The Book of Bright Ideas Read online

“I’ll have one,” Aunt Verdella said. “That went down pretty good.” June giggled right along with Aunt Verdella.

  Ma picked up her purse, ignoring Daddy. “Thanks for everything, Verdella,” she said. “Fanny, Ada, June, nice seeing you all again. Elroy, John, Melvin, Mike.” Fanny stood up too and jabbed John in the knee, waking him from his nap, his head sagged down against his chest. “I’m ready to go too,” she said.

  “Oh, Jewel, don’t leave yet. Reece wants to stay a bit longer, and Button is having so much fun. It’s not even dark yet!” Ma acted like she didn’t hear Aunt Verdella, even though Aunt Verdella was talking so loud that even the crows circling the top of the trees probably heard her.

  Daddy didn’t make a move to get up. He just sat there as Winnalee jumped on his knee, her arm going around his neck. He patted her on the head.

  Ma walked to the car and slipped in the driver’s side. “Come on, Button,” she said, her hand on the door, making ready to close it.

  “Hey!” Daddy shouted. “You expect me to walk home or what?”

  “I’m sure somebody would be more than willing to give you a ride,” Ma said. “Of course, you’ll probably have to take the back roads home.”

  Aunt Verdella ha-ha-ed. “Oh, I couldn’t drive him home if I tried, because I think I might be drunk!”

  “I wasn’t talking about you, Verdella,” Ma said, her voice as sharp as broken glass. “Button?” Ma said again.

  “I think we should go too, Mel,” June Thompson said, as she bounced her fussy baby, who was digging at her eyes with her fists.

  Winnalee opened her mouth to start begging for me to be able to stay, but Freeda leaned over and gave her a big kiss on her cheek. “You’re a pain in the ass. You know that, kid? Now tell Button you’ll see her tomorrow.”

  “Here, wait,” Aunt Verdella said. “I’ll cut you two each a piece of cake to bring home. You gotta wait for Fanny and John to pull out, anyway.”

  Aunt Verdella gave me a hug, then handed me the plate. Uncle Rudy came to pat me on the head and walk me to the car.

  I watched Ma out of the corner of my eye as we drove home, the cake plate on my legs. She looked extra saggy inside her gray and green dress. There was a little flinch jumping at that bony part right below her ear. She didn’t say a word until we pulled into our driveway, then she told me to go take my bath.

  The bathroom wasn’t far from the kitchen, and with my big ears, I could hear Ma on the phone with Bernice. “It was downright humiliating,” she said. “The two of them carrying on without an ounce of shame. And right in front of half the neighborhood too! Yes, yes! She brought over a guitar that one of her one-night-stands left there, and he played it for her. She danced like a hussy too, of course, and giggled at everything Reece said. Even Fanny thought it was terrible the way that woman carried on!” There were tears in Ma’s voice that I didn’t want to hear, so I started singing, just like Winnalee did in the tub.

  I don’t know who brought Daddy home. It was after dark, and all I saw was two headlights bounce down the drive. Daddy’s eyes were shining like glass, and he was walking a little topsy-turvy. He looked around for Ma, but she was in the bathroom soaking in the tub. He didn’t ask me where she was, or why I was still up, even though it was so late.

  Daddy was humming some of that slow Elvis song as he took off his shoes and left them at his feet. He lit a cigarette and dozed off, his elbow propped on the chair, the half-smoked-up cigarette still between his fingers. Ma was in the bathroom still, so I couldn’t tell her that he had fallen asleep with a cigarette in his hand. I didn’t know what to do. I stood at the far end of the room and bit the inside of my cheek as I watched his hand. When I saw his fingers loosening and the cigarette start to slip, I ran and caught it in my cupped hands. It burned my skin a bit before I could drop it in the ashtray, where it smoked all by itself. Daddy’s arm slowly sank down to the armrest. I looked at his dangling hand and wondered what it would feel like against my head. I looked down the hall and listened. I could hear more water filling into the tub, so I knew Ma wouldn’t come out for a while. I got down on my hands and knees then and tucked my chin in. I took two creeps forward before I felt his fingers brush the top of my head. I stopped and concentrated real hard. I’d hoped that his fingers on my head would give me the same warm, happy feeling inside that I got when Uncle Rudy patted my head, but it didn’t.

