A Life of Bright Ideas Read online

  I wanted to keep those magazines, just as Ma had, but when I heard Dad shuffling down the hallway, I quickly dropped them in the box like a thief who’d been caught red-handed. Dad had jeans on, but no belt or shirt. “Freeda, when the hell do you think I’m supposed to sleep?” he called in a voice I hadn’t heard in years, and had forgotten. Light. Teasing. Warm, even. He startled when he saw me.

  Freeda poked her nose out of the kitchen doorway. “You can go back to bed in a minute,” she said. “I just wanted to show the girls our handiwork.” Behind Freeda I could see a portion of the kitchen wall. Not the floor, but the wall. It was covered in wallpaper with big bright, surreal flowers in orange and yellow, with exaggerated stems and leaves. Ma hated wallpaper. And she hated the color orange. What had they done?

  I shot out the door and ran across the highway. I didn’t look back when I heard Winnalee call to me from the front steps. I just kept running, the air swirling my bare legs. Freeda had no business tampering. It was Ma’s place. Ma’s things. The things she saved, made, wanted. Even I didn’t dare move them.

  I was about a quarter mile down Peters Road and damp from tears and sweat when Freeda’s car came barreling up alongside of me. “Button.” Winnalee hung out of the passenger window as the car slowed to a crawl. “Button, what happened? Why’d you leave like that?”

  “Get in, Button,” Freeda said.

  I didn’t answer either of them. I just sobbed like a stupid baby and kept walking.

  “Button, stop, will you?”

  But I didn’t.

  I could hear Winnalee and Freeda hissing at each other, then the soft squeak of breaks.

  Freeda left the car idling, the door hanging open. “Button, you stop right now,” she ordered.

  “Or what? You going to throw me down and sit on me?” I snapped, without breaking my stride.

  “Maybe. If I have to!”

  Freeda ran to catch up to me and grabbed my arm. I yanked out of her grasp and wrapped my arms around me like a sweater, pressing against my itchy skin. I kept walking.

  “Button, what is it?” she asked, her sandals chomping at the gravel. “Everything was fine. What in the hell was that about?”

  I couldn’t ignore those words, even though I wanted to.

  I stopped. “You’re changing everything! Ma’s house, the way we raise Boohoo. My clothes. Why are you doing this?”

  “Because it needs changing, Button.”

  “But you’re getting rid of my ma. The magazines … the floor … the paint. You’re getting rid of her! Don’t you see that?”

  Freeda sighed, then wrapped her fingers around my upper arms. She put her face close to mine. “Honey, I’m not the one who got rid of your mom. God did. Or life did—whoever, whatever it is that decides these things. It wasn’t me. I loved your Ma. She was my best friend, like Winnalee is yours. You think I’d choose to get rid of her? You really think that?”

  I wanted Freeda to stop talking to me in such a compassionate tone.

  “Button, these are only her things. They aren’t her. She’s gone. And that house is so filled with memories of her that your dad can’t wade out of the past. But life is for the living, honey, and he’s been living like he’s dying for too long. I hope you and your dad remember Jewel forever. She was special enough that you should. And I hope you’ll give Boohoo some memories of her, too. But there’s a big difference between holding on to your memories, and holding on to the past. Am I making any sense? Probably not, because frankly, I don’t know how in the hell to say what I mean.

  “I’m not just talking about the family not going to Mardi Gras anymore, or your dad letting the house go to hell. I’m talking about what’s at the core of this. The thing I can’t put my finger on, but know it’s there.

  “I saw you and your dad together the night he came over for spaghetti. There’s something as spiky and solid as a barbed-wire fence sitting between you two. He won’t talk about it. I doubt you will. And I’m not sure Aunt Verdella knows. But whatever it is, it’s so sharp that it’s keeping both your hearts bleeding. And you may not like it, your dad might not like it, but I’m going to do my best to snap it. For Jewel, for all of you. I’m gonna do it so you can be a family again. So you can all get on with your lives. My friend would have wanted it that way. Do you understand?

  “Do you?” she asked again when I didn’t answer.

