A Life of Bright Ideas Read online

  Midweek, the sun woke me early. I rolled over and sighed at the thought of yet another day of weather so hot and humid that your clothes clung to you, and everything you touched felt damp.

  I’d been spending my days mainly alone, because Winnalee was afraid of caring for Evalee without Freeda and Aunt Verdella’s guidance, and stayed with them throughout the day, coming home only once Evalee was asleep for the night. Then she’d set her alarm—Freeda insisted she be there when Evalee woke—and shuffled across the road at six o’clock each morning. Tommy wasn’t even popping in, now that he was haying, and Boohoo was too fascinated with Evalee to break away and come over.

  With so much alone time, though, I did get a lot of sewing done on Cindy’s dress. It was fun watching a one-of-a-kind dress take form, and doubly fun to show Winnalee my progress each evening. When I finished the first sleeve, Winnalee ran it up her bare arm and made swimming motions to watch the layered angel sleeves flutter. “Oh my God, this is so cool! It’s the sleeve I saw in my head, and now here it is, on my arm!”

  “Winnalee,” I told her, “every piece of clothing you put on started first as a thought in someone’s head.”

  She blinked, then said, “I guess so, but this is the first piece of clothes to come from my head.”

  After about a week of working alone, loneliness started to set in. I pulled out scraps of satin and tried to formulate roses while I waited for the mail. My first flower looked like a squashed baby’s ear, and my second, like an overgrown kohlrabi. I was on my third try—better, still not good—watching Freeda hang clothes, and Boohoo dig in his sandbox, through the window. Finally I gave up and went across the road.

  “Evy, can you tie this?” Boohoo asked, holding out Monkey, who’d lost his yarn leash. He scratched his mosquito bites as he waited. “I think Knucklehead’s gotta stay in the lean-to now, even when it’s this hot. I’d put another diaper on him, but I’m afraid Freeda’d sit on me again. That Freeda probably only weighs as much as Wilma, but she’s still heavy. Why’d you let her sit on me like that, anyway?”

  “Forget about it, already,” I said. “Yell when the mailman comes, okay?”

  I went inside, where Evalee was squirming in Aunt Verdella’s arms and Winnalee was heating her bottle in a tiny pan of water. “Geez, all this kid does is eat and pee and poop and spit up,” she huffed.

  Freeda was coming up the stairs, carrying yet another load of wet laundry. She glanced at Aunt Verdella. “Why in the hell isn’t Reece doing his own laundry?”

  Winnalee tipped the bottle upside down and dribbled milk on her wrist. Her lips twisted to the side. “Is this too hot?” she asked, holding the bottle out and waiting for Aunt Verdella to turn over her wrist. “It’s just right, honey,” Aunt Verdella told her. But Winnalee wanted a third opinion. “Button?”

  Freeda rolled her eyes. “Crissakes, Winnalee. I told you. If it doesn’t feel hot, and it doesn’t feel cold, then it’s just right.” Freeda dropped the basket. She glanced at Aunt Verdella. “If you even try ironing his shit today in this heat, I’m gonna throw a hissy fit.”

  “I think the heat’s gettin’ to everybody,” Aunt Verdella whispered to me.

  I heard the muted sounds of a car and glanced at the clock. “Evyyyyyyy!” Boohoo shouted.

  When I got outside, Boohoo scooted in front of me to get to the mailbox first. He lifted the telltale red, white, and blue airmail envelope and waved it above his head. I held out my hand, not liking the devilish look on his face. “Hand it over, Boohoo.” But he ran off, snaking across our yard and then the road, ignoring my pleas, and my threats. I chased him into the house, and into the kitchen where Freeda and Aunt Verdella were going to pause for a cup of coffee, and Winnalee was feeding Evalee. “Evy’s got a boyfriend! Evy’s got a boyfriend!”

  Aunt Verdella turned. “Boohoo, you give Button that letter or I’m gonna sit on you!”

  “That would really hurt. You’re two hundred pounds.”

  “One hundred ninety-two,” Aunt Verdella said proudly.

  I probably would have had to chase Boohoo through the whole house if he hadn’t noticed Uncle Rudy’s truck pulling into the drive. “Hey, what’s he doin’ home?” he asked, letting Jesse’s letter sail to the floor as he headed for the door.

  Aunt Verdella leaned over the sink. “Rudy?”