  9

  I felt groggy when Ma woke me up in the morning. She looked groggy too. There was no sheet or blanket on the couch, but the melon-shaped indent on the couch pillow said that she’d slept there.

  I walked into the kitchen as quietly as I could and squeezed between the table and the chair to sit down. Even if I was going to be eating at Aunt Verdella’s, I had to have juice and milk at home first.

  Daddy didn’t come to the table. He came into the kitchen and reached for a coffee cup, then headed to the stove for the coffeepot. Ma was making his lunch at the counter, and when he passed, they were like two magnets facing the wrong way, so that probably not even tornado winds could push them close enough to touch.

  Daddy left his breakfast on the table and his lunch box on the counter, then he headed out the door. Ma thought he’d forgotten them, so she ran to the door and called out to him. He didn’t stop.

  “Sure,” she said to herself as she marched back into the kitchen and slammed them down on the table. “Now it can look like his wife doesn’t make him any lunch.

  “Finish your orange juice so we can go!” Ma snapped at me. I took a sip and tried not to make faces when the juice stung the inside of my cheek I’d chewed in the night.

  Winnalee was waiting for me in the driveway when I got to Aunt Verdella’s, her ma in her arms. “Aunt Verdella has a surprise for us!” she said, bouncing up and down. “I don’t know what it is, because we had to wait for you.”

  Ma smacked her lips, and I knew that meant that she was annoyed. She didn’t like when Aunt Verdella spoiled me. She looked away as she backed out the driveway.

  When we got into the house, Aunt Verdella was standing at the table, both of her hands shoved into a big Ben Franklin bag. She looked ready to burst. “First, something little. They’re the same, but different colors, so you girls decide who gets the one in my right hand and who gets the one in my left hand.”

  “I want the one in your right hand!” Winnalee said. She set her ma down on the table so that she could hop high without dropping her.

  “I’ll take the left one,” I said.

  Aunt Verdella took out two plastic headbands. Not just ordinary ones (though that would have been okay too) but fancy ones. A blue one for me in her left hand, and a pink one in her other hand, for Winnalee. They had a row of little fake flowers stuck to them. White cloth flowers, tipped with pink on Winnalee’s and tipped in blue on mine.

  Winnalee snatched her headband and put it on her head. Not how you’re supposed to—by starting at the front of your face and scraping it back across your scalp so the little sharp teeth can catch your hair and hold it back behind your ears—but sticking it straight down from the top of her head so that it disappeared in her loops, like she wasn’t even wearing one. “Thank you, Aunt Verdella,” I said, as Winnalee tried snatching the bag, asking, “What else? What else?”

  If there hadn’t been even one more thing in that bag for me, I’d have been happy. I’d wanted a plastic headband forever, just like some of the girls at school had. But when I’d asked Ma for one, she said that those were for girls with long hair, who needed help keeping their hair out of their faces.

  “Just a minute, just a minute. Here, let me help you with that, honey.” Aunt Verdella took Winnalee’s headband off and put it on the right way. “Button, you need help?” she asked when she saw me holding mine above my head, not sure what to do with it. I didn’t have any hair to fall in my face, and I knew my short knots weren’t going to stretch from the front all the way back to my ears. I told Aunt Verdella I didn’t need any help, then I slipped
it on as Winnalee had slipped hers on. Aunt Verdella reached to correct me, then changed her mind. “Well, it looks cute as a decoration, anyway,” she said.

  Aunt Verdella went back to the bag. She pulled from it two red metal squares with teeth like a comb, only bigger, and bags of multicolored nylon loops. “Well, I was thinking of how you girls could make a little money at the community sale, then I saw these looms. They make pot holders! Everybody needs pot holders. And I’ll bet they wouldn’t mind paying twenty-five cents for a pair of them from two pretty little girls.”

  Winnalee and I were happy about our weaving looms. Well, until Winnalee held up her bandaged hand. Then we all groaned. “Oh, what was I thinking!” Aunt Verdella said, whacking her head. “Well, you’ll be able to do it in a few days, honey.”

