of those.” To which I would answer that in my o-pin-ion I was as entitled to mine as much as any human being with a yearly Delta Dispatch newspaper subscription.

I feared Frances wouldn’t be too happy to see me. Especially after what Meemaw’d said about showing up uninvited. Suddenly I was so hot, I had to prop the window open again.

As girls, we were close, least for a while, though we were very different. I liked to tend to my guinea hens and a pair of peacocks I’d ordered through the mail, while all Frances wanted to do was brush her hair and look at herself in the mirror. She could be right scrappy if pressed, though—and a biter if cornered. The tiny arc of her top teeth was still carved, faintly, into my forearm. Our closeness, I realized later, was more about proximity than friendship—who else was there to torture within ten square miles? Daddy, a quiet but brilliant man, was gone three days a week trying to keep the Mississippi River from flooding. Mama was busy cooking, washing, worrying over the price of canned peaches. Meemaw’d zap us with her electric prod pole if we harassed her too much (she kept it on low, so it was more threat than sting). But I pushed the torture too far, at least according to Frances. Once, after she’d teased me for my lack of chin, I drew a picture of her as a goose and hung it up at school—Lord, the thing looked just like her. It was Frances but with a beak and a long neck that stretched down one, two, three sheets of paper, ending with the tiny body of a goose. Unfortunately the name Goose stuck longer than anybody expected. I mean for years people called her that.

My motto’d always been: You are important to me, therefore I will work to take my revenge in new and interesting ways. It took enormous time to think up a perfect retaliation. I thought it kept us close. And we were, until Mathilda Tate came along.

Our little school down the road ended at sixth grade. Even though Daddy made a fair living with the corps, he didn’t crave money. Daddy didn’t even believe in hired help in the kitchen, and Mama went along with him on that. He was sort of a freethinker, leaning toward socialist if you really got down to it, and he disdained that so few had so much when so many were poor. But he believed in education, so he asked Mama to make a caramel cake and, leaving his values at home, drove it over to the big Tate house to ask could we ride with their daughter, Mathilda, the thirty miles to the good Warren County school, which went up to eleventh grade.

Whereas most folks had farms, the Tates had a “plantation.” The Tates had maids; the Calhouns had a meemaw. Pockets of wealth like theirs were scattered all across the Delta, even if the radio liked to brag that Mississippi had the highest incidence of malnutrition and the lowest incidence of money. Mathilda Tate and Frances were the same age, and Mathilda wore long silk ribbons in her long golden hair that, to somebody gullible, probably made her look sweet. Her nose turned up similar to that of a Pekingese dog, except hers was cuter. She’d failed out of some fancy boarding school out east. I heard her say once that being around poor people made her want “to take a bath.” Well, Frances was rapt. Riding to school, I’d never seen somebody as disagreeable as Frances nod in agreement that much.

Pretty soon all Frances could talk about was “MathildaTate.” “MathildaTate has herself a real silver hairbrush with her name inscribed on it” and “MathildaTate’s icebox plugs right in the wall.” Mathilda’s parents paid Frances to help dum-dum Mathilda with her schoolwork, though Frances would’ve done it for free. “MathildaTate says when she’s eighteen, they’re taking her on a boat trip to Europe.” “Why wait?” I said. “Take her now.” Again, I wasn’t jealous, exactly, but I was watching my sister grow pettier and more popular with every motorcar ride to school. I was older and already had my own friends, I was head of the Tomato Club and the Math Club, and I sang in the school choir. Though that all got interrupted.

When I was sixteen, me and Frances both came down with a case of the mumps. Our necks swelled so fat we looked bovine, funnier on her since her neck was so long. A few weeks later, Frances got better but my fever still burned and a warm trickle of blood had started running between my legs. It didn’t stop for weeks, and the cold, uncaring doctor in Jackson, in a hurry to get home for his wife’s birthday, told my mother out in the hall it’d turned into a case of encephalitis. I finished eleventh grade, which was all the school offered, from my side of the bedroom we shared.