  I scooped up Jesse’s letter and held it against me.

  Uncle Rudy didn’t come in, but told Aunt Verdella through the window that he came home to grab a blade for Tommy’s hacksaw, but he wasn’t finding one. “I’m gonna have to run into town,” he said. “I’ll let the little squirt ride with me.”

  “Boohoo,” Aunt Verdella called. “You come in and wash up first.”

  I could hear Uncle Rudy’s truck door creaking open. “We’re just goin’ to the hardware store, Verdie. Not to a beauty contest.”

  “And A&W. We’re goin’ there, too, right, Uncle Rudy?” I heard Boohoo cheer, so I guessed that meant yes.

  I wanted to read Jesse’s letter in private, and was about to slip into the bathroom to do just that, when Freeda did.

  “That a letter from that Dayne boy?” Aunt Verdella asked, turning away from the window as the truck pulled out. I nodded and tried to look casual, even though my insides were jumping with hope that Jesse would say something to let me know he still thought I was special.

  I moved over by the stove and unfolded the letter.

  Evy,

  Been crazy-busy here. I put in for a three-day pass. Hope it comes through soon so I can go to Ulm. I could use a little fun. I really appreciate your letters, Evy. Busy or not, they’re always something to look forward to. You’ve always been there for me, and I love you for it.

  Love, Jesse

  The paper shook in my hand. I looked up, blinking, thinking I might cry.

  “What is it, Button?” Aunt Verdella asked. I wanted to show the letter to Winnalee so I could ask her if my eyes were tricking me, or if he’d really told me that he loved me. But I didn’t want Aunt Verdella feeling slighted.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Well, Jesse must have said something good to have you glowing like that.”

  “I think I slept with a Jesse here in Dauber, but doubt it would be the same one,” Freeda yelled from the bathroom. “So somebody tell me who in the hell Button’s Jesse is.”

  Aunt Verdella started telling her about his family, where they lived, how Jesse and I had been close since he moved here. “He’s cute, too. Even with his hair butchered,” Winnalee said. “He writes to her about once a week, and she writes to him every day now.” Evalee’s bottle made a few squeaks and Winnalee pulled it from her and put Evalee up to her shoulder to burp her.

  “They were friends through the last three years of high school,” Aunt Verdella told Freeda.

  “Friends?” Freeda said, coming out of the bathroom with a teasing glimmer in her eyes. As she headed to her chair, she stopped Winnalee’s hand. “You’re not banging a drum. Softer.” Winnalee sighed and rolled her eyes. “Friends?” Freeda asked again.

  I wanted to brush the whole thing off, but I was smiling like an idiot. Now that Jesse had used the word love, I could finally admit—at least to myself—that I’d always been in love with him.

  Freeda’s eyes squinted. “You mean you’ve been carrying this torch for a friend all this time?”

  I wished I didn’t blush so easily. I edged closer to the door, ready to say I had to get home and back to work.

  “Sit your butt down. We were talking,” Freeda told me, as she reached over the table to whack Aunt Verdella’s hand, because she was reaching for one of the leftover bunny pancakes still on the table.

  “Oh, ick,” Winnalee said, as a geyser of spit-up landed on her chest. She got up to lay Evalee down and to change her shirt.

  Freeda stood up. “It’s too damn hot for coffee. I’m having ice water. Who wants some? And Button, you’re going to tell me all about this guy.”

  Winnalee
pointed the box fan on the dining room table toward the kitchen and came back in as Freeda was bringing our glasses to the table. She lifted her hair off her back, bouncing it. “Damn, it’s hot. And it’s not even ten o’clock yet.” She reached down and gave her cutoffs another roll, bringing them up to her crotch. “I don’t know how you can stand it in pants,” she said to me.

  Freeda peeked under the table. “Jesus,” she said. “What’s up with that?”

  “She won’t show her legs,” Winnalee said. “She doesn’t even own a pair of shorts, or a skirt.”

  That wasn’t exactly true. In a box shoved in a downstairs closet, I had a pair of short shorts, and the skirt I sewed and wore when Penny and I went parking with those older guys. I used to wear them around the house sometimes when Dad was working, and Boohoo was with Aunt Verdella. It was humiliating to even think about how I would put them on with a tight shirt and prance around the house while I was cleaning, pretending I was irresistibly sexy.