  “Hey, there’s something else in the bag. What else you got in there?” Winnalee snatched the bag from Aunt Verdella and peeked inside. “Penny candy! Look, Button!” She pulled out a roll of white paper, with candy buttons stuck to it in neat rows. “And there’s Tootsie Roll Pops and Pixy Stix, and all kinds of goodies!” She pulled two tiny bottles made of wax out of the bag and handed me one. She bit off the wax top of hers, tipped her head back, and drained the red juice from inside.

  It took a whole week before Winnalee could make pot holders.

  It was hard making them at first, because you had to stick one side of the loop on one tooth-thing, then stretch it to a tooth on the other side, going under and over, under and over the other row of loops you connected first. Sometimes you’d get goofed up and go over or under two times instead of one, and then you’d have to pull the loop out and start over again. It sure was fun though, seeing what pretty color combinations you could come up with.

  I could tell that everybody thought the colors I used in my pot holders were prettiest. I made them in colors that would match people’s kitchens, with two colors that matched each other. But Winnalee didn’t. She’d pull out one loop because she liked green, maybe, then she’d grab a black one, because that was the color of sexy. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, sometimes she’d grab five of one color—orange maybe, just because that morning she had orange juice, or white, because clouds were white and she liked clouds—until she thought of which color she wanted to use next. Her pot holder would turn out ugly then, and I knew nobody would want a pair like that hanging in their kitchen, the color and pattern all which way. Well, if they could even get a pair, which they couldn’t, because Winnalee never made two exactly the same anyway.

  One morning, right after bunny pancakes and bacon, me and Winnalee and her ma went to sit in Aunt Verdella’s yard to make pot holders. We sat under a big shade tree in the front yard, because the day before, we sat in the sun and I sunburned my scalp so bad that I couldn’t even get my headband on that morning. Winnalee’s ma was sitting on the picnic table, which was right next to the shade tree. We were busy talking about how we hadn’t had a bright idea in a long time, and how if we didn’t get busy thinking up one, we were never gonna get to one hundred by the end of summer, no way.

  “Look at that!” Winnalee said, pointing out in the field, where a cow was giving another cow a piggyback ride.

  “Yeah,” I said. “The bulls like to get piggyback rides.”

  “They’re not playing piggyback rides. They’re making babies.”

  I blinked at her.

  “They are. Same as people do.”

  “Uh-uh,” I said.

  “It’s true! He’s putting his pee-pee inside her pee-pee.”

  “You’re lying!”

  “He is too! That’s what grown-ups do too. I saw it with my own eyes.”

  “You did not.”

  “I did too! I saw Freeda do that with that guy who left the toilet seat up. You know that closet I got? Up at the top, there’s a part where the boards don’t come all the way up. I was up there getting my shoe box, and I knocked it farther back on the shelf by accident. So I had to get a chair, and I got up there, and then I saw into the bedroom. And I saw them doing that. But he wasn’t up on her back. He was on her belly.”

  “That’s not true! Freeda don’t even use that room. She sleeps downstairs.”

  “Yeah, she sleeps downstairs. But when she brings a guy home to piggyback ride, she brings him upstairs into that room.”

  Winnalee started giggling. She flicked the loops off of her lap and stood up. She held her hands above her head and made her hips go frontward and backward. “They were going like this,” she said. “And they did this too.” She tossed her head back and opened her mouth, her tongue googling out, and she started panting like a dog.

  Winnalee sat back down and picked up her loom. I felt something scratch the top of my head, right where my skin was feeling tight and hurting. I reached up, but there was nothing there.

  She went on, “It must have hurt or something, because Freeda yelled out. And then she shoved him off of her and told him to get his sorry ass dressed and out of there.”

  “You telling the truth?”

  Winnalee took her finger and made an X over her chest. “Cross my heart! That’s what they were doing. And that’s what those cows are doing too. I’ll tell you this much though. When I get big, no guy is gonna do that to me. They have big pee-pees and that’s gotta hurt.”

  “I’m not gonna either,” I said.

  Winnalee was busy looping a yellow loop over and under, so she didn’t see me tap at my head again. “Anyway, we gotta think up another bright idea,” she said. “That’s the one thing peculiar about bright ideas though. The way you can’t get one just because you want one. Sometimes you get ten good ones in one day without even trying, and other times you can think till your head hurts and you’re still not gonna come up with nothing.”