It was after that doctor visit that Daddy started asking me to help him fix things around the house. He was patient, with the mathematical mind of an engineer. He taught me how to replace rotten porch boards and tighten a leaky sink, repair the clothes agitator, change the oil in the truck; then came spark plugs, bulbs, and necessary fluids. Never turning into the expert he was, I did learn my way around a Model T Ford carburetor.

I didn’t catch on right at first why he was teaching me these things. I thought it was because he didn’t have any boys and somebody had to look after things while he was on the river. “Gimme a hand, Bird,” he’d say, and an hour or two later I’d know how to change the tires on the Ford. Frances was clearly not interested in any of these things, but of course she still asked him why he was teaching me and not her. He smiled but didn’t say what I later learned he was thinking: You won’t need to know, you’ll have a husband to do these things for you. A few months later, Mama admitted, weeping, that the doctor’d told her I couldn’t bear children. I simply don’t remember losing any sleep over this.

Just past Vicksburg, the train ran alongside a dusty yellow highway. I saw people, groups of three or four at first, then ten, then dozens of them moving along on foot or in wagons stacked with trunks and chairs and tables. They were colored folks mostly, though some were white and I realized they must be sharecroppers who’d been run off the land, because of the government program that was paying owners not to grow cotton. I felt sick for them. They stared straight ahead, moving along the highway in what looked like dead silence. The children looked strangely old , like wrinkled old men and women, and when the road pulled closer, I saw they’d smeared mud up their arms and on their faces to keep the sun off. Where in the world were they all going? I wondered. What would they do when they got there? Then the road pulled away and I couldn’t see them anymore.

I was so grateful right then that we had what we did. I’d inherited my sanguine outlook from my daddy. I had a job, we had his annuity, surely everything’ll work out. But the thought of asking Frances for money felt like groveling. It tasted bitter, like grounds in the bottom of a coffee cup. How I wished I could prove her wrong for leaving us.

“MathildaTate says if you’re not engaged by the time you’re twenty, there’s a 99 percent chance you’ll turn out an old maid.” I was nineteen and change by then. I’d graduated class of 1926, and was taking a correspondence course called Basics of Bookkeeping. That was right around the first time I heard Frances say, “One day, I’m gonna get out of this place for good.”

And God love her, she did. After Frances graduated, she talked Mama, and therefore Daddy, into sending her to Miss Pickering’s Finishing School, two hundred fifty miles north of us in Memphis, Tennessee. Frances nearly wet her ironed underpants, she was so excited to leave Footely. She’d be taking courses entitled Etiquette of Courtship, Managing Marriage Proposals, and something called Comportment. But two weeks before she was to leave, Daddy had a heart attack on the river and died.

I cannot describe that week. Mama’s sobs sounded like vomiting. Purging pain sounds so violent on some, but it shut me right up. A hot, thick thing lodged in my throat. Watching the man you called Daddy go in a hole and get covered with dirt does not go down easy.

I thought Frances would put off going to finishing school, at least until after Christmas. After all, it seemed like pretty poor etiquette to leave mere weeks after your daddy’d died of a coronary. But when I mentioned it, Frances threw a flying fit. Said I was “selfish and jealous” of her, that just because I was “stuck here” didn’t mean she had to be. Mama intervened, telling me to hush , that “of course you can still go, Frances, of course you can.” Frances must’ve graduated with honors because hardly a month after she finished the course, she got married, and did I mention she didn’t invite us to the durn wedding?

Whenever people asked me, “Why ain’t you married, Bird?” I thought about telling them my fiancé died. That he’d been a traveling salesman—I’d call him Johnny—who sold carpet cleaner and drove a Buick. He’d died in a car crash over in Alabama, Buick and floor cleaner going up in sunset-colored flames.

I jumped awake to the porter bellowing, “Arriving Oxford Depot! Approaching the station!” The brakes screeched like catastrophe was imminent, and we jerked to a hard stop, the passengers all nodding together at the same time. As if we’d discussed it and agreed on the same thing: Yep, your sister left soon as she got the chance. Now you got to show up at her door uninvited and ask for a handout.