  “No wonder that boy only stayed your friend through high school,” Freeda said.

  “She hates her legs.” Winnalee tattled.

  Aunt Verdella looked confused. “You hate your legs? Why? You’ve got cute legs, Button.”

  Freeda got to her feet, and yanked me to mine. “Okay. Down with those jeans, kid.”

  I laughed nervously, and Winnalee rolled her eyes. “Good luck with that one. She won’t get naked in front of anybody.”

  “Well, that’s not necessarily a bad thing,” Freeda said, her eyes narrowing at Winnalee.

  “I mean not in front of anybody. Not even me.”

  Freeda stood up. “Okay, that’s it. Drop your drawers, missy. Let’s see what you got goin’ on there.” She reached for the snap on my jeans, and I wrapped my arms around my hips, covering the zipper and button as I held tight to Jesse’s letter. I was laughing, until I realized that she wasn’t kidding.

  “What do I gotta do, sit on you, too?”

  I glanced at the door, and Freeda reminded me that Uncle Rudy and Boohoo had left for town. She grappled to get at the button, backing me against the counter alongside Winnalee, who was fanning her hair again. “Oh, for crissakes,” Freeda said. “You’d think I was asking you to strip down to your birthday suit. You got panties on, don’t you?”

  “Glad she didn’t ask me that,” Winnalee mumbled, and Freeda slapped her with a scowl.

  Freeda started tickling me then, making me weak with laughter I didn’t feel. I dropped Jesse’s letter, and she dropped my jeans.

  “Oh, for crying out loud,” Freeda said, her hands going to her hips.

  “See what I mean?” Aunt Verdella said, all serious. “She’s got cute legs.”

  “You do,” Freeda said. “Skinny and pale, but shapely. Damn cute.”

  I felt near tears, standing there with my ugly, skinny, stilt-long legs showing, my white, bony knees clanking together like cue balls.

  Freeda softened, “Honey …,” she said. “Are you gonna cry? Why? Look at me.”

  “Oh Button …,” Aunt Verdella said, as though she might cry.

  Freeda lifted my chin off my chest. “Are you that ashamed of your legs?”

  “They’re ugly!” I said, my voice so forceful that I even startled myself.

  Freeda shook her head at Aunt Verdella. “No mystery where she got that from?”

  I nodded. “Yeah. Ma had skinny legs just like mine.”

  “I didn’t mean where you got your legs from. I meant, where you got that crappy attitude about your body from.”

  Freeda bent over so she could look into my face. “They’re not perfect, that’s true, but they’re not ugly, either. Far from it. You think I got perfect legs? Or Winnalee? Anybody, short of a Playboy model? Well if they got them at all—who knows, the way their legs are always tangled in bedsheets.”

  Nobody was going to convince me I had good legs. At least somebody with fat legs could lose weight and exercise to get them normal, but there was nothing I could do about mine. Aunt Verdella had been stuffing me since I got my first tooth, but I swear, every ounce of food she fed me only stacked up on my boobs.

  Freeda dropped her shorts to her bare feet and kicked them into the bathroom doorway. “Look at this,” she said, showing me the outside of her thigh, squeezing it so that the dimples puckered deeper. She let go and put her hands back on her hips again. “We all have things on our body we wish were better, Button. But that doesn’t mean we should hate them because they’re not perfect.”

  “I used to have chubby thighs when I was young,” Aunt Verdella said. “Can you believe it? But they thinned down, and my middle plumped up. Maybe I whittled them down by all the walking I did over the years.” She ha-ha’d.

  “Or maybe Rudy rubbed them away.” Freeda laughed, and Aunt Verdella blushed.

  Winnalee dropped her cutoffs—no underwear, as usual. “Look at my legs, Button. They’re almost as short as Evalee’s!”

  “They’re short because you’re short,” I told her.

  “No. They don’t even fit with the rest of my body.” To make her point, she whipped off her shirt; it stayed tangled in her hair. She wasn’t even embarrassed to be exposing her nipples, pale pink as Evalee’s cheeks, right in the kitchen. “Look how long I am here. That’s why when we sit side by side, Button, we look the same height. If somebody else hadn’t gotten my legs, I’d probably be five foot nine, too.

  “And check this out. I look like I have a flat gut, right? Well, watch this.” She turned sideways. “This is my gut when I’m not holding it in.” Her tiny pouch puffed twice its size. “And look,” she said, pointing to the inside edge of her hip bones. “Stretch marks. They creep me out. They look like silver worms.”