  I nodded, my hair tangling in front of my face. Freeda smoothed the strands from my cheeks and her eyes were glossy as wet grass. “Honey, I know this is painful, but it has to be done. Let go, Button, and let me do this. For all of you.” Winnalee was beside us then, and she wrapped her arms around our waists, and they led me to the car.

  “By the way,” Freeda said, when she was behind the wheel again. “Just so you know, … your ma hated those bells. She told me so. That sister of hers, Stella, brought her one back from Las Vegas—probably something she got for free—and Jewel made a big deal out of it to be nice. Aunt Verdella was there and thought Jewel was serious. So she gave her one for her birthday. Before long, everybody was giving them to her for gifts and eventually she had that whole shitload of them.”

  “She did not hate them,” I protested. “She dusted them practically every day, until I was old enough to do it.”

  “Yeah,” Freeda said. “But only because she hated dust worse than she hated those damn bells.”

  CHAPTER

  35

  BRIGHT IDEA #90: After you play beauty shop, your husband might say you look like a beauty queen, or he might just ask you where the Phillips screwdriver is. Either way, it doesn’t matter, as long as your new hair makes you think nice things about yourself.

  I suppose Freeda was trying to make amends when she came over the next morning, Boohoo in tow, and told Winnalee and me to be ready in half an hour. I was pressing a seam on one of Cindy’s bridesmaids’ gowns, but Freeda’s eyes warned me that no excuse would do. She squatted down where Evalee was lying peacefully in her playpen and said, “Auntie Verdella is going to watch you.”

  “And me, Uncle Boohoo. I’m gonna watch you, too.” He was about to lean over and pat her, but even at a distance I could smell Knucklehead on him and told him to wash first.

  “Where we going?” Winnalee asked, but Freeda told her, “Never mind.”

  An hour later, Freeda slid her car up in front of the Cut ’n Curl. “Come on,” she said, as she waved to Aunt Verdella’s beautician, Claire, who was standing in the window. “Button, you’re gettin’ a cut and a color. My treat. Then you’re putting on that cute skirt you made, and we’re sending soldier boy a Polaroid of you.” Freeda got out of the car and headed for the door.

  “Cool!” Winnalee said, as she nudged me with her hip to get out.

  “Not cool, Winnalee,” I whisper-hissed. “You saw Aunt Verdella’s hair. It was Pepto-Bismol pink!”

  Winnalee pushed my back until we got inside. Three older ladies were sitting against the wall under dryers, and two were in chairs getting trims, their white, dry curls floating to the floor like paint chips. The whole place stunk like perming solution and hair spray. I leaned down to Winnalee. “There’s only old ladies here. What does that tell you?” My hands instinctively lifted to clutch my hair.

  As it turned out, Aunt Verdella had helped convince Claire to let Freeda borrow her workstation over her lunch hour, since her next appointment wasn’t until three (three guesses why!). “I wasn’t about to color your hair with that boxed shit, or cut it with sewing shears,” Freeda explained as she wrapped me in a plastic cape.

  “I don’t want my hair cut,” I said, fear making me brave enough to say it.

  “Well, too bad for your ass,” Freeda said. “Because that’s what you’re gettin’.”

  Winnalee started giggling behind me. “She just means a trim, Button.” She turned to Freeda. “You did just mean a trim, didn’t you?”

  “Nope, I’m gonna cut it to its last inch, thin it, then give you those little knots you used
to love.” Freeda shook with laughter. “Sit down, kid. Your ends look like a goddamn rat was chewin’ on them. I’m just trimming it, that’s all. Then I’m going to frost it. Well, not really frost it—I hate that skunk look—I’m going to use the same technique, but do nice, subtle, golden strands to brighten it up.”

  As Freeda worked, Winnalee stood beside my chair, lifting one bottle after another from the counter and spraying or dabbing whatever was in them down her curly strands. The beautician working alongside us frowned over the perfumy cloud, then started coughing. “Crissakes, Winnalee. Will you stop? You look like someone shellacked you already.”

  Freeda patted Winnalee’s butt to move her out of the way the first time, but by the third time she had to move her, she snapped, “Winnalee, move your ass!” loud enough that even the old ladies under the dryers frowned.