  “Seems that way to me too,” I said.

  Winnalee held up her ugly pot holder, which was orange and black and green, with only one loop of yellow. “How does this one look?”

  I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, so I told her, “It looks nice. Somebody will probably buy it.” I pulled my newly made pot holder off of the loom and patted it flat. It was yellow and white, like a kitchen. Next I was going to make a pink and white one. “We have five pairs made now,” I told her. “That’s a dollar twenty-five if we sell them all.”

  “We’ll sell them all. And while we’re at the sale, we’ll take what we make and buy a compass. I bet we’ll find one there. And if we have any money left, we’ll buy hula hoops, just like we said we’d do.”

  While she was talking, I felt something on my scalp a third time, but this time it downright hurt, like a bee sting. “Ouch!”

  That’s when Tommy jumped out from behind the tree, bellowing like a monster. Winnalee and me jumped up fast and started screaming, the loops on our laps jumping too.

  Tommy started ha-ha-ing so hard that he doubled over, his hand slapping his knees. In his other hand, he was holding the chopped-off foot of a real chicken. He held it up and yanked at the stringy things dangling from the cut ankle, and the toes of that dead chicken scrinched in and out like they were grabbing. “Here’s a bright idea for you kiddies. If you feel a chicken foot scratchin’ at your head, turn around. Well, unless you’re so busy talking about screwin’ that you don’t notice.”

  Winnalee’s face was red with mad. She balled her hands into fists. “You asshole!” she screamed. She dove at him then, her fists pounding him good.

  Tommy was still laughing as he put his arms up to stop her punches. “Oh, owie! Owie!” he cried, making his voice high like mine. Getting punched or not, Tommy lifted his arms and made his hips move in and out, as Winnalee had. “Look at me. I’m getting a piggyback ride!” he said. He started panting. This made Winnalee all the madder, and she started kicking at his shins.

  Tommy backed up then, saying “Ow!” for real. The back of his legs hit the seat of the picnic table and he stopped. That’s when Winnalee shoved him. She shoved him so hard that she grunted when she did it. His arm swung b
ack and whacked Winnalee’s ma’s jar, and it went flying, just like he did. I clamped my hands over my mouth as I watched Winnalee’s ma roll across the table, bounce off the bench part on the other side, and land upside down on the ground.

  “My ma!” Winnalee screamed at the top of her lungs. Winnalee didn’t peek under the table, like I did. She ran around to the other side, then cried out when she saw that the lid of the jar had come off and that some of her ma was spilled out on the grass. Then dumb Tommy—trying to help, I suppose—grabbed the jar and yanked it up, spilling a trail of ash behind the heap already lying there.

  I couldn’t move. I couldn’t do anything but hold the sides of my face and stare at Winnalee’s spilled ma, streaked across the grass in the shape of a falling star.

  “Jesus!” Tommy shouted. “Why’d you shove me? I was just horsing around. I—”

  “My maaaaaaaaaa,” Winnalee cried. “You spilled my ma!” She snatched the jar from his hand, then plopped down on her knees and started scooping up the ashes. Her hands were shaking so bad as she tried pouring her ma back into the jar that most of what she was pouring slipped down the sides of the vase. “Maaaaaaaaa…”

  I felt like I was gonna puke.

  “What happened? What happened?” Aunt Verdella yelled as she burst out of the house and sprinted across the lawn, her bumps and belly thumping. I’d never seen Aunt Verdella run so fast.

  Tommy and I backed up when Aunt Verdella reached us. “I didn’t mean it, Mrs. Peters!” Tommy said. “She started beating up on me, and I bumped it.”

  Aunt Verdella gasped when she saw the spilled ma on the grass, that dead chicken’s foot lying next to it, and Winnalee on her knees, her face wet with tears, her eyes pulled wide with scared.

  “I tripped!” Tommy said. “It was an accident!”

  “Here, here, honey. Let me,” Aunt Verdella said, as she cupped her hands under Winnalee’s and waited for Winnalee to pour what she was holding of her ma into her hands. The breeze was strong, and it caught flecks of the ashes that poured from Winnalee’s hands into Aunt Verdella’s and carried them in the air. I held my breath so none would get into my mouth or up my nose.