  “Hey, those are your mommy badges. You wear them proudly, little girl. I do mine.” Freeda tugged off her panties, and bent back to poke out her hips. “Look at these. I got way more than you. A row on each side, lined up like ribs. Between my boobs and my belly, I looked liked a watermelon patch when I was carrying you.” To prove her point, she ripped her short-sleeved white top over her head and snapped her bra off. Her shirt landed on the table over the leftover bunny pancakes, her bra on the floor, over her shorts.

  “Wow, you’re saggy,” Winnalee said.

  “Tell me about it. They say you should be able to slip a pencil under your boob and if it doesn’t fall out, you’re too saggy. Shit, I could stick a whole box of number twos under these girls and keep them there until next semester. I don’t know what in the hell happened.” Aunt Verdella giggled as Freeda nudged her left boob over and pointed to the stretch marks streaking its side. Then Freeda turned around and grabbed the swell of skin high on her hips. “And get a load of this mess.” She shook her hips and shouted, “But ooh-la-la, can these hips swing!”

  I envied Freeda as she stood there—a little saggy, a little chubby, a little dimply—because I could tell, really tell, that she wasn’t ashamed of her body at all. Not even of the patch of dark red hair between her legs, where Dewey had once left his grime.

  Winnalee turned, exposing her bare backside. “I got a good ass, I think. Sorta makes up for my stubby legs.” Winnalee and Freeda shook their bare bottoms in unison, while me and Aunt Verdella laughed nervously at the absurdity of the four of us standing in the kitchen in broad daylight, three of us in various stages of dress.

  Winnalee caught me off guard then, when she grabbed the hem of my shirt in back and yanked it up. “I bet Button’s boobs are her best part. Bet you any money.”

  “What are you doing?” I yelled. I ducked—a bad move, because Winnalee yanked the shirt up over my head with one jerk. She gave my bra hooks a quick snap, then hustled in front of me and yanked it down my arms before I could stop her. “See? See? I knew it! Didn’t I tell ya? Ooooo, look at her nips, they’re cotton candy pink.”

  “Nice boobs, kiddo,” Freeda hooted. She looked at Aunt Verdella. “Sort of like looking at the ghost of Christmas past, huh, Verdella?” Freeda tossed her head
back and laughed.

  Freeda blew bangs out of her face. “It’s hotter than Hades in here, and even hotter outside, but damn, if it ain’t a whole lot cooler when you’re naked! Verdella, shed those skins and cool yourself off before you have a heatstroke.”

  Aunt Verdella brushed away the invitation with a freckled hand. “Oh, I’d scare these girls half to death, showing them this old wreck.”

  Freeda put her hands on her hips. “Did it ever dawn on you, Verdella Peters, that maybe if girls saw bodies—big and small, old and young, fat and skinny, smooth and lumpy—they just might stop comparing themselves with the perfect bodies they see in magazines and on TV? Young women need to see what regular people look like.”

  “Freeda’s right. I saw all kinds of naked, regular people at Woodstock, and let me clue you, most of them weren’t perfect. Not that anybody noticed.”

  “Yeah, well, somebody noticed yours. Obviously,” Freeda said. She turned and nudged Aunt Verdella with her elbow. “Come on, Verdella. Cool off. Show us your wild side. I know it’s there!”

  Giggles, the kind that fill your mouth when a fat man bends over and you can see the crack of his butt, swelled in my throat. I held my hand over my mouth to keep them in.

  Winnalee started dancing like she was back in the cage at the Purple Haze, shouting at Aunt Verdella to take her clothes off. Laughter busted out of my mouth at the thought. I’d never seen Aunt Verdella in less than her big white bloomers and her pointy white bra.

  “Damn, I wish it was raining,” Freeda said, giving a glance out the window.

  Aunt Verdella’s face changed after Freeda said that. Maybe because she was remembering the time, long ago, when we—Ma included—danced naked in the rain with the Malones. She lifted her chin and pursed her smile, like she’d suddenly been handed a permission slip from Heaven. Then she peeled her stretchy shorts (and undies!) down, and kicked them behind her. Her legs were skinny for a fat lady, bubbled with veins, and the insides of her thighs looked like wrinkled pockets somebody just emptied.