  Freeda stopped and dug in her purse. She pulled out some bills and handed them to Winnalee. “Here. Go buy yourself something pretty.” Winnalee gave Freeda’s cheek a peck, and off she went.

  Freeda spun my chair sideways after she washed the gunk out of my hair and before she trimmed and dried me, so the end result would be a surprise. And when she finally spun me back to face the mirror, I was staring at somebody else, not me. Somebody who belonged on the cover of Seventeen magazine. The beauticians fawned over my new look, saying the touch of blond added warmth to my skin, and made my eyes “pop.”

  “You like it?” Freeda asked hopefully. I nodded dumbly, as I ran my hands down hair so satiny that it didn’t even feel like my own.

  “You just wait until I’m done with her,” Freeda told the skinny beautician Winnalee had almost asphyxiated in that cloud of hair products. “She’s got a great little skirt, full and bouncy, that’s gonna give her some hips. With her good chest and tiny waist, she’s gonna be drooling material.”

  The beautician’s hands went instinctively to her own hips, hidden underneath a smock. “A fuller skirt will help?” she asked. And before you knew it, Freeda was working her magic, telling the whole salon how the “art of distraction” works, and how each of them could bring the eye to their best qualities, and downplay the parts that were “less blessed,” or “overly blessed.”

  Winnalee walked in just as I stood up. She took one look at me and said, “Holy shit!”

  Freeda made Winnalee sit down and trimmed the bottom of her hair, as she explained to the ladies what body parts of her own she accentuated, and which parts she was disguising—I was glad she didn’t feel inclined to show them.

  The women might have kept Freeda there forever if she’d let them, but she cut them off, paid Claire for the use of her station, and we left.

  When we got home, Boohoo met us at the door. “Guess what, Winnalee? Evalee got all the way up on her elbows. She did! She got up and looked right at me.”

  Winnalee frowned. “I missed it,” she said.

  After Aunt Verdella admired my new hair, I ran home to change into my bouncy skirt. Winnalee helped me pick out shoes and a top (a gold one), then Freeda dragged me around the yard and bent me into one “natural” pose after another. Poses, she said, that would best accentuate my “perky knockers” and “long legs.”

  “Hold that pose,” Freeda told me, once she had me sitting on the picnic table, skirt hiked and perfectly fanned, my legs crossed so my thigh would look fuller, my arms behind me and spread, fingers splayed so I wouldn’t tip over, and my back so arched that I was sure I’d look like the McDonald’s arches. “Hold it, hold it …,” Freeda said as she moved to take a few shots. Then we stood behind Boohoo at the picnic table and waited for the snapshots to appear on the paper squares like magic.

  After we got home, I snuck peeks at my photograph every time Winnalee wasn’t looking. In the morning I tucked my letter, my picture, and my hope into an envelope and sent it off to Jesse.

  CHAPTER

  36

  BRIGHT IDEA #7: If your boyfriend says he doesn’t want you going out with other guys, and you tell him you won’t, but then do, just tell him that it’s a woman’s peroggerative to change your mind. If he gets mad, tell him to hit the road. Sound mean when you say it, too, or he might hit you instead of the road.

  The day of Cindy Jamison’s wedding, Aunt Verdella watched as Winnalee and I loaded the dresses into the van, a smile tickling her lips. She put her arm around Freeda, who was holding Evalee. “I sure am proud of these girls. Thank you, Freeda, for lending me the camera, and watching the little ones so I can tag along and get pictures of Button’s first bridal gown.”

  “Little ones?” Boohoo said. He went to stand next to Freeda, and pointed first at himself, then Evalee. “Look at this. Me. Big. Cupcake. Little.”

  I sat in the back with the gowns, so Aunt Verdella could take the only other seat in the van. Cindy was getting married at the Lutheran church a block off Main Street. We were heading out an extra twenty-five minutes early, because Uncle Rudy had warned us about the detour on Highway 8. “They’re redoing that bridge just past the Smithys, and the county’s putting in new culverts on a five-mile stretch,” he’d said. “You’ve got to go all the way down Pike’s Peak Road, and up Circle Avenue.”

  Linda was waiting for us, along with Cindy and her bridesmaids, Mrs. Jamison, Marge, and Hazel. The whole dressing room turned into a bouquet of color as the girls slipped into their dresses.

  “Look at her dress!” Cindy said to her bridesmaids, when she saw Winnalee. Winnalee had grabbed one of her long granny dresses from her closet, decided it was boring, and shredded the dress from about the knees down with jagged horizontal cuts. She’d done the same with the sleeves, but her cuts were vertical. “I love the way you dress,” Cindy told Winnalee. She loved my hair, too, and wanted to know who’d streaked it. She was disappointed to hear it wasn’t a local.

  I dressed Cindy, and she waved her arms so the petal edges could flutter. “This dress is so cool!” Even Mrs. Jamison called the dress “lovely,” and bragged to the pastor’s wife that Cindy’s dress was “one of a kind.” Designed just for her.

  Linda was pleased, too. After the girls were dressed, she confessed that she had been nervous about me taking on a whole wedding myself, then added, “But like Hazel and Marge just said, they couldn’t have done a better job themselves.” I smiled, because I knew it was true.

  Aunt Verdella took a whole roll of pictures. She gave Cindy and her bridesmaids each one, then handed the rest to me and Winnalee.

  I helped the bridesmaids dress, then lined them up so I could make sure that the hems, when side by side, made a perfectly straight line. While I did this, Aunt Verdella and Linda talked about when or if her husband might get called back to work.

  Before we left, Linda held up her finger like she just remembered something, and pulled a paper bag out of her trunk. She handed it to me. “Some girls brought these jeans by. They said you’d know what to do with them. Their phone numbers are pinned to the jeans so you know whose are whose.” No doubt Linda thought it was a little mending on the side.

  Aunt Verdella insisted we stop for ice-cream floats before going home. She prattled on and on about what a beautiful job we’d done, while we ate. Winnalee shoveled a scoop of ice cream into her mouth and her eyes got huge. She made a couple high pitched grunts, and I thought maybe she’d gotten a brain freeze, but she was even more excited after she swallowed. “Hey, I just thought of something. Aunt Verdella, does anyone ever sell old clothes at the Community Sale?”

  She thought. “Well, Aggie usually has some old dresses and hats and things. Most of them come from the forties and the fifties. Some sixties. Just old junk clothes some pack rat like me had boxed away.”

  “Do they have old buttons and jewelry, belts there, too, like they did when I was a kid?”

  “Agnes and Mavis usually carry some. Why?”

  Winnalee turned to me, all excited. “Button, you know that wine-colored dress I have that you love? That long one that I wear bunched under the boobs with that big brooch? I
got that old dress in a secondhand store. The pin, too. I couldn’t do with it what I wanted because I can’t sew, but you and I could do that sorta thing together. Let’s go to the Community Sale this Saturday and see what we can find. I’ll bet we could recycle some old clothes and make some cool hippie dresses. Dresses that Cindy, or those girls at the Purple Haze would buy. Aunt Verdella, will you crochet more of that lace for us? We could do up some old jeans, too.”

  “Sure, honey.”

  “This’ll be fun. It’ll give me something to do when I’m not wiping baby butts and making bottles.”

  That Saturday, we packed a lunch and took off for the Community Sale. Winnalee and I sang along with the radio as we followed Freeda’s car. In the backseat of the Rambler, Boohoo made Evalee’s bear dance, and Evalee grinned, her too-big bonnet askew on her head. Through Freeda’s back window, I could see her hand gesturing as she talked, and I smiled as I sang. It was one of those moments, one of those days, that I knew I’d remember forever. Not because of its bigness, but because in that simple moment, our hearts were light and happy, and we were twined like roots of the same tree.

  The lady named Aggie had a whole rack filled with old-fashioned dresses in tiny prints. I blushed while Winnalee dickered with her until we got the whole lot of them for half of what they’d cost individually. I had no idea how we’d take fifteen outdated dresses and turn them into something girls would buy, but it would be fun to see what Winnalee came up with.

  Three hours later, we had the back of Evalee’s stroller and my trunk stuffed with old clothes, belts, purses, and bags of gaudy costume jewelry. Evalee was getting fussy, and we were melting, so we went home.